My book has now officially shipped from Chronicle’s warehouses and is wending its way to bookstores. I checked with my local Barnes & Noble and they said it’d be in the Biography section on November 28th. Amazon also predicts they’ll have it in customer’s mailboxes on the same date. If you’d like to preorder one on line, you can do it here.
If you just can’t wait, check out this trailer for the book. It’ll give you a healthy taste of what’s to come. I hope it whets your appetite!
If you would like to add this video to your own blog or Facebook page, I would be so happy and grateful. All you need to do is click on the share button on the upper right hand side of the screen and a window will open with code you can copy. If you need help doing it, let me know.
I had a lot of help from my friends in making this video: Butch Belair (remember him from this film?) did all the incredible special effects. Ben Lear composed the lovely soundtrack, “Scuba Lessons”.
My old pal, Tom Jucarone at Sound Lounge, recorded my voiceover and made the whole thing sound amazing. And I got a lot of great advice and guidance from my brilliant friends, JJ WIlmoth, Tommy Kane and Bruce Davidson. Order your copy today!
Just to recap and explain my absence over the past months, here are some souvenirs from my second consecutive shoot. We are making a big commercial that will run on Thanksgiving Day — if you watch American TV for even a minute on November 22, you’ll certainly see it. If not, I’ll post a copy later this month.
We filmed around New York City and Westchester in the days leading up to the arrival of Hurricane Sandy. In fact, we wrapped the evening the storm finally arrived on our shores.
Fall is here.
Our first location. This seems like ages ago, an idyllic Fall day in Brooklyn. Now all of these leaves have been blown away by the hurricane. Hopefully the house is still standing.
Jeff shoots in Ocean Park.
My director Jeff and I have made commercials together for over 20 years. We’ve shot in New York, California, Chicago, and Rome and the results are always spectacular. He’s one of my favorite creative collaborators and I can’t wait to see his feature film, scheduled to come out next year.
One of the three complete Thanksgiving dinners we prepared and shot.
We shot three scenes with large, extended, real families making and sharing Turkey Day. The food styling was extraordinary and cornucopian.
The crew films in a nut store on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Ave
We used real stores, streets, yards and homes as our locations.
Never mind the Bollexs. My director’s 16 mm. cammeras.
Jeff shot with several different cameras, film and digital: 35 mm., a Canon 5D, a Canon C300, and his personal collection of Bolexs.
A glass-blowing forge
We filmed a master craftsman as she and her team blew extraordinary glass vases.
Relics of the Industrial Age.
We shot a factory scene in a giant warehouse full of old machines from New York’s dwindling manufacturing industry.
This isn’t a scene from “Armageddon” or “Independence Day”. It’s just the first arrival of Sandy on our shores.
On our final Day, we shot high atop the World Trade Center where crews were battening down their gear as the wind picked up. Then we hired a ferry to drive us back and forth past the Statue of Liberty as the sky grew menacing.
Jack took the bus down from Providence last night so he could vote today. It’s his first time voting and his first time home since going away to college.
Tim and Joe went crazy when they first saw/smelled him.It’s been great to have him home, if even for just a few hours. We immediately slid back into old habits, ordered in Italian food, watched TV and talked about art. It was even nice to see Jack’s socks abandoned on the living room rug.
Sadly, he’ll be back on the northbound bus before dinner.
Now that my house is back to normal, I want to catch up on the all things I have been doing for the past month.
Shoot #1: Three weeks ago, I traveled to Los Angeles to shoot some commercials for AIDS Day (December 1st). We filmed near Santa Clara in a fantastic location, an entire Mexican village that was built just to be used as a set. It has a half-dozen streets lined with bars and churches and various hovels, all uninhabited and weathered in the hot California sun. I’ve used it as a stand in for West Africa twice now.
The new sherriff in town.The town doctor.Filming in our traditional African village. Tortillas on the side.My limo awaits.
Back in LA, we shot in an abandoned hospital which was still full of equipment and supplies. It was like something from “The Walking Dead,” and filled me with an eerie feeling that resurfaced during last week’s power outage in New York.
This emergency room needs an emergency room.Spell check. Stat!I napped in here.This left me in stitches.A good subject for a drawing.
The shoot went very smoothly (I’ll post a link to the commercials when they’re done) and then I flew back to New York and immediately went into production for another client, shooting around the city and environs. More on that in my next post…
Not a welcome sight, The last time we had Army vehicles on our streets was after 9/11.
I woke up at 4:25 this morning. The lamp next to my bed had just come on after being dark since Monday night. It was an incredible relief to have power again and I crawled out from under the covers to survey the house. All the radiators were on, valiantly pushing back the accumulated cold. The lamps in the living room were just like they were when we were interrupted while watching “Damages” on Netflix on Monday night, thinking we were just going to enjoy a long weekend once the storm had passed, a million years ago. I tested the elevator. It whirred right up; now we wouldn’t have to trudge up and down the eight flights of fire stairs carrying the dogs for their constitutional. We could clear away the candles that surrounded our nightly card games, empty the flashlights of the batteries we’d hoarded, toss out the empty beer bottles and spent matches.
I walked past this broken crane as it dangled 90 stories over my friend’s neighborhood, a literal Sword of Damocles.
I was lucky, of course. My sister’s home was swamped, her basement filled to the ceiling with Atlantic Ocean, her car destroyed. It may be six months before they are whole again. My little niece who just started kindergarten could be out of school for a month or more. And so many other people lost it all, in some cases their lives. I don’t need to tell you that—you are probably far better informed than I am, clinging to my dwindling cel phone and my staticky radio.
