ok, moving backwards in time again:
ssaturday day was more filming of the cosby show at HBML, which is going good but painfully slow. i thought i could hype up a day and get a ton of people (or all the people that continually tell me what a good idea it is) to come in, but this was not the case. but even though there was never really the line of people i anticipated, we had good crowds, and a fair amount of people that just came in off the street only to be instantly corralled into this baffling activity. i think one more good day and it’ll be in the can, which will be good, because i really need to be finished with this and move on to something else. after that i took a nap, then the wheelchair show, previously mentioned.

the show at the go go on friday was good, i played my acoustic guitar and even got really really quiet for once, which was really nice. i saw john guida on the street earlier in the day and he had a book of william blake, so when i saw him at the show i played “how sweet i roamed from field to field”. but i forgot to play “number of the beast” like i had planned, and the bowie song (”fantastic voyage” from “lodger”) i had spent precious time figuring out. shai’s band was him and his sister, super cute and playing a variety of nylon stringed intruments, with occasional abstract lyrics i really liked. the points north was nice quiet music with air organ or flute, guitar held very upright, and booming bass drum w/brushed snare. the audience was lots of folks that i did not know, which was nice and made me feel less embarrassed for not having tons of new songs.

the bone zone / shell shag / this bike is a pipe bomb show in providence was awesome– lots of us wanted to go, so as previously stated, MZ rented a 15 foot van and we packed 18 people into it, singing ramones songs the whole way there, with fading down the music suddenly to sporadically solo the singalong. it was like church camp. then once the show started we danced and rowdied and had a good time. bone zone played first, which was cool because we all got nuts even before the first note and kept high energy the whole time, through shell shag (who were amazing) and pipe bomb, who played two encores! i love to see the pipe bomb band, and to talk to them and for both of us say wonderful things to each other. about a million years ago, back when punks lived on the farm, the pipe bomb band came and stayed a night, and really stayed up all night talking and goofing off and cooking big meals on the wood stove and swimming in the old swimming hole, now every time i see terri she tells me that was her favorite cooking experience, and she owns a restaurant. it always makes me happy, but also a little sad, to think that she carries in her mind a vision of my life from 6 (?) years ago, and neither one of us can go back (which is information i withhold).

halloween pictures not in because the dock is still packed up, which is the same reason my phone stopped working– the charger’s in the same box. i guess i don’t really have much to say about the party anyway, nothing for posterity.

sorry gang, back to actual ideas and some semblance of communication soon.

tomorrow is my earth day. i will be entering my 30th year, continuing my infinitesimal creep towards death.

inthe past few days i’ve been doing a fair amount and being lazy about writing and then remembering that when i don’t write i get sort of crazy. sunday was bratfest, i missed opie and king tuff’s band PHASED OUT but still had a fun time, hanging out with dan wars, jackie susanne, and a miscellany of locals and nigh-locals. KT has another band called NAM BUDDIES that is full grunge riffers, led by some 17 year old baggy pants, it was awesome, as was RUTHIE.

deer tick / jana hunter show was great. jjbb also played, as did a lady with a totally fake shampoo commercial singing accent, who coasted through a brief set on popular themes. jana added phrase sampler looping pedals to her repertoire, and even though those things usually rub me the wrong way, this time it was perfect. i gripped the new record, which is as the last one: good. deer tick played a bunch of new songs that are great and spotlight his incredible use of vocal overtones. also this line: “i don’t want to be a millionaire / if it’s only a million of one thing”.

me and JK and jay skonietch went to see boris at the middle east, and it was pretty boring. i like boris but my buttons just didn’t get pushed. plus it’s weird now seeing a big show with a stage and lights and everything. so mediated. also matt carroll’s brother band opened up and were followed by a very similar band: BORING. and not even actively boring, like a drone band or something. this was just rock music with nothing going for it, no personality or weird twists. jimmy’s a nice guy, but this was just boring rockers boringly rocking, no finesse, no lack of finesse, no transgression, no refinement.

the yoni show was fun, i played a computer set, all sine wave cultivation and reading from “remembrance of things past” (or whatever you want to call it), which i threatened to do and then realized that was my best idea at the moment. as promised, yoni played for a long-ass time, it was awesome and matt coe was in heaven starting from the soundcheck.

silk screen saturday last weekend at the shop, the deisgn was a t rex stomping on a gas station labeled “HBML”, under which it said “FOREVER”. someone asked me what it meant and i said “either ‘HBML FOREVER’ or ‘PICTURE A T REX STOMPING ON A JUNK SHOPPE FOREVER’”. i’ll be making a few extras on white shirts with spray paint accents, look for them next week.

this has been fujichia core dump, an essential part of fujichia minutia reportage.

