Earlier this week me and the crew were just about asleep on the roof across the way from Matthewson when I sort of sat up and started vibing a little and had to come back home “to do work”; not sure what exactly I had in mind, but when I got to the house and my teeth were brushed and I was watching the sunrise from my own personal zone, I it meant that I started writing this update for my internet blog.

“Blogs: Neither an Email nor a Zine”

I read Coetzee “Youth” (totally relatable self-repulsion as empowerment and encouragement), David Lodge “British Museum is Falling Down” (guhhh) and Calvino “Cosmicomics” (I can’t remember if there were actually any fart jokes in this or not) since last time.

Music and movies are harder to keep up on.

I contributed ten items to Walker’s 100 10 Second Stories event at Building 16 earlier this month. There’s going to be a book documenting that.

Ospreys #10 came out a few days ago and can be found in the usual places, in person, or by sending me email with your address. I have about thirty of the hundred copies left.

I started a band with Jolly (gutter), Adam (bass) and Chris (drums) in which I am the vocalist and in which I totally intend to take my shirt off. We have a practice space at Mars that me and Adam sometimes go to after work to “unwind” and play awful/occasionally ruling techno jams until 5am.

I’m helping Ben with a writing project that will hopefully come together before long.

I’m working on a story that will be out in the streets next month, wherever fine flyers for upcoming events are given away.

I’m working on a video called “Night of the Living Wage” that will probably never get done, and a video called “Most Days” that will probably never get done either. The former is an exhausting stop motion/claustrophobia project about going into the horror-zone at work. It looks kind of like hell and I totally regret starting it because I have at least five more horrendous nights of work on it before it gets done. The latter is a Flash-driven project with like nine or ten painted backgrounds and hand-rendered animated characters. It looks good but I am like 7% done with it after probably 15 hours of work and am not feeling particularly encouraged, particularly re: I feel like I should be writing or doing almost anything else instead, blah blah blah.

Finally I feel like this isn’t the first time I’ve put this feeler out there, but mainly if anyone knows where Jeremiah Golden is or how to reach him I would appreciate it; postal address preferably. I want to send him a copy of pretty much everything I’ve made over the last four years but have no idea how to do that.

Major life themes/thought-streams lately have been on dignity (since/re: Work/Death at Bldg 16 when Reber used the word; come talk to me about dignity at the cable car b/w 3-11pm Tues, Wens, Fri or Sat if you want to, or call on the phone, 411 can give you the number), listing instances of shifting perception (initially spurred by thinking about the temporal moment when food from the trash begins to appear to be food, and not trash), decision-making and lifestyle choices (mainly re: confidence in their being the most productive ways to pursue very certain futures and desires from within an equally uncertain/unstable/unknowable present), continual explorations of male energy, petting cutest dogs in town Saba (see above!!!!!!) and new little buddy Coda when possible.

Anyway tonight I am stoked to see Door play at Mars. I mailed out a bunch of things to a bunch of people this week. I bought groceries today and had the most delicious french toast for breakfast. I think my car is dead. I am going to New York this weekend. I intend to visit Philadelphia at the end of June and to go on a Men’s Vacation with Mike during that time, and then to go to camp. How many emails do you think I can possibly send in the mean time? How many times do you think I can listen to White Light/White Heat?

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.

Darcone Triangle

Black dove paintings

There is No Such Thing as News #2

Okay so the obvious major work update is that I finished all three projects I said I was going to finish for the thing on Saturday. Below are more camera phone pics from the black dove paintings, a project that consumed me pretty much completely for about seven full days. I’m going to do scans of them and put them in the parent directory when I get back to West Pittston.

The weather has been miserable and I have been in the zone. I left the house maybe five or six times the whole time I’ve been here in Philly, otherwise I’ve been working. I got to hang out with Davey and Brian Morsberger at Davey’s house for World Series Game 5, and then I got to ride my bike back to Grays Ferry in the horrendous freezing rain once the game was called.

When I was at VSC Todd told me that in the winter the snow rolls off the Schultz sculpture studio roof in a clean incline out and over the bonfire spot, burying it seven or eight feet under, and that an intrepid sculpture resident will often take up the task each month of digging out a path and a circle. The bonfire, he said, surrounded by a tall bank of snow, then gets burned as high as possible. I’m excited to go back up there next week and am hoping x 1000 that the prospect of my employment there is resolved by the time I leave.

