Excuse this mess. I sit here writing to you from my desk, streamlined 1940s round on one end, beat to shit and full of secretaries initials and steno marks. I can't stop listening to the Alice Bag Band's 'Babylonian Gorgon' and I'm having a serious retro L.A. punk meltdown this week. You know, Alley Cats, Avengers, X etc. Strange to be driving these songs on the iTunes console, wanting only to break out my two turntables and a microphone. I've been busy with obligatory scenes, I sometimes get edgy, nasty, short with others and the worse part about it, I find it funny. Ohhh I can be baaad. Don't worry, I paid the price, sentenced to painting with my Dad, bedrooms and hallways at my parents. Fucking drudgery especially since he was in an atrocious mood, missed a golf outing or something. Thrown together, too much alike bumping into each other, and he is worse than I am when it comes to being an aggravating SHIT. Cussing up a storm, My father wove a tapestry of profanity which is still hovering somewhere over Lake Erie. After a bit, listening to 'oldies radio' it all became rather entertaining and ahhhh rooms got painted, much to our surprise. Whew, I promise to be good from now on. I even took my Pop for ice cream, he is a real turdball. Switching gears completely, yesterday while going to the 'store' for non-anabolic supplements, protein mostly, I stumbled upon St. Hedwig's. Damn, that's pretty hilarious. St. Hedwig, file under film and Polish Saints. Cabbage Rolls and coffee? More to hang on to. More tidbits to add in, too busy to structure transitional sentences...Finally picked up an Oster set of Clippers, hell it is a true joy to clipper and fuck up your own hair. I gave myself an 80s wedge ala Xanadu and sang 'Have You Ever Been Mellow' to myself with the comb as a microphone. It was a pretty messed up scene so I shaved most of it off, ahhhh nice, clean, short, I feel randy. Oh, created this tribute to Gilbert and George, I've always been so very very fond of them. I have so much fucking reading to do, what the hell am I doing on this thing? Shitski.
9:29 PM :
Wednesday, August 22, 2001
To be driving next to you with the top down in the MG midget, late summer riding through the countryside. Just a bit outside the city, cows and farmland, cornfields and big white homes with dogs that sleep on the front porch. The excursion is unusual for me, the banter on the radio, never minding the commercials. Sunny and cool, low humidity, riding under a clear blue sky. Oh, well ummm, you know what I like don't you, you know what I've lived and gotten bored with, you know what I love and where I am going. Its humorous to stop along the road and buy tomatoes and green peppers from little old ladies that sit in Aluminum lawnchairs encased by aqua nylon material. Their petite white sugar plum fairy hair as they peer over tiny lady glasses. Throwing in a few extras for good measure, gladly, kindly. Goodbyes. At the Starvin-Marvin I buy the local paper, pics of hot overgrown Ohio boys in shiney football pants and sleeveless t-shirts, big 10 prospects at triple 'A' schools; Hay throwers, weightlifters, and farmboys, those of a chemically induced 600 pound squat. Scholarships are tickets away from the farm, away from the factory and out of their small towns, gateways to good schools, hot girls and even hotter boys. Among Moms and Dads, dreams are made and broken on a fluorescent astro turf field. I chase away the romance, the story and read the police blotter that is filled with juvenile delinquents, an S. E Hinton fantasy. A few hours home and kitchen sink dramas unravel like dirty dish towels. Wash the tomatoes, a few slices, mozarella, basil, extra virgin olive oil, glasses and boxer shorts, reading through books for preps. Books on Italy, books long forgotten, getting bored closing, shutting down. It's raining, the fan is whirling, blowing summer past my face, cool breeze. The smell of fresh cut grass, earth, the sound of cars passing by the street below. Early evening, night stands behind the velvet rope waiting an entrance. Nighttime always gets in, dominates the conversation, covers the 'waterfront', blankets the place, exposing my restlessness that is starving. Hunger to stand on wooden floors and railroad trestles. Hunger to walk among the old warehouses of my city. Resting like a love vigilante in doorways and vestibules of downtown shops, doorways of tool shops and bakeries and neon lit funeral homes, kicking gravel turning, spinning, crashing burning rivers. You're holding a beer in your jacket drunk, an annoying pretty couple walks past us and you start in on that 'Zeros' song: 'When it gets dark they all come out, looking for love, ready to rock out, we look so pretty so so dressed up, then we walk through the city so so messed up, the flashes in their silver lam�, the punks in their black berets, lookin like lovers complete the crowd, they want the music mean, the volume loud, cosmetic couple, they make a good pair, spike heeled shoes and platinum hair....you're a fuck.
7:28 PM :
Tuesday, August 21, 2001
Previewing Los Amigos Invisibles Saturday at the Life Is Beautiful party benefitting the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, be sure to say hello, that is if you can drag my ass off the dance floor.
9:11 PM :
Monday, August 20, 2001
The brilliant, "Exercises in Style", is an experimental strip inspired by the French writer Raymond Queneau. Queneau spun as many variations as he could--over 100--out of a mundane, two-part text about two chance encounters with a mildly irritating character during the course of a day. He started by telling it in every conceivable tense, then by doing it in free verse and as a sonnet, as a telegram, in pig latin, as a series of exclamations, in an indifferent voice... and so on. 'Exercises in Style' applies the same principle to comics by creating as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story: different points of view, different genres, different formal games, and so on. The only variation is that a group of cartoonists have been given a brief script of the one-page piece and asked to create their own version of the comic.
LICK IT GOOD. Porn is HOT, WHITE HOT on campus
Providing inspirational kick-start creative reactions. Everyday Fresh-Froot starts with a new theme and then searches to find the defining images, words and atmospheres as well as the mad, tangential, off the wall masterpieces that encapsulate that theme. Their floaty navigational items turns ambient into a design term, while background items randomly send archived themes crashing together. Daily creative inspiration, consume art and design now.
11:12 AM :
Sunday, August 19, 2001
Keep Keep Keep Keep Feeling Fascination! Human League's indy label U.K. only 'Secrets' release is a fun 51 minutes pop disco dance romp with, Oakey and the Sistahs back in the groove. Check out BLINDYOUTH:The Complete Guide To The Human League-1977-1980. The site contains several mp3 demo tracks generously donated by Martyn Ware of some pre Human sound experiments like: Pulse Lovers and the 'Moroderesque' Disco Disasters.
At a time when most people were listening to the VOMIT inducing strains of Journey, Neil Diamond and Fleetwood Mac, the L.A. Punk scene was simmering underground. The sounds would reverberate well into the future, influencing those who thirsted for something real, raw, innovative and honest, and without all the bullshit of big record companies. Once upon a time in a magical kingdom called L.A., there was a defect in the space/time continuum known as "punk rock". Only in such a depraved environment could Dangerhouse Records have existed. Dangerhouse, highly naive attempt to create a politically and artistically correct playground for the unique, nihilistic talents of the L.A. punk "scene". It was clear something needed to be done. Dave Brown (DB): I was in a band called The SCREAMERS who were basically a bunch of homosexuals out in Hollywood who had read too much New Musical Express. Kind of believed too much of it and sort of decided that they'd adopt this whole attitude toward it. That was around the time that I started hanging around with Black Randy a lot. So we decided that we'd get together with a friend of K.K., the Screamers drummer Keith. He had a friend who just moved from Oklahoma named Pat Garrett that he thought I should meet, and Pat and I just hit it off right away. So we decided to have a record company. This all happened in about a week.
4:15 PM :
