afrojet

cold mornings and new web sites
Sakes alive it’s getting nippy outside. 45 degrees this morning. I don’t know how much longer I can keep up the biking if this weather continues. The air is thin. Breathing becomes really hard. Not hard as in difficult but hard as in deeply painful in the back of the throat. But I just can’t imagine hanging up the two wheeler yet. That would mean at least 6 long month of no biking, which is just unthinkable right now. This morning I got stuck behind a maroon Plymouth Voyager mini-van pumping out a thick blue smoke that I was forced to consume deep into my lungs. The taste was familiar. I swear to god it tasted like chicken. Bad chicken. Sitting out in the Arizona sun for three days chicken. But chicken non the less.

Twinkies took to the Angels last night with vigor and venom, giving the commissioner something to think about I hope. I would love nothing more than to see him present the World Series trophy to the team he tried to banish from his money grubbing kingdom. I already can’t wait for game two to start.

I finished two new sites last week with two very different spins. The Prevention and Intervention site needed to be ultra usable and simple. I wasn’t psyched about their color choices but I think It turned out O.K. I really like the Kabel type I used for the header. I am in something close to in love with that type. It’s a very nice readable font on the screen. Also finished the identity pieces, off-line materials, and the site for the Open Philanthropy Fund, which turned into a wonderful exercise in css while using some nice photos that I’ve taken lately as well as some great snaps from Peter Schutte’s collection. I like the easiness of this design. And after much internal debate am glad I went with the fleur de lea as The Mark. I think the OPFund site has inspired me to do a redesign of afrojet. Something in green perhaps.

Days and nights at IKEA.

Back from the long road to Chi-town. I am filled with fire and might. Spent Sunday afternoon held up in a Radisson, biting my nails to the quick, as I watched one of the more agonizing baseball games of my life. But in the end…a victory – a sweet sweet victory. It felt very wrong to be watching the game in Schamberg Illinois and not Minnesota. But it was a whole lot better than Saturdays game, which I lost on the Radio just as we were speeding through Wisconsin Dells. In a desperate fit, we pulled off the highway into the Ho-Chunck Casino, where I was sure I would be able to find a television to catch the last four innings of the game. Unfortunately, I learned a very important lesson about sports and Wisconsin. That is, if there is a flunky Wisconsin Badger game being played in the home state, the entire state comes to a stand still to watch their fearless rodants play an amateur game of tossing the pig skin. Any attempt to turn a television to a far more important game being played on a national stage, is met with threats, fists and broken beer bottles.

Kicked out of the Ho-Chunk sports bar for even broaching the topic, and with no radio reception of any kind, still hours from the Illinois border, I knew I was doomed to miss the rest of the game. So i settled into a soiled plastic stool, ordered a Hienekin and set out on a mad gambling spree. At one point I was really up in my winnings but I got greedy, started making large bets, and lost the kitty. In the end I walked out up $1.75 to the positive.

But the Twins won the series, the Packers romped the Bears last night and I trust I can ride this wave to both the World Series and the SuperBowl. Stick with me baby and we’ll go far.

All day IKEA shopping Saturday was very successful. IKEA shopping is very odd in that it’s the only place I’ve shopped where everyone actually looks happy in their consuming. It’s more than just people getting four dollar lamps that actually look nice. The amenities for kids, hungry bellies, and design playgrounds for adults, make the crowded aisles and crying babies just disappear. It’s a good thing that I have to drive seven hours to get to an IKEA or I think I would have less dollars to spend gambling at the Ho-Chunck.

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This is the scene outside my kitchen window this morning at 9AM. It’s my new neighbors once a year all weekend garage sale blowout (neighbors get 10% off). It sounds like a carnival from where I sit. Knowing that this mad parade of desperate junk junkies would drive us to take extreme measures this weekend, the missis and I are taking off to Chicago for the weekend, where we hope to: see some fall midwest color, visit I94 roadside attractions, hit the IKEA, make a few purchases at Dustygroove, and paint up the big windy city.

Not sure if I’ll be able to find a good bar to watch the Twins hopefully turn the series around tonight, but I’m feeling optimistic even after last nights heartbreaking loss.

eyes smoldering beneath the ashes of the night before
It’s a somber and wretched morning. Day two of a horrible sickness that has left me neutralized with a double barrel nose drainer and an impossible heavy head that wants to detach from my shoulders and fall to the nearest pillow. I feel like my mellon is a balloon that is being inflated by a small boy one hot breath at a time.

