so, my show review- fight fight fight (aka jack burton (aka jack burton aka)) played a great 5 minute set. handsome matt smith verified his former boy status by stomping around in an unprecedented manner, and giving it his all all the way. bad personalities played all their hits- they wicked rule. terribles made me proud, and played “pet sematary” to boot, with matt zacharino (sp?) filling in for mike leslie on the bassotar. wind up bird played admonition-esque guitar delay non-improv with trombone and pedal steel. cancer conspiracy pulled out some jams and arab on radar was unpleasant. but that’s their shtick, right? it made me want to leave, so i did. i liked them when i saw them before, because i was far away. up close, it’s like watching a circle jerk and being despised. and if that expresses your worldview, well, i’m sorry. if it doesn’t, you’re wasting your time. after the show was a great dance party at which yonni was the king of the night, first by creating a rad two-part mix tape (america under attack and america strikes back), and then by dancing like nobody’s dirty business, and then by telling off some lame crasher.

sunday i met not my biggest fan (that would be nicholas reville, who i’ve clearly met), but definitely a big fan indeed, who bought (or possibly stole) me a very nice greeting card, in addition to grabbing onto my arm and not letting go for a very long but not unpleasant time. hi lizzie. i can’t marry you- it’s like i always say- i’m married to the sea.

tonight i’m riding my bike to the home for wayward boys in fitchburg. after toying with the idea of halloweening as pleasure princible-era gary numan, i decided, after purchasing a double-breasted suit, that without altering it (for which i have neither the time nor ability right now) i look too much like a yuppie. so i have a back-up (floating baby). i warn you- once i properly fit this gary numan suit, and apply gary numan eyeliner, i will be irresistable. you may try- you will fail. we’ll laugh about it later.

oh yeah i almost forgot- the terribles, the bad personalities, fight fight fight, arab on radar, the cancer conspiracy, and the wind-up bird are playing at clark in the grind tnight. it’s 18+ (boo) and $5 for non-students.

i’ve been mooching off the college for the past three days. i don’t feel bad about it really, just like a bit of a loser. also i could use a change of clothes. i guess maybe i should mention that i don’t go to college, but i have lots of friends here. last night i was unable to get that ride, and instead caught the freaks & frankenstien double feature at the student cinema. some don’t like freaks, but i do. they may have gotten the short end of the stick w/r/t limb number & size, but they refuse to take shit from even the strongest man. hell, even the guy with no arms and legs will crawl through the mud with a dagger in his teeth when the time comes. frankenstien was great too. oddly enough i had nver seen it. colin clive plays the mad doctor with a feverish intensity and defines mad scientists for years to come. what surprsed me was that his hunchbacked assistant was named fritz, not igor. who was igor? where did this name come from?

i was just reading over the previous entry and it struck me- you know how horrible girls have those shirts that say “trash” or “princess” or “bitch”? why don’t guys have shirts that say “idiot” or “snob” or “complete shitheel”? i guess there are a bunch of pretty obvious answers. this and more on the topic of mind v. body when “horrible modern conundrums” returns!

ok! so this is jacob again! i have returned and am alive! i returned on monday morning, and as many of you regular readers know, i am jobless repeat jobless, so i had a bit of a time figuring out how to do updates here (i’m working out the communal isp sitch at my house) but it’ll get ironed, john, so don’t worry about it.

this first week of being jobless is going great. not spending lots of money, not sleeping too much, not watching movies or playing video games. these, i am to understand, are the tricks. last night i saw ghost world (good, but i’d rather you read the comics), then we had a very successful book club run (book club is my bike gang), then this morning i rocked some cafeteria breakfast at the college, got kicked out of salvatin army, and played seven (7) games of monster bash pinball. and all this before 11:30! see how important early to rise is? now watch me forget it.

oh, man, i saw the lamest thing at the movie last ngiht. there was a show
going on in the lobby, which wasn’t lame although it was kind of a bad
idea becasue i could hear the band throughout the movie, and the guy
putting on the show was lloyd the creepy all-ages profiteer. i asked a kid
(carrying those three “diner-style” danelectro pedals & a special
danelectro effects board to plug them into (wtf?)) what kind of music it
was to be and he said “punk/emo”, which is lame but come on, you gotta
start somewhere. incidentally i like some bands this kid likes i’m sure
but the reputable emo bands say “melodic hardcore” or just “pop music”. anyway the lamest thing was when all these girls came in carrying guitars and mic stands. i said “i really hope that’s the band and not the girlfriends of the band”, but i spoke too soon because girl one turns around with a tight-t w/ sparkly letters reading “rockstar’s girlfriend”. creezus! way to settle! incidentally jane speed is playing tonight with erase errata at mass art (or ass mart, as handsome matt says, cutting through it all as he occasionally does) at 9pm and who’s driving me?

