INTERVIEWS with me, the person whose website you are looking at

HAMPSHIRE LIFE/DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE - August 15th, 2008

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NEWSPAPER ARTICLE: The Republican, June 17th, 2008, in reference to the Easthampton Mural
By NANCY H. GONTER

NEWSPAPER ARTICLE: The Daily Hampshire Gazette, January 19, 2008, in reference to the Easthampton Mural
by Matt Pilon

EASTHAMPTON - An outdoor mural slated to be painted in the spring will give Cottage Street a new look.

Easthampton City Arts this month unanimously voted to award a $3,000 to Northampton-based graphic designer Tom Pappalardo to paint his design on the outer wall of 75 Cottage St., which houses Whiserkz Pub and faces a municipal parking lot.

The building is owned by Joseph Defazio, George and Marsha Bailey, and Jeremy Hewat, according to the Hampshire County Registry of Deeds.

City Arts Coordinator Ellen Koteen said the owners responded "enthusiastically" to their mural request last year.

Pappalardo, who works under the name of his one-man company, Standard Design, said Thursday that the project will be a first for him.

"I've never done anything like this before," he said. "It's totally cool."

Pappalardo also does animation work and draws the comic "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" that appears weekly in the Valley Advocate.

Creatively dodging eight windows located on the wall, Pappalardo's design spells out 'Easthampton' and 'Massachusetts' in a four-color scheme.

"It was a tricky challenge," he said. "I approached it as a pure typography challenge."

Board member Jean-Pierre Pasche of Eastmont Custom Framing described Pappalardo's use of the wall as "clever," which is part of the reason that his proposal was accepted.

"One of the positive points about that project was that it was using the wall to its fullest," he said. "I think it's going to be a striking image."

City Arts originally solicited submissions with a theme of the "evolving mosaic of Easthampton," but realized once submissions started coming in that the constraints of the brick canvass may pose a problem for a landscape or very detailed concept, Koteen said.

After a round of submissions that the jury committee did not favor, a new round brought in four new submissions.

Koteen said that a painting by the Amherst-based group Get Up Get Down depicting the history of the city from its native inhabitants to the future was the board's second choice.

Koteen, who was not on the jury committee, described the winning design as simple yet dramatic.

"I like it a lot," she said. "It's very creative."

The money that will pay the artist comes mostly from the state Cultural Council but also from a $500 local Cultural Council grant, which will pay for supplies.

The wall will likely be powerwashed and primed in March, and the painting work would start soon after, Koteen said.

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BLOGCRITICS INTERVIEW: Tom Pappalardo the face behind Standard Design, author of Broken Lines
Katie McNeill - published May 11, 2007

Broken Lines: Book One of Four, Maybe is simply about good and evil. You have evil firemen vs. a Cowboy complete with six shooters, a Spaceman who feeds red licorice through his suit, and Maggie the waitress. These characters come together to form Standard Design's delightful self-published illustrated novel.

What is Standard Design?

Standard Design is me, Tom Pappalardo. It's the name I do design work under. In the context of Broken Lines, Standard Design is also the publisher, I guess, since it's self-published. By me. Tom Pappalardo. And I'm Standard Design. See?

Would you mind telling us what Broken Lines is about?

Broken Lines is about a good and evil, death, redemption, and boredom. And lousy coffee. Lots of lousy coffee. You've got a grumpy cowboy and a goofy spaceman on a road trip in a stolen moving van. They save a waitress from her rather uninteresting life and boom! - she's tagging along on their cross-country mission. Naturally, they are being pursued by Bad Guys.

What made you decide to do an illustrated novel?

Well, I'm always sitting on a backlog of story ideas - some comic, some prose, some just scribbled outlines that could go either way. But my actual output has historically been pretty low, because, you know, I work for a living and stuff.

So it occurred to me that maybe I should just combine a bunch of unrelated ideas into one big story. I knew it would be a major undertaking, take forever to do, and require a lot of discipline that I don't by nature have, so I had to create a set of rules for myself that would let me complete the damned thing without giving up a third of the way through it, you know? That meant allowing myself the freedom to switch from drawing to writing to whatever I needed in order to get the story down on the page.

So the book's "illustrated novel" format is sort of the result of my short attention span, my impatience, and ultimately my desire to force the story out of my head and onto paper. I have found it to be a very enjoyable way to tell a story. It works. I like it.

Where did the idea for Broken Lines come from?

Broken Lines is a reaction against a lot of junk I see in movies, TV, and books that just drives me nuts - dialogue that makes me cringe, contrived plot twists, characters with no history or personality. So even though the story itself is a bit outlandish, I wanted Broken Lines to be grounded with characters that talked like real people and responded to weird situations like normal people would. I wanted everyday settings, and I wanted an extremely unromanticized, uncool, un-"comic booky" take on a hero story. I mean, why doesn't Batman drive a 1999 Ford Econoline moving van? They're very spacious.

I have to ask you about The Firemen because I laughed so hard while reading about them. Why did you decide to make firemen evil?

Well, the pragmatic answer is that I needed an army of bad guys that all looked alike so I wouldn't have to sit down and design a new character every time I needed a new bad guy on-scene. So, you know, they're my lazy equivalent of storm troopers, I guess. Other than that, the choice was pretty random. Just a bunch of dumb dudes wearing full-face oxygen masks. I had a serious doubt about making them firemen after 9/11 because real firefighters were being so revered for awhile. But fortunately, America has a short memory and we've gone back to ignoring their important contributions to society. So thank God for that.

What do you think is most appealing about your work?

It's got moxie.

Do you have a favorite character from Broken Lines? Why?

