wednesday’s show was pretty fun– lots of kids came out to see ghost mice, and i feel like i did a good job controlling the crowd, even getting everyone at the end to be super SUPER don’t-squeak-the-floorboards quiet for an acapella almost-whispering song with low-battery metronome accompaniment. no big surprises except that i sought for and achieved a half-decent dionne warwick cover– “didn’t we?” (ok, it was written by jimmy webb, who also wrote “macarthur park” (!!!)). matt fox was good, he has a song i like where he crams too many words in and says “GONNAWAKEUPINTHEMORNINGWITHACUPOFCOFFEEANDABLUEBERRYMUFFINYEAHHHHH” over and over again. ghost mice was good and got lots of people singing along and clapping, even though it was all acoustic (no PA) so when people clapped you couldn’t hear shit but clapping people. oh well! heathers was the standout- identical twins from ireland, two voices, one guitar. sometimes they would sing in TITE harmony, sometimes in counterpoint, and they have identical vocal chords? so tite and ecstatic churchlike trad pre revival FOLKlike. ESPECIALLY with all those great irish phonemes dipping around everywhere. jbruce was at that show, which got me psyched, and when this band came on he was BUGGIN u bet! and when the played they looked straight at each other (which shell shag does too and is such a good posture).

other bands with twins are listed at this twins resource page– breeders, bee gees, styx, nelson, proclaimers, tegan and sarah, more. the thompson twins weren’t twins, but there is a band called “the thompsons” that is? and oddly, the best band with (or without) twins is missing from the list– obviously i’m talking about the shangri-las, who had two sets (of twins). maybe they were held off the list for inclusion on another super-awesome list that never materialized because it was only one item large. oh, and PS- “disfigured freaks” (cassette on unskilled labor) wasn’t really “identical twins from hong kong” as claimed– it was totally obvious that it was just kites with other gloves on. even discogs.com knows that.

anyway the next night the Hs and the GMs played bread and roses’ last show, in boston ma, but i didn’t go but i wish i did. i played a lot of shows with bread and roses, and i liked them, and at least once i self-consciously set out to write a song like they would write. puzzled panther played a lot of shows with them, and it was great, when tim and rich were learning about the many facets of punk, to show them 1. an acoustic punk band that 2. had positive songs about 3. social justice issues and 4. awesome sing along parts. fare thee well bread and roses!

if you read all the way down here, here’s the link to didn’t we?.

yesterday’s bonezone / terribles show at the solomon pond mall newbury comics was… totally weird. it was record store appreciation day, so across the country there were events and special releases to try and get people into their neighborhood record store. anyway terribles / bone zone were asked to play by a friend of ours who works there, but at a low volume, so as not to anger the store next door (nb: the name of the place is “the kitchen store”). the feudal operations of a mall are fascinating to me– the terribles did indeed play too loud, and the store was fined. a mall cop was indeed fat, and on a segway with a bike helmet on, and would cruise behind the scene periodically. actual white male power holders would watch from across an expanse with holstered weapons (walkie talkies). kids made fun of us nonsensically as we loaded out, really just saying nonsense and i’d be like “what are you talking about?” and they’d laugh amongst themselves like classic feudal villiage idiots exercising the only power they have– nonsense towards outsiders. there was even a goon– a thick guy that would stare at us unabashedly as we stood around, and even followed us to the car– an overt undercover security guy or a sexual predator or possibly both. the entire duration of the show we were all on the brink of doing something bad, but didn’t want to get our friend fired. this tension just made me feel… dumb. and outside of myself. a few kids came in and watched, but mall psychology involves not trusting things that don’t come down the pipe from trusted channels, and to be towards coolness and passivity, and away from hotness and activity. as bone zone set up these kids in metallica tees were hanging out, but then when they played they left, then afterwards, they came back to talk about how they were also in a band. MZ: oh, what’s your band called? // the kids: void // me: !!!!!!!!!!!! //. are kids too dumb to google their shit already? despite “void” being a common word, the dischord page is fourth down! come on, i thought this was the internet generation! anyway i wrote this on a piece of paper and handed it to them:

wikipedia.org/void(band)

don’t tell me in the comments that the URL is malformed, i know. should be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_(band). live and learn. also, MZ was wearing the void logo shirt he made.

the most “revolution” part of the whole debacle was a lady with her kids who was watching the show, and MZ saying “do you want to play the bass?” and it totally worked!

