#1 In a dim room in Nashville TN

Things that have happened so far.

1) My feet were freezing cold by the fire in Philadelphia. I carried a case of beer down the tracks. Davey and Dori came. Matt Betz came and had his dog Blue running in and out of the firelight.

2) We played Risk to prepare for our first show. In the kitchen Muffy & I worked on our set by drawing a diagram of it. On the refrigerator was an old to do list I’d made with nothing on it other than #1. Make a Shopping List. Jeff Melkerson won the risk game

3) Felt terrible and insane in West Philly as I drove past 47th and Baltimore. We played a set in a basement. I saw many familiar faces. We got paid 46 dollars.

4) Baltimore noise set with the dudes, all painted up, slept with paint on my legs, washed it off in the tile bathroom Max made, Max talking about being young and jealous of success and then getting older and just not caring anymore and just doing what you want.

5) The baby, Coal, in Asheville NC, three years old with his little tigger hat on, carrying a huge bag of recycling down the dirt path, growing up in this crazy grapes of wrath free zone that his dad is squatting, and building these sprawling and wild slipstraw clay houses. His little bedroom has a tiny drum kit and is the only truly warm room in the complex, which is up a dirt road, in the woods behind a trailer park, near a power line cutaway in the hills, on the true edge of town. In the other room is a tiny piano and a desk with a block from which nails protrude. “Now that he can drive nails,” his dad says, “I can’t tell him he can’t play with them.” He will be very formidable when he turns 18, I say. Or, says Muffy, he’ll be totally incapable of communicating with anyone or living in the world.

6) White haired old men in the anarchist bookstore. The gay bongo dude sweating so hard and singing the worst, stupidest lyrics to an empty room. “On the A… train. (UHH) Thinking of you. … Afraid on the… plane. (UHH) Thinking of you.”

7) The switchbacks in Tennessee leading to the dead mountaintop covered in snow. “GPS is wrong. No way to TENN.”

8) Was totally naked at the show in the weird bar last night because whatever.

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#2 LA smog

In LA at night the palm trees snag the smog in their hard fronds, and the smog in turn tangles the light from the night street. The palms glow in this eerie way, filled with luminous, misty bundles, like glowing egg sacks maybe. The palm smog light like a pregnant sticky membrane. These light nests even appear to be physically heavy sometimes, as if from their constituent light and mist there might suddenly spill bile or amniotic fluid, and then some  hard thing that will land living and rush off into the night streets.

You can’t see LA from above. We drove up into the hills and past the hollywood sign and down below the city is invisible, smeared, as if drawn in colored charcoal and then wiped away. The tallest buildings downtown appear to stand on the smog. From above the strange cloud’s blanket weight and obvious toxicity are upsetting, and I wonder how there can be a city under there.

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#3 In Oakland

Last night we pulled in. The crackhead dude at the party got super upset at the end of the night when the super drunk bearded guy started baiting his “no homo” thing by insisting on a hug. “I shoots fags where I come from,” he says as he leaves. There’s a Swamp Donkey piece on the door next door.

The space is a fucking disaster of a mess but so perfect. There’s mud everywhere, the dog has three legs, I’m worried the entire night about my shit getting stolen, dog shit gets on my sleeping bag. But it’s also beautifully lit in the morning, and the trash even on an overcast and humid day – the fog is in the mountains just outside of the city, the low clouds, and it looks beautiful, tearfully beautiful to be lying in a sleeping bag, a fucking new total disaster, every single day – is a still and fine picture, as if the cigarette butts, empty bottles, ripped couch cushions, and scattered electronics were composed for the space; the shitty peeling posters and modified objects stapled up to the walls in the familiar anarchy house hard work with mixed results way are soft reminders that this is all a decision, that this is all a way to live, and even though it all looks like total hell, it’s a hell of totally impudent joy, and it feels so good and I feel so lucky and blessed to be here, hungover.

In the kitchen there’s a door that opens wider on the top half. The lintels rise, and then turn out another foot, and then rise to the ceiling. Watching the morning light in the mountains through this portal while the dog tears up the garbage behind me.

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#4 Good sets I saw

- Mark Lord in Columbus. Definitive.

- TJ Drinkwater in Iowa City.

- Moment Trigger in LA

- Human Hands in LA

- Aether Jag in Nashville

- Slime Queen in Oakland

- Sword Heaven in Columbus

- Lazy Magnet in Providence. Masterful.

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#5 Food of Band Tour

In re: walking knee deep into the pacific on Venice Beach with my pants on and the water being nice and then drying off and talking on the phone barefoot walking down the way, man, nothing beats artificial summer. Despite everything good/bad/ugly that’s happened on this trip of mine, it’s totally undeniable that leaving town in the middle of the new england winter crusher to put on shorts for five seconds and eat a slice of pizza and cruise around as if it weren’t January is completely regenerative and worth every weird eleven hour car drive and night sleeping in weird piles of mud and cat hair along the “american noise music trail.”

It’s totally stupid and basic, but I realized on this trip that the group experience of winter in Providence isn’t my only recourse to dealing with the cold and dark, and that if I want to, I can just go to California or Miami or something next time around, and that’s good to know.

No secret restaurants anywhere along the trail, but food/drink moments have been abundant.

