Goddamn This is Real

Chicagoland TV Guide

2011-03-05T18:53:00.000-08:00

Portrait of the Fourth Doctor

2011-03-03T13:12:00.000-08:00

Machine Gun Shemale

2011-03-02T17:40:00.000-08:00

(This image and the previous one tripped over courtesy That's Craptacular.

Golgo 13

2011-03-02T17:18:00.001-08:00

This could be amazing

2011-01-08T16:22:00.000-08:00

A Kickstarter proposal for Kentucky Route Zero is here.

Jim Flora

2011-01-08T11:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks, Irwin Chusid

Albert Ayler

2011-01-08T10:57:00.001-08:00

Some musings on the artist called "Banksy"

2010-12-06T23:34:00.000-08:00

THE DEATH OF BANKSY

Banksy [Within] Give us a light there, ho! 
Second Murderer Then 'tis he: the rest
That are within the stencil of expectation
Already are i' the court.
 First Murderer His stencils go about.  
Third Murderer Almost a mile: but he does usually,
 So all men do, from hence to stencil the palace gate 
Make it their stencil.
 Second Murderer A stencil, a stencil!

Enter BANKSY, and CHLOE WEBB with a stencil  

Third Murderer 'Tis he.
 First Murderer Stand to't. 
Banksy: It will be stencil to-night. 
First Murderer: Let it come down. 
Banksy: O, treachery!
— Fly, good Chloe Webb, fly, fly, fly!
Thou mayst stencil.
— O, slave!

Famous Zen Koan: "If Banksy stencils the Buddha on the road, kill him.  

A: Is Banksy actually stenciling on the Buddha? Or is he actually stenciling an image of the Buddha on the actual road? If the first, he is certainly an impertinent little scamp, isn't he! If the second, he is participating in a 2500 year old artistic tradition, and that's no reason to kill anyone, is it? Is there actually an actual actual? Kill which one?

  B: There is no road. Kill them all.

When Gordon Sumner, CBE (who records and plays his hit dance tunes under the Soubriquet "The Sting") considered reforming his band "The Police," he found that he couldn't, because everyone (including i.e., his guitarist and drum-player) hated him. So he asked the artist known as Banksy to help out. And that is why you can't imagine "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" without his signature stencil solo.

Shortly before his death, Patrick MacGoohan met the artist Banksy at a cocktail party thrown in honor of the Saudi Royal Family. As Michael Caine relates in his memoir, the meeting was not a happy one for either man. According to Caine, Banksy "...stenciled a bleeding riot 'elmet on MacGoohan's mac. Far be it for me to stand in judgement on the contemporary arts, but it were a Cardin mac, and a nice one too."

SITCOM PITCH. IN A SMALL ARKANSAS TOWN, A CORRUPT SHERIFF KEEPS A FIRM GRIP ON EVILDOERS AND SUCH. IN THE PILOT BANKSY (PLAYED BY BANKSY) COMES TO TOWN AND TEACHES THE TOWNSPEOPLE ABOUT THE FREEDOM OF EXPRESSIONS (USING STENCILS, ETC.). MANY OPPORTUNITIES FOR FISH OUT OF WATER HUMOR, WITH BANKSY'S CHARMING-YET-NAIVE-YET-CHARACTERISTICALLY "BRITISH" SENSE OF HUMOR PROVIDING THE BACKBONE. THE ROCK IS THE SHERIFF!?

ATTN DESIGN INSTRUCTORS: STENCILS ARE FOR BANKSY. NORMAL PEOPLE USE PHOTOSHOP.

50 by 50, day 10

2010-09-24T02:14:00.000-07:00

50 by 50, day 9, I suppose.

2010-09-23T01:27:00.001-07:00

50 by 50, day 8

2010-09-21T15:09:00.001-07:00

Surfs up, Reverend Phelps.

50 by 50, day 7

2010-09-21T14:55:00.001-07:00

50 by 50, day 6

2010-09-14T14:11:00.000-07:00

Phoned one in.

Sketchbook, September 12

2010-09-13T00:04:00.001-07:00

50 by 50, day 5

2010-09-12T23:15:00.000-07:00

Daisy at Motosketch.

50 by 50, day 4

2010-09-11T14:14:00.001-07:00

The Catahoula Leopard Hound is the State Dog of Louisiana.

Bob Peake, Getaway: Lisbon Madrid

2010-09-11T11:37:00.001-07:00

La Peste, Gallimard, 1947

2010-09-10T22:46:00.000-07:00

I need to reread this.

50 by 50, day 3

2010-09-10T22:37:00.000-07:00

I'm really into painting in low light. This isn't entirely successful, but I'm okay with it. My friend Danielle was at a bar, and I brought along my gouaches.

Mrs. Simmons' Young Jocks

2010-09-10T00:47:00.001-07:00

I'm not entirely sure when I'll get around to this.

50 by 50, day 2

2010-09-10T00:40:00.000-07:00

Everybody loves breakfast.

50 by 50

2010-09-09T00:46:00.000-07:00

Inspired by a project that Catherine Mackey did, a few of my drawing classmates and I have banded together to attempt to do 50 small (5 inch) drawings in 50 days. Here is the first, a quick gouache of my wife's hand:

Arrive at Easterwine

2010-09-05T00:14:00.001-07:00

This is one that I actually read, about the coming of age of a sentient computer. I think that this was an influence on the Infocom game A Mind Forever Voyaging. R. A. Lafferty is a lot of fun, with a delightfully word-drunk style. I think that cover is by Mati Klarwein.

City of Vice

2010-08-30T16:10:00.000-07:00

Apparently, I have some ridiculous paperbacks.

The Tobacco Auction Murders

2010-08-29T17:06:00.001-07:00

Now this is a fancy one.

Time For Travel

2010-08-29T16:57:00.001-07:00

I love this style of illustration. Although it was already out of style by the time I was born, I feel like it was extant in conservative design strategies such as this:

Brisingamen

2010-08-29T14:28:00.000-07:00

It features a Viking warrior on Pegasus-back over the Golden Gate Bridge. Could I resist?

Rendevous with Destiny by Ben Shahn

2010-08-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

I keep buying books just for the cover.

Yes, beer will fix it.

2010-08-28T23:32:00.000-07:00

And then this was on the other side of the Webster Cigars ad.

Three by Georgi

2010-08-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

Here are three scans of work by Edwin Georgi, the great American illustrator. The quality both of the sources and of the scans are middling, but I haven't seen these before. This guy is pretty much ruling me right now. I can't get get enough.

Something for a friend

2010-06-30T00:20:00.000-07:00

Motosketch, June 2010

2010-06-29T12:57:00.000-07:00

Serge Gainsbourg

2010-02-18T01:21:00.000-08:00

Harry Crews

2010-02-09T19:07:00.001-08:00

Facts in Five

2010-02-09T15:42:00.000-08:00

Who knew that 3M published board games?

another flash

2009-11-17T13:20:00.000-08:00

i made a movie

2009-11-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

Illustration Midterm Final

2009-10-13T23:58:00.000-07:00

Illustration Project Day 4

2009-10-11T18:18:00.000-07:00

Illustration Project Day 3

2009-10-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

Illustration Midterm

2009-10-09T15:36:00.000-07:00

So I have to paint a celebrity portrait for my illustration midterm. Here is my goache of Lemmy.

oh, and just to be complete about it

2009-09-28T00:06:00.000-07:00

The first sketchbook assignment in my illustration class was the word "mask."

