Bastard of art and commerce

To the residents of Abu Dhabi, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, et al.

2009-08-11T16:57:00.000-07:00

You really want to see naked ladies. I know you do, and I really hope that some day you may have that option (as long as the naked ladies are consenting, competent adults with full agency). But you aren't going to find naked ladies here. Every day, my traffic log tells the tale of hard-up folks needing some huggin' and kissin' in your part of the world, and it saddens me.

It also creeps me out.

Sorry.

Songs I hummed today

2009-08-03T21:59:00.001-07:00

I am an inveterate hummer and whistler, this in spite of having a horrible memory for melodies and being tone-deaf. I am also a terrible whistler.

But no matter. It's not my problem; it's everyone else's.

Anyway, I kept a running tally of the melodies I heard in my head today that came out in a tuneless rush (out of my mouth). These are they.

Who'll Be the Next In Line? (The Kinks)

Thelahujinjeet (sp?) (King Crimson)

The Common People (Pulp)

Let There Be Rock (AC/DC) (I think with this one I may have managed a quick vocalization of LETTHEREBEROCK out the side of my mouth. I probably sounded more like Brian Johnson than Bonn Scott, and that causes me a lot of heartache.)

The Primo Vere section from Carmina Burana (That's not the scary part. It's the light and airy part afterwards that sounds like an Alpine pagan mating ritual)

Is it Really So Strange? (The Smiths) ("I left the South. I travelled north. I got confused – I killed a horse. I can't help the way I feel.")

White Man in Hammersmith Palais (The Clash)

Happy Talk, from "South Pacific"

That's it.

Lothar's Floating Morsel

2009-07-07T11:16:00.001-07:00

Another goddamn thing wrong about advertising.

2009-06-18T11:32:00.000-07:00

TARGETS.

That is demographic targets, the low hanging fruit, that poor bastard abstraction that is being profiled and dissected and talked about in dark rooms in hushed tones.

The mythic user that uses things following the exact prescribed CORRECT method, the moron who smiles because her kids have fucking stars radiating from their eyes because they picked up some 39 cent stuffed toy made by political prisoners play skeeball at Chuckie Cheese's.

They are the people that you see on TV that makes you yell "fuck you, asshole! Nobody loves room deodorizer that much!"

Bad companies build castles on these sandy foundations, and are fucking ANGRY when the whole of humanity fails to produce one of these automatons.

Good brands, the best brands, don't presume to know what the consumer is going to do with their product.

Post-it notes?

Yes, I'm talking about Post-it Notes.

This is a terrible entry.

How are you?

My Golden Treasury of Eyestrain!

2009-06-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

Because I'm turning forty this year and I'm not about to take up physical activity, I have set out to read 75 books in 2009.

I've tried to read books that "count", thorny books I've been meaning to read but were intimidated by.

I'm at around 54 right now, and I'm working on two right now, Fooled by Randomness and The Trouble with Testosterone.

Here's everything I've knocked down to date:

A Few Seconds of Panic (A journalist attempts to be a professional placekicker in the NFL)

Polyphemus (Creepy short stories)

Alan's War The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope (Lovely Biographic Graphic Novel)

Burma Chronicles (Graphic Novel the author's experiences living in Burma)

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers
(Leszek Kolakowski)

The Wasp Factory (Disturbing novel)

The Beautiful Struggle (Lyrical autobiography of an African American guy who blogs for the Atlantic)

The Spiritual Tourist (British journalist investigates various Gurus)

The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (Book about the various factions within Middle Eastern politics)

Understanding Comics (Nice meditation on the art of Comics)

City of Glass The Graphic Novel (Graphic Novel version of Paul Auster's crazy novel)

Cults In Our Midst (Book about scary cults!!)

Rum, Sodomy & the Lash (33 1/3) (Slim little book about the Pogues album)

The Borscht Belt (History and anecdotes from the Borscht Belt from Joey Adams, old school Jewish stand-up comedian and tummler)

Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Cranky rant from a conservative German political scientist)

Myth and Reality (Mythic vs. reality-based temporal experiences. The author, Mircea Eliade, makes a roman a clefy appearance in Saul Bellows' Ravelstein as a pro-fascist crank)

Every Force Evolves a Form (Really, really good collection of essay written by Guy Davenport. Amazing stylist.)

Feet of Clay (Pathology of Gurus. I was on a cult jag.)

The structure of scientific revolutions (Many people talk about this book. I decided to read it. Painful.)

Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (Airy Fairy book about Japanese aesthetics. Probably a good bathroom books for homes with an abundance of potpourri and smelly candles)

Nixonland (A doorstop of a book about the rise of Nixon)

Truth About the Irish (Terry Eagleton. Pretty slight but funny)

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (Really good book about internal Iranian politics by an Iranian American guy)

Moonshine (OH MY GOD. Great book. Author hangs out with a revenue agent, busting moonshiners. Alec Wilkinson is the author)

Noodling for flatheads (Author examines various curiosities of Southern American culture, such as eating squirrel brains. Funny book.)

