|
|
Friday, November 20th, 2009
|
|
|
You see what happens when you're a tshirt designer and you say "how can I communicate to my team what a Kid Rock tshirt should look like?". Guess what. Now this is happening.
Pull on your butt-kicking boots and prepare to hold your lighter HIGH, kids, cuz Kid Rock is coming to town. America's biggest fan, Kid Rock travels everywhere in a huge, windowless van that's pulled by 50 giant bald eagles. Off the back of the van flies an American Fucking Flag that's made out of chain mail and awesome. The side of the van is covered by the biggest mural you've ever seen: a timber wolf riding a Harley while his woman bends over a pool table, her cutoff shorts riding up her ass, her soiled wifebeater barely covering her breasts. In the background, Skynyrd and Run-DMC pass joints around and play their favorite bands for one another.
The chain-mail American Flag? Hand-crafted by biker babes out of mountains of empty PBR cans. Every one of those babes has huge hair and feathers clipped in to that hair. The clips are so they can smoke the roach all the way down without burning their fingers.
Fire up a cheap cigar and prepare to tell the forces of Job, Sobriety and Propriety to Kiss Your Ass. Now design me a mother-jumpin' shirt already.
-Kid Rock
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
|
|
|
So, I put myself on a schedule according to which I'd crank out a S!H!S!H! story every two months and use the interstitial time to work on & finish other projects. That would have meant one finished project and an issue of S!H!S!H! out by Hallowe'en, if you're counting.
Neither of these things happened, quite. There's an issue in the works; many of the pieces are in place, and I'm just struggling to find the time to move them around the board in the appropriate inappropriate ways. And I've got this absolutely mammoth Selavy thing that I've been really struggling with.
And I think I had an idea for a actual novel the other night. The real kind of novel, the kind that takes research and is about a whole bunch of different people and stuff.
The big struggle is simply time. Time time time and laziness. I can make time to do pushups every day, but it's infinitely harder to force myself to pick up the pen every day.* But I am not here to wallow in that. No, I am here to announce the unaborting of the oft-aborted Queen City Fall project. As I noted over on the Twitter feed that I didn't bother to tell anybody about, it really looks like I might have a beta dead-tree version of this thing on hand when I go to Portland, this friday night.**
I've got the whole mess, more or less, here with me at the coffee shop, and it's funny to look at all the scraps, the notes and flails and failings and reworkings and stuff, dating back to late summer/early fall of 2007. This isn't THAT long to sit on a project, I know, but for something that's as short as it is, it sure feels like a long time.***
Anyway, beta copies will will be distributed free to whoever wants them. Drop me a line any which way you care to, and you will receive something in the MAIL.
*I would be appalled or daunted by Kim's productivity if I hadn't known her for so long: as it is, I am thoroughly comfortable knowing she is simply much smarter, more diligent and more organized than I am.
**Beta version will include the stolen placeholder artwork that actually inspired some of the project, and be missing the annotations and appendices. Whether or not the annotations and appendices are ever made public, my back pages style, will depend in part upon the reception of the beta. All that back matter stuff is probably more therapy for me than anything any non-Collision human might want to read anyway. That said, I personally love reading that shit, so.
***I'm not going to chase down the reference, but io9 not long ago mentioned that Disch and Delaney--and maybe another heavy hitter like Octavia Butler or somebody--both aborted novels b/c the love affairs that sparked them ended. In similar fashion, it appears that I can only work on QCF when I'm crushing / happy in a relationship. Which, heh, means I best hurry up and bash this fucker out before I fuck it up, no? Yes.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
|
|
|
Another rejected list from Fat.
a topographic map of my soul, as constituted by interactions with friends
OR the first word of the last 21 text messages I have received
The
If
Fuckin
Fuck
How
Slap
Eat
Rather
Going
I
C
Dam
Sorry
Metalstorm
OK
Packing
Maybe
Got
You
Hey
Dude
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
Found this the other day while looking for the bag in which all Queen City Fall materials had been shoved.
headphones (spare?)
light batteries
porn
pillows
soda water
groceries
ant chalk
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
|
|
|
Like everybody else, I'm currently obsessed with the Pissed Jeans record. Like most people, I'm stuck at work, feeling stupid and empty about my life choices. The interesting thing about the reception that Pissed Jeans has gotten is how everybody seems to view them as "just working dudes", where I get a consistent and thorough vibe of art fag. Anyways, it's just side 2 of My War with some charisma added so it doesn't suck anymore. Highly, highly great.
And blah blah blah, issue 14 of SHSH should be up soon, I'm working on the biggest, hardest chunk of Rows Selavy EVER and I think I'm ready to finish Queen City Fall.
