gotta be quick. moving forwards from last wednesday to sunday:
tin tin
person in a union suit,
some manner of tundra pack animal

a hand giving “the finger” (i was particularly upset) and
a pipe. ok ok, idle hands do the devil’s work but they aren’t exclusive to the activity nor it to they.

i got a record needle in the mail so today all day i communed with my records. i haven’t had a functioning record player in what might be two years now, and today’s massive analog power charge really underlined how much i’ve been missing it. today, while reorganizing (the records have been moved several times since the previous needle shit the bed) i listened to two glenn gould bach albums (turn it up and mumble along!), sun ra and the solar-myth arkestra (a spanish pressing- the sleeve is 1/4″ smaller than most sleeves, making extraction of the record difficult), kites (amazing record with my favorite album title ever- “royal paint with the metallic gardener from the united states of america helped into an open field by women and children”) and a mess of other stuff. the first record? after no deliberation at all, defiance of shit bastards.

two links:

the new downhill battle campaign is awesome and it’s blowing up: eyes on the screen is a p2p re-release of the 14-part civil rights documentary “eyes on the prize”. officially, the movie is bogged down in a miasma of copyright clearance (the movie contains footage from a myriad of different sources, which were licensed for a period of time that has since elapsed). new copies cannot be made, nor can it be broadcast. downhill battle is having it available for download (via blogtorrent), with the intent of organizing public screenings all over the nation on february 8th.

little andrew isn’t the only person i know who will enjoy these quicktime movies of kinetic sculpture, but he’s the one i’m pointing them out to. (via mike bell-smith).

i told cool breeze i’d send out his cds to him by friday. a cd, i might point out, that he recorded a year ago. last night i was screening the covers only to find out that the paper and my ink did not work together (?) and having spent the day doing preliminary stuff (including walking to the copy shop to make transparencies (part of the silk screening process)), i guess you could say it was a bummer. today the bummer kept rolling because i didn’t do shit and with a lot still on my mind. i started another biography– richard huelsenbeck’s “memoirs of a dada drummer” but huelsenbeck isn’t an iota as likable as rodney mullen. dada is something i am interested in, but to hear him tell it, it was just a lark perpetrated by a small cadre of nonetheless self-important jerkloafs. but isn’t that always the way?

from saturday to tuesday night we have: pretty good pyramid (but not great), molar bear, a flat banana for less embarrassing banana-in-pocket scenarios, and tonight, a really really nice llama (pictured). oh, and on an unreported day in the past week i made this neat little mr microphone. i swear i haven’t missed a single day.

i just finished ploughing through the rodney mullen autobiography that chris kane loaned me. i’ve always really liked rodney mullen, back from when i first started watching skate videos at cool breeze’s apartment, and having read the book, nothing’s changed. incredibly innovative- in addition to the flatground ollie, he invented something like 80% of all flip tricks (laying the groundwork for the street skating explosion of the 90s). possessed of an amazing amount of rigor. “lost” only one competition ever. keeps cassettes of lectures on quantum mechanics in his car in case he gets stuck in traffic. this: “i was so thankful to all the little skate rats out there who had validated [by voting rodney mullen transworld skater of the year 2001] my choice in just having fun when i skated [responding positively to a video sequence in which he does all freestyle, an unpopular style of skating that he exceled at which was way nerdier than vert and especially street]. to celebrate, i watched one of my favorite movies, ghostbusters.”. here is a fine video display of the fellow’s ample talents (i recommend turning the sound off).

past couple of nights we’ve been working on putting together my first fujichia “fun with tapes” podcast. last night we recorded a story that was a knitting-together of several choose your own adventures books. the night before we played at a most ingenious four-track round robin musical experiment (kpars, mike leslie, jamie buckmaster and myself). it’s winter and we’re holding our own. kpars and mary wilson are finishing up recording of their band from last summer and i’m reading the rodney mullin autobiography. new news as it brews: the drops drop but the beat won’t stop.

pictured above, watches girls. from last night there’s this beard imposter, shown here having parasitically attached itself to my face.

my apologies to anyone who read yesterday’s “a peacock” as “apecock”. the typo has been fixed.

in order of their creation and ending with tonight, tuseday night, my one-a-day stuffed animals are: a chubby bunny, scrimshaw (i’ve been reading tony millionaire’s gorgeous “sock monkey” books, which in addition to being about stuffed animals contain much nautical wonder), chirst on a cross (pictured, though the picture doesn’t give it justice) a peacock, and an animal i can only call kitty lafontaine. this last one is named after a character from a mark leyner book that is cylindrical with a “synesthetic sensory apparatus… distributed evenly across the entirety of its shiny outer sheath”. it is not named after elfish beauty xtina lafontaine, but someday maybe something will be.