Something Wonderful Right Away (Oral history of the Compass Players, the forerunner to Second City and various improv comedy troops)

catapult: harry and I build a siege weapon (Two guys build a catapult. Better than it sounds)

The Devil We Know (More Iran. Not as fun to read as the Ayatollah book above)

Your Name Here (POEMTRY, John Ashbury.)

A Childhood: A Biography of Place (Hair raising memoir of a Georgia childhood)

The Wisdom of Doubt (Exhaustive philosophical apologia of religious doubt)

Moral Minority (The Founding Father were children of the Enlightenment and skeptics.)

Patriotism and Other Mistakes (Various essays by George Taleb about various aspects of public life)

Imagined Communities (Benedict Anderson's look at the invention of nationalism)

Marriage, a History (See title)

Boys on the Bus (Journalists are bored and drink a lot during the McGovern campaign in '72)

Jesus Interrupted (Book about inconsistencies in the New Testament)

Being Good: An Introduction to Ethics (See title)

Creationists (Forgettable collection of essays by by E.L. Doctorow)

TWELVE YEARS An American Boyhood in East Germany (Great book by James Agee's son, who grew up in East Germany)

Veeps (Funny survey of American Vice Presidents)

On Being Certain (Neurologist and physician posits that the feeling of certainty has nothing to do with outward reality)

The Devil's Candy (Book about the film version of Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities")

The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up (Great book about misfits in modern CHina. Sort of like a studs terkel book)

Politics of the Governed (Partha Chattergee's rejoinder to the Benedict Anderson book referred to above. Newly emergent post-colonial democracies are missing an opportunity when they attempt to emulate the institutions of former colonial powers.)

Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace (Believing LA TImes reporter covers religion, and is subsequently grossed out.)

Inventing American History (Boston Review Books) (Three slender essays about how popular history is tweaked and glossed over in order to serve national mythologies)

The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture
(Okay, I sort of ended up with this one in a roundabout way.

At my last on-site freelance assignment, there is a pretty good little bookstore nearby where'd I'd peruse the shelves during my lunch break.

I was poking around in the philosophy section, looking at shelf after shelf of books whose titles I couldn't understand when I came across something called Slavoj Zizek presents Mao: On Practice and Contradiction. I'm a begrudging fan of Zizek, mainly because he can be funny and he's as pragmatic as a crazed Marxist can get, and I'd imagine he'd have an interesting take on Mao.

I pick up the volume, and I see that all Zizek did was write an introductory essay to Mao's On Practice and Contradiction. And who the hell wants to read Mao?

So I note the title of Zizek's essay "Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule" and decide to Google it when I get back to the office. Sure enough, it's there in it's entirety. I print up for the train ride home.

Interesting essay. Lays the foundation for an expensive future visit to Amazon. But one strange little passage sticks with me (Read it. It's long but weird):

"Mao's speculations closely echo the so-called "bio-cosmism," the strange combination of vulgar materialism and Gnostic spirituality which formed occult shadow-ideology, the obscene secret teaching, of the Soviet Marxism. Repressed out of the public sight in the central period of the Soviet state, bio-cosmism was openly propagated only in the first and in the last two decades of the Soviet rule; its main theses are: the goals of religion (collective paradise, overcoming of all suffering, full individual immortality, resurrection of the dead, victory over time and death, conquest of space far beyond the solar system) can be realized in terrestrial life through the development of modern science and technology. In the future, not only will sexual difference be abolished, with the rise of chaste post-humans reproducing themselves through direct bio-technical reproduction; it will also be possible to resurrect all the dead of the past (establishing their biological formula through their remains and then re-engendering them - at that time, DNA was not yet known...), thus even erasing all past injustices, "undoing" past suffering and destruction."

WHAT. THE. FONZI.?

COSMISM! Sound like a worthy candidate for my book buying dollars! Red zombies!

Now, it just so happens about a year ago I went through a Stalinism phase, because who hasn't, right? (Note: I was not an actual Stalinist. I was just interested in that period in Russian history, okay?) One of the books I picked up was a strange, very interesting book called New Myth, New World From Nietzsche to Stalinism, which made that case that Soviet ideology in the twenties and thirties ripped off a lot of ideas from Nietzsche, while at the same time holding him up as reactionary boogie man. (In the same order I also picked up the excellent Everyday Stalinism. If you're interested in Russian or Soviet history, this is a good 'un.)

Amazon very thoughtfully recommended The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture when I was purchasing my crazy Nietzche book (same author!), and the name stuck with me (I didn't buy it at the time because it seemed creepy and I had yet to stumble across the madness that is Cosmicism).

So I Googled The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture and did a search of the index, and yep, you got your dang Cosmicism right 'chair. So I bought it.

And it's good! It's a multi-disciplinary collection of essays by various scholars and it traces different aspects of Soviet ideology, philosophy of science, and aesthetics to different strains of pre-revolutionary Russian folk mysticism, Theosophy, masonry, Mysticism, etc.

Funny how the mind wanders, isn't it?)