And who gives a shit, anyway.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
|
|
Monday, August 31st, 2009
|
|
|
Your mom is right: breakfast is the most powerpacked meal of the day. Jerry Rig never quite learned that, so he was taken entirely off-guard by the totipotent combination of egg scrambled and imbricated with soft, wet potato. Wrapping it in an oven-warmed tortilla had proven far too puissant for his gin-wracked morning body, and he had made for the dubious comforts of the porch couch, bolstered by running the boom box' power cord through the window and fortifying himself with his all-Boston mix tape and the cleanishest glass from the kitchen (for a lengthy series of red beers).
It wasn't like he wanted to vomit, or die, or go back to bed, exactly. It was like his heart wanted to vomit, his eyes wanted to die, his neck felt made of splintering beestung granite. Flickers of flashback guttered over and through him like choppy seas surging amongst chunks of calving iceberg.
o0o
"I dunno. I loved the first one as much as anybody, but I genuinely think identity-fuckery combined with musings about that which is real versus the ersatz and the simple sadness that the satisfactions of the latter may well be more profound and accessible than the former is/was a bad choice for sequels--indeed, for a franchise. A certain dilution has occurred, and the subtlety of the original formulations has been lost, has become mere obfuscation..."
Humidor stared, straddling the beach cruiser he insisted upon riding everywhere. "Akka/Dekka...I am stunning. That was...easily...the most nuanced thing you have ever said. On anything."
Dekka shrugged and yanked at his backpack straps. Squinted into the early evening sun and muttered around a cigarette. "'Man said it. I just read the note he passed me."
The four grunted quietly as their respective bikes creaked under them, empty beers forgottenly stuffed and leaking their can-leavings in four men's bags, the last single-screen theatre in Portland receding behind them, the marquee grimly inflicting TOTAL RECALL 3 on any eye turned to the east on this sunday afternoon. Any eye at all: the letters were vast pillars of an eternal eldritch flame, dozens of cubits high.
o0o
"Fuck you, buddy!"
Rig rolled his eyes and adjusted his fanny pack. A stub of cigar worked its way around his mouth as the dank, starkly underlit club shook itself to pieces around him. Leather squeaked inaudibly everywhere, piercings gleamed and flashed, fishnets more a uniform than an accessory. Rig liked the flesh parade, bodies colliding as though they were in a large, invisible rock tumbler turned on its side, but mostly he just filed away the flickering cleavage and pale thigh meat for lonely later use. His mind fixed on strange, pointless things as he strained to avoid the things that actually bothered him. How had nobody ever noticed that the main riff in this tune was lifted directly from "woodpeckers from Mars"? Did nobody have ears?
In this way and by maintaining a very strict regimen of one tallboy per song was Jerry Rig able to avoid thinking about how a cover band--Hedgehog's Dilemma--had become a huge success playing songs his own band had never had a whole lot of luck playing, even as that cover band cavorted photogenically on the chest-high stage at Duckworth's. It had been a long day. Bike ride to their favored theatre for a free noontime screening, mile upon mile to the east. A brief post-film visit to the graveyard, a hustling exit before being rousted by the paracops, some amiably unsuccessful attempts to grill in the back-yard, followed by a sighing abandonation of tantrum-stricken Akka/Dekka, who'd climbed up on the roof for no reason anybody understood as everyone else jettisoned themselves into the remains of the sunday. Energy expended leaves a void to fill with alcohol; this cavity sours quickly, home to a sullen rage, the lashing pout of the naturally overlooked and underappreciated.
o0o
Rig had passed out on the couch, running the boom box cord out the window. He came to to a monday afternoon spalled by the flinty tenor of Akka/Dekka, raised yet beyond its usual car alarm heights. "My loan!? Her birthday? This is bullshit! What do you expect to talk about next--period panties, the glass ceiling and mascara ads? I'm talking ACTION! MAN TALK!"
As Rig fussed with his musty lab coat, sweat-moist from drunken, overfed couchsleep, Dekka's unfocused eyes strayed to the corner where walls and ceiling met. One arm hung limply from a bum, bruised shoulder. Almost no time passed. "Uh-huh. Okay, yeah. You're right. I will. Today, I promise. Today. TODAY. Right now. Love you too, mom."
Scowling, Akka/Dekka hung up the phone and repaired to his war room. All the rage and despair locked within that craggy frame would have to wait another day. Afternoon lost time like shedding hair and evening slid over the High Style like mustard on a biscuit. Sweating and shaky, Dekka clambered out of the stifling, repurposed mud room. "Ha-HAH!" his rough cry, a flat lozenge held above his head with his working arm. "They said it couldn't be done. They later retracted that statement and lengthily questioned my abilities, my suitability for the task. And yet I stand. Here I stand--victorious."
