The last few months of work-work have been extremely productive (re: especially a near-complete redo of the Mark Dion site, which I produced a ton of work for and did all of the building with Lord Whimsy art directing; a game I did some video work on for discoverychannel.com; a Flash project I produced with Hall Media crew), but as my two main, long term office projects both coincidentally end exactly as camp starts, and as our project management and workflow methods have evolved to the point that there isn’t even so much sidebar/cleanup work for me to do anymore anyway, the time to call it a wrap seemed perfect. I enjoy my final Beer Thursday at Lime Projects after the Dion install on the 20th, and what a mighty and beautiful two years it’s been. My infinite thanks and debt and permanent salutes to Laris and Kendra from every desk and city I work at from here out.

In conjunction with leaving my job, I decided it would be productive to move out of the random house and see what’s up in the world. I’ll be in Philadelphia until June 30th and then will be traveling and at camp until the end of August. After that is anyone’s guess. Feel free to contact me if you need work done; pretty much wherever you are I can come to you.

I haven’t worked on very much of public interest since band tour, other than a slow moving book/cd project that documents that move. If you want a copy of it, it’s still in development hell (which really just means done by mid-July), but you can have one for free if you get at me before I print them up. Otherwise, I’m in the middle of a fellowship application for a writing program in the fall (marking the first time I’ve drafted anything in probably four years), and am generally enjoying the early summer via bike/Men’s Group as much as possible before the hot street doldrums and mosquitos roll in and I head out.

In normal totally boring recounting of the week’s efforts news, I spent Wednesday with Lexie at the bar, Thursday in Newark airport with Susy, Friday at my old house on 43rd with Jon and the Team, Saturday with Ben and Mike at the Wiese / D. Charles Spear shows and eventually the train bridge (word to Chris Bee Mask who lives here now and gave me his new killah tape), today at the Magnet City thing downtown and then in my slippers and long weekend yawns. Tonight I’m going to see Matthew from Charlottesville’s band; I guess those kids all live up here or in Brooklyn now.

Horizon items =
- Ospreys / Robedoor / Pocahaunted / Natalie Wiseblood / Woods June 28th.
- Ospreys / Wilde Stallions C60 on wether’s new label
- New book in July before I go, as above
- I will be in New York June 11th-15th on camp/nonsense business
- One or two new website ideas, maybe for sooner, maybe for later

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So yeah. I’ve just been out cruising the old roads, rolling around in my 1995, cruising hard with my hair blowing in my 2003, overdriving a pitched up White Album through some kid’s Peavey in Savannah while my friends think it’s funny to pretend to open the jar they keep their pet Black Widow in. This is a long one with pictures.

Dali king, Tufts Library

Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Yesterday while I was driving to work, local public radio baroness Marty Maas had local public radio mutt Dan Gottlieb on her show and she kept asking him if he was ready to die.

There’ve been oceans of blank these past three or four weeks. I’ve been whiskey-washed and soaked in beer five times over, straight wilin’ my way through the March. I shot beams straight through daylight savings time, ruptured the Internet, rearranged entire houses full of furniture with my mind and pretty much didn’t document any of it. I’m doing a horrible job of keeping a blog, but that I do keep one at all speaks, I think, to a need for me to mark time in the gray waste when there’s nothing going on more than to an impulse to document, keep track of, or explain the actual retarded goings on of my mid-20s “wild years.” It’s not like I don’t remember everything that happens anyway. (And double-anyway, I don’t know, who is this for anyway? My kids when they finally get up the guts to look up their old man on the internet wayback machine in the year of our wishing we covered our tracks 2028?)

Mike and I went to the Wissahickon and we drove back listening to that George Thoroughgood song everyone knows. I tell everyone that when I heard it for the first time on public radio when I was in fourth grade that it made me want to immediately go out honkey tonkin. This remains the case even now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We drank a case of Mexican beer that Amber bought, two cases of yuengling and a case of delicious Magic Hat HI.P.A. before the wells ran dry. We’ve been godstorming in a more quality, less quantity way = Davey plays with us now, and Mark Price came and hung out the other night too. Susy calls this phenomenon Men’s Group. Meanwhile, dozens of 11×17 sheets get covered, I go into and out of the office, and life grinds on.

