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.

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.

Masonic temple

Normal bullshit for day three on this weird compound. What a sad and perfect life we lead.

I spent this morning corresponding with various real life team members. I’m working on my critical response to camp and my normal love poems to everything else. I dropped two and a half of the five pages I want to on a normal studio run. Up from yesterday, but still not yet at the point.

I do a work exchange in the development office. Today, I printed out a thousand color copies of an invitation to an opening in support of two Tibetan residents of the studio center, a show with work featuring 100 flags made by new yerk artists. During the painstaking print job I drew 40 copies of my moon lunger against a four color highlighter background with a reverse side reading “How can I hand you a diamond?” thinking that if there’s nothing here I can tag with paint markers, then at least I can literally hang tags on trees or hydrants or whatever. Eleven of the forty are up and I’ve already seen Joy say “Oh what is this a teabag in this tree? Wait it’s a note?” I’m hoping to bomb the rest in the morning and be done with it.

Zelda’s novel was looked at by a serious agent today. She’s been working on it for fifteen years. I felt like this was a good omen.

I swam in the creek with Jessica and then near the covered bridge with Leah and Cara too. The water was cool and the current fast. Twelve and thirteen year olds called each other douchebags in the warm September afternoon sun as we left the first spot. The clouds piled up and thunder rolled.

Five artists showed slides in the church. Camie’s sculpture and Don’s pencil work were both A+.

Magic Hat’s Jinx is in sesh and when I drink it I want to act like an idiot. It tastes like surfin USA. It tastes like I want to pick you up.

My room is third from the right

Tagged

Tagged

Say it! Say… you’ll give me your… skin! :-)

Oh, no, no, please god help me! :-)

Columbus ruled, Emeralds is the best band.

All joking and whatever aside, the reason I’m bloggin is because I am running in a 5k in two weeks and I need to be able to finish it. I ran two miles a couple weeks ago and I thought this evening would be a good time to go train a little more in the cold cold night. I rode out to the alma mater and started going around the track, and lord if a crowd of dudes walking back from the basketball game didn’t laugh super loud and yell “Look at how gay that guy is running!” while they passed.
But, I say to those dudes (via Facebook if I ever choose to check it again): how many drone bands did you go see last weekend nine hours away from your houses? How many races are you choosing to run in which you will tie jingle bells to your shoes (totally serious) so that all of the neighborhood kids will think it is Santa’s sleigh out racing a 5k? How many hours do you spend watching youtube and playing internet scrabble every day? How many website projects involving modern artists and botanical gardens are you photoshopping and developing Flash for all day? Exactly.

I ate a nice pasta dinner and drank wine tonight. I listened to the Silmaril record a pile of times and started drawing some wallpaper for the kitchen, which Bonsky fixed up a little while I was away. My body sighs (farts) with pleasure at each bite I take that isn’t Taco Bell, Quizno’s, Waffle House, Subway, Denny’s and Papa John’s. So stoked to step it up and spend next fake tour eating nothing but Pizza Hut [Bistro] and Red Lobster.

What a life this is!

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.

Every light in my apartment burned out during the four days it took me to get back from West Philly.

In an email to Tasneem I suggested that I might try asking the new residents of 4531 Locust whether they might allow me to have a key and crash on their couch and use their shower on an as-needed basis in exchange for some reasonable amount of money. The later it gets and the longer I hang out in my room the more viable this plan becomes. I am so delirious that I keep forgetting what the beginning of the sentences I’m typing are before I get to the ends of them. In a surprising but as yet not-necessarily turn of events, me and Tasneem are hanging out Wednesday night around midnight before I fly to Providence the next morning.
I wonder just how much I need to get done in a day to keep from feeling like I totally wasted my day. Eleven hectares? Twenty two pounds? Seriously, how can I possibly feel like I didn’t do anything today?

I’m working on an audio project that is based around location and time specific recording. It will be serious documentary recording to meta-listeners and it will be noise to regular ones. I am also going to start a band called Homer where the premise is that I blind myself and then tell a story for about eight hours. I mean a band called Socrates where I talk about why I have to drink poison and then I do it. I mean a band called September 11th where a plane crashes into me. I mean a band called blog where I write a blog.