purtle was talking to her kids at the time, saying “right now your mom is playing bass in a punk band!” and they were looking right at her, but still they did not register anything. it was like that video of the gorilla moonwalking through the basketball game and your brain won’t even let you see it because it’s too far out.

after the show we me and mel, ML, pars and MZ hopped in the hatchback and chugged to northampton for dan and george‘s weekly 60s soul / frat rock jamboree. d&g, if you’re reading this, i had a really really great time! as we got in the car to leave worcester that evening, we realized that both the grateful dead show and the new england hardcore and metal festival were happening simultaneously, and the streets were full of curious hangers-on, plus random errant clubbers, remaking the hometown into foreign and compelling territory. still we drove to northampton, were the first to arrive and the last to leave, and had a perfect time strutting and handclapping, with the dial on solid CHOOGLE. after a point (but well into it) i started to get kind of freaked out from there being so many people and such a large number of tiny interactions, and heat and claustrophobia, and a general water hole spring time mating ritual scenario opacity, and i couldn’t go outside (no reentry after midnight!). i had to sit down near a drafty exit and just stare at the floor for a little while. to be frank, my party personality crashed– memory overload. of course, once we got outside, the system reset- walking around again, and in the night air, and in the world of buildings and destinations and inertia, it was, well, it was the world again. not a bad experience; novel, and instructive, but a strange cap on the night. top celeb in attendance: merc! who i haven’t seen in a calender year and will be jobless while i woodshed comic book concepts at the ca$hman basement dojo this early may, which will be a session and a half in itself.

i’ve been lugging around an old imac (bondi blue, baby) for too long, today i’m getting all the old files (mostly music, mostly unreleased) off it and chucking it (the computer) into my own lungs via the landfill and ten pounds of particulate exhaust en route. the main logistical problem is that i can’t figure out how to plug the damn thing into the house network, so i’m loading everything on to a 4 gig thumb drive and sneakernetting it over. of course, even though storage is not an issue, if i try to copy too much to the drive in one pass, the whole thing goes belly up– i have to babysit, dragging 5 or ten files at a time. a pain in the place to be sure, but not an actionably-deep hell. anyway i pull stuff off, i shuffle it around, let’s see what we can make of it. LOTS of unreleased whatever from the past 10 (!) years, some of it ok, some of it totally annoying. also tons of old email, which i have already been enjoying looking through. what to do with non-public digital artifacts?

jamie decided last month (“metal month”) that this month was going to be “finish what you started” month, which i’m psyched about but where does it end? it didn’t really pop for me until the other day i was hanging out with jong ouida and drinking coffee and me giving him (and me) a pep talk about stopping reading corruptive french novels and reading william blake instead and asking at critical junctures, W.W.W.B.D.? so then that night i sat down and made a (lousy) cover for my 24 hour comic, then the next day, ran out and printed some up. din dan don! but also, where does it end? this is the million dollar question, “it” being “finishing what you started”. do you catch my meaning? do you follow me? do you pick up what i’m laying down?

the days since have been largely superb, a very nice time in provvvvvvvvidence, dinner at nboom’s new spacious solo living scenario, late night BS sesh with scott rebar and just cozz, then the next day, ALL DAY hanging out in the sunny street in mostly one spot with no guilt or tension or apprehension, like a dandelion or a stain you think is a puddle. at night a weird worcester show at bldg 16 featuring dungeoneers, bloody swimsuit, and blister pack. i sold zacherlino my old drums so he doesn’t have to feel weird about smashing them– as a consequence the dungeoneers set was batshit insane, uncomfortable, and occasionally, overwhelmed by spectacle. when the show ended some kid tried to talk to our mr z, but he grabbed the kid and dragged him into the shower with him fully clothed and turned the water on, yelling and screaming. what’s crazy is that he’s a high school teacher and somehow a kid from his school was there– there’s a distinct blackmail possibility.

once i got back home to worcester it stopped being so nice out, snowing even, and also for other reasons i got pretty bummed and crazy feeling. finish what you started month continues… i know now that i have to close down the store and most likely leave town, and move on to the next big project. mixed feelings obviously, but mostly: psyched for the future and worried about money. no concrete plans. this war had such promise…

well, i’ve rested and eaten and i drank some coffee and maybe this is unfair but i’m still mad that no one from worcester except ML and my mom came to the big art opening in providence. i worked really hard on it, thinking about my friends the whole time, how great it would be to show them what i was capable of. there were times in the construction of the piece (“my life 08″) where i really wanted to give up, but i wanted to do a good job and make everyone proud, so i kept pushing myself. at the end of the night i realized that ML was right, and actually no one was coming. this was really a slap in the face.