Kind of busy at work, sort of overwhelmed by disorganization and office
politics. So bad.

The waterfront by my office is largely reused
industrial warehouse-type spaces (think worcester, but dense). A lot of
people work there so there’s a few random restaurants and gentleman’s
clubs in odd corners. Tiffiniy and I were walking around there today and
ended up at a great lunch cafe tucked away. We got falaffel and fried
eggplant plus hummous and salad and other good shit. The guy at the
counter (owner operator type) conveyed this, “I’m going to make really
really good food by hand and I don’t care if anyone comes and eats
it” type attitude which is strange but awesome.

I want to
recommend that newcomers to this page spend some serious time checking out
the photobook
which I love dearly and is back up and running, as well as the other links
on the upper right corner of this page (I keep telling jake to make them
more prominent).

I’ve been
reconnecting with Arts and Letters
Daily so here’s another href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/books/A12789-2001Oct18.html">article
that I highly recommend. It’s got me thinking that some of the lifestlye
and anti-development issues that the environmental movement has raised
(kudos, Collective a Go-Go) might be worth advocating more vocally on
their own merits rather than on environmental grounds. Not that I
necessarily accept the findings of this book, but I am a scientist at
heart– plus, why waste our time?

New href="http://www.fujichia.com/tour.html">tour updates from
jake,
possibly his last. I expect control of this page to be peacefully
wrestled from me soon.

work
yesterday was a bitch. tiffiniy and i were up late writing a grant request
for $35,000 to fund the anti-sweatshop work here and then scrambling
yesterday to get it in on time. i really hope we get it, but these things
are tough.
Check out this href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/web2524/zizek2524.html">article
about Sept 11 stuff– Slavoj Zizek back at ya.

Sat Oct 20 18:48:05
2001:
Tonight Tiffiniy and I are going to see Joe Zarrow(from
Brown)’s New York acting premier in the play ‘How To Be A Black Man in
America’ which the hyperbolic BKrugs describes as ‘the worst thing I’ve
ever seen’ (the play, not Joe’s performance, of course). Among Joe’s
claims to fame is that his father is self-proclaimed href="http://mmexandra.tripod.com/wamu.htm">‘America’s Funniest Office
Products Dealer’, a designation that proves itself true through it’s
mere statement. Also he has t-shirts to back it up.

Thu Oct 18
12:29:17 2001:
tiffiniy and I met up with aross last night to
experience href="http://www.superdrag.com">Superdrag. the show was
really good and afterwards I bought a sticker from the drummer, who failed
to convince me to buy a tshirt. we warmed ourselves in the cold with this
fall’s official beverage — warm apple cider and southern comfort. so
good.

this morning a 52 year old woman (who looks 70) and her 35
year old son came in to the office. they were kicked out of the single
room they had been staying in and are living on the street. she’s in
methadone treatment, he lost his job and can’t get unemployment. it
gotreally cold last night and i don’t think they can keep sleeping outside
but they don’t want to go to the shelters because it’s violent and they
would have to be seperated. i sent him to try to get href="http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/mac/html/social.html#foodstamps">emergency
food stamps, but they’re going to have to decide about the shelter
when
they come back unless they can find a room for $200 a month which is
all welfare will pay her to live (he probably can’t get anything) and
which is basically impossible to find. this sucks.

Tue Oct 16
10:40:04 2001:
Last night my friend Kris Rutman came to hang out in
Sunset Park after he finished rehearsing for his play, The Outsiders,
which is touring high schools around the country beginning next week (with
a scheduled stop at an unknown location in Worcester). We got some
mexican food and walked around down by the industrial waterfront
area. There are huge factory/warehouse buildings that are filling up with
sweatshops (hence my job). We climbed up some fire escapes to peer in, a
lot of the shops were still open at 11pm.

