Because We All Love Visual Puns.  Made For B3ta's Verbular Celebrities Image Challenge.

This doodle came about because I’m excited for the upcoming album by those fine folks at Information Society.

I started drawing it right after pressing play on “Dominion,” a track to which those who preorder the album have been granted access, and stopped drawing when the song ended four minutes and twenty-one seconds later.

The logo of the fictional Union Broadcasting System (UBS) television network, from the brilliant Sidney Lumet film Network.  Recreated using screenshots from the film.  I thought I might someday use this to make a microphone flag, or maybe some novelty press credentials.

If you haven't seen Network yet watch it ASAP, preferably without looking up any plot points or spoilers beforehand.  It's a requirement for membership in the human race.

One fine evening in the lobby of the radio station WBAI, where I work on Off the Hook, I was doodling in my sketchbook to kill some time.  I decided to draw the file cabinet, plant, and telephone which happened to be in front of me.

When the drawing was complete I stuck it to the wall behind the cabinet, natch.  It was suddenly inaccurate, though, so I added the picture on the wall to the picture, and so on.  It's cabinets, plants, and phones, all the way down.

I figured someone at the station would get rid of this before too long, but as you can see from this photo taken a couple of months later (note the plant's growth) it's still in place. In that time I've witnessed a few other denizens of the place notice, do a double-take, and get at least a slight chuckle out of it.  RESULT!

2013 UPDATE: The sketch, which I posted in November of 2010, surprisingly ended up staying on the wall for a couple of years.  It remained even after the plant had grown larger, the phone had been replaced, and the cabinet had been moved.  The lobby closed down, and the station and its contents hurriedly transferred to other facilities, when the building was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012; the drawing's fate remains unknown.

Motorola MicroTAC 9800X 1989

The MicroTAC 9800X was not only the smallest and lightest mobile phone of its time, it was the first to feature the trend-setting "clamshell" type design where a mouthpiece flipped to cover the keypad when not in use.

Featuring a dot-matrix LED display, very advanced for the day, the MicroTAC and its immediate variants remained in production well into the 1990s and formed the basis for much of the world’s idea of what a "cellular phone" looked like.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Mojave Phone Booth 196?-2000

In the late 1990s, certain corners of the Internet took notice of a strange anomaly in California’s Mojave desert: a lone phone booth, miles from civilization. The Mojave Phone Booth developed a strong following among telecom enthusiasts, phone phreaks, and other fans of odd cultural artifacts.  People called the booth for days on end hoping to talk to strangers wandering the desert, and pilgrimages to the booth itself became increasingly common.

The National Park Service, bothered by the effect of growing numbers of visiting telephone fans, eventually had the booth removed.  Its legacy lives on, with the booth and its story inspiring literature, film, and music as well as the continuing exchange of fond memories.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

In the interest of art-blogging something as quickly as possible which isn't my big ol' face, here's an illustration commissioned by Brad Carter for the Phone Losers of America book.  It's the first of three illustrations of mine appearing in the book, for which I also wrote the foreword.  You should probably go purchase a copy right now, before you've had time to think it over properly.

Archival inks on acid-free paper, 8x6".  Scan is low-res.

The t-shirt I designed for Off the Hook, the radio show of which I am part.

WBAI, the nonprofit community radio station which airs our show, must periodically run fundraising drives to keep the bills paid. This shirt has been exclusively available as a thank-you gift to listeners who donated to those drives during our show's broadcast.

Anyone you see wearing this shirt has either been amazingly generous in showing their support and keeping our show and station on the air, or attacked our supporter and stole their shirt.  Either way, that person's sense of style is unquestionable.

Photo © Grey Frequency

Tim Berners-Lee (b. June 8, 1955)

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist who invented an information management system which we know as the World Wide Web. He serves on several organizations dedicated to developing and maintaining the Web as the resource most visible to Internet users today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

Digital portrait of a woman named Courtney I used to know, done in August 2005 with a smallish camera phone photo as reference.  Her hair was really those colors.

I didn't have a drawing tablet back then; all points and vectors were placed manually with a mouse.  That method, combined with the fact that I wasn't entirely comfortable doing vector-based art at that point, resulted in this being very slow work.

Also, OMG LENS FLARE!!!@#$%^&*

I started playing with recording over my own voice in multitrack, and after about an hour and a half this accidentally happened.

If you're one of the poor unfortunate souls who haven't experienced the glorious original version, here's the video and here's the Wikipedia article.  I put together these lyrics based on multiple English translations floating around out there; I think I've kept the basic gist of each line intact.

I have no regrets; if nothing else, at least I actually hit every sour note without pitch-bending or autotuning of any kind.

Download this track here if you're unwell enough to want to do such a thing.

There's a music video now as well.