Best (no order) =

1) PIG’S EYE BEER in Iowa City = $5 12 pack, tastes like Bodington’s

2) Delicious hemp beer in Topanga Canyon outside of LA at Froggy’s Topanga Fish Market = kind of expensive, but drank it with two excellent mahi mahi tacos and sat by a huge fire eating/drinking, and a guy started asking me what I do in life, and then talking to him it turns out he did “additional music” for Malik “Days of Heaven” and “Thin Blue Line” and sound effects for the first star trek movie?! I was sort of thinking like “Dude buy me a beer” but obviously he was pretty much only interested in me as a foothold for talking to haley and sasha.

3) All burritos in LA, oh my god.

4) House-smoked brisket sandwich at ANCIENT WAYS CAFE in way rural new mexico

5) Lamb shawarma sandwich at ALI BABA’S GRILL in knoxville = Got a speeding ticket at this exit, and feeling totally dejected pulled off to try to find food. Millions of miles of taco bell/kfc/home depot/target/walmart/car dealership anywhere USA braindeath, but then I noticed this joint Ali Baba’s right on the strip with the rest of it. Totally weird middle eastern dude hangout zone, complete with a guy who tried to upsell me many times to “the special” ($12), claiming to have the best hummus in the world, etc., etc. But I mean, the sandwich was totally good!

6) Ethiopian vegetarian and meat combo platters shared with my ancient best friend in Berkeley Tasneem and her new husband who I’d never hung out with before, and it turns out he’s pretty cool (then we went to a climbing wall gym, and after that played settlers of catan)

7) In LA at the liquor store = “Hey man what can I get for not a lot of money.” “Natural Ice.” “But that isn’t disgusting.” “You like wine?” “Yes.” “Charles Shaw mang. And you know, put a little liquor in it, that makes it nice, IT’LL GET YOU DRONNNNK”

8) Blue cheese / mixed greens / hummus on baguette sandwich in the car in Wyoming, would eat this every day

9) Beautiful spread of cheeses and olives at a super fancy party in Santa Fe that we somehow ended up going to. Drank bombay sapphire martinis and maker’s on the rocks. Everyone was dressed to the nines except for me and two skateboard dudes. A guy with white pants on kept smiling at me and taking my picture, and I never talked to him or questioned it.

10) Drinking a huge pitcher of the bar’s homebrew with Jeremy Harris in Nashville

Worst (no order) =

1) Two slices of sausage slime pizza and a Naked Juice from the Casey’s General Store rest stop on I-80 outside of chicago.

2) Oakland groceries getting kind of gnarly by the upper mid west; the mixed greens getting slimy, the yogurt thickening up, the bananas turning black and frozen.

3) Papa John’s Pizza with an egg fried on it in Oakland for breakfast, total mistake

4) All coffee at Flying J rest stops

5) Grocery store free sample pig out at 10pm outside of Oklahoma City, booo.

6) $5 for a scrambled egg and toast with butter in Santa Fe, should’ve just ordered breakfast. Skateboard dude from the party was at the restaurant. I talked to the waitress’s boyfriend at the party about circuit bending. At one point he said “Oh your band sounds like noise music, I have a noise band!”

7) Totally rank dumpstered sushi from The Bank in Baltimore = eating it thinking “well maybe I’ll get food poisoning from this” and then throwing it out without finishing it.

8) Drinking Ancient Age bourbon in Iowa City. Not that I would ever not drink it again given the opportunity (obv.), but fuck that shit.

9) Getting paid in methadone in Nashville (girl asked for it back, we gave it back); getting paid in weed brownie in Oakland

10) We fucking went to Taco John’s for some reason one day.

11) Wanting to cook so bad all month but not being able to

12) 51 Grill in Asheville NC, east coast hippie capital. Don’t put “greek salad with mixed greens” on your dumb menu if you mean “pile of iceberg lettuce with fake feta”

And I mean very little of this touches on actual adventures/occurrences, or the list of the best dogs of tour, or anything.

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#6 Boosh list excerpt Jan 21

Guys so much insane shit has happened since I last checked in, I’m sorry, my internet scene on this trip has been so terrible, now I have to drive to Chicago so I can’t check in, buuuuut here’s a possible parable/karmic anecdote for your faces:

So I quit smoking marijuana a while ago and that has been great so far, and I’ve been refusing it at every turn since, but I mean, I know my brain, and I know that occasional horrible slime experiences will happen despite the fact that I’m pretty much not at all behaving like it’s 2006 anymore.

In Oakland somebody paid us with a weed brownie that had an alien sticker on it, about the size of a free sample piece of bread at east side marketplace, not exactly looking like a stunner, but a handsome dude with long hair and eyeliner on was like “split that with someone man it will FUCK YOU UP!”. I decided I wanted to keep this pot brownie because A) I could trade it to someone for beer or B) being on band tour and feeling insane and exhausted all of the time alters my decision-making.

In Iowa City last night after drinking six PIG EYE beers (so good, $5/12 pack, tastes like bodington’s!) I decided, because I was drunk and in this crazy touring mind-state, to eat the pot brownie, which I’d been fingering in my pocket in the car for the 2500 miles of horrible salt/snow/gray sky since we left CA, and it was kind of warm and crumbly when I took the shitty drug cellophane off of it, and I ate it.

The dudes we’re staying with (#1 lifestyle band in america TJ DRINKWATER = Jeff / Si / Tater = excellent hosts, excellent dudes, total maniacs) were on mushrooms and at like 2am after throwing the pool balls all over the bar and smashing the cues and getting into weird fights, they were like, “Come on let’s go break into the new squat.” And normally in Providence or certainly in Philadelphia at 2am kind of drunk I would 100% definitely participate in entering a weird building, but because I was extremely, sickly stoned from having this total aberration of a decision to eat a brownie with an alien sticker on it, I was like “Buhhhhhhhh” and couldn’t get up from the couch when they left. The dudes got arrested by five cops (who they repeatedly hilariously kept calling “big daddies”) with guns with laser sights on them, spent the night in jail, and have $500 trespassing fines. But because I chose to do drugs, I just had a kind of bad night’s sleep and got sort of dehydrated.