Making things fearfully worse the Twins took a preposterous and cruel beating from the pine of the mighty Oakland bats last night. The trouncing brought no solace or relief to my struggles. It hurt. When you’re stricken with the gripe, your day can be parceled into very small nodes of decision and possibility, hope and responsibility (or lack there of). So it was, that I looked forward all day yesterday to the Twins lifting me off the couch and into the merry hands of the baseball brotherhood. It just wasn’t our day. It’s not all a wash I tell myself, the day before was a different story. A good story.

And if that wasn’t enough, that business in Milwaukee, that brutal rebuttal by a bunch of blood thirsty 12 year old bandits laid me flat out. Everything drained. I oozed from my couch into a dirty puddle on the floor.

My only hope today is pharmaceuticals and the new songs from Doug Martsh. His lyrical poetry empties out of the hi-fi, finds my broken head and begins to rebuild me with hard granite stone and a solid mixture of mortar. Were his songs my guide each day, maybe I could outlive mountains.

Morning bike commute: reflections of a transplant.

Here is another photo taken in the narcissistic reflection series. I like this one because It makes me look like a Giant looming over the tree tops getting ready to squash a tiny village under my feet.

This guy took some surreal, really creepy photos of what it looks like when the Military tests missiles near his house in smoggy Los Angeles.

I am rediscovering what an incredible band Supercunck is! Punch me Harder! Here is a fun documentary that Cam Carrithers made about the chunk over the years.

It’s off to Tracy’s Bar at 3pm today to catch the first game of the Twins battle against the Oakland A’s. Of course the bastards at MLB want everyone to watch the New York Yankees in prime time so the always underdog Twins get relegated to a 3pm show time. Ohhh the injustice of it all. ESPN has 10 reasons to root for the Twins.

America needs your help
Just got back from seeing Gabe Hudson read from his book Dear Mr. President tonight at Ruminator. Gabe’s a nice guy and a swell writer. I can’t wait to sit down and devour this book. He held a small contest where he had the audience guessed what colour panties he was wearing, cause I guess he’s really into wearing them these day, and Kelly guessed blue, which was the right color, and she won a bic pen. The bic pen that Gabe used to write “Cross Dresser”. It was very odd to hear someone read stories about the past Iraqi war, knowing and watching the U.S. gear up for Iraqi War part two.

the day i fell in love with cold storage
It’s finally over…ten thousand footsteps later…I have moved most all my belongings into the impossibly awesome pre-historic invention – cold storage</a.. 25 heavy boxes of super heavy funk are now stored with most of my other devices, dictionaries, doctrines and past memories. It’s still all so new and wonderful. My own 5×10. A shiny metal room amongst 1200 other little rooms that houses the physical debris of at least 26 years . Can you imagine? Do you have one of these things? If you don’t, you ain’t really living. Even if you only put a few things in it, just get one and feel the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve got a secret little box hidden in the middle of the city that no one but you knows the contents too. Its got no address. The post office can’t find you there. You can’t get phone bills there. Nobody will drop by unexpectedly on your cold storage. It needs no repairs. It asks nothing and gives so damn much.

I’m sure that I will visit my storage unit often, at least once a week, if only to rotate the minimum number of records that I have allowed myself in my Uptown Domicile. I can see myself just hanging out there sometimes. Maybe hook up a little generator in the winter and warm some tea on a hot plate, skateboard the endlessly smooth concrete maze of storage hallways in the dark, dig out my portable and dance a jig to an old Crimpshine seven inch. It’s really something all the units there. Moving in I saw one family that was changing their babies diapers from their unit. I think they really may actually live in their unit. I saw a couple open their unit and piles just started falling out of the door. I must have an insane ego, cause I really think that the quality of the stuff in my unit is superior to what most people are shoveling into their unit. Lots of the same stuff that I took right to the Goodwill (eight trips in total to the G.W.), I saw oozing from the ceiling of other peoples open units. I have an insatiable curiosity to know what the heck is in all the those other units. What other treasures do people keep in their cold storage? I must know.

It took most of all Saturday to empty my excessively spacious old apartment, bring things to the Goodwill and carefully stack the remaining contents into storage. All of you, my friends, will be receiving unsolicited first class packages of my junk that I thought would be funnier served on your doorstep by the postman instead of finding it’s way into the garbage.

Today was a full day of cleaning the emptiness of a space that has 1050 square feet too many, for which I now owe the missis a lifetime of paybacks and favors. One positive note: I found that when doing horrible housework, like cleaning the fridge and oven, that singing the theme song to Trading Spaces makes it seem less like work and more like a really fun Television show.