in all fairness, i didn’t do as good a job at telling people about the show as i could’ve– i told every person i came in contact with, and i put up a big post on this very website, but i didn’t send anything out to the lists. so, it could be the case that people have dedicated a part of their brainspace to email– when an upcoming event doesn’t have a corresponding email, it doesn’t really register. i can picture this. but mike called around looking for a ride in on the day of and was unilaterally shut down, so many people did make a conscious choice to not attend. and i can forgive any individual for not being able to make it, i am not that vain. it’s that it was almost everyone, that’s the kicker. the other thing is that i didn’t stress that it was important to me that people come to the opening. i guess this is a classic marriage sitcom cliché, but is it unreasonable to want people to want what we want without telling them we want them to want it?

riding the bus back with ML we got into the conversation: do we stay in worcester just because we know where everything is and all our stuff is here? are we babies? also, are we surrounded by babies? does the city of worcester self-select for people that don’t see the value of going for it? i can’t remember if i said this before but there’s an apocryphal story about newly-hatched eagles, that their mother holds them up to the sun and the eagles that cannot hold the gaze of the sun and look away are thrown off a cliff to die. is this my life here in reverse?

it goes without saying that there was a good amount of my friends from providence there, but that’s not a fair comparison because they’re right there. mike t had very positive things to say about my work, which is ultimately the most important thing, as i greatly value his opinions, and he really helped me out in getting me on this show and by putting my piece right in front, the first thing you see as you walk in (which i know caused others some stress during the construction process). also, he’s really helped me out every time he could since the very beginning of our friendship. mike, i think it’s a dumb idea that you are moving to miami, but i kind of understand. i will really really miss you but perhaps that’s a topic for another time.

quik update from swamped brainstates:

• tonite’s mystery band show is at the go go, 8pm, followed by a 1000 HOLMES DJS karaoke mash-up set that’s going to be OFF. DA CHAIN.

• had to ankle tomorrow’s beantown zinetown boston zine fair, on account of so busy and really, i won’t have any zines by tomorrow morning.

• actually, i do have some zines, copies of the new newspaper me and mickey dm have been treading on, but i only have an advance of 200 from a run of 2000, so i’m holding them for sunday, when i can give them to people i don’t know and the people slap my face.

• sunday is the start on the street fest, which i’m playing at, at like, 11am, which is kind of ideal. also i’ll be sharing a table with Jujube Buckmaster and Kit-Kat Perry. TIIIIIIIIITE.

• slight possibility of having a new comic book by sunday. SLIGHT. i don’t know what i’ll call it- i left my sketchbook with all my names in it at the store. which reminds me, DMO- i thought up some BAD NEW RAP DUDES, but they aren’t that great: LL MacPherson, Virginia Slim Thug, Fat Joan of R Kelly, Jodeci 3PO… strickly mort drucker parody-grade stuff, except one that i remember being really funny but if so why can’t i remember it?

• i can’t remember if i mentioned this already but october 1st, at BLDGXVI in providence, the first show kind of by JACOB TERRENDIBLENDES. AKA “the TERRIBLES play the music of JACOB BERENDES featuring JACOB
BERENDES singing the words part of the music”.

i messed around a little with the site, let me know if anything looks or acts wonky (that shouldn’t). the major thing you might notice (but not if you get the feed) is that now displayed on the sidebar under the recent comments is the day’s daily panel. that’s cute, right?

you know when it’s hot all day and then it rains way hard and it’s awesome but you say well, it’s awesome but i’m happy i’m not out there and then you’re like wait, am i? and then you’re like no? that happened the other day but by the time i had emptied my pockets of everything ruinable (everything except soda money and keys) the rain had really let up to a degree that a mythical regular person would enjoy walking in and stubborn in my resolve i walked a really long way away from my point of departure until it hammered down again and mission accomplished. it was cool, i used to walk late at night a lot, this was like that except it didn’t make me depressed. i walked all the way to the 7 11 near my old house for a suicide soda, which i’m sure helped to elevate the mood, although also someone told me about ionizing properties of falling droplets of water that cause your feelings to better but now that i write it down and look at it, that seems like pretty bogue science. ok, maybe it’s just this, which we all know: there’s a certain flavor of “dumb + confusing + valueless” fun that, when realized, is a fine draught of amiable meaninglessness.

