today and tomorrow i’ll be packing up / cleaning up to move literally three blocks away, moving in with little lando, clammy cluckmaster, belly barfson, amba lance and all those other rats (not literal rats) at Distinct Hastle. i’m psyched to move and to have control over my space (in re: painting the floors, nailing things where i want them to be nailed, etc.) but moving is ssuch a pain when you have such an extensive and varied library as i do. anyway when i go a while without writing i forget things, so i want to make a brief nod in the direction of my recent memory for a half second–

the party was fun although promised pictures are still forthcoming and will remain that way for a time. in the meantime i’ll entertain guesses based on these buzzwords: triumphant, suave, monstruous, mystical/mythical, still alive, and with flowy appendages. the party was lousy with college students, which is fine but gets depressing (to me alone, for my own reasons) as the night winds out. mixtape triumphant although it sure cleared the floor at first (“gravy” by dee dee sharp is apparently not as much a call to arms to others as to me, which is a shame especially considering the lyrical content). i left while my memories were still beautiful, but to be plain, the night did not stand still or turn inside out, or make everything glass, or suddenly be a magical glade, or offer any noteworthy respite from the day, although i did experience the effect of seeing someone’s face melt off, quite casually and some hours after i left.

maybe soon, maybe never:
• new directions in mixtapes
• trying hard to not be a bummer
• how anything can happen but usually doesn’t and how to address this issue
• review of recent archie acquisitions

mild chance the show friday might be totally totally new, and technically a “flash flood” show, will keep the readers informed.

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”.

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.

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”.

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.

(more…)

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.

yesterday’s stArt on the street was ssuper duper fun, the best one yet and they’ve all been awesome. i split a space with jjb buckmaster and nik perry, which was really fun, and which gave me more ability to take walks around and see other people’s stuff. other exhibitors that i knew included ashleigh, who had her sculpey jewelery and home-made hula hoops; eamon, who had paintings; audra, who had paintings and sculpture; and john guida, who had a total yard sale of paintings– no table, no tent, just a blanket with everything saloned out.

the crowd was great, tons of people from the very beginning right up to the end. i only caught a little bit of the music (ok, just bone zone and bj snowden) but what i saw was great and it’s my understanding that this tip was indicative of the entire iceberg. the ubiquitous industrial sonic echo played, of course. hey, even i got on the mic to play a few songs at the second stage. pictures of my set are here, from the part where mz, matt carroll and flo grabbed traffic cones as megaphones and sang back-up vocals for me, which made me super super happy. i met tons of new folks and passed out tons of flyers and copies of the new newspaper me and mickey dm have been working on. i made bank but, well, not to be cocky, but i kind of always clean up at these affairs. more to the point, all the vendors i talked to (which is a select group, but whatever) did good. john guida, god bless him, came up to me late in the day with a big smile, wearing a cool macrame wristband / coffee cousy he just bought, almost embarrassed at how high the cheddar he stacked up stacked up. middle andrew (andrew oesch) and jean coz made a huge cardboard building building party that was super busy all day, and when it came time to smash it all down and flatten all the cardobard for recycling, it was all pushed into an alley, where bone zone set up and played the funnest ten-minute set ever– cardboard flying everywhere and people being crazy crazy crazy. i already posted the video, which looks like serious braveheart, but watch it again and realize how rare it is to have a punk show that is either outside, at a festival, or during the day, plus with tons of actual kids, and cops twenty feet away, that is even close to creating this level of blissful abandonment (from which all art stems). so much fun. it got shut down a few songs in because people were on the roof, which was not something anyone could control, but oh well. joe and tobin were both in the thick of it, and when we all came out joe was the first person i saw so i grabbed him and said “PUNKS RULE OK!!!!!”. he was like “YAAAAAAARRRGGHHH!!!!!!”.