The third was "duality."

I was sick for "fear."

alphabet project

2009-09-27T23:51:00.001-07:00

I've recently become fascinated with typography, and with hand lettering in particular. I thought it would be cool to start doing an alphabet a day in my sketchbook. Let's face it folks, that's not going to happen. But here are the first ones:

one panel cartoon

2009-09-27T23:35:00.000-07:00

So, for my illustration class we have this weekly sketchbook assignment where we are given a word, and we have to illustrate it, drawing upon an image we select as inspiration.This week's word: spirituality. I chose a Bill Mauldin cartoon from Up Front as my touchstone, but the only similarity between my piece and his is that they are both one panel cartoons. I can't say that this is very good, but I wanted to share:

Signage (mostly hand-lettered)

2009-09-27T22:52:00.000-07:00

Amazing hand-painted signage from SF, mostly Haight St. and Cole Valley.

Valcour Records

2009-09-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

Valcour Records is probably my favorite record label right now. Small labels like these are the only ones really worth patronizing any more. It's really exciting to find people promoting and curating traditional and progressive Louisiana music. Buy stuff from them. I recommend this:

and this:

Magazine Cover Mockup

2009-09-11T00:32:00.000-07:00

The streetcar photo is by Tony DiLorenzo, and I greatly appreciate his allowing me to post it here!

Another one

2009-09-03T15:00:00.001-07:00

Photoshop Project

2009-09-03T13:45:00.000-07:00

A project for my media class.

grafx r 4un

2009-08-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

Deserters

2009-06-08T16:49:00.001-07:00

sketch

2009-06-05T12:00:00.001-07:00

I've been vaguely researching 18th and 19th century military uniforms.

Helvetica, and other considerations

2009-06-03T01:52:00.000-07:00

So, I've been thinking a lot about Helvetica. Like, how it annoys me. Like, how it's chosen as a typeface for people who don't really understand why one typeface is better than another. Helvetica was, according to Wikipedia, designed to "create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, had no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage." This is a noble aim for a designer of type. To come up with a font that works well on road signage, that conveys meaning clearly and directly in such a way that the letterforms do not in any way obstruct or cause to be filtered through any preconceptions the printed text; this is a letterer's Holy Grail: the Platonic ideal of the alphabet. Instead, Helvetica has become the typeface of choice for hoteliers determined to give their corporate identity the frisson of European minimalism, of the designers of dance music fliers who've never heard of Peter Saville, and of publishers of small press "transgressive" novels who can't understand that a typeface intended for signage might not have the crucial solubility of typefaces intended for extended text.

I suppose that I'm going to have to develop that concept of solubility. It means what it says,that soluble text essentially dissolves straight into the reader's brain, without any lingering concern about what the letters look like, or what their shapes mean. And the sad damned thing about Helvetica was that it was apparently designed to be as neutral as possible, and so every designer in the world (designers apparently love neutrality) dogpiled on it and freighted it with more meanings and connotations than any other typeface extant. We read Times New Roman easier than we read Helvetica. And I hate Times New Roman. But thanks to its longtime stance as the default MS Office typeface, it seems more Helvetica than Helvetica can ever be. So yes, let's see highway signs and subway stops in TNR, and let's try to find the beauty in Helvetica again. And let's forbid boutique hotels, design-over-cuisine restaurants, and stupid t-shirts from using it. Helvetica is currently being debased by being held up as a standard of design excellence by people who think that it's okay to wear a t-shirt with a blazer: let's not encourage them.

I've been drinking, and thinking of type.

Thank you.

Good night.

kitty at work

2009-02-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

This guy

2009-01-09T09:45:00.001-08:00

This guy, Robert Sylvester of Bloomington, Illinois was fleeing police after robbing a convenience store when this was taken. He was ultimately shot and killed. May he rest in peace.

This is not a poem

2008-12-12T04:46:00.000-08:00

I made some notes for a story I was thinking about. They are notes. They are not a poem. I wonder what the hell I thought I was doing.

Chances, the gambling cat.

designed by scientists to be a cat that gambles.

Made without a childhood

liars dice, with truths the hazard

and childhood memories the wager

the house never wins

no one ever wins

the house has a bigger stake

bets more; plays more games

but in the end, the house is another sucker

I don't want it

2008-11-16T12:10:00.000-08:00

Kevin

And at last,

2008-10-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

Fucking finally.

9:20PM this evening

2008-10-27T21:57:00.000-07:00

Tonight at the bus stop at Geneva and Naples, I let out the sort of loud hooting laugh that I do when I really can't help it. Immediately I looked around and noticed a pretty young Asian girl to my left, and I felt slightly embarrassed (NOTE: NOT BECAUSE I WANTED TO MAKE IT WITH HER. SHE IS LIKE SEVENTEEN OR SOMETHING). But then I saw that she was safely ensconced in iPodland, and had most likely not heard me. I returned to the book that had inspired the maniacal cackle in the first place. After a moment, I caught movement from the corner of my eye. I glanced back at the girl to find her doing a sort of awkward shuffling, bouncing sort of hip hop kind of dance (I suppose, like I said, she's like seventeen, and that age group falls well without the bounds of my knowledge of terpsichorean taxonomy). She has a huge black purse under one arm and a heavy blue plaid backpack, so it can't be said that her dancing was entirely graceful, but it seemed fairly rhythmic, and certainly enthusiastic. And it was all of the sudden this beautiful moment, where I don't care if she hears my stupid laugh and she doesn't care if I see her (let's be fair) goofy dancing. And then the bus comes.

Best worst idea for a story ever

2008-10-23T10:37:00.001-07:00

Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Thundercats and the Diary of Anne Frank.
The story should use marriage as a plot device!

Generated by the Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator

short fictional prose writing thing

2008-10-13T23:57:00.001-07:00

There once was a man named John Pinchback who was a marvelously gifted calligrapher. He never studied the art, and was never aware of his talent for as long as he lived. He was indifferently read, but a meticulous speller. He worked as a mechanic at a muffler specialist, and rarely had occasion to write more than a receipt. However, when the time came to write a tag for a Christmas gift, or to knock off a flier for a garage sale, to draw a simple map for a lost stranger, or to leave a note for the babysitter, his lettering was a marvel of composition, perfectly balanced, with each stroke evincing an effortless awareness of the overall sense of what was being written. Each letter vibrated with a holographic richness, each ascender and descender conveying the sum expression of the word it formed. Despite the fact that his artistic training was limited to one high school shop class, and that his media were never more refined than a Sharpie or a ball-point pen, his calligraphy could have stood up in a comparison with any of the great Zen or Confucian masters. He has been dead for fifteen years. Outside of fragments in the possession of his family, his only extant work is a hastily scrawled "Wet Paint" sign that is folded into quarters, housed in a sun-yellowed paperback copy of J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man on a shelf at the Purple Heart store in Tyler, TX.

