A Blog Is Born: Unknown, Friendless Jerk Goes Viral

Back in 2005, I designed some cover art for a compilation CD I had intended as a gift for family and the ever-dwindling number of people gutsy enough to have stuck around and were still willing to call me a friend. "Jesus Shuffle" was slapped together in fragmented sections over a matter of weeks and included album cuts by Gram Parsons, Iron & Wine, Uncle Tupelo and about a dozen others. I juggled the playlist for a long time as the holidays loomed closer and closer, but in the end I was unable to get it exactly right. Eventually the season of giving came and went and the aforementioned design and incongruent playlist that accompanied it were relegated to the projects folder on my hard drive where they've sat inert and all but forgotten ever since. That is until about a week ago.

In a desperate effort to find work that doesn't require me to labor like a knackered pack animal, I constructed a portfolio on Coroflot (www.coroflot.com) and began posting some of the crap that I had wasted so much time on over the last 10 years, including the artwork for the unfinished "Jesus Shuffle". Within 24 hours, an online magazine called TrendHunter (www.trendhunter.com/trends/j-derek-allred) had somehow gotten wind of the design and had posted it out in the ether for general consumption. The image posted on my Coroflot site then received a modest 470 hits over the next ten days and was subsequently reposted from hell to breakfast. Now I don't really know how to deal with even the slightest success. Having been a perennial loser since 1972 and, aside from the obvious difficulties encountered when yoked with a sub-sub .500 record, left me in quite a conundrum. I found myself lying awake for a whole new set of reasons; trying to think of some way of parlaying this minor emotional windfall into gen-u-ine creative momentum. "Steep Spiral Staircase" is the result.

With that said, let me welcome you to this blog dedicated to the publication and promotion of art, books, music and movies. Either terrific or terrible, these are the things that make me do up my monogrammed bathrobe, clean off my glasses and lean toward the monitor for a closer look.