The important post script is that this morning they skyped in their friend from England to play a set for us while we ate breakfast, and their attitudes/spirits weren’t broken at all by their night. (“Totally TJ.”)

Okay I’m going to a mud wrestling party or something with Aaron later, more soon, back in a fucking week, overheard just now, 5:56pm, Janaury 21st, 2,010: “We’ll smoke the hash and we’ll do it. No we gotta do something chill. Let’s get hashed out and do it. And then we’ll walk to starbucks.”

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#7 Boosh List excerpt February 6th

Well okay, I’ll weigh in on this email thread, which is surely already the definitive document of the 2010 “thank god we have each other, because the world is so weird” zeitgeist.

A little atmospheric context = I’m listening to reggae, it’s 45 degrees in my house, there are sheets covering the windows, I just ate the best oatmeal, I woke up at 2pm, the kitchen and the living room are clean and still, we’re out of toilet paper.

I know I’m the odd man out as the guy on boosh list who isn’t “excessively prone to feelings” but I think maybe it’s worth adding a couple recent winter occurrences that made me feel okay about everything =

1) Walker scampers up to the car in Pittsburgh and then makes a killer breakfast after we walk through the rainy winter night cemetery, climbing over the wet stone wall, considering holes in the ground where rabbits might fall into tombs and never escape (“it’s a long drop”), and the changing silhouettes of angels and saints and statuary as you move past them; how they turn to follow you, like standing, wriggling shadows, at night suggesting images much removed from what their sculptors intended, and where I see what I think at first behind my rainy glasses are flashlights, but what are actually white tail deer, bounding silently away.

2) Sitting at Katy’s table the night I got back on the opposite side I usually do, drinking beer from a glass, just looking around the warm room, looking out over the street. There was a thing when I used to travel pretty much always where when I’d get home to wherever I lived and I’d feel like “Ugh the kitchen and living room in Richmond are better than this.” Upon returning to Providence, even from a t-shirt in breezy LA and strange Santa Fe, I didn’t feel this at all. Incredibly I’ve been here for a year now, and this is now where I live, Providence is now where I’m home. And since I don’t think it’s super evident from the above, my saying the kitchens of Richmond were better than the kitchens of Philadelphia was an evaluation of personnel just as much of space. I would rather be back and bundled warm and looking at the familiar low ceilings with my people here, eating pizza with Jonathan at Summer St, my head steaming in the morning as I come out of my sleeping bag in freezing Lockwood and have the first thing that happens in the morning (morning: 1pm) be that Walker asks me some question about where something is or how we’re going to do something on Friday, hiking around the butterfly farm, listening to podcasts in the eternal February 1st foodstamps checkout line at Price Rite eagle square. The weird corners and secret warm rooms of Providence have the filthy mud floors of Oakland beat. They have the true life-hating murder spirit of Nashville, the jolly, ugly aggression of Free Philadelphia, the sunny, easy shrugging bullshit of LA, the crystal drop-out free zones of Santa Fe, and everything else on I-40 and I-80 all beat. I’d rather be shrugging and freezing and UGHing in Providence because it’s Providence and because this is where we all are, as demonstrated at Katy’s table in a glass of beer, January 31st, 2010.

3) Making eye contact with Andrew in the night as he came in and I was about to go to bed, and we both smiled and I crossed from behind the big table, and got the good huggy shit. Susan referred to Andrew as being the only guy in “our posse” with a beard yesterday. I don’t call it a posse, I call it a team!

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#8 Excerpt to Ben Feb 18th

In my world I’m still doing this vegan secret restaurant with my roommate. In re: things being logical, sustainable, scalable, & self-perpetuating, it’s all of these, and has made it possible to not have a day job, if not quite possible for us to turn on the heat.

In re: projects, I just did a full US tour and only played eight shows with a new band, I finished my 14th mini drawing book and have a “best of 2009″ book ready to go that I’m trying to figure out how to print for less than $100), I’m working on a video, I’m manifesting my reality day by day, pushing with arms outstretched against the rough bedroom walls of reality, like in time bandits, and they continue to give, revealing long dark hallways full of blowing trash, and I’m hoping these too will eventually with persistence and finesse drop away, opening a portal that leads somewhere good and weird and different.

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#9 Bioburden

On Feb 17, 2010, at 5:49 PM, Susy Jones wrote:

> Bioburden

>

> Send a sample to the Berkeley Labs because

> I have a heart murmur now, not to mention

> My lungs are filled with dark romantic dander

> From the double-pawed posse of calico cats

> Who warded off sea monsters on trips to New Bedford,

> In between sleeping and catching fish for snack.

> Had a hunch Melville was a Leo, too,

> And so he is according to the wiki.

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#10 Excerpt to Matt Feb 25th

Yeah okay I’ll send one more email today before I go to bed!

What’s in Rochester that you want to go there? This sick band PENGO was from there, might still be.

http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/pengo.html

Jeremy Bailey went to grad school there too. Sort of useless except for bro hardcore though I always thought?