For my birthday my dad emailed me this:

I don’t remember if I told you this one or not, but a few years back Joni Mitchell cut an album entitled “Mingus”. It was a tribute to the legendary jazz musician Charles Mingus. Some of the tracks were prefaced by some live discussion with Mingus himself. One of them was at a birthday celebration in his honor and at the critical ” Happy birthday Dear Charles” part he bellowed out “Happy Birthday MotherF***er”.

Susy brought cake to Mike’s house. Melissa brought five beers in a white plastic bag. All was well. Last night I drank framboise mixed with hoegaarden (a “dirty ho,” our server happily explained) and John told us about word oven and sustainable medicine in Africa. Meghan remembered the Waterworld story and I was baffled. Susy and I had an afterparty of raspberry pancakes and at the hostel this morning I listened to Dopesmoker on maximum volume while I rolled in other people’s mud, was landed on by other people’s flies, squeezed other people’s shit in my bare hands. I live out my bad karma five days each week. Nothing else can go wrong. Every year is better than the last.

Last night was the first concert ever to happen at the record store. The GDDWB played. On the back deck earlier tonight, Andrew claimed that the internet recording he heard of theirs was “the worst thing [I] have ever heard.” It wasn’t so bad. I was so tired that I fell asleep when I went home afterward to make a snack. The snack was a bagel with goat cheese on one half and marmalade on the other. In dreams two sisters stole the boombox from the back of my car while I drove east down Market Street. They laughed on their bikes and I drove after them. After driving into a chainlink fence they trashtalked me and I chased them further, crashing into both of their back wheels at once. I got out of the car and had forgotten about the boombox in the dream. We fought and I punched one of them in the mouth, but soon we were better and we went to their co-op. It was a converted horse stable with painstakingly crafted wooden fences and carefully raked rows where vegetables were planted. The younger sister told me I was standing in the tomato row and I apologized. We went into their house which was white concrete and undecorated and distorted. The walls didn’t meet up correctly with the floor or ceiling and gravity was not absolute throughout, in that there was no distinct “down.”

After work today I talked to folks from the DWB on Mike’s porch. I drank coffee and we went to Tommy Gun’s where I had suspect chicken instead of deep-fried mac and cheese. Out of the delicious frying pan and into the delicious fire. Stuck between a delicious rock and a delicious hard place. Deliciously damned if you do, deliciously damned etc. etc. We went swimming at devil’s and sat on the bridge for a long time afterward. At Jon’s I drank beer and talked to Susy about our supposedly forthcoming camping trip.

Susy’s wisdom teeth came out. I asked her if she could save them in a jar for me to keep as a totem but when she woke up and became coherent she said they cut the teeth into pieces before they took them out. I ate a plate of ribs while she was lying in bed with {Proof} on pause. Was it seven years ago that Jeremiah told me how brackets are extraneous and goofy in titles? Eight?

At the beach I peed in the dunes behind the forbidden zone, ate five kinds of fish, played cards, sat in the hot tub and wondered how my family can conceivably continue to do this year after year for nearly twenty years without getting bored and tired. Perhaps it won’t be until the fifty-fourth year that they finally decide to use that week to take a vacation from the vacation. It’s a separate life with it’s own problems and it’s own stupid hang-ups that sits and waits year after year for it’s week. Meanwhile, I guarantee that I will go back to Europe within the next twelve months. Man wow kids sure are different from their parents whoao generations sure don’t understand each other

I saw a plane fly by out of the corner of my eye just now and wondered how a lightning bug could fly so straight.

Umm what else. I saw VxBx in NxBx after playing a show in the backyard of an indian restaurant. Both parts of that day were amazing. Blaine bought us ice cream at the end of it and I got vertigo while we walked out onto a railroad bridge to eat it.

Okay I quit I am going to bed, fucking email me if you want an actual update, blogs are retarded, who is this even for anyway?