Imaginary music, 2

2008-10-03T06:55:00.000-07:00

Scholars of the American Delta Blues are notoriously as fickle in their allegiances as a high school lunch room. The discovery of a stack of warped 78 rpm records by an obscure songster will be fêted in the obscure mimeographed journals that are the lifesblood of the field. Cassette tapes will be traded, and thousands of words will unfold in contrarian letters and in heated posts on internet forums. Sooner or later, the most marketable of these forgotten artists filter in to the mainstream. With luck, an expensive boxed set of that artist's works will eventually follow, usually with a fulsome essay or two by one of the critical eminenses grises of the blues field. Adulation and Grammy to follow. After a few years of this, there will in invariably a backlash, and the artist will be found to be derivative of some newly-discovered predecessor, their songs trite, their former critical praise rooted in some complex form of racism that takes ten years of calculus and a very sharp knife to understand.

This tendency may have reached its pinnacle in the recent lionization of Blind Pat Morita Jones. Jones may or may not have been a native of Greasetrap, Mississippi, born around 1895 (there is a burgeoning literature devoted singly to the issue of his birthdate. Some scholars believe him to have been born at least six centuries previous to this date). He was apparently the master of a sort of homemade ukelele fabricated from a cigar box and, according to Lomax, the femur of Leadbelly's uncle Rex. This is all highly speculative. In the thousands of hours of interviews done by various folklorists with his putative contemporaries, no one so much as mentions him in passing. There is no birth certificate or gravesite. And in spite of the best efforts of several anthropology faculties, no descendants have been uncovered.

There are no extant recordings of Jones' work. Some authorities believe that he at one point had a record contract, or at least had heard of one. Two years ago there was a moment of delirious academic excitement when Dr. Ted Bissup of the University of Toronto claimed to have evidence that the notorious "lost" Comanche singles (CR 105-108), always listed in the contemporary catalogs with a blank where the artist and title information should be, were in fact Blind Pat Morita Jones recordings. This theory remained current until the discovery of a test pressing of CR-107, which proved to be a pornographic recording geared towards the nascent rubber fetishist niche market, far-sighted marketing well in line with what this writer described in The Comanche Story: The Story of Comanche Records (Tulpa Press, 2007). Nevertheless, Arthur Q. Lomax (no relation) is hard at work on a boxed set of the Complete Blind Pat Morita Jones. The theory at work there is that any of the handful of structures still standing that may have been roadhouses where Jones may or may not have played (see "Is You is or Is You Ain't Mama Joon's Saloon," Delta Blues News and Review June 2002) contain in their very walls some acoustic artifact of the theoretical performance or performances, in that the soundwaves emitted necessarily caused infinitessimal changes in the structure of the building. At the time of this writing, there is no information available concerning the technology that will be used to reconstruct Jones' music from the decades of layers that these phenomena have been overlaid by other acoustic evernt, or even if such technology is at all possible.

In related work, Dr. Denis Donadieu is currently engaged in a tentative reconstruction of Blind Pat Morita Jones' lyrics, based on a subtractive analysis of back numbers of Colliers magazine, the dimensions of contemporary McCormick harvester blades, and a computer-generated composite model of the performers who might have been Jones' inspirations. A sample verse:

Baby [...]
[...]
[...]treefrog[...]
Well pemmican wine[...]
[...]mm-hmmm.

As you can see, there are more exciting developments to come.

this is beautiful

2008-09-13T12:27:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Coulton's "I'm Still Alive" performed by the famous-on-the-internet Molly, a.k.a. Sweetafton23.

reflections upon the first 3 episodes of Airwolf, Part 1

2008-09-12T01:42:00.000-07:00

(This is an abstract for a paper currently under revision for publication in the Spring 2010 number of the North American Journal of Airwolf Studies.)

The 1984-1987 American television show Airwolf is in many ways simply awful. The writing is horrible. The acting is almost uniformly shambolic. The special effects are often laughable model shots that look all the worse for their marriage to the much more big-budget helicopter action sequences. Stock footage is utilized relentlessly, in a way that you simply can't get away with on television any more. And yet, all of these failings combine to create something, that when it is examined from the right perspective, is far greater than the sum of its parts.

The acting and writing, as bad as they are succeed in creating a sense of an unseen mythology behind the surface of the action. Stringfellow Hawke, woodenly portrayed by Jan Michael Vincent (henceforth JMV) seems to have depths unrevealed by the scripted show. Stringfellow can fly the heck out of a helicopter. If he meets any random veteran, odds are that String probably airlifted them out of "Indian Country" back in 'Nam. Oh yeah, and Airwolf.

He performs cello recitals of Prokofiev for a bald eagle (represented by the same few seconds of stock footage again and again, occasionally flipped for the sake of variety) that fishes in the lake where Hawkes' cabin lies. (represented by the same few seconds of stock footage again and again, occasionally flipped for the sake of variety) whilst sitting in a camp chair on his dock/launch pad. His bucolic cabin on a soundstage (which is disjunctive, considering that the dock is a location shot) is filled with a collection of priceless old masters and early modern paintings. Gabrielle, his love interest from the pilot episode (they all die) exclaims at the quality of his reproduction of Van Gogh's "Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear." Hawke informs her that it is not a copy. She exclaims that she saw the original at the "Impressionists Museum" (presumably the Musée d'Orsee, one supposes--Donald Belasario apparently lacked an encyclopedia) never mind that this painting has been in London's Courtauld Institute Galleries since 1948) His wine cellar is exquisitely stocked. Gabrielle tries to impress him by identifying the wine they are drinking as a '79 Montrachet (never mind that the bottle is resting on the bar two feet from her head). A few lines later he cuttingly identifies it as a '78. Hawke is kind a total jerk if he likes you, because if he likes you, you'll probably die. Like his parents. His first girlfriend. His brother Saint John (annoyingly referred to as "Sin Jin") has been MIA in Vietnam for years. His girlfriends die with alarming regularity. This makes him understandably taciturn and brooding, communicated by JMV as a sort of sullen grumpiness. All of these ludicrous details paint a colossal figure, a dark hero who thinks nothing of using a supersonic attack helicopter as a one-on-one antipersonnel weapon. The script and JMV fail to communicate this. But the slapdash fragments of their failures somehow do.

Another aspect of Airwolf which works when it really shouldn't is the disjucntive textures of the various modes of film making used in each episode. Location shots are deliriously interspersed with soundstage sets, stock footage of various ages and qualities weaves drunkenly from exploding model shots to footage recycled from previous episodes. The end result is a celebration of the idiosyncracies of each, and their staggering incompatibility brings a fascinating off-kilter rhythm to the proceedings: we are remorselessly asked to suspend disbelief again and again, finally settling into a shell-shocked haze at the magnificent stupidity of it all. A further notable aspect of this is the recycling of various shots from the pilot episode--the iconic slow spin up of the juxtaposed rotors, shots of Airwolf at rest in her mountain fastness, the deployment of the weapons system, or of JMV's steely, determined glare through the glass of the cockpit. The reuse of these images results in sort of ritual space in the narrative. As Sylvester LeVay's iconic synthesizer theme begins, and we see the images of Airwolf becoming prepared for her next adventure, we are in the presence of a great warrior girding her loins for battle, and these images are the traditional benediction or supplications performed as part of that rite.

An aside concerning the music: Sylvester LeVay was really good. The Airwolf theme is instantly recognizable, of course. But the incidental music and synthesized sound design are totally bitchin'. There is some wicked cool fm synth programming going down here.

oh dear

2008-09-09T12:26:00.001-07:00

As seen on Mission St.

typefighters

2008-09-09T10:26:00.000-07:00

If any of you who care about typefaces and such didn't notice this on BoingBoing, well, there it is.

thank you Japan

2008-09-01T18:47:00.001-07:00

From AltJapan.

