All about the little lines

Yup.

It is.


this is half of the bottom third of the framed board (about one and a half times real size).

Almost done with the drawing . . . then on to the painting of it. Couldn't even possibly imagine the fresh hells that task will bring about. I'm giving myself a month.

one month.

yup

Growth and Hand-Cramps

Painting-one-detail2
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

Day two of drawing has started off nicely. Half a pot of coffee has been added to my own magic garden. The skritchy little boxes of feet and teeth and arms and mechanical cows and finger factories grow at an astoundingly meticulous rate. Mayan Micro-chips, Cartoon Circutry, little people and their little things interwoven into a mass of indecipherable, smudgy graphite. The history shows subtly. Yesterdays globs bear a slight faded look as the hand rests over them to draw the nieghboring scapes of stuff next-door. If you click into the flicker site, the full-sized image in the "large" size "all sizes box" is about equal to the real size visuals.

breaks over.
repeat fantomas disc (today I added some Tomahawk too).
(cracks knuckles)

enjoy the sabbath,
-M to the A to the double T, P.

werky werky

painting-1-detail
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

This is about a four inch by four inch section of sketching that will soon engulf a 27 inch by 12 inch canvas-board (yeah, the one's I was bitching about a couple posts below). There are these little infections of growing drawing all over the wood that, eventually, will connect with eachother. After that the painting begins. I don't really know what the fuck I'm doing (aside from listening to live Fantomas/Melvins over and over again. . . funnyhow that is the only music that doesn't relly distract me from my thoughts). It looks like it's gonna be one gigantic cluster fuck of symbols and characters and mechanic-like drawings that will only have meaning in relationship to what is directly next to them (Kafkan logic, from Franz Kafka. . . the way dreams work). The eye can follow a story around a hundred different ways like a cross-word/cartoon and always form the same set of stuff into a new and different story.

Can't wait till these are done (working on two at the same time) so I can start on the three foot by two foot versions (YIKES!!! I'm gonna need glasses).

CHEERS
Mattcockso

BATMAN BEGINS to annoy me

batman
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

For the last couple of days, my joblessness has landed me reading at the coffee house downtown which shares sidewalk-table/chair sets with the comic store. While smoking between paragraphs (sentences, sometimes) I’ve been getting an ear-full of whining, elitist criticism in regards to the new BATMAN movie:

“I hate it!!”
“I can’t even watch it!”
and my personal favorite:
something about how when buddy watches the movie, its like a split screen comes up with the movie on one side and a running list of mistakes on the other. . . he hates it too.

The main theme behind all this hatred has to do with how far the characters and the plot digress from the comic book. These are the same folks who probably felt slapped in the face when they saw black leathery suits in the X-MEN movie instead of yellow spandex.

So I see the movie last night, and it’s great! Walking out of the theater I start to get really pissed off at the comic-twits for being so hurt by the movie’s obvious improvements on a stupid, half-decade old cartoon for children. I can understand that they are fanatical escapists offended by the betrayal of an original story-line that they’ve invested time and money into. I’m sorry that their defining status symbol is a privileged knowledge of every Batman character that was ever inked onto paper and sold for under $2.00 (yeah, I know, the Dark Knight stuff cost more, but wasn’t that just as derivative if not more?). It’s a real shame that the main villain (who was so obscure he avoided the touch of a hand-full of previous Batman movies, not to mention the totality of the 70’s TV series and every Saturday morning cartoon ever made) was a combination of several characters written into one, well . . . pretty enjoyable and believable movie villain.

FUCK YOU COMIC SNOBS!!!
THIS IS A MOVIE, NOT A COMIC BOOK!!!
NO ONE’S IMPRESSED WITH YOUR ALL-KNOWING EYE FOR BATMAN AUTHENTICITY.
NOBODY OWES YOU ANYTHING FOR READING A BUNCH OF COMIC BOOKS!!

GO HOME AND CRY TO YOUR 1/6 SCALE, LIMITED EDITION, RESIN CAST BATMAN “SCUPLT” ABOUT IT ‘CAUSE DOING IT IN PUBLIC IS JUST FUCKIN’ SAD AND MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A BUNCH OF RELIGIOUS ZEALOTS ARGUEING ABOUT THE CONSISTANCY OF JESUS’S HAIR.

So, yeah . . . anyway.
Love ya’ll,
-m

Sand Paper Doll Houses

art of David Ho
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

Woke up this morning, over the course of a couple hours, to the intense foot-biting of our new kitten. Got out of bed, threw on some coffee, threw on "Angel Food" by Ani (If the mattress was a table top, and the bedsheet was a page, we'd be written out like a couple of question marks, my convex to your concave, and we'd be lying here at the end of a sentence that asks, are you ready know?) and hopped on the computer to browse art and talk smarty-pants bullshit with some old friends from Omaha/Lincoln. Reran across David Ho, whose work i had just seen in a digital art book. What an intense imagination this man has. His dreams would pull a lot more at the box office than mine would.

