dear handsome matt- i realize i have been grappling these past few days with a fear that while i am away from home my records may get damaged. i mean, even though i paid $2 each, tops, for 90% of them, i really consider many of them to be priceless. should my copy of, say, florence foster jenkins “the glory (????) of the human voice” get damaged, i would really think i would be inconsolable. this sucks right? anyway, i know you are in my boat, and i comiserate with you. oh, to be like cool breeze- he is dedicated to getting rid of as many physical possessions as possible, and is learning to play his favorite songs on the guitar, so that he can get rid of his whole record collection, and stereo. creezus, what a macher!
leave for portland tomorrow and probably back to worcester the day after that, so if anyone wants to write letters so that i can arrive home to find a big stack of letters waiting for me, you just barely have time. in other news spring fever and all characteristic dreaminesses and associated anxieties is in 70% full swing.
the kids are on school break up here so it’s constant good times. today we
tie-dyed (tied-dye?) with the church youth group, ate candy (and later,
spaghetti) and drew a lot of great pictures. i think the youngest, kc, 8,
is really going to go ahead with drawing caricatures in the
jake-on-tour-with-
href="http://www.fujichia.com/tour.html">fiesel fashion, which
fashion involves three primary points that are: 1). get paid 2). ask people what their hobbies are and 3). don’t pay too much attention to any actual physical likeness (and if neccessary draw the sitter’s spirit animal). my caricature was the back of my head staring at a monitor with a word balloon saying “i am a computer nerd”. we also drew great (really incredible) jam comiques. “jam comique” is a term trademarked by meant to describe a comic drawn between multiple people where you trade off panels. the comics me and the smith kids drew are anti-authoritarian, scatalogical, genius, and there’s even a veiled reference to the secret wars, so dan and jason, i hope you guys won’t sue me. i’m sure lots of these drawings will make it into the next interview so keep watching the skies. i don’t know exactly what tomorrow holds, but i’m told it will involve candlepin bowling and pizza so woo hoo.
oh yeah, is it really farenheit 90 [degrees] in worcester? to quote mike leslie, damn, sun!
ok so, uh… thursday was a do of sorts at the ryder boys’ house with lots of people and a decent level of frivolity, friday a do of sorts at my house for to celebrate a job quit, with not a lot of people but a level of frivolity threatening to pass mere horseplay into madness. keg stands, bon fires, wrasslin’, bmx bike jumps, zurburts, live band and so forth. saturday me, drove waaaaaaaay out to for the show. i was a little let down, as they struck me as more or less a jam band, but featuring kid koala, who is an exceptional turntablist. the drive (we all agreed) was made well worth it by one phenominal “drunk trumpet” routine. talk with the kid after the show was nice too; he remembered me, even noting that i got my haircut, and he says he played a song of mine on a cbc radio show he did (he hails from montreal, city of windy lights). anther drive and some late nite hellenic dinering with kev & his goonie pal bears the following fruit– table dive french fries, overheard conversation (drunk dudes conversing with wives who are on celly speakerphone about classic Bruin’s penis sizes), half-assed plans to start a “like naked city but way more brutal” band (kd: “with a sticker on the cd: ‘if you like naked city… FUCK YOU!’.”), hot chocolate, grilled muffin (aside to cool breezio: the muffin grilled on the diner grill really is the way to go!). drive home and we run out of gas in the middle of nowhere at 4:30. no one could have been more let down than kevin and i when an apres-rave landrover pulls up, we call triple-a and they come in 4 minutes. come on! we wanted to walk until dawn on the side of the road! (aside to holmes: i’m with you when you say that any establishment explicitly set up for raves is total shit, so i laughed to myself the superiority laugh when the kids asked if we were coming from the asylum (such a place), but now, thinking about it, i laugh again, because they asked two weirdos in the middle of the night on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere if they were “coming from the asylum”! never before did i wish i had a hook for a hand!).
now i’m in scenic portland ME with my marvelous . tomorrow we drive up to presque isle, 5 hours from here (which is 4 hours from worcester), to hoist a few (good times) with cousins both little and large. about the drive it’s a good thing i have copius mix tapes (secretly jess- yours made the cut– gentleman jeff schaefer, yours did not). about the hoisting they don’t call me jungle jim for nothing. back in a week and call the participation line if you haven’t already (508.792.2579). if i get home and that red light isn’t blinking i’ll… i’ll… oh, i don’t know what i’ll do!
i guess i didn’t really do so much but it feels like i
did. probably because it’s gorgeous out, combined with i
finally left the house. in actual fact, yesterday i had one task (go to
the post office), and i definitely failed that one. but i did go to the
library, and i had a nice dinner, and i spent time with friends… it was
pretty
alright. i picked up the new weekly world news, which is, oddly, the
swimsuit issue, and it’s pretty awesome– one, it’s boys and girls, which
is nice, two, it’s totally, typically bizarre (exorcism scene, graveside
bikini, old west shootout &tc.). weekly world news is most likely the world’s most consistantly excellent newsweekly. oh yeah, me and handsome matt smith are making plans to start up a drug-free stoner band called ‘caterpillar’. i want to play drums. i am in the midst of convincing handsome matt that i cannot really play drums in a conventional sense, but that it’ll be alright, as long as we play s… l… o… w…. tim, we need a third and i counted you in but it doesn’t have to be part of our shtick that we all look alike, even tough we do, kind of.
there’s a minifest at clark– blood feast (the movie, not the actual feast) tonight, 2000 maniacs tomorrow, both at 10pm in jefferson 218 for free dollars. more movie news from the wogan list: “‘Life and Debt’,
a powerful film offering ‘the clearest analysis of
globalization and its negative effects ever seen on a
movie or television screen’ (New York Times), at the Bijou Cinema (in the
Worcester Common Outlets) on Tuesday, April 16 at
6:30pm! The film focuses on the impact of International
Monetary Fund and World Bank policies on the island
nation of Jamaica and includes a rousing reggae
soundtrack and narration from the novelist Jamaica
Kincaid.” forgive me for saying but you’d be a chump not to go.
Three jolly sailors from Bladon-on-Tyne
All went to sea in a :
Since all of the sea was inside of the hull
They all found the voyage exceedingly dull.
tonight (monday night, tuesday morning) me and hot chocolate (that’s danny action for all you square heads) watched “rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead”, basically one of my favorite movies. it’s a story set within the story of hamlet, starring two slapsticky minor characters. i enjoy hamlet in part because i enjoy things that fold in on themselves; but if hamlet is a napkin, R&GAD is a napkin at a chinese restaurant. it’s come to my attention and it should come as no surprise to anyone, that i really really enjoy things that have to do with self reference and strange loops and funny stuff. the link above has to do with self reference of a sort, but i don’t know if topography is really my avenue of expertise. which is to say, i do know if topography is my area of expertise (matt coe translates jacob language: “i don’t know about [x]” = “[x] (stinks/is false)”).
i know i’ve said this before, and probably about a hundred times, but for more on funny folding see hofstadter’s “gödel escher bach: eternal golden braid”. a great read with lots of puzzles and stories, generally speaking, about self reference, but specifically addressing gödel’s incompleteness theorem which (in an exceedingly clever way) states (in a nutshell) that “no system for proving/expressing truths will ever be complete because nary a one will be able to prove this statement true.”. score one for epimenides!
second aside in a week specifically addressed to nicholas reville:
nick- i put on my list of things you don’t want to hear me talk about the somewhat farsical but ultimately solid gold “existance of medieval werewolves” but today i realized i should probably replace it with the mildly more for-real and significantly (there i go again) more substantial ““. i guess my question is, do all lists of things have to be ten items long? is ten so holy a number? is eleven so nonholy a number?
scope out . true, it’s the hindside of a fraction of my crew, but we’re pretty characteristic i’d say- my man hot chocolate rocking the octopus stencil shirt, melissa lake giving no quarter, me standing arms akimbo with fresh haircut, dan wars a vision in red gingham no doubt harrassing some poor sap, jenine bressler doing for stripes what i did for plaid in kindergarden (that is to say, rockin’ it). also note calling-card golden anniversary booty chest. key.
sunday morning brunch with peter and chas at the caf made me a little
sick. part of the problem is that i have yet to work out a good pancakes
and homefries on one plate scenario in which syrup doesn’t go everywhere
but everywhere. another part of the problem is that i have yet to work out
a scenario in which i don’t prepare hot chocolate for myself, forget about
it all through the meal, then gulp it down all at once when it hits
lukewarm. some leisurely recovery bike riding, then i spent a good amount
of time at the art museum. mostly, i was in the gorgeous italian room,
where the gold is gold and the people are green for some reason
(oxidation?). ran through the dutch/english room, because let’s face it,
those people (in the paintings) are u-g-l-y: ugly. noted with no small
horror that for some reason they have erected a wall with locking door
mechanism in between the two rooms of the 20th century american wing
(previous to today’s excursion my favorite area of the museum). please
bear in mind my delerious premontion of ages ago that one day ellsworth
kelley’s “orange on white” would escape it’s canvassy bounds into the
third dimension. admit it– it’s spooky. some dilly dallying in the pre
columbian room (which was tight), a special excursion to that huge spanish
princess
in the mesmerizing hugo ball dress (sick), and access denied to the
enourmous glass-eyed buddha head, on account of some grade 5
performance in the main hall, with grade 5 sized tuxedos even, and
about which i have no real basis for complaint.
man- j jonah jamie j buckmaster got me a nice hardcover sketchpad from the
mass art illustration department and i’m so into it. i know that it’s a
sketchbook, and it’s for sketches, but i must say it’s really coming along
nicely.
hey, did anyone else read that article in friday’s globe about the
physicist
working on a time travel device? man, i’ve got so many problems with that article, i’m not even going to go into it. anyway, nick reville doesn’t want to hear that shit. nick- i wrote an essay for the new interview with a frankenstein about the top ten things you don’t want to hear me talk about. but it’s good and it’s written in a semi-respectful tone and what more do you want from me? oh yeah, and thanks for getting a family membership to the art museum and trickling down one of the passes. and way to download my i.p. address off the net and reverse backdoor into my mainframe to put that enron picture up, you hacktivist.
oh yeah, why does no one believe that putting smashed-up candy in beer is a great idea? me and cool breeze split a golden adversary with sweet tarts and chocolate in it and to onlookers it was as though we had two heads (apiece). seriously- the only thing that doesn’t benefit from the addition of smashed-up candy is an inexhaustible pile of non-smashed-up candy. or a pile of smashed-up fake candy made of glass / poison. or a carpet.
tonight (saturday) pre-emptive birthday party for glasses brigade, who turns [negligible number] old this coming thursday. man, the more i see the brigade kids… well, come on, i’ve always liked those kids a wicked lot. let’s say that hanging out with the brigade kids (and others) was a perfect antidote to the blasé-blasés what come with a) not leaving the house all day, b) only eating two big pancakes all day, and c) sitting around listening to the imagine album (but not “imagine”).
in answer to some questions- yes, the participation line is still ongoing, so if you haven’t checked it out, do it. yes, sometimes the line is busy, sometimes for a long time, but that’s no excuse.