Joblessness = Insane life of leisure / life of worrying about everything falling apart in two months. I haven’t had a job in the normal sense for four months which is the longest I’ve ever been unemployed. But while it’s tough sometimes I feel like the stress of living at the far left of things and manifesting/sustaining my own reality instead of working in a super safe and riskless but kill-myself $10/h time render environment is a different and better kind of stress, and I’m actually pretty into having not left my house except when I want to for the past so long, and my “work” being listening to records, eating what I want, and cooking in my own kitchen. I think your actual objection is maybe Idleness is for the birds, or Being broke is for the birds (both true).

Melvins = First time I drank Patron was with Jello and the Melvins! I love LYSOL (download here = http://www.mediafire.com/?rpnxmn4k5sy) but that said, I’m not sure exactly if it’s a dichotomy or not, even though in my mind it is, but I’m more of an Earth dude than a Melvins dude. Put a beer in my 2006 hand and play LYSOL wherever whenever though.

OFFICE HOURS = I’m so bad at doing this but I know what you’re saying. Escaping the house/closed loop and getting into the world and being around other humans is mega important. Main thing I’m missing about “working” is not being in the public, good and bad parts of that equally.

Also = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD4EGN2MQjk

Tom Bubul

240 Lockwood St

Providence RI 02907

I’m going to send you more tomorrow. I feel like writing this now and sending it gets me started and it being out there will compel me to finish.

The short story is that I now live in Providence. The long story is written on all kinds of walls and surfaces between here and Philadelphia and as far up as Johnson VT; you can ask me about it if you run into me.

Readout of the basics follows.

WORK WORK I am presently unemployed during the day, and spend most of the morning working on this problem. I work two late shifts as the night janitor at the Cable Car cinema on the east side, where my roommate Adam works as a projectionist, and helped plug me in. If anyone needs anything done up here during the normal hours, I can be your man.

MEDIA Last week I read Harold Brodkey “First Love and Other Sorrows.” I recently finished “The Tin Drum.” I saw “Waltz with Bashir,” “The Watchmen,” “Over the Edge” (totally awesome and essential), “Fishing With John,” a night of short “private” film care of Magic Lantern at the Cable Car and a night of old film at AS220. I have seen the bands National Grid, Aids Wolf, Tinsel Teeth, US Girls (A+ and the only actually affecting live sound I’ve heard in a while – this is her on WFMU) and Chrome Jackson. I have heard six poets read at the book store and then helped at a reading of James Joyce’s The Dead which I enjoyed a lot more than when I first read it seven years ago. I have listened to about a billion new records.

FUN WORK I am learning to paint with gouache and am sketching several ideas on larger sheets of very nice paper that I will maybe paint if I get comfortable, ink otherwise.

I did a new sketchbook zine, Ospreys #9, see dogchirp.com; there’re still a few copies left in my coat pocket.

“Six Stories from Kokomo” which I wrote at VSC is going to be in the new issue of a magazine that Anna Wolfe works on, Untitled #4, coming out soonish. If my assumption is correct there will be more copies of that in existence than of all of the zines and newspapers and prints I’ve ever printed or photocopied combined, which rules in a hilarious man/mountain way.

I’m finishing a new fiction that I am going to release (aka photocopy) in rather small print on an 11×17 with a thing I was working on in January on the back; more on that as it develops.

WHAT ELSE My yard is huge, my house is drafty but beautiful, and I totally love living in PROVIDENCE and you should come and visit me if you want to, because I think you might like it here too.

Bonjour from inside of the holiday echo chamber, from which I wanted to post a short notice with December updates. If you live in Northeastern Pennsylvania and want to hang out, get at me, I usually get extremely bored around 10pm. If you don’t live here but might want to email with me for a day or two, my email address is still tom//at//dogchirp//com.

Work Work = I will work for you anywhere in the United States or abroad, get in touch if you have a full time salaried job.

Fun Work = I painted/embroidered two big clothing patches this month but forgot to photograph one of them (the other is above). I started brainstorming a new video yesterday that I may or may not decide to start working on next week, if for no other reason than to goof around animating and playing with the new Flash, which I haven’t used on any personal projects yet. I am in the middle stage of putting together a critical mass of text that I am going to edit into whatever I wind up using for January 15 application deadlines; this work will likely wind up abridged across Test Patterns #3 or No Such Thing as News #3, unless someone else winds up wanting to deal with it. I have a giant pile of sketches that are going to get scanned and may or may not appear on this blog, as well as in those aforementioned print projects, and I have a design for a painting that I’m hoping to do the week after christmas.

Schedule = Planning on going to Philly this weekend, but not totally sure what the deal with that will be, then back home. Will likely be around New England for New Years, and then hopefully moving soon after that pending work options.

Last week I was in New York. I stayed with Christi some nights and Leah others. I got to hang out with Kathryn, Aaron, Julio and Jeff, and I ran into Sarah. I rode my bike all over. I did some work with Emily and Corey and I had a great lunch with Dan. I got lost in the rain while I rode to Max’s house, where I watched Futurama and ate a burger. I ate delicious sweet potato quasadillas, but I didn’t sleep too well.

Arson in the new development

Patrick and Scout

I’m not numbering this one because I feel like the cycle of my leaving camp -> going to VSC -> trying to work there -> getting home and being like “????” is over. Now I have a whole new set of things to be like “????” about (strange fires in Providence, moving to New York very soon, new total life stupidity/fugues that weren’t visible or predictable when this past numbered set began in September), so once things stabilize enough that I have an okay idea of where I’ll be from week to week, I’ll restart the numbered entry system on a schedule again.

