Andy's Chair

In Denver now… Day three of the move. Be in Utah soon. Abandoned hangars… Bison… Antelope Island…

Finally got everything loaded and got on the road at 6pm today. In Paducah, Kentucky now… be in Kansas tomorrow night.

There goes excessive carbon footprint guilt. There goes all those repair bills. There goes those insane fill-up costs. Hello effective public transit and new bicycle in the South Bay.

Yes, after 10 years of painful internal combustion agony that followed 5 years of bicycle bliss, I am finally declaring ‘one less car’ again and it feels so damn good.

Share the road, fucker!

The mug I purchased from the BBC shop at Bush House off the Strand while on our honeymoon has lost it’s latest battle with the Kenmore dish washer. The handle surrendered completely, and the hairline crack down the side has become inoperable. The Head of George Harrison weeps.

I have this deep conviction that, given the chance, most Americans would take anything that smells like art or an artist and ship it to the giant island of plastic waste in the middle of the Pacific. With that mindset it should come as little surprise the events in Troy, New York during the last week involving RPI’s visiting artist Wafaa Bilal. Except things reached a point of the truly wrong. That the storied engineering school with the slogan ‘Why Not Change the World’ should have a hardcore club of republican students with apparent connections beyond campus (or whatever the case is) should also come as little surprise. Still, the whole thing leaves a bitter taste in the mouth as a supreme ‘what the fuck’ moment. Although officially written out of US law in 1973, federally protected free speech still held a shimmering veneer, that, in practice, anyway, seemed secure. Secure until what the application of “community standards” really amounts to in a former industrial center of the American northeast became apparent. Welcome to the scene in Troy, New York. Early March, 2008.

Across the river, mansion hill burns with the emerging scandal of now former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer’s indiscretions. In the historic district of downtown Troy an untarnished hero of the people is roasted for doing what was clearly the right thing at the right time. Steve Pierce is a saint. A champion of the empowering possibilities of media placed in the hand of the common man. He should be held in the same regard as other such far-thinkers as Rick Prelinger and Kevin Kelly. His most recent passion, The Sanctuary for Independent Media was callously shut down by the City of Troy, New York this week in a blatant flexing of cronyism.

Here’s Steve’s official statement from last night:

Hi-

Perhaps you’ve heard the news that the City of Troy, citing code violations, has shut down The Sanctuary for Independent Media effective immediately.

This happened the day after a top Troy official, who is also a Rensselaer County legislator and a constituent liaison for Senator Joseph Bruno, organized a protest condemning Wafaa Bilal’s work and our decision to present it on Monday night.

We have been working on our building since we first occupied it and throughout have been in close communication with the city about our plans, so this sudden closure-following the censorship of Wafaa’s work by RPI last week-came as quite a shock.

You can hear the phone call from the City of Troy at www.MediaSanctuary.org, along with a clip from Wafaa Bilal’s talk, and make up your own mind about the motivation behind the City’s action.

We have contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and private practice attorneys for assistance on the First Amendment aspects of this situation.

This crisis has created an urgent need to raise funds for building improvements: if you can manage it, it would be greatly appreciated if you could make a secure online financial contribution at www.MediaSanctuary.org, or send a check payable to The Sanctuary for Independent Media to PO Box 35, Troy NY 12181.

Under the circumstances, the remaining three programs in our “Art, Freedom, Democracy” series are in jeopardy as is the rest of the Sanctuary season. We will let you know shortly whether our presentation of The Yes Men next Tuesday, March 18 will proceed as planned, and if so, where.

Many thanks for your support in the past; if you can offer further help in this moment of need, please let us know by emailing info@MediaSanctuary.org.

Hope to see you soon!

–Your Friends at The Sanctuary for Independent Media

Here is Wafaa Bilal’s videotaped statement on the incident:

Interview with Wafaa Bilal on We Make Money Not Art

Virtual Jihadi main page

Article on Wired

Wikipedia entry on Bilal

YouTube Channel with coverage of the event

Still on the fence? Cast your vote… would you waterboard a dog or this Iraqi?