–+–

I had a long reverie the other day about an early argument I got into with my dad. I feel like I can figure out when it was to the year based on family vacation memories (maybe my mom will leave a comment and let me know) – it was the year of Altered Beast, when we went to the arcade every month, put a collective dollar fifty up in that machine, and rose from the grave to save Zeus’s daughter in two player mode. (Non-losers should maybe note that $1.50 is not a lot of money for two people to spend on a complete trip to an arcade, a fact I took weird pride in. We’d spend the rest of the $5 he changed to quarters on the skeeball, and I would buy plastic ninjas with the tickets. In the story that I told with them at home the black ninja with the two swords was the hero. He hid and watched the infighting between the reds and whites from on top of the ottoman and he swooped down on his grappling hook to finish them off when they’d worn each other down.) One Sunday that year, my cousins and I were playing Altered Beast in my gramma’s basement, and mimicking the wolf beast’s power, I did a lot of diving into the couches. When I got home, I said I could fly, and my dad told me it was impossible for a man to fly. I told him I had been doing it earlier in the afternoon. He got out an encyclopedia that showed a picture of a fish with wings (and I remember laughing and saying “Look at that fish with wings, that’s crazy” and immediately realizing that what I was claiming was, to him, exactly the same thing) and the text read “Man cannot fly.” We went back and forth and he eventually agreed to disagree. I asked him if he would read to me (we were reading this killer pink book of Norse mythology, with fucking Odin losing his eye to Mimir so he could know everything happening the previous week) and he said he wouldn’t because we’d wasted all of our time arguing.

Should I just scan my entire journal from 4th-8th grade, annotate it, and post it here? I feel like I should.

My brother emailed me earlier this month to let me know he was doing jumps from Australian cliffs. I miss him dearly and my wish is that he will run and take a leap and be surprised to find that he can carry himself up and disappear into the sun.

–+–

Kurt Vile

I went to see Kurt Vile + xNoBBQx a while ago. NoBBQ was horrible, Vile ruled. Going to see him with Sunburned and Davey tonight. Tomorrow I am working on my video all day. I think I am going to Assateague Island this Friday and then to my parents house for easter.

Mostly sure I mentioned already that Ospreys is touring with Davey or Tenspeed from the end of April through the beginning of May, our first tour in eleven(!) months, re: I went to camp, Mike bought a house and went on poster tour, etc. Massively stoked to lay down all manner of styles in all manner of territories. Definitely sure I mentioned that I’m working on a video. I was going to post a part of it here but seriously why would I do that when it isn’t done.

Dali spade, Tufts Library

Massachusetts

Me and Suzanne

Advice column

Wissahickon

Working on a video

Everything you can learn from yourself is already inside of you

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.

At home with my dogs, February y.o.o.b.w.hz., 1808

Click here to view the embedded video.

I saw Forrest Gump for the first time last night. Bonsky used to say “seat’s taken!” all the time and I never knew where this was from. The part where he runs across America over and over was a pleasant surprise.

I had a dream the other night that I was at my gramma’s house with my cousins, standing on the old plank back porch circa I don’t even know, early 90s, standing under the tin roof where me and Maria were when we saw the bolt of lightning strike a few yards away by the pool, and we were looking out into the field. The entire dream was just this: that the field was still there. Earlier when I went into our kitchen, my heart skipped a beat and I wondered suddenly where Robyn’s old cutting board and the old shelves with all of the pots and pans had gone. Last week at my gramma’s, even though the field has been gone since I got back from camp, my disgust was fresh at the fact that the paths are gone, gone, gone. When we were in the Wissahickon yesterday, we reached a sign that read “INDIAN ->”. Since it dictated that we turn right, we stepped over it and went forward. Eventually we arrived at the foot of the above statue, placed a little over a hundred years ago on its hill. Across the river is a sign that points up the hill toward it, and even reading it the statue is hard to spot. The sign says, “According to legend,” super absurd, I know, “the Lenape chief is watching his people move west.” I’m going to build a small statue to the naked indian when I next visit home, and hope, according to the legends, that I’ll find him in some western fields and finally get to ask him about all of the things that’ve been on my mind since last time.

What can I say? Sunday is the only day that works. I had a fine conversation with Brian this afternoon while I drank my coffee and had my fake sausage and cheesy eggs. I listened to all of the radio shows and did twenty five pages in CX Cult. I have less than 75 more to go before it’s done, which means I did between 250-300 in the first month of the project, which isn’t really bad by any means but less than half of what I had planned. When this book’s done, it’ll represent the first 17% of a proposed 2000 drawings for a video I’m doing for later this fall.

