i forgot that i scanned these in… when billy blue used to play gilrein’s, i would bring my sketchbook and try to draw the guitarist, pete henderson, who has a really good guitar face, like he’s eating something so good it’s freaking him out but he’s really trying to concentrate on it. here’s three of the best attempts out of very many tries:

as a angry cat:

jjb bucks’ valiant effort:

and my own final personal best:

here’s an ok photo for reference, but he doesn’t have the face. but he is doing the same thing as the guy on his t-shirt, which i always enjoy.

our wednesday HBML volunteer caught a flu so i went in yesterday and shuffled some stuff around and worked on some projects, most notably a series of mirrors with different mustaches drawn on them. it was pretty good, i drank tea all day.

tonight two high school girls (one of whom i know through the store) are performing my song “japanese pen pal girl tattoo” at an open mic somewhere in worcester county. i’m told it will be taped. actually, the only reason i know about it in advance is that in the lyric sheet to foreign policy, that’s the song that gets truncated with a curt “the rest of the words are perfectly audible”. and evidently, that is not the case, which works out quite to my advantage, as i had to be queried. how many other teenage open mics have i been a part of unawares? oh, yeah, and speaking of lyric sheets, i don’t know if i mentioned this but i finally accidentally looked at the lyrics to Dry Bones after so much vigilance only to find out that i was right and they don’t say what i initiallly thought they said, which just means now i’ll have to record my own version with my own serendipitous words. oh, and it turns out that what i actually say is “pretty much what [the girl who emailed me] thought”. anyway, from now on, all lyric sheets are vague or introduce untruths.

oh, and i’m playing a show in providence at meg turner’s falls (meg from summercamp’s new place) tomorrow with the terribles and j9 bressner. oh, i’ll play my version! and if you can’t tell from teh infographic, i’ve been working on some new songs, some of which i will play, and will probably have to read off a piece of paper like a hack.

catching up…

wednesday’s missoula oblangata show was super good- lots of folks, it started more or less on time, i played some new songs and a bunch of covers, the play was great. afterwards i traveled with the troupe back to northhampton, where there next show and my friends were. i stayed at “bill murry’s house”, a nice big rented house with action figures, good magazines and bad movies EVERYWHERE. it was good hanging out with the missoula oblangata– immediately upon getting in the car we got into a cool gossiping mode, until i realized the next day that the majority of what these people have heard me say in all of our time together has been petty BS. ok, i’m not actually worried.

friday’s show with billy blue and the terribles was awesome. i opened the show somewhat awkwardly, being a solo singer at the dancey movey rock show, but it was ok. i played some new songs and old standbys of course, and stood on a table and was a spectacle. the billy blue blues band tore it up and lots of folks were dancing, which is ideal. at one point during a harmonica solo MZ hoisted billy blue on his shoulders– BB was so psyched he almost couldn’t play, it ruled. terribles tore up in the style, with a lot of folks going nuts. dance party mix tapes before, intermittent, and after the bands. a few times i had to distract people that were wasted and unfortunately fixated on something or someone, but i’m pretty good at this. my method is to get inbetween and sing a catchy song that they’ll want to sing along to. sinatra usually works. the night was a mess but the place wasn’t so bad in the morning. i had a ton of fun, and it was a great send-off for bily blue (who is flying to spain in a few days for a european tour).

also collective a go go in today’s t & g, because of the “punk house” book (which i still haven’t seen despite my artwork on the back cover). yikes!

uh, the show tonight is at the firehouse in worcester, not firehouse 13 in providence.

sheryl ann got home from denmark yesterday and brought lots of weird mostly salty candy, so last night me and snowflake and carolyn and nik perry went over her house and ate a mess of it. needless to say, today i’m dealing with the ramifications, which is to say, feeling bummmmmmmmed out. but i ate some nice things, took some vitamins, wrote some new songs and halfway recorded them, listened to records, and watched “my neighbor totoro”, which is just about the most adorable movie i’ve ever seen and quite refreshing.

it’s MLK day, happy MLK everyone, and remember:

In 1999, Coretta Scott King, King’s widow, along with the rest of King’s family, won a wrongful death civil trial against Loyd Jowers and “other unknown co-conspirators”. Jowers claimed to have received $100,000 to arrange King’s assassination. The jury of six whites and six blacks found Jowers guilty and that “governmental agencies were parties” to the assassination plot.

link

don’t forget. also missoula oblangata this wednesday, same location.

last night’s show at mystery train was great. we got there late and unfortunately missed ben hersey, who i had been psyched to see, but transit always takes longer than you think to arrange, even if you plan on it taking longer than you think. in this instance we borrowed a van from joanne, who is a dear and the van worked superb.

anyway like i said we missed ben, which was a bummer. bromp treb was awesome as always– matt carroll said he had “the stage presence of leatherface” which was pretty accurate i think, if you were to raise leatherface in a friendly environment with music everywhere instead of people’s disconnected body parts. i played ok but made a few mistakes and the terribles played great, as they always do really good in small enclosed spaces.

mystery train is a record store and i shopped during the stonewall jackson set. i got an elvin jones record, and on the way home i realized that i like elvin jones because of this one picture from (i think) serious as you life, where he’s wearing a corduroy jacket. i got this record (”the main force”) because he’s wearing a yellow tshirt that says “ELVIN” in iron-on letters, and there’s a song called “song of rejoicing after returning from a hunt”. but it’s not super-great– he’s good but the other dudes (who he selected, presumably) really M the B. i could’ve listened to the records there, but i don’t like to do this too much. i got a bunch of other records too but i haven’t listened to them yet, except capt beefheart “ice cream for crow”, which i’m listening to now. i got it because of the title. because of crow.