The short “Lately” recap —>New York = I got to hang out with Emily, babysit Pearl, rode over the Williamsburg bridge for the first time, played dominoes and ate burritos and watched Ruthless People with Leah, dinner/bar with Katie and Alex, meteor shower thing with camp team, wrote a lot of emails.

In Boston = I went to the Stairwell team’s show at BU, talked to Ben, watched the new Bond, ate Redbone’s, sushi and Girardelli squares, almost played Earthopoly with Sus, drove home with Patrick super late.

Home so far = Haven’t been in the basement yet, but today nearly finished a long-outstanding painting, did the firstish round of mailouts re: darcone triangle to stores, slept a ton, played chess in real life once, played chess on the computer a lot of times.

Current plan = Back in New York by next weekend. This morning I am going to the craft store with my dad for a black friday sale. More substantial update or whatever soon.

Ultimate slow/fast week. I’ll post my good Obama being president joke later. As of right now, it sure looks like I’m moving to New York. If you have a job lead for me, get in touch.

Let the eternal record of my blog reflect that there was a time when Sierra and Zelda and I went to the Lincoln Inn in Essex Vermont, where Sierra showed me how to box step while grizzled country/rockabilly dudes played hard and whiskey sweaty, and middle aged guys with tucked in shirts and blonde girlfriends much taller whisked briskly around the floor. I ate a burger and we talked about 2nd Life and whether Barack Obama puts his hand on his heart when he pledges allegience for the entire night. Zelda said, “George, this is Melinda.” “I’m Tom,” I said. “I’m Rachel,” she said. Later, I walked around the mountain in Johnson, the sun set black-eye blue on the mountains, and we trekked past lit trailers, through the mud of vinegar and shit-smelling cow pastures, and back down across the dilapidated bridge. At a bonfire I took off my sweaters and sat in my tshirt with dry lips and the rims of my glasses getting hot. The smoke blew up and high away from stacked palettes to fierce orange black, and beyond the streetlights on School Ave was the silver sky. On Saturday morning Leah and I left and we stopped at Father’s Restaurant, where I ate delicious fried fish and mixed berry pie in Norman Rockwell desolate green interior/gray deathmask belltoll drizzle outside, old couple sitting in another booth and not talking, and I chewed with the full, terrible awareness that I am not going to drive back up I-89 for a long time.

Now I’m in Brooklyn, where it looks like I’ll live. I watched Hackers with Cory, went for drinks with Katie and Alex, ate burgers and played dominos with Julio and his totally good men’s group, partied with Allen, Kathryn and that extended team, went to Dinner Group where I talked to Justin bald and bearded about the trains and had a staring contest with Alfe and team, and pursued employment and made burritos and yucked it up with Leah almost full time since we got here. I’ve moved my car at least four or five times. In all, it’s been such a fun and fast-moving time that I got over feeling disappointed and insane by the time I had even officially heard the status of my work in Vermont.

They’re hard steps out of the gray area and they ring out loud across many months. BOOM here’s the job I wind up with, BOOM here’s the house I live in, BOOM, it’s 2009, where am I, who am I, what am I doing, BOOM, life sucks, but amazingly, resiliently, it still somehow rules way more.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kites INC 2006

The biggest update is that after like six years off I listen to dance music again!

Short news this time around =

I am in Gray House Philadelphia working on a pair of projects for Saturday’s <a href=”http://www.215festival.com”>215 Festival</a>. One is a two-sided 8.5×11 – the three-years-coming sequel to my fake newspaper, “There Is No Such Thing as News” that compiles the normal inside jokes and bullshit in a disposable three column format – while the other is way more involved. I decided to do a five page comic in an edition of 10 where every page is completely done by hand. Each page is 5×7 and fully watercolored and inked. I’m stoked on the results so far and am about 60% done. <a href=”http://www.markpriceisafactory.com”>Mark Price</a> is going to have Darcone Triangle printed by Friday so I’ll have that too.

We played Ospreys swoop maybe four times since I’ve been here. Jams have been excursions into new territory for sure. It’s fun and weird to rejoin after long periods of doing our own things into the old duo format and find as ever that there’s still so much ground left to cover. I’m hoping we get to play out before I leave but if not at least we’re recording.

I’ve been sleeping in my sleeping bag upstairs in the office. In the morning, Pumpkin comes up and licks my face. For the first few days Molly my favorite dog alive has been here too, and she was coming up and getting in my area too. Some mornings they’d both lay back down with me for an hour, one on each side. The bum deal is that I’ve been having horrendous stress nightmares (camp failure, haunted house, empty labyrinthine farm, overgrown everything), but I can only hope that has as much to do with all that’s on the actual up that I’m spending so much energy on as all that’s up in the air that I’m so actually worried about.

Mike and Allen and Justin and I went to the Y the other night and looked at the Tropicana Juice train as it rolled on by. Before that, Mike and I went to South Philly and looked at trash trains. $1 covers a lot of ground. Men’s Group. Sorry for being vague about this, because it’s really no big deal, but you don’t know who with how much time is googling what about whom.

Current plans are to stay here until Halloween because I am extremely stoked to see top five Philly band ever ANGELDUST, who so succinctly and horrendously conjure everything I love and hate about this place in the most perfect sweaty baby’s fist full of drugs and razorblades imaginable/possible.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then I’m going home, vote, go to Vermont, and then either head to Salt Lake or lurk in the northeast for a while. As ever I’m open to suggestions.