George Tabb Benefit, Thursday March 13 at 10pm with Mike Watt + the Missingmen at Safari Sam’s, 5214 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, CA, (323) 666-7267. Visit MySpace.com/HelpGeorgeTabb.

I have to admit to being way clueless. My apartment in Brooklyn is a scant 4 3/4 miles away from the World Trade Center, in a neighborhood heavily populated by firefighters, and apart from some vague sense that, ‘yeah, the air after 911 was probably pretty bad and I’m sure some people are a little sick’, I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought (given that I only live there part time and moved in over a year and a half after 911, I’d probably miss a little, but c’mon!). Randomly today I see a bulletin from Mike Watt in my rarely visited MySpaceship about the benefit show, and first I’m thinkin’, ‘I didn’t know George was sick’, I read a little and it’s ‘I didn’t know George lived in New York’ (somewhere in there is, ‘we both worked at MaximumRockNRoll and even though we met once or twice I dodn’t really know George’), and then I’m sucked into a new scary world.

Simple version: George lived downtown during 911 and shortly after that he got sick… and then he got very sick, and found out that not only was there not much help available for anything beyond a runny nose, but the possibility that a causal link existed was denied in the interest of homeland security. Read his whole story at MySpace.com/HelpGeorgeTabb. As always George dishes things up in a clear, direct and honest human voice. For more on the human wreckage caused by the attacks in the years since, see these pieces in CBS News, The Village Voice, and Discover Magazine.

Back in the nonreal world, you should also give a visit to George’s YouTube channel, which contains many fine installments from his punk TV joint Destroy Television.

fognozzle live again. In temporary identity of Shredni Vashtar (C’mon, give it up, Saki fans!) we shredded live with exploding light fixtures in day care centers and drum circles in crusty east Oakland warehouses. The current equipment list is none too shabby. Go Pete!

Homemade dough, sauce and mozzarella. A pretty good Neapolitan. Food still is the best thing to eat when you’re hungry.

We were going to eat out tonight… after a trip to the book store… So… totally creeped out by the recent article in Harpers about toxic chemicals in your blood and a report on Trans fat that I read… I ventured out with the rest of the fam… and, even though it was a few more miles drive, I just had to take us to Knoxville’s La Costa, which promised a dedication to local and organic ingredients, and, as learned in many past brunch visits was pretty damn good. So… we’re sitting down and going over the menu. I look up and make eye contact with an incredibly tall person, who was leaving the restroom. I asked my wife if she’d noticed him. “Yeah, that’s the guy who asked them to bring in an extra table from outside”. Oh… did, uh, he have an English accent? So, for the length of our meal I marveled that Stephen Fry was inexplicably in Knoxville… eating dinner… just a few tables down from us. Jeeves. The voice of the Harry Potter books. The voice of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The librarian in MirrorMask. Deitrich in V for Vendetta. And Lord Snot in the Young Ones!

How? Why? In Knoxville, Tennessee?

I pretty much never ask for autographs. I asked Jack Kirby for his once. I absolutely never pose for pictures with celebs I meet. But this was Stephen Fry. The smartest man in Britain. And there he was in Knoxville. He graciously posed with us (It took two takes, maybe if we’d gone for three little boy and me might have looked better. This is seriously the worst photo of him ever), we gabbed a bit about his project of visiting all 50 states. I almost wished he was going somewhere next other than Savannah (he’d never been), so that I didn’t have to gush so much about how pretty it is. (It really is, and I felt for the presumably Knoxvillian folk he was dining with).

It’s no joke that Stephen Fry is smarter that the rest of us, and he has recently started doing a blog. You should read it. He seemed genuinely surprised that I even knew he did such a thing.