Cultural Amnesia (Exhaustive book of biographical essays about various folks, which, in sum, prove that the author Clive JAmes is way smarter than me.)

Occidentalism (The "Occident" in this case being liberal democracy and Enlightenment values. The authors trace the history of anti-liberalism through Imperial Japan, Germany, Russia, Zionism and various strains of Islamism. Interesting book.)

Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years (Michael Palin. Duller than one would think)

The Waste Books (Many, many aphorisms written by 18th century German person, Georg Lichtenberg)

In Praise of Barbarians (Disappointing collection of shrill essays written by Mike Davis, who wrote the excellent City of Quartz.

Who Hates Whom (Breezy book about ethnic hatred and modern warfare)

After January 1st, I think I'm never, ever going to read ever again.

I don't know what the hell is going on anymore

2009-06-08T22:22:00.000-07:00

Hello. Yes, I haven't blog because I'm an out of work spaz, and my time is better spent staring into the abyss that participating in human society.

Joke.

I've been freelancing. It's been mindless fun. I forgot how mindless advertising really is. The pressure of keeping up with the douchebags is less urgent when you're paying for your own health insurance.

The reason I started up blogging again is I started up on the vile and idiotic Twitter, and then realized I already have a perfectly outlet for vapidity and hideousness in this, my black hearted ol' blog.

I am turning 40 on Friday, by the way.

I am a bad blogger. Bad.

2009-04-11T11:12:00.001-07:00

I've been scrambling for freelance work and I've finally hit my stride, so that's good.

Now, blog:

Ruby was playing dress up today with... a crutch.

She was putting on scarves, underwear and old baby clothes on this crutch.

Here's her monologue: "Yes, don't worry Mrs. Jones... our clothes will cover your boobies AND your vagina. Our clothes are very good."

Also:
I am working on an animated short, starring none other than our good friend the Nude Fat Man Eating Cookie Dough. A commercial producer friend of mine forwarded Mr. Nude's entry on to an animator, and he's a fan. So we developed a six minute script, and it looks like it's happening.

Which terrifies me. I don't know why. But it does.

America's Tug Boats in Crisis

2009-03-11T22:20:00.000-07:00

This is a cross-post from Best Recession Ever.

Friend of the blog Matt is a San Francisco Bay Area tugboat engineer, and he reports that: “When the economy or market was doing well, we would do five to six ship jobs a day. That`s four tractor tugboats doing five to six jobs a day. Right now each boat is doing two or maybe three on a busy day. “

We aren’t entirely sure what this indicates, because we are not actually economists but unpaid, under employeed bloggers who barely can make it out of the house to buy milk for our flocks of mewling children (hush, little ones. Daddy is blogging), but our guts find it alarming that even people in cool, tough guy professions are feeling it.

Are the rodeo clowns next?

It’s also our way to talk about tugboats and the fact that we know a real life tugboat guy, which blows our minds.

How many tugboat guys do YOU know?

How many can you even name, besides Hal Lindsey and Sterling Morrison?

Tugboats are AWESOME!

Nude Fat Man Eating Cookie Dough VIII: I Am The Lizard King

2009-03-11T22:19:00.001-07:00

Cookie dough, as you may have gleaned, dear attentive reader, is my ambrosia and nectar, my soma and my score. Raw, uncut cookie is the stuff that pumps through the chambers of my dreamer’s heart.

Specifically Sam’s EZ Riser Chunk o’ Chips Cookie Dough in the Slap n’ Serve Tube.

The crack of a new tube splitting open on the dark mahogany-colored arm of the barcalounger (Is it wood? A polymer of Midwestern origins? Pressed offal? Will ask Mother. Do not expect a coherent answer, as she is Mother.) is enough to send me deep into À la recherche du temps perdu-type revelry (note: I have not read that particular book, though I sat through a dreary documentary on it hosted by the bald man from Star Trek on my public television station, waiting for an Are You Being Served marathon. By the way, the marathon was a satisfying omnibus, though it’s flow would have been greatly enhanced if that moist-eyed public television man didn’t plead for cash in such an excruciating inauthentic manner) crystallizing that exact moment I last cracked a tube, usually twenty minutes prior to opening the new one.

There were at one point entire DYNASTIES of spent tubes scatter’d throughout the room, a veritable core sample of my ever more fine-tuned taste. From my perch, I could observe in sharp relief my progress of a connoisseur of this glorious stuff. That is until mother, operating under the influence of stars not of our galaxy, “cleaned” (destroyed, pillaged, etc.) my room. But that holocaust I cover elsewhere.

Now, from time to time, I am forced to shift out of my domain, if only to attend to needs best left unspoken (Note: regarding toilet use). On the days I might have to LEAVE THE HOUSE (sending correspondence to world leaders, visiting the hobby shop that I might educate the feeble Corey on the dazzling range of Dragon Lance collectible fantasy figures. Like explaining a Faberge egg to a chicken) I pack a few dozen tubes in my shoulder sack.

If I plan to dart about inside the house (for a man of girth I am surprisingly catlike. As a self-trained dancer and exhibitor of Sensual Though Not Dirty Beauty I have developed an uncanny grace and economy in movement), I have cached dough in clever hidey holes throughout -- sometimes too clever, as will soon be clear.