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!

so the show was on saturday but i went down early on friday to eat tacos at la lupita and attend “the corlies” an awards show for everyone on the label (in which everyone gets an award). pretty player. it was at the dirt palace, everyone was really dressed up, there was excellent food, it ruled. the awards show part of it went pretty much just like i think it always does– slower than you’d like, making everyone kind of antsy. after a while people got rowdy and started throwing shit. someone threw a chair at MT while he was presenting an award. there was a party afterwards but i was too antsy and just paced around. oh, i won “most charming”, which i’m sure some of you out there will find to be quite the farce. again, this wasn’t really an award, i mean, everyone got one, it was mostly a way to just get everyone to get together and clap for everyone, and eat lasagna. it was nice.

i slept over at the dirt palace and the next day took too long to get to the show which was obviously fine. the line-up had to be changed around a little and i got moved to even earlier, which meant some people missed me, which is, in the words of the poet “the way of the world”. i did ok. who was awesome? VVLTVRE and bonedust were both awesome, i thin kthiss was the best bonedust show i’ve seen, which sucks because they broke up and it was a reunion show. but it was haunty and poundy with drums of spirit war and beautiful ssinging, and everything was mixed really well. work/death was awesome, having just that day returned from tour and still looking 18-hour-drive crazy. GM pointed out that his sset was really confident, playing for the people in the front. lazy magnet was epic– full band with GM on drums, sakiko on keyboards, scott on bass, guest solo by jason mcgill on ssaxophone. alternately epic prog, tender late-nite, and thrilling form, with a dash of steely dan and always the undercurrent of wide-awake void-staring. it ruuuuled. the body wass having equipment troubles and only played one song before giving up, a total bummer. nightwounds didn’t make it, but black pus filled in, which ruled. all in all, an epic night.

oh, i got a messs of the dvds, which i’ll have at the store if anyone out there wants one. i also got the new CF book, “POWR MASTRS”, which rules so hard and maybe more on that later

first, i should mention the drive down and back, a heroic 28 hours. obviously i cannot drive so MT did the whole thing, and splendidly. we left rhode island at 2:30pm, borrowing mikey hotsauce’s cool newish station wagon. on the way down we stopped at a waffle house somewhere in south carolina and at rad librarian travis fristoe’s place in gainesville, then heave ho to miami where we met up with jim drain at his and naomi’s studio, got some burritos, and crashed out at their cool condo. the whole miami fine art / condominium living scene is totally weird but i quickly got over it enough to function.

wednesday we woke up and went to the gallery (which is the front quarter of naomi and jim’s studio) and spent most of the day taking down mike’s installation. the gallery/studio is great– it’s in this totally weird mall where miami chill-out jungle music bumps 24/7, and at least a third of every storefront is empty so that the building owner can display his art collection (which is an investment in cred upping). i think they barter for rent with their own artworks, but this wasn’t clear. as i may have said before, jim and naomi are big-name artists, and i like what they do, but i still don’t understand how they get over, unless the whole fine arts world boils down to a few eccentric multimillionaires, which i suspect it does. while i was there they received a commission to make pieces for an “artists only” party to be held during art basel, which as you know is “the most important art show on the American continent and a cultural and social highlight of the Americas”. it’s commissioned works, so they get paid without the works ever selling– naomi wanted jim to make a couch for their condo. i told him to make a year’s worth of groceries. hey, i was just riffin’.

