Welcome to Alex's home page.

June 10 , 2008 - Lake Merritt pics: ponies, geese, fairyland and more geese.

I'm pretty clueless on what is cool these days - especially among an ultra-niche audience such as custom toy afficianados. But thanks to the good-ol' internet I did today stumble across something called a Munny. Obviously intrigued by anything named Munn I sought more info.

The New Republic had a really interesting article by Jed Perl on Chinese contemporary art. I knew that Chinese art was pretty hot on the international art scene, but this kind of put it in a different light (I will always remember when I installed my graduate show at the Berkeley Art Museum, in the adjacent gallery was this pretty amazing electric fireworks / massage chair display by superstar Cai Guo-Qiang. During the week-long fulltime install I must have stared at that mesmerizing light show for hours).

May 10 , 2008 - Here's the train level I've been goofing around with in Unreal 3.

April 3 , 2008 - Man I guess it's time for an update. I did a quick revision to the look of the site, hopefully it appears a little cleaner.

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October 7, 2007 - Things are kind of cruising along as I'm putting in my Monday -Friday hours over at Stormfront. And since I'm behind a desk all week, I am definitely appreciating my sunny weekends at home in the Oakland. Today, besides dragging my truck over to Big O for a brake job, I ended up at the bird sanctuary shooting "wing flapping" reference (1.2 MB) for my current art project.

Last week I checked out bigtime painter Kerry James Marshall at his SFAI lecture.

The other week Jen and I headed down to LA for my buddy Dave's birthday. Here are some shots walking around Venice beach on a quiet Saturday morning (shot1, shot2, shot3).

September 2, 2007 - Yesterday I went under the needle again for the first time in six years - and it sure hasn't gotten any easier. To celebrate our first anniversary Jen and I barted into the Mission to keep an appointment with local tattooing all-star Scott Sylvia (Scott was hovering over me the last time six years ago). Anyway, three hours of teeth-gritting and toe-curling later I emerged with some pretty sweet ink. Ouch!!

Also we stopped by the Oakland Art and Soul festival to hear some salsa music (pic).

August 19, 2007 - Sunday was good. We headed out on the bay for a couple hours and I hooked and released a pretty big stingray. Then Jen and I headed over to PFA in Berkeley for a long, bizarre 1970's Russian fantasy epic called "Ruslan and Lumila". This one landed somewhere between Excalibur and The Wizard of Oz, which I guess makes it okay. Then topped it off with a little C&C when I got home.

August 15, 2007 - Sierra made the announcement for Stormfront's upcoming game.

August 4, 2007 - My summer has basically been chugging along peacefully as I plow away at my job and enjoy the nice weather around the lake.

Unfortunately I just heard some sad news about one of former O-town artist neighbors. Brad Silverstein, my friend who I met through the 33 Grand gallery, died a few weeks ago. I have nothing but good things to say about Brad based on the short time I knew him. He strolled into my new art gallery in the summer of 2005 and pitched a group show. Then a few months later we put up his own show centered around, of all things, the Thanksgiving Turkey.

During this brief, busy period Brad and I hung out a lot, planning the shows, running errands together, and doing one of the goofiest things I've done in a while: collaborate with a 1st grade class on an art installation. We spent two full days with a pack of miniature wannabe artists that kept running into our kneecaps with gobs of tempera paint and dripping wads of Elmer's glue. To top it off, we decided to hire some actors from Craig's list to perform as Pilgrims, with Brad writing Thanksgiving proclamations the night before the opening. Brad and I were definitely on the same page: anything and everything for the art show.

I've thought about Brad a lot this past week since I heard the news and my thoughts also go out to his wife Mariana. For those who never had a chance to check it out, here is the old page from the 33 Grand site.

June 11 , 2007 - My jet-lag is gradually fading the day after my 30+ hours-awake day of flying back from Italy. I had a great time touring ruins and cathedrals - and eating pizza and gelato - for ten days.

I also plowed through a book that I've been meaning to get around to for a while - Frank Norris's "The Octopus". Hundred-year old American lit is not my usual cup of tea but this turned out to be a pretty awesome epic - it reminded me a lot of "Grapes of Wrath" and Upton Sinclair's "Oil". And it's definitely a strange feeling to be sitting on a hi-speed Italian train and simultaneously leap back into a 19th century world of California steam engines and wheat ranchers.

April 29 , 2007 - You don't see this everyday. Like most everybody else, I awoke today to news flashes of the freeway collapse (sfgate photo) in the MacArthur Maze. Having turned on the radio on my way to pick up my daily coffee, I drove out to the site to check out the mayhem. Although heavily cordoned by police, you can get within 150 yds of the wreckage. I didn't have my camera handy but it's quite an amazing sight. On the way back home they were talking on the radio about the 15th anniversary of the LA riots, and I remembered gawking in a similar fashion at the wreckage (my photo) in south central a decade and half ago.

Also I've finally got the worm rigged up for my Pueblo level.

