Oh yeah my heart felt today said that I should consider my costume as myself in 5 years we’ll see how that turns out, pictures forth coming. listen

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I’m just now making the mix tapes for the Halloween party tonight, which is par for the course. Halloween is such a romantic time for me, but I couldn’t resist putting Who Baby Your a Nag after These Arms of Mine. listen

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keep it live out there

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i’ll be playing a show at collective a go go on november 7 with the points north and the sandcastles, which i think are both on the twee / pop axis. i’ll be playing some new covers, some new songs, some classics, and talking a lot. if you don’t know where this is, email me and i’ll give you directions, in the manner of house shows all over this community “punk”.

two from the vaults

smelly fartson URGES me to mention the hulloween party this year at the firehouse in worcester, replete with mixtapes, mess-ups, and entanglements. i’m making a mixtape and half-fretting about it– get ready for weird choices but also largely finger pointers. i have yet to damage a costume together but i have a few bad ideas and, admittedly, a really weird feeling about this whole thing. check in now for song requests that may not be honored.

stephanie katz organized a boat collective and sure enough bought a boat and asked me to come up with a short list of possible names for it. i am delighted to report that my number one draft pick was chosen and the boat, pictured above, is now “the elizabeth bishop”.

i was operating in a pogo mode, and so wanted to name the boat after a person, and stephanie requested a worcester theme, which of course i was happy to entertain. no lie, second place was “the jacob berendes” but that didn’t fly, and nor did it float (and maybe that’s for the best, as after all, i don’t even float). the important part is: if you need something named, really, i’m your person.

it rained all nice last night, warm and windy, with huge piles of leaves accumulating at various points on the hill. nice transitional smells everywhere, it ruled.

silk screening went: good, with both images working out really really good– really, as good as i thought they would. and of course, way better than once i started drawing them and thought “this already looks like shit”. some interesting design problems which i solved nicely i think– the headless horseman design was based on napoleon crossing the alps, and there was the matter of what to do with the horse’s eyes, so i just covered its face in little wormy tentacles, obscuring everything except those horrible laughing teeth. the john and yoko picture was also not without its problems to be solved, but “absence of weird genitalia” was one i got out of the way very early in the game. in any event, a good crowd and a great time just hanging out– perfect.

backwards in time to the show friday night at the DCU center, which was tite and i got some zines from sy, and not only the already-mentioned “those fucking unicorns”, but also “EXXXTINCTION”, about how the dinosaurs became extinct because they were too exhausted from having non-procreative sex to bother with the other kind. two total classics in the speculative beast sex realm. sy is the projectionist for this awesome band called “the judy experience”, which is just one person, james, playing guitar or saxophone to packaged backings, plus overhead projections of marching animals and colorful pieces of plastic. with them was mirror mirror, a three-piece with a laconic but nonetheless captivating singer, ponchoed and reverb-wettened, and waving various wands. guitarist was as tall as me and very limber but most importantly no sloppy or uncontrolled movements. we talked afterwards and in obv-answer to your nonquestion, lots of yoga, duh, but also pilates, which is funny to hear from anyone, because it’s one of those trendy proprietary exercise systems, but did you know (i didn’t) that it was invented in prison? it was. here’s a nice video to get you inspired to do YOGA. and PILATES. : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnTaDjKoO2g.

backwards in time again to the early show earlier friday at the firehouse: lazy magnet, crank sturgeon, and pro bro gold. got there late and missed sam gas can, but he told me everything broke, which makes me wish i was there, because that’s exciting and it’s good to see how people react to a challenge. crank sturgeon got off to a slow start, firing marshmallow peeps into the crowd with a seemingly antique catapult. i had seen him before years ago and had him pegged as merely an exhibitionist, which is ultimately boring. this time, halfway through the set his character developed past “obnoxious guy messing with you” and i got into it, seeing the world through his eyes as he monkeyed and explored in a caveman/spaceman folk science “look at it, smell it, touch it, taste it, eat it” way.

