Over at the Mother Jones site, I ran across a fantastic photo essay called American Happiness and the Need to Consume. The sequence of photos is very tightly constructed, taking the viewer from a starting point at the mouth of a mall-based retail store to an endpoint in a grocery store, facing a wall of stacked goods.

The selection of photos is taken from a larger project called Copia by photographer Brian Ulrich. Begun after 9/11, the intent of the project was to explore the Bush administration's directive to the people of the U.S. to stimulate the economy in the wake of the attack by going shopping.

I find a lot to admire in these photos, but I was particularly drawn to the faces of people while shopping. Ulrich has captured that moment of intense decision-making in consumers' expressions, which I recognize from my own experience of shopping. I know that look has been on my face, and I've seen it often on people around me. But captured in photos, the expression appears catatonic.

Sometimes my favorite comic book layout is a simple symmetrical grid. The regularity of the grid can create different effects depending on the story. In some stories, I find that the strict progression of the grid propels the narrative forward in a way that makes the outcome seem inevitable. In other cases, a grid can serve as a quiet counterpoint to an explosive or strange storyline.

Over at Electro^plankton, I was intrigued to read about a photography team, made up of photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek, who uses the grid format . Their work plays off the ideas of individual and group identity, showing members of various groups composed in a grid layout. One can see both the distinctiveness of the group identity and the conformity within the group at the same time.

What I noticed looking at these pictures was the different ways my eye read these photos. In some cases, my eye would take in a block at a time, moving vertically down the page, as if to emphasize the uniformity of the images. At other times, I seemed to take in the whole grid at once, then various sets of images would emerge from the grid based on similarities of color or style. The photos could tell different stories, either of similarity or difference, based on how my eyes viewed the grid.

I found a link on Muttpop's blog to an online gallery of artwork inspired by Mexican wrestling, or Lucha Libre. The exhibit is called Viva Lucha! and it's free to view, although it will cost you several minutes of your time as you wait for the flash gallery to load. I'm not kidding--open a new browser tab, go make tea, do some stretching--it's going to take a while. The image shown here, by Mik Gaspay, is from the show.

We dragged our asses out of bed the morning after the PURE White Party and made a sorry appearance at the hotel breakfast buffet, along with many equally sorry-looking dykes. After greeting us with a wry call of "Morning, ladies!" the gay male wait staff proved quite caring and sympathetic as they served us our coffee.

After the excesses of the previous night, the Cute-Little-Red-Headed-Girlfriend and I felt a need to, shall we say, cleanse the palette. So instead of attending one of the numerous pool parties on offer, we opted to visit a nearby art gallery, m modern. I've been interested in some of the exhibits they've held in the past but never made the trip out to Palm Springs expressly to visit. Now I was in the neighborhood.

m modern specializes in contemporary art and artists representing the movement known as "Pop Surrealism." There were two solo shows on display while we were there, Floating World, New Work from Pizz and Imagination is Salvation by Stone. I was intrigued by the title "Floating World" because of my interest in Japanese woodblock prints known by the name ukiyo-e (floating world).

Pizz's paintings resembled ukiyo-e prints in their emphasis on objects and figures of mass commercial desire: cars, models, pleasure spots. In the canvas I photographed here, I like the way the curves and deep purple color create unity among the various figures . The Cute-Little-Red-Headed-Girlfriend pointed out the striking flatness of Pizz's compositions, in contrast with their sinuous surface lines.

Unconstrained by city rents, m modern has the space to display a wide variety of other artists in addition to its current exhibits. We saw work by other artists I've written about here, such as Shephard Fairey, Shag and Tim Biskup. Seeing our interest, the gallery kindly opened up some closed-off areas that were under construction to us as well. In addition to paintings and prints, m modern displayed sculpture, toys and furniture. I stopped to take a picture of designer Karim Rashid's "Orgy Couch," below, which seemed relevant to my time at Dinah.

I had hoped to see work by the artist Yumiko Kayakuwa, who recently had a show at m modern, but had to settle on flipping through the pages of her book, The Wild Kingdom of Yumiko Kayukawa. I became interested in the work of two artists on display, Joey Remmers, whose paintings of dislocated women in graytone landscapes I thought were beautiful. Also Glenn Barr, whose pictures seethed color while mixing mythological themes with scenes of urban life.

View more photos at my page.

Last weekend, the Cute-Little-Red-Headed-Girlfriend and I went to see the "Shared Women" exhibit of lesbian feminist art at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in Hollywood. The show was brought to my attention by the New York Times, where it was favorably reviewed alongside the massive WACK! exhibit happening at MOCA. I also discovered, via art.blogging.la, that there are a number of female-focused shows being held across Los Angeles to coincide with WACK!

