My Virgin Brain

I was grabbing some x-rays, getting prepared for making some new paintings in order to balance out the slow-slow-slow-pace of the new drawings . . . actually remember what it feels like to finish something. You can't beat the sense of accomplishment when it comes to motivating your work ethic.

So I'm going through some old stacks of shit, looking for all the right resources for some new work, and I run across some ridiculous old drawings. Pre-pubes the clown stuff, but the same style. It amazes me how utterly fucked-up I was, pre-drugs, pre-life, before I really ever did anything at all. It's so nice to see I was always dirty and inappropriately perverted.

Consider the Birds

whctbfront
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

To be truthful, the first couple Woven Hand albums seemed to be 15 Horsepower to me. I love the voice, but the tunes just didn't have the same impact as the full band. The newest album, Consider the Birds, is the antidote to the lacking spirit I was missing.

I ordered it from Hoffa's, the only music store in town aside from WalMart, and promptly recieved the request in the form of a cardboard-cased-13-dollar bundle of good 'ole haunted channeling for the unholy ghost of God's true voice untempered by the hypocracy of pay-to-prey religion. If you haven't had a listen yet, treat yourself.

Mister West:

Reunited hard rockers VAIN will be releasing their new album, "On the Line", in the U.S. on August 23 via Perris Records. The new CD features ten new scorching tracks produced and recorded by lead singer Davy Vain and the band. "This new CD encompasses all of the elements that fans have grown to expect from VAIN's music: pure, raw energy, emotion and attitude," says guitarist Jamie Scott.

"On the Line" was produced entirely in Davy's recording studio, The Groove Room. The Groove Room features one of the most highly desired vintage microphone, compressor and outboard gear collections around. As Davy puts it, "I've always had a thing for the vibe and sound of classic recordings of the '60s and 70s." Jamie's take on recording at The Groove Room: "I think it's just been a natural progression of Davy's to aquire the vintage equipment that has produced some of the best sounding recordings of all time and at the same time create an environment that allows him capture his music on his terms. The Groove Room is an extension of that."

Check out a "teaser" track from "On the Line", entitled "Runnin' on Empty", at this location: Cockus Rockus

Fingerman

The two hour drive to Columbus yesterday was chest-pinchingly stressful. It was raining hard. To you that may mean nothing, but out here, in the foothills of the mountains, in the middle of fucking no-where, it's disastrous.

Nothing here is built under the guise of modern technology. There are houses on our block that have no foundation. Everything floods. There was a penitentiary that closed down because of the Black Mold. It often feels like I'm on a prolonged camping trip.

I've seen peoples' houses in water up to the door knobs.
I've seen men entering the Wal-Mart in blow-up canoes.

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, where they have modern conveniences like drainage and spill-offs; I am not born into a fear of water. I have always assumed that a little rain never hurt anybody.

Driving down the highway yesterday was a drag. Most of the "highway" is a winding, two-lane road, carved into the valleys of Appalachia. The 55 MPH speed limit is often broken-up by 35 MPH through depressing little towns that consist mostly of drive-through liquor stores, fast food, and a dozen different flavors of Christian worship places. If you see someone walking down the street, they don't look inviting or friendly or even all that literate.

The water was brutal. I've never really hydro-planed before and it's a scary thing even without the hills and tall drop-offs. The semis heading down steep grades can't slow down and tear past you, blinding your vision with tidal splashes. Visibility being 10%, you'd figure people would turn their lights on and not drive 20 MPH, but you'd be wrong.

We almost turned around out of fear that we wouldn't be able to get back home (it's very common for the route to Columbus to be impassible during heavy rain). I kept driving though, slowly, because Missy had an appointment with a Fingerman. It's usually a month wait to see a Fingerman, so the appointment can't be taken lightly. She's been in the market for a guy whose down with amputation. The finger bothers her. She wants it gone.

