Casual Swim

How to motivate yourself to rehearse your rendition of “Amazing Grace” for the musical saw you intend to play at your benefit show to convince people to give you money so you can keep living in the SF Bay and doing all that community activism shit you enjoy:

1. Record numerous videos of your practice

2. Pick the one that has the fewest errors

3. Post it on the internet so people will post youtube links to better saw players than you in the comments, bitch how they hate “Amazing Grace” and ask “is that Wonder Woman” on your shirt?

4, Ride the tsunami of motivation to epic glory

If you’re not planning to already, or if you need a reason to drive all the way to the SF Bay, I strongly recommend you come to my benefit show. Cuz I need the money for pay for  medicinez.

 

Glue Mom On Yo

Oh look, the space monkey knows how to anagram.

While you were busy not reading my blog to notice that I wasn’t updating:

• Some friends and I started TransFix, a trans outreach program that hosts events/creates spaces for the community, like Zomburlesque, a zombie themed cabaret where I serenaded an audience against their will with a breathy rendition of “Science Fiction Double Feature”

 

 

 

 

 

 

• I got back together with my first love, performance art, but am still on amicable terms with lying in my bed crying all day and will be sharing custody of our dog. If we have one.

I recently performed a spoken word monologue at a recent TransFix fundraiser held at the Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland. Thankfully nobody recorded it, but I do have my script (well, a draft of it before I switched things around, same content, different order), which I memorized front and back and then subsequently blanked on halfway through the performance.

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Twenty

Like the nylon string guitars of nineteenth birthdays, your intermitten emptiness can be filled with things melodic and meaningful

Nineteen

The words legato, schadenfreude, ampersand and résistance

Eighteen

Women in tights tying up other women in tights to prove that being a woman in tights doesn’t pay

Seventeen

The first orgasm in a new pair of panties

Sixteen

Tragically hip road trips, sewing machine dreams and dinner at IKEA

Fifteen

UFOs that blot out the sun and make love to the president’s wife

Fourteen

The cathartic comfort of crying on a beautiful pair of breasts

Thirteen

Up up down down Left right left right A B

Twelve

The majestic flight of the midget masked wrestler from Mexico

Eleven

Saturday morning John Waters movie marathons

Ten

Suicide is a tool of the patriarchy and counter-revolutionary

Nine

There’s still so much shit you don’t own yet, like a typewriter, toy piano, volkswagen, a vagina and a vibrator to put in it

Eight

The flight of infatuation you harbor for the new person you become after a haircut

Seven

When you went to art school you took an oath to promote free thought and creativity not silence it think of the children

Six

The forced march of your libido to the drumming of high heels on filthy dance floors

Five

Marxism, anarchism, existentialism and sadomasochist exhibitionism

Four

Your girlfriend, your mother, your friends, enemies and everyone else that you love

Three

Yourself, your father, your abuser, neighbors and everyone else that you hate

Two

Dying is so mainstream anyway, everybody’s doing it, life is the last vestige of non conformity

One

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Terrorist finds face of John Lennon in cauliflower.

When I started this blog, I wanted, among other things, to update it at least 1-2 a week with heroic exploits of my quest to prove to my dad that becoming an artist would not, in fact, “have me on the street sucking unwashed dicks for singles”. In a year of living in the Bay, I’ve had, combined about three months of steady work, and while buying paint or a new sound rig instead of food would make a poetic scene in my biopic, I’m sure that’s the kind of shit that makes your loved ones invite themselves over to your house and stage an intervention, and I just can’t let that happen. My living room is a mess.

So right now all I’ve got are hopes and dreams sketched in notebooks and livejournals. Either I’ll get my shit together or I won’t.

Meanwhile, it turns out I live on the same street as local artist Emily Lounsbury who let me come over and make a collage out of her yoga magazines!

In college I had an instructor who said collage was the lowest form of visual art and it was impossible to make it cheaper or more meaningless than it was to begin with.

Sir, your challenge has been accepted.

Ghost of Elvis told me to lobotomise politician with laser pointer , alleges porn star.