Can we just say

2008-08-06T02:52:00.000-07:00

Fuck a bunch of steampunk. Please? It was a nice mental exercise. But can it now be fucked? Please? Do I have to see grown men in waistcoats and derbies walking around without a goddamned jacket on? Seriously. If people put a little bit more effort than sticking a broken watch on a pair of cufflinks, maybe it would be okay. Maybe. Naw.

Naw.

Naw.

Naw, fuck a bunch of steampunk.

boris videos

2008-08-04T22:33:00.000-07:00

A Bao A Qu
When people ask me (they don't, but humor me) why I like Boris, the above pretty much sums it up. Yeah, it's metal. There is some shredding and some tearing a trapset a new asshole. But it's so dreamlike, so enveloping. I love the way that they can manage to make metal feel like modernist poetry. Yes folks, you read it here first: Boris is the Wallace Stevens of metal.

Flower Sun Rain
Or maybe this one, apparently a live Merzbow mix of "Flower Sun Rain" from Rock Dream. To be so aggressively noisy and so damned pretty at the same time.

Rainbow
Or just plain pretty.

Ibitsu
But then again, if I was a Boris video, "Ibitsu" would be me.

inking exercise

2008-07-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

A little while ago, I posted this drawing. I decided to practice my brush skills today, and so went hunting for a suitable pencil drawing to victimize. The results:

Totally effed up the hat and his hands, but I like the results in the drapery.

hey bro

2008-07-27T23:56:00.001-07:00

Imaginary musical genres, 1

2008-07-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

As a sort of thought exercise, I have been trying to come up with a few imaginary genres of music that do not yet exist. The first one is

Greasecore

Car culture has for too long been caught up in the flamejob, hellbilly, Bettie Page bangs thing. As our culture of excess begins to devour itself, it seems natural that automobile enthusiasts must, like their hobby, change or die. I am envisioning a grafting of the motorhead, hotrodder scene with the blazing zealotry of some aspects of the alternative fuel movement. Yes, I run my car on stale fryer grease, but man does it go!

The cheeseball hippy bullshit and defanged world music preferred by the current biodiesel acolytes will most emphatically NOT transfer to the custom car crowd (should it be Kustom Kar Krowd?), whether they are more Big Daddy Roth, or more Lowrider Magazine. What is needed is a fusion of the amphetamine-crazed spirit of the subculture with the utopian vision that is their only hope for salvation. I am envisioning something that combines the perfect aural vistas of classic Kraftwerk with the musique concrete aesthetic of early-period Einsturzende Neubaten, peppered with the sense of danger and abandon of rockabilly (because, really, can you really purge the rockabilly from the hotrod scene?). A sonic dreamscape of a perfect future where the individual can travel wherever they like at breakneck speed, without destroying the world. An epic poetry of automotion, told in the voices of the very machines they love, with the reminder of the grinning face of death (black cat clutching a firecracker on the forehead of a skull with snake-eyes dice in its sockets, skeletal hand wrapped around an 8-ball gearshift wearing a Bettie Page wig) never very far away.

2008-07-01T03:34:00.001-07:00

So, if I were a creative person, I would write some gripping content, and not rely upon Youtube videos to make up the bulk of these posts.

This is how I feel most days. Frank Black really does a better job than I can of explaining it all.

Mark E. Smith has made a career of that moment when you're singing a karaoke song that you think you know, and you suddenly realize that you have no idea how the verse goes. Only he writes the songs. I know it sounds like a bloody mess. You should see them live; it all will make sense.
There are a few questions that arise in any assessment of the late '70s U.K. punk rock scene. How did Joy Division become New Order? How did Johnny Rotten have the wherewithal to bring together PIL? And how did Howard Devoto manage to create pop-punk and move on to Magazine?

Something Brief

2008-07-01T03:03:00.000-07:00

Cory McAbee's The American Astronaut is one of my top two or three favorite films of all time. And so naturally, I am waiting faithfully for his next feature. I am terrified that that might never happen, the vagaries of funding for visionary artists being what they are. He was, however, tapped to produce a straight-to-cellphone short a few years ago that I think is worth everyone's time:

One moment please, nostalgia coming through

2008-06-29T00:02:00.000-07:00

I spent as much time as humanly possible hanging out at Cafe 101 in Lafayette, LA in the years between my 17th and 20th birthday (I spent the evening of my 21st eating pizza with Richard Grant at the Papa Johns that took over the space after the cafe failed). The moments not spent going to shows at Metropolis, chasing girls, doing drugs, or working were lived there. My work study at USL was in the English department, and on my runs to the campus post office, I always managed to swing way out of my way to grab a cup of coffee (in my personal George E. Ohr mug, kept behind the counter) and catch up with the folks. It's that place for me, the place where I met the people who taught me the things that made me the person I am. The coffee was okay, a little better once they started roasting their own. I've since had much better. But the people and the space, the open mikes that we had, the stupid shit that we did, that is irreplaceable.

Okay okay just one more

2008-06-27T00:42:00.000-07:00

Garfield Fan Fiction. Yes, it exists. No, I don't know why.

more wordles

2008-06-27T00:18:00.000-07:00

"Ça Plane Pour Moi," by Plastic Bertrand

"Surfin' Bird," by The Trashmen

"The Classical," by The Fall

atomized Moby-Dick

2008-06-26T14:37:00.000-07:00

Wordle is a web gee-gaw that generates awesome clouds of words from submitted text. I fed Wordle the text of Moby-Dick:

(click, of course, to increase girth)

Thanks, Bully!

Chris Sims is a really funny guy

2008-06-25T00:16:00.000-07:00

So, I read Chris Sims' Incredible Super Blog pretty much daily. It is a treasure: smartly written, funny prose, mostly about comic books that should by all rights be consigned to the dust-heap of history. So yeah, geek-city. Anyway, today's entry contained a real gem, which I would like to share with you:

For my part, the evening started in the hotel room, where I mixed up a Wake-Up Call (Kahlua, Cream Liqueur, Vanilla Rum and a Starbucks Double-Shot) to recover from a long day of conventioneering and Dr. K pointed out that the actual name of that drink is something that ends in “-tini.” I told him that if I was going to make a Girl Drink, I should at least be allowed to give it a manlier name. It was then decided–and this took me, Dr. K, Chad, Trey and Jay–that by that rationale, a Strawberry Daquiri with extra whipped cream, cherries and a pineapple stick should be called a Cock Sword Machinegun Pickup Truck Volume 2: The Metal Years. Tell your friends!

Can we please go out for Cock Sword Machinegun Pickup Truck Volume 2: The Metal Yearses this weekend guys, please?!

Two Exercises

2008-06-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

I have recently decided to start trying the exercises in Jessica Abel and Matt Madden's Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, the wonderful new comics-art textbook from First Second. Since I have this blog thing, and part of the point of it is to show people stuff I do, here are two results that I like:

(Draw a person staggering)

(Draw a person running)

I got a whale tattooed on me for my birthday

2008-06-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

Why The Incredible Hulk is a cinematic masterpiece

2008-06-13T12:09:00.001-07:00

There was this one part where the Hulk throws a forklift at a guy. And there was this other part where the Hulk rips a police car in half and puts the halves on his fists to use as brass knuckles so he can whale on the Abomination. Yes, you read that right. Rips a police car in half. Oh, and also, Ed Norton is a gifted actor who makes me not mind so much the parts of the movie where the Hulk is not hulking around, smashing stuff. William Hurt? Good stuff. Thunderbolt Ross to a T. Liv Tyler? A good actress, giving emotional depth to a part in a comic book movie. But the Hulk, smashing? Yes. Very nice.

