oh yeah, i’m playing at “may-n-kevin’s 4-eva”, (where nick and downtown dan live, in providence) on april 30th, with tiny hawks and the good good. it’s the tiny hawks cd release party, and it’s a books through bars benefit.
also, i talked to brian o made of snow over at corleone records, and hashed out plans for the release on his label of my new hit cd “foreign policy”, featuring many of the nice songs i like to sing. mike t is doing the artwork, which i’m pumped about, and it’s also nice because that’s one thing i don’t have to think about now. all i have to do is record and mix down and have the disc in his hands by may 10th at the latest. totally doable. oh, also i have to make up a press pak with bio and pictures. ha!
i went to providence the other day for adam ryder’s birthday party. i gave him one of the “bram cohen seeded my torrent” t-shirts i made for downhill battle, which we are not allowed to sell. the party was weird in that almost no one i know from providence was there, and a lot of people from worcester were. even people i had never met form worcester were there! there were a lot of art school students. heart 2 heart was there, and nick from downtown. other than that, it was all risd or worcester, i think. trish insisted i bring this huge bag of t-shirts she’s getting rid of, so i be-shirted very many people, walking up and saying “hands up!” then putting a t-shirt over their well-put-together outfit. really shlubbing everybody up. no one had any objections that couldn’t be swayed by an authoritative “it’s cool, it’s a party”. pretty fun. peter got his bike stolen, most definitely from someone at the party, so that sucks. other than that, a good, though weird time. the next day i hung out most of the day with nicole 2 heart, who had a wisdom toothache so bad that only ice cream helped (and that only a little bit). today she went and got that sonofabitch pulled for $400, and was told that the other three wisdom teeth would make their presence known in a month or two or three. well, she doesn’t have that kind of money, so i’m holding a raffle this saturday to try and offset the costs a little, if you’re going to the show and have something cool to raffle, email me and we’ll get it together.
i’m ten days behind in posting the new animals, so here goes, moving forwards in time to last night from eleven days ago: spirit of flight, a pretzel (pictured), red monster, a blue pup, some sort of bipedal creature, a fiji mermaid (based on a famous example named “jake”, something i almost ate in a peanut, a li’l devil, a grape ape (but not /the/ grape ape), and lastly, a leopard-skin predicament.
fujichia: a quiescently frozen confection
i would be remiss if i did not mention that downhill battle is “presenting” one of the movies in the aforementioned film fest, and it’s tonight, at clark university. the movie is at 6pm and it’s called “the target shoots first”. it’s about a guy working at columbia house around 1991 (the year punk broke). OK.
yesterday i went on a double date with jen (dan wars’ girlfriend), mike leslie, and dan wars. we went to al bum’s, the comic book store, and the movies. they were surprised by how shitty and expensive al bum’s had gotten– it’s sad. the guy running it is a meathead who inherited it as a family business, and it’s pretty clear he doesn’t really like music much at all, a tradgedy considering how many people would give their eyeteeth to run a record store like that. additionally he’s constantly screaming at his mother on the telephone and listening to either club anthems or sublime. it was really good when he first took over the store, when he had no idea what things were worth. now everything is priced way out of reach. for example, they had a number of ramones albums, each priced at $25, which, as dan said, is high for new york. even the weird dumb stuff is labeled “DJS- SAMPLE THIS” and priced beyond reason. oh well. still, there’s tons of 7″ and cassettes for pretty cheap.
the movie we saw was fritz lang’s “woman on the moon”, which was presented as part of the mass bay film fest, and was shown at all saint’s church with live organ accompaniment. it was phenominal. the organist had composed a special score just for tonight’s lone showing, and the organ is made integrated with the cathedral, so the pipes are all around you. afterwards i had a chance to chat a bit with festival organizer rob newton, who said that things didn’t go so smoothly across town, at the abbie hoffman movie at the WAG. evidently the landlord (who rents to the WAG and everyone in the “sprinkler factory” complex) came down and insisted that for every event at the WAG from here on, they need to rent a police detail and a fire detail (to the tune of $160 each). the reason? because he “wanted to get a higher class of artist” (as he was heard to remark). the WAG is a great community space, one that rents out their room for events of all sorts for $50 and/or a miniscule cut of the door. i’ve played there a number of times, DC-FIY books shows there as fundraisers, and i’ve been to some amazing shows. it is the only place to see a show in worcester if you are under 21. i guess the WAG, and everyone else, are tenants at will, and can be bullied around like this. rob has two more events scheduled there this week and can’t do anything except shell out the $640. it sucks- things were starting to pick up there, good stuff was happening. hell, even i was inquiring about a space there. fuck landlords, fuck yuppies,
i feel like there’s a lot of pictures like this in the world but certainly this is the best one.
