so the arts district festival thing was actually pretty ok and i had a
good time. i saw all the DC-FIY kids,
and phil macnamara as a clown made me a balloon guitar, and i saw a mess
of great local painters (whose work i had never seen before). i made a
special “art is shit” button but no one really said anything except nicky
revs. my defense: i got nothing against shit. there was a rock stage
(which was pretty boring, despite seeing my favorite ex-dimwit (that being
the gremlin-voiced 2nd guitarist)’s new band) and a poetry / synthesizer
stage (an odd combo to be sure but who cares) and a stage in front af
santiago’s that had some sort of speed latin band (i don’t know exactly
what the style of music was and i don’t want to mis-label it– it was fast
and had one of those rectangular tex-mex concertinas and the singer gave
great eyes to everyone). afterwards me and little andrew made fried
zucchini and watched the new spiderman movie. my review: i like the idea
“spiderman” and the execution was decent. j jonah jameson was spot-on and
george jones as uncle ben was a great choice. the latex costumes were
busted and with the mouthlessness of the masks and the fight-scene banter
(and willem dafoe’s atrocious green goblin voice) conspired to remind me
of the mighty morphin’ power rangers (not like campiness is so bad, just
why couldn’t they err on the side of the old campy spiderman
effects?). also the cgi stuff looked like crap for days, the ridiculous
post-production “new yorkers / america united” insertions were, well,
ridiculous, and a single homophobic remark by peter parker (to macho man
randy savage, not like it makes any difference) spoils toby maguire as a
lovable nerd. but really, these are petty things– people are living and
dying while i rewind videocassettes.

to last week’s lists mike leslie adds “vincent van halen”, “knick knack”, and “mish mash”. i add “ping pong”, “flim flam”, and “hip hop”, but abstain from “flip flop”.

“My art is for those that take the lighter side of life. Good hearts
that like to watch sunrises and sunsets and look at the stars in the heavens and dream. Thank you for looking. Hang loose and be cool.”

my three point plan for selling art on ebay:
1. shit talking. “unlike SOME artists, i use REAL PAINT.”
2. those words that don’t mean anything. “mixed media”, “outsider art”, “frameable”.
3. niche markets. wonder woman walking a greyhound. wonder woman walking a
weimerammer (sp?). wonder woman walking a lhasa apso. batman playing the bass clarinet. silver wind-surfer. my question to you: do you know someone who plays bass? i bet they’d like a painting on REAL POSTERBOARD showing peter parker’s spidey sense going off as he plays bass in a high school rock combo! and you reply: by a WORLD REKNOWNED ARTIST? are you fucking insane? you must be if you need to ask because the answer is clearly yes! then i’m like, whoa, ok! let’s talk!

also, am i helping or hurting myself if i use a whisical art name? you know what i mean– something derivative, like koreanardo, or salvador
wally, or my number one pick right now, helena ptolemaic.
.

instead of going to the harvest fest me and my mom drive out to the decordova museum. the exhibit right now is all painters from boston, and we chanced upon a talk being held by one of them. her paintings were crummy and she was a dubious figure (very “me and my friends were so crazy in [high school/the boston art scene]!”). more or less a quote: “we used to just hang out all the time! we shared a studio and whenever we weren’t painting we were just in hysterics! we used to hang out in this one totally seedy bar and just cry into out beer, or in my case, wine, about how painting was dead in boston. it was really a gift.” (nb: everything was “a gift” to this woman). old ladies in the audince were for-real old ladies (or as mike leslie would say, they were old ladies for days). anyway i busied myself making a list in my head of two-word phrases such that the second part was a one or two letter change from the first, and neither part was a word independantly. my goal was to get ten before leaving, and i got 14: hodge podge, hurly burly, helter skelter, willy nilly, artsy fartsy, higglety pigglety, fiddle faddle, roly poly, jibber jabber, namby pamby, tutti fruitti, hoity toity, itsy bitsy, and rinky-dink. i cannot corroborate jibber jabber, nor could i remember for certain whether looking up “willy nilly” in a latin dictionary and finding “volens nolens” was a dream or an actual occurance.