I also finished installing a new patch on my jacket fashioned from a sleeve of my favorite blue button down shirt, which I had worn in all seasons of the past six years. I got it at Bryn Mawr Hospital Thrift with Zach one January afternoon of my freshman year of college, and I decided one afternoon about a month ago that I needed to retire it. I think it was the only material relic from those days still surviving in its original form in my daily life. It may be the last shirt I bought for myself, which is incredible. Little scraps of it are around my bedroom floor.

Around five I convinced myself that I needed to go to a show tonight, to see Pippi Bone Dust’s band VVLTVRE and Jared’s band RAWAR (both in caps? I don’t know). I did these four discs beforehand re: trades/gives and realized a way better way to build the CD boxes themselves.

Private Idiot #8-11

Best part of the day by far was the total paralysis that overcame me as I tried to leave the house around 7:30pm. I had my coat on, my backpack completely packed, my pant leg rolled up, my bike rebuilt and the tires pumped, and as I started to go out the door I froze in my tracks for three minutes. I walked my bike back to its starting point at the wall, went into the kitchen and had a glass of water. I drank it on the couch and thought “Do I need to leave the house,” and I kept thinking “No of course not, I can stay home and work.” This kind of sudden overwhelming agoraphobic episode hasn’t happened in about three years. Sitting on the couch, I was able to summon the energy to leave by arguing to myself that I would not allow myself to work or enjoy myself if I stayed in, because I would continue to regret not going out despite the fact that I didn’t technically need to or even particularly want to.

The ride was nice. I took my bike apart when I went to Boston whenever and hadn’t yet put it back together, re: the weather has been terrible for two weeks/I have been too busy watching Forrest Gump. Traded Jared a disc for a Wet Cement disc; gave Pippi a disc and bought one of her shirts. I got back and wasted the rest of the night, but I didn’t feel too bad about it.

At home with my dogs, February y.o.o.h.v.a.s.v., 2008

I’m not doing a great job of posting these on Sundays.

Last night me and Mike were in the middle of the usual records/beer/board games Gray House flop-out that horrendously replaced the ultra-productive December/early January videos/whiskey/drawing mode (what can I say other than that we apparently enjoy having many, many titanic godswars more than we enjoy having anything to show for our stupid days) when it started snowing and Mike decided to take the dog to the park.

Despite predictions and the observed weather that prompted the move out, There were no clouds in the sky. We stayed in the park for a frigid hour and watched the first eclipse I’ve seen in probably ten years. I remember standing in the spring night in my boy scout uniform watching Hale-Bopp and thinking, shouldn’t there be some sound or something for this? Shouldn’t there be some great clap that shatters windshields and sets off car alarms in order to draw everyone’s attention to the fact that the universe is indeed fucking gigantic, and check it out the moon is disappearing and then turning a weird red? I drank my beer and paced to keep my feet warm. Mike tried to get his dog to climb up onto the playground’s fort. Cops idled and watched us from the edge of the park – their tire tracks in the frozen mud shone in the red moonlight. The dog chewed a plastic water bottle and its crunch echoed loudly. We had a hard time setting up the board for game three when we went back inside because our hands had frozen.

Earlier, Amber bought me beer because I drove her around. This somehow seems relevant to my being able to linger in the park for an hour, play three games of godstorm and have what may or may not have been a killer Bavarian Kings-style band practice (to be decided). Even earlier, and this is only tangentially related, Davey joined us to drink 40s and plan a band tour (and play two games of godstorm).

Even earlier, Sunday, I was at my parents’ house. I riled up my baby cousins at my gramma’s, scared my brother John and played video games without thinking too hard about the big issues of the day. I beat my dad in chess twice (which feels weird, re: he used to constantly destroy me when I was 10 when we last played, and the game itself always felt like such a raw ego vs. ego Chronus/Zeus thing especially now re: our general disagreement on almost every matter in the world, not being used to having my weird family position validated by winning, feeling weird about getting older/my dad getting way older (he was only eight years older than I am now when I remember him at his youngest), etc.). I missed my brother, who is in Australia, and who I can’t call on the telephone. I watched many Hollywood movies and walked on the banks. I finished watching the Mighty Boosh and have, as ever, been drawing.