Jerry, drinking on the porch and enjoying Boston's late period, nearly audibly ignored Dekka. Humidor was long gone to the bar and Mudman lurked below, still playing games alone. Grumpy and underappreciated, Dekka intoned "Yup. Cool. Is. The. Word. What I got right here is probably the best thank-you note any man ever wrote to his aunt. For kicking down a little cash when she makes like a million dollars a minute. And I am currently between jobs. Which she expects to be paid back in like 2 months." When this proclamation somehow failed to win the spectacular response it merited, Akka/Dekka dropped his envelope hand and went to rummage the couch for stamp change. Still grumbling.
o0o
His night both ruined and fulfilled, his face lumpier and bloodier than usual, Rig slumped on the ped access platform of the Steel Bridge. About a third of the way across it (going east) there's a spot of black between two lights. Rig was treating his soul to one of his beloved punk rock picnics, a Black & Mild smoldering, bebourboned Plaid coffee half forgotten, a filthy handkerchief around a fistful of ice held to his bleeding brow. Occasionally he'd toe the rear tire of his jounced and battered mountain bike to hear its comforting ticks. As the ice melted through the handkerchief, blood from his eyebrow seeped around and covered the stains from the 5 fluids from all 4 of his body's front's primary emitters of same.
o0o
It started in a tavern. It always starts in a tavern. Humidor hadn't noticed anything odd or interesting about the Pillbox when he's stopped in as afternoon lost a savage match against evening. Had he noticed two pairs of ember-eyes hotly glowing from corner shadows, he would simply have waved to Jukeboxer and Ritch Tapestry.
Who sat beclouded by smoke and gloom. Back by the pinball machines.
Humidor approached the bar. All he heard was two old men at talk. "Wow, your ex?"
"Yeah. Dating my girlfriend's stepson."
"They came in here?"
"Right up in here. Said they didn't know I drank here. I felt like a Mexican in a bookstore, for sure."
"..."
"Awkward. I felt very awkward."
"You're a fucking asshole."
Armed with a tall yellow beer, Humidor beat a retreat to the pinball forest. "Humidor. Sit." Ritch Tapestry stood over the pinball machine like a stalk of bamboo. The ball hurtled through the gates and switches, careened off throbbing obstacles and caused lights to strobe. The score mounted, grew intimidating. Though his hands were in the customary and appropriate place on the table, his fingers never moved, the buttons never were pressed, and his eyes always burned, never straying from Humidor's wan, swarthy face.
Jukeboxer leaned forward creepily and got to the crux. "It is time, El Humidor. To be tutored in the ways of power. For example, you can walk down the street drinking a beer. Right out in the open."
"No! That's not true! That's impossible!"
"You know it to be true."
Time passed. Humidor's mind was further blown. The jukebox transmorphed into a pulsing vortex--something like a screen saver or a particularly good visualizer--eldritch spectra frying eyeballs over comet/planet collision drumbeats. A phalanx of guitars grinding like cavalries churning across the steppes. The portal didn't open so much as simply appear; by its very presence the dingy tavern was changed.
Humidor in a strangled voice asked "You mean...like some kind of...Eternal Champion?"
After a pause, Jukeboxer answered him. "Yes. No. Well, an overnight champion, one could say. A midnight warrior of a sort, chosen to battle once--"
"And only once." Tapestry followed his interruption with a freight train of a glance and a brief monologue. "You must understand. Grim forces abound. Occasionally a man is selected to help another throw one or another dire yoke. You wear the mantle of the midnight warrior like a rank, and sally forth on some yet unknown sortie, like so many before you, so many yet to come. No one knows who will be chosen, or when, or where. Except us. Jukeboxer and I have the honor of introducing you to tonight's task."
Cued, Jukeboxer said "There are ways, Humidor, ways of power you have been introduced to. Ways any of us can, for one moment, hold the whip hand."
"Yes. And save another." Tapestry sat back and smoked. Jukeboxer glanced at the portal somehow disgorging Creet.
Humidor knew why he had been chosen. "What...what must I do?"
"Her. Buy her a beer." At Jukeboxer's point, El Humidor steeled himself and swallowed hard. Then he swallowed beer. A lot of beer. Then got up, squared his shoulders and his recollection of his bank balance and headed to the bar and the slim young lady waiting there.
o0o
Akka/Dekka woke up in free fall.
"Fu--" whump.
When a man falls asleep on the roof, he will sometimes wake up on the ground, or nearly so.
o0o
Creet smiled. "Hey, El Humidor."
