February 27, 2004

The Wages of Sin
Check out the music of The Wages of Sin. They bill themselves as playing Punk-Rock Sea Shanties & Appalachian Death Polka. The group features veteran fiddler Jon Brier (ex: Subversive Youth). Try the song Jolly Roger. It's a real foot stomper.

In other music news featuring another 'Jon B'...Jon Bunch (ex: Reason to Believe, Sensefield) is now singing with Further Seems Forever.

Personal Identity Guides
Don't you wish everyone came equipped with a Personal Identity Kit like this guy? I think it would be quite useful.

February 26, 2004

Hometown Pride
Your faith in humanity is shaken when the last thing you hear on the local news before going to bed is that two men, arguing about which area code (612 or 651) is better, got into a shoot out on a stretch of I-94. Read the story Man dies in I-94 shooting.

I've been going on brief little walks everyday in order to upset the sedentary nature of work and stretch my legs a bit. The last couple of days, I seem to have chosen to take my walks at the exact same time that the local Middle School gets out. There I am strolling amongst the shorter people of society who are darting about with little backpacks, racing to get home and play internet or Xbox no doubt. I've also noticed that the kids have been trained very well to avoid people like me. I'm slowly learning that adult individuals, who are not walking dogs, have no business wandering about the neighborhood three to four hours before the accepted post-dinner time when the curfew on adult walkers is lifted. To be fair I don't make things easy on myself, what with my black jacket, and black wool skull cap pulled tightly over my dome, and sometimes rocking the three day old beard. I guess I just have to get comfortable with the fact that I look like some sketchy dude prowling the neighborhood. But damn do you really have to cross to the other side of the street and start running in the opposite direction when I come walking down the sidewalk?

But these are the days of 'Fear-Factor' alert orange. Even I fall into the same pattern given the right opportunity. I read an article about iPod thievery the other day. Basically the little white ear buds are such a brilliant branding idea that they've become a prime reason for getting jacked, much like Air Jordans in the 90's. So now I'm on the alert when I walk around with the iPod. Two days ago I went for a walk down by the creek. The path I take to get down to the creek goes through a Holiday convenience station. As I was walking through the lot of the Holiday, bobbing my head to the beat, I noticed that a group of men were standing outside, one was holding a huge wad of cash out in the open. He started motioning me to come over. Apparently, he wanted to have a polite chat. I thought about it for a split second: group of large men, one with huge wad of cash in hand, it's pretty dark outside, is this something I want to get involved in? Answer: no. Absolutley not. It was a safe bet that no good would come from me responding to their invitation. Unfortunately, I pointed directly at my earbuds and made some sort of half-assed gesture that was meant to be interpreted as: "Sorry sir, I have headphones on and cannot understand what you are saying, so I'm just going to keep walking, thanks anyway." I could faintly hear them yelling towards me as I walked away and turned the corener. Well that pretty much ruined the walk for me. You see, as soon as your clear of the Holiday station you descend a large stone staircase that empties onto the path down by the creek. Picture a scene from any 80's horror flick where dim street lamps are obscured by a soft frozen mist coming off a creek and you can see what I was up against. Just like that I turned into the Middle School kid with the fear radar going bananas.

February 25, 2004

Mel Gibson
I was going to weigh in on the current media frenzy surrounding 'Gibson-gate' but I think these words from the Good Doctor in an email I received today sum it up better than I could:

ITEM: You would think that there is no other news in this world with all the fuss over Mel Gibson and his idiotic movie about Jesus. Some Bible thumper from town was interviewed on the local news this morning and was saying how the movie was "accurate". How does he know this? Fuck Mel Gibson. Everything he has been involved with since Road Warrior has been shit shit shit. The Willamette Week critic said it was more violent than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

And from an article in the London News Review about the troubling 'acts of god' that occured on the set of 'Passion':

This week Jim Caviezel, the actor playing Christ in the film which now has the much snappier title, The Passion of Christ, was struck by lightning for a second time. Steve McEveety, self-confessed Catholic and producer of the film, said, "I'm about a hundred feet away from them when I glance over and see lightning coming out of Caviezel's ears." And as if that weren't enough - coming out of his *ears*, for Christ's sake - he also had his fingertips burned by a separate bolt earlier in filming.