lazy magnet destroyed as should be expected. half his set was quiet acoustic versions of songs from the corleone record, half was midi bumpers with echo-laden crooning, but they weren’t two distinct halves, it was intermittently spliced. the electronic songs were new and really good– driving and motivational. i’ve seen people perform “sing along to sequencer” a fair amount and the lack of liveness always leaves me sort of cold, unless they really work the crowd or the lyrics are really clear and engaging. jeremy did not work the crowd nor could i hear all of what he was saying, but he had the slightest thing which bridged the gap between recorded and live– possibly intentional, probably incidental, but it really worked for me. over the sequencer he had two tape decks playing different textures and accents. these he operated in an intentional but coarse way (turning them on and off, fading them up and down, fast forwarding / rewinding), and obviously he knew what was on the tapes, so there’s a modicum of control. but knowing that they were not sequenced, or sequenceable, or controllable at all in a rhythmic or precise way, and hearing this uncontrollability compounded by having two things play against each other in ways you know have never been exactly played before, there was added an essential chaos element that brought everything back to this live band feeling– that if things work out it is not because everything is responding to a metronome, but because of drive, and personality, and the faith in things to always work out. really really good.

the acoustic part was also great, really quiet and seemingly effortless. on the record, all the songs are layered and juxtaposed and balanced in this rich and phenomenal way- it was really great to hear them played on just whatever guitar was laying around, and see that, um, a house that stands, it’s foundation is awesome. i had that experience when there’s a song you sing to yourself about a hundred times a day and the band that plays the song comes to your town and sings the song and you sing along and everything else fades out. the song is the one that goes “hey…”.

pro bro gold was brandon, also of byron house, this time playing keyboards in a dancey but buhlowne-out fashion, featuring the beats “rave” and “techno”. also, a light show, although by his own admission, “the light show is 50% of it”. plus smoke machines. oh, and i should add that it’s a real “spencer’s gifts” light show, strictly “consumer grade”. nonetheless, i definitely zoned out on the lights, which, combined with the smoke machine, cast these tangible beams in two intersecting, steadily spinning lateral cones, one of which i was at the center of. when i looked into the apex for longer than five seconds, i got a real motion sickness feeling, which made everything timeless, and left me totally unable to access or anticipate the otherwise moronically present beat of the music. needless to say, this was really a tremendously weird experience. i could tell something was happening, but i was unable to process it in any rational way. if i looked away, it became immediately apparent that the something that was happening was just loud repetitive beats, but then i could always just look back and in five seconds i was lost in animal time again, and not only that but under some sort of weird spell. in short, it was turning a mystery on and off, on and off, over and over again, without dulling the mystery even though it’s the same mystery each time. if you want to get this feeling, find a good solid spinning chair, get going, and then look directly up. and FYI i’m saving this mode for two installations from now, and this shit is time-stamped so don’t jamp me.

is that it? i guess that’s it on the catch-up end of things. please ssend links and info for upcoming essays on:
• jack parsons
• ugly art
• hekoyas & holy fools.

this saturday we’re having another silk screen day at HBML, from 2 - 5. for halloween we’ll have two designs to choose from: a ghoulish headless horseman replete with jack o’lantern, and a design based on john & yoko “two virgins” but with jack o’lantern heads and, uh, goblin genitalia (like in the painting at the art museum in which bacchus & company call bees to nest in a disgusting tree by clattering dishware). both designs will be in black ink and cost $5. huppy hulloween!

tonight lazy magnet is playing at the firehouse. 5pm seems unlikely but that’s what the flyer says, and it’s a pre-show before another rumbler at dishpan casserole– a bunch of punk bands i can’t remember but one of them includes sy, who made the incredible zine “those fucking unicorns”.

yesterday and monday in providence taking down the installation, which, for the record, is easier than setting up. i did find ML, thank you very much. he’s got a truck now, so we hauled the good wood from the intallation back to worcester to build some new excellent stuff for the shoppe (using also my now-confident but wrongly so carpentry skills). monday night hanging out a bit with xander, who just returned from missouri having met exene cervenka at a film festival. the best part is the trophy note in which it’s pretty obvious that exene was psyched to have an excuse to write a capital X. obviously she has perfect handwriting.

today working at the shoppe but getting there early to at least clean up but mostly to listen to rudy ray moore albums. RRM RIP.