"You have on me a disadvantage. I think we haven't never met."
"Oh, I was at a party at your house a while back. Don't get out much now."
"No?"
"Nah. Dumb desk day job thing. Dress code, the whole bit."
Humidor finally caught the bartender's eye. Thickly he thumbed at his envelope, impressed at a distant remove by the bulk of his rent money. "Hey..." distracted by the jukebox, omnipresent as the surf and powerful as summer thunder, "Can I get another? And whatever she's drinking? And some quarters?"
Receding to the shadows, Jukeboxer mumbled a question at Ritch Tapestry. "You think he's got a shot?"
"I think he'd better."
o0o
Gorgeous late-summer monday afternoon in Portland. Cloudless sky, everything's clear, blue and green. The air has a magic sweetness rarely attainable by lesser cities, even near Jerry's cigar, on a porch that could be promoted to ramshackle with a few free hours and a pressure washer. "These Dreams" blared, because Jerry's view of "all-Boston mix tape" is as whimsical as everything else.
Dekka and Humidor mounted the porch from opposite directions, both struck by Rig's struck face.
"The fuck happened to you?" Akka/Dekka gently inquires. "You fall down getting the mail again?"
o0o
Pinball, jukebox and vast accessible alcohol took the night out back behind the barn, shoved a rifle in its mouth, delivered an Oscar-worthy disquisition on the topic of renting oneself, and loosed two shots. The second was just for effect. Creet and El Humidor laughed with newly-won familiarity as last call happened, and delivered their orders with glee. Somehow they'd spent most--55, maybe 60%--of the night talking about Creet's "dumb day job".
"Seriously. Not one person there will drink a beer at lunch. At least three people have told me they don't understand why I'd rollerblade to work instead of owning a car. They decorate their cubes and can't understand why I dress the way I do. I get there in a good mood from my ride; by lunch I'm furious. Every night I roll into my pad and just go to bed I'm so tired from dealing with all the bullshit."
Humidor shoved his cigarettes across the table. Creet spoke around one, absently clicking her Zippo a few times after lighting the tube.
"It's like getting beat up. My life is getting abused. Bruised. They won't let me be who I am when I'm there. By the time I get home, I'm too exhausted to be who I want to be."
Humidor cleared his throat quietly. Now was the crucial moment--as the midnight champion, he needed to strike a blow for the forces of freedom. He could just tell.
"Would you excuse me for a moment?" Creet's eyes were focused on some dimension unknown to most as she unfolded her lanky frame and vanished out the front door. Humidor slumped, crushed by the weight of failure as Jukeboxer and Ritch Tapestry appeared behind him, radiating thrill and not a little surprise as the bar's get-out lights suddenly shed harsh illumination on outing's end.
"Good man."
"Well done." And they were gone. Confused, Humidor finished his quarter-inch of beer, eyed the surround, shrugged and downed Creet's last inch. As he attained the pavement, Creet rushed him. "Wanna hit the Plaid? We have like 6 minutes."
"Thought you worked in the morning, not?"
Creet moved her cell phone like a tambourine. "Nope. I just called them and quit. Let's grab a sixer; I want to show you that anime I told you about."
"O-ohkay."
o0o
"Well, I don't entirely know. I remember going in to La Dolce 'Gina for a second, and getting kicked out for getting blood on the stage."
"The hell did you get the dough to go to a peeler bar?"
"I wasn't there for long."
Rig was lying. He'd been there for about a hundred bucks. And he knew perfectly well what had happened to his face, now that a raft of red beers had reassembled his sundered memories. As Hedgehog's Dilemma had wound up their second to last number, Rig's voice had unleashed the mightiest known heckle. "You're not very good!" The words wheeled around the room like predatory birds. The Bowie knockoff known as Kludge had hurled his keytar to the ground and leapt feetfirst onto Rig's grinning, furious face. He'd hung out alone on the bridge for a bit, then paid to look at naked women. But your roommates don't need to know everything.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
|
|
|
Make it so the random feature on your .mp3 player can accommodate classic-rock-radio-approved formats like "2fer tuesday" and the all-conquering "rock block" aka the "menage a troi weekend".
The only problem with this is that it would require slightly more subtle/robust categorization schemes than currently are easy. I think I solved this problem for a customer of mine at the bar like 6 years ago, but I doubt he ever went anywhere with it...
