i’m in western mass for a few days to read comic books and listen to cds. i’ve been eating a lot of the saurkraut little andrew made for me, and it’s been delicious. traveling is weird and i almost never do it, but it’s a nice vacation. i know this is somewhat atrocious but here’s some thinking about money- the catalog is doing ok, and i’ve been having people mail me money where i am, not entirely sustainable but enough i think for food and a bus ticket here or there. i’ll be back in worcester this weekend to mail stuff off and print up more shirts (oh yeah, the turtle boy shirts are also back in print). believe it or not, in the last few days the ads have made me ~$5 a day, so if that holds up i’ll be sitting pretty, although i can’t collect until $100 rolls around.
ok, i realize that i talk about money a lot, but it’s also something people ask me about a lot. now back to work (eating kraut and reading comics and porch sitting in this shockingly temperate weather). i’m still reachable by email, though don’t expect lengthy replies. chris dooley, i’m looking for you.
ok, gang, i pressed up more of those “worcester paris of the eighties” t-shirts everyone’s been clamoring for. i have limited colors and sizes, so get them now while you can, i don’t know when i’ll be able to press more but i don’t think it’ll be for another few weeks. christmas shopping, gifts etc. full list of variables (and other good stuff, including new buyable stuffed animals) on the catalog buddypal and hop to it.
i slept through my alarm and now i’m not doing all the stuff i wrote on my list in time allotted. but while i’m definitely slowing, i’m also steadying, so the race-win can only be forthcoming (unless xeno’s paradox holds any water at all (it does)).
thanksgiving yesterday was pretty nice alright, seeing lots of family i don’t see too often, playing some scrabble, and most importantly, drawing a ton with my cousins the smiths, the lot of them crazy and fun and all with their own great styles, drawing and otherwise. together we drew a few jam com¨ªques, and alone i drew a ton of video game characters. the kids were all playing this one cross-title fighting game (where you could play dr. mario vs. samus, or zelda vs. jigglypuff, and so forth), and it was really fun to draw a bunch of fighting poses. i’m not fulfilling my sketchbook goal of finishing the sketchbook before it the cover falls off, but today i did some bumpersticker surgery and it looks like i’ll get through this last third before it totally shits the bed. i’ve already got a replacement sketchbook on deck, and i’m debating fixing that one to withstand typical punishment, or maybe i should just try to draw faster and less precious even than now.
mel, you’re on vacation but maybe you’re at your parent’s house reading this (and a lot of people tell me around this time “i was stuck at my parents house and read a ton of your webpage.”). well i went to visit you at work at the library when you weren’t there and a lady coming out the door said a couple times “joshua wouldn’t cuddle. joshua wouldn’t cuddle.” but then i realized she was just talking in vietnamese. and while i’m making shout-outs, hey, michael sokol, your email address bounces back and i tried to write you a letter care of your school but damn if that didn’t bounce back too. i like that john cage book a lot, and i always thought it curious how hated he was by the culture at large. but i only thought that because the picture on the back of the book makes him look like a big barrel-chested bear with a hearty back-slapping and room-filling laugh. listen to some of the interview with him on - he sounds like vincent price almost! so villianous! and thanks for the article on ralph eugene meatyard- great name, photographer, character.
there, i did it. new page design, and ads and everything. i already objected to one of the ads, and put it on my filter list, so i never see it again (but you might be seeing it now, as theh filter doesn’t kick in for a few hours). it’s interesting to see the way different pages get summed up as it were by the ads. on the front page (as of this typing, it changes all the time) there are a lot of “be your own boss” sorts of things, on the new “projects archive” page it’s a surfeit of “punk personals” and other online meetup weirdness. and isn’t that a big part of it all? meeting people?
oh, and not all the mp3s on the archive are up yet-currently only the cat and bird hospital stuff. both albums, long out of print, now for download. rss heads please stop in and peek around the new design. oh, and i took out the guestbook for now, but i’m trying to figure out a new deal that won’t get so logjammed with information-poor turing test spam. email me with broken links and suggestions, and thoughts on the ads.