The Hulk, for me, represents the sense of rage and powerlessness that is a symptom of living in a world run by avaricious, shortsighted jackasses. Individuals living today cannot escape a feeling of hopelessness in the face of the fact that the ruling elite, those that have power over us, are to a man lunatics and assholes. In a strange sense, despite his brutality and the swath of destruction that his presence invariably carves across reality, the Hulk embodies a primarily creative principle, that of the ability of the individual to enact change in a world that tends towards moral decay and despair. It is important to remember that the Hulk is more often heroic than not. Even in his darkest moments, where he seems to be the twisted embodiment of Banner's unfettered id, this sense of boundless power arising from rage at the way the world is is still a fundamental aspect of the portrayal of the Hulk. Anyway, that's me rambling on about why I love the Hulk.

It is my effing birthday

2008-06-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

So, I'm just posting to kill time before people buy me drinks and give me things.

Things that are important today:

The new Hulk movie is out this weekend, and it will probably blow. If you need solace, or an explanation as to why the Incredible Hulk is worth your while, you should read the best Hulk strip ever.

Boris is the most important band doing music made with guitars currently in existence.

Speaking of guitars, Moog's Paul Vo has created what may be the greatest innovation in the history of that instrument since Les Paul invented the electric. If it's as amazing as it seems, it may actually change the face of guitar-based music. Or it's the next Chapman Stick
It's my birthday

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: A Review

2008-05-24T02:34:00.000-07:00

You are chained to a damp concrete floor in a room, blinded by remorseless, harsh spotlights that intermittently sputter and strobe in heart-stopping, insane rhythms. On a torn projector screen, a poorly-focused, off color image is flickering silently. A pair of inhumanly strong, cybernetically-operated severed hands clamp your fingers to a white-hot cast iron Playstation controller, forcing you to play through the first level of Tomb Raider 2 again and again, forcing you to die in the same place each time. A keening, idiot humming is coming from somewhere, the broken melody is familiar: Duhn da nuh NAHH, dun na NAH.

You feel something wet against your leg and you realize that you have shit yourself. It is not the honest shit of a sick person; it is the feces of shame. The reek of self-loathing and rotting childhood fills the air.

Indistinct figures loom above you. You can only make out beards at first, but in a sudden flaring of the spotlights, the silhouettes resolve into the leering, bearded faces of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. They are drinking Champipple from a baby's skull goblet and smoking PCP and laughing at you. And your mom is there, and she is laughing at you. And you can't help it and you gout out another jet of steaming diarrhea, and they laugh even louder. And you are weeping, and shitting, and they are laughing. Suddenly another figure is in front of you, silhouetted by the projector! That hat! Oh, it is Harrison Ford! Maybe he can save you! He leans in to the light and smiles at you. You know, that smile. Sorry kid. You wanted this. Not me.

Han Bennink in Ethiopia

2008-05-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

And people say that free improv is inaccessable music.

What really went on there? We only have this excerpt:

2008-05-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

The so-called New Wave of science fiction, exemplified by such writers as Samuel Delaney, Norman Spinrad, Joanna Russ, and M. John Harrison was the cause of literally tons of amazing paperback covers in the late '60s and early '70s. Here is one of them, announcing a title by the High Priest of New Wave SF, Philip K. Dick, writing in collaboration with Ray Nelson. The artist is uncredited, but I suspect it may be the noted German illustrator Mati Klarwein, best know for his cover art for Mile's Davis' Bitches' Brew. I may of course, be totally wrong.

All of the represented elements in the design are indeed present in the text of the novel: A black man is one of the principal protagonists, and a hapa woman is another. And yes, there are giant aardvarks and a mountain with an angry, glaring eye. About the only element that isn't found in the story are the zappy Art-Deco electrodes. Despite the fact that that this is an amazingly psychedelic cover design, it may be one of the most literal interpretations of the text to ever grace a book cover. God love the 1960s.

Anyway, just thought I'd share.

Also: it's a rad book.

It's here folks

2008-05-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

The summer jam of the year has arrived:

Space Viking by H. Beam Piper

2008-04-28T21:01:00.000-07:00

I haven't read this novel. I bought it because I like the cover. Before I read it, or read anything about it, I'd like to invite the readers of this weblog to join me in extrapolating a brief synopsis of the book from the cover alone. Afterwards, we can all read the novel together, and figure out whose idea came closest to the actual text, and if any of our plots are any better than the late H. Beam Piper's.

So, I just want to say

2008-04-24T02:10:00.000-07:00

BURN MICROSOFT VISTA IN EFFIGY. So I know that one of the readers of my blog uses a Mac. The other guy who reads it is using like, Windows 98 or something. I think that someone once complained that it wasn't optimized for Mosaic. Anyway, anyone who reads this, please join with me in trying to come up with a physical avatar for Microsoft Vista that I can lynch from a lamppost and set aflame. I spent about four hours tonight having an utter conniption fit because I accidentally opened a *.exe file with a text editor, and my bitchface OS decided that "Oh, you prefer to experience programs as scrambled masses of incomprehensible text? Allow me." And lo, every single fucking program on my hard drive would only open as a text file. Yes, it apparently made a global change to my registry to this end. I was able to start my web browser by clicking on the Help and Support section of my start menu (Microsoft wants $60 before they will even consider helping you fix their shittily-designed product after 90 days activation), and thence found my way to a blog post where someone posted a registry fix, and things are better now. But what was crazy was that there were so many other people with the same problem thanking the poster. I guess when you have global dominance over a market, you stop giving a shit about quality.

Okay, I lost some things I was working on, and I'm a little upset. Microsoft Vista blows donkey and makes appreciative slurping noises.

Not if I Kill You First, Orphan Bitch!

2008-04-21T22:18:00.000-07:00

I sat through the closing credits of Rob Minkoff's The Forbidden Kingdom in a state of amazement that so many people in at least five different countries combined forces to midwife this stinking heap of dogshit into the world. Who gave these guys so much money? It seems as if a little dust had settled on the junkheap of pop culture history, and so they decided to toss another on. I mean, I would say that this movie must have been written by a brain-damaged donkey with too much of a fondness for crème de menthe, but I have more respect for donkeys--Grasshopper-addled or not--than to make that statement. It was so bad that I imbd-ed to make sure it wasn't a vanity project. Minkoff is apparently responsible for The Lion King, and the writer John Fusco is the man who brought you such gems as Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Loch Ness which I'm sure we all remember fondly. Okay, okay, he also wrote Young Guns and Thunderheart both of which films are not entirely awful. These guys are perfectly respectable laborers in the more commercial, more lowest-common-denominator mines of Hollywood. Bad work, maybe, but Hollywood-standard bad, not insultingly, monumentally, jaw-droppingly bad. How could they have made this film, this movie that stars both Jackie Chan and Jet Li so intensely bad? So bad indeed, that Chan, not exactly known for his great range as an actor, was quoted as saying that the script was nonsense, that he did it mostly for the experience of being in a film with Jet Li.