Stepping into the "Shared Women" show transported me back to the mid-80s, when so many gay and lesbian artistic endeavors were overtly activist and mobilized around the issue of AIDS. It was a time when gays and lesbians in the U.S. still thought of themselves as part of a liberation movement, as opposed to a highly focused consumer segment or an incredibly large and enthusiastic group of wedding planners. (Sorry. That was bitter.)

I had a small point-and-shoot camera with me, so I was able to take a bunch of photos at the exhibit, which I've put up as a set at the photo-sharing site Zooomr. They're not great quality, but you can view the photos in whatever size you wish, download them, read my embedded notes, or comment on them. Warning: these photos are not even remotely work safe. There are many, many vaginas and sex acts represented. Click on this link to view the set.

The exhibit's title, "Shared Women," brought to mind a number of associations: sharing, sampling, collectivism, wife-swapping. After seeing the show, all of those meanings seem to have been intended, plus a few more: sharing of bodies and identities, sharing as a group celebration, and sharing as the result of exclusion or "non-sharing."

Sharing through exclusion was the theme of the first piece I saw, a collection of homemade commemorative plates depicting the First Ladies of the United States. Their photos had been taped on a hodge-podge collection of cheap, transparent glass plates. The DIY nature of the piece was certainly contemporary, while also underlining the relationship between craft, kitsch and women's work.

There weren't any exhibit notes that I could take home with me, so I can't identify most of the artists in the show for you now. But I recognized the work of the next artist I saw, Nicole Eisenman, who I've previously written about. Spread across two walls and the floor below, Eisenman's work focused on the lesbian body.

Looming large over the installation was an image of the L Word's iconic character Shane, pregnant, with a phallic arm ending in a clenched fist emerging from her vagina. In a word balloon Shane asks, "How can I get people to pour their love into my emptyness?" On the floor beneath Eisenman's assemblage lay a sculpture of two lifesized beavers engaging in oral sex. The receiving beaver lay in ecstasy on her back, tiny paws waving in the air.

At the other end of the room was a large purple mural by a Canadian group of artists called "Welcome to Gayside." The mural was of a large fantasy landmass with gay-, lesbian- and transgender-themed geographic features and populations. Interspersed on the map were small drawings showing gays communing with the natural world. My favorite of these showed a naked lesbian finger-fucking a sheep.

Someone working at the gallery told me the sheep picture had caused some consternation among visitors to the gallery. I thought it was a hilarious send-up of the belief that lesbians, and women generally, are not as sexually aggressive as men, nor as depraved in their tastes. I also loved the way the image parodied lesbians' own beliefs about themselves, in this case, the idea that lesbians are all animal lovers.

I was really excited to see four pieces by G.B. Jones included in the show. Her drawings depict lesbian dramas in the style of the infamous gay artist and pornographer, Tom of Finland. The stylistic translation from gay male to lesbian subject matter serves to highlight cultural differences between the sexes, yet her drawings still retain the erotic charge of Tom of Finland's work.

There was a video piece by Tara Mateik on display called P.Y.T. In this faux-music video, an androgynous figure dressed as Peter Pan dances and and lip-synchs to the Michael Jackson song "Pretty Young Thing" while clips from filmed productions of Peter Pan roll in the background. You can watch a clip from the video here.

The "Shared Women" exhibit is on view at LACE through April 9.

View more photos at my page.

I've been reading Image's The Nightly News, a six-part comic about an urban revolutionary cult that targets the news media. Written and illustrated by Jonathan Hickman, it's an ambitious work that uses a bold, innovative graphic style to tells its story.

Hickman largely dispenses with the paneled progression of most comics, preferring instead to compose the page as a single layout. Drawing on graphic design techniques, Hickman uses a range of layered graphics to draw the eye across the page. Dense infographics punctuate the story from time to time, offering real-world background on the media industry that serves to deepen the plot.

The graphics and story are both interesting, but I wish Hickman and given more visibility to text within the layout. His technique of using boxes rather than balloons allows the text to wrap around figures and move across the page in interesting ways, but the type in The Nightly News is so small at times that I found it both difficult and annoying to read.

I like The Nightly News, however, in part because it does seem like the artist is experimenting. I can imagine myself buying more of Hickman's work in the future to see how he continues to refine and develop his storytelling style.

I read about an interesting post-9/11 art project called The Real Story of the Superheroes on we-make-money-not-art.

The photographer, Dulce Pinzon, was born in Mexico but currently resides in the U.S. In a collection of 12 striking photos, Pinzon depicts the lives of Mexican immigrant workers living in New York. Each is wearing a superhero costume as they go about their usual work routine.

The photo shown here, called "Aquaman," depicts a young man, Juventino Rosas, cleaning fish. Along with the name and place of origin of each individual, Pinzon has included the amount each person sends home--superheroically--to family in Mexico each week.