So, yeah, I’m always the last to know it seems. I heard from about the last person I would expect to hear from that Lance Hahn had died. That news disturbed me and colored these last few day more than I would have thought possible. I only knew Lance a little bit, but liked him an awful lot. About 13 years back when we were both shitworkers at MaximumRockNRoll, he was one of the few people I’d talk to a bunch around the MRR house. I guess most people knew Lance just through his music. He played two of the most memorable shows I ever saw. I caught Cringer at ABC No Rio with Citizen Fish (I think it was Cringer’s last tour) I was just blown away by the whole thing. They had changed a lot since that first awesomely sing-along-to-able (if a little goofy) 7″. It’s a show that people still talk about. There may have been many other J Church shows I was at, but the one at UC Berkeley, In some glorified hallway, called (I think, just) The Golden Bear, really stood out. A great night. In the years since everything has drifted to places none of us would have guessed. It seemed like every time I heard some news about Lance it was bad. (House burning down… things like that) He always seemed to be upbeat and just the epitome of the non-defeatist punk spirit that few of us can ever say we keep going like that.

There’s a memorial gathering for Lance tonight in Austin, more info on his site. His MySpace page is still weirdly out there also. Say hi.

This was my neighbors lawn this morning. If anyone, I thought the guy two doors down who kept telling the trick-or-treaters to stay off his grass would be the one to get nailed. What must these guys have done that was so much worse? Maybe all it took was the hideous yellow SUV in their driveway (far to shocking to show here)… That was left wrapped in green cellophane.

I spend too much time on the road. Long crazy drives… It’s way too easy to exist on Combos and Slim Jims on the 12-odd hour drive between Knoxville and Brooklyn (um… yes… I’m in one or the other). Otherwise there’s the too many hours to get to a karate tournament somewhere (yes, also true…) You really have to force yourself sometimes to take a decent break to get some good eats. Chains/franchises are to be avoided at all costs (of course). There’s been some odd ones, like a jews-for-jesus bagel shop in the middle of Virginia.

Lately, tho, I’ve become obsessed with finding really good pizza. In Brooklyn I’m a little spoiled for this… I’ve waited the many long minutes (sometimes more than an hour) for a pie at Grimaldi’s (by the Brooklyn Bridge) or Totonno’s (Coney Island). If you need to ask… yes, it is worth it. I haven’t actually been inside Di Fara yet to order a pie, but I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait.

One great find, pretty late at night, on the long drive up to Brooklyn was a little place called Luigi’s in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Harrisonburg is about half way between Knoxville and Brooklyn, but if you’re driving that long ribbon of highway, the I-81, it’s a good place to hit. Fine beer selection, excellent pizza, friendly staff and patrons. Downtown Harrisonburg was disturbingly similar to my home town of Schenectady, New York. A place that had been abandoned by the southern migration of industrialization some time in the 60s or 70s. I got involved in a totally out-of-left field discussion while there about Madonna’s legal ties upon the Bad Brains… Apparently (some super-light Google research revealed) she did actually own their name at one time. I dunno. I really don’t care. I just know that beer and pizza never tasted so good before catching a few Z’s before the next day’s (what proved to be excessively hellish) drive.

A couple of weeks later, I’m fleeing the Hartford/Springfield Airport (sorry… Bradley), headed for the Mohegan Sun Casino for another Karate tournament. Too hungry to cope in the rental, I randomly pulled off of CT Rte. 2 into the outskirts of Glastonbury, Conneticut. There were no music festivals, but there was a great tag sale (more on that in later posts), and a tip to try out Giovanni’s Brick Oven Pizzeria… which we did, and it was well worth the trip.

A footnote or aside… There is a web site called Slice, that is for the serious pizza hound, that has been a pretty good guide in my search for some good pie. I could never rise to the level of their stringent review criteria… and certainly won’t here… but if you are mad for that perfect slice, you might want to see them for guidance.

In Closing. There is good food, it’s usually not in the retailtainment hubs that have polluted this country. They are off to the side, in strange locals you might not normally visit. Restauranteering is possibly second only to bookselling for eccentric professions of the most benefit to the greater society, and it really is worth your extra effort to seek out and support such establishments.

I don’t know why, but that little piece of spyware just came to irritate me to the point where I finally deleted all of it today. I was quitting out of it every day after I started up. It was starting to bug me that it couldn’t record the individual songs in the radio shows that I was mainly listening to. I knew it was a problem when it started to bother me that the cassettes I’d been playing on the way to work couldn’t register. What a mental snakepit. It was time to stop. Now if I could just stop huffing airplane glue…

For the morbidly curious, here’s my Last FM page.