February 24, 2004

War Drums
I think I've found the drum set of my dreams. Isn't she a thing of beauty. And what with it being an election year and all, these babies are the perfect instrument I need to beat a war march to the polls in November. I can do a drum roll for John Edwards, a cymbal splash for John Kerry, a paradiddle for Al Sharpton and can give Ralph Nader the big kick drum. Sitting upon the throne of this patriotic drum set, I will lay down a wicked bossa nova groove and we will all dance George Bush from his un-hip exclusive clubhouse. Dance! It's Carnival time.

February 20, 2004

Bukowski in Film
Reading the FLM magazine last night I got all kinds of excited about - not one, but two movies about Charles Bukowski that are about to drop. The first will be the documentary, Bukowski: Born into This. From the review it looks like the movie will be a long overdue historical portrait with tons of old archival footage of the man the folks he hung out and worked with. This movie looks like it's making the rounds in the independent film circuit and will hopefully be in a movie theater near me soon. The second full length is being written and directed by Bent Hamer (sweet name), who has the flick, Kitchen Stories, currently out in theaters. Hamer will be making a talking picture out of Bukowski's book Factotum.

February 19, 2004

Touching the Void
The work load was more than I could take yesterday. It's still daunting but yesterday I couldn't take any more pixel pushing. It was time for some irresponsible mid-day movie time. I got what I was looking for in 'Touching the Void' (IFC Films, The book, Joe Simpson's website). Hot damn is that a fine human drama. The shots alone of the heinous mountains that sought to destroy the two protagonists was worth the price of admission alone. Then add to that a story of unparalleled bad-assness on the part of Joe Simpson and his miraculous decent from the summit, and you've got yourself something close to brilliance. Pure guts and death defiant triumph. I would talk more about this movie but I don't want to ruin it for those of you who should go see it ASAP.

February 17, 2004

A Kitten and Her Robot
Not much time for blogging these days. I am in a constant state of catch up with my work load. For now I leave you with another gratuitous cute kitten snap (courtesy of Grandpa Leach) and some good links.

In doing some research on diorama's I ran across this and this.

The Bend Press

Pie of the Month

The Dime Museum

A trip to the Eames House

A review of The Overtones 7-inch that I found at a record show over the weekend. The b-side has an amazing surf instrumental called "The Calhoun Surf", which if you live in Minneapolis Minnesota strikes you as damn funny.

Last week I got to see some fine paintings by Ta-coumba Aiken

February 13, 2004

Me Talk Kitty One Day
I now have three ladies to take care of. Two calico sisters from the same litter arrived on our door step last night. The misses and I have been looking for two kittens for a little while now and they have finally come home. One is watching me type this post right now. She enjoys watching the mouse fly across all the screens I have hooked up. How fun is this? As much as I love working at home, I was getting a little lonely during the days and I think these two girls will more than keep me busy.

We put a "Kittens Wanted" ad on Craig's List earlier in the week and we were emailed fairly quickly by a gentleman who lives in Northfield Minnesota. He had two barn kittens that were in need of a good home. Apparently, he has lots of barn cats put these were the only two from a recent litter that were willing to play with humans. Pictures were sent, a love connection was made and before we knew it we were dashing off to the pet store to come home with the right provisions and other cat items that we needed.

We still haven't come up with names yet, but for now one is being called Walkie-Talkie because it's a little chatty cathy. They both talk a lot. They've got a lot on their mind. The other one just wants it's little melon scratched all day, which is fine by me. I may need to learn to work with only one hand.