and sspeaking of no-wrong-answerhood, last night’s incisor / tinsel teeth / nadir show was a ripper with lots of fake blood and white clothing and masks and nice dresses. mike’s new pedal pooped out so even though we practiced a hundred times (aka 4 times) the universe conspired once again to sound us like ten eggs in a box in a swamp, WHICH IS FINE. nadir has a 7″ out, which rules, and it’s two different genres if you play it on 45 (as intended) or 33 1/3. tinsel teeth was good although it’s awkward to watch someone’s unpicked wedgie.

sold more t shirts to the comic book store, so even though i’m pretty strapped for cash, i got some awesome comics (utilizing the player’s discount that is “payment in trade”). i got 2 paperbacks of old family circus (“PEACE, MOMMY, PEACE!” (1969) and “WANNA BE SMILED AT?” (1970)), 2 issues of jack kirby’s 2001 comic, and the new fantagraphics book of the comics of lyonel feininger. the family circus books are really good– better design than later ones and the jokes seem less trite maybe, or you maybe you think they’re more “classic” or whatever; the 2001 comics are pretty nuts– a ten issue series filling in the gaps between the apes and the spacemen in batshit kirby style; the feininger stuff is, duh, awesome. i’ll try to do a full review once i digest a little.

friday there was an art opening for mike t at HBML, and both the show and the set up ruled. the show is a lot of new prints and drawings, plus a limited edition cereal that mike made special for HBML, with a cool 4-color silkscreened box, and inside, actual breakfast. the set up was kicking it all day with mike t, chip, nathan, and ML. it was a beautiful day, the bench saw a lot of action. lots of awesome folks came out for the show itself, it ruled. afterwards there was a three-stage attack on duck yao, which culminated in all of us at one long thanksgiving-style table, shoveling taoist eats into our stinky mouths. perfection!

saturday me and purtle drove to north ham town for another weekend of play rehearsals, which was once again really really fun. last week we pretty much just hung out with madeline and gossiped, this week we got to explore the town a little more, we went to the skatepark (which is pretty good), hung out with josh TC, played some handball, and on top of that, we hung out with madeline and gossiped (which is fun). the play is going great and me and mike discovered that with all this monkey time (and a sort of carte blanche for hyjinx) we’re developing a practically marxian confidence, with minds less quieted than flowy. sure there will always be those times in the preposterously expensive ice cream shop with magnificent yoga instructor where you find yourself describing the cover art for munchie, in which a leather-jacketed hitler puppet surfs a pizza over loni anderson, and your mind is telling your brain “shutupshutupshutup” and your brain isn’t telling your mouth. but that’s why weeks have next weeks, RITE?!!?

incidentally handball is really fun, we’ve got to get a crowtown session burning. oh, and next weekend the play begins for real, with actual strangers that i spit on a little bit. oh, and i half-secured a ride for this wednesday’s show in turner’s falls, so eat it!

picture above from daily panel, which is still turning.

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.

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 fixed the images on all the white vinegar scans, so now hopefully they’ll all load faster and look better. i went to three different supermarkets. i cashed in $90 worth of change. i ate a candy bar from canada. i’m sleepy. at the last supermarket i went to tonight there was a baby in a shopping cart and her and her dad were singing “hey baybay” “hey baybay” over and over again, like in the “hey baybay” song. everyone in line was pretty psyched.

the recording of the commentary for the corleone DVD went pretty good. it was me and ML and MT, and MT was shit-talking lots of people in the video, which made me and ML nervous. i feel like we all said some pretty dumb shit that someone at some point in the near future is going to call us on, but at the same time, who even listens to commentary tracks? no one, right? AJ and lee recorded their parts right before us and left soda and cookies in the room, which ruled. also there was a cat that could say hello. oh, and all the videos were good but the one for snake apartment is really really gross (which is good). i thought my video was gross, but this one is way grosser, way to go brian.

i’m starting to get my finances in order and i’m ordering spirulina online because proper nutrition helps me think better. don’t worry jenine, the air is still thick with the fetid odor of stupid website ideas, but i can’t say exactly when the launch of the newest (and easily the dumbest) will be– i’ve got to stack the cheddar a little higher first, and also melissa #1 is coming to visit in a few days.