sasha sent me pictures from the dirt palace installation and i made a nice little page for them. check it out.
just returned from the woods, where trends have a habit of continuing. brooks still run, animals still sleep, eyes still refocus to find themselves inside of enourmous clouds of gnats (or possibly nanobots). pornographic magazines still migrate waterlogged and shredded between clearings to underneath different rocks. the woods across from my house is an old large-items dump, so there are outcroppings of antique washing machines and car hulks rusted way thin. additionally, old glass bottles are occasionally found, sometimes with what looks to be booze or medicine or both at the bottom– the cure for modern ails to be sure.
today i got an email from venezuela, regarding the order of t-shirts: “I am professor of Teenage Apparel at University”. i love you.
yesterday i was in providence, taking down the squid installation at the dirt palace. sasha got some good pictures, i guess, so i should have those up in a couple days. other than that, my days have been hanging out with mike “the lad” leslie, slowly listening to all the to-be-listened-to noise cassettes and cdrs accumulated over the past month, drawing at the library, and plain old walking around, sometimes at night. today walking home from the bus station mike and i came across numerous tempting wet concrete scenarios and apropos of nothing i wrote “YES or OK”. tonight i ate shaved carrot salad and later, decadent peanut butter on hearty bread, all while listening (twice) to jessica rylan “private time”, which is so far my favorite tape of the accumulated lot. in worcester there’s a vegan restaurant run by some buddist sect and it used to be that when you walked in they would turn on a video of celebrity worship for this woman at the helm of it all but inbetween tapes or in lulls you could almost hear the beautiful quiet prayer music with chimes and singing coming from the kitchen. anyway “private time” is to me like an attempt at that music as it was heard, even with the noise boxes bubbling soup and frying tofu softly.
starting from last night and working backwards: aztec spirit of a warrior, bearded clam (after an idea by kc henniman), gold tooth, albino elephant (pictured), terrible baby, afterimage of a person in a black hooded sweatshirt.
last night i went to the flywheel for a show i was looking forward too for a month, going so far as to write it on my wall and then write “yow!” next to it in a splash bubble. the show was peter b, jessica rylan, hnatiw & defneg (face-off), vanessa from the schoolhouse, and others i didn’t know. i brought a lot of money and bought a lot of stuff- all the jessica rylan tapes i don’t have, a bunch of peter b’s. also i paid for mike at the show, because he drove me, and bought gas and snacks. all in all, it was as expensive as if i had taken the bus (which i was planning on doing). but i got no complaints, it was great. jessica rylan is my favorite person to see play music right now, and peter b is someone who i’ve watched from afar for a little while now, and was psyched to see in person (all mp3s on the website rule). i started to make a list of questions for each of them, interview style, but i had to stop.
oh yeah, mike l is back like a breath of some sort of air. he’ll be around for two weeks or so, then off to live in brooklyn with meredith for a month, then on tour with me and cool breeze, then around.
oh! i almost forgot to say- the cat is alive! late one night a couple weeks ago i see a stealthy figure walking up the yard and who jumps up to the busted-out barn window but felix da housecat, not, as previously surmised, dead in a ditch. i brought him inside and fed him and scratched his belly for a while and discovered his battle wounds almost healed and his belly fatter- tell-tale signs of greener pastures somewhere else. he stuck around for a night or two but now he’s gone again. it’s like i said to trish- he’s a damn animal, he’ll do whatever he wants.
ok, matt hallas, you big bully, i know that the world won’t end if i don’t make a stuffed animal every day. it’s not a compulsion, like excessive hand-washing, it’s more like i said i was going to do it every day for a year, and i just want to stick to it (having never had such rigor for anything in my life). i worry about missing a day unjustified because i feel like if i miss a day, i might as well just quit right then and there, and having to do one a day forces me into creative thought and make-do. is it a burden sometimes? yes, but it’s a preposterous burden, and even the really bad, rushed and busted ones i still really like. moreover i find it be a weird document of a weird year (as they are all weird years). incidentally i got the idea from jeremy harris, who made a really great tape called “365 days of the blues”, in which he wrote a song every day for a year then released a best-of.
ok so anyway here’s the past couple of days, starting with sunday– a cone-shaped creature inspired by noise nomads,
something furry in a bag,
my bed, with colorful dream (which, remember, was the day that spanned two sunrises), and last night, a laptop computer, as illustrated above. oh, in the back of the picture is the oscillator i built- the cd is mounted on a cd motor, underneath which, in place of the cd lens, is a photoresistor. the cd has a section of the silvery stuff scraped off so when it spins it produces a vibrato effect. boss.
