"I'M YOUR BIGGEST FAN!"

One of the things I like about forcing myself to write this blog every week is the fact that I'm getting some interesting and esoteric stories about my work loaded on to the the web where they will hopefully be archived forever. This will be a real bonus for the folk art historians of the future who decide to research my odd little niche in the crafts universe. Yes, I realize this sounds a bit egotistical, but when you see the photo at the end of this post, you will see why I'm feeling so full of myself today. The topic for this week is "Fan offerings and the fans that offer them: a trip down memory lane with the stuff people have sent me over the years". Enjoy!

The Tim T-shirt: This came to me from a fan who wanted to make a commemorative shirt for her friend Tim who was going on a trip to Japan. It was always fun for me to wear because people thought it was a typo that it said "Tim" instead of "Tom".

The Fred Babb original plate: Back in the summer of 1989, we had so many orders that there was a six week waiting list for galleries to receive their pots. Oh, those were the days! One of my best accounts was "What iz Art?" in Cambria, CA. It was owned by Julia and Fred Babb. Fred is an amazing artist and he is one of my true heroes and mentors in the world of crazy, fun and magical self-expression. When I told Fred his order was going to go to the back of the line just like everyone else, he sent me this plate as a bribe. It worked like a charm and I squeezed his pots in the next firing.

The silver Wally pin: A jeweler named Jewel sent me this a few years ago, and I love the way Wally looks in shiny metal. I used to do ceramic Wally pins back in the 1980s, and one of them was worn by Demi Moore in the film, "The Seventh Sign". Look for it in the chase scene where she is running through a church wearing a beige overcoat. Wally is right there on her collar!

The Wally Tattoo: This pic just came to me last week from a superfan via email.... really! I'm overwhelmingly flattered by it and I'm still kind of in a daze. It isn't finished yet, as the Wallys need to be colored in and the banner will have a phrase. The words have yet to be decided.... any ideas out there?

P.S. I just got a nice mention today on missmalaprop.com. Check it out!

BJM tonight

Just a short little post this week as I'm not in the blogging mood. But I am in the sycophantic rock fan mode today because tonight I'm going to see one of my very favorite bands in the whole world, The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Their sound is an reminiscent of The Stones in their psychedelic period, but they have pulled off an amazing feat by creating much more than just a retro sound. A few years back Robin brought home their double CD "Tepid Peppermint Wonderland" and after just one listen I was totally hooked. Their lead singer, Anton Newcomb, is one of the craziest geniuses in the rock world, and his live appearances can be really hit or miss. Check out the documentary, "DIG!" to get a good overview of his eccentric (i.e. borderline psychotic) personality. I was lucky enough to see them live two years ago and the show was near perfect and they played for almost four hours without a break. Other shows have clocked in at just fifteen minutes so it's a real crap shoot what you get when you see these guys. Whenever I see a band in concert, I always like to pick a song I hope they will play. My pick for tonight is "That Girl Suicide". Here's a ragged video of the song:




Post script: It was a great show and they did indeed play "That Girl Suicide". Here's a nice review in Denver Post.com

My Top Ten Favorite Wally Adventures

I can't even estimate how many various adventures my imaginary dog Wally has had over the past twenty-five years. The total number is probably close to a thousand, especially if you count all the various custom orders I've produced. Wally has been commissioned to motorcycle jump over wedding parties and "wrestle" with Hillary Clinton, just to name a few. Today I'm going to take another trip down memory lane and present you with my top ten favorite Wally cartoons of all time.

WARNING: SOME OF THESE JOKES CONTAIN DRUG REFERENCES AND SEXUAL SITUATIONS THAT MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOUNGER AUDIENCES. PARENTAL DISCRETION IS ADVISED.... REALLY!!!!

#10: "Wally finds a way to secure increased funding for NASA". I really like the simplicity of this one, and it was a good simple political joke for the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion in 2003.

#9: Wally comes home to find his house completely redecorated and Martha Stewart waiting in a bathtub filled with whipped cream". When I first came up with this idea, I thought it was too racy to sell in stores. Wrong!

#8: "Jerry Garcia wills Wally the marketing rights to his obscure but memorable exercise video". I did a number of Grateful Dead jokes with Wally in the 80s and 90s, so when Jerry died I was compelled to commemorate his passing. This cartoon was printed in Bill Husted's column in The Denver Post in 1995.

