The Home Office

So I'm hanging out at a coffee shop today minding my own business. I'm keeping a low profile, surfing the internet, and occasionally trying to get some real work done. The place is air conditioned and filled with people who seem to be doing the same exact thing. For some it seems like this place is an actual office. It's a sea of laptops. The Mac to PC ratio is especially high too. Most people are alone, but there are a few people who are sitting at a table together. I tend to think they're doing the same type of work I'm doing, but they look so stern. I try not to think of my work as being THAT serious.

IT guy is next to me. His cell phone startles him every twenty minutes with it's obnoxious ring and he digs for it in his dancing pants. He's far more flamboyant than any IT guy I've seen before. Mutton chops too. It's a real treat. And I'm listening to Morrissey. I swear you can't plan these coincidences.

No new emails yet. I have my gmail placed just underneath this page so I can see any developments that may occur in the inbox. In case I miss the action there, I have my gmail notifier at the top of my display. It's a sealed envelope right now, which is kind of a weird icon to have when you have no new mail. Maybe the empty mailbox is patented by AOL in every conceivable way.

It's a weird existence when you don't have to talk to someone everyday. You clear your throat to make sure you're capable of talking if the need shall arise. I get my practice with the counter girls too. "Just that?" they say, and I get my opportunity to answer back. "yeah, that'll be it. For now." I like that "for now" part. It means I'm not going anywhere.

I had another excuse to talk soon after I got here. I was rocking out and trying to write (yeah, this was before Morrissey) and this guy stands right in front of me. I ignore him. But he doesn't go away. He sort of motions for me to take off my earphones, and I'm thinking this guy really has balls if he's just going to ask me for money or something. I mean, I'm in a groove. Or at least as big of a groove as I'm able to get into this universal home office away from home. So I take off my earphones and what does he say? What are these words he exchanges with a guy who's had very few words with anyone all day long?

"Were you the one I was talking to about anxiety issues yesterday?"

Nope, that wasn't me. At least not yet.

Dylan in Modern Times

Bob Dylan is full of surprises. An XM radio show where he seems right at home spinning the songs that inspired him. A new album out in August called Modern Times. And hopefully the next installment of Chronicles before too long. This Letterman performance is pretty amazing too. Who knew he had such energy and confidence back in 1984? I guess this band only played for the Letterman shows and never toured. This Letterman performance (one of three songs he did that night) along with his albums Infidels, Oh Mercy and Time Out Of Mind have been dominating my stereo lately. I'll blog about that later.

Sketches Of Eddie

According to Tom Chase, a new age Christian writer who has used astrology and the bible to calculate when the antichrist will emerge, that date is today. 6/6/06. His emergence will be followed by an asteroid collision and a two year battle of Armageddon. The name of the antichrist? He says it's Vladimir Putin. Sort of reminds me of Star Wars and Emperor Palpatine, or whatever his name was.

Back in 1982, a different beastly event was unleashed on the world. It was the release of Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast. By widening Iron Maiden's audience and helping to bring their brand of British metal to the US, it inspired a generation of metal fans to take up art.

Sure I'd drawn a Van Halen or Twisted Sister sign in sunday school or during a boring math lesson, but the intricate work involved in sketching Iron Maiden's mascot, Eddie, separated the novices from the die hards. I'd invent band names, album titles, tracklistings, and even complete bios and career trajectories of bands, but the cover art was always very rudimentary if it existed at all. Just like the Kiss logo before it, I knew that you had to use the right fonts when you wrote down a bands name, but actually drawing Eddie was far too complex for me.

I keep thinking of some of those metal kids. Long hair hanging over their faces and blocking their books in study hall so they could keep their head low and nobody can see what they were doing. Sometimes one of them would lift their head up at the end of the period and show you what they sketched. It was pretty amazing, if not a little disturbing. Eddie yielding an ax with Margaret Thatcher clutching at his leg. Eddie coming out of a grave and tearing off his clothes and howling at the stormy sky. Eddie with a chain around his neck, shackled to a prison wall.

They were nice kids. Just a little misunderstood, but weren't we all. They had a certain bond. They were united by metal and they showed it proudly with torn and frayed blue jeans, a black metal shirt with their favorite band on it, and a jean jacket to top it off. Sometimes they kept it simple with pins of their favorite bands on the front. Other times they went all out and put a huge patch of Metallica or Iron Maiden on the back of the jacket. It was a statement. It said "I do not like fake metal. In fact I hate it. Fuck Poison and Bon Jovi". It felt permanent, or as permanent as black metal got in suburbia. Tattoo parlors had yet to find their niche.

Eddie fed the imagination and illustrated Iron Maiden's music in much the same way that Stanley & Tchock's packaging colors Radiohead's music today. And it gave them an identity. As easy as it is to picture some of those kids in one of VH1's Fanatic shows with thousands of pictures of Eddie covering their walls and life size models of Eddie rising from coffins in their living room, the reality is they're probably just like you and me. Accountants, lawyers, dentists, truck drivers and cube occupants.

Although I'd like to think that at least a few of them took up art. I'd like to think that those long hours of sketching Eddie paid off in some way. Maybe I'll have to probe a little bit and ask the next graphic designer I meet what they were listening to when they grew up. If they could navigate through the hair bands in the 80's and find something with substance, they're probably doing it in their careers as well.

Or maybe if the fundamentalists are right about 6/6/06, we'll all be drawing pictures of Vladimir Putin come tomorrow.