Check out these href="http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~ajross/shanghai/shanghai.html">HOT
NEW PICS FROM CHINA of me and tiffiniy chilling with adam ross in
shanghai. big props to adam for naming 2 of them ‘hey, let’s get a
drink’. in the first of these we are seen playing drinking games with
waitresses at an overstaffed bar. also note that we really did eat the
money that’s in our mouths in the next picture and that in the ‘woah’
picture we’re standing at the edge of a 40 foot drop. See the href="http://www.fujichia.com/npr.html">first entry in my rarely
updated china log for more narrative of the evening, which can be
cross-checked against the photographic evidence for accuracy.

Mon
Oct 15 10:09:33 2001:
more tour updates from
jake.

yesterday my dad was in new
york with his wife and the kids, they came on saturday to see the lion
king musical which is supposed to be pretty good, despite several strikes
against it – muscial theater, disney, broadway. we had brunch sunday
morning in a brisk outdoor setting. afterwards, i went with dmyshivs to
her painting studio at hunter college where she’s getting her master’s in
fine arts. her studio has four essential elements, presented in car-talk
numbering:
a. acrylic paint
2. sheet metal
d. madonna cds

IIII. audobon field guide to mushrooms.
the last is key because
her new project is to make fungus-like growths that will start small and
expand over surfaces like walls. she was originally thinking about
infecting the outside of buildings with this and seeing how far she could
take it, which i wholeheartedly support. so far she’s made 2 clay studies,
one that looks like href="http://www.evergreen.edu/user/library/tesce/mushroom/mtsm/25.jpg">this
and one that looks like href="http://www.dwabrams.com/today/images/apr/320_bracket.fungus.little.jpg">this. They’re
cool. The big debate is what kinds of materials and surfaces will look
creepy enough, will be mass reproducable, and will last long enough
(esp. outside).

hey jackass, keep
your tour updates on your own page, this is my town for now.

apologies to readers, but not to jake, for slow updating– this has been a
hectic week of work and stuff. things around the office are good in the
sense that i get to do whatever i want (voter registration, childhood
obesity, housing, wtc relief for undocumented immigrants, etc) and bad
that there’s ridiculous inter-office politics that i’m thrown right into
the middle of.

tiffiniy and i have been running a mini freedom of
speech campaign to try to combat all the media censorship of peace
protests and self censorship of people questioning what’s going on. i
can’t even really say that i disagree strongly with what the goverment is
doing right now, but we also aren’t hearing the full story and anytime the
white house is calling tv stations to tell them what to say we’re in
trouble. so far we’ve made three signs (“this space is for freedom of
speech”, “defending democracy=encouraging debate”, and “freedom of
speech: dead or alive?”), and are planning a sticker campaign (american
flag with “freedom of speech” overlaid in multiple languages).

i’ve been putting fujichia stickers up in NYC, anyone reading this because
they saw one? email me.

i’ve
still yet to see a lot of my friends who live in far away corners of new
york city, it’s bizarre that we can be so “close” but not really close at
all. it takes an hour to get to most of manhattan– that sucks. i’m so
glad to be in brooklyn, but people we’ve got to consolidate! my fantasy of
starting a housing co-op in brooklyn has been stalled but i’m going to
keep working on it. the major stumbling block is that houses here cost at
least three times what they would in worcester. boo.

mike
bell-smith who seems to add at drop the ‘bell’ in his name at random, has
an internet only electronic band with worcester’s own willy ‘big shakes’
schachterle called, “things are looking up for mike and will”. one of them
will make a track and then email it to the other who will add another
track and email it back, and so on. mike or will, if you have an mp3s
online somewhere let me know and i’ll link to it on the left. jake and i
have entered into contract negotiations to sign the band, but we’re at an
impasse over rights to the cell-phone ring tones.

i’m on my way
out the door to a party ‘not really a party’ at dmyshivs, a worcester
raised painter friend whose loved by all and lives nearby. her main steez
is pouring sheets of paint, peeling them up, hole punching them and then
gluing the hole punches one by one to a huge piece of metal. unBELIEValby
painstaking but super awesome when finished.

Sat Oct 13 18:00:42
2001:
nickshea, you sure are doing a lousy job on updating my
page. pick it up or i will hand it off to kim wetzell motherfucker. i am
reporting to you from gainesville FLA, where the fiesel boys are playing
with army of ponch tonight. already i ran into one gainesville pal, drew,
with whom i drank strawbeery floats in worcester not three weeks
ago. unfortunately he works at a tempting record store, so i might lose
some more money (i already blew 30 large in greeneville). let’s
see… last ngith we were in daytona beach, where there was no show. we
slept in the van and woke up and put our feet in the ocean. it was
nice. daytona beach has a lot of t-shirt shops, minigolf, and strip
clubs. “all good harmless fun” i half-tried to fake-convince andy
wagner. night before we were in myrtle beach, where we planned to have no
show, but andy pulled it off and scraped together a show at a local bar
having an all-ages night. fiesel was asked to turn down (a no-no) and then
later the soundguy (zeus was his name) was super-apologetic. and, i should
mention, fairly drunk (he had been double fisting it all night). it was
good times. jesse is getting lots of stuff on tape, whcih i can work into
my fiesel remix album.

this is the halfway point of the tour. i am
homesick for the people of home. i am homesick for the peripheral people
of home, who i only see infrequently. we have been listening to black
sabbath “paranoid” in the van and i really like it.

Wed Oct 10
19:14:41 2001:
long day at work, i’m still here at 7:07.

href="http://www.fujichia.com/tour.html">new updates from jake on
tour!

last night i rocked it to swarthmore with tiffiniy and naomi
to see the fiesel and adam and jay/some dude that’s not tim show which was
a long trip but really fun. jake is making money from zines and
characatures and tiffiniy bought one of each. fiesel totally rocked as is
their custom despite being pestered to turn down and adam wagner let lose
too. jay started off the show but we missed the beggining of his set, the
end was introspective and spacey which sounds crappy but was very
cool. not much sleep last night. i gotta get out of here…

Tue
Oct 9 11:23:04 2001:
I almost forgot- All units should report to
Swarthmore College outside Philidelphia for the Fiesel and Jay/Tim show
TONIGHT!

Also, sorry for the poor formatting and typos below, I’m
still getting the hang of this thing.

OK Folks, my first day on the job as guest editor. This follows my first
day on my actual job which was last wednesday. I just moved to Brooklyn,
NY and I’m working at the href="http://www.sunsetparkredhookldc.org">Sunset
Park Red Hook LDC
doing (anti) sweatshop stuff and some environmental and general community
development stuff. For now I’m staying with the very same Tiffiniy Cheng
that I traveled all over
China with this summer who lives just two blocks from work. She got href="http://images.google.com/images?num=20&hl=en&q=holmes">HOlmes
this job over the summer and then got it for me when he went to
Italy.

I’m still deciding whether I should try to immitate Jake to
provide a gentle transition for loyal readers or whether my own witty
repartee will provide a refreshing change. I’m leaning towards a little
from column a. and a little from column b.

There’s a store up the
street called “Craft and Bridal Supplies”, I’m
considering starting a
minimalist rock synth by the same name.

I’ve been searching for
people I know on the new href="http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en">google image search– it’s
great because if you find a picture of the person you know it’s exciting
and if not you usually find people with the same name which is funny or
just a bunch of pictures that are somehow associated with your friend. It
is also quickly becoming my default for links off this page. Definitely
try it (highly recommended: “Jeremy Bruce”, “aross”, “David Moore”, “Naomi
Fox”, my name is “Nicholas Reville” if you’re curious, and hey, give
yourself a shot, buddy). Post your favorite searches to the guestbook,
PLEASE. Conceptual art hipsters will soon be making portraits of people
based on collages of this stuff so jump on the bandwagon pronto.

Crap, I still need to figure out how to archive last week’s entries. Jake
told me but in my other email. Speaking of which, for confidential
contact, my email is: npr at fujichia dot com — what’s yours,
sucker? For all other contact — guestbook, guestbook, href="http://pluto.he.net/cgi-bin/suid/~fujichia/guestbook.cgi">guestbook.

oh, one more thing before i pass the baton- there’s a big dictionary here at work that i walk by all the time (it’s the kind whose cover cannot be shut). i routinely check the first and last words and it’s usually ominous (i can’t think of examples). today the first word is “exhale”. that’s a good sign.