#7: "Wally is diagnosed with a clinical case of caffeine dependency, thus enabling him to park in the handicapped spaces at Starbucks". I suppose the fact that this one is our #1 top selling Wally mug helps, but it's still a really solid joke. I've drawn it on pots well over a thousand times!
#6: "A 'Random Acts of Kindness' seminar inspires Wally to beat up a masochist". This joke was inspired by the witticism: "A masochist is someone who is kind to a sadist".
#5: "Wally makes the mistake of using George W. Bush for his lifeline on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionare". We made a ton of these five years ago, and I still really like the hook in this joke.
#4: "As luck would have it, Wally's trip to Disneyland falls on the same day as The Apocalypse". I love the premise of this one: the happiest place on Earth on the last day on Earth.
#3: "Wally guest stars in a 'Love Is' cartoon". I never could convince my wholesale accounts to carry this one, but I still think it's about as funny as it gets. Perverted, but funny!
#2: "Wally buys the 'Lost in Space' robot on eBay only to have it nag him about how much time he spends shopping online". If I could think of one joke as simple and funny as this every day, I could do a syndicated cartoon in the newspapers.
#1: "Wally experiences a blind date so bad, it causes severe psychological damages". I had a really great guy who worked for me for about a year, and his name was Kyle. One day he told me about a friend of his who took LSD and watched the movie 'Faces of Death'. Yikes! I just took that story one step further here, and I think it's wonderfully dark and weird.

It's 2009! Hello Etsy, goodby Cosmo.

Happy New Year!

I'm putting some of my "beginning of the year" energy into building a new website for my pottery at a social networking/retail craft site called Etsy. I came across it last month while I was reading various pottery blogs and it has been getting good reviews all over. It's dirt cheap: just twenty cents to display each item plus a small fee if you sell through their site. I'm using it primarily as a way to find new customers and steer them to my existing online webstore. As I was building my store, literally within the first few hours of being on Etsy, I received an email from someone who had bought my work back in the 80s and was happy to see that I was still making pots. This is a very good sign! The selection of artists on the site is a younger crowd and I really like the vibe. It's like Facebook for artists and I'm looking forward to seeing how well it pans out in terms of sales. I should have my site completely built by the end of the week at a total cost of under ten dollars. Click this link to check it out!

Over the holidays I read the book, "Clear Blogging" by Bob Walsh. It's a very good overview on the mechanics of blogging and I picked up some excellent tips and ideas. It was great to learn that I did a good job of figuring out how to create a blog by just stumbling through it the past few months. A lot of things in life are just common sense. But I think if I had read this book before I started this endeavor, I might not have jumped into it at all. There is a fair amount of maintenance and diligence needed to have a blog that is read by the masses. So from a business point of view, the jury is still out as to whether or not I should be spending my time doing this. But now I have a better sense for how I should focus my writing so it is something people will want to read once a week. It's pretty clear that my weekly posts should:

• be really fun to read
• be focused on the zany aspect of my artwork
• be shorter so as not to loose my audience
  
• use bullet points to make my point, because for some reason you should use a lot of bullet points to make your point
  

So long, introspective, "talking to myself out loud to myself" posts like this one will just have to go, I guess.

One of the things the book emphasized was to have a "beat" and cover it on a regular basis. This was totally the case with my "Stump the Sage" blog. I started that one on a whim because I really know a lot about rock trivia and I'm a geek for Bret Saunders' trivia shtick every Wednesday morning on KBCO. The blog pretty much wrote itself and it was terribly fun to do. Writing from the perspective of a caustic monkey just fit the subject matter perfectly and I probably could have kept it going if I had much of an audience. But the sad fact is that it just didn't get many hits. The one week that Bret mentioned it on air was good and we got a decent number of viewers. But the next week was dismal and I think the only people who were reading it were people from Clear Channel... DJs and corporate goons. I know this stuff because I have Stat Counter, an amazing service that gives you tons of info on who is visiting your various sites. I sent a fair amount of emails to the KBCO folks to try and get links and such, but they really didn't see it as an asset so I'm letting it drop. So I am sorry to inform you that Cosmo the monkey "died" in a plane crash last week. Life goes on, man. You just gotta deal with it. If this sad news really affects you, I suggest that you leave your thoughts and feelings in the comments section at the "How to Stump the Sage" site (That was a not-so-subtle hint)

The 22nd Century Collector’s Guide to Wallyware

Permit me to indulge myself for just a bit here and let us imagine that it’s one hundred years in the future and Wallyware pottery has become a collectable item. For the record, I never tell fans of my work to buy it as an investment, so we are just pretending here. But a century from now these pots would certainly make an entertaining feature on a futuristic version of “Antiques Roadshow”. And it’s not unrealistic to think that the tens of thousands of pots I’ve created in my lifetime could be enough volume to warrant a small collectables market in the next century. Only time will tell. One thing is for sure, the topical humor I’m doing now is going to seem like it’s from another planet to people in the distant future. So let’s dig deep into the Wallyware catalog and unearth some esoteric and already ancient Wally adventures that will be the most collectable of the bunch, due to their extremely limited availability and/or their significance to history:

1) “NAPPY! HE AM GOOD BOY!!!” (1983) True fact: There is only one of these, and it is the very first image of Wally that I ever drew. It was a gift to my friend Liz, to commemorate an experience she had as a medical intern. Don’t be surprised if someday there are imitations of this plate now that its picture is posted on the web.
2) “The First Wally Adventures” (mid-1980s) These are the very early Wally pots that look a lot like they are drawn by a child. The artwork is crude, and the jokes are incredibly simple: “Wally sees God”, “Wally meets visitors from outer space”, “Wally eats visitors from outer space”, etc.

3) “Happy Wedding, Julia and Keifer. Love, Wally” (1991) Inspired by the big celebrity news of the day, this joke was drawn on only a couple dozen plates. (Note the painted-on sale price sticker!) A few years after I created it, one of the galleries that shows my work sold it to a friend of Julia Roberts who allegedly gave it to the academy award winning actress. How fun!
4) “While negotiating a labor contract with Zigfried and Roy, Wally encourages his clients to get tough with management” (1990s) I created this joke for a fine craft store in the MGM Grand at Las Vegas and it sold pretty well for them. It was kind of creepy in 2003 when the news broke about Roy Horn getting attacked by his tigers.
5) “Wally and Up with People sing their way into the Guinness Book of records in a ditch in Waco, Texas” (1993) I made less than a dozen of these just one week before the Branch Davidian compound was burned to the ground by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. We shipped the first ones out to Twist Gallery in Oregon, and they arrived the exact same day as the tragedy. The gallery owner called us and said, “We need to send these back.”
6) The “Wally and OJ” series: 1995 was a real boom time for us with the OJ trial. The Geraldo Rivera joke was the first, and Geraldo himself held up a mug with this cartoon on his TV show. We did a series of spin-off adventures about the trial, and the high point of it all was sending a batch of plates off to the prosecution lawyers for a special order from the DA of Los Angeles, Gil Garcetti. I even got to talk to Gil on the phone one day. It was so weird!
7) The Oregon Bach Festival series (1990s): For a string of about five or six years, my account in Eugene, New Twist, would order commemorative Wally designs for the Oregon Bach Festival. They were a big hit with the musicians at the festival, and the subjects of the jokes were wonderfully esoteric.
8) The Provincetown gay theme series: In 2004 I received a really huge order for ten different gay themed Wally adventures for my account in Provincetown, MA. That summer we produced a couple hundred pots with Wally as a drag queen, Wally as a giant ape carrying female impersonator Ray Fay to the top of a skyscraper, Wally cuddling with “The Bears” etc. It was quite the left-wing soapbox tour de force!
9) “The Unsinkable Molly Brown Spittoon” (2008) Every year I donate something to Rocky Mountain PBS station and this year I got inspired and created an epic tale to grace a spittoon. It sold for $250.00… cheap! It’s definitely a one of a kind.10) “Wally creates the ultimate political reality TV show: ‘The Perils of Palin” and “Wally defends Sarah Palin’s stand on hunting wolves with helicopters with some folksy backwoods wisdom” (2008) These two adventures celebrate the overwhelming national spotlight on that spunky right-wing Alaskan governor that dropped into our laps a few months ago. I’m hoping that she will go away now, but only time will tell.
If you happen to have any old Wally ceramics out there that might be worthy of this list, feel free to post the titles below. The really odd thing about doing this line of pottery for as long as I have is the fact that there are pots out there that I don’t even remember making. I have shoe boxes full of photos and memorabilia, but I don’t have records of everything I’ve done. It’s going to be an interesting task for folk art historians of the future to nail down all those esoteric designs out there!

What's funny? Talking dirty at dinnertime.

A big part of my job as a potter/cartoonist is coming up with new jokes to put on my pots. It is by far the most challenging and mysterious aspect of my work. It can be wonderfully easy or totally exasperating, depending on how the idea comes to me. I have all the creative issues that regular cartoonists deal with plus one extra hurdle: the joke has to be something that people will want to look at while they drink their morning coffee. I've noticed that this means that just about any joke on the subject of coffee is pretty much certain to sell well. But esoteric ones like "Wally introduces Pee Wee Herman to Jocyln Elders. Kleenex is required before they shake hands." really don't have that much sales appeal. What was I thinking when I came up with that one? So while I'm banging my head against the wall looking for new material, I've got a marketing director in the back of my brain saying, "Make sure it will sell!"