On the day in question, I was making my way through the hall to the den, a wraith in a white sheet (sheets are required in areas shared with Mother, due to a cosmically inane series of misunderstandings). I was making my way to the den to see if I could muster up some old Sear’s catalogs that I might study the girdle pages more closely, when I felt the Plunge. The fading was pronounced and I felt the spectacular dread of being caught out. No dough, no dough, no dough. Blackness. Detuned violins.

I clawed at the telephone table in the hall. I must have.... hid… YES! YES! I DID! But, hullo, what is this? It wasn’t Sam’s EZ Riser Chunk o’ Chips Cookie Dough, this was… MRS. TAFFETY’S COOKIE FUN PASTE?

This tube was Jurassic. This was the stuff I cut my teeth on, my first score. And this tube would have to do.

I gobbled it. And then the bats.

Some sort of diabolical chemical process had twisted this tube into a paisley broth of hippy bathwater, lysergic to a degree that would crumble the skulls of lesser souls.

I was soon swatting at a panoply of shrieking Mother-headed bats with wings of cat fur. They plunged at me like Stukas, shrieking “CLEAN YOUR ROOM! CLEAN YOUR ROOM! CLEAN YOUR ROOM!”.

I roared, I pleaded, I cajoled, I laughed like goddamn fiend. They raised up then formed into one giant monolith of cookie dough, bible black and as strange and new as the morning of creation. It was Me, I was It. It was God. It was Wife. It blurbled in an atavistic tongue only we shared…. EAT ME! EAT ME! JOIN ME AS ONE! FAAAAT MAAAAAN!

And I could feel my mouth unhinge like a great primordial snake and I devoured it, there in the hall by the telephone table. I was It. We were enjoined.

And into that murk, Reason made its advance.

A small voice, my voice, made a plea. “The show…. The show is starting…. The show.”

The Lost Season! They’d been advertising that in the Arts and Entertainment Section for months! The lost season of “Are You Being Served?”

I marshaled every quark of my superiorly trained soul and chipped at the dark forces grip on my will. Steely iron determination and the unabashed power of PURE NUDITY conquered and banished the demons. I was free, standing in the hall, sweating, nude and ALIVE! ALIVE DAMN YOU!

Psychotropics be damned. I had a damn show to catch.

Me, doing more blogging, because what the hell else am I going to do?

2009-03-10T18:37:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be blogging on occasion at Best Recession Ever, a blog that whistles cheerfully amid the collapse of the West.

I'll be cross-posting here, so, while you should be support Mac, Aaron and Jeremy, if you're in a hurry, you can just read my stuff over here.

I don't know how to say the above without sounding like an asshole.

I'm sorry.

You see civilizational collapse. Quaker Oats see GOLD!

2009-03-10T13:41:00.001-07:00

If this ad specimen is any indication, Quaker Oats is putting their chips against our current economic system collapsing to the point where the gainfully employed are forced to commute by jetpacks, high above the churning, ultraviolent CHUD-populated exburb favelas of our nation’s near-future.

Fast, cheap, fuel packed foodstuffs are going to be big come the Collapse, so if you’ve got any cash, put on the Quaker.

If only there were a way they could augment their oatmeal with some sort of protein supplement; a “soylent” if you will.

West Elm sells Legos.

2009-03-07T20:42:00.000-08:00

Our new bed is made of Legos. Large and tasteful (well, a catalogue marketer's idea of tasteful) Legos.

Today was my second Saturday of economically induced leisure (laid off like so many burnt kitchen matches, in other words) and the parental hut, the master bedroom-cum-sushi bar that has been under construction since October is nearing completion. The general contractor has been amazing -- attentive, flexible, and agreeable. He's also anxious; after this job, well, there isn't. Work has dried up, so he's going to lay off his guys.

Anyways, enough. Yes, we all know. On to beds.

Specifically the bed that has sat under my wife's desk for two months, in pieces in a 7 foot long cardboard box that my kids have been using a mural surface. It's from West Elm. You no doubt have received the catalog: vague, unmemorably tasteful furniture.

I pulled that crap out today, wondering if I'm going to have get the scary yellow DeWalt drill out.

Nope. I was assured in the directions (the English directions. The French directions came out first, and I was alarmed) that all I would need for the Chunky Dark Wood Bed Frame was a Phillips screwdriver.

And it was true. I put together this bastard in forty-five minutes, as I'm sure that thousands of other bloated suburbites were doing this Saturday afternoon with various IKEA, West Elm, Pottery Barn SKUs. Mass produced esoterica, gauranteed to spark a vague racial memory of Tuscan Danish Shaker Basque Provencal Kenyan Dorset Balinese workmanship and a warm afternoon in cotton sheets drinking tea and reading the Herald Tribune printed on the local linty foolscrap.

Only you don't drink tea and you read the Onion online. And all you have is a screwdriver.