The idea was this: people at the time didn't like the iPod shuffle, b/c they thought it wasn't random. The problem is that PERCIEVED randomness is much much different than actual randomness. Actual randomness tends at the small-scale level to be clumpy as hell, which bugs a human being told to expect randomness. The other problem about randomness as it applies to a small collection of music, and here it is violently relevant that the shuffle held on the order of 100 songs, is that a human's expectation of randomness is operating on more than just the song level. That is, given a 100 song capacity and assuming 10 songs per album, allocated in the following way:
Guns & Roses (4 albums)
MC5 (2 albums)
NoMeansNo (2 albums)
Bad Brains (1 album)
Blue Oyster Cult (1 album)
A standard "random" procedure will give you a GNR song 40% of the time. This will strike your average listener as a seriously unrandom preponderance of GNR b/c the expectation a LISTENER has of randomness operates on the song and on the band level.
My solution involved categorizing each song as an ordered n-tuple, encoding minimally band and album; the algorithm would pick a path thru the n-tuples such that starting with n-tuple N, all the values of n-tuple N+1 would have to be distinct, and that this rule would apply at every instance. So, given (GNR, Patience, Lies), song two would have be be NOT GNR, NOT Patience, and NOT Lies.*
Given a scheme where the songs were categorized in this fashion, it would obviously be a simple matter to say, ideally, that 2fer tuesday would vary song + album but NOT artist and so forth. This would also facilitate my old mix-tape trick of like 4 songs in a row called "swallow my pride".
But that's a different post.
*My actual suggestion to the Apple employee** was tailored for the shuffle and involved picking a satisfactory path thru the entire search field at the beginning of the operation. That's relevant to ensure that the thing doesn't end up randomly bouncing between two songs for a while, which probably would have resulted in some smashed-up shuffles.
**No, I'm not making this up. I also had an idea for a spam filter that the guy said "that would probably work, and I wish there were a way for you to get paid for that." Now I suck cock for a living, down at the Olive Garden, and I'm still getting spam. FML.
|
|
Comments: Read 1 or Add Your Own.
|
|
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
|
|
|
More soon: I wrote this at work, where I have no access to the original work, hence the paucity of quotations. Attempting to find the pdf, I stumbled over the following link, in which a desperate(ly) hateful monster describes other human beings in atrocious ways. I had to read it twice to get what he was getting at and (thus) attain maximal despair re: this race.
http://mypetjawa.blogspot.com/2004_01_28_mypetjawa_archive.html#107531992791729862
Jarkko Clenninden's magisterial "Sexy Little Jawa", a work of such originality and power that it has remained unpublished for over a decade, has finally been issued in a well-translated English edition. While $149.89 seems a high price for a pdf file, it will be the task of this review to convince you to lay out the cash and forever discard your well-thumbed samizdat version of this essential tome.
Lovingly annotated and compendiouslyly researched by the small circle of Jawa eroticists that sprang up upon the release of an early version of this work (late afternoon on a tuesday, June of '91), the crystal clarity of Clenninden's vision has never been more compellingly presented. His limpid prose is vividly--some (will) say luridly--accompanied by some 13 dozen illustrations, collected here for the first time. While longtime fellow travellers will recognize many of these, it is frankly a mitzvah to have them all in one place. Leafing through Appendix Q, where scholars have attempted to turn all the extant sketches into a flipbook--sort of an animated Kama Sutra as imagined by Larry Flynt and populated nigh-exclusively by Jawas--is a strange delight, like chewing cactus.
A work wholly without genre, "Sexy Little Jawa" veers from autobiographied fantasy to speculative xenopology to rigorous biological exegesis, always with the consummate verve and exhaustive--indeed exhausting--scholarship Clenninden brought to all his projects.
(It is my sad duty to inform his American readers that Clenninden recently died after choking on a fish bone. It didn't kill him, but the fistfight he provoked with the chef, his about-to-be-estranged wife, did.)
Jawas, those tinker-pirates of Tattoine's high deserts, have been said to be among the least eroticizable races in speculative fiction. (E.g., Safire 1979, Bloom 1980, 1983, 1987) It is not merely a (large, and haphazardly interconnected array of) personal kink(s) that led Clenninden to spend many of his most productive years demanding that we ALL fixate sexually on these vaguely rodenty midget cyborg hackers of robots, these nocturnal nomads of the sand, and the nearly 48,000-word passage exhorting all to give in to the power of the "Jawabreaker" still thrills after all these years. By politicizing the sexualization of the entirely alien, he alienates the very notion of sexuality itself, in a vermiform demonstration of the highly ramified "body politic" so endemic to late capitalism.