It's bad because it's a kung fu film strapped into a rejected little-boy's-fantasy-comes-to-life movie from the 80s, like The Last Starfighter or Cloak and Dagger. Cloak and Dagger had Dabney Coleman in dual roles, much like both Chan and Li in this film, but I gotta say, they just don't have the panache that old Dabney had. Scrolling down to the very bottom of John Fusco's list of accomplishments, we see that he wrote a little thing called Crossroads. Crossroads was a movie about a geeky East Coast white teenager (affably played by Ralph Macchio, who reprised this role in The Karate Kid) who is guided through the Land of the Blues by a Magical Negro (wonderfully played by Joe Seneca, who was replaced by Pat Morita as a Magical Nip in The Karate Kid). This movie is about a geeky East Coast teenager (played with slack-jawed ineptitude by some teenaged schlub called Michael Angarano) who is transported into a weakly-imagined fantasy China, guided by a duo of Magical Chinamen. These super-powered people that happen to not be white are in both films dee-lighted to help the white kid out in his hero quest, and happily step aside when it comes time for folk of European descent to shine. The big difference between the two films is that Walter Hill was a director with a knack for turning what could have been utter schlock into cinema with weight and power. Mr. Minkoff directed Stuart Little.

Mr. Chan and Mr. Li are awesome when they're fighting, and at they're best when they are brutalizing and humiliating their young student during the inevitable training sequences, with what I hope seems to be real relish. Chan moves with a sturdy grace that's amazing for a 54 year-old man, and Jet Li is his usual balletic bad self. As actors, well you know. Li is at his best looking determined and noble, and when he strays from this things can get a little hinky. His performance as the Monkey King is really annoying and giggly, but it seems that that's how Sun Wu Kung is usually portrayed. Jackie Chan is just being himself, you know, charming and one note, this time wearing an awesome wig. The plot is horseshit, and really really badly written. Angarano's character has a line during one of the training sequences where he blurts, "And you're just sitting there on that horse like the King of England!" at Mr. Chan. Not only has no contemporary teenager ever lived during the reign of a King of England, no one of any age would ever have used such a shitty simile. Why is a guy on a horse anything like the King of England? Golden Sparrow, the young lad's love interest (gamely played--against unspeakable odds-- by Liu Yifei), for no good reason whatsoever talks about herself in the third person for the whole goddamned movie. Mr. Chan, Mr. Li, and the rest of the characters who interact with Agarano's character inexplicably switch between Mandarin and English. Now people, I know the plot wouldn't have worked if nobody could speak to the fucking kid, he's the main character and all, but really, you could have made a joke about it at least, I mean gone a little metafilmic with it. Or not. You could have him drink a magic potion. Or that people with Kung Fu superpowers automatically have like a universal translator that gives them crash courses in language, like a super-Berlitz. Whatever. They don't do shit. The movie is a clinker, and not worth the time I've spent writing about it. But Jackie Chan and Jet Li have a great fight scene or two. Watch for it on YouTube.

Yuri's Night 2008

2008-04-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

My friends Erik and Lisa build robots with Swarm and so they were at Yuri's Night at NASA Ames in Mountainview, and they invited me. I gotta say: a party in a NASA hanger is a pretty bitchin' idea.

Yeah! Beer and uh, candy cigarettes next to jet fuel! If that's not living, I don't know what is.

I have this thing about taking pictures of people taking pictures.

The orbs are pretty damned rad. Gyro-stabilized, radio controlled, with user-triggered light and sound effects.

Eventually, they are to be software controlled, so that they can be programmed to move in formation, possibly with coordinated music and light shows.

They look pretty intense at night.

How many Garfields do you have to kill to make a coat like this dude's?

Erik wanted a Buckaroo Banzai shot. We were really too tired to make the effort.

Can I say that Jesse is a champ?

I know it's because I am old

2008-04-05T13:37:00.000-07:00

I am old. As far as the internet is concerned, I'm like 70. I'm old enough to have used Lynx on a VAX/VMS network. I was there when Al Gore made the internet out of wattle and daub. I remember when people had homepages. So, maybe it's just that that makes me want to strangle people when they talk about shooting each other emails. Just think about that phrase: "I'll shoot you an email." The blueshirt shitbag who coined that ugly idiom deserves to be dragged into the street and shot. People who use it sound like they discovered the internet last week and are trying to make up slang so they can sound hip. When you say, "I'll shoot you an email," you sound like a small town middle school guidance counsellor who was forced to start using a computer last year. Seriously people, don't say it.

Georgia: a Coda

2008-04-01T11:41:00.001-07:00

No, they don't pay me money for the naming rights.

If you're old like me,

2008-03-31T10:10:00.000-07:00

you might find this as funny as I did. (From Lady, That's My Skull)

Testpatterns

2008-03-30T12:57:00.001-07:00

I have been interested in inadvertent art for years, the way that sound and vision not created for the purposes of aesthetic enjoyment can sometimes be delightfully beautiful. The minimalist tapestries of printer self-tests. The voice synthesizer announcements in subways. Warning signs and hazardous-waste labels. I remember being fascinated by industrial signage catalogs at a young age. Tibor Kalman's book (un)Fashion is a great document of these principals applied to clothing. There seems to be a sort of subconscious aesthetic at play in the most pragmatic of designs, almost as if even in our most mechanistic, problem-solving artificing there is a dream of beauty that we cannot help but express.

I've used the word "testpattern" in my e-mail address for something like eight years now. Television test patterns, or test cards, were created for the most pragmatic of purposes: to tune and align the images being sent by a television station. As such, they are very rationally ordered images, clearly presenting elements of contrast and detail, focus and alignment, and of course color and hue, once those became important factors in broadcast. I'm sure that all of the test patterns used over the years by various TV networks all had designers. In fact, the original art for perhaps the most iconic test card of all, the RCA Indian Head was discovered in 1970, and now belongs to a private collector of historical television ephemera. Nevertheless, each one seems to be somehow undesigned, created for single-mindedly optical purposes, with little real consideration of aesthetics. I think that in this purity of purpose they manage to become almost like secular mandalas, abstractions that draw the mind in and allow for the cessation of thought. I spent this morning collecting a few images of test cards that I found particularly appealing, and I thought I'd share them with you. I don't propose to make any analysis of the images, or provide any historical context. If that interests you, this is one of many good starting places. And if you long for the comfort of a piercing sine wave tone to accompany them, go here or just search for test cards on Youtube

The Cokesbury Stunt Book

2008-03-30T11:08:00.001-07:00

I found this book at a thrift store in Columbia, SC. Arthur Depew was a loyal member of the West Palm Beach Kiwanis club. This useful 1934 manual contains 600 stunts, japes, and hilarious suggestions for all of your service club meeting needs, whether you be Rotarian, Kiwanis, K. of C. or any other white male brotherhood:

My favorite part of the so-called "stunt" entitled "K. K. K." is the suggestion that robes be "secure[d]" from the Klan, as though the intended audience of the book generally won't be lacking such contacts.
There are a few more amazingly offensive pages in this book, but the rest are crashingly boring, miraculously unfunny party ideas that make me wonder why anyone ever joined a service club in the first place.

