This is kind of strange, but if anyone sees Mike Leslie, tell me give me a call. It’s a–I don’t know what day it is. It’s whatever day it is today. listen

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ha! press stacks up– here’s another review of NEW OBSTRUCTION, but one that ONLY mentions my secondary piece.

in the fashion, i have copied the entire text of the review to after the jump (so that i may have it forever, regardless of whether the site goes down). the review contains a reference to twin peaks which may be a spoiler (i have not seen twin peaks), so i rot13ed it.

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many of you wanted more information on this 24 hour comic book thing. ok. the idea is to make a 24 page comic book in 24 consecutive hours. the idea “24 hour comic book” was invented as a challenge by comics pontif scott mccloud, to act as a constrained set of rules for making a comic book. for more on constraints in art, see wiki entries on constrained writing and oulipo.

ok, so anyway this happened saturday into sunday, 3pm to 3pm, at the worcester art museum. present were myself, jamie buckmaster, mike leslie, andy fish, veronica hebard, jim welu (the president of the museum), allison cowell (not to be confused with allison towel), sara with whom i’ve had tacos a few times (this is a literal expression, not a coded message), and a bunch of other people i didn’t know. oh yeah, the edward gorey rip-off dude was there but he doesn’t count because he only did the three hour version, and not only were his three pages both not a story and not original, but even given the format “edward gorey rip-off”, he only ever does like three different panel rips. steady chumpin’. anyway, i got there early and as a result got in the t&g article. they wanted us to pose in mid-draw, but it was only 2:30 and the things started at 3, and none of us wanted to be called cheater, so we all just doodled some warm-ups. i drew something i had no intention of developing into a story– a bunch of flayed horses, cribbed out of sara’s big book of horse anatomy. and because i was having my picture taken, i had to write FUCK FACE huge across the bottom of the page. i gave the page to pars as a regular everyday present, the sort its nice to give. pars, in fifteen years, when you’re trying to refinance a house, or buy your robotic child a new leg, i give you permission to sell this picture for $40,000.

once the bell rung (NB: no actual bell) i seated up next to ML and jambuck and quickly built a nest of snack food detritus, noise cassettes, and failed starts. it was getting dark before i finally committed to a theme, having discarded a few methods already for various reasons (like: “it is too hard to draw a horse”, “now is not the time for me to start redrawing old scrooge mc ducks (although this day will come)”, and “i don’t want to just draw a funny little dude walking around in a weird world“). i tried not to think too hard about what i wanted to do beforehand, because i wanted to exercise my open hand technique. ok, truth be told, purtle was right next to me doing “space”, which proved to be too enticing for me to resist. so i also did “space”. i know enough about myself to know that once a problem is solved i lose 85% of my interest in it, so i was careful not to think too far ahead in the scripting stage, and this worked out to my advantage, posing fresh problems up until the last hour. i was running behind most of the time on account of starting late, but finished with 20 minutes to spare. anyway, you can see my jamb (“a letter to sweety”) hanging up in the museum until thursday, at which point it gets reprinted somewhere, and also i’m going to do a nice reprint with my new print connectch and fixing some things that bug me (like misspelling “sweetie” in the title). my pen, a fresh one with no other lines drawn with it, ran out in hour #20, which was pretty satisfying.

i enjoy a marathon situation, but this especially was very rewarding. i’m happy with what i did, and it’s valuable to know that while i can’t “just turn it on”, i can, given a little bit of wiggle room, figure out a way to turn it on. hanging out with jamie and mike for 24 consecutive hours was also really fun, especially given the individual struggle with group support and no competition aspect. there was good food and like we told john guida, the $5 entry fee is a bargain just to get 24 hours of free coffee, plus pizza for dinner and nice pastries for breakfast (NB: the bean counter cinnamon buns are the best ever). more than anything, i was really psyched that mike was there, in part because hanging out with mike is super fun (especially late at night / early in the morning), but mostly because it was great to see him do something he’d never done before, and to work really hard at an art project, even through times of trial. mike’s comic, about DPW guys in space (the SDPW), totally rules, and it’s really awesome to see all his symbols move and interact. of course it’s all in his classic full-color linework style. worcester folks near the library are advised to stop in this week to check it out. also good are veronica and sara’s flawless entries, seriously leaps and bounds over everyone else. plus jamie buckmaster of course, who i think is going to revisit his story in a larger thing, and the first kid to finish, elbert, 13, with an awesome pencil and red ink palate and a totally sweet horror theme. oh yeah, and i didn’t get sick or fall asleep, and today i feel a little out of it but not too too bad.

full text of the t&g article after the jump. allison towel- you can see that my roots need doing so return my phone calls! remember: i don’t get texts.