oh, also, divine “jungle jezebel”, teddy fire “fluxing headset man” (signed!), noise nomads s/t (full platter on RRR), ornette “the great london concert” (which i got because there’s a song “Dough Nuts”, and because i’ve been playing to hell the golden circle record). maybe i shouldn’t be spending money but i’d rather have these records and eat peanut butter an jelly for a week than not.

joanne hart is loaning me and the terribles her totally awesome space van for the cosmic voyage. excelsior! i’m really psyched for ben “steve industry” hersey and bromp “he’s the king” treb. we got all the new bromp treb releases at HBML, they all rule (each other).

flyer by george w myers.

SOON! next wednesday is january 23rd, and it is the day that the missoula oblongata theatre diad returns to the firehouse to perform their smash success hit (according to me) “the most mysterious day of the year”. they did this play last june, i was in kind of a bad mood, i came to the show, and i was in heaven. this is a non-musical play that is not a jokey, half-assed play where the joke is “we are in a play”. and this is sort of weird to say, but the play doesn’t have overt political commentary, which i know some people find boring (and other words). here is a link to my review, which is GLOWING. the play has shady detectives, morose pets, boxers, street lamps, pontificating, marginalia, snappy patter, whimsical blocking, vaudevillian postures, webwork bummers, and mitigating factors plenty. these people are professionals.

the show will start and end early so that people in high school (students or teachers) can come (if they want). i’m going on at or before 6:30, the play will start at 7:05. it is approximately 1 hour long. i know that things have been running really late lately, but i really want to be considerate to my early-waking (and early-curfew) friends, so let’s not slob this one up. err towards earliness. it’s totally worth it to not be fashionably (or reasonably, as it were) late on this one.

this is all ages of course, but i feel the need to say that, just as most children don’t like brie, most children will not only not like this, but will use you liking it to make fun of you.

today me and carolyn tried to go to the new sit-down duck yao (11 to 3 at the old spot on beaver brook) but we were late (ok, i was late) so we just went to pickle barrel.

JPB: do you want to split an order of french fries?
CAK: yeah! spicy fries?
JPB: i usually get just regular fries
CAK: it’s 2008.
JPB: ok, spicy fries

this friday is seah’s art show at HBML, from 5 to 8, then russian zarlag, witch hat, soiled mattress and the springs, dudebro, and stonewall jackson, at downhill mansion. saturday is the big squid raffle at HBML, then at night me and the terribles and stonewall jackson at mystery train records in amherst MA. lots to see and be.

the silk screening thing went great the other day, it always goes great. actually, it keeps getting better and better, second law of thermodynamics notwithstanding. people always want the print after the day of the print, and i always want to be a jerk about it, but i think from now on i’m going to print up a few extra shirts and then just charge a lot for them (or, print more than just the printing charge). after the thing was a show at mr worcester, which was fun, and a pretty predictable mess.

i don’t know so much about punk genres in the year 2008, but the last show was more ecstatic and this show was more angry / aimless, so needless to say, i had more fun dancing at the last show. still, there were a ton of people there, and i had fun just hanging out. nicky revs had this gooey chocolate desert in his car and i walked around the show giving people bites, and it’s age-old wisdom about the way to some people’s hearts but it’s true. dan wars and crusty tim and a bunch of other boston heads were there, to report “worcester is really weird” and tell me over and over again about how awesome the cover of the flash #186 is (dan- see dead flash cover gallery). lots of beautiful people, a few knuckleheads. i left before the end (which is my M.O. at these events, to keep my memories beautiful) and walked around a bit, a nice quiet night for it, and warm. i found a little LED flashlight in the street, and then i stopped in to see gentle dan at nick’s bar, and casey gave me two flashing LED bracelets. if sheryl ann was home i would’ve wrapped them around the spokes of her bike, but she’s still in either denmark, north carolina, or scotland (while i’m wasting away to nothing for lack of donut-eating companions). oh yeah, dan, i watched that video of the record spinning around. i love the song, i love the format.

the past few days i’ve been working on a few new things for the shop. some new fujichia action figures (the “information series”), plus restocks of “Li’l Bendy” personal noisepals and “FIELD REPORT” hermeneutic game cards. oh, and i made those iron maiden shirts, based on the “killers” cover, but with a dripping ice cream cone instead of a dripping hatchet. after the fact, i realized two things about the shirt. the first is that this is sort of a big daddy roth tribute– later in his life he edited the violent content out of earlier drawings, replacing knives with ice cream cones. the second thing is that without the presence of the hatchet, the hand gripping eddie’s shirt looks like it belings less to someone getting slaughtered than someone on the giving end of a blowjob. but really, would you rather your children see a person getting killed or a person having oral sex with an unhuman ghoul while the ghoul eats an ice cream cone?

i’ve been watching joseph campbell’s power of myth, and reading jack kirby’s complete fourth world (both of which i downloaded illegally). i’ve been drinking coffee every three days or so. i’ve been doing physical, mental, and spiritual exercises. sometimes i feel like a slob, and never do i feel like a machine, but always i feel like a person in the world.

2 - 5pm, 420 pleasant st worcester.