I’m in West Pittston, I’m in my parents’ basement.

Trying to relate everything that happens day after day is like drinking, where you can drink a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth drink, a tenth, a twelfth, but then you begin to throw up, and you can’t relate anymore, and you can’t possibly explain what the hell you’ve been doing, or how you’ve got to where you are. I ate a giant meatball sub and watched some dudes eat cinnamon and laughed a ton. I trespassed in a hundred buildings. I watched Simon & Simon, got out of bed to build puzzles and play boggle, drank so much fucking whiskey, had work group, painted, drew, wrote, finished things.

I drove eight gray hours down from Johnson. I talked to Susy, I talked to Cassie, Patrick, everyone. I have a provisional studio setup in my dad’s gardening room. I’m painting, I’m writing, I’m sending out mail, I’m having very rich dreams.

I redesigned dogchirp.com while I was in Church Studio and posted a lot of stuff on there. The plan is to keep posting my blah blah blah projects on here and to post my more finished crap there in the official archive.

The next few days are pregnant with things to get done, pregnant like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, where I’m trying to keep all of the things I have to get done from exploding out of my guts and making a huge mess everywhere. More as I do them. I’ll be in New York on Friday or Saturday; holler if you want to hang out.

My time in Vermont was a massive success. I don’t want to write specifically about things I’m working on as a result for fear of jinxing them. More as the arrows start to come down.

My new studio is in this building, Church

I wrote this entry yesterday around 6pm. I stayed awake almost all night. I don’t have easy access to the internet anymore and am posting this now from the laundromat. Open studios are tonight and I’m finishing up here in a second to go back and do some revising.

James and Cara and Leah and I stayed up last night and drank whiskey and played drawing games. I dreamed I was handing James a beer and my hand squeezed my leg and I was startled and woke up, thinking an animal was on me. I sent in an application and drafted a few other ones. I had a great conversation with Howie about how to be a writer. I bought art supplies. I went to slide night tonight. Dinner was delicious chicken pot pie.

I listened to the recent Kites record a lot of times. I wrote a huge thing about it just now that I’m not going to post because frankly it touches way too many of my own personal raw nerves for this, my internet blog.

AJW always says he makes art, and he talks about his art and calls it that. “My art,” or “I make art,” he says. I think in part he says it because it’s over the top and funny, but in part because that’s also what he fucking makes, and that’s the word for it. A lot of people here call the process of doing stuff “making work” or “creating work.” “My work.” Andrew doesn’t drink, and neither do Ben or Christopher. Howie told me he started to have life figured out when he was 30. I am 25. I don’t have a home or a plan. I’m trying to make art. At the very least I make a lot of work.
I don’t have much more to say here today; it’s all going into other things, and I think that’s the best possible report I can give.

Cara

James, Leah

Wolf Kahn state of mind

1) I live in Art House Community Center, my studio space is in Maverick Building.
2) I can’t sleep in Art House Community Center because I can’t sleep in beds anymore re: gigantic mental block I developed at camp post break-up, where I would just straight up rather be on the ground in my sleeping bag.
3) I can’t work in Maverick Bulding because there isn’t enough space for me to spread out.
4) I am sleeping in Maverick Building in my sleeping bag in my studio, while showering and storing my things in Art House.
5) I am doing my work by squatting in Wolf Kahn in a painters’ studio nobody is using.

Meanwhile last night we had a grinder on iPod speakers at the fire, and I drank Maker’s and Heinekan from a minikeg. A lightning bolt struck the ground exactly after every step I took today. It was scary until it became calming; until I became okay with the fact that, yes, everywhere I stepped was going to be struck by lightning.

I drove into town. I drew for a long time.

The year was 2008. We had no hopes and no futures. We squatted Danny Kahn I mean Wolf Kahn. Our studio was blank but we worked in it. We wrote text that streamed like blood, we wrote text that streamed like chocolate syrup on fat ripe strawberries, we wrote text that streamed like black clouds on thin windy new england blue sky, we wrote text that streamed like every bad decision our guts have ever quietly held, we wrote text that zummed like a willing, tin guitar.

The year was 2008. Everything rules. Fuck everything.

The red mill

I rode my bike to the top of the hill to Johnson State College yesterday afternoon and my ass was totally kicked. I walked back down with Genevieve; she was getting Haryette Mullen’s book Sleeping with the Dictionary from the library. I have it now and am going to read it when I get back tonight. I’m about to go to the bar with James.

Nothing terribly exciting to follow, just a quick recounting of the day’s grind.

This afternoon I slept on the floor in my studio for forty five minutes. The sound of the creek outside my window is a serious husher of a shh and I had to lay down and get into it. On a related note, I think I can’t listen to music while I work anymore, which is a 180 from having to listen to music while I draw or paint. Even Strumming Music or that Wada piece were too much for me, and I kept going on soulseek to try to find something calmer – lots of wasted time.

On a related-related note, it’s also been interesting to work on definitively realizing whether I work better at night or during the day. I’ve been doing my project work between 9am and noon and then for two more hours in the afternoon, and each time slot has its unique distractions and advantages, as does working at night. I’m hoping to have my schedule totally perfected by Friday.

Re: actual work/productivity, I put down something like two pages (target is five/day, aiming for about 45,000 words over the course of the month) and a lot of notes for a continuation of the piece I started in May for my application, and yesterday I put down two shorter things that I might continue with. I’m calling that latter project Tales from Cocomo re: my conversation with Allen earlier this summer; it’s a collection of dirt zone boring episodes from real life. I might post them here when I leave if I don’t do anything else with them.