ok. so. me and nicky revs drove out to easthampton and talked about monetizing content and creating content for the purpose of monetizing it. we got to the show, my western mass heads showed up, and the show started. the show was billed as “fake rap nite” and this was delivered. bromp treb did an extra-long set of fake DJing, playing reel-to-reel cassette machines. i guess he was TJing. anyway his set was great and had a lot of great moments that touched upon a number of elements of DJ culture, all in a stream-of-consciousness style with slithery gloopy nonsensical beats rubbing up against each other wheezing and farting. i’ve never seen the man give a bad show. he’s one of my all-time favorite noise performers. BARR talked over a little mp3 player running into the now-ubiquitous euromixer (which BT also had), having conversations with himself in his charming way. if you haven’t heard BARR, there are mp3s on , and he was also on , which is archived on the bsr site. his set was really great despite having a nearly-lost voice from being stuck in new york traffic all day screaming along to funk master flex, who dropped bomb after bomb after bomb. after the show we got to talking and i told him about the store idea and he was psyched. he asked for an address to send his magazines to, but i was unable to produce a piece of paper to write on, so i just gave him my ID, which is out-of-date now and strangely valueless and besides i have another one on the way anyway (NB: it’s ridiculous that it should go out-of-date because it isn’t a driver’s license it’s a liquor ID, and it’s not like i’m going to do something that’s going to render me suddenly ineligible to be older than 21. also, initially the people at the dmv wouldn’t issue me another one because they needed ID to do it and the old one was the only ID i had but that was out of date now!). he gave me arecord and i gave him a cd and he was psyched (even unto making the home alone “yes” fist recoil) to discover that the cover’s boss art is by none other than art boss mike t.
ooh , not right now, i have to lie down on a hard surface and listen to stereolab because my tummy hurts from slouching in the car, but me and nicky revs indeed went to see BARR and bromp treb and it was ahsome with full details a hair’s breadth away.
me and little andrew and ML went to providence for ‘s window installation opening at the . well, the postcard i got said 7-9, but i’ve been plenty burned by that town w/r/t things not happening on time by a good 3 hours, so we arrived just before 9 and everyone was going home. well, not everyone– psibs and jeanc and h2h and new friend robert were still kicking, so we gooned around in their hallway a while and then broke to some party where lucky fishbeck was DJing (“spinning” is a stupid word for this context and i refuse to use it and i wish you would too). well, that’s when we kicked gooning into high gear. surrounded by art school students and other people trying to establish sex partners, we made a beeline to the kitchen to drink molasses and apple cider vinegar with cemetary mary. it’s good for you you know, but maybe not so much when you chug half a bottle of the stuff (with the mother) which is what i did when one dude started to get upset by our idea of fun. i gave lukey the “worcester destruction playlist” on a crumpled receipt and bless his blond heart he played some of it and we went bonkers, full of actual piss and bona fide vinegar and nearly blacking out from excitement. even peter danced a bunch. it was a really fun time.
lately i’ve been working on the new version of this webpage, which will be quite nice and now with a nice little zone for archived projects, including both cat and bird hospital albums and a variety of other stuff. also, in an effort to monetize my content, i’ve decided to run google ads. my mind won’t be changed, also, i decided it’s not a big deal and could result in some extra fun money. maybe not a lot, but i’m a not a lot of money kind of person.
gals, let’s go see at the in easthampton on tuesday november 22nd. also hawnay troof, bromp treb, and other nonsense words. it’s our civic duty as smart, fucked-up kids!
ml and i went on errands today that enabled me to swing by the library and pick up some books i inter-librarily loaned. even though libraries are an established thing, i still feel like it’s some sort of scam because it’s so easy and so awesome (and i’m always reading about new ways media companies are trying to get you to stop sharing). i can’t buy the books, they are $50 each! but i can just search for them on the library (and affiliates) webpage, fill out an online form, and they get shipped to my library from another, and my library calls me when they come in! i guess everyone knows this already.
the books i got are: takashi murakami’s “little boy: the arts of japan’s exploding subculture” and “hollywood horror: from gothic to cosmic”. both are full of positively gorgeous pictures of monsters, with essays on same. it’s east and west monsters week! books + monsters + drawing + wood stove + cold outside + spicy peanut butter pasta with the good peanut butter, and there goes my life for the next 128 hours.
oh, heart 2 heart are having their art opening at the dirt palace tonight– they did a window installation, and there will be cake and booze, or so i am told.
on the tip of archived pictures of awesome monsters, here’s the aptly-named (and a sneaky way to look through the pictures in a thumbnail way). i’ve been drawing a lot of these guys and gals today. don’t worry mike, i won’t turn into an action-figure drawer.