Anyway… for the last few years I’ve put together a CD that I hand out at the holidays with that past year’s fave tracks, and it’s time to start working on the new one. Mostly new stuff, but a few oldies that made their way into heavy rotation too. A major omission here would be Slow Club, who I just have on a podcast. I also left out a few of the bigger acts like Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen and CSS. So, in the interest of still spreading my dubious taste to the world, I offer this playlist - my own festive 50 - Optimator 07. It’s not necessarily sequenced… I’ve given links for a few of the more obscure artists.

Song Title - Artist - Album

Gojira Suit - Sunset Cinema Club

Konichiwa bitches - Robyn - Robyn

Hang Me Up To Dry - Cold War Kids - Robbers and Cowards

Cheer it on - Tokyo Police Club - A Lesson in crime

Can’t Stop (Produced By Rich Harrison) - Missy Elliott - The Cookbook

Electronic Battle Weapon 8 - The Chemical Brothers

Normal Teenager - Loaded Knife - Normal Teenager 7″

Star Trail - Duloks

The Prayer - Bloc Party - A Weekend In The City

Save Myself - Willy Mason

Stop Me - Mark Ronson - Versions

This Time (I’m Gonna Try it My Way) - DJ Shadow - The Outsider

Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps - Splodgenessabounds

Chelsea Dagger - The Fratellis - Costello Music

Valerie - Amy Winehouse - BBC 1 Live Lounge

Moving to New York - The Wombats - Girls, Boys & Marsupials

Meds (feat. VV of The Kills) - Placebo - Meds

Panda Style - L.A.O.S.

My blue heaven - Palast Orchester mit Max Raabe

Crambodia (Pink Skull Remix) - Plastic Little - Crambodia

Mind of Soon Hey - Tri-Lambs - Jacket Smasher EP

Rebellion (Lies) - The Arcade Fire - Funeral

We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives - Los Campesinos!

Burn My Shadow - Unkle - War Stories

Satan Said Dance - Clap your Hands Say Yeah - Live

Elzeviro - Piero Umiliani - Musicaelettronica Volume Uno

A New Experience - Piero Umiliani - Musicaelettronica Volume Uno

MAH-NA-MAH-NA - Piero Umiliani - ARIEL RECORDS 500 Single

Beats to the Rhyme - Run-DMC - Tougher Than Leather

Can’t Stop Moving - Sonny Jim

Grip Like A Vice - The Go! Team

Move On Up - Curtis Mayfield - Extended 12″ mix

D.A.N.C.E. - Justice

You! Me! Dancing! - Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now Youngster…

Chemistry - Unkle - Nights Temper EP (A Prelude To War Stories)

3-2-1 Contact theme song

The Late, Late Show - Count Basie - The Complete Atomic Basie

Wichita Lineman - Glen Campbell

Thou Shalt Always Kill - Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip

Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret - Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R

Hangin Tree - Queens Of The Stone Age - Songs For The Deaf

No One Knows - Queens Of The Stone Age - Songs For The Deaf

solta o frango - Bonde Do Role - Solta o Frango - EP

Starz In Their Eyes - Just Jack - Overtones (Album Sampler)

Don’t Be Afraid To Sweat - Miss Odd Kidd

Convenience Shopping - Alan Hawkshaw - Music For TV Dinners - The ’60s

Sexual Healing - Hot 8 Brass Band - Rock With the Hot 8

Boyz - M.I.A.

Amylase - Cajun Dance Party

You Don’t Know Her Name - Maps - We Can Create - This track is just massive. I can’t possibly say enough good things about it.

You might guess, if you are a dedicated listener to BBC Radio 1, that I’ve been heavily influenced by Rob da Bank, Huw Stephens and Mary Anne Hobbs these last couple of years… I can honestly say that I haven’t been as excited by the new music coming out since like 1985.

So… what have you been listening to?

Or, If you were really punk you’d have thrown a full bottle, part 2… I guess.

