I am a mom, entrepreneur, occasional blogger, and creator. I recently launched Here Comes the Apocalypse, a self-paced disaster preparedness system with a dark sense of humor. My team and I make up Artsy Geek, a top-ranked Bay Area branding and digital agency.
You have stumbled on my little corner of the internet. Thanks for coming by.
I spent some time last night checking out the prices of retail spaces along Broadway Auto Row. I have a dream of renting one of the empty auto dealerships…
While looking I stumbled on a Craigslist post for an office building titled, “WE’RE HAVING A HOLIDAY SPECIAL DEAL! OFFICES FOR RENT IN CHEAPER PRICE.”
Well, we all know that postings all in caps sell better, so that was definitely a good choice. You have to shout to get our attention! It’s not enough that you’re offering a holiday special in mid-January. I don’t know if that’s a marketing mistake or just plain negligence.
Thankfully the post body was not in all caps. Score one property management company. Continue Reading
When designing the website for Lushes in Love, I set out to use all the amazing features available to those browsers that implement CSS3, but aimed to provide a viewing experience that degraded gracefully when viewed in Internet Explorer and older versions of other browsers.
I wanted the blog to remind the viewer of neon lights and classy bars. Continue Reading
Once upon a time I lived with my sister Alexandra in an apartment building in the shape of a dome.
See??? You didn’t believe me, but it’s actually a dome. Google street view sure does come through in a pinch.
She was just coming back to the Bay Area from living in a cooperative warehouse space in Brooklyn. It was a cool space; though haunted. The ghosts danced away in the air above human heads all the way up the 40 foot ceilings just like in Magnetic Fields’ song Busby Berkeley Dreams. Continue Reading
The other night we enjoyed The Late Show, the 1977 movie starring Lily Tomlin, Art Carney and Bill Macy.
Bill Macy plays Charles Hatter, a down-on-his-luck entrepreneur. We first meet him leaving his office, and catch the following glorious screen shot:
Five businesses all named after himself, all with the same address but various specialties? I love it. Hey, if you have a skill, why not make a business out of it on the off chance you succeed?
He reminds me of me. Had Charles Hatter hired me as a marketing consultant, though, I would have told him that if he wanted to list all his various enterprises in the lobby directory, he should definitely not name them all after himself. Each business should have its own unique vibrant identity so that they seemingly stand on their own. Naming them all after himself sends an almost desperate message–hire me to do anything! I can do anything! Continue Reading
Last week I spent a full two and a half hours at the vet with my best friend, the Guster.
Gus is not a flexible fellow. He does not like traveling. It is a rare trip in the car that he does not pee in the cat carrier. Long ago I invested in a sturdy plastic cat carrier so that I could clean it out. Before that, he would ruin a cardboard carrier every time. That was both expensive and wasteful.
This time he really set a higher standard for boycotting the vet visit. He pooped on the way there.
That’s enough about that.
I was taking him to the vet because he has become very grumpy in his tenth year on this planet. He has trouble jumping, and he tends to whine when we disturb him. We’ve taken to calling him “Squeaky Old Wood” because his whine sounds like a creaky staircase. Continue Reading
Over the course of last year Will and I began experimenting and really appreciating how good a cocktail can be. Before then, we had basically subsisted on scotch on ice, beer, and gin and vodka tonics. And food, of course.
All of a sudden our eyes were opened to a whole new world of drinks! Will began to play with different ingredients and soon had invented his first custom cocktail, the Santa Rosa. And he sure has the touch. Even without booze, he can whip up a great drink. He makes awesome sodas during the day out of some combination of soda water, grenadine or simple syrup and various types of bitters. Yum! Continue Reading
We watched Howl last night, the feature film with John Hamm and James Franco about Allen Ginsberg’s controversial poem Howl.
It was okay. James Franco was a fairly convincing Ginsberg, and I thought his reading of Howl was pretty good though a fellow viewer felt it got off to a terrible start.
The movie was punctuated with animation illustrating the poem. The trouble with animating a poem, I realized as I watched, is that it takes a lot of interpretation to get to the point of turning a poem into images. Watching someone’s visual interpretation unfortunately detracts from one’s own experience of interpreting the poem.
The animation struck me as lacking a cohesive vision, though some parts were terribly beautiful and haunting. It was done by an animation house, and I felt that whoever was in charge of all the different animators was perhaps not providing strong enough leadership. The style kept morphing, and though that can be done well, in this case it really distracted from the overall experience. The animation of the poem would have been better as a prequel to the movie rather than being continually interrupted by live action.
On the bright side, the poem really got me appreciating one of my all-time favorite pieces of animation, the music video for Terminally Ambivalent Over You from the Real Tuesday Weld. Animated by Alex Budovsky whose work is continually inspiring, it is the perfect mix of awesome song and awesome animation.
Yesterday was David Bowie’s birthday. My friend Andrea alerted me to the fact on Facebook, making me so happy (for the millionth time) to have the friends that I have and, it has to be said, social networking. I might never have known if it wasn’t for her! Now, of course, I have his birthday as a repeating event on my Google calendar so I’ll never miss it again.
2010 was a year of nothing but Bowie for me. That’s not true, of course, I listened to a lot of Willie Nelson, Roxy Music, Lee Hazelwood, Mountain Goats and Levon Helm (to name a few), but I really and truly spent the year submerged in David Bowie. I read about this life, his rise to stardom. As we listened to his album Last Dance last night, I realized that it’s more than just a love for his music that makes me love him.
It’s the drama that he so beautifully imparts in every word he says. It’s the way he stopped at nothing to be the success that he became. It’s the way he threw his drink in the face of social norms and wore make up. Men should totally be allowed to wear make up, in my opinion. Encouraged even. And he does it so beautifully, sometimes donning almost a costume, sometimes just the perfect amount of silver eye shadow. An inspiration.
It’s the sincerity of each line of every song. It’s the way he so beautifully and succinctly captures the joy and terror of real life, and emerges optimistic. It’s the way that even if his lyrics make no sense to me, the feeling does. The feeling always does. Yes, David Bowie, I think, yes.
I had this idea a couple years ago when Evite first started getting annoying. Is it still annoying? I haven’t used it in years but I remember it being exceedingly frustrating to use.
My idea was for an event invitation site called ESPvite.com. Enter your event details and guest list (no need for email addresses!) and POOF! ESPVITE would invite your guests via ESP.
ESP, or extrasensory perception, you remember, is the act of receiving information not through physical senses but through your mind. Continue Reading