basically, from all points of view and from every level of participation (and there was a million ways to participate) and in every quantifiable and qualitative way, it was worth everyone’s while in a big way. super big thanks to the organizers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

all my pictures are up on pretty alright– i saw tons of bloggers out snapping digicams, here’s jeff, claudia, and brendan. oh, and flickr tag startonthestreet

BONE ZONE at stArt in the street, worcester 2008 from fujichia katsuda on Vimeo.

holy shittttttttttttttttt

this was at yesterday’s “stArt in the street” streetfest.

ok, so the update over the phone thing doesn’t work ssuper super great, but what do you want for nothing? the past week has been really good, lots of thinly-velied and sometimes veiled not at all requests from me to other people that they make dinner for me and also i stay at their house, WHICH IS COOL. that was providence. return to worcester on the saturday and immediately jumped into the big mystery band show, which ruled. there was an auction that i was the auctioneer for, to raise money for HBML, and that was splendid also– lots of people donated skills and services like cranio-sacral massages and time in a recording studio and a piggyback to anywhere, and then i fast-talked and lots of people bid in a mild frenzy, pretty ideal. as is the custom, all the bands were great and many of them had people that had never been in bands before, and you could see them realizing that their own creative instincts were valid. the audience was lots of people. the second show of the summer is this friday, at the go go, it’s gonna rip.

ssunday i hung out with my sister, my brurinlaw, and my niece. sheryl-ann, if you’re out in oak-land reading this, you’ll be pleassed i’m sure to see the photoevidence of this on the photo blog. the day was fun and the baby is great, and me and the brurinlaw talked more about the flash game idea i had, DONKEY COMMAND.

the installation thing i’m doing, the grand opening got pushed back to the 26th or 27th, which frees me up to do tons of get-ready stuff for the big start on the street streetfest this sunday, plus the boston zine fair this saturday. as it turns out, i’m playing music at the start in the street thing, which is fine but really just one more thing to stress about, but it’ll be fun, plus i’m getting paid, which is good, because i have to move out of where i’m now living at, and into a more expensive place.

me and mickey DM are meeting tomorrow to put the layout down of the new broadsheet magazine, previously called RHODODENDRON FESTIVAL, now i think to be called NEW PARIS GAZETTE, or something like that. tonight until late, finishing writing everything.

fujichia: when it rains, it pours.
fujichia: it’s always raining something.

other quick news:
• the new empty mountain site looks hecka tite bro…
• robot finds kitten, the video game that was the sole entrant to a contest i created 10 years ago has been included as a minigame in a recent PSP release. more news here. also, RFK came preloaded on dave paquette’s mp3 player.
• peter sibley reps a paris of the eighties tshirt in the group shot for the software project he’s been working on, which (the software) is nuts, which was recently launched into outer space for some reason.

well, sure enough a few days go by and my memory’s completely shot. let’s see what we can dredge up, eh?

friday one of my favorite bands, best friends forever played at the go go with the terribles, dead mom the dog (previously the foundation), and bob carlton. i was bummed because i didn’t get asked to play, despite being requested by the bffs, but then the terribles played my song “jla dreamer” and i sang and it felt great to sing for everyone. none can keep me down but me! BFF played last year at this time and it ruled, this time it was even better because everyone knew all the words, and people went super-crazy. they’re like the smiths to me, lots of clever lines about crushes, and everyone clutching at their own shirt and rolling their eyes back.

the next day they came to the shoppe and filmed some scenes for the cosby show idea, which is a little more than halfway through in the filming department, and is going on hiatus so i can do other things with my life. i’m giving myself two weeks from now to have a teaser commercial up on youtube, a few edited scenes, with the backdrops and laughtracks and everything. again, what we have so far is really really really awesome. andy fish is going to help me stage the premiere at the worcester art museum, a prospect i am delighted about.

