Summer 2023: June 17

THE EARLY DAYS

No, the blog title isn’t misspelled. And if you don’t get the reference, well, you’re probably not as old as I am. It’s a most-likely-not-very-good sketch on SNL by Mike Myers about a kid who likes to draw, and anytime I think about drawing, the theme song runs through my head. Can’t remember a damn thing about the sketches, but that song was a banger. Anyway, moving on. As a kid, I was obsessed with Peanuts. I remember obsessively sketching Snoopy over and over, trying to get it just right, sometimes mimicking the curves correctly, sometimes making strange mutant versions of Charlie Brown’s companion. As I started experimenting and searching for more of my own style, I was influenced heavily by an even older stack of paperbacks and books that my dad had collected when he was younger. He has piles of old MAD magazine books and a comic called Pogo (if you look up some of Pogo’s stuff, you can see how I was influenced a lot by the eyes). I always dreamed of animating, too, but I didn’t have the patience for traditional cell animation (where you have to draw each frame, between 24-30 frames for every second of animation). I was digging through the garage the other day looking for my one attempt in high school called, “One Fine Day.” I shot it on 8mm film, using the plunger-control to capture one frame at a time, and made the soundtrack for it on my tiny studio setup, recording to an old Fostex cassette 4-track recorder. It was super fun but I had to recruit my best friend, Brad, who shared my love of drawing, to come over and help me ink some of the hundreds of pages I had drawn.

THEM MIDDLE YEARS

Once I became a professional musician, my time was understandably mostly devoted to figuring out how to write the best songs I could and trying to crack the music industry nut. That being said, I kept doodling and drawing, and along the way released some digital children’s books with my wife, Cheryl. This series of Momo books still lives in the Apple book store:

We never put this one out, but we also did a cute book about our older daughter Kena and every parents’ struggle with getting their kids to go to sleep:

I would also periodically buy animation software like Toonboom Studio, hoping that it would streamline the process and make animating something I could realistically do without spending too much time. Yep, I never learned how to use those programs. Later on, I was inspired by an iPhone app called StopMotion and created an entire music video with Legos. I distinctly remember being about halfway through the process when I was ready to jump off a bridge. I love animation. I just don’t love the process. Here’s that video:

NOW

About eight months into the pandemic, and more specifically just before the last Presidential election here in America, I stumbled across a program called Cartoon Animator. I watched a few demo vids and was convinced that this would finally enable me to mess around with animation. And mess around, I did. I bought the program and literally a week later started posting videos on TikTok. I mostly used this as an outlet for my frustration and anxiety about the possibility that we would have four more years of an orange buffoon in the White House, and channeled my id through a crudely drawn rabbit named Barfy the Carrot. Apologies for those easily offended. What I didn’t expect was it going viral about a month after I started posting. At its peak, the account had over 250k followers and some videos had millions of views. The highlight, though, was when Mandy Patinkin reached out to me through TikTok to collaborate on a video for the Georgia run-off election. Actually, an even bigger highlight was communicating with many recently-turned 18 year olds who needed a little guidance on how to register and vote. I had hundreds of DM conversations that usually ended with, “I did it, Barfy! I voted!” So yes, I single-handedly saved our country, you’re welcome. After getting a taste of that level of virality, I started another account called Red Monster, a children’s entertainment account which I worked on for a while with the whole family, though producing those proved to be much more time-consuming. Even though some of those videos got hundreds of thousands of views, we ran out of steam. Recently, my daughter Kaia had a choir brunch for which she made purposely funny-looking muffins. You never know where inspiration is gonna come from, so I asked her permission, and my most recent outlet for making short animations is Muffinz. I’ll know I’ve finally succeeded when we open a muffin chain filled with ugly but delicious muffins.

https://www.tiktok.com/@barfythecarrot

https://www.tiktok.com/@redmonsterfamily

https://www.youtube.com/@MuffinzFamily

FEATURED ART

As I’ve said many times, one thing I love about this Web3 community and the NFT space is that I’ve been able to start using more of my creative skills, so I’m excited to let you know about my new expansion pack on Async for their Dynamic Blueprint, Forever Supper. If you don’t know about it, it’s based on the Last Supper and is a free mint, giving you a soulbound NFT. From there you can buy expansions from different artists and mix and match the artwork to your liking to populate your room. You can change or update it as much as you want, and that part is a gasless transaction. My pack is – you guessed it – music themed, as I turn the room into “Genzo’s Studio.” And I couldn’t resist giving you a little music, too, even though this is a straight visual art project. The back two “screens” in the room show static art, but if you own the expansion, you can go to your OpenSea folder and will find that the previews are videos, one a complete acoustic performance, and the other a sneak peek of an upcoming music video. You can grab it here for a month only, starting July 18:

https://async.market/expansions/64b38f0db3d76e3eca30808d/genzo-genzos-studio

COME ALONG FOR THE RIDE

Join me on my journey by subscribing to my Mirror and Twitter (@genzomusic), and if you see or hear anything you like along the way, help support me and my collaborators as we all build together. You can also subscribe (minus the ability to collect) on Substack. Thanks for reading!