The problem is doctors are trained to save stuff, so they don't like taking stuff off. It's against their intentions. You have to find a guy who's secure enough in his doctor hood to accept that it's the best thing for keeping her hand working right. Every other place has looked at her, being a girl, and pretty much refused to believe that she doesn't care what it looks like, she just wants it to handle the tough work-load she requires it to perform.



She's really great in the doctor's office. It's impressive to see someone request an amputation and not let the doctor intimidate them. He said she'd have to convince him, and she said "or have a little accident in the kitchen?".

The last guy (who she waited a month to see because he was a "hand specialist"), recoiled in terror when he saw the finger in person. He and his nurse just exchanged dumb looks and sent her off because there was nothing they could do.

This guy was different. He was a real, honest-to-god fingerman of the highest caliber. He offered options that included skin grafts and nail-bed-scar-removal, but was reluctant to mention the big chop because he thought she couldn't handle the idea. But she can. After running your hand through a press, the idea of a controlled surgery is not off-putting.

Other high-lights of the trip included:

A sign on the highway, written in spray paint, that said
"WANTED: HOT SECRATERY"

A $6 black bomber jacket, size small, off the Old Navy discount rack

Two people farted audibly outside a Barnes and Nobles while I smoked

My mix CD:
1. First song off the newest-TRICKEY CD
2. Passive-Trent and Maynard
3. A.D.D.-System of a Down
4. Taut-P.J.Harvey
5. Doll-Dagga Buzz Buzz-Marilyn Manson
6. Mudvayne
7. The Remedy (acoustic)-Abandoned Pools
8. Remnants of Pearcy Bass-Rasputina
9. Lucky You-Deftones
10. Seven Years(acoustic)-Saosin
11. Neutral Milk Hotel
12. Not Enough-Billy Corrigan
13. Really Here-Far
14. Mysterions(live)-PortisHead
15. Rape This Day-Tomahawk
16. RCV 22:20-Pucifer
17. The Way You Make Me Like Myself-Doughty
18. Roulette-S.A.O.D.
19. All These Things-Rasputina
20. Submission-Failure
21. Them Bones-Alice In Chains
22. Appollonia-Team Sleep

Blast from the Past #1

They say money can't buy happiness . . . but it can buy beer, and beer can make you happy. Just ask Johnny B. He sure looks happy.



His party never stopped. He never turned the stereo down. He didn't care how much work Tom put into a girl, after five minutes talking to John she was outta there. Every girl was out of there, but it didn't matter because Johnny be could spin a tale that was better than a drunken hand-job.

What's that?

You want pictures of Johnny B dancing on my grandparent's tombstones?



He's even wearing my shoes without socks!
He just doesn't give a fuck.

Need someone to order a pizza . . . rudely? Start a fight with the girl at the Hut, maybe make her cry?

I got your guy, guy:



If Drunk was a superhero, Johnny B was his secret identity. 1001 Facial Cumshots couldn't keep him from turning an ordinary get-together into an uncomfortable extravaganza of unsober mischief and sexist pagentry.

Drink to him.
Smoke to him.
Intoxicating penance is in order.
Inebriating sacrements are mandetory.

Make him a god.

EL Gato Meurto Del Auto

Every once in a while we are confronted in our lives by a stupefying and senseless situation that requires the mental “stop-drop-and-roll”. You just take a couple deep breathes, clear your mind, and proceed to initiate the proper sequence of events that will remedy whatever the crisis is. If you’re lucky (unlucky, actually) and the situation is dire enough, the autopilot will kick in and you will act without any “thinking”. Yay Reptilian Brain!!! It not only keeps your lungs active and the blood flowing, but also channels super-human strength or pin-point concentration should you need it. There are other times when your life is not threatened, no one is in physical jeopardy, but you are, none-the-less, confronted with a task of a completely repulsive nature without the benefits of these instinctive buffers. You are totally aware of yourself in your circumstances and about to do something really yucky. Really, yucky, right.