oh yeah, mike’s got a new scenery out and i will have some copies to sell next week i think. it’s really good and has contributions from your humble narrator, amongst others. lee buford also drew another franigan comic for it, and it’s really good, and as a result, i’ve been developing my black metal fonts, all tendrilly and shit.
oh, it’s no secret that i’m having big time spam problems on the , destroying the community give-and-take, but the spam is really weird. i’ve disabled html and there isn’t a box for entering urls anymore, so the spam is completely guileless. or rather, it’s all guile with no direction– fake praise, fake criticism, a few instances of fake flirting, and lately, a weird serialized story about a kid named marty and a sexist kung fu master, who scored the anticipated 2000th message! wait, is this a reader or is it weird spam? if it’s a reader i have a present for you, seriously, for the 2000th message.
tuesday’s show at okie st was pretty okie, but awkward you bet. i had, as promised, some new songs, but they didn’t all work out so good. in fact, the only thing i was 100% for was the duo me and jean did, where i wrote a mad libs-style song and she filled it in. i wrote it as a sad country western song about non-trancendency called “it’s not the night”, and jean turned it into a sad song about time travel. oh, cool breeze, i also covered “burn in hell”, and my new sad song that tries to go all the way around to being happy again– “i’m going to get eaten by a bear”. bussed into town, bussed out. now it’s wednesday night (thursday morning i guess) and i’d be hard-pressed to say what i’ve been up to really since then… thinking and writing and some doing. happy birthday little andrew (25)!
here are some links:
mike t, is that archive of reconstituted toys i was telling you about (warning: vast).
is the bsr broadcast of byron house / russian tsarcasm, recently aired. both bands feature that guy carlos i like with the dreamland accent. byron house also has brendan fastner and nicole 2heart, other people i like. only listen if you want to get sssssssssssssssslllllllllaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyed. “trapped in a pit, traaaaaaaapped in a pit”.
is that thing about the girl who folded a piece of paper in half 12 times. this was a commonly-repeated impossibility, but i can’t figure out why no one before ever thought to just get a really long piece of paper. did we all really know it could just come to this but we didn’t care enough to argue?
worcester magazine once again quoted me in their blogger section, this time they pulled this article. i’m happy they quoted me using the phrase “total J.O.”, but as is my burden, i must critique their correction of my punctuation and defend my own novel (but commonsensical) practices. in my original post, “J.O.” ends the sentence, so i end with a period, making two periods in a row– “[...] total J.O..”. in the paper, they take the second period out, and the sentences run together. if you want to be ambiguous that’s your prerogative, magazine, but don’t make my punctuation inconsistent for the sake of some dead strunk or white.
today of the open source dance dance revolution was posted on boing boing (by a worcester utilizing an obvious pseudonym), with links and actual names of programs, so i’ll write up my more thoughts on the subject, which i was thinking about yesterday. i know DDR is like, so 2003 but you need to grow out of this schema of forced social obsolescence. ;P
first a basic (skippable) synopsis: you’re standing on a mat that’s a 9×9 grid of squares, and the operable squares are in the up down left and right positions. a song plays and arrows scroll up to the top of the screen. the arrows are pointing in the direction of the button you have to step in. additionally they are in separate columns, grouped by direction, so the scrolling display is like that of a player piano. when the arrows reach a certain mark at the very top you have to step on them (to the beat of the song). is a synopsis with pictures, from DDRfreak.
what struck me about the game is much of the fun is the fun inherent in acquiring a new language. the beginner stages are all about mapping the different columns to the different steps, and when you can do it successfully, you’re proud, like a kid that can say a few words. soon enough though, you learn that there are more neccessary words– beyond just up down left right there are also the words formed by combinations- left and right at the same time, up and down, and eventually all the four corners get introduced. once all the words are mastered, you start to put them into sentances consisting of long strings or arrows, and then the sentances get more exotic and playful and words start to get used in new ways. arrows begin appearing on the half-step, there are freezes in which you have to hold down the arrows for a prescribed amount of time rather than just step on them, and with each new thing it catches you totally off guard but you feel compelled to master it. there are a number of reasons the game is great– it’s physical (but not dependant on or influenced by its participants being in perfect or even good physical shape), it fosters community, it’s often played in a noncompetitive way, and it doesn’t have a gender bias. but the language acquisition angle is to me the most compelling- exercizing the mind as well. again, it’s super fun, the pads are ebayable (i’m told) for ~$30, and the program is free (although you need a fast enough computer, and ideally a big screen). i would love for this to become part of the new thanksgiving tradition.
