I found this Radar Magazine article to be pretty trippy.

In the late 90's Bill Geerhart pretended to be a 10 year old boy and wrote personal letters to Richard Ramirez, Charles Manson, the Unabomber, Erik Menendez, Larry Flynt, Alan Greenspan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clarence Thomas, and Dick Cheney.

In some cases, Bill responded 10 years later with a follow up letter.

There's something fascinating in people's penmanship and ways of phrasing a response to a child's inquiry.

CHECK THEM OUT BY CLICKING HERE.

Here's a lovely page from Bill for Luchadores5 from the upcoming issue #5. Beginning with issue #4 (in stores in about 2 weeks!), the Luchadores 5 begin an adventure that leads them to the beaches of Southern California. As you can see, Bill was more than happy to showcase his skills at illustrating the better looking gender of the human species! :-)

Below's the video of Kobe jumping over a speeding Aston Martin to promote his new Nike Hyperdunk shoe. It's been an effective guerilla marketing tool that's built hype strictly via it's presence on the internet. People still question it's validity (even though Kobe's acknowledged "it's Hollywood").

What's made this decent bit into "Classic" material is the amazing spoof Kenny Smith and Ernie Johnson of TNT's "NBA Inside Stuff" did as homage. It's worth watching all the way through for the replays. It gets better with each rewatch!

The first video is the Kobe Original. The second video is Kenny Smith's spoof as it was first shown to Kobe after their Game 2 victory against Denver:

I had the fortune to go to the second LA show of Kanye West's Glow In The Dark Tour with my longtime friends Mista Hippo and Bruce Banner of Get Down. Overall, it was an ambitious show whose ambition overshadowed the intimate interaction with fans that makes a good show fantastic.

With the exception of Rihanna, the line up was rock solid. Lupe Fiasco, N.E.R.D. and Kanye West represent the modern face of hip hop/pop artistry. All three of them are commited to pushing the current perceptions of Hip Hop music by infusing it with their own personalities and interests without the machismo or political motives that scare the Mainstream. In many ways, they're the Native Tongue (De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest's musical clique) of the 21st century (even if Lupe Fiasco doesn't know who Tribe is!). As artists, they've had varying degrees of success.

Lupe is the new kid. He's a strong lyricist with a decent flow whose success has been marginal with his first 2 albums. N.E.R.D. are the granddaddies. As music Producers, the Neptunes, Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo had a heavy hand in shaping hip-hop and pop music since 2000. N.E.R.D. has been their eclectic place to explore their musical roots. Kanye is the phenom. He's managed to reinterpret elements of underground hip-hop into smashing mainstream successes.

Where does Rihanna fit into this picture? She doesn't. The only connection she has is her extreme mainstream success (Rihanna's "Umbrella" rivaled West's "Stronger" as the big pop song of 2007). She's a Pop singer with a great voice and strong presence whose presence probably assured that this concert was a Sell Out... but also looked severly out of place.

The crowd was a bit weird. There were a TON of 13-15 year old teenaged girls running around. While waiting in line there was no way to decipher who was performing.

Once inside, Lupe was already performing. He carried a decent show but you could sense that the scale of the concert didn't lend itself well to the density of Lupe's rhymes and music. It was impossible to understand what he was rhyming but the energy of the performance was cool. Lupe and his people were dressed predominantly in black. I think this was all agreed to from the get go since the stages became more colorful with each act.

N.E.R.D. was amazing. Their energy and vibe was fun and charming. They managed to stay relax and cool while they performed a mix of classic tracks and a couple of things from their upcoming album. To bring up the dosage of color, they had a snazzy monitor backdrop that displayed psychadelic colors and textures that complemented the various songs performed. They finished off their performance with a little White Stripes riff that seguewayed into "She Wants To Move". While performing they final track, cameras on stage behind Pharrell were filming ladies in the crowd dancing and showcasing them in realtime on the display monitor and screens next to the stage. Tons of fun.

Rihanna tried to go Tron with her performance. Everyone on stage wore flourescent colors that glowed under the blacklight. They looked pretty cool between songs with the black lights on, but as soon as the song started, the spotlights would go on and the effect was completely destroyed. It didn't help that the costumes looked awful under real lighting. It was like a bad mix of 80's day-glo sports bras and cheap X-men movie pleather Halloween costumes. I understand that people come to see their favorite performers, but it'd have been nice if they performed at least a part of the song under blacklight to appreciate the glow effect of the costumes and set. The singing was nice, but the dancing choreography was forgettable. There was no chemistry between the dancers and Rihanna. Most of all it felt completely out of place next to the other performers.