I’m at home on the phone with my mom, it’s early, and Melissa is grabbing some breakfast from the village bakery before she heads off for her last day of teaching summer class. After a while, she drives back up to the house and I can see her hand over her mouth through the windshield in a silent “Oh My God” pose that I’ve only seen a couple times and is never good (really, it’s the eyes above the hand-over-mouth that give away how not good it is). She, for no good reason, unlocks the passenger side door, which is facing me, and gets out on the driver’s side and says:

“GET OFF THE PHONE THERE’S A DEAD CAT IN MY MUFFLER!!”

(As she’s saying this I’m mentally noting that it’s said while she’s holding our breakfast.)

I don’t look under the car; I look at her, and try to piece together the part of the sentence that goes “dead cat in my muffler” because I’m not really sure what it means. I’m hoping hard that it doesn’t mean there is a dead cat in her muffler. If there was, in fact, a dead cat in her muffler I would have to come into contact with it because that’s really the underlying meaning to “dead cat in my muffler” that my logic is stepping around.

DEAD CAT IN MY MUFFLER = MATT TOUCHES DEAD CAT

(Word math is so very peculiar!)

Luckily, this is where the Brain kicks in and says, “It’s cool guy. This one’s on me”. The Brain proceeds towards the garage after getting a garbage bag from under the kitchen sink. The Brain is in the garage looking for the pinnacle of primate technology, the right tool for every job . . . some sort of Stick. The Brain selects a nice piece of long lumber that could realistically be perceived as a Stick. Brain and Stick have a plan. Brain and Stick are in control.

Somewhere between the garage and the car I pipe up, “Maybe we should look at it and figure out what we’re going to do”. I immediately realize I’ve over-stepped important boundaries. Brain and Stick are no dummies. They understand that if I’m a big enough boy to check out the carnage, then this situation doesn’t call for their emergency-only status. Next thing I know, Brain is gone and I’m standing there with Stick (who is just the muscle . . . he doesn’t know anything about Brain’s plan to eradicate my girlfriend’s car of the Dead Cat in the Muffler).

At this point Melissa sees Stick and I standing there, not advancing, no Brain in sight, like a toy without a battery, staring, for the first time, at the Cat in the Muffler. Part of the cat anyway, hanging out of the underside of her car. No question at all, from a hundred yards you’d know it was a Dead Cat in the Muffler.

Here’s the solution me and Stick come up with:

DRIVE AROUND, OVER SOME BUMPS, AND SHAKE IT LOOSE.

If that doesn’t work, make your students remove it. That’s how big an asshole I am. I leave it for an end-of-summer-school-teacher’s-pet-task. She drives off, Dead Cat in the Muffler dangling behind her. Bobbing up and down actually, smoke colored and dim.

I eat my breakfast sandwich. You know that dead cat is still going to be in the muffler when she gets home.

I’m going to have to touch it.

Just can’t beat the math.


-Math Puzzle

Rabbit Holes and Buckets of Gold

OxBaker
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

I've got this kinda' head game I like to play with myself. Following, sleuthing my way around in my past, I let myself remember a very specific place that I haven't thought about in a long time. For some reason it usually starts off with a parking lot, somewhere, that used to be a frequent stop in my past's day-to-day habits. I sometimes visualize these places out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, but when they stick I latch on. I let this memory of a forgotten place link into some other related place or person . . . whatever's near there, things that happened, whoever was with me . . . these secondary memories usually allow access to even deeper, more forgotten thoughts. And down into my head I go, thinking back things that haven't touched my consciousness in decades. The visual images are the easiest to chain because they are related spatially, but emotional similarities and other unknown factors make interesting and inexplicable connections too. It's important to immediately refuse any commonly recalled item, as in this particular game they are pennies compared to hundred dollar bills.

They say the brain holds the sensation of everything it has ever experienced. It even retains the stuff that didn’t take front stage as a focused and realized perception. Every sound that has been made within your earshot, every visual stimulus that has bounced a light wave into your retina, every particle that has rebounded off your skin . . . they are all filed, stored and accounted for inside the grey, water-logged meat inside your skull.