I had a few interesting conversations with people about their processes and about their situations in real life, and how they relate their creative zones to the necessary moves they need to make to make a dollar bill materialize. I also had several good talks with staff people about how they wound up here. More on these things as they develop.

I watched slides with about ten sculptors and painters last night and drank wine and beer. It was a thrill to see that they all do good work, and some of them totally killer. Tomorrow is the first above-ground slide night, and I’m stoked for it. Tomorrow during the day, I’m going swimming in the creek at the spot they took me to after dinner just now, and trying harder at hitting the daily 1500 goal on the main project. It seems to be within reach.

My room

The creek from above

Last Wednesday it was 70 degrees out and threatening rain so we went ahead and went to the Wissahickon anyway. Mike’s argument was the always compelling and strangely effective “it won’t rain if we don’t want it to.” After we ran through some hills, he pulled three ticks off of his pants, and I began to cough.

Little else happened this week. I had a fever, I drove to Boston with it, I languished there. On Sunday we went to Redbone’s after I finished coloring a shirt of Susy’s I started well over a year ago. I watched Karate Kid 3, Jurassic Park, part of Die Hard, Mysterious Skin and maybe two seasons of the Mighty Boosh on youtube.

While vibing out in my room last week, where the ground was completely covered in discarded clothes, dishes, assorted art refuse, towels, books and the rest, where the only light was from the harsh overheads or nothing, I dreamed that I went with a red tin can of gasoline to my cousin Michael’s house. He and his brother were inside lying on their stomachs watching TV while my Aunt Mary Pat and my Uncle Mike sat at the kitchen table reading the newspaper and eating salads. I threw the gasoline on the house’s white siding and threw the can under the tree in their back yard and set a match to it. The flame licked along under a panel until it burned in a straight line down the length of the house. I thought, I couldn’t not do this. I had to. But then I found a wet rag and went down along the line of flame, wiping it off of the house. I couldn’t do it with their garden hose because they would have heard from inside and come out, wondering why I would burn their house for nothing, with them inside, right in the afternoon. When I finished wiping out the fire I went inside to check on them and none of them looked up.

Normal readouts from the broken monitors at home: I stayed at Gray house last night and slept on the floor with Pumpkin, projects are moving along, playing music, planning a tour, the norm. At Amber’s school Nasir told me I was a good friend. This week I am catching up on many emails and tons of lost time both pretty much re: five days in the fever death bag, continuing to search for personal purpose in this stupid life, etc. I’m hoping to spend one night drinking red wine until I don’t want any more. I may visit my parents this weekend. Mike and I are meeting with Davey re: band tour.

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I fell asleep at 2am on Saturday night after a fun but exhausting show and a final weary game of Godstorm with Mike and Amber. I woke up today at 10:30am but didn’t scrape up from beneath the ground until well after one. I watched the cold afternoon burn the walls in the increasingly classic home fashion: long hours drawing uncomfortable CX on the kitchen stool, black coffee, granola with milk and crushed trader joe oreos in there, Garrison Keyler like an old bell clanging in my 4th grade stomach. One night my parents came into my room while I was reading and my dad said, “Here,” and it was a clock radio. He plugged it in and tuned it to WVIA, and I listened to All That Jazz and then Echoes where I heard Nana Simopoulos “White Bird” and Mark Isham “The Woman in Gray.” Hearing even ten seconds of these goofy songs still makes me crumble into the adolescent night. While my parents and grandparents have grown younger and younger Garrison Keylor remains ancient and permanently distant.

My dad brought me the old couch on Saturday. It appears in our old family tapes and I haven’t seen it in about nine years. Fittingly, we ripped the top a little bringing it into the house, but it’s here and it’s fine. Bonsky and I rearranged the downstairs this afternoon to accommodate it, opting out of what I call “Random house classical” (tv bottom of steps, couch opposite) for a new approach, with couch where the communal computer desk was, TV where the barbi stacks were and dining room table + chairs where the old coffee table was, and bikes where the TV and beer refrigerator were. We found a punk patch dating from the Mike Straight era stapled to the wall behind the tape shelf that read “No War Between Nations / No Peace Between Classes,” featuring a dove carrying a molotov cocktail. I sprayed the walls with bleach water and wiped them with a sponge. I live here. When I say I am going home this is where I mean. My dad said to my mom, “You can never visit, you can never see it. He lives in total filth.” I look out over the back on Sunday afternoons here – behind me, out the window behind the stool – and I feel the same warmth from dead yards and bare trees that I feel at my grandparents’ house. As if my house is our old campsite in the gone woods that filled their backyard as recently as a year ago. As if when they were plowed under those tangled trees and the strange sand pits around them went underground and swam to me beneath the mud and the leaden soil, to sprout their vines beyond my window, to wind up over the fences and into the neighbors’ yards. My grampa snores with the TV and the fire turned on and my little cousins screaming and laughing. He has a dream that says, The naked indian moved to Thomas’s back yard.

My dad also brought me a lamp that he had in his and my mom’s room while I was growing up. He famously had a nightmare one night, got out of bed and, to my mother’s horror, punched it off of his night table while whimpering with wide sleeping eyes. I would convince myself every night when going to sleep that I would surely hear a burglar or kidnapper entering the house, and could wake in time to get my dad if I needed to. I slept through this and many other night episodes, but woke up once: one night with wide eyes I watched a single thin black hand part the curtains of my room from the outside enough for a head out in the dark on the roof to look in. I was paralyzed with fear and pulled the covers up above my head. In the morning I couldn’t tell if it had actually happened.