Current projects = General website upkeep/bugfixing/indexhibit play (not 100% satisfied with the provisional setup I got to a working point last month, and my dad reports weirdness on PCs with IE), super overdue job of putting together a paypal store for all of my stuff, Fake Catalogue with Jon Bocksel, hopefully this group paintings thing with J Roc if I can get her to come down to the Grays Ferry spot, and finally resuming serious like top-priority work on the naked indian project. Web junk and hopefully at least a few things for Jon will be done by the time I go to VSC next week, we’ll see after that.

Current schedule = Here until Sunday, home until Tuesday, VSC until the 8th/9th, New York until maybe the 15th, back home indefinitely re: my employment status developing or not.

This is just a note in case I want to elaborate more next time or whenever -

Floors I’ve Slept On 6/8-10/8

The Provisional.
Domain pod.
Art Barn.
Tinderbox.
Maverick 2-4.
Wolf Kahn #1
Wolf Kahn #2
Church Studios 2-1.
Parents’ dining room.
Mike’s living room.
Mike’s office.

Okay and here are photos from black dove:

The current schedule is to update this every Tuesday with what I’m currently working on, where I am, and possibly a story about a thing that happened.

The above is from a collaboration I did with Loren Erdritch at VSC; she put down the color and I riffed on it. I did two others with her that came alright, and I gave her two color plates that she’s going to do the ink for. Similarly I did two pieces with Leah Wolff, and there are maybe two or three more pending. In all of them I put down one color layer and then she did the second. The two done ones are here:

I mentioned the hanging diamonds thing last month, made from scraps from my work exchange job in the office upstairs; in a similar vein was my drawing game Alpha Symbolia, which I did on thick paper plates that were the cropped edges of the invitations the development office printed out to send to the center’s donors for the big Tibetan flags art show last month. The principle was to see how far I could get without spending more than a few seconds on a given small drawing, with “no repeats or hesitations,” and with the entire body meant to appear as a single unit. That’s below.

I’m doing a table at the 215 Festival on the 25th where I’ll have like every zine I’ve ever made, hopefully the Darcone Triangle books that Mark Price is printing for us, a new Philly junk/joke book, and an old school “doing it the hard way”-style painting/ink book in a mega small edition where I am just going to make five or ten completely original copies and that’s going to be it.

While I’m in town I’m going to Don Simon’s thing at City Hall and me and Jenn Rockwell will be drawing. Me and my Men’s Group will be up to our typical no-good/not-much. I feel like I should reiterate that anyone who wants to collaborate should get started on something and then get it to me with directions.

Alpha Symbolia

The dust blows forward and the dust blows back

Would you like to buy this painting? I would like to sell it to you so that I might be able to drive my car home from the mountains when I’m done in them. Please get in touch, tom dot** bubul@gmail com, or forward to your moneyed friends.

My sun salutation blows out the sky
11×17, watercolor + paintpen + acrylic paint + ink on watercolor paper
Created in thirds August 2008 at Beam Camp, Gray House Philadelphia, and VSC.
Click for bigger views.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To be sure, there is not and cannot be a single fast wonder in the year of our wonder and sorrow 2008. I took most of last week off from the Internet and spent it in Boston. I’ve been working on my video “Strobe” and spending time in my office at 5th and Girard. Look for my longer update soon.

And now on to the normal crawl, L.I.F.E. on a pixel, life on a bristle, life on a sheet: things I did, thought and ate, January 6th, year of our wonder and sorrow 2008.

While I made coffee or possibly lunch (Sunday meal plan = dinner: pasta with trader joe sausage sauce, lovely cheese, fresh onion/peppers/mushrooms; breakfast = granola + yogurt; lunch = ??; also had two glasses of tang, a sip of a root beer float, three beers), Bonsky said, “Tom, you thought it would take you twenty minutes because you have no sense of time.” We were talking about how I went to Kinko’s to make that zine up above thinking it would only take me twenty minutes to go in, print and get out, when it took upwards of two hours.

After reflecting on it (during Alphaville and Training Day mostly, both of which are terrible movies), I got to thinking that maybe the issue isn’t so much one of time lapse, but more generally of primarily storing experiences in impressionistic ways rather than in emotional or empirical ones. This seams to speak more fully to the ways I think about reading, listening to music, cooking, traveling, and so on. Not that I don’t perceive time in these things, but I do find that time (and emotional response, and empirical fact) often distorts around the more prominent forms of memory, i.e., light, color, temperature. We can talk about it maybe.