It's been hot here. Not to talk about the weather, but it's fucking hot with some absurd humidity in the ball-park of 83%. The wet and sultry atmosphere of the outside sticks and clings to limbs like living in a fishbowl full of summer jello syrup. I keep thinking I'll wake up and the soaked heat will be gone and I'll bound out of bed with that sensation of when you take off ankle weights and you think you'll leap to the ceiling with every step.

Anyway. . .

DEE
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

I still can't even think to write about how great the David Eugene Edwards show was. The only thing that could have made it better was the rest of Sixteen Horsepower backing him up. Fuck! fuck . . .
There was a Ticket Master episode that accompanied this show. Fucking TM sold us tickets online and two weeks later hadn't been able to get them to us yet. So we call them and they tell us that we'll be on a call list at the door and not to worry about it. Needless to say, we get there and are not on the list, pay cash to get in and get a bunch of info from the guy at the door who is very cool. He gives us his name and number, with a promise of vouching for us, and a contact to talk to in order to get a charge back.
The first thirty minute long phone conversation revolved around them wanting me to do a bunch of stuff because they can't seem to perform their simple ass service of taking my money and doing something for it. Fax a ticket stub, of which we had none, 'cause we paid at the door. bullshit, bullshit. . . If it was my business, at this point I'd be struggling to make amends with the unsatisfied, jilted customer, but no, they're coping attitude like we're trying to steal from them. What assholes.
We eventually got the charge back, but it would be nice if these incompetent fucks could refrain from besmirching an other-wise holy event with their unprofessional antics.


Anyway. . .

This


And this


and even this


I used to think the rhythm was gonna get me,
-M

Got a couple hours in today already. . .

again, it just kinda' grows like a petri dish full of candied acid fungus. It swells so slowly, slowly. . . slooooooowwwwwwwwwwwlllllly. My hands don't cramp up anymore. Found myself trying to describe it to my Mom on the phone today when she asked what I was working on:

"uhhhh, you know how lots of stuff, all together, starts to not be lots of stuff, but just, like, something that looks like a lot of stuff but is really one big thing made up of smaller things, and stuff. . . . ".



For size reference, that border is 1cm wide. This is ruoghly 2/3 way across the length of the board (12" x 27"). Earlier in the summer I wanted to have a job and a new painting by my birthday. Don't think I'm gonna make it. I'm gonna blame it on going to see Woven Hand this weekend.

back to the drawing board
(I've always wanted to say that when that's what it means),
Matt's the way, Uh-huh Uh-huh, I like it, Uh-huh Uh-HUh!

Later that day. . .

Round Two

For the last week I've been training at work, so I had a while to stew on the best way to restart these things:

less blocky figures.
more layering
more delicate lines
more confusion
longer tendrils floating off individual figures
make the connections more intricate



As always, the "all sizes" button at flickr will lead you too a giant version with more detail than you'll ever need.

On a completely different note, Melissa and I were sitting on the front steps of our rental house, drinking our first morning cups of hot coffee, and I pointed out all the ants walking on the square of sidewalk that touches our stoop.

She says, "When I was little, I used to follow them back to their holes and play mind games with 'em."

I told her I used to do the same thing with girls,
-M-M-M-M-Matt's All Folks!

Marco Maggi

When I started drawing all these little lines Missy told me they looked like Marco Maggi's work. We saw a show of his in K.C. a couple years back, and when you see his work once you don't ever really forget it.

Since he was fresh in our minds, Missy took a shot at approaching him for a Visiting Artist's lecture. This was her first cold call to a complete stranger (or stranger's representative), usually someone knows someone. . .

Anyway: he's been really great to her and friendly and it looks like he's coming in March.

So: these are on REYNOLD'S ALUMINUM FUCKING FOIL!!