So much duct tape, so few home improvement projects.

I made a “first aid box” for all my injection supplies 1) so my girlfriend doesn’t have to Where’s Waldo my shelves to look for an alcohol swab and 2) because I feel, and this is just my personal opinion, that storing all my needles in a box with a big friendly red cross better reassures guests and DEA agents that I’m using them for their intended medical function.

First I took apart the package the pharmacy sends the supplies in, wrapped each separate piece in tape, and then attached them at the edges. It occurred to me, like three or four different times, that there is probably a more efficient way to do it.

I didn’t want to touch up the exposed tape or uneven tape lines because it struck me as a reflection of my body: an imperfect vessel made useful through chemistry. </lies>

Okay. I think that is sufficient craft. Going to work on getting some actual art projects up on here.

Bazooka Joe Superstar

Like many artists, when progress on projects is slow, I enjoy wrapping my girlfriend in duct tape, doubly so when we can find a practical use for the leftovers.

Spaghetti Tango Deathmatch

Good news, everybody! Now that I have a regular writing gig at The Second Awakening and expect my duties over at BelowTheBelt resuming later this summer, I simply have no more patience for “writing for the sake of writing”. So no more faux op-ed humor!

The bad news is this is now being made into my art/music/tech geekery blog. So instead you get pics, videos, and shitty mp3s of me playing guitar. Imma get in your head and drive you crazy. Gary Busey crazy.

So the first art project that I’m going to feature on here, which is also my first non-academic, non-commissioned work(see also: I ain’t getting shit in return for this), is a multimedia, multiplayer crossover piece called THIS PERSON IS YOUR FRIEND.

Why don’t you explain the premise for the project, Me From A Couple Days Ago Who Sent The E-Mail Looking For Contributors?

Kay. So here’s the score.

Back in WWII, there was a propaganda campaign where American soldiers were issued cards/posters/etc with pictures of soldiers from the other Allied nations (as Americans weren’t known to be very well traveled in those days) with a caption reading “this man is your friend, he fights for freedom”. This was done to prevent team-killing, which is a really big deal in like, real war.

What I propose to do is to make a modern day reinterpretation for the LGBT movement. The cards, which will read “This person is your friend, they fight for equality” will depict both typical and non-typical portrayals of the LGBT community, from leather daddies to U-Haul lesbians to “straight but not narrow” allies. Once the “deck” is complete (so far 22 are planned), myself and others will go into SF dressed as guerrillas and pass these out in and around queer-friendly establishments.

So far the “team” for this project spans multiple visual mediums, from pencil and ink to vector illustration, and have collaborators as far away as Maryland. While the actual talent get with the talent-ing, I’ll be looking into ways to expand the project for a performance medium. The best idea I have so far is a pseudo-scavenger hunt, where people dress up like the illustrations and mingle in a massive party, and I don’t know, people look for them. Or don’t. As long as they pay at the door I won’t care what they do. It has been suggested to me to sell prints, but as I didn’t actually do any of the illustration or design I would feel uncomfortable hanging onto any of that money, so if I did that it would be only to cover costs and break off my team a little something something for their efforts.

Below is a conceptual sketch of my “guerrilla” costume for when I go into the streets and pass out flyers.

Yes, I made it myself. Five years of art school, son.

Dancing bear eats anti fascist youth!

Inspired by FutureMe but knowing the limits of my patience, I wrote my future self a letter that I can share with you today.

Oh, and today will also begin my tradition of using random generators to come up with blog titles.

Yay for chaos!

Dear Me Five Years From Now,

Greetings and salutations, meatbag.

I am you, from five years ago.

First, let me congratulate you on staying alive long enough to have received this letter. Being you is no simple feat. I’m proud of you, more than you’ll ever know.

No homo.

I wish I could be with you and for you right now. As I can’t be with you in real time, I’ve prepared for you a guide of sorts to help you weather the terrors of this brave new world you’ve found yourself in.