Currently, it's me, the omniscient narrator. I hog a lot of the funny lines, because I want everyone to think I'm clever and witty. My second favorite character doesn't appear until Book Three, so hold your breath til like, 2010.

Would you mind sharing a little bit of what the future holds for your heroes?

Their future is everyone's future: Lots of sitting around, a few laughs, then death. Then maybe a few more laughs.

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/05/11/180940.php

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TOTALLY FAKE ZINE INTERVIEW: LETTERX, 2006

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HONESTLY, THEY'RE GOOD
by Sean Glennon,The Valley Advocate 07/20/00

  This is not what a Northampton band is supposed to sound like.
  There's not a hook to be found. Nor the slightest hint of twang.
  And no one, not anyone at all, would consider describing No-Shadow Kick's music as accessible. Because it isn't. And it doesn't want to be.
  Good? Oh, yes it is. Very good, in fact. Not great. Not on the band's debut CD, Basement Make-Out Party, anyhow. There are some sublime moments to be sure, but there are some missteps as well.
  That's OK, too, you know? Because, really, if you're looking at things honestly you can't help but realize that great just doesn't come along very often. And at least with No-Shadow Kick there's no sense that anyone in the band is pretending they're great.
  They seem to know they're good. And they certainly know what they're about. But they're too honest to believe they're great.
  The band's music is mostly honest, too. Honest, at least, in the sense that it presents itself as the music No-Shadow Kick was called to make, rather than music the band members thought people would like.
  That allows the music to succeed honestly. Or to fail honestly.
  But No-Shadow Kick's work is also deceptive. Its songs carry the illusion of simplicity, but are in fact deeply nuanced. Its music doesn't scream for attention -- it beckons almost shyly, asking with an odd sense of quiet urgency if you might like to hear what it has to say -- but to make any sense of it, you absolutely have to give it your full attention. And even if you concentrate with all your might, you still may not understand what the band is up to.
  The trio's sound is anchored in a funk/soul love of the groove, but it draws on strains of goth, Television-style punk (as filtered through Yo La Tengo-ish space drones), and not-infrequent nods to the sometimes meandering post-hardcore sound practiced most notably by fIREHOSE (indeed one of Basement's most intriguing tracks, "Integrity," sounds for all the world like an homage to Mike Watt and Ed Crawford).
  And No-Shadow Kick is a Northampton band, even if it doesn't sound like one. And even if almost no one in NoHo knows it. 

  Just about every music fan in Northampton knows Tom Pappalardo, No-Shadow Kick's bassist. He's the tall, brown-haired guy with a bit of scruff on his face as often as not, who used to run Turn It Up! records.
  Tom (he asks that his first name, not his last, be used on second reference) still works for Turn It Up!, but he spends his days in the chain's Florence warehouse. He's also the guy responsible for creating Turn It Up!'s oddball cartoon newspaper ads and similarly off-key radio spots.
  When he's not doing that, he plays his bass. And when he plays his bass he sounds a lot like Watt, only maybe a bit funkier.
  It's guitarist/vocalist Josh Gilb who brings in the gothy sounds, working a hollow, Robert Smith-style guitar sound as often as he references Crawford's furiously spare style. And while it's always tempting to take drumming for granted, it's vital to No-Shadow's sound that Shawn Reynolds knows how to keep the band connected to the groove without denying Gilb the opportunity to explore his sonic wanderlust.
  Tom isn't at all surprised that his band is so widely unknown. Much as he and his bandmates would like more people to hear their music, they don't put in much effort.
  "We talk like we're interested and we play like we're interested, but we're really bad at the simple stuff like booking shows," he says. "We're bad businessmen. We're bad at the business end of the deal."
  You're not going to see No-Shadow Kick playing at the Bay State every other week. Not even close.
  "We try to play out once a month, but there have certainly been stretches of months where we don't play out."
  When I told Tom I planned to write about his band, he thought about trying to set up a show, so he'd have something to plug in the article. He even put in a call to Don Rooke, who books the Bay State. But he never quite got around to seeing it through.
  "We're really like a fine example of the pure artist," he says half-joking. "We are only interested in our craft."

  There's something about Tom that allows him to says things like that without coming off as pretentious. It's his sense of sincerity, maybe, the way he seems to recognize that even if you can say such things and sound like you mean them, it's not such a good idea.
  You just have to give the guy points for being down to earth, if only because you're glad he's not one of those people who think the music world -- bookers, journalists, radio programmers, label reps and fans alike -- ought to seek them out just because they have talent.
  You have to wonder, though, if maybe Tom and his bandmates take things a bit too far in the other direction. When he talks about Basement's lack of cohesion, when he apologizes for the fact that the songs on Basement sometimes lose focus and leave the listener feeling a bit abandoned, when he promises that the band's next record will concentrate more on the funky side of the band's sound in hopes that it will paint a more consistent picture, you wonder if he isn't beating himself up a little too much.
  But he doesn't see it that way.
  "It's not really a lack of confidence as much as my firm belief in truth in advertising," Tom says. "If a couple of tracks on the album leak shit all over the place, I think it's a good idea to say it."
  He says its only natural for him to try to view his own work honestly.
  "I wouldn't believe anyone who went around saying they were great, and I don't like the punk rock approach where you go around saying you suck," he explains.
  And since neither he nor either of his bandmates is all that interested in promoting their stuff, it only makes sense that they should simply look at their work as what it is and keep trying to improve it.
  It's hard to take issue with that approach -- except when what you want is for Valley music fans to hear No-Shadow Kick's work, which, for all its imperfections, is not just good, but interesting, different and infinitely worthy of attention. And in a town where pop is king and alt.country is the sound of the moment, that's just not going to happen all by itself.