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tonight was the closing of the NEW OBSTRUCTION exhibit, which was fun, a good crowd from worcester came down, and afterwards we got pizza at pizza queen, then stopped to see HUMAN BEAST (aka maralie + eli) perform at as220. the performance was good although maralie had made these wearable music controllers, and i was focused too much on trying to figure out what exactly they were doing, which was kind of impossible with so many other things going on. i have to go back to providence this week to disassemble my installation, to turn it back into a pile of wood and a pile of trash.

back in worcester we stopped at the electronic show / dance party that holmes has been pulling so hard for. there were a ton of people having a great time but i wasn’t one of them. me and ML kept cracking jokes about the whole national geographic mating display, but you can crack jokes only so long– you’re still there, and everyone else is seemingly having “the time of [thier] life[s]” so what’s wrong with you? after A LOT of pacing around, i left. nostalgia for an age yet to come i guess. i was booked to play this sshow, and do a computer noise set, but i had to cancel. i wish i could’ve done it though, it would’ve been really awkward for me. the best part of the night was seeing long-time reciprocated fan karkar, who told me in a very gracious way that i need to get off my ass.

today at 3pm until tomorrow at 3pm me, jambuck, ML, fish, hebs, and maybe john guida are doing the 24 hour comic book challenge, hosted by the worcester art museum. but check it- tomorrow morning we sneak out to the public library, which is celebrating being open on sunday for the first time in a dog’s age with FREE ICE CREAM. and that’s what i call STACKIN IT.

ok, i gotta go get my snacks together.

jeremy took me out for lunch at the quan yin and we talked about my obsession with tagging (which is to say, categorizing the posts on a (this) webpage). i even have a system for tagging older posts from the days before tagging, in which i randomly choose a previous post and apply appropriate categories, or clean things up (right now there’s tags for both “psyched” and “P.O.L.”, for example). of course, at the rate i’m going, roughly one per day, the past will catch up with the present in only seven years.

i grant you, it’s crazythinking to pretend this is comprehensive, but in a pinch, it’s nice to be able to quickly sort through and see, oh, i don’t know, as mentioned before, things i’m psyched about, or rhetorical questions i have asked. i think once the tags start to pile up things will really get interesting. joining the every day and the long term, that’s my goal lately.

in any event, the best example of this is daily panel, which is finally accumulating enough material for the categories to be valuable. see for example all panels relevant to god, or better yet, the universe.

via the CLIMAX YOUR MIND blog, it’s skinbyrd– just oi mp3s and pictures of skinhead girls. mary, this is your shit! or, it was a few years ago. uhm, is this still your shit? can you commute to worcester to practice for our sugar oi band with ML?

UPDATE: i had the wrong site linked, i fixed it.

here’s a review of the NEW OBSTRUCTION installation show which is factually inaccurate, and possibly valueless. ok, it’s a review in the free weekly, so it has the value of saying “this is fun, go see it”, which is all the value one should
expect i guess (although who wants to be always bound by what they expect?). anyway, i just wanted to say some stuff in reponse, because i can. mostly, just the first sentence is wrong:

AS220’s exhibit “New Obstructions” is one of those right-on ideas that seem to come so naturally to the institution

the exhibit is not an as220 exhibit, and it was not their idea. it’s true that the exhibit is in a building that was bought by as220, but it was not their idea, and they did not sponsor or help. the rest of the article, like i said, is whatever. as is the custom, i was mentioned only for the more frivolous of my two pieces in the show, which is a lesson to be sure on relationships between the immediate and the long-term, or to put it another way, between work and play. more on this in the big wrap-up to come after the take-down.

incidentally, the closing reception is this friday, from 6 to 9pm. again, it’s at 135 washington st, providence ri. come on down!

comic by ad reinhart

full text of article (for my records) after the jump:
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reminder: today (friday the 10th) at 6pm, RUSSIAN TSARLAG instore at HBML, performance + movie.

tomorrow (saturday the 11th) at 6pm, KEENAN CASSIDY “on fire and out of control” art opening, featuring paintings and otherwise, and possibly lots of people you’ve never seen before, since there were articles in the t&g and the womag about it.

here’s a trailer for the documentary about russian tsarcasm, which was the previous incarnation of russian tsarlag:

YES!!!!!!