West Elm and their ilk sell efficient shipping and clever modularity. The aesthetics don't happen until the copywriter sits down to write the catalogue, to build the narrative that make these allen-wrenched, machine painted monstrosities be something more than what they are.

I'm not saying anything new, I know. That's just what I was thinking in my pajama pants and t-shirt this morning, swearing at each new batch of plastic wrapped bolts, each matte black and slightly oily to the touch, waiting to be allen-wrenched into place.

Nude Fat Man Eating Cookie Dough VII: My uneasy relationship with the local demimonde.

2009-03-05T11:42:00.000-08:00

Truth and Beauty. Beauty and Truth. Truth, Beauty, Beauty, Truth in endless variation. Beauty.

Truth.

These are my various milieus.

My pillowy length is a delight of colors and textures of supreme luxury and delicacy (though I have been assured by the jackbooted bluenose bumpkins that run this bowel of a fetid pig wallow of a septic tank that is this rotten specimen of town that distributing TASTEFUL images of my Beauty (NOTE: WITHOUT SEEKING COMPENSATION) to the suffering cohabitants of my street will be met with the full force of their “laws”.

I don’t recognize their “laws” of course.

Vicious, risk adverse, unimaginative gray patches of civil code AUTHORED BY TROG BURGERMEISTERS is a term better suited to describe ‘em.

My laws are transcendent. But you knew that, because your sensitivity, while crude, holds a flicker of understanding.

(Through my tutelage you can open your aperture to let in the Light a bit more, if you get my meaning. I do offer instructional tapes for a reasonable cost. Contact me through the FACEBOOK to discuss if you are interested.)

But while the various Burgermeisters cannot share in the transcendent laws of Truth and Beauty, they DO have the truncheons on their side, and the berserker that is Officer Penske. His WILLFUL ABILITY TO NOT LISTEN TO REASON was rendered starkly on the day that my sheet slipped as I was enjoying walking bare foot through the grass on the parking strip last April.

Owning a taser is not license to use it indiscriminately against citizens, Officer Penske, if you are reading this (assuming you have that capacity), especially ones that are clad only in sky.

Anyhoo, communication is distribution, and it turns out that the mailboxes of feebs and ninnies aren’t the ideal medium to share (FREE, WITH ALL COSTS AND BURDENS SHOULDERED BY ME, A MONK WITHOUT DENOMINATION) Beauty.

My charity for humanity never fails to stun me. My munificence may in fact be my downfall. The fact that my mother still freely walks abroad in the land despite being demonstrably insane (evidence: she switched the Glade Air Dazzler to a horrible cloying Jasmine Breeze from the pleasant and sensuality-positive Coconut Accents), and if that isn’t evidence with goddamn pretty bow on it that I have the patience and charity of Nature Herself, I’m at a loss.

I also have a problem with the tiny holes of the rotary dial of the phone, but that’s neither here nor there for our purposes here.

Anyway, I realized that the Art For the Undeserving Community distribution strategy was a dead-end. So, despite resisting the call of the High Art Establishment my entire career, and I decided to submit. Moloch honey, Nude Fat Man is a-comin’ home.

In this sad affair, the gatekeeper to the Teat of the Demimonde was none other than Maggie Oxford, culture affairs editor for the Valley Penny Shopper. I have been following her work for years, and I particularly enjoyed her ENVISICERATION of the Lamplighters’ staging of Driving Miss Daisy. Ms. Oxford is “blessed” with what I thought was a Dark Mirror of Truth that she held up to the wreckage of San Guano’s cultural collapse. It turns out all that vituperative ink was spilled in service to a mere subcortial amphibian rage against Truth and Newness. Everything will be clear soon.

(The fact that she is a friend with Mother I took as a McGuffin. I was wrong.)

So, charity bites again. Operating under a bunch of romantic moonshine, I assumed that Ms. Oxford and I were as one in our sensitivity to phoniness. So I picked out a few choice snaps, shot with the Polaroid. They were innocence itself, mere indications and shadows, tone poems on Biological Texture and Beauty. The was even one that for the life of me looked EXACTLY like a satellite photo of the Nile Delta I had seen in a textbook during my school days.

Nothing explicit. True, it skated on the Erotic, but we are adults (Ms. Oxford is more than that. She is very, very old).

I included a note, a bit of pith, something to the effect “What ya think, doll?” with contact information. I also THOUGHT I had included an artist’s statement, but I later found it woven into one of the cats’ pelts. (I think art should explain itself, but remember I was trying fake the role of rule-player)

Ms. Oxford took it the wrong way. The SWAT team frightened Mother a bit. I had hid in the junipers as is my habit on hearing sirens (the State is fragile myth, my Pollyannas. They will come for the Beautiful first). I now itch in the nethers.

Mother, in a prolonged fit of lucidity, seemed to manage to piece a coherent story together from the snatches of evidence the detective put to her attention. After fifteen hours, she was back home. I was famished, too. The kitchen is a low and chthonic place, not suited for a conduit to the Bright and Divine, such as myself. I also caused an INSIGNIFICENT fire when I put some bologna in the toaster in order to fry it. Heat is heat.

