A few weeks ago, I commissioned my favorite online comic artist, Anthony Clark, to create a painting of Heather and I. If you haven’t heard of this guy, well, shame on you. He does some seriously wonderful work, comics and paintings that genuinely make you laugh, consistently funny without ever becoming perverse or absurd. I even own a few prints of his. I’m especially fond of his wandering robot series. Go visit his site, and prepare to smile.

Someone really needs to finish his Wikipedia entry. He just has his name listed. Dude deserves more, and is way better then the guy who played the barber in The Rock.

I gave the print to Heather as a surprise. Not for an anniversary or anything, though I sort of intended it to be for that, but just because. Presents and little expressions of love shouldn’t just be set aside for special occasions or lame designated holidays.

You love someone, you tell them. Go out of your way to do something wonderful. Hire an artist you both love, take them on a special date (or make a show about said date), do something, just don’t be that couple who end up being those sad sacks sitting in restaurants, not speaking to one another, and wondering how the hell they got there. I’ve seen too much of that lately.

God, we are so damn cute.

Thanks Anthony.

Fields in Iowa, the sunset in Kentucky, the sunset in Louisiana…

You know, a lot of my friends have given me flack for never leaving the country (note: I have been to Canada, but apparently that doesn’t count). It’s not that I don’t want to leave the states for a few days and see new and exotic places, like, you know, Botswana, but I always felt you should completely know YOUR country before leaving to explore someone else’s.

What’s this have to do with tour photography?

Well, I finally uploaded all of my tour images to Flickr, thus making them insanely easy to view. You can check out the Strange Distress Calls Tour, Aim For Your Hearts Tour, Intensity In-Ten-Cities Tour, Sleep-In-You Tour, and Over & Out Tour, all on my Flickr page.

Man that was a lot of links.

These galleries feature time on the road with bands like Cute Is What We Aim For, David Melillo, Farewell, Foster, Just Surrender, Sleepaway, Socratic, Tourmaline,  The Transit War, Upper  Class Trash, and more. Artists from labels like Drive Thru, Fueled By Ramen, Atlantic, and Universal. Fun times, good music.

That being said, I’ve successfully seen every single state within the continental USA while on these tours. I feel like people get so accustomed to city life or, such as with my hometown friends, living in New Jersey, they forget that the rest of our country is absolutely breathtaking. So before you plan that wild trip to Italy or Botswana, think about hopping on an Amtrak train, and visiting middle America. No sense in seeing other countries if you don’t even know your own.

*insert obligatory patriotic country music here and/or theme from Team America*

So after the amazing amount of web traffic I received from Cuteoverload, and the overwhelming response to my photos via email / AIM / Myspace, I decided it was time to start uploading my bunny and kitten photos somewhere. You can now find them on my Flickr. I just uploaded a couple dozen photos from this weekend. Enjoy and smile.

I also finally uploaded a majority of the Over & Out Tour that I went on back in May, with Forever The Sickest Kids (Universal), Farewell (Epitaph), and Upper Class Trash. You can get there via the photos section. Those are also in Flickr, as those photosets are wonderfully easy to upload. I plan on moving most of my tour images onto Flickr. Simply way easier to share and maintain.

I’ll be doing most of my photo editing on a glorious eMac G4 that I scored off eBay for $150, shipping included. Man, I am good.

Arcadia has officially taken over my life again. Medivial Literature, seven books. Writing Fiction Workshop, two short stories, three books. History of Rhetoric, five books. It’s a good kind of busy though.

I’m helping out two of my good friends, Brett and Seabass, with their clothing company, Dazzle Me Formal. I’m pretty psyched about it, and they’ve been working with some fun artists, like Cute Is What We Aim For, David Melillo, The Higher, and Sherwood. While I know the first two personally, the other two I’ve never met, and I really dig them. The Higher have a great pop-punk-fused-with-R&B sound, while Sherwood is just straight up happy pop rock.

