baby's day out

woh i need to get some wifi at my house.  i wrote a poem about the end of summer yesterday and it was pretty good, something about the good kind of exhaustion and sort of patting myself on the back for getting by this summer.  i lost it.  shit.

golly, do i have anything to say?  that it is nice to have a day off in which to get work done and get to know a dog.  that i am excited to see you all at Henry's Tavern on tuesday for the Pick Your Poison show. I just googled "Pick Your Poison" and I don't see any books or movies or albums with that title, which is odd.  I haven't had a memorable dream in weeks.  Last night, I went to the Big Lebowski at the lake and ate fries and saw a burlesque show and drank a beer and heard my friend Dan read Kenneth Koch's "Some General Instructions," and this was all in about an hour.  i found out a geographically big secret this week.  i like my job and not very many other people like theirs.

this is a digital story my dad made about raising his kids: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXwA3uEj2e0.

show tuesday, new wwd print edition this week, all hail j.r. bob dobbs.

Choose Your Own Adventure River

Here is something you should remember and go to.  It is an event as momentous as the great flood itself: World Wide Dirt and Shift Freedom's live Choose Your Own Adventure event, Pick Your Poison, featuring an array of awesomeness from some of the coolest people around including WWD's own Sean and Parker, as well as featured WWD contributors Mitch Olson and Lee Odeja, and many many others.  Eight different pathways from a single starting point have been crafted by a slew of awesome writers and the audience will choose which path the story takes in front of them.


The event will also involve other fiction and poetry pieces, as well as cookies and beer.  It will be Tuesday, August 31st at Henry's Bar, 2523 East Belleview Place, Milwaukee.  It's right next to that ice cream place that's next to the Downer Theater.  It's free and it's going to be a great time.

In other adventure news, I went to Noah's Ark today and did the adventure ricer.  I used to wreak havoc on it, squirt on lifeguards with water out of plastic guns I'd won with skeeball tickets, take over the big rubber froot loop tubes (which no longer exist), and hold people under the waterfalls.  Today, I just lied under the sun and drifted.  I closed my eyes because it made no difference where I was going.  I was just going to keep floating in a circle.  I could hear speaking and new that people were all around me, having conversations and splash wars, their own little adventure and I listened to them like it was a radio show, tuning in and out.  I opened my eyes once when the sound of geyser streams falling into the river became louder and I saw only a jet of pale water and a solid blue sky like it had been printed that way.  Beautiful. 

That's For Me...

Scott Pilgrim isn’t a perfect movie, but does something that needed to be done.  It rethinks the way stories are told in cinema.  The rules and methods handed down from old dead masters like Welles, Ford, even Godard & Scorsese (who aren’t literally dead), come from another time, a different context of thought & art.

The best movie I’d seen in a while before SPVTW was Inception, a mind-blower, geniusly constructed, handsomely and gracefully executed, that ignores everything that has happened in the last 3 decades besides the popularization of cell phones, new car models & current men’s fashion.

It’s a milieu of seventies philosophy and eighties slick.  Cinematic methods perfected by Fritz Lang in the 1930’s are given room to expand in an original setting and there is little more to say about the film’s advancements of the medium.

Scott Pilgrim is made with a new language of a new era.  Welles made movies using a largely Shakespearean mythos, Lang used a mythos of  Greek & German mythology, Scorsese had a mythos of Welles & Ford & Godard.  Edgar Wright, in SPVTW, uses the mythos of the video game.  Mortal Kombat, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Rock Band, and many, many others; these are the fairy tales of a generation, the context for much of its thought, and this, along with other features of the new millennium like instant messaging, the accelerated cycles of popular music, horrifyingly arrested development, forms the world the film feeds off of and is made for.

Chief Nojoke of the Fugawi

I am too tired so let me list the following words in order of appearance… the spiral’s thinning diameter… Ishmael the lost gorilla … a darkened box … a beehive fetishised … an old flame farted upon … a schoolyard monopoly … the things we learn from being bad … how to drive like you have cataracts … the finer points of Ethan Hawke’s cheekbones … the shed hair of American jazz … the gift of a graceful irritation … gelato is iced milk and there is a reason most people ice cream … the best news that I’ve ever heard … frequent dining is well rewarded … avocados are not good with everything … it is easy to slay an hour but hard to strangle a second … will next year be hotter? … who will benefit?

What does it look like? I asked.  Like cake, he said.  It looks like cake.  It’s not, I said.

Today I feel like I’m climbing a mountain.  When you’re trying to reach a peak, you look up and the peak always looks near, relatively.  10, 20 minutes is how far away it looks.  You throw a hand up and flex your thigh to pulley your weight up, you do this a thousand times and you get to the peak you were eyeing before but now its not a peak, it’s just another step on the way to the real peak.  When you climb over the faux peak, you encounter a mystery.  Above it could be a terrain much like the one you had just scaled, same slope, texture, vegetation populous – or – it could be something entirely new, red shiny rocks, brittle and they break easily and splinter into your hands, thick bonsai shrubs, snow.  And who knows how much further up the next peak will appear?  So, as if you haven’t guessed, this is a metaphor for something.  I think I am near a peak right now.  I don’t know what will be found above it.  I don’t know why I’m even climbing toward it.  I don’t know why I’m writing this right now except that it was what I felt like doing.  I don’t know why I went to work today except that it was what I did.  There is something to be said and I don’t know what it is.

Those pictures, by the way, are of Guy & Dirt, circa 1994, courtesy the Jim Winship archives.