saturday after work we went to the king st block party, which had as many people and as much music as last year, but everything suffered from lack of a bumpin’ sound system– speakers couldn’t be heard, music didn’t inspire dance. so let a lesson be took: bump it. slept over at purtle’s and all the next day hung out with him and j9, just shooting the shit and almost not going outside, which ended up driving everyone crazy. that night drove to providence for a terribles show at the intersection of batty and vermin st (no joke!) that had to get moved due to a trying-to-sleep baby. the car was briefly broke down and had to be pushed slightly uphill, a task that proved impossible due to the fact that it was biodiesel and the whole backend was greasy and slippery from condensed china lantern vapors. uh, everything was fine with it, ultimately– no worries.

got some more books, including the kirby bio “king of comics” (which is not exactly exceptional but is honorable and necessary and has more than a few amazing pages) and the incredible “rationale of the dirty joke” by g legman. i first learned about this latter book in this article (a good a place to start as any) from the new yorker some years ago. i remember quoting this specifically, but i’m unable to search out wherein i did:

“Legman was a handsome man, with thick dark hair, blue eyes, and a strong nose; because of chronic poverty, he was typically dressed in threadbare clothes with a length of rope for a belt. Friends describe him as tetchy and difficult, but exhilarating to be around. Academics were put off by this autodidact from the murky demimonde, whose rambling prose was full of marginal jeremiads. Legman, in turn, was disdainful of folklorists with Ph.D.s, whom he called “Phudniks” and “cacademics.” Yet, by freely making available to them materials that academic journals were afraid to publish, he helped establish erotic folklore as a respectable subject for scholarly study.”

the book is a tremendous work cataloging thousands of dirty jokes in their original dialects and providing their lineage across time and space, all in a very erudite but readable and even charming manner. in other words, it’s pretty much perfect. in addition to being the world’s foremost scholar of erotic folklore, legman was also instrumental in introducing the art of origami to the west, and claims to have invented both the slogan “make love not war” (possible), and the vibrating dildo (most certainly false). truly a character for the ages. here‘s another nice article on our man, here‘s his wikipedia entry.

oh yeah, and i saw DP last night and he told me he’s got a new band called “pregnant polaroids” and could they buy some songs off of me. big tiiiiiiiime…

i’m on another episode of the snow ghost community show, discussing my opinions on art (and everything) in worcester. i’ll cut you to the end, where i say something i think about a lot in a way i’ve never said before: “anything can grow in a garden– who cares?”. also i call everyone with pretentions of being a fine artist in worcester “a chump”. it’ll be great when that bites me in the ass. i’m trying to not look at the camera dead-on, in keeping with my decision to be 3/4 as much as possible.

today i went to the beach, which was great, but i didn’t eat all day and then at 7:30 got really really grouchy. earlier i passed to will and danielle the meme “D.W-P.O.M.F-B.”, a weird mishearing so psychologically damaging i can’t even write it on the internet.

september looks like it may be money month for me, with lots of small scams (aka jobs) for me to run– chiefly silk screening at RISD and the start on the street street fair. there’s more but i don’t want to ruin it. anyway, also bumping this [next] month is a big installation at the new as220 “mercantile block” space in providence. and this is big, like 20 foot ceilings, nigh-unlimited floor space. since it’s a really great opportunity for me, i’m doing that thing i like to do- something i’ve never done and have no skills at and haven’t really thought out supergreat. tentative title “my life 08″. oh, and i got the ask on the virtue of a couple snappy mass emails, nothing else. this is good, but “nothing else”? why not do the unthinkable and just write letters all day? no more nothing! anyway i’m trying to get two weeks off from my troubles to work on the bastard on site, but that may be unfeasible. but it would be fun, and as close to a vacation as i’ll ever get, it seems.

last night it was a little chilly, and get dark earlier than i had expected. today i realized that it was going to get really cold again, and in not a very long time. i’m strategizing for what will surely be, without adequate strategy, a really really rough winter.

here are my current best plans:

and

more filming of the cosby show friday and saturday got us almost to the half-way mark! of filming, leaving the arduous process of editing entirely on my shoulders. that aside, this week has been pretty tite. i got the HBML site redesign and catalog up and running, and already the orders have been coming in, in a slow trickle to be sure, but hopefully the sort of trickle that is indicative of a larger flood, and more stuff getting added every few days, so, uh, let’s be exponential, monied interests!

