home sweetest home

been home for about a week.




this is where i wake up


this is where i drink my dad's amazing coffee.



this is my neighbor's backyard. every morning i find a better hunk of trash to focus my attention on.



i mean, it doesn't really compete with the neighbors i had in london at alec's place.

the real one-stop shop.



and also zombie lions.



but, fuck! it feels good to be home. there are so many dogs to play with and burritos to eat. i have been working on my driving and watching movies with my dad. things are so easy and relaxed and perfectly wintery.


and i love just being in my house.

"Sometimes the house grows and spreads so that, in order to live in it, greater elasticity of daydreaming, a daydream that is less clearly outlined, are needed. 'My house,' writes Georges Spyridaki, 'is diaphanous, but it is not made of glass. It is more of the nature of vapor. Its walls contract and expand as I desire.'"
from G. Bachelard's "Poetics of Space."

just biding my time til all modern coviencenes become made of marshmallow.

who is BILL SCHER?

i am so glad to find someone who takes spuds mackenzie as seriously as i do.


"Dog Gone"

Published: September 14, 1996
To the Editor:

In the Sept. 10 Op-Ed article ''Matchmaker, Matchmaker,'' all of your readers should take offense at the suggestion by Representative Pat Schroeder for Ross Perot's running mate: ''Spuds MacKenzie. He's popular and you can keep him on a leash.''

For the record, Spuds MacKenzie is a she, and she died in 1994. Those of us who continue to mourn the passing of one of the greatest spokes animals for beer are repulsed at the thought of a dead dog being paraded around infomercials, rallies and especially ''Larry King Live,'' all in the name of a shameless political campaign.

Furthermore, you could not keep Spuds MacKenzie ''on a leash.'' Her free spirit, love of the party and thirst for cheap American beer could not be restrained by a mere leash.

BILL SCHER
Washington, Sept. 11, 1996



where are you bill? i'll be waiting right here, bud lite in hand.

amsterdamn!

do you know what beauty is? it is an old man who spends his few last years taking care of cats on a houseboat in amsterdamn and lovingly drawing pencil sketches of them. that's what fucking beauty is.





this is poezenboot. an amazing stray cat rescue center on a houseboat that sounds like its name is "puss n boot."





the cats don't swim. i asked.

this was my favorite cat.


after going on and on about what a 'pretty kitty' it was, the old man told me that this cat in fact had brain damage. i wasn't sure how to feel about that.


amsterdam is pretty okay. after lindsay and i did our community service of petting stray cats, we decided it was HIGH time for a little amsterdamian indulgence.


i suck at rolling joints.



but i do okay at smoking them.


then all of amsterdam got way funnier.


a cool hot dawg


the patron saint of amsterdam. "not the baby!"



the next day was a little less stoned. i went to check out the weegee show at the photo center. there was also a ryan mcginley show of all the roadtrip photos up too.
i really love weegee. it's such a great mix of noir and jokes. unfortunately, my camera ran out of batteries. but not before taking this one:


the weeg used to listen to the police radio and follow the reports as they came in. he basically lived in his car which looked like that. i love when the space we occupy becomes less and less standard and more like the spaces we want and need them to be. snail living -making your space your house, you body your home and leaving a trail. fuck yeah.

who doesn't smoke weed at the holography museum?





this is the corridor of infinity. this what it is like when you timetravel?

i went (back) to the Camera Obscura in Edinburgh. But, not for the camera -for the optical illusions and the holograms, and mostly for this:


It is a psychedlic cave you can put your head in. Andy demonstrates.



There was this room of those glass balls that are filled with lightening or something that come to your hand when you touch it. Remember these things?


Remember snakes in a can?

me and the girl who works at this place do. She made fun me for laughing so hard when she opened the "mixed nuts" plastic can and those spring snakes exploded out. What? YOU WORK AT A JOKE SHOP. aren't you into people laughing? don't you love snakes in a can as much as i do???

I went to a few of the national galleries in Edinburgh. They were really strict about picture taking. I wasn't that in to anything so it wasn't hard to figure out which ones to wait in front of til the guard went away.



This is a miniscule selection of the Penrose collection of "folk art," "high art" that is based on "folk art" and really cool rocks. Roland Penrose hung with some up there dudes.

He was married to Lee Miller.

This photo is of her and also demonstrating the technique she pioneered solarization. Coincidentally, Lindsay and I had gone to the Victoria and Albert museum to see a show of hers a few weeks ago. It was really good.

Anyway, this little box is inside a library space in the museum with lots and lost of books on art and rocks. But you can't read them. They are literally roped off. What a dumb curatorial decision!

I really like looking at other people's collections. I used to go to the Forbes Gallery on Fifth Ave alot when I was at Lang. It was basically a rich weirdos favorite things on display forever. It has lots of old toys and this great display where you look into a glass opening and there is a reflection of your head with the body of a young boy laying in bed and playing war with tin toys. Next to the display is a picture of Regan grinning really huge looking in. I really liked the fake parlour house wall in the Pompidou.
Knickknacks and art all mixed together. The things I liked most when I was younger were also like this, but in smaller packages. Joseph Cornell's boxes were so important to me when I was young. And Susan Hiller's "From the Freud Musuem" was a little later. I just want to go through other people's stuff.

In fact, I have to go scan a bunch of radical gossip ephemera.


half me, half stock baby. thanks camera obscura!

you've read this one before

i wrote this the other day, but i wanted to start posting regularly and in a better format. myspace blogs are slow.
so from12/11/07 when i was listening to in utero.

i have been stumbling on great things lately.

first, i finally tripped on a banana peel! i mean, it was a really big moment in my life -one that in never thought would actually happen. after discussing it with a few people, i am pretty sure that the right thing to do is 'pay it forward,' so to speak. if i am this stoked, i am sure some other people might be just as fulfilled by having their joke dreams come true by slipping on a banana peel. i am going to start setting up the banana peels around the city in key places. by the monkey house, single steps, in front of haha joke shop. keep you're eyes peeled!

Went to go to Sweet and Spicy on Brick Lane one last time last night and got to see my favorite painting in all of London.



this is a great painting. and it's done by a man named:


Imran BUTT.

(remember when that creepy girl Lisa Butts from my class sent me the creepiest email of all time?)


Anyway, then Alec and I went to go see "Throne of Blood" the Kurosawa movie. It's the one based on Macbeth that i really like.

Woke up on time and went to the fake meat buffet off Archway. Got a great painting and ASSTRAY at a charity shop there.




I checked out the Jeff Wall show at White Cube. Mostly really big black and white 'near documentary' shots of working folk. It made me homesick. Then went to go see the David Shrigley show at the Stephen Friedman gallery.
This is what the main wall looks like


Some favorites:




Made some friends on the walk home.




But the best thing I saw all day was without a doubt this headline:


feeling active, feeling posi.

gonna get some of this before getting on the bus to edinburgh!