that night we got pizza at a place in this pedestrian mall and watched people. the pizza was pretty good- huge square slabs about 1/4 the size of a conventional large, which were then cut into nine pieces. it was boutique style, meaning there were a bunch of pizzas already made, and you selected from which pizza you wanted a slice, then they heat it up for you. they didn’t have plain, which i think is a strike against– i got the plainest they had, which was spinach and bleu cheese. it was good. the really weird thing about the pizza place is that every set of toppings was like an entire salad– pine nuts, cucumbers, barbeque chicken, stuff like that. two different styles had hard boiled eggs. two! eating pizza and pointing out funny-looking people put me at ease and i had a way way better time than if we had gone to a fancy party or upscale bar or society art opening. also i got the feeling that jim was happy to have some real goons to dirtbag around with. after a while we went off to a condo that a friend of mike’s lives in, to try and use the hot tub– we couldn’t get it to turn on so we just dangled our feet in it and talked shit for a while. the condo was called, no lie, “nirvana”, but i guess everyone was already way over making nirvana jokes because i was the only one. the air mattress i was sleeping on had a hole in it but i think this is something more mattresses should have- i went to sleep super comfy, when i deserved comfort; i woke up on the floor, when i needed a reminder of an uncaring world.

the next day we got up and got breakfast and cuban coffee at a restaurant with huge square plates that are more like cafeteria trays. this was a place of big eaters. the coffee (which i now drink occassionally) was really strong and really really sweet, and comes with ten paper thimbles to drink out of, the idea being that one cut supplies the whole job site. me and MT each drank one obviously. just like that the return trip began and we went back up to northern florda to stay a night with mike’s folks, which i enjoyed. i love seeing trees from which apples don’t fall far, and ma and pa taylor were just this sort, telling jokes, cooking egg rolls, and being catty. we all watched a comedy movie with a hilariously long and awkward sex scene, it was cool. the next day we stopped in gainesville to see mike’s brother dan taylor, then hauled, in the fashion we were accustomed, towards home. all in all i had a great time, me and mike t are still friends, and now i owe jim a bunch of cool toys and comics for the cool toys and comics he gave me.

oh, i got my grant application in the other day, it’s not perfect but i did it.

me and sheryl ann just got back from another donut excursion, this time to the park ave dunkin donuts down near mill street (which is 24 hours (it’s 2 in the morning)). it’s true that i haven’t really been writing about this donut odyssey (trying to visit, with sheryl ann, every donut place in worcester, excluding some dunkin donutses) in the depth i envisioned. in fact, i haven’t been writing nearly at all but who needs to write a dead day to death.

anyway, just to give you an idea, i’ll say that right now our favorite is gonuts 4 donuts, on park ave– it’s a little drivethrough place but there’s a nice outdoor hangout zone, and i got a glazed that was, i don’t know, really really really good, not too sticky, in a cakey style but very fresh. the dunkins on shrewsbury st had a cool cadre of old men and we got to watch a really good window washer and listen to tennis on tv. also there were 2 motorcycle cops there that both got muffins and ice tea, which is cute, but, uh, they still had guns and stuff. donut cafe II is run by cool older ladies and has a really regular crowd, serving coffee in what i feel is a slight variant on “the” classic diner mug. while we were there a man finished his whatever at the counter, then went to pay at the register and asked for “a bottle of room temperature water”. i think that’s all so far. oh, and it’s fair to invision us walking around these neighborhoods quite a bit before and afterwards and talking about: growing up the son of an interior designer, buildings we would like to live in, “what used to be here”, the kind of nonsense i am afraid of, grant money, and of course, my new religion that (might) reward interestingness over traditional morality (although most likely rewards as such do not exist and survival is always interesting).

i’ve been trying to revamp the store, build some new stuff, change things around, make it less intimidating, and, you know, more information and more in formation.

tiny if if’s mom and dad are doing duck yao again, but as box lunch takeout, available at the artichoke co-op. today i got orange peel “chicken” with onion and brown rice, it was delicious and $5. there are also sandwiches for $3. all meals are vegan. they drop at 11:30, today was the first day and they ran out in ten minutes.

billy played his last show at gilrein’s last thursday– he was not getting paid as much as other musicians that bring in less people, and generally being treated like “a local musician”, not the world class talent that he is. anyway i think it’s a good move- shows at the ship room are cheaper and more fun and the community’s better and it’s more “traditional”. lately i’ve been hassling billy about not being traditional enough- he should do what older blues musicians did– be totally innovative musically, and create his own mythology.