friday my bike finally caught a flat. well, actually, i got fed up with waiting and popped the tire with a pin. i know this seems ridiculous, but the tire had a worn-out section that went through the black (exterior) rubber AND through the white (interior) rubber, and you could see an eighth-inch section of the tube itself! and moreover, i’d been riding it like that since last winter! friday i was carrying my computer and pars’ camcorder, plus sshirts and stickers, and i just knew i was going to catch a flat and be late to the shoppe, so i took ML’s old ROLLFAST chopper, which he half-gave to me, and then just because, i went “way of the samurai” and popped that b myself, just to see how much it would take. the important part of this story is, riding the chopper totally rules. leopard-print banana seat, ape hanger handlebars, front and rear fenders… shiiiiiiiiit. it’s a knee-burner, and i have to walk it up all bu the most slight hills, and the understuffed seat is like sitting on another bony butt, but still… shiiiiiiiiit. i thought i would get a lot of people heckling me for being a tall dude on a tiny bike, or being mad for going hell slow in the street with wide squirrely steering, but surprisingly all i got was respect. also it was the latin american fest downtown this weekend, so lots of other lowrider bikes were out, their owners giving me what’s ups. really really fun. here’s a video, shot during nat needle’s “creative laundry” event at elm park: don’t blink.

friday like i said we got some more shooting in the can for the cosby show idea, plus dan and sue came in from boston and hung out, and delivered a bunch of awesome stuff for the shoppe from the sue jeivan lifestyle collection. that night there was a show at the wheelchair, featuring a band from holland called “antidote”, and other usual suspects. great crowd, the bands were fun, i had a blast. there were some brief moments where some people were just acting crazy, then one of them decided this craziness was an act of war, not of love, and things got tense and violent, and then they got broken up, and then one of the parties stormed over to the other party and you think “here we go again”, but then the stormer says “i was only being crazy, let’s hug each other”, then they do. this was totally cute and happened, like i said, a few times. the warhol twins were there except they both dyed their hair back to natural and it’s too hot to wear leather jackets or maybe they were only borrowed. also radical rodney the casual commie, bruce bertleman, dan and grant from nadir, (almost) all the stars. oh, and it was cameron’s 21st birthday, and he got wasted and lovey-dovey, it was totally cute.

during antidote matty buttcakes was throwing fireworks into the crowd from sort of a balcony area, and someone from the venue came up all hard like “are you the one throwing the fireworks?”. buttcakes was sheepishly like “yeah…” and the someone said “why are you throwing them in the middle of everyone? really hit someone!”. pause. “well, not just anyone… uh, hit that guy (points).”.

ok, lots of funny stuff happened at the show but the funniest was that when antidote started playing, all the cushions from the couches (which remain perennially soaked with beer spilled before, during, or after digestion) started flying, and there was a big greasy pillowfight, it was totally pure fun, and big silliness, and perfect. the band was initially psyched but then one of them got his hat pushed back and they stopped to apparently admonish the crowd though no one could tell what they were saying due to language and distortion issues. they resumed, the pillowfight resumed, and then they stopped again while someone collected all the pillows and hid them, then people decided en masse that if they could only be crazy in a sanctioned way it was peace out time, and the rest of the set was pretty lackluster on the audience side of things. if i’m ever in a band trying to get people to wall of death and someone gets from a backroom a boogie board and starts using it as a shield and i’m upset, wedgie me.

saturday more filming at the shop, although i went in early to have breakfast at the diner next door (which was decent) and read comic books i got tricked into buying the previous day (omega the unknown #s 1 – 6, which the comic books store ordered for me even though i only wanted #7 (which they did not order)). saturday a steady drip of folks, then on the way home i ran into vaula van who took me out to dinner at da lat, just when i was good and hungry. dan, you were right about me having it pretty sweet.