The last couple days has been filled with building these "canvases" that aren't really canvases at all. They're masonite board with hidden screw-mounts conneted to 1 1/2" wodden frames, wood puttied together in a seamless fasion. Lots of sanding, painting, sanding, making the seam disappear. They're really starting to look like objects instead of just a board that will be painted. I'd pat myself on the back over how slick they look but my hand is crampy from grasping blocks coated with sand paper.

The work I'm gonna do on them will surprise you. very different from anything you've seen out of my head yet. A compilation of ideas, literally, mostly about the similarities between computer/virtual reality and the way our brains symbolize all these wierd mathematical processes around us into traditional "reality". It's the first capital "A" art i've made since school, and that's been several (SEVERAL) years, so it's refreshing to start out with the surface crafted meticulously. If you've ever stared at a blank sheet of paper or a blank computer screen and buckled under the pressure of all the possibilities, imagine what it would be like if that same blank surface took three days of relentless concentration to make.

Back to the coffee,
Mattamar Pazzolov

Comets On Fire

Comets On Fire
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

Saw this Bay Area ensemble last night. Think: Old Kyuss playing Mars Volta B-sides with a dash of Bob-Seger-via-Pharmacueticles on the vocals. The rumors i caught from the audience included:
1. The lead singer/guitar soloist is some guit-nerd hero from way back that thas been here on a solo tour (he makes George Lynch look like a trained pretty boy with an expensive, nice sounding amp and . . . uh, wait a minute . . . ).
2. The second guitarist was the bassist and the bassist was playing guitar. This is funny because the dudes look interchangable. I was shocked that they had different styles of shoes on.
3. The dude that played the stack of electronic stuff (none of which looked less than 20 years old) was, in fact, not wearing a fake mustache. He played drums on a couple songs and had this way of holding his arms tight against his torso so that he appeared to be driving a team of horses.
4. (from the drummer, the other one, without a mustache) the new CD is best because it made them fight alot.

What was really captivating about this performance was the venue. The show was held in the Wexner Center for Performing Arts on the Ohio State (Columbus) Campus. It's a theater stage set up for, well, theater. We buy our tix and proceed to the double doors across from the lobby. A women stamps our hands and sez, "down the left, along the wall, up the stage. . . the shows behind the curtain." We follow her directions up the stage and pass the heavy black curtain cloth to find a smaller stage set against the backdrop of the four story "back stage" area. Three inch thick ropes, running vertically up the walls, spaced about 2 inches apart, were color lighted and single, low-wattage bulbs hung from long cables to illuminate the audience area. Mass capacity would have been about a hundred people. It was really a dream setting for a show. I wish I could see every band in that environment.

on a completely different subject:
I was reading how mantras are supposedly derived from the Egyptians, who used to repeat the names of dieties over and over to invoke there presence. Every morning the priests would chant the sun god's name and, what-do-you-know, he'd appear. And this worked every day!! Incidently, his name was Amen, and the Christians still repeat his name every day because their god won't give his out. He's a busy guy. Git ahold of his people and they'll let him know you're looking for 'em.

Eatin' Wood

k8204-7i
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

I'm pulled out of sleep this morning by a loud dental drilling sound accompanied by an unfamiliar male voice, right outside my bedroom window, discussing the mass extinction of an "entire population of . . . ".

As it turns out, our two-car garage is infested with arterial passages full of termites. BUGS!! Little see-through critters like baby moles. They're glutting themselves on the delicious, mushy wood of our garage's 1930-era, untreated shelving units.

Seeing a big, swarming mass of insects flips that switch in your amygdala that makes your brain experience "phantom bug contact" all over your body. The yelling of "WHUHH-AUHH", shortly followed by arm-swinging and one-knee-raising-goose-steps, is sporadically induced for hours after the sighting. Adrenal-pychotic heeby jeeby bouts are no way to start off the morning.

It was decided that Melissa's art work (the work) needed to be moved out of the garage. I picked up a box full of cloth houses, and was half-way into the house with it, when she screamed for me to stop, put down the box and get it the hell away from the house. The entire under-side was covered with unspeakable horror. I dropped it and did the creepy bug dance for awhile.

All this seems pretty unmentionable now, though, because my smoking porch time that followed was interrupted by a sour sight. Why, oh why-why-why, would someone put a TOOL sticker on their rear-windshield directly under a see-through Jerry Garcia head?

givin' you the business

stupidcardsingle
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

Made some new cards to hand out . . . businessily. Now, when I'm giving someone the business, they will have hard, concrete evidence to prove it really happened. That it wasn't just a figment of the Image-in-nation. They can touch my business. Put it in their mouths and recoil at the acid-free flavor of my business manifest. Behold the cool, blue tint of my business. The Tri-digit metal fist of my cartoony, yet not ironic, offering. It is with you, in your ass-pocket, in your purse, in your wallet like a spy on your own business. It betrays it's own kind. My business is the business of busy-ness. I must remember my work.