Mother is angry. Ms. Oxford has told her that their friendship was over, and I guess Mother treasures her vulgar dealings (MAH JONG) with that sentient piece of leather.

Mother walks in spiritual blindness. How else can her mourning over this loss of a deficit be explained?

That’s it for now. Be well.

Here's my new portfolio site.

2009-03-02T15:52:00.000-08:00

I think some stuff is going to come out:

Greg Mills Copywriter

So I got shit-canned.

2009-02-28T14:51:00.000-08:00

Meh.

It happend Thursday. My spidey-senses had been tingling for a while (not exactly an amazing feat of prescience in the wretched whore shitbag of an economy we are living under, I know), so I was packed and was gathering work examples for my portfolio for a few days before the I was touched inapproriately by the Invisible Hand.

I had sent an email to the person who manages assignments, a "what the fuck, woman. Give me some work" email on Wednesday (I was pleasanter than that. I am not a barbarian, after all). I didn't hear back, and me being a genius, thought that didn't bode well. Then Thursday I received a suspicious meeting maker to "catch up" and I packed the last of my shit.

Sure enough, the HR hachet woman was milling around outside, and the creative services manager was crying.

Jesus.

As reported to me by my boss and creative services manager, It was:

-- A numbers thing
-- Nothing personal
-- heartbreaking
-- VERY hard on them

And that I was:

-- so very talented
-- and so very funny

Well, gee. Thanks. So I guess funny and talented is not part of the new vision. Interesting. Keep 'em guessing. I like that.

People have been coming out of the woodwork with leads, encouragement, contacts, ideas. I'm not worried about finding a job, but it's still insanely stressful.

Poor Paula is cranking on my portfolio like a trooper (Mary a web designer if you want a portfolio site fast). I am fretting and pacing. That's my job. Last night some friends came over and I got a little stink-eyed on red wine. That is also my job.

And truth be told, my nerd futurist side is sort of excited. I'm a few month shy of forty; I'm old enough to have some sort of appreciation of what the world has been and I'm young enough that I still have enough flexiabilty to be in the thick of the changes the world is going through. Ten years from now is not something I can imagine. That's cool.

I dunno. In the next couple of days I'll be posting my sure-to-be-awesome portfolio (Paula is the greatest of all time), and the hunt begins.

I've already picked up a little freelance assignment, basically writing gags for a series of web videos. I'm going to try to experiment with cautious optimism and realistic positivity.

In the meantime, I'm going to the plasma clinic.

That would explain his breath.

2009-02-24T08:01:00.000-08:00

Owen this morning: "I want brush my teeth with JIZZ!"

"Wait... WHAT?"

Owen: "I named my new toothbrush Jizz."

"Yeah, let's work on a new name. Jizz is kind of silly."

Owen: "I like Jizz."

Goddamn. Uncle Walt is kind of a badass.

2009-02-14T20:55:00.001-08:00

I had lunch with Uncle Walt today. He's a man of 72, still built like Gibraltar, with a face like the love child of Van Morrison and Rip Torn. He wears his work clothes eveywhere and he has hands that look like gargoyles. He has retained a slight Texas panhandle twang despite years of living in California.

Here's what he told me:

-- He spent his teenage years in Bakersfield ("the worst place on earth"), where he built rot gut hot rods and had dance parties out on the "band shell" (basically a concrete slab). Three girls in his school died in girl-on-girl knife fights. The pachucos wore large gauge chains hanging from their belts like watch fobs.

-- Bakersfield in the '50s was de facto segregated. Blacks knew that being off the streets at ten was more or less a good idea, and busses wouldn't pick you at night if you were black. Uncle Walt's best friend was a black kid who he played baseball with. The kid use to stay with Walt's family on the nights he didn't get home in time. There was one night when Walt and his friend got to scrapping with some redneck on the blacktop after a game. Walt's friend jammed a finger on his right hand pretty bad and Walt took him home to have his nurse mother tape up the finger. The kid stayed for dinner and Walt's dad, a west Texas rancher turned Bakersfield rancher, was staying at this kid's head. "How do you comb your hair?" looking at the kid's kinky hair. The kid held up his injured right hand and replied "With my left hand."

-- On one occasion, the local sheriff got complaints for the neighbors that the Jones' were harboring a black kid. How unseemly!

The cop showed up and said to something to the effect of you need to get that N-word out of here. Walt's dad replied: "Next time you come round to peddle that shit your gun better be loaded."

Damn! I bust a sweat when I jay walk. But then again, I'm not from Texas.

-- Walt's then-wife got sucked up into the People's Temple, and Walt sort of followed along but was suspicious. (He eventually met his current wife, who is amazing, in the People's Temple). There was a loss with associated tragedy, but this isn't the place, you know?

-- Walt has a sunny, aw-shucks disposition, with a broad smile. He calls women "darlin'" and men "buddy". But if the conversation wanders into religion, he will turn as sober and correct as a existential philosophy and tell you with great earnestness "There is no god." Get him in the right mood and he will wax long (and occasionally repetitively) about the mystery and beauty of creation.

