as those who have met or seen me in real life can attest, i am very tall, and rarely does a day pass when this is not pointed out to me by strangers, who upon learning my exact height ask if i play basketball (i don’t, can’t, and won’t). today i was riding my bike past some kids who stopped their chatter as i rode by and one said to the other (quietly, but i heard) “he doesn’t play basketball”. a casual fame i delight in.
there are pictures up from the animal shelter benefit art show i was in at haNNa, in tokyo japan. it was a t-shirt show, but there isn’t a picture with my t-shirt in it. but you can see some of the birds-of-paradise i made sitting on the strings from which the shirts hang. thanks hanna! baby steps to japan.
as i’m sure you’re well aware, today is christopher lee’s birthday. so, let us now praise famous draculas.
lee played dracula in a succession of brilliantly titled movies made by great britain’s hammer studios in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, including “the satanic rites of dracula” (aka “dracula is alive and well and living in london”), “dracula A.D. 1972″, “scars of dracula”, “taste the blood of dracula”, “dracula has risen from the grave”, “bloody scream of dracula”, “hard times for dracula”, “horror of dracula”, and the semi-quasi-demi-documentary “in search of dracula”. to the character of dracula, always a dignified man, he added a particularly british aristocracy, a particulalry british frustration, and a singular driving hatred for humanity (where other draculas had, at best, contempt). lee turned his experience as draucla into a career playing moody ectomorph roles including rasputin, fu manchu, sherlock holmes, ramses, saruman, darth tyrannus, willie wonka’s dad, and a long line of sinister wizards, professors, and doctors. additionally, he is one of the few movie actors to have portrayed both dracula and frankenstein, and he also played the mummy. additionally, when “rasputin” was released in england, movie goers got complementary fake beards. in conclusion, today is chrispher lee’s birthday: happy birthday christopher lee.
next: udo kier
this morning i got up early and me and my mom went and did yard sales around worcester. i got some good records, more plastic flowers to put up in the shower, a stereo for the store, and a furby, the newer kind. i know there was some buzz over hacking the previous versions, and the new furby seems advanced enough that someone could figure out something really creative to do with it. there’s limited speech recognition, a mess of different sensors, some sort of inter-furby communication… in the meantime it’ll just sit on my shelf kind of enticing me, kind of freaking me out. it’s got white fur and a purple mohawk- cyber goth. also, the first furbys were banned from the NSA headquarters, which pretty much rules. ok, if you want more info, look it up on wikipedia, that’s what i did.
happy birthday mike leslie now has not just one but two new domains: happybirthdaymikeleslie.com, and the slightly easier but still a little confusing hbml.org. there is also a new online diary, so subscribe to the feed already.
did some errands and such with nicole 2heart and GM who were in town for the afternoon- building 19, recycling center, quan yin, stuff like that. later me and purtle went back to the bldg to get a pool raft, get some nori (37 cents a pack, bwah), look at pants, and drink coffee. since our neighbor at the shop sells coffee, we thought it would be “a real good idea” and neighborly if we both started to drink the stuff (having never in our lives had the habit or inclination). coffee at building 19 is pretty perfect, we drank it grey. we both found the experience pleasurable, but we are both used to enjoying things as a by-product of our defense mechanisms. we should get a pot for the store, anyone have an extra?
in the middle of a standard “how tall i am” discussion at the recycling center, i delighted a nearby hippie mom who pumped her fist when i told the elderly lady that no, i don’t get my calcium from drinking milk, i get it from leafy green vegetables. the mom further broed down with “i’m a vegetarian too!” and it made me happy that she’s of the school that “vegetarian” defaults to “vegan”. both the mom and her teenage daughter were wearing drug rugs, which i was personally into. other cool fashion ideas from kurt russell movies: sombreros, eye patches.
summer style today, breaking a sweat, and wearing shorts even. drifting in to my summer productive mode of staying up until 4 and sleeping until 10:30.
yesterday me and purtle rode down to providence to hang out with peter slippery and pick up stuff from people for the store (we finally found the squids). hung out for a spell with jo dery (aka “oh deary”) who is making the first of the exclusive prints for the rent club. FYI the rent club still has 20 – 30 spots open so hurry up and if you’re going to mail in the money send me an email so i reserve you a spot! jo’s print is going to be a portrait of me, mike, and peter, and the only way to get one is to join the rent club! that’s what “exclusive” means!
oh, starting next wednesday we’ll have regular hours: wed thurs fri 3 – 8pm. and we already made our first sale and taped the dollar to the wall, so don’t bother camping outside the door tuesday night- you’ll get nothing out of it except people waiting for the bus on top of you.