sunday was the start on the street festival and i pretty cleaned up as i expected, selling the popular t-shirts. i also passed out a lot of flyers for the store and talked to a lot of people. every time kids dressed kind of punky walked by i yelled “hey, you punks!”. if they came over i gave them a flyer and told them about the store. if they didn’t look i yelled “you’re not really punks!”. i also ran into old friends from high school, which is an especial delight.

i played a last-minute show at the firehouse on friday- one of the two bands that was scheduled to play canceled, and a frantic brian called me for a favor. i didn’t have time to practice, and i really messed up a lot, it was embarrassing. everyone else knew the words except me. i’m playing again at clark this saturday, and i’m really not pumped about it. i’m trying to put together a special computer set, but i don’t really have a lot of time left. it’s not really a show– i’m going to be background music for a collaborative building thing that jean is doing. i should’ve just said no, now it’s too late. oh well. the event (in which you help build a city out of available materials) is going to be fun and it’s at the traina center, 92 downing street. the website is here.

the fashion show is this friday, at the firehouse. i don’t know what time it’s going to be at yet.

i’m spreading myself thin again/still. i’m really psyched about going to miami.

for previous pages see the category “comics“.

for previous pages see the category “comics“.

saturday was danzig day at the store which fuckin’ ruled- scully gave out five haircuts, lots of people brought clothes to get printed (roughly equal numbers of crimson ghost and roy orbison), the store was packed, and we raised $43 for the new vigilante skatepark i’m not allowed to talk about. like i said, it ruled. pictures forthcoming.

saturday night was a big party in providence for the dirt palace’s 7 year anniversary, and i got really psyched seeing people i’ve known for a long time get stronger and weirder and blow up in their fields. even getting stranded the next day was fun- going to the flea market and the pond, and talking shop with sasha, who, inspired in part by HBML, opened her own store in providence called “forever XV”. ok, so sasha’s store pays her a living wage, which i’m obviously jealous of, as my store routinely loses me money i don’t have. but by her own admission, she’s largely selling known names to weird collectors, people who “frequently” (and suspiciously i might add) spend upwards of $100. so while i may not make the living i am clearly owed, i still corner the market in selling items to people that have never seen items such as these.

oh, i set up a guestbook at paul’s subtle request, and i mention paul in the header information and paul was the first person to post. maybe this is going to turn out a mess, but maybe it’ll be nice to have a “town square” as paul put it, to air out laundry of all sorts unrelated to a specific post. paul paul paul. everything paul.

fujichia: mostly psyched, some fiscal woes
fujichia: the batwing thing, pointy teeth, look of desperation
fujichia: how does laundry happen?

what do you think, we’re all asleep out here? been working on then giving up on certain internet schemes, went to the recycling center with JVW to get parts for a space city i’m building on the ceiling of HBML, eric YF took me and a bunch of folks out for ice cream boats (”YF” stands for “your friend”), maybe i did sleep a little, when it rained, but if i did, it was nice. new art show is up at the store, all cool drawings by jeff “noise nomads” hartford. he made a catalog for the show too, and it rules. stop by and pick one up. also i finally installed the soundtrack element of the sun ra solar myth planetarium- it’s two walkmans playing different sun ra songs controlled by an ingenious device with tiny momentary pushbuttons on a turtle’s back that turn each one on, or both at once. it’s further mesmerizing, and now people hang out inside it a lot.

i’m working on a zine for the 1st anniversary of the store, should be epic, sick, etc. if i ever finish it. i wrote an introduction that was going going going about the history of punk inspiration in worcester going back personally through the firecracker and the space and the go go and the WAG and then abbie hoffman and birth control and sacco and vanzetti and emma goldman’s ice cream shop, then i replaced 80% of it with a single word sentence - “Hi!”. too big a task for right now’s attempt at a nigh-overwhelming amount of curious detritus, plus what’s my attack- to talk about influence or be the influence? wild dogs v. intellectual snobs?

ugh! this site’s been down for a few weeks i guess due to server problems that resulted in a switching of servers which i didn’t have to actually deal with (and good thing)but i did have to wait for (which is nothing new). writing is such a huge part of my learning and remembering process that when i can’t or don’t write, things start to go bad. this time i did ok, though (i think). so what happened in the interim? oh, the weather was nice, i walked around.