Asked for examples of my not being able to perceive time, Bonsky went on to point out that I often used to say I would be over “in a little while” and then not show up for three or more hours. I think this is more just my being socially untimely and cluttered than my not being able to understand time, but I’m including this point of his so you might form your own opinion.

At night I went to see the mighty Blues Control and everything shuddered back into place. I always know when I like bands and when I don’t, but sometimes I forget when I straight up love bands. Total jammers. Check these dudes outtttt!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ten years ago I was a creator on the Discworld MUD. I had just “met” Larissa Sky, while Jeremiah and I had already worked together on at least one major project. Good heavens.

Next in life = planning a tour to New Orleans and back.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve been staying in the little room at L+K’s for the last few nights finishing the Mark Dion project for launch. Roger produced the visual elements, while I worked with our ruling computerz genius Mickey for the last few weeks – and especially the last few days – to make it a functioning reality. The site debuted today and I’m extremely stoked about both the work I did for it and the project in general.

Mark Dion’s Travels of William Bartram – Reconsidered
markdionsbartramstravels.com

If Jeremiah Golden or anyone who has his email address sees this, get in touch with me.

This weekend I’m catching up on email and taping / printing CX Asylums. Call me if you want to eat dinner, drink celebratory gin, listen to Ayler records or sing big business princess diana late night philadelphia karaoke at a dude bar.

Outlife shits after the jump = 50 totally different inserts I drew/colored for the Ospreys tape on BTH. Godspeed these mugs to new bruns.

I finished CX Asylums aka How Can I Hand You a Diamond = if you have Phil Todd’s email address send it to me, scans coming later or whatever

I signed up for a Facebook account, my account is the one of me in the Ecuadorian mask L+K brought back for me from their recent trip down that way, not the big question mark, which is my dad.

My mom and I went to dinner tonight at a restaurant near Scranton. My mom asked me if found the music offensive. I didn’t, but the low lighting was somewhat unpleasant. This was remarkable because, taken as a general, what happened was this: A person thought a thing I cannot control that I hadn’t noticed was upsetting me, but it was in fact a different thing that I cannot control that they hadn’t noticed that was upsetting me. The key philosophical questions that arise are A) What does a person’s misreading of what in your shared environment is bothering you tell you about how that person conceptualizes you; B) [How] does this simple miscommunication affect other conversation; C) Is there ultimately a difference between being distracted by one thing or another in this way (minor and ambient), except in the difference between a second person’s perception or misperception of your distraction and how that plays out as in question A.

At dinner I had a gin and tonic. It was Gordon’s Gin and I tried to tell my mom some “tales of the unbreakable bottle” but she doesn’t like to talk about my drinking. Earlier in the day we had a hilarious car ride back from the mall, where we went to buy shirts for business breakfasts but instead ended up buying paint pens, during which she was appalled at the thought of using paint pens to write graffiti.

Also, let it be known that none of the above is a metaphor for or pointer to anything else in my life, nor is any of it a rhetorical secret internet message. However there are secret internet messages elsewhere in this entry.

I’m going to sleep now, back on a normal schedule. Tomorrow I’m going home and hopefully out to Lancaster and Monday I’m going to New York and Tuesday we’re playing a show and Wednesday I think I’m going to Boston.

I slept in my childhood bedroom last night for the first time in a few years and tonight – though I was planning to go back – I’m sleeping in my room in the attic. I walked up the night steps at 6am after drinking a bottle of wine and I turned off all the lights and looked out at the 1996 streets from behind my old curtains.

cover dudes

DB

Lindsay Daen 

10 yr old Joe W’s skate dude. 

TI 

TI page from Apple and Banana

Current events 

I finished my loft last week. My room mural is ongoing. I am working on a drawing zine with Travis, who was kind and visionary enough to start it and send it to my court. I cooked delicious vegetables tonight and Jamie came and visited. I spent a weekend in Ohio. I have Netflix now and have seen a lot of dumb movies and two good ones. I started working on suspended shelves for my stereo speakers and next week I’m building normal shelves for my collapsing piles of floor junk and records. This weekend is The Cabin and I’ll be out of town for a few days for that. The following is Beam Halloween stuff. Real true stories coming soon.