Hours until twilight and I've already swept out the tent, rearranged the cheaper items and classified the expensive stuff as either: earthly, airborne or of-the-water. Here at Benito's we like to think about what we have to offer and what variety of value it concerns. Wouldn't want to find ourselves in a situation that could compromise the whole Golden Mean.

While out wearing a glammied-up, middle-ninties Joan Jett t-shirt, I was approached by a stranger wanting to know if it was Steve Stevens.

"No, It's Joan Jet."

"Oh." pause. "I was hoping it was Steve Stevens. He's my favorite Jew."

Like a sit-com written by my brain, life was pitching one-liners and I just stood back and watched the show.

Contagious

Not the Y&T album.

We've lost a brave blog gaurd to whatever it is that's going around these days. Here we call it "The Plague". The season for viral frenzy is upon us. An orgy of microsexual filth clouds the air we breath and we pass it back and forth like we're playing breath hockey. Intimate spit fights claim and lose territory with completely innocent abandon inside the front ends of our digestive system. The same track of flesh that nourishes our entire system and cleans, filters, stores and deposits cargo from the Outside. A dirty doorknob says a lot about a home.

Back in the day, even the poorest of families would sweep the porch and polish the doorknob as a sign of civility. Ants must think we're insane. Our shining knobs hardly disquising the fact that we shit in our homes and store trash next to the toolbox.

Here I'll allude to the every-end-has-a-new-beginning thing and wish our brave guardian a happy journey inside the great mystery.

Yung wanna lung lee-Nung

My Blog's been sick for a while now. Swollen templates, Status Deficiency, dashboard defects, a deficit in options and a default archive. But, through my constant love and tidings of good health (both physical and of the mind), I have managed to compromise this sickness. I've haggled medically with the system and healed the numbered consciousness of it's bloggy program.

It's as good as new.
-M

Dirty Johnny

dirty-johnny
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

You can maybe get the nickname "Dirty Johnny" for no good reason, but it won't stick. Chances are, if you've been known as Dirty Johnny for a long time you're pretty dirty.

Johnny's been dirty in this town for a really long time.

We work together at the co-op and on Wednesday he hits me up with, "you wanna play a show on Saturday?" Turns out a band called This Day in Black History was coming down from Cleveland and the slotted opening act was some pop-punk band that was a little too clean for Johnny's tastes. The plan was to remind the main act that Athens was still dirty and ugly and no safe place for the pop bands of the world.

So I meet three Casa bartenders after work on Saturday. I was pleased to walk into a living room with a full drum set and a Full stack of guitar amp sitting there. For a good three hours we practice and smoke and drink cans of foul-tasting energy drinks that look like batteries. It was me on bass, Johnny on vocals, Dan on guitar and Addison on the drums and guitar. We wrote some songs, loaded up and loaded into the club. We played really loud and noisey. My bass was a full-on, distortion-squeeling wall of semi-rythmic feed-back with an octave pedal for some low-end. Johnny had a Dirty Drum Machine going through a vocal processor, a distortion pedal and and eq that sounded like a shorted out chord being played like an electric tambourine.

We managed to sound pretty good. Makes me wonder why I spent all those three-practice-a-week months with those other bands.

We were most definately dirty and ugly.

Movie fun

From: Me and You and Everyone We Know":

The scene: Two brothers on the internet. The 8 year old is dictating to the 14 year old a conversation with a woman (who they presume is a "big fat man with a little wiener"). When the older brother asks him what to write next the little guy say:

"I want to poop back and forth."

"What?!?! What does that mean?"

"Like, I poop into her butthole and then she'll poop it back into my butthole and then we'll just keep doing it back and forth with the same poop forever."

What it really needed was some. . .

smaller drawing on it. Why wouldn't it? I mean there's small and then there's small and why should I hold back on all the rich smallness I have to offer?

You hear a lot of talk concerning small art. People are apt to say that the scale of small work brings the viewer in. It attracts closeness. It's intimate. The physiological action of focusing on all the tiny detail requires eliminating all but the smallest amount of space that will still let in light. To the observer there seems to be a closeness that could easily be mistaken for an art-viewer relationship. Sounds charming, right?



Couldn't the smallness also represent a vast space? A seeing-in-the-distance of massive shapes combining and aligning themselves into pattern-like structures. From the perspective of planets like proportions of thoughts and relative rhetorical arguments on the matter of scale. We think we can focus on what we see, but it's only ever the truth we can recognize in regards to our scale in relation to the object. Waves that emanate from the surface of the thing will always translate themselves to a common scale of perception.



I'm sure the mites on our bodies would describe skin to us in a shocking manner could they possess this same talent for translating perceptions. Yet we still feel we recognize our skin. And when we eliminate all but the smallest amount of space that will still let in light and focus on our skin, we see our version.

The scenic view of the middlelobe

After working nearly fifty hours this week training for a new job, I've finally got some time off. We had an Art Friend stay with us this last week. She resided in our spare room, did a lecture, did another lecture and managed to procure a bunch of students for some underling work. Missy has a big grant due tomorrow*. There is also the matter of whether-or-not I will be make-believe this weekend in Columbus because Dirty Johnny has yet to get ahold of me.



Here's a "map" of the penwork for the drawing. You can't see all the line-work 'cause it's fucking small, but you can check it out in these close-ups.







Now I'll start in on the background, which will be a bug-like, germy looking texture of little floating guys (in my head I think of them as phantom yolks) done with mechanical pencils. I'm Gonna hafta' get real small for this one, real small indeed. . .

*Living with someone who is writing a grant, if you don't know, is often riddled with intricate near-misses concerning them not killing you in your sleep.

Treating time to a swing on the old tree sled.

I've been really good at filling my time lately. I do everything at once while I think about what I'm gonna do next. One of these things was finding a close proximity to a recorded bass tone that makes me smile. . . and then rocking it out like the devil himself's got me hired to play his bachelor party.

If you wanna hear it, it's here, and for some reason it's called Bass Ness.