Now, conventional logic (and like 99 percent of all sci fi written on the subject) dictates that you, being from the future, should be visiting me with gifts of advice and insider knowledge, but this trope is predicated on the faulty premise that people grow wiser with age. At 20, I was earning a BA and looking into opening my own cinema. At 24, I take medication to keep out “the black thoughts” and cry whenever I hear Rush on the radio. By 29, if you haven’t already been forcibly removed from society, you will need all the help you can get.

It’s not much, but you know, you get what you pay for. I hope it helps.

•You might never beat Mike Tyson in Punch-Out. Move on. Take your victories where you can get them. Sure, he’s a nigh-invulnerable final boss in one of the most epic video games of all time.  But you can still vote. Seriously. Get on with your life.

• Do not let greed for material possessions distract you from the bigger picture. You did not endure five years of art school so you could get a handbag that matches your iPod. Would it kill you to have some expectations of yourself?

• You probably do suck at playing the guitar. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be making music.

• Go easy on the people who’ve let you go in the past. It’s hard to love you when you struggle to love yourself.

• One game of Marvel vs Capcom 2 with a friend is worth a week of playing XBox by yourself.

• Never put anything on a pizza that you wouldn’t eat straight out of the bag or can.

• A drug dealer who makes pot brownies from a box is not to be trusted.

• Failure and being proud of yourself are not mutually exclusive.

• Having a quirky and humorous response to any given question does not actually make you quirky or humorous. The harder you work at being unique, the more ordinary you will become.

• The next time Dad accuses you of “only calling him when you need something”, the appropriate comeback is “yes, and that thing I need is for you to act like a father”, NOT “that isn’t true, sometimes I send a text”

• No matter how sophisticated social networking becomes, it will never replace a high five.

• Don’t be ashamed of where you come from. Take solace in knowing the enemy.

• “Shazam” is not to be used as a safeword.

• A girl who cooks you dinner is worth more than one who buys you a drink. Or even two.

• If you absolutely must leave someone a passive aggressive note, try to do so with tasteful stationary. A post-it note will cost you the moral high ground.

• Shoes don’t make the woman. They make her awesome.

• After you overthrow the facist, god-fearing heteronormative patriarchy, please remember to write a thank you letter to the married preacher in Texas who sent you checks while you were unemployed and needed medication.

• Don’t wish too hard for a zombie apocalypse. You are exactly the kind of person people would tire of in like two minutes and throw out of the shelter.

• If you haven’t yet, you really owe it to yourself to try Linux. And naked sushi.

• Love isn’t all you need. But it’s probably all you’ll have.

And that concludes our heart to heart. Thank you for choosing awkward introspection.

Keep your chin up. It’s a fucking Chuck E Cheese ball pit of shit but you can handle it. After all, you used to be me.

I love you, but I’m not in love with you,

-Me

PS. Don’t just forward this to the me five years from your time. Try to write your own.

Keep The Pee Out Of Our Dead Pool

Or, the Thinking Jackass’s Guide to the Most Inhuman of Party Games

So you’re browsing the blogosphere and one of your friends–though you wouldn’t refer to them as such in front of company–has announced they are putting together a dead pool. You find yourself torn between the human decency that your mama (or 2nd dad, who is equal in every way to a mother…yes, this is going to be one of THOSE blogs…) taught you, and your need to supplement the dissatisfaction and fulfillment with your life by beating your friends at inane, irrelevant tests of pop culture chutzpah, especially since you totally bombed bar trivia the week before. Seriously, Ivan Draco? You bring great shame to our  family. I can’t even look at you.

A dead pool is like freestyle rapping at your 3 year old cousin’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s: you’re an asshole for doing it, unless you can do it well. The winner of a dead pool is a pop culture savant, a smarter-than-your-average-bear Machiavelli who will undoubtedly go places. Everyone else is a tool, forever doomed to substitute social connection with jabbering about people and places they know not of with other sheeple as burned out as them. That’s just the way it is. For Zordon wills it so.

Still wanna play?