February 11, 2004

The Games We Play
Lately, the misses has been taking my ass back to the 'Jack of Club's School for Challenged Card Players'. Her game is Gin and she's on a hot streak that can only be classified as merciless. On most nights, our mini tournaments will end after I've lost my eighth game in a row. As I am no fan of losing, even when money isn't involved, I usually do something childish - throw cards across room, make wild accusations of cheating, misdealing, feeding me too much booze, etc. But seriously folks, I need a new strategy cause it's getting ridiculous. I taught her the game not two months ago and now I'm beginning to regret it. Fortunately I think my luck will change after I purchase this typographical deck of cards put out by the P22 Type Foundry. Never has there been a prettier deck of cards. Fonts come save me.

While I'm at it, the Apple computer historians over at Folklore have a nice piece of history about the creation and naming of the first Apple font sets. Boy do I remember abusing a 14 point Geneva back in the old college days. That font single handily saved me hours of work on those twenty plus page papers. It was almost scary how quickly Geneva could turn a slacker effort fourteen pages into an epic twenty one page polemic blast.

Also, a funny video as metaphor for life.

February 10, 2004

Ice House Makeovers
It's very possible that the whole redecorating/makeover reality television trend seriously jumped the shark this weekend. The local news was holding makeovers for people's ice houses (those little shacks that Minnesotan's spend their winter in attempting to catch fish through a small hole in the ice). Are we far from a redecorating show for Ice Palaces (snaps | web cam)?

February 06, 2004

A1 Records
A younger author at his favorite record spot in Los Angeles - A1 Record Finders. The good doctor and I easily killed a whole day at this joint. The guy who runs the spot is decently shady and has a keen understanding of his product. It took awhile but after he was buttered up and complimented enough times on his outstanding collection, he allowed us into an inner chamber where we got to see some records that we knew existed only as myth and had heard ghostly rumors about on the internet. He was pretty proud of this room and would point to random records and say things like. "Jay-Z rented that record from me last week." and "Oh you like that record? It's a good one. Biz Markie rents it from me from time to time." Humbling.

February 05, 2004

Buen Cultura
It takes a lot to get me leave the warm comforts of my home during these frigid weeks, but this weekend a cultural perfect storm is coming to the city and I plan to catch as much of it as I can. Saturday night, George Thompson of Burlesquedesign will be having an opening at the ox-op gallery. Shortly afterwards, the talented boys in Hey Mercedes and Wheat will be gracing the 7th Street Entry stage. That right there would be a great weekend. But it only gets better Sunday when Maritime (ex Promise Ring, Dismemberment Plan) will play a set of songs in the Ascot Room.

February 03, 2004

Blogger Versus the Shovel
Over the last 36 hours, another 12 inches of the white stuff came strafing in over the high planes. I feel like I've spent half this winter shoveling the walk. Where were all these snow storms when I lived in an apartment and some poor bastard had to do all my snow removal bidding?

I went for Indian food yesterday during the worst of it. With a middle finger raised to the heavens, and Heavy anthems blaring from the stereo, good time was made rushing up 94 West to the Northern outskirts of town and to the best Indian food you can find under a mountain of Minnesota snow. The plows had given up keeping the interstate clean. The lanes were hidden under inches of snow. Looking back in the rearview mirror you saw soft yellow headlights trying to push their way through the blizzard. You could barely make out any shapes. The cars seemed like ghosts suspended in a white sea. My traveling companion, a Southerner, was loosing his hold on reality. He kept looking back frighteningly over his shoulder at the crowd of cars behind us. His posture was contorting as he crouched lower and lower in his seat. He kept on hollering, "This is some Mad Max type shit right here!!". At Broadway Avenue we had to do some fancy driving to avoid the parade of cars that were spinning out of control. Through the front window the world looked like a giant pinpball game. One moment a car would be driving comfortably in front of us and then just like that it would spin 560 degrees and then carom off the cushion of a seven foot deep natural highway buffer. It was somewhat beautiful. Like ballet. At anytime we knew our number could be up and we'd be sliding across five lanes of traffic just to end up turned around staring down a Cub Foods semi. This is Minnesota. This is where the fun starts.