And now that the moving is done and I’m all settled, I can get back to what i do best – Cup Stacking!

flashy fridays, zippy cars, and protest hats
Wheehoo. Time for another IMF World Bank protest. Today is the official People’s Strike Day of Non-Compliance and Resistance, So I’m only going to work a half day today. Solidarity! And then I’m going to fuck some shit up old school and like move some stuff into my storage locker and sneer at people who drive big imposing SUV’s. Yeah, and then I’m going to…well…probably log on and read about what other more brave souls are up to in D.C. What I really like about these biannual protests is the art; the political posters and the calls to action are worth the price of admission. Check out this clusterjam poster of Washington D.C. And these ain’t too bad either. All are available from your good folks at AbolishTheBank. Don’t forget that while protesting it’s really important to wear a really dope mesh hat – Neptune’s style. You dig?

I really hope that Zip Cars makes it here to Minneapolis someday. I would totally use that service. In fact I might even get rid of my car and just rely on Zip Cars if the service turns out to be as good as it claims. This idea has been done with bikes before here in Minneapolis as well as other places and its times has come. I really like that you can choose from a variety of different cars to rent. I’d never want to own a new VW bug but I’d certainly enjoy renting one. Here’s hoping…

Friday is a good day for checking out the flashiest flash around. Today it’s all about the Ninja. I laughed good at watching these little stick figure ninjas run around and perform acts of kung fu on each other. The creative monsters at MK12 have a heavy beautiful segment on the ultralove ninja. He’s the international ninja of leisure. great type design. Also, the beat freaks at Ninjatune have some nice new songs that they want you to listen to. The Cinematic Orchestra song is simply wonderful. Finally TheBlueSeaAndSails has some pretty snaps to look at while you listen to the ninjas.

my life is filled with gorgeous models
Ok, that’s not entirely true. I stopped in at Borders Books on my wet ride in today. I wanted to check out the new Intersection magazine, a very slick new mag about cars. Kind of a Wallpaper magazine meets any car magazine. Some funky looking autos in those pages mixed with euro-models showing you ummm…the highlights of the cars? I am looking at the Intersection mag and all the other Wallpaper inspired magazines of which there seem to be way too many these days, and I overhear these two blond girls, dressed to the nines in full length brown leather trenches, discussing some early morning rainy outdoor photo shoot they had just come from. The conversation went like this:

blond model #1: My hair never looks good in the rain. I hope they touch-up my hair.
blond model #2: Totally. Mine too. We need to do way more sunny shoots, if we are going to be outdoors at all. But that photographer was really cute!
blond model #1: Yeah! But I really like (some photographer’s name i don’t know). He knows my hair doesn’t like the rain. He’s really Zen and loves the sun.

It went on like this for a good length of time…Zen, sun, body parts…and then they got distracted by the shiny pictures in a magazine.

When I finally got to work I was soaking wet again. Dirty. Sweaty. Punched the elevator button. Waited. The doors opened and there on the elevator were four models, all done up, going up to the Modeling (and Talent?) agency on the fifth floor. It’s always a startling site when this happens. I would so loved to have had a picture taken of my dirty and wet self standing amongst the four clean amazon models with cowboy hats. It’s an odd thing to see someone who looks like they are about to go clubbing at your office at nine in the morning. It’s enough to drive a person to Le Parkour.

Lightning lit up the land this morning and I got a really embarrassing brown streak down the back of my light beige shorts. The uptown waters and detritus form the avenue have painted me into a corner. I need a splash guard on my rear wheel in a bad way. I don’t think I’ll be able to walk the halls of work today until my shorts dry.

Yesterday, when my shorts were a lot dryer, I did some work for Dave the printer who works a large scale printing operation just down the hall in my building. He had a large job for Payless Shoes, which demanded that he cut out about 500 tiny little feet that Payless would then use to stick on the ground so that customers would be able to find their way to savings by following these little footprints. So I took a break from reading about the the little ZipZaps at Radio Shack that I’m going to buy for my Homies to cruise around in, and made time to cut out about 200 of the little feet. Really rewarding work. Turns out I’m really skilled with an x-acto knife. So Payless is really my art gallery and you should all make time to go check out my work, say in about three weeks. While you’re there, see if they have these shoes that I want. He paid me in gift certificates to Hell’s Kitchen, and I’m going to go there for lunch today and sample their foodstuffs. The whole aesthetic of the joint is Ralph Steadman.