Like all Clenninden's work, the gimlet-eyed focus on Others and Otherness is but the thick part of the blade; the heavy lifting is done by the robustness of his introspection. While the narrative trends in social science have largely been supplanted by a recent move towards simply making things up and studying the implications of imaginative artificats, "Sexy Little Jawa" still reads as thoroughly up-to-date. Particularly stirring (as in "stiffening") is his multi-part recollection of becoming aware of the erotic and frankly sexual potential of the Jawa race, investigating and rejecting various human-standard sexual fetishes as altogether too bland*, and finally his fervent decision/belief that long about 2012, the Jawas would come and cum to Earth to release us from one kind of bondage and introduce us to a savagely satisfying other kind.
A personal favorite comes about two-thirds of the way through the text, a section commonly known as "just lemme sniff on 'em".
*After you've tortured a file cabinet with feet to blow a load, tying somebody down or fucking your sister or whatever probably seems a tad tepid.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
without a doubt, is the access to weird industry jargon. The following list strikes me as queerly noir.
* Muller Martini Binder (Side Gluing and Hinge Scoring)
* Muller Martini Saddle Stitcher
* Three-Knife Trimmer and Stacker
* STL 1000 Wire-O
* Sicknger Auto Punch
* Auto Plastic Spiral
* Consolidated Computerized Cutter
* Baum Folder – Series 700 26x40
* Lawson Auto Drill
* Seybold Drill
* Campak Shrink Wrapper
* Clamco Shrink Wrapper
* Shanklin Tunnel
* D&K Laminator
* Seybold Round Corner
* Strapex Strapper
* 3M Auto Box Taper
Who among us hasn't been in a smoky, bouborn-soaked dive, down the bar from a guy whose gnarled phizz billboarded for the whole world that his name was Otto "Three-Knife" Punch? Who hasn't fantasized about the beautiful "Shanklin Tunnel", Sherri from honors history, who never spoke to you, but whose crimson-painted lips and white minis seemed to speak volumes?
|
|
Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
|
|
|
|
The coffee at work today tastes like Folger's and cum.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
So...be a dick to a cop, go to the White House? Abuse your power and get invited to share a beer with the president?
So where's my fucking invite, Barry?
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
The CEO of Kaiser is on the radio, attempting to answer the question "what is it we don't understand about what you do?". He's got some really interesting perspectives.
"Well, wringing our gloved fists is most of thursday, mondays and wednesdays we grovel before senators to avoid oversight of any meaningful kind, fridays we bully those same senators to remind them who really holds the whip hand...tuesdays are mostly mustache-twirling day..."
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
Saturday, July 18th, 2009
|
|
|
was probably when I followed up "this is a man whose emotional map has many areas marked 'here there be dragons'" with "and then he sees the area marked 'here there be unicorns' and he squeals and is like 'awesome'.
In other news, Fat's all busted up cuz McSweeny's turned him down and won't be publishing the following list. I keep trying to tell him that being rejected by a bunch of twee twerps isn't the end of the world, but he's taking it pretty hard. (Like he ALWAYS does--in the BEHIND!! ZING!!!)
some things my bosses were, apparently, unprepared to hear me say
"No."
"I'm trying to eat a pita here, so could you please go fuck yourself?"
"Masturbating. Duh."
"Whoever on the night shift isn't flushing when they're done needs to be fired. Or shot."
"GodDAMN those fucking Red Wings!" (Shrieked while doing dishes.)
"I don't see why not. We do stuff that's WAY more asinine than that all the time."
"If you didn't want to know, what the fuck did you ask me for?"
"It'd probably be a little easier if you were sober."
"Well, as I said in my email, my assumption is that the man is simply incapable of counting to 5 successfully given two separate tries."
"This is NOT a weapon. It is a tool."
"I guess what I'm 'suggesting' is that you give him the rest of the afternoon off so he can quit fucking up my life."
"Do you think you can kick my ass?"
"I find it incredibly inappropriate and offensive for you to use the word 'retard'."
"Oh, sure, I've been fired for THAT. A couple times, actually."
"I would like a raise."
Lafayette "Fat" Contradiction
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
|
|
|
so THAT's what that's about. I saw some of their postcards at a coffee shop the other night, but didn't remember to look it up.
And remember, especially until civilization falls*, bikes are as mobile as mobile gets! (Though their rules state that you can go by foot or public transport only--a rule I dislike, but the whole point is for a game like this to have rules, so.)
*Further.+
+There once was a heavy metal magazine called RIP. It covered punk, hardcore--everything with loud guitars and shouting men. It also--and this was bizarre, given the times--covered skateboarding. This is mid/late 80s, when skateboards were still overwhelmingly a Cali phenomenon, and the few skaters in the midwest were, by my observation, mercilessly harassed and beaten, often by the same dude who were otherwise the target market for RIP.
