Holy crap. Well first of all you may notice the new look of the site. I’ve spent a few long nights installing and setting up Wordpress, importing my posts from blogger, and tinkering with the CSS to make everything look clean and pretty. I hope you like it. Blogger is such a pile, I’m glad to finally have blogging software I can work with. If you are one of the few people who subscribed to the feed, make sure you are doing it through the feedburner address as the old feed is dead.

Moving on. It is confirmed that I will be landing in London on February 24th and spending 8 days overseas with two of my favorite dudes in the world. Two or three of those days are going to be spent outside England, I am leaning towards Italy, will consider France, and might settle for Belgium. We don’t have any solid plans yet other than going to the Arsenal game on the 1st of March, and are totally open to suggestions and totally open to sleeping on your couch, on your floor, or in your bed (wink wink nudge nudge). I will be celebrating my birthday on February 29th, and it will be the first time in 4 years that I’ll be able to do that, so let’s make it a good one eh? I can’t wait, this will be my first trip to another country (well unless you count Canada, and I don’t.)

Leave a comment with tips, suggestions, and offers for hospitality.

I think that when something you designed gets tattooed on someone you’ve officially “made it.” Check it out, the new Dashboard Confessional album “The Shade Of Poison Trees” that I designed has been permanently marked on someone’s arm. I dig it

“Pay your rent, pay your bills, pay the doctor for your pills - So you can work another day, as life slips away” - Quasi

I’ve been working on getting rid of a lot of “stuff” that I have. Getting rid of DVD’s rather than buying more, getting music digitally rather than going down to Amoeba, giving away my PS2, etc. However I got paid for a merch design I did for Wilco and I went on a little spending spree. What’s that? You don’t care?! Well I’m going to tell you what I bought anyway! Here goes…
• First I got a Road Bike.
• Then of course I had to get it tuned up and buy new chain rings for it.
• Next I totally needed to be able to carry things while I ride so I bought a bag from Bailey Works.
• I’ve been talking about doing a podcast for a while with Jonah Ray, so I bought a USB mic.
• Jeff Soto is one of my favorite artists, I even have a tattoo of one of his paintings. He is putting out a limited edition calendar/zine so I had to pre-order it.
• A while ago I had registered BenGoetting.com but never renewed it. I’m lucky there aren’t too many other Ben Goetting’s out there (or they just aren’t computer savvy enough to own their own domain) so it was still available. I had to re-register it so I’ll always have MY domain (of course as you can see it just re-directs straight back here so don’t get too excited)

That’s it. I’m broke again. I think I made some nice purchases though. Oof.

AP did an article on Vagrant. Look Ma’ I’m in the press!

This review tears apart (quite well I might add) one of my favorite records of 2006, The Hold Steady’s -”Boys and Girls In America.” Yes, it did come out on the label I work for and yes I did do the cover art, that doesn’t mean It can’t be one of my favorite records. Ask Ryan Dale who’s had to listen to it constantly in my car for months now.

Anyway, the one good thing said about the album was in regard to the artwork I did for the album “BTW, I am going to take this moment to mention that in spite of everything, the album art is really lovely and fantastic.” (props to Marina Chavez and Sacha Penn for the photos and type)

edit-
oh yeah.. someone on The Lemonheads’ myspace page said my album artwork is “probably the best record - artwork since “shame about ray”!” in the comments section of the pic. Neat.

Alright. I accidentally made this page live without posting a blog first!

I’m gonna stop pretending I know how to do web design, and just focus on having something clean that works. So this part, the portfolio part, and the future store part are all now powered by blogs.

It’s not much to look at now. But I’ll be fleshing it out.

~Ben