Amelia meets her great-grandmother Mary Davidson.
Same nose, four generations apart.
Showin’ Amelia how to play in a proper yard.
The mysteries of the piano.
bathin’ in a sink.
Sarah Berry has a particular gift for playing with babies. The rest of these pictures are from the dinner party.
I fucking love the way that Django just came right out and said, “Fuck these guys.” Inglorious gets major points with me for making it so clear that the Nazis and the Germans were two different things. Django goes the exact opposite way and it needed to be said so badly. Fuck the Confederate States. Kaboom. To hell with your sisters and your sons and your horses, kaboom. Oh hi there you’re Australian you’re Quentin Tarantino and you’re going to let Django free? Too bad you’re still one of them kaboom. All you get is the coolest death.
I guess what we’re really worried about is Tarantino’s right to make revenge fantasies for any demographic besides his own. But Tarantino’s demographic has notably had enough revenge fantasies.
One of Mia’s friends (I’m sorry, I forgot your name!) at Ringling. We were trying to do one of those photo trickery things but were undone when we realized wings come out the back, not the front.
They knew how to paint lemons in those days.
The Florida family!
Amelia meets her great-grandmother Mary Sebesta.
Mom and Amelia get along real good.
My dad and my daughter.
Amelia meets the bluegrass.
Amelia sleeping on the floor in Sarasota.
Amelia and me.
Amelia meets her uncle Charles.
Charles and Gewel and Amelia and I go to visit Gewel’s aunt Tomara and her boyfriend Mike.
Charles and the baby like each other.
Rock star Mom.
Amelia meets her grandma.
A painting I found amusing at the Ringling Museum. I bet if you knew who those two guys on either side of the banner were this would be a very witty commentary.
Fascinating image, all the more so when you know some history of John Ringling. I really like the reflected EXIT sign, the artist should have included that.
Gewel and her grandmother.
Dawn in Hamshire, Texas.
Amelia attempts to eat the tie of her great-grandmother’s pastor. We took Amelia to church for the first time, at a very enthusiastic little place in Hamshire. It was actually mad fun.
Gewel about seven or eight years ago, from a picture her grandma had.
A photograph of a photograph of Gewel’s grandmother in elementary school. It was the 1930s in Dust Bowl Kansas, near a town by the name of Hutchinson.
Florida. Amelia and the ducks regard each other with interest.
Amelia over Sarasota Bay.
Sarasota Bay.
Ca d’Zan, a Venetian palace transported to Sarasota for John Ringling about a hundred years ago.
A weird little statue at the Ringling Museum. Knowing what I know about John Ringling I find this statue very interesting.
Gewel and Amelia at Big E’s. I never got this lady’s name, but she was cool.
I’m trying to figure out bitcoins and namecoins. I find them endlessly fascinating. Bitcoin is a commodity masquerading as a currency, and so few people seem to understand this that I am having high hopes for myself, I suspect that I might have a slight bit more insight into what money really is than most of the people I meet. Namecoins, I don’t even understand yet. They are, apparently, a DNS registry system masquerading as Bitcoin, which means they are a way of allocating internet names….as a currency. That’s some meta shit. That’s, like, the fourth derivative.
online information -> name -> namecoin -> commodity -> currency
You are literally buying and selling names.
I…find this fascinating.
Bitcoins are selling short strings of letters and numbers. Essentially what they’re selling is collector’s value — only you can have one particular string of characters, and some are worth more than others.
This is not a currency, though it is going to be able to work as a currency because it is actually pure conceptual barter. This is a thing that, as an artist and writer, I understand. I’ve always been able to trade strings of characters for food and durable goods. The foundation of currency has always been this theoretical to me. In a better world, we’d be trading little bits of jpegs of Picassos. But instead we’re trading the one thing that we know nobody else has, which is the exact same sequence of 1s and 0s.
I’ve long suspected that the internet would find a way to lift the yoke of economics from us. This might could maybe be the way.
The way it works right now is, I write something today, I get paid on Friday, it takes three days for the Paypal transfer to get to my bank account. Soon that time will collapse to zero. Soon I will be able to sit down for a meal, write an article during that meal, get paid at the end of the article, and pay for the meal with it.
If Facebook were to do something crazy like institute a system where every “like” was worth 0.0000001 Bitcoins, you would quickly see the economy shift to something very…interesting. I think that would work out for the artists and the creatives.
Oh, I forgot, that will never happen, the Winklevoss twins are heavily invested in bitcoins, and they hate Zuckerberg and all that. Well, maybe Google will do it. Oh Internet daemons I beseech thee! Hear my prayer and grant me one ten thousandth of a Bitcoin for each like that someone casteth on my page and I shall toil in the vineyards most faithfully for thee.
What could go wrong?
French curves are fun. It’s so much fun to line it up and instantly produce this crisp, clear, professional line. There’s this Syd Mead video that I watched a couple dozen times, and he doesn’t waste time trying to find the perfect line for the entire thing. He just grabs little sections and approximates. One long curve might be five or six little curves, and it’s no problem with a tiny little French curve that’s about the size of your hand. It’s easy and it looks great.
Spoilers: you are going to see lots of smooth curved lines in the future in this comic.
I just found out that Danzig is from Lodi, New Jersey, which is the next town over from where my mother grew up. Who knows, maybe she beat him up in high school* and that’s why he turned to satan and comic books.
I never really listened to the Misfits until my wife came into my life. I see now that Cough/Cool is the song that inspired Joy Division’s entire sound. I really like them. To me, Danzig is a heavy metal gnome and I love him now. I would never fight him now; it would be like fighting a hockey puck. I bet he fights like the Tasmanian Devil. I bet that’s also how he makes love. I think his massive density is one of the reasons that his music is so high on the periodic table. I think he is made of adamantium and unobtanium and there is no better person to carry the torch of Satan’s rock for sixty years.
*My mom is short, but Danzig is shorter. When I pointed out to Gewel that Danzig was from the same place as all my shortest relatives, she said, “I wonder if there’s something in the water up there that makes people short.” She might be right.
Taking this baby on a tour of all the grandparents has been a tremendously good idea. It’s a ritual, an ablution around the South where as many relatives get to lay hands on the baby as possible. We’ve stopped everywhere, seen everywhere. Baby Amelia has met two great-grandmothers, three great-aunts and uncles, an uncle, both grandmothers, and her grandfather. She’s been to East Texas, New Orleans, Sarasota, and now central Kentucky. By the time this trip is over she will have spent 1% of her young life in the car. I know she won’t remember a thing of it but it’s been so good for her.
Everywhere she goes, the world is filled with people who are delighted to see her. I’m glad that she’s learning that lesson.
Summer is my favorite season. It’s summer, and then a three-way tie for #2. I like winter better now that I’m a Texan, but I’d still rather have a Texas summer than a Texas winter.
But what I’d really prefer is a Texas winter and a San Diego summer.