ANYways, one of the articles I remember% most clearly from that magazine was a piece about a skater that started off with a postapocalyptic fantasy about how, after all the gasoline was gone#, and the streets were too busted up to accommodate inflatable tires$
%Obsessive rereader, me. Generally, I would shoplift an issue and read and reread it until another issue came out or I stole an issue of Guitar World. I had to do something to fill those anguished interstices between books about unicorns.
#We were all REALLY BIG fans of the Mad Max movies. Interestingly, everybody I know only seems to remember the last, Beyond Thunderdome, which I regard as more of a failed parody of the first two than anything else.
$Seriously! This was, like, given its entire own paragraph!!
|
|
Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
|
|
|
Longish production meeting with DDT today. Another project added to the roster: Super! Hero! Shared! Housing! cook book.
This is actually an outgrowth of an idea I had some years back, a public access cooking show called The Bachelor Kitchen. My idea is that every bachelor has a handful of recipes: a few staples, usually, things that don't take all that much prep time, effort or money, and generally yield enough comestables to fuel a foolish lifestyle for maybe half a week.
And some of us have a showpiece recipe. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a recipe that's earmarked for that crucial first time you cook for a lady. If you see what I'm driving at here.
(Sex. I'm talking about trying to impress a woman with food in order to gain access to her vagina. Well, not just her vagina. That I think this actually might work is a testament to my confidence in my cookery, as it's clear that Gourmet Ramen's got a long way to go to make up for my myriad shortcomings.)
Anyways, please anticipate it!
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
Last night, I dreamed of Africa. Okay, that's not actually true. Last night I dreamed I was a dragon who, after a long night at the crowded bar, accidentally dropped some acid and decided to go for a walk.
Some nice fellow decided to accompany me, but I really didn't crave this escort.
On my way home, for to sleep, the last thing I heard, from the porch of a punk house in south Berkeley, was a girl, staring into her last inch of 40, say "I'm turning 20 in 5 days, & I'm having a total midlife crisis.".
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
Found the following while parsing scribbles preparing for the largeish piece over to Selavy. Kim had asked me to put together a review, I had said yes, and then, predictably, never managed to.
This is, I think, all I managed to get down on paper, though probably I did kick her some feedback here and there in back-channel ways.
Anyway.
Notes toward a review of Kim's chapbook
Observations pitiless and merciful in equal striped nature, and a halting, crippled domesticity coexisting with creatures partaking of the infinite. So it's a lot like being close to a human.
I saw a draft of this some bit ago, and was stunned then by its evocations, its images grinding against and dancing amongst each other, entirely resisting any reduction to allegory.
This version is sharpened--images lunge past one another like fencers missing, strike home like sarcastic archers. Reading The Residents teaches things you never knew--things you didn't want to but could never be whole without.
I think I did pretty good at capturing the "review voice". I will say that.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
In the way that a Christmas or a vacation may be very Brady, my past week has been very...Collision.
Started with the first wave of comments about the dead-tree version of the Super! Hero! Shared! Housing! Omnibus Volume One. Thus far, people have been very positive, which is half-nice (I would like one absolute savaging, though, just so I can (a) stop waiting for the other shoe (trou?) to drop and (b) get pissed off and thus more productive. But people ranging from co-workers to my mom have said they thought it was funny and good and asked the occasional question that made it clear that they'd actually thought about it. So...I'm basically calling this one a flawless victory for the Tinzeroes/Collision Creative Axis.
Just wait 'til Volume II. Y'all gonna brickshit.
In addition to nice words and the occasional couple bucks or lovely item in trade, I got two separate boxes of baked goods. For most of the past week, I've been trailing crumbs of chocolate chip and scone behind me, navigating primarily by echolocation facilitiated by constant little pleasure-grunts.
I feel a little like Steve Martin's character early in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: "do you have any idea how good it feels when a woman gives you baked goods in exchange for something you wrote?".
Then I found 15 bucks on the ground outside the drug store at lunch. I turned that money mostly into a glass-walled quart and an issue of Heavy Metal. I drank the bulk of that quart in the wonderfully named Bushrod Park, watching high school kids have a softball scrimmage while grade schoolers behind me ran thru soccer drills and amazing profanity gouted from the teen center behind me. I investigated my exciting new bike bag the while. My new-bag pride manifested itself in a tiny outcropping of new work over at Selavy.
I was frustrated, however, to discover that I hadn't updated that worthy 'ject since Fucking January. This is particularly galling since I've actually been working reasonably diligently and somewhat regularly on two fairly large pieces of Selavy. One of them spiralled rather out of control and kinda got away from me. But will appear someday, hopefully soon. The other I was going to stitch together and post today, but I forgot the bag of scraps where it currently lives, so. (Still no internet at home, y'dig.)