saturday morning i went to the worcester art museum to check out the new surrealist show (that’s [new] [surrealist show]) and to keep a pledge i took to go to the art museum every saturday morning that i’m not otherwise engaged (it’s free saturdays before 12). the surrealist show had some good pieces (a dali print i had never seen, an arp print), but wasn’t great. i used to be really into the surrealists but now not so much. i still like dali, ernst, arp, magritte and some others, and i like andre breton as an inveterate hothead and general prig, and there is a book that my mom got in high school that used to transfix me as a kid- less for the writing than the pictures of the artists themselves. but i can’t help but look at surrealism as a passage, like being eleven years old. an important step, had to be done, but it seems unhealthy to pretend it was the acme of anything. dadaism i similarly equate with being six. huelsenbeck’s “biography of a dada drummer” is (i’m told) the required reading on dada but it’s embarrassing and like the also-rans in my mom’s book the best things he ever did were other people’s photographs of him. of course it should be noted although perhaps it’s obvious that there are beautiful transcendant six and eleven year olds whose charms and merits are multifold. anyway.
after cruising that show i peeped in at the other new shows i already saw, david thorpe and stephen shore. i really liked both of them at first and now i still do. thorpe’s meticulous cut paper pictures of ecstatic space age hippie colonization are a perfect synthesis of the back-to-the-land movement’s beards, down vests, medallions, teepees, etc., and buckminster fuller’s radical rounded white plaster organic spaceship future- as if the whole earth catalog had rockets you could buy and a decentralized fleet of bearded new dads and barefoot moms landed on an otherwise unpopulated northwestern america. shore’s huge catalog of winning snapshots of meals half-eaten, parking lots, motel beds, and other ephemera was also a doozy. but what struck me on this visit more than any individual piece was what i hope is a new habit in curating at the WAM- both artists had accompanying collections of not their own work. shore had a display case that featured some of his personal collection of yellowing and curling 8×10 star glossies, amateur pornography, and car salesman potraiture. shore was allowed to root through the vast permanent collection of the museum and select other expansive and/or colonial works to hang next to his. and they’ve started doing this sort of juxtaposition within the catalog too– there’s a video piece of slo-mo total naked suffering that hangs (much to the chagrin of almost everyone i’ve spoken to) in the early christianity room, and it’s brilliant. there’s also a room that’s all marys, in the middle of which sits a louise bourgeois soft sculpture of a pregnant woman. the WAM has a huge and somewhat distinguished permanent collection, it makes me happy to see that they’re starting to use it more gloriously. i also found while walking around briefly that some paintings had been switched out, and found the effect just like when there’s a new comic on the comics page- excitement at the prospect of a new world to get lost in, displeasure in the failure to recall what was in that space before.
also spent some time staring at one of my favorites, “blue tree”, a total ephus. i was delighted to find under the bench in front of the painting a piece of gum, as the painting itself is thick gobs irreverently strewn.
today we got a phone at the store, one with a number even. we tried to do what jenine does, get the prefix and then try and work out a word and select the number that works best. but stuck with the prefix “791″, we had pretty much nothing to work with (1s and 0s have no letters), and anyway they wouldn’t let us select just any number, they gave us a list to choose from and we picked one. turns out it works out to 791 DOFF (or RX 1 DOFF) but even this is problematic as O the letter and 0 the number are whaddayacallit… isomorphic.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaanywazzzzz, don’t call it yet unless you think we might be down there (and we have upstairs and next door neighbors who don’t want to hear a phone ringing at all weird hours). we’ll have the nice answering maching set up soon for you/us.
on the way home this angry dude in a pickup tried his best to scare me because i was riding a bike in the road (which is where bikes go). i got shook but not scared and it was pretty satisfying to see him twice make illegal moves so i wouldn’t catch up to him (which i wasn’t trying to do). i never even said anything, i didn’t even raise a finger! generally i find worcester a pretty good place to ride a bike- i’m visible, i take up as much space as i need to feel safe, i use hand signals, and for the most part people are fine. sometimes people yell “get off the road” and i wave like they were just saying hi, which is generally the best tactic i find.
last night i was getting ready for bed in the dark and i thought i saw bioluminescent growths on my abdomen, but upon further inspection i was just looking a little bit to the side.
there’s a party in worcester this saturday and in an odd turn it seems that matt brinkman is djing? which to me means no anthems, and i only like anthems. also it’s a graduation party, and i never approved of college: the institution, the lifestyle, the rock.
still gussying up / filling up the store. today we signed up for a phone, which won’t go live until friday or saturday. i lost those giant squids i made last year (two years ago?). i want to put one if not both of them up, hanging from the ceiling in the store, but i looked in all the likely spots and can’t find the bastards no how. they are in a box unstuffed, but still, they are GIANT squids, you’d think they’d pop out.
the church bells near my house play what to me always sounds like a medley of “aloha oe” and “hallelujah i’m a bum”. i’m enjoying the spring weather, even if it is rain rain rain. the countess’ brother gave her downloaded copies of every star trek the next generation episode and it’s every night, every night.