I promise to do sit-ups all day Sunday

2008-03-28T12:29:00.001-07:00

For those of us who are truly serious about loving food, those of us who think of bicycle chains and dark alleys when we hear the word "Foodie," Atlanta may be one of the Holy Cities of our faith. It is definitely true that great Southern food can be found in just about any city in the country in which a sizable population of Southerners resides. People tell me you can get good barbeque in Oakland, for instance, and I've found at least one good soul food place in SF. It is also true that scattered throughout the cities and tiny backwoods towns of the South are more great meals than any one human being could ever imagine to sample in a lifetime (even if said lifetime managed to escape curtailment at the hands of the attendant cholesterol that this cuisine proudly assaults its acolytes with). Each state, each subregion, each city, each cook has their own techniques, tricks, and preferences. And there is of course the omnipresent racial divide. The same dish is sometimes quite different when filtered through the cultural lens of either side of the melanin line. More talented writers on food have addressed the issues of race in Southern cuisine, and I certainly am not qualified to wrassle that sack of porcupines. Anyway, more germane to the point of this writing is that Atlanta is an embarrassment of riches for the discerning omnivore. The sheer size and historical density of the city, coupled with its citizens' sense of pride in their heritage has resulted in a bewildering array of culinary seductions. I have had the chance to sample a few of them.

The photographs accompanying this post were taken of my meals at Mary Mac's Tea Room and Paschal's Restaurant, both of which are Altanta institutions. I also had barbeque at Daddy D'z this afternoon, and I forgot my camera. These were the three best meals of my visit, and I think that what I have to say here will be mostly taken from those experiences.
Above you see our first course at Mary Mac's: fried crawfish tails and fried okra. The sauces are a vaguely spicy jalapeño cocktail sauce for the mudbugs and a lovely creamed horseradish concoction for the okra. These dishes were good. It's definitely possible to screw up crunchy fried things, but it's hard to make them really outstanding. The okra was fresh. The crawfish tails were probably frozen. Whatever. They were delicious. What is not documented in the photograph is the amuse bouche of a cup of potlikker and cornbread that we received upon making our order. That was divine. If you haven't had potlikker before, it's essentially the broth left over from making collard greens. The potlikker at Mary Mac's was subtle, porky, and delicious. Salty enough to make its point without destroying the vibrant flavor of the greens. It was intense enough that I elected not to order the collard as one of the sides with my main course, the fried chicken:
I wish that my camera could convey just how perfect the above meal was. The chicken was simultaneously somehow rich and greasy and dancingly light and crisp. It sat with me for hours afterwards, a gastronomic satori radiating out from my stomach. I have had better fried chicken. Frenchy's in Houston, for instance, has a far more flavorful batter. But there was something about the combination of comfort-food richness and sure-handed execution that made this bird stand out. I'm sorry I wasn't able to try the lauded buttermilk-marinated yardbird at Scott Peacock's Watershed in Decateur, but I am pleased with my choice.

The sides I chose for it, the mac and cheese and the hoppin' john were equally stellar. The mac and cheese had a wonderful curd-like consistency, perhaps from the use of ricotta or cottage cheese. The hoppin' john made me wish that I had forgone the rest of the dinner and just eaten a bowl of these black-eyed peas. I think that more traditionally, hoppin' john is a sort of bean stew, the way that Cajun and Creole cooks make red beans and rice. At Mary Mac's, it was a spoonful of their side order of black-eyed peas over rice. THAT DIDN'T FUCKING MATTER. These little guys were gorgeous. After my first bite, I bewailed my misfortune for having involved rice in the equation, and my dining companion
generously offered to let me finish hers. Predictably enough, she had plenty of that vile carrot and raisin salad left over (I'm sure it was wonderfully executed), and like six beans. Can I tell you? Can I convey the perfect love with which this humble legume was treated? Cooked just enough--firm but tender. Salty, and with an understated hint of pork, floating dreamlike just under the surface of the flavors. This is a wonderful example of how a minimum of ingredients, lovingly handled, can come together in a symphony of flavors that rivals the heights of the most exalted culinary baroqueries. These beans alone make Mary Mac's worth visiting, and that's saying something, as the rest of the meal was pretty damned sublime.

One jarring note at Mary Mac's was a tiny aspect of the decor. Among the various autographed celebrity photos and newspaper clippings was a little cluster of stories about Georgia's controversial governor, Lester Maddox, who rode to political success upon the basis of his violent opposition to segregation, famously defending his Pickrick restaurant from black activists, ax-handle and pistol in hand. Apparently, in his later years, Maddox enjoyed celebrating his birthday at Mary Mac's, and a few society-pages clippings chronicle these events. Maddox is a central figure in Georgia's history, and one can argue that his governorship was extremely beneficial to Georgia's African American population. However, he is still a controversial figure, and enshrining him in an establishment where the ownership is white and a large percentage of the employees black is a decision in questionable taste at best.

No such greater socio-political quandaries taint the meal at Paschal's, which is a good thing, because Paschal's needs all the help it can get. It's not bad, mind you, but when compared to Mary Mac's, it comes across as a bit bland. This is a shame, as Paschal's is one of the oldest and most successful black-owned restaurants in Atlanta. In the '50s and 60s, it was a favored meeting place for Dr. King and his aides. The founding Paschal brothers were known to post bail for jailed protesters, and to extend their hours to offer a meeting place for their families to welcome them home. With such a rich and honorable tradition, it is a shame that Paschal's only satisfies, instead of impressing.

This is the Paschal's gumbo. It wasn't by any means bad, just awkward. What seemed like at least two whole bell peppers, cut into quarter-sized pieces floated in the broth, rendering it more of a pepper soup than anything else. Wisps of boiled-to-death chicken floated like faint memories through the startlingly red liquid (over-liberal Tabasco, I'm afraid). Now, I grew up in Louisiana, so maybe I just don't understand the subtleties of Atlantan variations upon Creole cuisine. And like I said, this soup wasn't bad. It just wasn't what I would hope for from a landmark restaurant.

The sides faired much better. Although the mac and cheese lacked the intriguing texture of Mary Mac's, it was very well done, with a perfectly cheddary flavor. I'm afraid that the black-eyed peas were a disappointment after my earlier meal. These were most likely canned, and a bit overcooked. Not at all bad, but not the lethally-focused weapon in use a Mary Mac's. The collards were excellent, though. I suspect that brown sugar is a part of the recipe here, which played up the flavor of the greens rather than the pork, and was very successful.

The chicken-fried steak was just so almost-there as to be heartbreaking. I mean, look at it: the apex of what Brown Food should look like. And yet. And yet. Underseasoned beef, too loose a patty. Batter too quick to wilt under the onslaught of gravy. People, I can't get edible chicken-fried steak in California! What are you doing to me?!

Paschal's seems to have extended its operations very successfully into the catering market, and this can certainly explain why the flagship kitchen belies their reputation. It's tragic, though.