Whereas the thing that went up the other morning was just a 15-minute freewrite response to a new bike bag and having read a chapter or two of Vineland before bed.
Sigh. I still just don't get Pynchon, nor my responses to him. I guess one of these years I'll have to get off my hinder and read one of the books that's actually considered good Pynchon. I know I picked up a copy of the new one (Against the Day? Can't remember the name.) a while before leaving Portland, but I ransacked the storage space and couldn't find it. Plus a co-worker is reading it right now, and I'll be thrice-damn'd before I bite his estilo.
One thing I do get, as of this week, is Pere Ubu's album The Modern Dance. It took a long time to parse and process this disc. I bought it a little over 2 years ago. Initially, I recall a tentative liking, but a fair bit of anxiety whenever it would play. I figured this was the desired effect, and didn't begrudge it, but neither do I live a life that needs additional anxiety... (He said, yoinking another 14 ounces of wholly unneccessary coffee.)
Now, though, though it still creates some anxiety, I can kinda site the record a bit more accurately. Essentially what we have here is Devo + early Roxy Music, where Brian Eno is split equally into Allen Ravenstine's synth and David Thomas' insanity. (BTW, it bears mentioning that Thomas' nom du art punk, Crocus Bohemoth, is probably better than anything I will ever write. Fucker.)
Or, to put it another way, Pere Ubu is Wire. At least thru side one.
Other elements of this week I'm particularly proud of involve getting two bikes running considerably better than they did the week before. I got off work on friday last to a flat tire--surely the exception that proves the rule I call Collision's Conundrum:
The little gods* will always make it harder for you to do things you don't want to do. Thus it will always be hard to get to work, but will never be hard to leave work.
*The little gods are like the Wind God, the God of the Roads, the God of Whether or not There'll be Hot Water, etc.
I did my usual slow, drunken job of patching the tube and inspecting the tire lengthily, finding much ground-in glass and the like, so I booted the tube many times, reinstalled everything, and went to bed.
And discovered upon awakening a flat tire. So, I rode to work (on a saturday, natch) on a single-speed with no appreciable brakes and devoted sunday to a new tire, a working brake cable, and sundry other life-improvement projects.
Last night I hit up a Cyclecide event, wandering around and drinking beer under fading light while commuters of a stunning array of ages matched attitudes with bike punks, everybody in their uniforms, everybody intensely self-satisfied and suspicious of other tribes. Tipsy, I headed for SF to see Portland's Pierced Arrows.
They were wonderful--actually much better than the last time I'd seen them, not long before leaving Portland, and finally have accumulated enough songs and differences to be a viable follow-up to Dead Moon, who were one of my 4 or 5 favorite things about living in Portland. I got drunk, fell in love with a couple-three women, got incredibly homesick. Most of these good vibes were wrecked by me butchering my pal's advice about the last BART and having to navigate the Drunk Bus.
The Drunk Bus is a very Collision environment, but in the way that my third-hand mattress or the linoleum around my toilet is a very Collision environment. Perhaps best not to dwell. Perhaps indeed best not to dwell in my life...
Addendum:
Pierced Arrows are a weird case. If you care at all about 3-chord rock and roll, but weren't in Portland in the 90s and early 00s, you probably haven't heard of Dead Moon. If you have heard of Dead Moon, but haven't seen them live in Portland, then you've missed the greatest exponent of the genre in its natural habitat, and one of the few repeatable experiences that reliably produced real joy. Pierced Arrows is two of the three people from Dead Moon, and until last night I hadn't been convinced they had managed to bottle the lightning. I may have been right about their early shows, but it certainly feels as though that issue has been resolved.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
Put this together a couple weeks ago. Half the job of the QA analyst, it seems, is sending corrections to designers asking them to reduce the amount of white space on some given page.
do not deal gently with the space that is white.
unfollow'd standards should be burnt and raged against by a QA.
rage, rage against the copy of the site.
though wise temps at their job know quiet is right,
because their words and works had found no ears, they
do not deal gently with the space that is white.
good work, the last long done, done now in spite.
sullenly sitting in meetings as they
rage, rage against the copy of the site.
undertrained and ignored, new resumes in flight,
wincing comparisons endured to Office Space or the Office's Dwight.
do not deal gently with the space that is white.
glaring at menus or ensuring images are used right,
surely a life isn't all meant to be used this way.
rage, rage against the copy of the site.
and you, my co-workers, here amidst your plight,
do not deal gently with the space that is white.
rage, rage against the copy of the site.
|
|
Comments: Add Your Own.
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
c_collision's journal