We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen. was on TV today, the Sundance Channel. It was pretty riveting stuff for me… but really a pretty weird documentary. I didn’t really, say, learn anything new about them. There was very little historical footage to be had, I guess, and it’s mainly current interviews people who were around 20 years before (the film was made, that is. We’re 2 more years on now). The real true thunder mersh for most people is on the 2 DVD set, which has many the extra hours of live stuff and the bands few videos. Ahhhh “Search” just came on… from The Punch Line… just amazing. I wore my copy of My First Bells into a thin squeechy bunch of ribbon years ago.

There’s really never been anything else quite like the Minutemen. It can be easy to forget these things. Don’t.

Second act bring the story up to 25 years…
or Happy Birthday MRR!

Yes, it’s true. On stands now. As Punk Planet has bid us goodbye, Its stepfather MaximumRockNRoll turns 25… about 10 years after the passing of MRR mainman Tim Yohannan. Haven’t read it yet, but it looks, well, mainly like another issue of MRR… Very nice cover by Aaron Cometbus. He has a unique design sense that confuses me, but I like it.

I had a fun couple of years as a shitworker and zine reviewer at MRR. This was 1994-1995. I wrote about a hundred reviews, I guess. They made a bit more of an impression than I would have thought possible… you know, death threats… that sort of thing. One funny thing was that I couldn’t use my real name… exactly. Reviews were (and are) credited by initials, and they already had an MA. So, I said, just use my middle names shortened, and I’ll be Billy Joe Arsenault (You will know why this would be amusing to me if you do)… so I was BA in the review credit. There was a taboo at Maximum… there shall be no mention of John Crawford. This was a little hard to avoid, as the creator of Baboon Dooley’s smear of the various bay area punk feuds - real and imagined - in his comic strip “Queen of the Scene” appeared in an awful lot of zines, and I seemed to get all of them to review. So I started putting things like “and another pointless (worthless, puerile, etc.) episode of Queen of the Scene”, in the descriptions. These, then, made their way into Crawford’s strips and those relentless packages of material that he sent to every damn zine on the planet. “pointless” - Billy Arse, MRR The final compliment was, of course, the appearance of the Tim Yo worshipping minion Billy Arse character in the Queen of the Scene strip itself. I guess there are worse kinds of fame.

I really miss Tim. I used to drive him nuts with requests to start a folk column in the zine… “but, no, there are so many interesting parallels, Tim, don’t you see it? The whole subculture/DIY/Make Your own Scene thing, man, I think it could be cool”. He didn’t buy it.

In other exciting MRR news, I found out recently from the lovely and talented Paul Curran that MRR Radio is alive and kicking. You can even subscribe to it through iTunes (paste this link into the “Subscribe to Podcast…” window under “Advanced” in yr iTunes). Another vital punk podcast is the one for the long-running PDX radio show Life During Wartime. I have been unable to figure out how to subscribe to this, but they do have downloadable MP3s of the show.

Party with me Punker

Reposted from the Reading Frenzy Ledger. Help Chloe out!

Please donate your used books, comics and zines for an upcoming fundraiser for Ye Olde Reading Frenzy! We’ll be having a used zine smorgasbord during the Portland Zine Symposium (August 11th-12th), and a big book sale as part of our 13th Anniversary celebrations on September 1st. If you’re an author, editor and/or publisher and would like to pitch in a few new items (or hurts or overstocks), that’s great too! Xtra-Fancy stuff will go up for auction. This is a small, relatively painless way, for a lot of folks to make a cumulatively big contribution towards keeping our good thing going.

You can drop off your donations, any time during business hours (Mon-Sat: 11-7, Sun 12-6) or ship them to: Reading Frenzy, 921 SW Oak Street, Portland, OR 97205. If you’re bringing in more than a couple grocery bags full of printed matter, please call in advance to make arrangements — we don’t have much storage space! We will find good homes for all the materials donated that we are not able to sell — lending libraries, schools, charity shops, etc. We will be accepting donations through August 31st, but would especially appreciate your zines and mini-comics donations prior to August 11th.