Right now, a lot of the galleries that carry my work are begging for new jokes about Barack Obama. I've been grappling with this subject for almost a year now, and I have yet to come up with a really good zinger about the senator from Illinois. And a lot of my fellow humorists are in the same boat. Sarah Palin is a total goldmine for all of us. There is so much goofy reality to that $150,000 wardrobe hockey mom that the sky is the limit for jokes about her. But getting a good laugh out of Mr. Obama tends to be a real conundrum. This was brought home to me the other night while I was watching Dana Carvey on The Tonight Show. He is absolutely amazing at doing impersonations, and he did a brilliant job of lampooning recent newsmakers: Biden, McCain, Palin, Tom Brokaw, etc. But when he did his impersonation of Barack Obama, it fell totally flat. I was floored by this, and it completely confirmed my gut feeling that the man who just might be our next president is going to be a tough subject for satire. But I'll keep working on it.

The best way to come up with new jokes is to find them in your daily life. I had a really funny experience a while back. My wife and I were out to dinner with a group of friends, and just as we were ordering our food, our friends brought up the weirdest topic of conversation. Totally out of the blue, they started talking about their way-cool designer toilet. It comes from Japan and it's called a "Toto". It has a heated seat and tons of features, the best one being this weird little motorized bidet gizmo that slides out underneath you and washes you clean when you are done. Yes, this conversation was happening just as we were perusing our menus. I was pretty much speechless during this curious filibuster, but I was genuinely fascinated as I had no idea that commode technology had advanced so much in my lifetime. Where had I been while these incredible technological developments were being developed? I really need to get out more and learn about what's happening in the world. So the funniest part of this conversation came when my friend asked us, "What's the dirtiest part of your body?" For some reason I couldn't answer this one immediately, and the next day I realized that I wished I'd said, "My mind." And then he asked us a rhetorical question, "You wouldn't just wipe your hands with paper to get them clean, would you?" My wife answered this one quite well, as well she should because she has a sharp mind and a PhD in Public Health. She replied, "Well, you don't pick up food with your butt."

The next day I found myself thinking about this situation and I realized that the whole thing was like something out of the TV show "Curb Your Enthusiasm". Larry David, the offbeat writer for "Seinfeld" has made a career out of observing weird interpersonal situations in everyday life and depicting them in his comedy. So that was my Larry David experience! But I really don't think that I'm going to get a Wally cartoon out of it, as it feels like it could be another one like that Pee Wee Herman joke, and the fans of Toto toilets are a pretty small market to cater to. But I do have a new Wally design on a similar subject. It was inspired by my dog, Ivy and it is posted below. Do you think it will sell?

Maybe I should change my name to "Joe the Potter"

I'm really jealous of this Joe the Plumber guy. Can you believe how much media attention he is getting? I'm googling the news every day to see the latest developments in his story. The most recent is an online effort to get him to run for congress as a Republican in 2010. That's a brilliant idea! Now we have a trend in the GOP to launch candidates who are woefully unqualified for the job, but super flashy in the "fifteen minutes of fame" department. Isn't it reassuring at a time in history when we are facing a lot of really scary Gordian knots in just about every aspect of our society, that we want "real" guys and gals like Joe and Sarah to help us try to untie these knots?

But it's a shame that Joe doesn't have a plan to cash in on all this notoriety because he obviously needs the money to pay his back taxes, gas for his SUV, etc. I really identify with Joe's dream of making more money because that's one of the issues I deal with all the time as a self-employed studio potter. Right now I'm looking for ways to increase the visibility of my work on the web and this blog is, apparently, one of the ways I can increase my "searchability factor" on the internet. Just yesterday, I googled the words "The Caffeine Curve" to see what kind of buzz is out there on one of my top selling mug designs. I was amazed to find that the graphic I had made for this mug was posted on literally thousands of blogs and websites all over the world. I left responses on some of these blogs, thanking the writers for sharing my joke with their readers. I also mentioned that these mugs are for sale at my website. I know, leaving comments on blogs is a lame way to hustle my pots, but it's a start. The funny thing is, a half an hour later I got an email from a blog poster in South Africa asking if I can ship my work to him there. Wow!

So now I'm looking at Joe the Plumber's overnight fame and thinking about ways to try and get the world to beat a path to my door. Any suggestions you folks out there might have would be much appreciated. I realize that getting famous can be a Faustian bargain. It could be a problem that I don't have a valid potter's license and I might have some overdue library books out there. The media can be a vicious pack of wolves if it decides to turn on you. But at least I have a way to make a buck off of it all. So far, Joe the Plumber hasn't gotten that far.