For those that don't know, one of my hobbies is painting and I'm currently trying to focus a little more attention on it for whatever reason.  It's fitting then, that a few days ago, a friend of mine reminded me about the East Austin Studio Tour (E.A.S.T.) which I went to last year for the first time and was completely blown away by the multitude of hidden studios that exist in my old neighborhood.  I wish I had a better memory to tell you all the great places I went to (making this entry a lot more useful).  What I can offer however, is a suggestion if you're going: start at a few of the larger exhibition spaces (i.e. Pump which is E15 on the map), find an artist who is creating art that you particularly enjoy and just ask them which other spaces they would suggest.  Last year I talked to Mychal at Iona Handcrafted Books (81 on the map) and she was kind enough to point me in the right direction and even gave me a delicious chocolate chip cookie with a beer kicker to boot.

That's it.  I just wanted to push more people to go to this event.  I'll update the blog with some pics and thoughts about my trip to the E.A.S.T. and then later will upload some of my paintings that I am working on (a Goodie in Austin Studio Tour of sorts GiA.S.T.) just for kicks.  I'm thinking this will be a Friday night or Sunday afternoon deal though Friday seems like a strange choice and Sunday's their last day so I'm not sure I'm planning this right.  Hit me up if you're heading there too.

Btw, the above picture was drawn by an artist friend of mine during my recent visit to NYC, he's currently doing a project where he is drawing every person in new york which I think is completely badass.  I realize that it's not from East Austin, but it certainly is from the East.

Thrill the World for me started as a night of just hanging out with a couple friends and a tip from a blog about a Michael Jackson sing-a-long at the Alamo Drafthouse followed by Thriller dance lessons at a private bar.  It ended about a year later when I'm doing the dance for the 4th time at a power plant parking lot before attending a Michael Jackson sing-a-long (see how it came full circle?) 

The original dance I performed was to set a world record for the most people dancing to Thriller at the same time.  The way they were planning on doing this was to get various cities from around the world to all perform the dance at a predesignated time and date.  So before this date, I studied all the videos and learned all the moves so I knew every booty-bounce-step and roar-turn that was going to come my way.  The first performance not only set a world record for most people dancing around the world at the same time, but also set a record for most people in one place dancing it, and guess where that place happened to be?  That's right, Austin, Texas.  

I've been doing this event for 3 years now because it combines two of my favorite things: Halloween and running.  I skipped this last year because they pushed the time to 8am, which was way too early in the morning for my group of friends and I.  We had the clever idea of going as the cast from Hangover and actually be hungover while running but somehow that didn't happen and we chose sleeping-in instead.  Hey guy in charge! Fix It!

The past year we won first place with our Dr. Suess costumes which had me answering hard hitting local news questions like "why did you choose blue fish" and meeting local ice cream celebrity Amy of Amy's Ice Cream who was the sponsor of the grand prize.  I'll let you guess what it was. 

Flugtag or "Flight Day" as it is translated from German is an event sponsored by Red Bull.  The general concept is that you get a team together to build a pile of crafts that can somehow support a human being, and then you push that pile (with your human attached) from a large height into water in front of 80,000 spectators in hopes that it might give the appearance of flight.  I really think the team I was on accomplished all of those goals except maybe the last one.  

To be a Flugtag participant, every potential team had to submit a mock up drawing that would represent their intentions on what they would build.  We decided we wanted to do something that could somehow represent both Austin and flying so we naturally came up with doing a play on the Congress Bridge Bats that fly out in the millions every summer night in downtown Austin.  So I whipped up the below picture and we waited to see if we were selected.

Somehow we were selected but were given the strict warning that we couldn't actually hang someone upside down as our picture suggested.  Pity, because I had this idea that was pretty amazing and probably wouldn't have killed our pilot, Andrew.