Walt is a great guy. I'm glad I know him.

The Parental Hut, nearly complete.

2009-02-14T10:10:00.000-08:00

The Parental Hut, aka the new master bedroom, aka the former backyard, is nearly complete. Ha! Two more weeks of bullshit and air compressors and listening to conversations in halting english between native spanish and mandarin speakers as I make my coffee in the morning (Jaime and Jin are two very skilled and hard working men).

We've doing the wretched hippy piece of patchoulie cluster fuck that is the "family bed" for too goddamn long. THE PARENTS NEED THEIR OWN ROOM, GODDAMIT.

We are the cusp of new era of orby pendant lamps and slightly gay bathroom sconces.

In other news, Paula had a hysterectomy last week to address some "lady problem". She is doing fine. Apparently she has, or had, a freakishly long cervix. Neat!

Advertising occaisonally manages to create something beautiful

2009-02-10T17:54:00.000-08:00

This is a promotional video created for my friend Randy's little ad agency, The Great Society. Love, love, love it.

It's like a fruity European art comic, in the best sense.

He also did this great documentary series on the Finnish village of Fiskars, home of the scissors.

See? Advertising doesn't have to be talking toilets.

Facebook/blogger synergy. Neat.

2009-02-09T15:59:00.000-08:00

This is some horseshit thing from Facebook. Actually, it's pretty okay. You get "tagged" and you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. Only thing is more than one person tagged me, and because I enjoy needless guilt and anxiety over trivial things so darn more, I add more facts when more people tagged me -- BECAUSE I WANTED EVERYONE TO HAVE FRESH FACTS.

So I ended up with 50 facts. And, what the fuck, I'll make a blog entry. Hurray internet!

1. My wife was annoyed with me when we first met, then decided she liked me. Which is exactly the opposite of how my previous relationships worked.

2. My left hand can't rotate into a "slap me five" position. Makes it difficult to collect change at drive-thrus.

3. I won a ancient, feeble pony named Billy Blazer in a raffle when I was four. We kept him for all of two weeks. I was mostly scared of him.

4. I have auditioned for both Junior Tic-Tac-Dough and Jeopardy. I was too old for Junior Tic-Tac-Dough and I froze and smiled idiotically during the screen test portion of Jeopardy.

5. Christopher Guest once told me that I am a good straight man.

6. I am totally indifferent to the supposed charms of watching professional sports.

7. I was an exchange student in Japan in the summer of '87. I was in awe of the beer vending machines.

8. I got my driver's license at age 30. Funny story about that I'll tell you sometime.

9. I once miscalculated the distance between a conference center in Denver with the bus stop and ended up walking for about six hours.

10. I have been stung by a very wimpy jellyfish.

11. Got my wallet stolen in Heathrow, and as I was reporting it a kind and efficient Bobby, Stephen Hawking rode by.

12. I shook Gerald Ford's hand once.

13. I don't like having things draped over my face.

14. I once cut a tendon in my foot vacuuming.

15. In sixth grade, I got food poisoning and ended up vomiting at the crossing guard roller skating party. I handed in my badge that monday.

16. I wasn't entirely sure how my oldest sister was related to me until I was about six.

17. I recently found out that I'm part Swedish.

18. I used to wear karate pants to High School.

19. I inherited a huge and fabulous post card collection, which I subsequently tossed when I became old and respectable. I regret this act every day, though I suspect my wife is thankful it happened before we met.

20. My son invented a great joke: "Why did the turd cross the road? He wanted to go to the TURD sanctuary."

21. I can do a pretty good imitation of a water drop. (Sound imitation, just to be clear.)

22. I was very briefly a child star, doing impersonations at Sun Valley mall. I don't think I was that good, but I was paid, so who cares really?

23. It bothers me that I can read music only with great difficulty. And that I can't play guitar because of my gimp wrist.

24. I can't grow sideburns

25. I was once rolled by a mugger who jumped while I was barfing after drinking too much. Outside of Slim's. My friend Mark was befriended by skinheads who took us back to their apartment. That was a weird night.

26. If the stars are aligned just right, I am morbidly shy

27. I drink alcohol infrequently. It just doesn't come up that often.

28. Potted trees bum me out.

29. I like being near the ocean, because I always have a means of escaping in case giant ants come.

30. The best job I ever had was working in a bookstore.

31. I am a materialist, an empiricist, and a skeptic, though I try not to be an ass about it.

32. That said, I know that as a species we necessarily have a limited spectrum of things we CAN know about, so life is still mysterious and weird.

33. I wish I cooked more.

34. As crazy and f-upped as reality is, I like this world pretty okay.

35. My wife is having surgery soon, and I'm freaked out about it.

36. I am an orphan.

37. As a child, my family was possibly going to move to Saudi Arabia for my dad's work. It is hard to tell with my parents what was true vs. what was wishful thinking.

38. I saw Mao's Tomb, The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, ice bergs in Newfoundland, the Lake District, and the Berlin Wall all on someone else's dime.