• there were a couple shows, enough that i got temporarily sick of shows. i will highlight one- nadir, the dungeoneers, trap them, furnace, and some other band with a basement-themed name, at maniac mansion (in the basement obviously). this was supposed to be the dungeoneers tape release but things didn’t happen in time (as they tend to not), so it was merely “the second-to-last show” (before matt carroll returned from germany and the terribles could continue being a band). nadir played before them and totally destroyed. i know no one likes to be put in a box, but nadir is a grind-oriented band from worcester. guitar drums vocals, and everything is so fast and so tech it’s like watching hummingbirds- all wrist, all twitch. i’ve seen them a couple times and i like it more and more, and more and more they make other bands on the bill look like a bunch of sleepy kittens by comparison. i don’t remember who the third band was- my understanding is that hardcore is now (and has been for some time) driven by a sort of nerd so psyched on specific parts of previous canonical hardcore bands that only nerds can really tell you if a band’s sources are valid and their construction sound, making them good. but no need to hate, as electronic dance music is also driven by specific tempo ranges, lustrous clichés, and precision homage, and that’s still fun (though also not my idiom). anyway, i absolutely had to leave halfway through, as 2.5 bands is my limit in the basement of maniac mansion- all the smoke you know, but mostly it’s the low ceilings that force me into a bad posture which gives me horrible stomach cramps.

• there were these beautiful russians visiting some friend of a friend and we ended up hanging out and talking about music, prisons, hygeine, and the internet. the best part was when one of them asked me why punks didn’t shower and i gave her a brief but thorough breakdown of the ways in which not showering displayed the best of the punk ethos. basically, that being OK with your own body odor is an enourmous step towards being OK with your body; that it is the tantalizing smell of action; that smelling like a person sets one apart in a clear and unfakeable way from the the beauty standards of a possibly large and certainly objectionable set of people who would rather smell like a supermarket aisle, and more in line with the rest of the animal kingdom. the one talkative lady told me i was very funny, and moreover that i “say good things”, which made me really happy and to some degree rescued me from a foggy outlook. she had a weird shirt with a very high moderately floppy collar, long straight black hair with one ear poking through, high elfish cheekbones, and sharp facial features set farther away from each other than might seem reasonable in a planning stage. in short, the sort of person it is simply nice to be amid, like a full-spectrum lightbulb.

• my show at julian’s with adam gnade was really fun- i was really stressed out but all the stress just made me want more and more to get lost in myself and my friends and abandon myself to rogue operators and sing super fucking loud, which is what i did and it worked. also they gave me really good food– i got a side order of asparagus because i’d never buy it for myself, it was delicious.

• went to the art museum two weeks in a row (still free on saturdays before noon), first to see the pettibon / ed ruscha exhibit, then to manage a scavenger hunt for esther and jen.

  • pettibon/ruscha killed. obviously i like both of these guys a ton. ruscha (“ru-SHAY”) for his great boringness, his californiosity, his craft, and for being another great creator in the perambulatory mode (basing his paintings on things overheard while walking around the city). i look at “styrene they called her”, his book of word paintings, at least once a month. pettibon i like for his lineage (black flag duh), his subject matter (scummy hippies, trains, surfers on huge waves), his goony style, his handwriting, his inclusion of texts, and the texts he includes. both i like a lot for their dry wit, and for employing reading as a skill. the show at the art museum was 1/2 about “the end” and 1/2 about “the bible”. i expected their collabs to feature pettibon on the images and ruscha on the texts, but it was actually quite the reverse, and not a disappointment. it’s still at the art museum, i’d really like to hear a review by someone with a black flag tattoo.

  • the scavenger hunt totally ruled, a version of an idea i had a while back regarding my own personal relationship to the worcester art museum (with the ultimate goal of getting others to develop such a relationship as well, and work the paintings of the museum into a local artistic vocabulary). the scavenger hunt featured about 20 items- all pieces in the museum. the clues were jokes about or things i think about or funny things in any of the given paintings- “a lady that is a spaceship”, “a dude, holding”, “a garish and sinister mess from which the only comfort that can be had is tackiness.”. it went great and they got most of them (with a little help). i’ll post the full list of items when i get the sheet back from esther (maybe never).

well, that’s enough of the past off my brainback to allow me some rest. there’s always more, but we are now sufficiently caught up that i can go draw, or make food, or read comic books, or anything, and not feel the weight of recent memory compounding. glad to be back.