This week is almost over and I have no plans for the immediate future. Tonight I’m going to drop in on my old roommates at their show. I’m going to have band practice a couple times and work on finishing drinking the beer. I’m going to try to go to the park. And on.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Especially boring version of the weekly lump for Sunday January 13th, year of our wonder and sorrow 2008.

In New York at the New Museum Friday saw Paper Rad “Problem Solvers,” ran into Ash and Etienne, had vegan chili fries with Susy, Crystal, AJW, Ted, Ben and Jess. At Judy’s we ate an entire piece of gouda on a baguette, drank tanguerray and found it unsatisfactory, watched dino squad and saturday night live. Met Kyle at the Lovid thing after internet talking to him last year.  Listened to the Mammal record on the train home.

The house is the house. I’m working and making packages. There isn’t much to report otherwise. I discovered “music blogs” this week and have listened to a ton of terrible synth music in pursuit of the follow-up to my love affair with that Vaggione record a few weeks back.  Good finds so far are Aktuala “Tappeto Volante,” Ed Yazijian “Six Ways To Avoid The Evil Eye,” and some Dream Syndicate jams, but otherwise nothing I flipped over and didn’t already know about.

I am working on compiling a disc of recent Ospreys fuzz from October through now, all from various Private Idiots basement styles.

I am going to buy a couch this week. What else? What else.

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.

I have an art show in three days that I am getting moderately stressed out about because I haven’t worked on anything in days and have nothing done.

I drove home to Philadelphia after eating chicken cutlets and gnocchi at my gramma’s (as before). I drank black coffee and drove as quickly as I could. When I got in, I unloaded my things into my room, cleaned a little and went to Mike’s. We had band practice. Ellen lives there now. Then we went to the show.

The show was us, Davey or Tenspeed, Morsbergers like Machine Guns and three units from Birmingham AL – Dick Neff, Important Eagle, Mugu Guymen. IE played tapes and reeds, DN played drums, a custom synth and a Chippendale vocal mask,  and MG played drums and distorto guitar. DN played a song with Davey at the end and that slayed. All solid dudes who we will hopefully visit. Our set was a little rugged – first one played on our micro amps setup at middle volume. Feedback and sustain didn’t work as expected and there were some weird mid-set problems as a result.

The difficult influence of Providence RI’s Fort Thunder art collective was highly apparent in the musical and visual styles the AL crew brought with them, possibly championed furthest by DN, who screened the green yellow and red bleeding monster crazy lines weird letters show poster with clear flying hard line crystals, and yeah, played fast drums with a loop dealie and a mask on. I’m not going to write an essay about this influence and its obvious continuing role in defining a certain branch of fringe art and music just now, but let this be a placeholder for when I decide to.

Also, let me be clear in that I don’t mean to front on DN or any of these dudes by calling them out or whatever on invoking FT in their shit, consciously or not (I mean, the poster for this show was still totally tight). It’s totally okay. My interest and concern is for what comes next (in noise music and young art) in this so-called movement’s path, since we can only (presumably) print bleeding ghost monsters with weird letters on our show posters for so long.

I ate one and a half odwalla bars at the show. We ate delicious burritos beforehand. At the show, Rosa and Pumpkin ran back and forth, back and forth, kicking up a royal racket. I drank organic orange juice and some odwalla strawberry juice and had a sip of coca cola even though I can’t stand soda.

In the morning I woke up with a triple dream, 1/3 in the ancient city, 1/3 in the underground complex, 1/3 fresh weird allegory/film digestion in a tar pit. Two of my favorite three things, I volunteered to an old classmate of mine, are “fresh garlic” and “Enya.” Full disclosure in the zine I’m putting together for the two shows on the 5th, art/sabbath thing at dgl, and apparently an ospreys show in Lancaster – reunion jammer with our buddies Wether + P Des that I thought wasn’t happening until a wake later. Whoops.

I had breakfast at my gramma’s at 1pm after writing all of this down. I ate fried chicken, green beans, sweet potatoes and perfect gnocchi. I had no dessert but drank black coffee from my grampa’s new coffee machine (replacing his ancient Mr. C that took like 55 minutes to brew a pot and made the most terrible/perfect sunday buzz sludge ever – new Cuisinart pot or whatever brand makes the same brew [the flavor is based on his coffee making style of filling the filter to the absolute max with grind regardless of the amount of brew he plans to make] but in 10 minutes instead) while soundly defeating a challenge from my brother to beat original Contra without the ++– code. I died three times against the belly dancer (boss of energy zone = one general sloppy style, one because I forgot you jump over him, one because I forgot you can’t blow up the spikes he throws at you) and once at the end boss (just sloppy). All of my cousins watched me do this and laughed as I recalled to them the Contra styles our neighbors once espoused (machine gun against the waterfall boss, laser against the snowfield boss, etc.) while ruining all with what I believe to be the perfect unbeatable style for this game, S + R.