It’s an exciting half-of-the-year. Work is busy, school is intense, and personal projects are keeping me active. Life is good.

Amtrak, please get to work on making this option available as soon as possible. Thanks. And yes, I know, you wish you had my level of Photoshop skills, especially my ability to make absolutely perfect circles in magenta.

Off to Albany to see the girlfriend. See you all next week.

Expect to see photography updates galore next week, including live photos of Bang Camero, Echo Screen, Maxeen, Racing Kites, The Mile After, and We Are The Fury, as well as press photos of Belafonte and Someday Never. And who knows, maybe some still photography from the secret music related website I’m launching later this year. *wink*

I know, it’s an insane concept, having updates on my website that have to do with my portfolio and photography.

This past week, Cuteoverload, one of my favorite websites for all that is cute, featured one of my photos, a silly picture that I had taken of my girlfriend getting mauled by bunnies. It was a ferocious attack, rivaled only by the carnage seen in Night of the Lepus and delivered with the fury of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog

This caused more traffic then my little blog / portfolio has ever seen. When the Silverstein video debuted on MTV, I saw a few dozen extra hits and some new search results hitting my site, mostly along the lines of “music video where dude steals diamond.” My stats went from 70 hits to 1,237. I’ve since gone back to my normal traffic. My internet fame was fun while it lasted.

This however, made me feel a little bad for my visitors, as all of them immediately hit up the photography section, hoping for some more cute animal photography. Alas, they were probably disappointed, seeing only indie-rock bands and tour photos. This made me decide to add a new category in my photography, which will be popping up in the coming weeks.

That being said, here’s a random photo of my bunny, Ash, sitting on my bed. Yes, he is the size of a small dog now. Seriously, compare him to the size of those black pillows. It’s ridiculous.
Be sure to check out the actual page on Cuteoverload. That’s my girlie. Read the comments, they are sure to make you laugh, as she certainly is “trapped in a bunderstorm.”

http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2007/09/halp.html

Life updates? I’m meeting with the artist who is designing my half sleeve tomorrow and, checking out the Eastern State Penitentiary for the first time. Should be a nice night full of fun photos and hopefully, an awesome looking sketch of my future ink.

I’ll be meeting with some of my friends in Houston Calls and Socratic for a top secret web project. Very exciting. If you don’t know either of those two bands, shame on you. Houston Calls toured Australia with Yellowcard last year, and Socratic just finished producing their new album with Mark Hoppus of Blink182 fame. The site is set to launch at the end of the year, and man, it is going to be one fun endeavor. Details to follow.

Also, everyone, please try some of the Halo III Edition Mountain Dew. It takes like you are drinking Starbursts out of a can. It is pure happiness.

So my awesome artist roommate recently purchased three old school library card catalogs off eBay, one of which is currently sitting in our living room. He’s going to use them as storage in the apartment, and I have to say, it is probably one of the coolest looking dressers I’ve ever seen. Ikea needs to hire him to design rooms.

Seriously, who thinks of stuff like this? The only clever artistic thing I could think of was to put the kitty inside one of the drawers and then take a cute picture.

Oh well.

I’ve decided I’m officially going to stop hating on cats. I’ve made fun of cats ladies and people with gigantic cats my entire life, and well, now I’m starting to like them. I mean look at that face.

That’s Aurora’s “come on Eric, are you seriously playing the King Kong video game for XBox 360 on a Saturday night? What’s wrong with you.”

My half sleeve tattoo is in the works of being designed. Can’t wait. I kept seeing this guy’s sweet ink every other day here in Philly, and opted for one. It’ll become a full sleeve once my MFA is finished. The entire tattoo is literature themed, and will feature characters from works of classic lit that are important to me.

First class of the semester starts tomorrow. Here’s to four months of working full time while handling full time (three classes) graduate school. Woo!

Oh, and I scored a cheap video camera off Craigslist. Here’s the first video I took, of Aurora attempting to free herself from an Urban Outfitters paper bag. Silly kitten.