today i silk screened more shirts for downhill battle and had a wonderfully impulsive breakfast/lunch at the clark cafeteria, open for business once again. the past few days i’ve been thinking and drawing and talking and so on and so forth. as a group we watched marx brothers movies and discussed them greatly. [a person] says to me in private that i’ve begun to “do” groucho during shows, and i tell him not only do i find his claims unfounded and his motivations for making such claims peculiar, but that anyway this is both nothing to be ashamed of and nothing of any real meaning. as i see it, groucho, and indeed, chico and harpo as well, are not comedians to be aped (the way one might “do” rodney dangerfield) but a school of philosophy that one studies, and in studying enacts and upholds in a personal manner. do i wear a black greasepaint mustache, a red wig, or an italian accent? no. do i actively engage the world around me, remain suspicious, belive in the sanctity of a joke over personal pride or well-being, despise all authority, love my enemies, play music, delight in bedlam and hold it all together with sheer force of personality? who can call themselves a fan that doesn’t? as the famous parisian ‘68 wall said, “je suis marxiste, tendance groucho”. mike and i are getting both recently released marx brothers dvd box sets and are going to put all the movies on a single dvd to distribute for the world we know.

last night’s show was, obviously, really good. nat baldwin, jason anderson, yr humble narrator. filling the living room to a comfortable lounge level, no mics, no wires, jason even played a couple songs with the lights off. jason’s a great songwriter and a great performer with an incredibly inclusive style that i’ve written about before. nat played upright bass and sang in a beautiful haunting manner. i had three new songs written in my now-traditional style (of writing songs based on search requests to this website): “ants in my old desk”, “a good conclusion for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich”, and “japanese pen-pal girl tattoo”.

mike leslie is back from tour for a spell before he rambles off west. had a great time and no tour turmoil apparently. he returned a few days ago bearing gifts- the new scam and the new scenery (which is really really good). the new scenery is the ten year anniversary issue, and has a checklist of all the issues, which includes the one i made by cutting up old issues word-for-word and meticulously gluing them back together, then sloppily silk-screening covers and sprinkling glitter on them while the ink was wet. mike, would you believe that matt smith’s roommate asked if i had anymore? he’s a collector!

ok, so a million years ago i went to see las aeropajitas and there was this really awesome andean rocker dude wearing motorcycle boots with shiny metallic shinguards. more importantly he was wearing a bandana folded in such a way that the paisley border created two paisley horns on his forehead. this made a pretty big impression on me. a couple days a go me and kpars went to building 19 to buy underwear for yet another weird bad idea / good idea project i’m working on (no dice) and i picked up an impulse 70 cent hankercheif, light pink, of a standard paisley design. tonight i find that folding it in the andean rocker way and wearing it under a baseball hat creates not paisley horns but eyespots! like, insect-style fake-out eyespots. i was unable to find any information on the symbolism of wearing a bandana in this way, maybe it’s not a thing at all, just something this cool dude did (and now, something your humble narrator does). anyone? matt smith, mike leslie, other gang-sign afficianados? oh, i did find this other webpage about handkercheif codes, but that’s something else entirely.

pictured above is tonight’s columnar beast with diagonal striations. as for yesterday? i’m sure diligent guestbook readers don’t even need to look at the picture to guess what yesterday’s animal was.

oh! i very nearly forgot the most important part- tonight before anything i shaved my face and cut my hair. generally speaking, the more hair i have on my head the less sane i feel (although i need some up top– perhaps to “give me the edge”). additionally, nothing says “getting down to brass tacks” like shaving the face, even if one does cut onesself to ribbons as i did today with that miserable disposable blade (and is there some temporary condition which predisposes one to nicks and cuts? today and yesterday i’ve been quite literally a bloody mess).

tonight i busied myself with my silkscreening and listened to fast music loud on headphones, ate dumpstered bittersweet chocolate in large chunks, and drank mate with a funny straw (a gift from empty mountain). why “busied”? the aforementioned impact of the show last night, combined with some void-oriented ruminations from an “on-the-way” companion at the show fostered what could best be described as an all-day irascible hemi-snit. having spent the whole day skulking, i decided my best bet was to load up some poundy, messy scree on the walkman, keep the hands busy, and self-medicate some mild stimulants. now, i’m not ignoring any problems with the country in specific, humanity in general, worcester, my house, the manner in which my daily operations reflect my beliefs, or the basic cheapness of life– these are still on my mind and will be most likely for some time. i’m just putting myself in a better state to assess the situation and work things out.

ok, here’s the punchline- all things said and done, i’ll still sit down tonight and make another stuffed animal.