YAY!!

bathroom
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

So this used to be covered in pink, crumbling, black-mold-cornered wall paper (ever see the movie Barton Fink?) and the ceiling looked like it hadn't had a good shave in years . . . I'm gonna go lay on the floor and suck paint off my fingers now.

Breaking the Mold

Spent the better (or worse) part of yesterday scraping down the rotting bathroom in our rental house. 6 hours on a ladder, looking up, mask and goggles, working through 5 layers of buckled-mold-infested paint over my head. Luckily, this room has no ventilation. The mixture of wallpaper stripper, mildew remover, bleach and caulk fumed into a visible cloud of caustic vapor. Considering the previous night was comprised of a full night's worth of margarita ass shaking, my body had little sweat to add further discomfort to the face mask/safety goggle combo strapped to my head. The mask would not conform to my chin hair in a way conducive to creating a good seal, but this was easily remedied by a clothes pin to the nose with the white, rubber-banded cup only over my lips and chin. 12 hours later, the walls are ready for paint, the caulk in drying, the adhesive residue from the wallpaper is gone, and I am left with no functional shower to wash up in. This all made me very angry. There was no love in the process, just black hatred towards the previous tenants, their inability to make pee pee go in the toilet, and spores in general.

Problem of Unknown Origin

Toronto Graffiti

Found all these pictures that Missy took of the S. King Alley. They were slide-showing across the monitor in her office. I totally forgot she took them. This is exactly what I remember about walking around the old neighborhood (well, that and picking up tranny crack-persons for our X-tasy orgies/x-box tournaments).
here's a couple:

We were up early. . . the fruit's not even out yet!



Same artist as the fruit mart. Dude got around!!


I think this guy worked at Currie's Art Supplies. He always had work for sale there, hidden among the stock of supplies.

matty: OUT

????????????

How come I've never, in my whole life, ever, even once, found a split-end on my body hair?

Sabbath, Dark-Roasted Sabbath

So the party was a great time. Had the Faculty and Grads over for an after-hours. The basement dance room worked wonders on the end-of-the-quarter stress-bundles. The Ampeg shook the whole house with ,among other things, SELF, Eagles of Death Metal, Beastie Boys, Jane's Addiction, Skinny Puppy, Devo, the OUTKAST and even some David Lee Roth en Espanol. By four in the morning the last of the guests left, I had a shower, and the bed-trip to unconsciousness was underway.

What's in the fore-front of my mind these days:
After this week I'm officially jobless.
The room in my basement that's sole occupant is my lonely bass-rig.
How one goes about finding illustration work.
Baking puppets in this ungodly, humid heat.
Breaking in the newly built drawing studio.
Reading my way away from insanity.

. . . and just to keep it visually stimulating, here's an old painting I found that the three people who read this may remember.


Bedroom mirrors do tell
who's the fairest of them all
Lime light silhouette transparent attic walls
Dancing shadows cascade paper walls
Wailing ghost guitars send in the clowns

Don't mind the Jack Daniels, I'm drinking spelling mistakes

Anything worse than waiting for the party to start? I'm sitting in my house with two-hundred cans of cheap beer, pig masks, lab coats, creme puffs, strap-on snouts, rubber gas masks and enough finger cots for everybody (we run a clean show here). All those fuckers are still in the sculpture yard finishing off the second keg. I've got blacklights in the basements surrounded by two-thousand neon colored post-its and a laptop hooked-up to my 400 watt Ampeg head.

Any minute now. . .

Skin Memory

I manage to inject a freshly sharpened pencil into the sole of my foot while moving a chair. After firmly pressing an alcohol-soaked cotton ball over the wound for a couple minutes, I realize that the graphite of the "lead" will probably be visible for at least twenty years. For the first time in a decade, I locate a faint grey dot to the left of the first knuckle on my third finger, the result of defensive pencil-play that dates back to grade school. I'm assuming this version of scarring works on the same premise that retains tattoos over the years, but why? How's it work? I know that every seven years, as new skin is formed, the bottom-most layer of skin is forced up to the barrier that separates the inside of the body from the outside (this rate of travel is what I call "the speed of dark"). It is then released into the atmosphere where it combines with boogers and star-matter and, inevitably, turns into dust. So what are these marks? Residual ink and graphite that stays around longer than the skin? Doesn't that grow out too? Has the memory of some implanted color been etched into the reproductive intelligence of my skin's cells? Is my skin re-living some past trauma or is it learning? I wonder what else it knows.