I am thankful every day that I do not play video games anymore.

At my grandmother’s house I had a glass of port and a bite of a ham sandwich. I have always had the feeling that she makes sandwiches only once per year, and that time being when we come over. (Or, perhaps I am being unfair because I eat most of my meals between two slices of bread, and I have become especially particular when served in this way.) When we left her house we moved logs up the river bank and my hair came out of its bun. The thinking was that if we didn’t move them up, the river might rise and take them. It was 60 degrees out and I didn’t wear a coat and my hair blew in my face. My sleeves were wet with the water from the muddy ground’s melted snow. I rubbed a piece of ice in my hands to clean them when I finished, and wiped them off on my pants when I sat in the car and closed the door.

At home my dad asked me if I knew any of the comics in the best comics 2007 collection re: his reading the times, and one of Ben’s was one of the images associated with the article.

I ate four chicken wings for dinner and drank a glass of wine from a homemade bottle. It was sweet and very mild. I moved onto the beaujolais nouveau and tried unsuccessfully for two hours to get work done. I organized drawings but didn’t produce. I ate three cookies and then two more later. I played chess against my dad with a chess clock and the game lasted for slightly less than the length of the Sun Balance side of VCO “Sun Balance / Open Knot.” I checkmated him as white in a wild rush after sacrificing a knight to gain space and one move’s time, but really it was a dumb luck gambit in a red wine crazy game. I finished the wine and drifted in and out of sleep listening to “Versatile Arab Chord Chart.”

I watched “The Limey.” Last night I watched “300.” Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.

2008 = Whatever, Go Even Bigger

January = build tall couches, allen coming over on the 2nd, show on the fifth
March = band tour with stallions
June = MDBTR project is finished
July/August = camp
Late September/Early October = traveling with my mom

Sunday Dec 16th year of our lawd 2007 I spent in Boston. I ate Trader Joe’s raviolis, a chicken sandwich with sauce and cheese for lunch, and toast with butter and jam for breakfast. I ate a box of “Men’s Pocky” during snack. I watched Ace Ventura Pet Detective, a special about Charles Manson, a special about Jeffrey Dahmer and a hundred and fifty thousand youtube videos, and the new movie Juno. I enjoyed several of the youtube videos. I don’t think Manson poses much of a threat to anyone, and watching him, was reminded chiefly of Stinky Steve. Dahmer inspired pity. Juno was shrill, in part because I am not nostalgic for the 1990s.

Jen may or may not have moved into the Random House today. When I get back, I’m building a tall couch in the middle room and harvesting furniture.

I am working on a gigantic pile of stuff for a show on January 5th in South Philly, joined by Heather’s Black Sabbath band and some others. Ospreys is playing on the 30th at Katrina’s house and in Lancaster at KPPL on the 12th. Allen is hopefully coming to Philly on the 2nd and staying for a while. Travis is working on copying our zine. I’m sketching for a final version of MDBT-R.com and hoping to launch that by end-of-year. My Christmas work party was amazing and mind-blowing.

On this day Sunday December 9: I had long afternoon dreams, got out of bed, and drew them. I painted for most of the early afternoon, worked on house junk (literally – sorting and discarding the last of the junk pile) until it was dark, drew for two hours, cleaned the stove for an hour, worked on the kitchen wallpaper, painted for a while longer. I conceptualized for an upcoming art show (January 5th), began to think out loud about how to use the rest of the house, and continued to think about while avoiding other less important internet projects.

I had granola for breakfast, a tuna sandwich in the evening and granola for dinner. I drank coffee from the french press, regular black tea that Robyn left, green tea that’s been here forever and a glass of milk. I wore my long underwear, my slippers from high school, a tshirt and a blue sweater. I listened to Wu Tang and NPR all afternoon.

Retired this week: “Tongue planted firmly in cheek”

This weekend I’m going to Boston to run a 5k and hopefully check out Emeralds / Caboladies in PDX.

Youtube Videos I Watched:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stop motion mario kart student film

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nerd party