Well, it took nearly two months for me to sit down to a book, and once I did I ripped through it in a couple of days.

I watched an interview with Denni Lehane a few weeks ago and I realized that I'd probably love his books. I'd never really been interested in his stuff, but watching him talk changed that. I realized that he and I come from similar backgrounds. That realization was like a flipped switch.
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Lots of respect for Alph around these parts.

Like Shepard Fairey, Alphabet Soup reuses potent images in much of his work has been active in both the street and gallery. 'Alph' differs with Fairey, however, on the articulation of the images they create. He says that Fairey's merchandising from his own street art and propagandizing for political campaigns contradicts what he stood for when he began his own campaigns.

The following is a chat Alphabet Soup and Christian Holland had about Fairey and his exhibition, "Supply and Demand," at Boston's ICA.

Read the interview

And here are some photos:

No, not a tattoo (although if anyone out there is looking for some I can recommend some people.) I tried out some new (to me at least) ink from Liquitex last night and this is the result. The result? It flows like wine, but needs two coats to really reach "black" status.

Still, it was fun to draw for the first time in a month or two (*sigh*)

Some facts about Challenge of The Masters:

• Lau Kar-Fai (Gordon Liu) plays Wong Fei-Hung
• One of the climactic battles is with his adopted brother, Lau Kar Leung
• Lau Kar Leung also direct the film

So yeah, Challenge of the Masters is pretty good.
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A LOT of people leech my images for blog posts, forum posts and social networking profiles. When it's a one-off and it isn't too much of a bandwidth hog, I chalk it up as a cost of doing business. Honestly, the face that 15 year olds think my work is cool enough for their purposes pleases me to no end. Still, I do put a stop to it under several circumstances- with high traffic sites, when people use large images (over 50k) for message board avatars or signatures and when people basically redistribute a leeched image as part of a theme.

Such is the case with this MySpace theme.

At least it was the case. For a while that theme used the top edge of one of my black book images as an accent. Since I moved the original source image as part of the site reorganization over at robreact.com, it was generating a lot of 404s. Investigating the 404s and seeing how often it was being used, I decided to use the leeching to my advantage with a little bit of an advertisement.

I guess they should be happy I'm so nice. There are a lot of less savory variations I could have chosen….