Dirtonians! Hear my call!

My friends have a band called The Scarring Party. here is picture of a couple of them in Pittsburgh. They are cool. props on the pic to William Smith.

They have an album release party on August 12th at Turner Hall. Check it!

I got more film for Heavy Hands and have been working hard on a slew of projects.

Besides the fact that i'm 25 now, really nothing has changed. I still spend most of my days on the phone and complaining about money.

It's a brand new-quarter century-world.

Here's something i wrote at seven this morning on my stoop.

Lets make this easy and not consider,
random outs make it
so sweet and possible.
Cause, honestly,
i'm trying if you're trying
...
you're a well like i'm a well.
crooked and stagnant and deep.
boarded over top
and covered with warnings
to not fall in.

Instructions

Its been a good week.  I'm touring around the south a little, just got back from a Brave's game, saw Shakespeare last night, Inception the night before, attended the Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrites the day before that.

Coolest thing by far I've done in recent memory is to get a tour of the studio that belongs to friend of my uncle and dude in the top 1% of literary and comic illustrators, Mr. Charles Vess.  He and my family talked for a while about the stuff of his we liked, including issues of The Sandman comic, Stardust and many others.  I told him I had just read his fairy tale collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Instructions, so he opened up a drawer and showed me original drawings from that book.

An incredibly cool video version of the Instructions can be found here.
Charles Vess's website can be found here.

The story I wrote that is inspired by Instructions and that I felt too presumptuous to give to Mr. Vess can be found right here:

THE TREASURE MAP

Walk outside of the building.  This is harder than it sounds.  Inside is nearly as large as outside, but there is no raw inside, and it is only upon remarking this that you need to leave.

There is an allure to the pool, the chlorine scent assuring bleach-level cleanliness, the bobbing ropes that designate a lap lane for you only, water running off swim suits on muscular bodies before they sproing from the diving boards.  You must leave it behind.

And in the next room, you will find an informal banquet.  Confident murmurs, wine glasses on hovering tablets, a buffet on white tablecloth.  A man must eat to live, most men need companionship nearly as much, and you will surely find both of adequate quality in this room, but do not linger.  Circumvent the fountain.  Exit through the grand doors.

Enter a hallway notched with nooks, lined with windows to look on the streets below.  You will pass a friendly card game, the unaged antiqueness of a retirement home’s sitting room, a bar with ready-made and fairly-priced sandwiches, someone eager to know you and lead you by your hand to the end of the hall, to the balcony.

And you could do some lovely things here.  There are benches because they know you’ll be tired.  There are movies playing here because they know you’d like to unwind.  And yet, you know to put one foot before the other and keep your hands in your pockets.

Enter the lobby.  Walls are incomplete to give separate rooms the appearance of an unending landscape.  Restaurants and shops are staggered at discrepant heights, the ramped corridors between them equipped with tables, vendors, waiters.  Smell the spiced humid scent of the trees as you walk by them. 

Some will walk through this place with their glances swaying and their heads bobbing, but there are others who keep their eyes directed forward, who walk with a purpose.  Follow one of them and you will find yourself in the depot.  Tickets are cheap.  Machines sell apples, pretzels, coffee.  Pictures on the wall show you places you can go to and lists on the wall tell you what time you can leave to get there.

You will see people pleased to be where they’ve gotten to, happy to be going where they’re off to by air, rail, road, sea even.  Get out of the depot.  It will not take you anywhere.  You will notice a sign with a list of other rooms, each with an arrow next to it.  There are restrooms, a cafeteria, a chapel, a doctor’s office, a few others.  The last item on the list is the Exit.  Go to it.  Leave.

And now you may be outside, but it is merely an outdoor hallway to another indoor room.  Walk on.  Busses will offer to take you back.  Buildings will offer to feed you, clothe you, provide you a bed to lie down.  Walk on.

Over the hill, there is a house you know, but it is not what you had pictured.  The yard is small, the garage large, the brush cleared, the town near.  But there is no doubt this is your house.  You should stop walking.  Now do you what you like.  The place is yours.

WI to VA

My uncle called my dad and asked what he wanted in the kitchen when we arrived.  Cereal?  I’m a Cheerios man, my dad said.  What Kind? Plain Cheerios like Jesus used to eat, he said.

In Franklin, Indiana I was served a smoked sausage skillet by a woman who used to work at a retirement home and take care of both the world’s oldest woman and the world’s tallest woman.

At a Cracker Barrel in Lexington, a cop was changed in the bathroom into an outfit from a small piece of luggage.  His boot was on the floor with a sock stuffed in its neck, his gun belt hung from the open stall door’s hook.  The busser was a pretty girl with one arm.  A man ordered for his whole family.  My dad couldn’t figure out how a waitress got her hair to behave the way it did.

Pineville’s a town between mountains in Kentucky.  It has a ten foot high cement wall around it and there are big swinging vault doors on either end of the main road.  They must have had a bad flood sometime.  The houses are close together down there like in a city, but it doesn’t spread far.  It’s like a Warner Brothers back lot.

We lost a Snickers in Kentucky but we hope it turns up in Tennessee.

In Damascus, in the rain, we searched in the grass for my uncle’s temporary crown and our clothes got so wet we went to the thrift store across the street for new shirts.

We went to a collection of Hollywood memorabilia in Abingdon.  One of the best comic and book artists in the world lives here and I might see his studio tomorrow.  There’s more culture in rural Virginia than in rural Wisconsin.  It’s been here longer and people live closer together.  Other than that, I can’t think of a good reason.