If you have any questions, please contact - info [at] readingfrenzy dot com. Please spread the word! Thanks in advance for your support!

We are looking for:

Books, all subjects
Children’s books
Comics and graphic novels
Zines, pamphlets, broadsides
Magazines, alternative/independent, vintage
Paper ephemera, posters, prints, mail art materials, rubber stamps
Reading accoutrements: magnifying glasses, reading glasses, book ends, book stands, bookmarks, pipes, slippers, footstools, small lamps
Blank journals
We are not looking for:

Outdated textbooks (unless they are vintage and illustrated)
Old encyclopedia sets (unless they are vintage, illustrated kid’s sets)
Adult series westerns or romances
Most mainstream glossy magazines
Most newspapers and freebies
Original software users manuals

I found out tonight that John Peel had a rubber stamp that he’d sign off on letters with [in red] that read “John Peel, The Worlds Most Boring Man”. That’s “John Peel” on one line… the rest, centered on the next. All in red. no apostrophes in sight. No idea the start date or tenure of this sign off… I can only remember getting one letter back from John (an email, actually… no rubber stamp) a brief thing it was, but I’ve cherished it like the note I got back from Herb Caen the one time I wrote him. There is a funny thing with heroes… that, the more you get to know them, the (quite quickly, usually) less heroic they become. John Peel has never suffered that… despite, or perhaps, because the more you learn, the more ordinary he becomes. I watch interviews with him now and just can’t stop cracking up. Humour so dry, but so original it’s an absolute wonder. Restart the world at the correct speed somebody…

Apparently some wood bees had bored there way in to a plank of wood near a knot in the rail on my back deck. Finding this too delicious a bit of wordplay to ignore, a woodpecker decided to blast his way into the board to dig them out. I found the crime scene at around 11pm that night and thought some weird explosive bug eggs had hatched, or maybe a bear had been hanging out… or maybe it was some psycho with an axe. I figured it all out the next morning when I heard that distinctive woodpecker hammering…

Was working on the weekend and I found this strange bird that was just standing in front of this big vinyl banner that was left out in the hope that it would flatten. She stood there for a very long time… moving very little. Later on I went back outside to find her standing under my car, sort of staring into the inside of the back tire… I left her alone, and I was really glad I could take the work van home that day. I totally forgot to look for her today…

Somehow I got obsessed with picking up variations on my childhood favorite (called something different, depending on where you are - Nutty Buddy, Cornetto Classico, Crispina, Sundae Cone… basically Vanilla ice cream in a cornet (aka the sugar cone) covered with chocolate and nuts) and trying them out and reviewing them… I pretty much gave up on finding a decent one. In the end, just about everything available was chemically crap from Unilever… here’s the only finished review:

Mayfield Sundae Cone

• 4oz 118ml
• chemically tasting
• ice cream not very good
• stingy on the choc & peanuts
• good tasty solid crunchy cone

I was in Livermore, California a few years ago… and in the middle of a big empty field was a little shack surrounded by a metal fence, with a million antennas around it and a pickup truck parked on the side. There was a sign out front that said “FCC Listening Station”. I just thought, “what a job… there’s some guy sitting next to a stack of radios in there… just waiting for someone to say ‘fuck’”.

Back in October 1994 I went down to Austin, Texas to do a strange training gig in HTML at a long gone early eCom startup. While there I got to see my old Northampton, Mass neighbors Sebadoh. That night, after their show the lot of us (me, Lou, Bob, Jason, Flood, Jason Austin) went over to the Electric Lounge and got into a massive jam with Azalia Snail and her guitarist Rob. I’d heard that a tape of that was floating around for some reason. anyway… some of that sound has made it’s way to a video of Azalia and friends (also in Austin) on You Tube. Enjoy.

I later wrote a song about that trip which I recorded with Cindy Gretchen O. of Doris zine. That’s called, strangely enough, electric lounge

My first ever blog post done in Austin in ‘94

–Marc Arsenault, Knoxville, TN

Enjoy this sad tableau from the local Borders.Rest in Peace Punk Planet

You figure it out…

Although I really would not want to live with this as a driving goal in life; a goal it is… I’d like to enter more words into the english language than Shakespeare.