Kanye's set was pretty crazy. It was some lunar terrain with a huge display backdrop and two smaller screens: 1 behind Kanye and 1 below him that became his spaceship when needed. The entire performance was just Kanye and the set. Nobody else. Lupe appeared briefly for "Touch The Sky". Beyond that it was Kanye peforming alongside screens, smokes, and lights for 90 minutes.

It was ambitious. Kanye left himself "naked" as a performer (he still had his clothes on!) with nobody to distract you from what he was doing. It's hard enough to be perfect rhyming 1 song... and here Kanye has himself memorizing and rhyming 15-20. Crazy. And he held his own. He was energetic the whole way through. He even did a little acting. But the whole time I was thinking, "What the HELL is Kanye thinking?!". This is performance torture. A performance, like a good song, needs to breathe. But as a rap performer, on stage by himself performing song, after song, after song... Kanye is putting way too much on his shoulders. It was kind of stressful watching the whole thing because I couldn't help but think of how exhausting the whole thing was. I sure hope Kanye is giving himself his much deserved rest: eating right, meditating, sleeping. Because any form of exertion is going to result in a physical and emotional breakdown. No one is crazy enough to do this to themselves. Even Michael Jackson, regarded by most as one of the greatest performers of all time, gave himself support in his performances. He didn't just do it all himself. And the times when Jackson had bits that were solo, it was usually a dance number.

Watching Kanye was like watching Michael Jordan run back and forth between baskets doing dunk after crazy dunk. Yeah, it's impressive... some of it was really cool... but after a while you get tired watching it and start wondering why are you even there. The peformance was solid, but the set was so tight that there was no interaction with the audience without the occasional, "What's up LA!". It was just song, song, 1 minute of story, song, song and more song. It'd have been nice if West would have stepped away from the narrative created for the concert and engaged the audience. As an audience we're not there to just watch, we want to connect with the performer. It needs to be as much about us as it is about them. But with Glow In The Dark, I walked away feeling like Kanye wants to prove to me that he's superhuman. But he's not. He's human. He's an amazingly ambitious and talented human being. But I'm worried that if he keeps taking this route he's going to destroy himself... just burst. They say in space the stars that shine brightest have significantly shorter lives.

Either way, it was a show worth seeing. I'm sure there'll be nothing like it.

Lionsgate and Frank Miller debuted Eisner's "The Spirit" trailer at NYCC this past weekend. What was shown was closer to "Sin City" than Eisner's pulp masked adventurer stories, but I loved it nonetheless.

Will Eisner and Frank Miller both have a passion for cartooning, the City, and women. As Eisner matured as an artist, he began to explore more sophisticated concepts like City life and comic narrative. Miller's maturing process was short-lived. After doing seminal works like "Dark Knight Returns" and "Daredevil: Born Again", Miller said, "to hell with it" and commited to elevating the sex and violence of American comics flirted with to sophisticated levels of style. His evolution was polarizing. Ironically it was his embracement of these more juvenile trappings that brought him success in Hollywood.

The teaser hints that what Miller's developed for Eisner's "The Spirit" is a nice mix of the purest elements of modern Miller and early Eisner. Too bad we're going to have to wait until 2009 to see the final product.

Here's the teaser (in HD, so please be patient!):

Wow. I am more than impressed with the wonderful job Delkographik and Muttpop Nico did at putting together the "100 Years of Muttpop" Gallery Show. The Artist Customs were amazing. The overall presentation was solid.

I'm just sad that I was stuck here in Los Angeles while the whole thing happened in France. It makes me want to do a US custom show. Delkographik and the French custom Artists sure set a high standard! Great job from everyone involved. Thank you!

You can see more photos from the show CLICK HERE (MUTTPOP SHOW) and  CLICK HERE (DELKOGRAPHIK'S PHOTOSTREAM).

Here are some amazing customs by OPEN_CLOSE (black RD), MADAME (indian chief RD), and EASY HEY (hungry EP).