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gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

"tribes": ten questions for seth godinOctober 8

10 Questions For Seth Godin

My friend and mentor, Seth Godin has a new book out, "Tribes". As has become a regular gapingvoid tradition, to celebrate the launch I e-mailed Seth 10 questions, which he kindly answered below. Rock on.

1. For the benefit of gapingvoid readers not yet familiar with your work [all 14 of them], let's get the main schpiel over and done with: From your perspective, what is "Tribes" about?

It explains why top-down, buzz-driven media is the past, not the future.

The world has always been organized into tribes, groups of people who want to (need to) connect with each other, with a leader and with a movement. The products, services and ideas that are gaining currency faster than ever are ones that are built on a tribe.

Barack Obama has one, John McCain tried to co-opt one. Arianna Huffington has built the most popular b

debora smailOctober 5

[Applying the pencil to DesertManhattan. Photos courtesy of Debora Smail, who was in town last week. Click on images to enlarge etc.]

desertmanhattan updateSeptember 29

[A rough idea of how I'm hoping "Desertmanhattan" will turn out, cannibalized from "Fred 44". 4x8 feet, pencil, acrylic and ink on canvas. Click on image to enlarge etc.]

Over the last week, I've been dividing my time between finishing the book manuscript and getting started on Desertmanhattan.

My head is all over the place at the moment; I thought I should write down some of my thoughts, just to gain some clarity for myself:

1. I'll be damn glad to have the book out of the way. It's been a long, four-year road. I feel a combination of gloriously happy and elated, and utterly burned out from the whole thing.

2. While I was working on Desertmanhattan, the feeling that "This is what I ought to be doing; this what I was born to be doing," kept swelling up inside me. And you know what? This totally terrified me. What if I gave up everything to do this, and suddenly nobody cared? Suddenly nobody wanted to buy my work, and I ended up penniless and ruined?

3. Paintings don't scale. Even if I could sell the painti

studio update: desertmanhattanSeptember 27

[Click on image to enlarge etc.]

For the last couple of months, I've been talking about a return to large-format paintings.

Originally I was planning 6-by-6-foot canvases; I decided instead to opt for 4'x8'.

I finally have my studio set up, as pictured above. It's an outdoor studio, with cement floor, tin roof, and as shown here, canvas walls to keep the rain and dust out.

That's a 4x8' wooden board you see there, with two-by-fours framing it on the backside. I'm going to cover it with canvas and get painting on it, hopefully in the next couple of days, before I take off out of town on business at the end of the week.

In the foreground you see my acrylic painting materials- plus a ten-foot roll of canvas in the orange plastic bag.

[A rough idea of how I'm hoping it'll turn out, cannibalized from a photo of "Fred 44". Click on image to enlarge etc.]

It's going to be called "Desertmanhattan". "Fred 44" was a ink-on-paper study for it,

the complexity war a.ka. "success is more complex than failure"September 25

Rudyard Kipling once described Triumph and Disaster as "Imposters, both". The longer I stay in the working world, the more I start to get what he means.

It's funny how you can have two guys sitting next to each other in an office, both doing the same job. Both using the same computers and phones. Both with the same academic qualifications. Both with a similar IQ. Both working the same amount of hours. But why does one guy take home five times more sales commission than the other guy? What's going on? Is it luck? Skill? Justice? Injustice?

The question of what separates success from failure, is something I've always liked to ponder on. Suddenly this week, out of nowhere, the following line hit me:

"Success is more complex than Failure."

Think about it. Being a failure is a no-brainer. All you have to do is sleep till noon, get out of bed, scratch your balls, have your morning visit to the bathroom, turn on the Star Trek re-runs, help yourself to some breakfast [Leftover pizza and a bottle of Jack Daniels, Hurrah!], light up your first joint of they day, download some porn, and already you're well on your way. Sure, a few inconvenient variables may enter the picture here and there, to co