Well, even if you don’t, um, read on anyway, because I put a lot of time and effort into this lesson and judging by the virtue of your presence on this blog, you probably don’t have anything better to do. Unless that “thing” is coming to my house and giving me a case of PBR, in which case WHO ARE YOU I NEVER DRINK OR DO DRUGS BECAUSE MY MOM AND DAD WOULD BE VERY DISAPPOINTED IN ME IF I DID GET AWAY FROM ME ARE YOU ONE OF THOSE JEHOVAH WITNESSES I’M HAPPY WITH MY CURRENT INVISIBLE DEITY THANK YOU.

There are 11 fool proof strategies to greatly improve (market data suggests an up to 5% increase in likelihood) your chances at winning a dead pool.

I will teach you 10. The 11th I will save for if you ever betray me.

Wait. Hold on. What is a dead pool?

Are you serious? Did you just graduate from home school or something?

I thought you were talking about the Marvel character.

I defy you to make less sense.

Don’t be a bitch. Just tell me.

Here.

Okay sweet. Gonna read this. Brb.

Ugh. Fine. I’ll wait. So anyway, this confusion can be further avoided by remembering that Deadpool, the super badass Marvel anti-hero, is spelled without a space, whereas a dead pool, the Heidi Fleiss of betting games, is spelled with a space. If anybody has any other questions, let’s have them now before I begin the li–

K I’m done. Proceed.

…

Fine.

Behold.

And thus They Call Me Vroom gaveth unto her peeps the ten rules for victory in the pools of the deceased. Yea varily.

1. Respect your elders. While Bob Barker, Betty White, and Wilford Brimley may appear to be obvious choices, consider this: you’re an idiot. The average lifespan of an American adult is somewhere between 75 and 80, and by the time you get to that age, you’re probably gonna wish you hadn’t. Old age is hell. My grandmother is in her 60′s and can barely get out of bed on her own. Betty White is 87 and just hosted SNL. That’s not “eating your vegetables and doing yoga”. That’s warrior-like conditioning brought on by weathering decades of bullshit. Have you ever even finished one whole episode of The Price Is Right? Between the three of them, they’ve survived twenty years of bear hugs from overexcited housewives, diabetes, and Bea Fucking Arthur. You wouldn’t last ten of your Earth minutes in their world. Show some respect.

2. There’s nothing like a steady customer. Dying of a drug overdose or from too much drinking is like learning another language: you gotta learn that shit while you’re young. Keith Richards isn’t going to wake up one day and “forget” how much heroin he can take in one sitting. He’s got that shit down to a science. You’ve got a better chance with Karen O, or the guy from Tokio Hotel with the Dragonball Z hair. Yeah, you know who I’m talking about. Dude, just look at him. I wouldn’t trust him with a bottle of Dimetapp. In an infuriating twist of poetic justice, “straight edge” artists tend to be equally bullet proof to the pratfalls of the rock and roll lifestyle. But hey, that’s the cost of doing business. Ted Nugent’s prolonged existence is the price we pay for Electric Ladyland, Nevermind, and Strange Days, which I still haven’t listened to in its entirety though I should because I bought that Doors shirt from Target and people are always asking what my favorite song of theirs is I DON’T KNOW OKAY LEAVE ME ALONE I’M TRYING TO MAKE A FASHION STATEMENT.

3. Different meanings for the same word. Before you google “celebrities who are still alive”, take a look at your opponents and their interests. Celebrity is in the mind of the media consumer. If you have a high concentration of software programmers/computer geeks in your group, you could probably get away with picking MC Chris and/or Steve Wozniak. Ditto Vince McMahon for wrestling fans and The Nostalgia Critic for anyone with the fucking free time to know who The Nostalgia Critic is. Tapping into the collective consciousness of your opponents lets you cast a wider net from which to harvest to list, and spares everyone the embarrassment of picking the same celebrities who live anyway because Allah hates you.

