BXNG

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Benjamen

A boxing gym in Vegas

I’ve become really interested in boxing-related stuff, although I don’t really follow the sport. (HBO’s excellent and addictive series 24/7 is the closest I come to even watching it.) Scrolling through my iPhone album and wanting to play with my new VSCO CAM app, I decided to process and post a little collection of some of the boxing-related images I’ve snapped this past year. The shot above is the back entrance of a boxing gym in Las Vegas.

Here’s a wood-burned portrait of Joe Brown that I spotted at the mind-blowing Mantiques Modern store last weekend:

Joe Brown wood etching

A pair of old boxing gloves that I bought at Brimfield last August:

Brimfield boxing gloves

Another Brimfield purchase: a vintage movie poster for The Fighting Gentleman, rendered in a crude style that you don’t normally see on movie posters, and in just one color. (I also bought the old circus poster.)

The Fighting Gentleman

Here are a couple reproduced and enlarged photos for sale in the Timothy Oulton department at the ABC Home store:

ABC Home store

I saw these great paintings in a store window in DUMBO. They’re from the series “The Golden Age of Jewish Boxing” by Charles Miller:

Jewish boxers

Brooklyn artist George Spencer paints only boxers, and it feels like blood, sweat and tears are his primary tools. I first saw his visceral work at the Brooklyn Flea, and it stopped me in my tracks. I bought two of his originals through his Etsy store:

Boxer Paintings

And here’s another boxer painted huge on a wall outside that gym in Vegas:

Vegas Boxing Gym Wall

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Wayback Machine Rescue #01: October 17th, 2008

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Benjamen

Back in mid-2009 I mercilessly deleted all but a couple of the blog posts I’d written between October 2008 — the month I was laid off from my art director job at Las Vegas Weekly — and the summer of 2009 — a few months after I’d moved to Seattle and begun working as art director of Seattle Met.

I’d started my blog during my unemployment, in the hopes that it might possibly help me in landing a new job during the cruelest economy the country had faced in nearly a century. The blog was my first step toward building up an online presence. (I also moved my outdated web portfolio over to Clickbook for a fresh redesign, and joined LinkedIn. I didn’t get around to Facebook until about a month after I found work, and still haven’t used my Twitter account …) There were a number of personal reasons that compelled me to take down all the old blog posts once I’d begun my new job and new life in Seattle. But I’ve always regretted totally wiping them out from my WordPress archives, rather than merely marking them as private and un-publishing them.

Well, lucky for me, the Internet never forgets. And thanks to the Wayback Machine, I’ve been able to recover all my old posts. And weirdly, I’m able to go back in time and publish them on the exact date that they were initially posted. I’m making an effort to not modify the original posts in any significant way. And I’m leaving off any reader comments that were originally published, because it seems weird to enter those in myself.

Here’s the first one I’ve retro-published, from October 17th, 2008:

It's right there on the table.

(Click the image to time travel …)

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On the Street: Ben Stiller

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Benjamen

Since moving to New York last year, I’ve developed a trick that I use when I pass someone on the street whom I want to discreetly photograph. I’ve tried it three times now, with a 66.66% success rate.

Here’s the scenario: I’ll be walking down the street and glance up and see someone striking and photogenic coming right toward me. I’ll immediately double back at top speed, as though I’ve just realized that I’ve forgotten something important at wherever I’ve just come from. And I’ll whip out my iPhone and launch the camera in the meantime, readying it for action. Then I’ll casually turn back around — as though I hadn’t forgotten anything after all — and head back toward the photogenic person, with my camera set to go at my hip.

Since I can’t see what I’m pointing the camera at, the framing and other results vary. Here’s a guy walking around Midtown in January dressed as Edward Scissorhands:

Scissorhands guy

And here’s one I shot today: Ben Stiller walking around Midtown talking to some woman:

Ben Stiller

You might be able to see my trick in action for yourself in the next Ben Stiller movie. Because I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I looked across the street after snapping that photo, I discovered the whole thing was captured on film by the movie crew facing us:

Movie crewMovie crewMovie crew

The one time I tried this and failed was a few weeks ago, when I passed a blonde woman in the subway who was completely topless, and wearing a black mustache painted on her face. I was totally disoriented by the site, and unable to launch my camera in time. I later found out she’s a performance artist named Holly Van Voast (NSFW).

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Post-Presentation Disorder

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Benjamen

CRMA badge

I’m at a hotel in Las Vegas right now, where I’ll be resting and relaxing and hanging out with friends and family for the next four days. I arrived on Saturday afternoon for the CRMA convention, and did my first-ever public speaking the next day.

I’d obsessed over my presentation daily in the months that passed since I agreed to speak, waking up every morning these last two months thinking about what I was going to say. I spent well over 120 hours putting together a multimedia presentation, which included 540 slides in Keynote. I digitized hundreds of CDs and DVDs from my archives so that I could carefully go through everything I’ve worked on over the last 12 years, and put together a presentation where every piece included was part of a larger narrative. It was a very introspective experience, spending so much time with work I’d forgotten I’d even done, and recognizing in a lot of it something that felt connected to work that’s become a fixture in my portfolio.

I’d never even attended a design lecture before, so I watched whatever ones I could find online to help get a sense of what to do and what not to do. My favorite by far is this presentation by Field Notes creator Aaron Draplin, a guy I’ve become friends with since commissioning him for something for Men’s Journal last fall:

I had an hour and fifteen minutes to fill, with some of that time reserved for questions at the end. I was so determined not to rush through it and leave way too much time for the Q&A session that I actually went long, and had time for only one question at the end. But many art directors approached me afterward and asked me one-on-one questions, which was nice. And I heard more than a few people call my presentation “inspirational,” which is the best review I could’ve hoped for.

Once I was done, I went to my room at Caesars and collapsed on the bed, and slept hard for over three hours. I woke up with a voice that was shot, and with my presentation still going through my head. It was still going through my head when I woke up this morning, two days after finishing it. It’s going to take a little while to get back to normal, I think.

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Flea Market Find #004: Turn-of-the-Century Uncle Sam Wine Box

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Benjamen

Turn-of-the-Century Uncle Sam Wine Box

Found at the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market: I’m always on the lookout for cool storage options with great graphics, so this turn-of-the-century Uncle Sam wooden wine box got my blood racing when I spotted it on a dealer’s table. I tried to be discreet about my excitement, and even walked away for about 15 minutes to seem disinterested, so that when I returned I was able to talk the seller into a nice discount. But I would’ve paid full asking price without hesitating.

I cleaned this up and set in on my desk as an inbox for bills and magazines.

Turn-of-the-Century Uncle Sam Wine Box at home

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