39. I have distant cousins in Chile. (Not Nazis)

40. The more I think about, the more the notion of one generalized model of human belief and conduct being correct for everyone seems bizarre

41. Parenthood should be the most banal thing in the world, but man, it's not.

42. I'm comfortable with not talking to anyone for long stretches of time.

43. Marriage should be the most banal thing in the world, but man, it's not.

44. I liked Coraline more than I liked Slumdog Millionaire. There, I said it.

45. I have À la recherche du temps perdu-like prompting from very hoppy cheap beer. A can of Olympia beer I sprayed on the apple tree on the Fourth of July, 1976. I was 7.

46. Pickled herring is something I bought a lot of when I was a bachelor living on my own, and I would eat it with Akmak crackers and beer.

47. My wife, whom I love, once bought me a t-shirt featuring two unicorns making love, which I have never in public.

48. I once sat transfixed as John Doe performed "See You Later, Alligator" in a recording studio, while a small platoon of oblivious clients typed on their laptops the entire time. What is the goddamn point of existence people?

49. When I was 16, I went and saw Tom Wolfe talk and churlishly I asked him about Hunter S. Thompson, because I was 16.

50. I once interrupted an Alan Ginsburg poetry reading, and I don't really feel bad about it.

In which the boy urinates on me.

2009-02-04T14:25:00.000-08:00

c. 6:00 am

Owen, sleeping next to me: "Could you open the window, please?"

I chuckle to myself: "Meh, talking in his sleep. Meh. Wait a sec? Why am I all wet?"

"Christina's World", or: Greg is going to Hell for this post

2009-01-18T16:46:00.001-08:00

The painter Andrew Wyeth croaked the other day. I was listening to NPR and they were going through his bio, and they started talking about the painting Christina's World (example above).

Until hearing Wyeth's bio on the radio the other day, I love/hated Christina's World, because I assumed the girl in the painting was just wistful ol' Christina, a romantic and sensitive farm girl dreaming her dreamy little dreams, longing for something more than that old farm house. Ahhh, Christinas's World. We're all a little Christina, yeah?

Well, turns out we aren't. Because I found out from that NPR piece that our Christina is parapalegic who had to drag herself across the farm everyday.

And that's fucked up. That's a crazy fucked up painting. Thank you Andrew Wyeth, you sick bastard.

The title ruin everything! Here's some alternate titles (this the part that sends me to Hell):

Coyotes Have Long Memories

Too Many Bran Muffins

Are You Done Yet, Mr. Wyeth?

Pissed Off at God

Why'd I Put the House So Damn Far From The Road?

My idea that I posted to President Elect Obama's "There are no bad ideas" site

2009-01-15T18:36:00.000-08:00

I dunno. It's kind of a good idea. I think.

A Federal science academy -- a "West Point" for the sciences

I think we should start a research and education institution that would attract the best and brightest science-focused young people. Each state would refer their best qualified and interested students to receive a fully funded science education with a feeder program into higher degree institutions. As well a vigorous academic program in fields that serve our national interests, Students could serve over the summer in one of the national labs or in Federally funded programs at private or state institutions.

I am giving Ruby the gift of knowledge about primordial dwarves and giant creme brulees

2008-12-13T09:56:00.000-08:00

The lucky, undeserving little brat is getting the finest reference known to man: The Full Color Guinness Book of World Records (16 pages in 3D!).

I don't know how it was for you as a snubbin, but when I was a grade schooler, the Guinness Book of World Records was the pinnacle of Western thought.

Dwarves! The World's Fattest Twins (The McCrarys. See above.)! Longest beard on a woman! Most supernumery nipples!

The full rich physiognomic pageant was right there, in tiny type on cheap Earl Grey-tinted paper. It was a platonic freakshow, with only the most superlative aberrations. And unlike previous generations, I didn't have to wait for the circus to wheel into town with it's icky carnies and scary clowns. I just had to head to the school library at lunch, grab a matt and relish the horror of those seedy little black and white smudged photographs.

There was also an aspirational, Horatio Alger aspect to it: if I work hard, someday I'll be able to avail myself of the sublime comfort of a mink-lined golf shoes with ruby tipped cleats (The Most Expensive Golf Shoes In the World), or the complete Canon system (Most Extensive Photographic System In The World).

I would own the Bugatti, Hearst Castle, a case of 1945 Mouton. Yep, Guinness was teaching me how to be a huge douche.

I walked away from Guinness when I discovered The People's Almanac, a foot-thick doorstop filled with articles about ghosts, strange weapons of WWII, strange political and religious screeds, and the sexual practices of dead celebrities. In other words, it was the Internet in book form.

All this came flooding back when Ruby started expounding this new book she had found in her school library, full of bearded ladies and tiny people.

This year, I am initiating her into the temple of corn dog wisdom that is Guinness. And it's in 3-D, so it's even more classy than it was when I was a kid.

Awesome!

Owen's amazingly well crafted joke.

2008-12-13T00:19:00.000-08:00

Owen, 5, made up this cracker today:

Q: Why did the turd cross the road?

A: To go to the TURD sanctuary.

Pure gold.