4. It takes all kinds. Don’t be a noob and make your list all movie stars. The smart, successful misanthrope will craft a list encompassing an eclectic mix of actors, musicians, athletes, and assholes who protest at soldier’s funerals. You’re odds suck enough as it is. Celebrities make up such an infinitesimal portion of the human population that despite having to take College Algebra twice I couldn’t work on the calculations for longer than 5 minutes without popping every blood vessel in my head.  Even with 30 players, it’s possible to go a whole year without anyone scoring a single point. A dead pool is but a reflection on life itself: you can make all the “right” choices and lose anyway. If you’ll excuse me, I need a have a happy thought for just a second. A CARE BEAR MAULING THE ASSHOLE FROM MAN VS WILD TO DEATH. Ah yes. All better.

5. Some people are their bank accounts. Conventional logic dictates that a rich person (i.e. celebrity that isn’t  O.J. Simpson) will not succumb to the diseases that afflict the middle and lower class. (See also: Magic Johnson). For my money (or year’s paid lj account, as my current dead pool is playing for), you can’t go wrong with cancer (unless you actually get it, than I guess you could go wrong with it…), but even that’s iffy at best. Cancer seems to just take whoever it wants. Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer and didn’t even smoke. On the other hand, Tom Green, who probably couldn’t find the cheese in the maze if you gave him a fucking map, survived testicular cancer. So I guess the moral of the story here is not to stack your deck with sick people, because it probably won’t work out the way you want to. And feel yourself up. Often. Early detection is key.

6. Do the fucking research. This belongs higher up on the list, but Betty White said I could keep my lunch money if I mentioned her first. MAKE SURE THE PEOPLE ON YOUR LIST AREN’T ALREADY DEAD. Not everyone gets the viking funeral. Sometimes people die and everyone’s too busy twittering about the Kardashians to notice. Your “so obscure nobody but you would think to pick them” choice might be obscure because they’re already worm food. Or still uses myspace. I mean, COME ON.

7. Don’t order the beef. You will not believe what I am about to tell you, but when it happens, and trust me, as sure as quoting Chris Rock at your office will you shitcanned, this WILL happen, you will perhaps be more prepared to deal with the sitch, as the kiddies say. Before you sign up for a dead pool, you will browse the lists others have made and someone will have your favorite actor/actress/musician/clone of David Bowie on their list. Do not leave them a comment, do not write them a private message, do not mention it in conversation that x is your favorite y and you would be heartbroken if they were to die. If you do, and your subsequent list contains one of THEIR favorite pop sensations, they will a) consider that an act of retaliation and b) blame you if that person were to die. This could lead to ill feelings that result in you not being invited to their birthday party, and then you have to explain to your stomach why your annual intake of cake has gone down, AND THAT IS NEVER A GOOD TALK. Or, more realistically, they won’t play next year. Which sort of defeats the point. Why the best at something if there’s no competition?

8. Sometimes the bad guy wins. A thousand white people tweeting how Kanye West should be lynched for interrupting Taylor Swift at the MTV Awards does not actually improve his chances of being killed on the street. Don’t give in to temptation and put people on your list “because lots of people hate them”.  More often than not, it’s people with tons of friends/fans who get murdered for no apparent reason. It is for this reason I try to keep my facebook friends list under 400. And never disclose my allergies. Sure, that makes me a pain in the ass to have over for dinner parties, but you know what you’ll never read on gawker? “Blogger killed when friend forced her to eat a PayDay bar.” Am I actually allergic to peanuts, and going for a “oh no I’ve said too much” gag, or using a fake allergy to achieve the same comic effect while simultaneously misinforming you? YOU TELL ME!!!!!11ONE

9. Murder is not only cheating, but illegal. Nothing says “please strong arm into getting therapy” like asking if it’s okay to kill the celebrities on your list. The answer will always be no, followed by “but if you want to kill someone on someone else’s list, or hire someone to kill a celebrity off your list, there’s really nothing we can do to stop you” in an uncomfortably ambiguous deadpan.

10. It is generally frowned upon to write a celebrity and tell them they’re on your dead pool. I’m required by law to leave it at that.

Aaaaaaand scene.

-TCMV