April 15 , 2007 - I'm a part-time train afficianado (an impulse retained from my days as an 8 year-old) and thanks to my studio mate Linda I was able to get access to the old passenger station in west Oakland yesterday. This is an amazing site of decaying urban archeology (I'm reminded of one of my favorite websites: www.opacity.us). Here are some of my images: pic 1, pic 2, pic 3.

Also we had an open-house at the studio Thursday. Here's the new arcade cabinet that I'm working on.

March 23, 2007 - I'm trying to get this shotgun into my Pueblo mod, and even though UT is an awesome toolkit, they don't make importing stuff like this very easy. And Maya's Y-up cooridinate system causes a mess importing weapons. I've got it working, but more interesting I'm having a blast rigging the arms to follow the gun -check this out.

Also check out this train wheel I've been jamming on.

March 17, 2007 - I try to keep my blog-thingy free of politics (though I have no shortage of opinion) however today's entry could be classified as more event than political. The Barack Obama express rolled through Oaktown this sunny Saturday afternoon and we walked over to Ogawa plaza and got stuck miles behind the throngs of cheering fans. We didn't actually see him until after the speech. Here's a a quick shot moments after I got to shake hands with the future pres.

March 10, 2007 - GDC just wrapped and once again I feel utterly humbled be the amazing shit that I saw being done by the next-gen developers (check out: Crysis, Warmonger, Lair, Resistance, etc.) Just like last year, I think I need a few weeks to digest the info swimming in my head, specially all the art tech stuff, and hopefully I'll get a chance to try out some of the new tricks on my own. I saw demos of the new physics systems (Aegia, Havok). This stuff blew my mind: keyed joints detecting collision, then switching one or two joints temporarily to ragdoll, then back to a keyed anim; envirionmental objects like cars and buildings being dynamically destroyed (I mean bending their geometry on the fly, cracking shaped and updating UVs on the fly). Ubisoft had a demo of a guy picking up tons of objects in a sandbox, with each object having tons of manually placed "handles" for the characters IK to connnect to. I also saw muscle-rigging for characters with hundreds of "leaf" joints (Midway) or morph-targets (Crytek) that drive all the subtle muscle flexes for every pose (all driven by mo-cap data of course). Mind-blowing.

February 17, 2007 - I just rolled in this week from a quick trip to Costa Rica. I try to jump over the southern border at least once a year in a feeble attempt to improve my spanish. This time I dragged my dad and my unsuspecting uncle along for the whirl-wind driving adventure. We survived. And after 20-something straight meals of gallo pinto dosed with Lizano (I brought back 6 bottles in my suitcase), Jen and I picked up a pizza striaght from the airport.

Here are some highlight pics.

Also, here's a sketch I did based on some of the pics I shot in Golfito down near the Panamanian border. Here's another one loosely based on a waterfall just north of San Jose.

Also, switching topics, I just read a great article. I have this kind-of-lame subscription to Art In America that I probably should have cancelled years ago. Typically I cruise it once-over and put it on the pile, but today I read Peter Plagen's awesome article ("Contmporary Art, Uncovered", Feb. 2007) on the state of art criticism. He actually criticizes the critics, "too many arts writers fail to write about modern and comtemporary art in plain English that the general reader can understand" and talks about art's futility in the popular press, "'Visual Culture' - that is, signs, symbols, and images from throw away graphics to satellite surveilance photographs, presented on everything from cheaply printed matchbook covers to 4-foot plasma screens - is where its at. 'Art' may be buried in there somewhere, but who cares exactly where?" (Unfortunately I can't find an online link for this, hopefully I can add one later)

January 22, 2007 - Listening to the radio this morning someone mentioned artist Jeff Gillette and after a quick search found these pics. This sorta dovetailed with another artist came across last week. After watching John Carpenter's "The Thing" I saw a making-of interview with a then 70+year old Albert Whitlock, the father of big-time disaster movie matte painting. Here's one of the cooler pics I dug up; I guess this is permanently part of the collective imagination when people think of LA.

January 19, 2007 - Alright, so I occasionally have a break-through moment figuring our some new tech thingy which results in me jumping up and down and yelling for a couple minutes. Today's installment was caused by the figuring out of how to set up a fixed camera script in UT (I'm admittedly totally indebt to alot of forum posts) Anyway here's a movie of how it turned out.

January 14, 2007 - I managed to squeeze in a couple fishing trips over the holiday break. Here's fisherman Dave hauling in a baby shark during our cruise last week. We also got another outing in yesterday - here's a shot of my very first flounder getting ready for the frying pan. What a weird looking fish... but like I say, "Everything tastes good on a taco."

January 12, 2007 - So I finally got around to watching the Terry Zwigoff/ Dan Clowes film "Art School Confidential" last night. Jennifer mentioned that she could see why it did so bad at the theaters - I totally agree: this was one big inside joke. And it was great. Yes, its a dark weird comedy that drags in places, but for an art school escapee like me it nailed the punchline. Clowes mentions some line in the commentary about how art school is for him "what Vietnam was to Oliver Stone." Hysterical.

January 5, 2007 - Happy New Year, etc. With the holiday break I'm trying to get some time in the studio. I've got a new drawing here along with a cover I did for JohnErick Lawson's Mad Happys comic-zine.