For dinner tonight I had black and white beans in olive oil with four mushrooms, an onion, four garlic cloves and a pepper all chopped in and all fried up into a delicious gray bean slop. Cook it up with cumin chili powder black pepper. Add rice and cheese when it’s done. I crushed some crackers on there and then added some hot sauce, also two pieces of toast. I cooked chicken again earlier this week with the same recipe as before but did a better job, mostly re: cooking longer on lower heat and adding stock gradually rather than all at once like a god damn idiot.

On Tuesday I start going to Amber’s school to read to two of her kids. On Friday or so I’m going to Boston. Tomorrow me, Mike and Sienna are completing the unbeatable proposal we’re working on.

Perhaps you have been reading this blog for the last seven weeks and wondering, “I wonder what he is going to do this Sunday?” Well hey, it looks like I’m writing about it right now. Megalos and home tales for Sunday January 27th for the magic year of our perfect vision and unopened eyes 2008. Less boring than the last two weeks. Pre-fold holler to my boy Jesse “The Kud” who was man enough to admit that he once read this blog.

Sunday styles were consistent. I drank black coffee and listened to A Prairie Home Companion. I drank tang. I cooked myself rapturous spiral cut pasta like so: garlic + chopped spinach + black beans in olive oil with black pepper, cumin and cayenne; throw the cooked pasta in there, crack two eggs on it, break a chunk of feta off, stir until consistent and the egg is cooked.

Earlier tonight my pizza recipe = throw a little pasta sauce on the dough but not a lot, chop an onion super fine and saute with garlic and chopped spinach and mushrooms in olive oil and black pepper, cook way down, spread out on the dough, grate some cheddar and parmesan on there, chop some olives and sun dried tomatoes to top it. Drink a beer and work some CX and listen to the bee mask tape while that monster comes together.

Both of these resulted in near drug frenzy levels of food coma. I am stoked to have finally emerged from burrito/beans and rice/pot of beans purgatory after what must have been six months of not actually cooking. It is good to be well fed and to lay on my floor watching youtube without the listlessness of a can of tuna for dinner and water for dessert. It is good to come home from the grocery store with more options than an egg sandwich.

I spent the rest of Sunday at Mike’s, where I drank two Yuengling Black and Tans. The day before, not that it matters re: the scope of this blog, but anyway I make the rules, I had the first glass of white wine I’ve enjoyed in about a year. Lenka used to give me white wine in the Christian house and we would watch American idol while I cooked chicken or fettucini alfredo or instant Indian food and Mike B’s beautiful dog would lie there with his big ears up. Mike Hall and I played two games of godstorm in which I was the greeks. We played music. We watched The Ten. I listened to Tom Waits on American Routes.

This week I’m assembling my portfolio and great statement of purpose for Sienna. We’re playing a fest on Saturday and my dad might bring me my couch. My brother is coming tomorrow. I’m going to Whimsy’s house on Wednesday. I’m on page 200 and some of CX Cult, a start I’m more than happy with, and hope to be twice as far by next week. I am going back to camp.

Here’s lookin at you kid

Private idiots #3-7

Skating

Wave caps ect

I am curious as to how it took me until the 7th entry in this series to realize that I had begun using this blog once again in a way that I said back when I decided to do the DUST project that I would no longer, i.e., doing my personal accounting on the Internet. Is this a generational or developmental problem? After twelve years on the Internet at least one and likely two entire years of my waking life must now have been spent staring into screens. Have I lost the ability to write along with my vision? Has my ability to coherently reflect become inextricably bound to the act of typing?

In any event, after a Saturday night spent basting in Wild Turkey, I spent Sunday watching the shadows move across the floor and walls and watching the green and gray winter pieces of my yard click in the wind. I ate two pieces of toast with butter, Tang and black coffee. I ate the third part of a chicken I cooked on Thursday. I ate a microwaved burrito with cheddar cheese for dinner and had two large glasses of Wild Berry Zinger made from the same tea bag. I drew all day and for some of the night. I did 20 odd pages in <i>CX Cult</i> – companion speed volume to CX Styles, CX Asylums, etc. – and drew some small lines on the larger piece that I was supposed to have completed two weeks ago that remains 100% colored but only some 20% complete.

This week I am meeting with Mike and Sienna to discuss future art, continuing to try to spend the additional time on my computer beyond the time I spend on it for everything else to book a band tour, likely submitting my camp contract to Brian and possibly going to see my brother before he leaves for Australia. We are playing a show on Friday.

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I would not have graduated college if the Internet ruled as much then as it does now.

Updated this in the morning with a couple I forgot.

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Never say die

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Moog cookbook black hole sun. Same mylar ripple effect as Tbolt pagoda / barbarian movie at a minute in.

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Moroder promo from Laris = sick vocoder part at 1:30

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Teachers

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Hi kids we’re home early

The rest of these are archival rap relatable:

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I love this track because it is the first one I remember hearing where the fact that it is a remix is a part of the song. “Dancin to this remix makes me want to step.” I want to go to Charlottesville and act like an idiot when I listen to it.

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Throw Some Ds = Valhalla of radio raps. Mike and I heard this for this first time on January 22nd 2007 in Atlanta, where we correctly assumed that their raps would be at least two months ahead of ours. We immediately realized what we had found and I for one completely flipped my shit. Video is so good.

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Gillie

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Hitler Biggie