I am also lucky because I was given another wakeup call, a reminder of how inundated I am with media and luxury and bullshit. To spend the evening listening to a crackling jazz station and eating beans on toast by candlelight is a rare pleasure, a reminder of the simpler things. I hope I don’t lose the insights Sandy gave me. And I hope the next storm isn’t even worse.
There’re few things as depressing as a bare fridge. It’s the cliché of the single person you always see in movies: a few moldy Chinese takeout containers, a half-empty jar of mayonnaise, a box of baking soda, a six-pack.
But shopping for one is tricky. These days, I do tend to eat at home and to cook more than I did when I had a teenaged roommate. But I have to be careful not to be too ambitious and to fill my kitchen with stuff I’ll never have time to eat. I hate throwing out stuff that survived past its due date: a head of cauliflower, a half-gallon of milk, some cheddar that’s turning into bleu cheese. Still, I’d rather waste food than face an empty larder.
Whenever I do a drawing in indian and sumi ink, I think of Ben Katchor. For years he did comics in the Daily Forward that had a bleakness and everyday decrepitude that made a big impression in me. His weltschmerz came out in a sigh of grey washes, a shrug of indifferent lines and cramped composition. These days as he branches out to publications with bigger budgets, he uses bright colors but his work still has a lovely unsavoriness to it that smells vaguely of sour milk and unwashed socks.
I just did the lettering for the cover (you’ll notice on Amazon that they uploaded the art for the cover before including my handlettering — that’ll be fixed soon) and the design for the interior continues. It’ll be a lavish book with work from forty of my favorite artists and will be out at the end of February, next year.
I’ll talk about it more in the months ahead but meanwhile you can see some of the art work from the book on my Pinterest page.
Okay, time to start drawing again. I made this from a photo I took at an outdoor party in the Hamptons. The bird was very impressive and the intensity of his gaze stayed with me long after he was put back in his cage. Horned owls are amazing predators and have been known to pluck out unwitting birdwatchers’ eyes, even here in New York City.
For some reason, this drawing made me think of Brad Holland, an illustrator I’ve loved since I was a teen ager but haven’t referred to in years. I just went and looked at some of his work and, while I don’t think it actually does look like anything he’d do, I sort of see why it brought him to mind.
If you don’t know Holland’s work, check out this nice and too brief video about him:
I did this drawing with my Lamy Safari in one of the new Stillman & Birn hardcover books. I love the paper though there are some issues with the binding and they suggest we wait for the next shipment before using the hardbound ones.
Three weeks ago, I dropped my boy off at art school in Providence, Rhode Island. It’s a trip we’ve been planning for years, maybe even decades. From the days when Jack was first able to pick up a crayon and started making marks on paper, his mom and I celebrated his creativity and put those pieces of paper into a special binder, a collection which grew to two books, then three, then a shelf-full. We didn’t have any particular plan to create an artist or designer or an illustrator; we just celebrated what seemed special about him, and let him know that if this (or drumming or soccer or World of Warcraft…) is what he really loved most, it was fine with us.
When it came time to apply to college, I told Jack that committing to an art school had risks but so did any career path. As far as I was concerned, a bigger risk would be to seek a profession that didn’t ignite his passion, to simply try to make money at something in which he had no real interest. I know too many people who have gone down this path and found little at its end. That shelf full of drawings proved that Jack had a calling, a rare thing indeed.
I borrowed a truck from a friend, loaded it with Jack’s belongings and we drove up 1-95 to RISD. After lunch in the cafeteria, I sensed that Jack was ready to take off, that he wanted to set up his room, meet his new friends and start his life. My job was done.
I had been dreading what was to follow. I have only ever lived alone for about six months — after graduating from Princeton and moving into a studio apartment on the Lower East Side. Then I got some roommates, then a girlfriend who became a wife, then a son …. and the last three decades were filled. Overnight, I was on my own again.
For a year, I had been worried about being alone in my empty apartment — empty evenings, lonely mornings, no one to talk to but my dogs and the wind. My girlfriend Jenny has been in Dallas all summer and I have been missing her sorely too.
But here’s the funny thing: I love it.
Despite all my worries and fears of dying alone in my sleep and being eaten by my dachshunds, I love being able to decide when I get up, when I got to bed and what I do in between. What I eat, what I do, whether I watch TV or read or draw or stare out the window. It’s fantastic. Time expands. I have a huge sense of accomplishment and also of being relaxed and at my own pace. And I love having a neat apartment, not having soccer equipment on the living room floor or boxer shorts in the kitchen. I don’t have to share the bathroom or the remote control or the sofa. It’s just me and two miniature hounds.
I do miss Jack. I email him, he texts me, we chat on the phone a couple of times a week. He sends me phone photos of the art he is making and tells me about his new friends, about his teachers (for the first time ever he loves them all), about how great the food is.
And he is flourishing. He works his ass off, staying up till the wee hours doing enormous assignments. His first week, he posted the following on Facebook:
a haiku about getting out of bed;
no no no no no
no no no no no no no
no no no fuck that
Then one of his new classmates uploaded this picture:
Jack’s new best friend.
He’s going to be okay, it would seem, and so am I.
P.S. I try to avoid getting emotional about commercials but this one has been getting to me:
Danny Gregory 