My last meal out in Atlanta was a mess of ribs and a quarter chicken at Daddy D'z on Memorial. This was straight up the best food I've had all week. I can't get good barbeque at home, and this is a constant source of woe, especially since I live a block from the almost-there Lilly's in SF, and the aroma of smoked meat is a constant in my life. So coming to Atlanta had to culminate with smoked meat. After careful research, I chose Daddy D'z, based on internet reviews, and boy howdy am I glad I did. Something about the way everything was smoked (hickory is the wood of choice, as it is most everywhere but Texas) rendered all the meat into a delightfully liquid consistency that flooded the palate with juicy gorgeousness. The sauce was intense, delightfully deep and vinegary. It's hard to use words to describe successful barbeque, but suffice it to say that this was some of the best I've ever had. Daddy D'z sides were also excellent. The fried okra was as perfectly executed as at Mary Mac's, and the collard greens were hands-down the best of the three presentations I managed to sample this week. As perfectly meaty and salted as Mary Mac's, they had the added distinction of some indefinable earthy, smoky spice that I suspect consisted of a mug of barbeque sauce tossed into the pot with everything else. This was surprising, as usually the sides at a good BBQ place tend to be well-executed afterthoughts at best.

So, that's it for Atlanta food. Those of you who live near me will probably taste the fruits of my fieldwork in the near future. Nothing makes me want to cook so much as eating.

Atlanta dispatch #2

2008-03-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

I've spent the past few days trying to really come to an understanding of this city, at least as much as one can in a visit as short as this one. I've tried to listen to the stories that the city has to tell the attentive listener, to orient myself in this sprawling southern city, both geographically and psychically. It has been a wonderfully enriching experience. Atlanta has a lot more to offer the casual explorer than I thought it would.

This city is a bit of a mess. There are about 50 different streets named Peachtree: some are Streets, some Avenues, some Centers, some Ways. Each one of these seem to be divided up into a compass point or three, for example, Peachtree Battle Circle NW or S Peachtree Road. None of these geographic markers seem to have any particular bearing upon where in the city the stretch of road in question lies. Another confusing factor is the mutability of street names. Seemingly vital arteries fluctuate from name to name with dizzying frequency. I have been told that this is a vestige of the old color lines in the city, with Black neighborhoods using one name, and paler sorts another. Monroe becomes, simply Boulevard. Moreland becomes Briarcliff Road NE (I have yet to determine if there are truncated bits of Briarcliff Road elsewhere in the city) Capping all of this is the relative uselessness of the MARTA public transit system. A cruciform network of trains connects the cardinal axes of the city, with buses crawling out from the stations with depressing infrequency. The sum of all of these locative complexities is that each section of Atlanta feels very discrete, and travel between them seems to require mastery of a complex geographical hermeneutics, an pseudokabbalah with the Atlanta NFT as its holy text. And no matter how deep in to the intricacies of this system one gets, the shift from one neighborhood to another still feels like a something from one of Jose Luis Borges's jewel-like short stories.

More to come.

Infant Mortality in the State of Georgia: Something You May Not Know

2008-03-24T19:56:00.001-07:00

So, our hostess Allison took us to one of her preferred laid-back watering holes this evening, the Mellow Mushroom. The Mellow Mushroom is not, as you may have hypothesized, a club where guys with dreads dance badly to a guy wearing a Phish T-shirt covering "Redemption Song." It is indeed hippy-themed, but is in actuality a clean, aggressively well-lit fast food pizza joint with a decent little bar. I spent the greater part of my visit squinting at the captions on CNN during Larry King Live and what is it, Anderson Cooper 360°, and James Carville looking more like one of Steadman's caricatures of HST than Johnny Depp, or Hunter himself for that matter, ever could, and Carville is repeating the same phrase over and over, about how he said something, and found a colorful way of saying it, and he's glad he said it, and he'd say it again. And meanwhile, these guys at the bar, Bear and Bubba (these are indeed the names I was given), kind of ex-hippy good old boy types, are totally faced and just rambling on at us about all kinds of stuff, traveling when they were young, having five kids, saying the kind of scary-true things that drunks can sometimes say without stopping smiling, and without pausing before the next subject, and me, I have a half a chicken (fried, mind you) in my stomach, with mac & cheese and hoppin' john working, and I am having a hard time (what with James Carville, who also looks like Skeletor with a funny accent) focusing on anything, and then the President is on the TV with an Easter Bunny, and Bubba says how he'd like to have that on a T-shirt. My lady agreed with him, and then Bubba started telling us about the baby and the sheet-rock bucket.

The baby in the sheet-rock bucket. I know you're all wondering how I was going to tie in the title of this post with it's content, and well, here it comes. See, this was an image that Bubba thought would make a great T-shirt. Now, I'm still busy trying to figure out what the hell James Carville is markedly not apologizing for, so I hear the beginning of this in fragments and I don't think I understand it. Surely he didn't just say that a baby in a sheet-rock bucket would make a great T-shirt, right? That makes no sense! What the hell is a sheet-rock bucket anyway? I'm imagining some bizarre baptismal formed from four gypsum panels plastered together, something like that. While I'm coping with this, Bubba is not stopping. He's saying about how you know, if the baby falls in the sheet-rock bucket, well, throw the parents in too. And how it would be simple to make it safer for babies, just make 5-gallon buckets narrower and taller, that way babies couldn't fall in. Get OSHA on it. And rmember, he is repeating the phrase "baby in a sheet-rock bucket" over and over again, and I am starting to get the idea here, that the kind of white plastic five-gallon buckets that you might use in patching sheet-rock are conceivably a danger to small infants, who might fall in head first (he specifies that). I don't know if he means headfirst and drown in some kind of liquid, whether plaster (it's plaster, right? Sheet rock is more or less sheets of plaster, right?) or whatever else may be in the bucket, and how it's a statement about "Darnwism" (note: I am preserving the idiosyncratic pronunciation in the service of atmospheric verisimilitude, not to make Bubba sound like a dumb hick. He was indeed a self-proclaimed redneck, but he certainly seemed to be a rather intelligent man, perhaps a few sheets further to the wind than is beneficial for the purposes of clarity in discourse), it's like culling. And by this point I'm sort of starting to get it, how there would be a white 5-gallon bucket on the front, with a diapered hindquarters poking out of the top (and I confess, I kind of want this shirt right now), with the parents being similarly immersed on the verso.

This is an interesting diptych in many ways. It can be seen as a metaphor for the responsibility of parents for the pitfalls that their children encounter, or for the need for them to face said responsibility. It's certainly a powerful image, and I expect to see it on the cover of a 'zine in the near future. What strikes me most, however, is the resonance that it seemed to have for Bubba. Did this happen to someone he knew? Or did it happen to someone, and he heard about it, and the failure of the parents to prevent this gristly end for their child stuck with him at such a deep level that he goes of on it at great length at the slightest provocation, often in bars, sometimes involving ironically humorous T-shirts. Or is this such a common factor in infant fatalities in Georgia as to be a good target for the shaming power of such T-shirts? I'd think that the rest of the country would have heard about it by now, don't you? Now, don't get me wrong dead babies really aren't funny (yes I do know why; it was stapled to the chicken), but the sheer delirious absurdity of the repeated phrase "baby in a sheet-rock bucket," repeated in an ostinato polyphony with Carville's as-often-repeated "I was quoted accurately and in context, and I was glad to give the quote and I was glad I gave it. I’m not apologizing, I’m not resigning, I’m not doing anything," created this shimmering, hilarious fabric with all of the hypnotic complexity of a Steve Reich composition. Ah, it was a hoot. Thank you, Bubba. Thank you Atlanta.

Mary Mac's Tearoom: A preliminary report.

2008-03-24T18:06:00.000-07:00

I may never eat again. Thank you, Mary Mac's.