You'll never look at anything wrapped in tinfoil again without thinking about this dude,
-mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

He's still out there. Dead to life but more alive than ever. I'm reading his book The Power of Myth and it might as well be titled How to Understand Everything. I needed to get this particular part down just to keep it straight in my head 'cause I keep trying to recall it throughout the day and it gets jumbled:

He's asked "Why is myth different from a dream?"

"Oh, because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you."

I was somehow suprised I couldn't find a picture of him done by Dave McKean.

Trabajo aqui

casanueavaexterior
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

So this is the new place of work. It's the green bottom of this building on the corner of the main street (that's right. . . one street) in thriving downtown Athens. It has a bar with a stage, a bodega that serves sandwiches, wraps and appetizers as well as two dinings rooms for sit-down meals. It's the coolest restaruant in town. Art shows, live music, big gay dance night, latin dance night, rock and roll karaoke, D'J's and a mostly organic menu (not to mention the most ass-kicking margaritas in town). No bosses, no managers. . . just co-operation. I've put in a whopping two shifts, but feel like I will fit in nicely. Quite a step up from serving fat people chocolate muffins in the coffee house where I could only listen to world music without a hassle. Heard the Flash Gordon soundtrack in it's entirety in the kitchen today. Not just the Queen tune. . . all of it! It was a later release so it even had this atrocious remix of the main song that sounded so dated it made my ears mold a little.

I cook, and then I cook some more. Tonight I'm heading there for margaritas (which I get dirt cheap) and dancing with friends and then stumbling home. It definately feels like summer.

adios penditos

Can you feel the LOVE?

bassest
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

Just looking at it makes my forearms raw and tingles the backs of my calves. Makes me wish I had another set of arms. Another twelve inch speaker and it will be perfect (had to sell-off the 15" cabinet when I went to Toronto. . . but I had personal issues with it anyway). Can you believe I've been playing this shit since Justin needed a bass player? Who knew it would stick. Fuck all our friends who gave it up. They don't know what they left behind. I can feel the love, and I can make you feel it too.

Award for BEST POST OF THE DAY

Ever find yourself getting caught-up in some message board bullshit and just unleashing? Yeah, well then you know how my morning went. I'm sure you can figure out the subtext:

Rock IS a fashion. It's political. It's sociological. It's a starting point for reaching the disinfranchised, the uncommunal. Unless you're listening to Top 40 as background music, chances are you picked a type of music as a distraction from/too a different state of being. Get off your high-horse. Anyone who says anything like "back-in-the-day. . . ", or takes any sort of elitist view on their experience of music is being a total douche. They're feeling betrayed by the fact that their history's were plotted by someone else. No one is impressed by your all-knowing eye for spotting authenticty in some form of genre fashion. Everybody looks stupid dancing unless they mean it. Dancing always looks ridiculous as a mating ritual. AND, AND, AND. . . can we finally acknowledge homophobic slander as the repressed homosexuality it really is. Like when you hit the retarded guy at school cause he makes you remember all the times you did stupid stuff in public and got made fun of.

If you've got nothing better to do than get on people's case for not being like you then the rock has failed you. YOU FLUNKED ROCK AND ROLL!! It didn't teach you to be a better person. . . it just made you like everyone else.

And you only hate guys in girls jeans cause you wanna fuck 'em, right. . . faggot.

You know it's true

Does not the collective unconscious contain the image of King Kong leading battalions of rats and cockaroaches in blitzkrieg attack on the white house?

BITE!!

BITE
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

Fuck you all if you're not severely allergic to mosquito bites. This beauty is in the crook of my arm. It looks not unlike a giant junked-out needle hole. Like in Naked Lunch when they'd just rub drugs into the gaping sore and not even need a syringe. My cunty girlfriend thought it would be fun to slap at it with twizzlers while I was driving. I mean, I was talking about it a bit, but only because I could barely keep from raking into it's juicy, mosquito-spit-infected surface with my full mit of nails and relief. This scan was taken after I doused it with peroxide and picked the clear yellow scab of seeping crust from the bed of reddened flesh that it was nestled into.