pizza on the way home (making two pizza nights in a row) and it’s only now that i realize my pizza party physics (basically, that a person only really has one instance of eating pizza and revisits that instance whenever applicable) is largely a restatement of borges’ “new refutation of time”. jacob berendes, jorge luis borges– are they great minds or are they bargain hunters? today we’re exploring “thinking alike” on the …dichotomy… connection. 1 800 423 DICHOTOMY.

today is the anniversary of the bombing of sacco and vanzetti’s judge’s house. if memory serves me (and to be frank it rarely does) he and his wife walked away from the incident, having escaped the blast entirely somehow while tucked away in bed. tomorrow is the harvest fest at in the ymca parking lot, put together by my pal jonah, the fuckin’ worcester community gardens coordinator. day after is the stART on the street arts festival of sorts on main south, which all right-thinking people should have mixed feelings toward and will elaborate later when not celebrating mikey’s birthday (happy birthday mikey!).

fujichia– we will walk at a leisurely pace

oh yeah, i added a live review of the as220 show to the p.r.e.s.s. page. so that was one more thing i did this summer.

ok, so all the junk i’ve been reading lately points to (read: explicitly states) time as a construct that doesn’t “happen”, but just “is”; that time as we experience it (as a present which destroys the past and is awaiting destruction by the future, unknowable and vast) is a quirk of consciousness. so is it irrational to think that something can be done about how time seems (to me) to be speeding up? also, is it irrational to think that i’m the one to do that something which can be done? anyway i say no (to both counts), but where to start?

i realize i’m writing this at 3:30 but at 4:00 at holy corss colelge howard zinn is speaking about the impending war with iraq.

fujichia.com– the web’s last bastion of flashless splash pages.

ok so saturday there was another puppet show, this time at the wag, then a
fun party with some good dancing and numerous pig piles, at which i drank
lemonade. sunday i went into providence for the tail end of the
recycle-a-bike festival, which was basically a party at julian’s on
broadway, with an art bike auction, plus bands and free food. the bikes
there were incredible. sue ellen built an adult-sized chopper using an
ingenious three-fork method i’m going to copy, href="http://www.circleacycles.com">chris crime fixed up his vicious
cycle, and dan (i think) made a Super Trick Cycle with a unicycle rear
wheel and a regular front, and both wheels can turn, making riding, well,
tricky. also, brian chapman built a brilliant two-speeder in which
pedalling forwards gets you one speed, and pedalling backwards, by virtue
of having two freewheels and a chain that flips like a moebius strip, gets
you another (still going forwards. i haven’t met the man really and i
mention his name only so that i make can use of the term “ href="http://www.ewirezine.com/riding/brianchapman/">king of
flatland” (and so i can say “no, not that flatland.”). anyway i really want to try and make one of those, too.

man, google has this new news search feature that’s great! just testing it out i found this little thing about mayonnaise, then this really good article about the indian monkey man and the new indian mass-hysteria object, the muhnuchwa, or “face-scratcher”, which served in part to remind me how much i like ball lightning (website). huh, it’s 3:00 already.

oh yeah, i updated the projects page.

oh yeah, my mom and i are teaming up to make special limited-edition fujichia mittens. the mittens will be polar fleece (that space fabric that’s ideal for mittens and is made of soda bottles) and will have silk screened patches sewn on tastefully. so any good suggestions for a winter-related knuckle tattoo pair? so far all i got is “fuck school / snow day!”. bear in mind that since it’s to be on mittens you’re not bound to the knuckle tattoo four letter precept.

i’ve been writing for two hours now and like syd barrett it’s coming down all wrong. case in point.

i’ve been having great dreams that are exactly like nightmares but everything is smooth sailing and besides i’m just goofing around anyway.

“no man can set foot in the same river twice” never gets me when i wake up but around 2 o’clock or so wham! like a ton of bricks.

my fort’s going good, we had a puppet show at my house that went alright, there’s parties this weekend (and another puppet show, and a parade) and i’m getting the parts i need for my bike, #1 is going to get me a bunch of spirulina and i got hot chocolate to drink now too and i’m making headway with a bunch of books. tonight, i went walking in the woods at midnight (full moon) and i’m gearing up to call my sister (tomorrow) and say i’m sorry i haven’t called her in so long. so all these things are pretty good.

link: maasai and agents of change.