…which probably won’t make much sense in the future, but i can’t know if in the future i’ll only want to read things that make sense.

• i love when people hit you on del.icio.us and you try and figure out if you know them and if so who they are, and if not, how did they find you, all by triangulating them by their tag clouds.

• i love when people hit you on twitter and you can’t figure out who they are, so you add them to keep tabs on the situation, and every day there’s more clues. tiny and banal clues. which to me is all the more curious because i mostly only repost george herbert quotes.

• i don’t know if this counts as social media but i love when my friends’ cd releases have not had the metadata (song titles etc.) entered into CDDB yet, so i can do it and leave them a note. i didn’t do this for the grey skull 3″, though, as the computer immediately though it was a lecture entitled “Dealing with Menopause” by a doctor whose name i forgot. i can explain why this happens but why bother.

back from my harrowing kidnapping at the hands of number one and nate powell. we went to the ocean, to spike’s junkyard dogs, to the nate powell booksigning at ada books– some relevant pics on pretty alright. the ocean was absolutely gorgeous, real anne of green gables if you can believe it. spike’s junkyard dogs was on my suggestion, but we had been talking about it. still, there was that moment, talking about fake hot dogs and sitting in the beautiful new england coastal shrubs with actual butterflies flitting about and breezes and the loud quiet of “classic” nature, in which we made the jump to “actually, let’s go get fake hot dogs” that was like apres-drugs in a circle of people keeping it together saying finally “guys, i’m really really high” and everyone else says “yessssssssssss…”. needless to say the afternoon was tite. in the pictures on the wall of the spikes on branch ave (spike’s is a chain), a polaroid of a man labeled “PUN – 14 dogs” and i couldn’t tell if it was really big pun (rip), because most of the time i see big pun’s face it’s on a mural, distorted in the way that things get distorted when you’re painting a dead rapper’s face on a bodega wall without the luxury of taking in the whole picture. or it’s printed on an xxxxl t-shirt worn by a skinny man. either way there’s a mapping problem. also at spike’s they watch spike tv. powell: “someone got a raise for that”.

nate had just come back from the small press expo where his really beautiful new book “swallow me whole” won an ignatz award. the award was in his car and i was stepping on it because i didn’t realize what it was. the award itself is just a brick, no inscription no nothing. again, powell: “is the brick still there?” me: “yes, it’s fine. what’s the big deal” p: (changes subject). it was great to see him again and great to see number one, a woman to whom i was once almost married for social monkeywrenching reasons. hi!

now i’m back in worcester revamping the store while i still have dave howl land’s nice drillgun. tomorrow at 6, RUSSIAN TZARLAG plays instore!!!!! not to be missed. also NTBM: saturday is the art opening for keenan cassidy, a very talented 13 year old with a cool stencil style but an even better monstery painterly style. kid’s a ripper and young so invest wisely. our economy is fine.

image via riotclitshave.

(bloomington indiana’s) melissa number one (not that there could be another but that’s where she lives) and nate powell came to town and kidnapped me, now i’m providence, where people are going to go go in the ocean, but not me. can’t write right right now, gotta tie up other ends. back tonight/tomorrow morning.

well, i tried, but i just can’t do it. kpraas had the idea of not writing about the providence show, so that it would just be a rumor, uncorroborated and non-official. ssounds good but here i am a few days later and i have to do it. i’m not worried about the show sinking into the memory hole, in part because, well, to be honest, there’s not a lot about the show itself specifically that i remember, as i can’t really ever remember what happens when i’m performing, and the rest of the night was just getting ready and then winding down. i rode in with lil spat and ML, there was home made ice cream there, the bands were ok if you like riot folk (which some people don’t and some do), i went to that 7-11, there was a good crowd etc.. i guess i have to write because i want to say: thank you to everyone involved. it was awesome to see everyone going totally nuts and pushing and yelling and singing along as loud as possible, and at the end i shut my eyes and i remember feeling as light as a feather, and indeed, being physically lifted up over everyone’s heads, and hearing someone (kristina) yell “this is beautiful!” in that sudden exasperated way, a real “oh my god, is this even happening?!?!”. needless to say, being a part of this was a tremendously good feeling, of the sort i will chase for the rest of my life. thank you to everyone. thank you to the terribles- i am blessed to be able to perform with one of my favorite bands ever. and thank you to building 16, you asked me to play. and thank you to andrew oe, who made a cool flyer with a huge picture of personal hero george plimpton.

even though i said it was a one-time only thing, i think we may bust out a worcester show at a sufficiently special time.