One of my designer friends, Denny Chen, is a finalist in a toy design contest. If you have a minute, please help him out by voting for his design here. His design is in the second column, five rows down, and it's labeled with his name. He's the dunny-obsessed friend I wrote about a few days ago.

So far, I've managed to resist falling prey to the dunny collecting passion. Dunnys, for the uninitiated, are a fiendishly cute series of artist-created collectible toys. They're sold in blind boxes, so you don't know which one you're getting when you buy them. And they're produced in varying numbers, so some are rare while others are more common. They're also immensely popular collectibles here in L.A.

I first witnessed the madness dunnys can inspire in one of my co-workers, whose rapidly growing collection of dunnys slowly took over his workspace. One day, I watched over his shoulder as he browsed auctions for some of the more hard-to-find dunnys on eBay. He confessed to having participated in several bidding wars over the toys, and that's when a steady voice inside my head first cautioned me: "Don't go there, don't go there."

That voice has stayed with me, despite the release of the right-up-my-alley Los Angeles series of dunnys, the terribly adorable Batman-inspired dunny, the unconscionably precious blue-meenie-style dunny. But with the release of the Azteca series, designed by 12 Mexican artists and designers, I give up. Just watch this sweet fan-made film featuring several Azteca dunnys hitting a dunny-blind-box-shaped pinata and then you try to resist.

On Neatorama, I discovered a link to the coloring book "The Color of Dissent," which "celebrates revolutionaries and political visionaries in American history." I would totally buy this if I had kids. "Mom, I'm bored!" they would complain. And I'd say, "Oh, go color Wilma Mankiller, woud you? Mamma T's surfing the Internets."

Amanda and Michelle of The Girls Productions! offered a peek at what they've been up to lately on their blog. Turns out they've been laboring on a lot of fine art and schwag to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Pirates of the Carribean ride at Disneyland. I've put up a sample of the art that they'll be showing at the gallery above the ride on March 18. This print is called "Showem your larboard side" and depicts the famous auction sequence from the attraction, in which the pirates are all shouting "We want the Redhead! We want the Redhead!" You can check out the rest of their Pirates work here.

I've got a piece up at The Horror Blog that I hope my readers will go take a look at. I was asked to participate in a Halloween celebration featuring contributions from non-Horror bloggers about a "favorite scare." I wrote about an album from the punk era called "A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die." For graphic art fans, you might want to look at the original punk flyers I scanned to go with the article. Also, there's a picture of me as a little kid dressed in a Halloween costume that I think is at least worth a click.

The latest newsletter from Aeclectic Tarot contained several interesting decks, including an homage to video game art called 8-bit Tarot. I've shown a sample here of the "Wheel of Fortune" card. This is an unfinished deck, part of a work-in-progress scheduled to be exhibited in November 2007.

I also liked the Manga Deck, although I don't feel I'm enough of a fan of mainstream manga to be able to render an intelligent opinion on the translation of manga from comics to cards. However, Aeclectic Tarot does have several reviews of the deck on the site which shed light on different aspects of the deck's interpretation of Tarot. I thought it was particularly intriguing that the deck reversed traditionally gendered roles on the cards, so that female figures become males ones and vice versa.

The Cute Little Red-Haired Girlfriend and I went to Laguna Beach for a few days. Not the Virtual Laguna Beach, which seems to quite hot with the young'uns, but the actual Laguna Beach. It's startlingly gorgeous, and remains so, despite being a tourist attraction.

We stayed at a secluded inn, and on our first night there, went to dinner at a restaurant recommended by several travel websites. I didn't know when I chose it that, in addition to being a very fine restaurant, it also happened to be a very friendly gay bar. We found this out while the girlfriend and I were driving by, looking for a place to park. Seeing two men standing in front of the building, the girlfriend leaned out the car window to ask, "Where should we park?" Before the words were out of her mouth, one of the men walked towards her crying out, "You're gorgeous!" and embraced her in a boozy hug. Seconds later, the other man ran out into the street screaming, "LESBIANS!" and began nuzzling the girlfriend like a puppy. I've decided this is how I would prefer to be greeted in public from now on.

While we were in Laguna, we attended an exhibit of work by Tim Biskup and Gary Baseman called "Pervasions" at the Laguna Beach Museum. I like both artists, and was pleased to be able to see their work away from the hubub fo L.A. I took a picture of my favorite piece from the show, a work by Biskup called The Demon Painter.

I have a soft spot for some of the paper and other crafts of Mexico, handiwork that I often associate with holidays. Awhile ago I read about an artist named Dylan Graham on We Make Money Not Art who has adapted traditional Mexican paper cut outs to modern themes. Here, I've chosen to show a detail from his work Armada which highlights its delicacy. To see it in context, take a look at Graham's web site.