It itches.

It itches bad.

This is the fun part?

Let's talk. Pull up a chair and open your ear hole to this. Now tell me I'm not crazy (oh, yeah, and this is gonna be chaulk-full of visuals so you can see what I'm talking about here).

After about four hours of outlining the pencil sketch, I started to really get the I-don't-know-what-the-hell-I'm-doing feeling about what I was doing. The line quality (and I use the term "Quality" here as a quantifier, not a judgement-word) was really too chunky for my tastes. Looking at yesterday's post you can see what I mean. So I start to change-up my style and experiment a little bit. Better now than later. What I came up with was a distinctly different approach to shading the little critters that looked like this:


Lighter, more expressive, less fill-in-the-blanky. I like the Wash look. It is better than a solid color, more spacial (special, too!). Missy agreed, and she's smarter than me, so I know I'm right.

So this is a problem. What do I do with the completed section from yesterday. I jump into it and try to save it a bit:


This is Case 1. It started off as a flesh tone and then I painted over it with white when I decided it looked like a fourth grader did it. It still looks like a fourth grader did it.

something different, keep moving, don't fuss and holler over a little artistic opposition:


Case 2. I started this off as a deep red and when it looked a shitty mess, I remember my "white solution" (how's that for sounding racial?) with Case 1 and fixed 'er up. Not to bad. Case 3 and 4 went pretty much the same:


started off blue, add some white. The problem here is that I'm fighting the drawing. The initial dark color (i.e; deep red then white, blue then white) is that I'm stuck with my old painting style and it's pissing me off. The colors look better laying over darks, but painting it dark first looses most of the work that went into the template of the sketch. Which takes us back to liking the washes. The light painting leaves the sketch as the dominant force behind defining these figures. Fuck it! One more try at the old shit before I forswear it to history:


this one turns out pretty well, but you get a couple of 'em together and:


FUCK IS THAT UGLY!!! Now realistically, I could finish it off in this manner, but it's just looking towards being a disgusting eye-sore (and it still looks like a fourth grader did it, which is cool, but I'm more of an early-thirties sorta guy).

At this point I give some color washes a try:


This, I like. Had to work around some black details that I had already painted, but the combo looks pretty good. From scratch, no black, just a nice color wash, we get:


Now, I'm thinking that a bunch of these could actually sit next to eachother without the weight and eye-heavy-shit-appeal of the previous calamity. Only problem is it only really works out when there isn't any BIG BLACK HEAVY OUTLINES already and I've put about four hours of those on already.

You see where this is going right?

You guessed it:

Gotta start over. An entire week of drawing and feeling like I really accomplished something productive is always the first sign of some bad shit on the way. That's the artistic process. Maybe if I didn't sporadically takes three year breaks with my painting I'd remember that. Besides, this is the reason I made two framed boards in the first place.

Now that I've therapuetically got it all off my chest and onto the computer (cause, really, what's more fun than sharing the failure) I will start again from scratch. It will feel like complete insanity whiting over last week's work (I'll save that for tomorrow), but I guess in some ways it will feel great too. Like burning photos of people you have decided to "X-out" of your life (not that I've ever done that, but I probably should).

Fuck Tomahawk,
-m

Hangin' out in my underpaints

Underpaints. This is what will live under the full-color version. The color paints don't wanna just sit over a bunch of white space. They want some juicey greys to rest upon. It'll make the whole "Shay-Ding" process easier in the long-run.

I've started on both ends. Damian had this whole "meet me in the middle" idea about closin' deals that seemed to stick, besides, who wants to just designate a beginning and an end? This is the "more finished" end. It's the width of the piece. I'd say it took about 2.5 hours to do. Math tells me I've got 10-14 more hours before I can start in with the color.

It's funny, the black and white seems to tame down the level of complication. Everything looks flat and simple. Don't fear; I'll fix that later (I know you're lovin' that 'semi). Imagine if you could just scroll this left for about 30 more inches: