Calamity, NY

New project in the works, my friends! If you liked the style of Skateboard Heroes and ever thought a sort of Skateboard Heroes/Walking Dead mashup would have real promise, Calamity, NY is for you!

I’ve started uploading pages from the first issue and will try to get at least a page a week published going forward. Sometimes it takes a while to arrange photo shoots to generate the art, so please be patient.

And hey, if you have any interest in being an infected antagonist in the book (they’re not zombies!) we may be holding a casting call in the near future. You, too, could be a diseased and dying victim of chemical warfare coupled with crippling radiation.

In a fictional, comic book world of course.

I hope.

Good luck.

Be well.

Read.

The B!tch is Back

So… the election.

If you know me, know my projects and music, or have read anything I’ve ever written, you probably know that I am a compassionate, sensitive, new-age guy. So it is no surprise that I am not a big fan of Annoying Orange.

Sure you think this is a dated reference, but ride with me here. I’m being intentionally facetious. (Should I have said “spoiler alert?”)

Her, it was cute when Annoying Orange had short little YouTube videos. Micro-bits of stupidity and juvenile ejaculation that really made the grade school kids chuckle. It was just the right level of small-brained, dimwitted humor that makes an almost-formed mind of limited intellectual capability laugh for a moment.

Then the Annoying Orange went mainstream. A full show on actual television! What a mistake. We learned pretty quickly that 20+ minutes at a time of barely scripted nonsense with no real sense of cohesion – hell, completely lacking a plan when you come right down to it – was an embarrassingly ill-conceived cock up.

So yeah. Now we have a president elect who clearly can’t follow the instructions on a can of spray-tan. Sure, fodder for countless sitcom scripts, but is this the guy we want with his finger on the button?

Okay, I jumped from Annoying Orange to Captain Dump pretty abruptly, but I figure the average attention span is declining fast these days. Can’t milk it like I used to.

Hell, I probably lost you at “facetious.”

Mad Match Surveys are almost all in!

1Most of the Mad Match surveys are in and in no time we’ll be mailing out rewards.

If you missed the kickstarter and want to get in on the fun, we will be selling the game through The Game Crafter as soon as all rewards have been delivered. Check back in a couple weeks to buy.

Can’t wait to get your Pope Street Game fix? Mad Science The Card Game is available now:

New Duds

We hope you like the new site. We are renewing our focus on music – particularly upcoming performances and releases for sale, though your favorite independent Pope Street projects like Skateboard Heroes and Mad Science The Card Game are stillĀ here.

Nonpostage

So… I haven’t been writing for a couple months. A few things have come up, but mostly I’ve been barely making music or doing much else that’s physically creative because of a shoulder injury. Ah yes, the lovely rotator cuff – great for chopping wood, but when you strain it… oh boy. I haven’t slept on my left side in three months.

No new gear to post about. No Crown XLS or ebayed Dearmond. No significant progress on Touch, or any of the other new writing/recording bits. But as the swelling and aching slowly recedes, I continue playing away at some new bits. Yes… soon…

Phoning it in

“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

So said George W. Bush in the year 2000. Really, you’d have to ask yourself, who else could have spoken such words? But enjoying such quotes is not my only purpose today. The goofballery that we love to laugh at is a clear sign of a greater problem in this country – the very public and very aggressive anti-intellectualism movement.

When I was a kid, we were encouraged to work hard, bust our butts, try to get into a good college, and stop complaining about homework.

Now, parents of my kids’ friends battle against standardized curriculum, performance and competency testing, and my God!!! – they have way too much homework! In fact, kids should not be tested at all because school is about them smiling and playing at recess, and really, isn’t college a ridiculous waste of money?

I fear that too many parents in my generation and that immediately following mine are so focused on their own mobile social media opportunities, that their children are being formed into mushy balls of helplessness. These parents love little league because they can park their butts on the bleachers and play with their phones under the auspices of making their kids more well rounded. But they hate things like Cub Scouts because they are expected to actually participate, and other than an occasional snapshot, barely get to glance at their iPhone screen. And at some point, somebody is going to ask them to sleep in a tent.

Surety

Some care. Some don’t. some are prepared. Some… not so much. Don Allred Insurance of Burlington NC may or may not help you to be prepared. I don’t know, but when it comes to Allreds, I’m a Michael and Laura fan. I mean, who didn’t love their FF run? Or for that matter, Madman? That’s one of those books gifted me in the mid-90s that brought me back to comics via weird and wonderful indie magnificence.

Remember?

Starfire Special

The key to my guitar tone efforts in recent weeks is, of course, my current favorite guitar. I am very much favoring a Korean-made Guild version of its own cutaway Starfire model. It is semi-hollow with American-made Dearmond pickups. I know I have raved about this short-lived line of gems made during the period when master luthiers from the Providence Guild plant were helping establish a Korean manufacturing plant and ended up turning out value-priced masterpieces that often outperformed their American-made counterparts.

For this style of guitar, you can have your gold 335 from Musicians Friend. I’m going to keep my Starfire Special from ebay. Actually, I have two of them now. Red and Black. So I can pretty much match any outfit.

Instrument Gumping

At the risk of getting Gump-y in listing my instruments (you know, like the shrimp guy in the movie), I feel I should add to my list from a couple posts ago. In addition to all the stuff I mentioned already, we have a vintage clarinet (wife’s), two trumpets (each of the boys has one), a bugle (one of the boys), several recorders (multiple owners), a Williamsburg flute thing I got when I was very young, and a flutophone. The clarinet is a classic and I hope someone starts playing it again. It’s no professional clarinet at guitar center, but then what is?

Marching on

I have a friend whose son is in a marching band. This is something my Manhattan High School without a football team lacked. Maybe that’s why they fascinate me so much. Especially when I learned about the massive competitions some of these bands participate in. The competitive vibe may even top that of overbearing horror-moms painting their 5 year olds up like pole dancers to vie for some plastic crown in an airport Hilton.

Not saying I’d like to participate. Not even admitting I shopped color guard flags at wwbw a little. It’s just… neat. at least for the uninitiated.