For now, I’m pretty excited to be acknowledged as a contributor to the mighty OED.

Let it be noted, that on this day, Marc Arsenault did coin the 4LA “VOFE”… sweeter and shorter than VOMFEB… for “Vomit Out My Fucking Eye Balls”. As in, “that meeting made me want to VOFE, those people don’t know the first thing about marketing, they just learned some fucking buzzwords and now they want to set up goddamn committes about everything”

Flying in to San Francisco for the hollidays… the most amazing sight… looking over the wing… a vivid rainbow… behind it, a nuclear power plant.

Let it be here recorded that Marc Arsenault did on this day invent the portmanteau word ‘Solsticitations’ as a catchier alternative to religion-dodging salutation “Happy Holidays”. Solstice + Felicitations = Solsticitations.

OMFG. I just had the 2 best, most amazing, mind-blowingly good Jaffa Cakes. Thank you Burton’s. Good night and may your god go with you.

I couldn’t sleep last night… I kept having nightmares inspired by all the recent political tourmoil in Thailand and Mexico… I was convinced that it would somehow affect the supply of ingredients for more than half the food I eat…

of becoming larger, more influential, yet being even less visible… and now? Well, I miss those cool show flyers.

This has been a day. Quite a day. I’m freaking sunburned from being out at the Great Black Swamp Olde-Time Strongman Picnic all day in Bowling Green, Ohio. I’m in Cleveland now. The Indians just tanked and the streets are a sea of diverted traffic… mostly from the fleeing fans but also from the many closed-off blocks of downtown–due to filming for Spiderman 3. Was wandering down Euclid earlier–no idea at all what was going on–I thought a bomb had gone off or something–parts of cars everywhere, crushed vehicles, posters from 15-year-old shows at Irving Plaza (Violent Femmes, Neubauten, X, and… These Arms are Snakes?!) Right after that chaos, wander by a hotel that has a stream of oddly leather clad folks wandering into the streets… I’m in complete Mad Max territory here… Sign in the lobby “The Best Leather You’ll Ever Have” or something like that… WTF? Trying to find a reasonable place to eat, totally had wandered the wrong way, away from the warehouse district. Eventually turn around and wind up there. First thing I see and Hear is the torrent of someone pissing from the second floor of a parking garage. Evenually end up at a crazy bar and grill that makes these sandwiches with stacks of fries in them… Quite a day. More later… laster… maybe…

Yesterday was quite an amazing day! Saw a car on fire on the thruway, watched Qigong Master Tu Jin Sheng pull a 15 foot moving van and I got a personal tour of his new traditional Shaolin-style training facility. The picture does not quite do it justice. A whole room of hand crafted traditional training gear. All sorts of gears, posts, stands, targets… You could still smell the freshness of the wood. Clicking on the photo brings you to some video clips of Master Tu’s feats of strength. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention. Master Tu is also known as Iron Crotch, and he pulled that truck with his cock.

Maybe it’s the hour… (really, it is not that late … 10:39 pm) but this really got to me. The movie 12 Monkeys. Terry Gilliam… Bruce Willis. There is a scene towards the end of the film where the stars are in a movie theatre watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. OK, yeah possible, whatever. I’m guessing that Gilliam wanted to just accent something in his film… time travel and all that. But. Here’s the deal. 12 Monkeys came out in 1995 - so, written and made a little earlier. It depicts events in 1996 (among some other years). In the real 1996 Vertigo was in a very successful restored release… Sure it’s possible that Gilliam knew… but, well not likely. Very odd. We’re talking BIG. Notable re-release here. All kinds of old movies are referenced in newer ones all the time… I thought some other things about this film. How there is just so much resonance on so many levels for so many people. This remake of Chris Marker’s La Jette. It’s hard to watch - even for the 10th time - and not to be near tears in points. Now there are those odd bits that I wish were just not there. They are too Hollywood - “some crazy dentist”… I’m beginning to suspect that some of these things - these images - these dreams - these commodities… might matter. they might be important.