This here internet you’re perusing is a glorius visual cesspool. If you want to see something — no matter how bizarre, debased, repulsive, obsessive, impressive, excessive, even mundane if that’s your thing — you can. The threshold of measurement for creepiness, therefore, must be pretty high. That said, and having seen only a small portion of what must be out there (and glad of it), I am willing to present this image as quite possibly the creepiest one on the internet:

Oh god.

When I first saw it I had no idea what it was. Thankfully for me a coworker recognized it — it’s bad enough with a context, let alone floating around out there with no explanation to keep it at bay. This image is part of series by the artist Charlie White entitled Understanding Joshua. Guess which one is Joshua. Poor Joshua represents male vulnerability, according to the artist’s explanation. In the sense of self-image and its ties to fantasty, violence and depravity. Joshua, an everyman, sees himself this way, and his surroundings, human interactions and fantasies take on the same twisted character. Joshua is the creepiest puppet in the history of creepy puppets in conceptual staged fine photography of the psychosexual button-pushing variety. Here’s a page with an interview on NPR. Some video and an interview at PBS. A Wired piece with some other work and some geeky technical details. A brief interview that sheds a little light on this image.

Yesterday I drank beers with some friends in the eighth most dangerous U.S. city.  We tried the Imperial Stout as bullets richocheted off the door.  A very hoppy IPA as a man on fire crashed through the window.  A fine pilsner to accompany the exploding car next door.  Blood everywhere.  Of course, none of this happened, and my very pleasant afternoon (along with the many I had in the five years I lived across the bay) is typical of my own experience.  I always knew there was shit going down, but seemed to avoid it.  Sheer luck? Traveling out of town and letting people know you were from Oaktown had a certain cachet to it; they assumed you must be strapped.  They were amazed you could live there. 

This is a bit silly of course. Oakland is a great city. Plenty going on, plenty of art, music, culture, everything. However, it has been getting a little nastier, it seems. Friends of friends have been beat up and robbed in broad daylight in what are considered good neighborhoods. The shit going down is finding its way northwest, breaking out of the East Oakland avenues one would be wise to avoid.  Usually when it gets out of the civically abandoned neighborhoods, people start to take notice.  Let’s hope this survey also helps get the ball rolling on Oakland getting its shit together. 

I would also like to congratulate my brother on making a life for himself in America’s most dangerous city, St. Louis.  Don’t fuck with him.

Do you use the internet?  Then perhaps you’ve seen one of these photo-a-day projects, in which an individual does just that — photographs themself once a day and merges them into a sort of time-lapse video.  Nowadays, as soon as something reaches phenomenon status (i.e. has been done 3+ times) it is ripe for parody.  It’s a quick cycle, and the folks at Olde English Comedy appear to be on it.

 

 

You’ve exhausted your daily internet visits.  You seek adventure.  You long to sled down a single line, to be a tiny sledder, a victim of the whims of your own unstable hand.  You must ride the line, friend.   Ride the line.

Let it be known I’m a big fan of Pelicans.  They have giant beaks. And stately grace. And the way they zoom across the water in single-file is just so cool.  As if to solidify the title of most bad-assed bird I’ve already granted, this one ate a pigeon.  I’m not sure that’s such a healthy thing to do, but I commend you nonetheless, Murray.  

 

  

 

Went to see Boris last night, and got to see guitarist Wata live in action.  She is a riffmaster, a sludge-lover, a feedback attacker.  She is the pinnacle of bad-assness, giving Boris their edge as they continue their identiy-crisis explorations through all things heavy.  A salute to you, Wata!  Always nice to go to a rock show and come home feeling inspired. You give Boris their edge, and are currently number one on the list of guitarists.

Boris’ drummer was a bit of another story.  He’s good, to be sure, and he has a gong.  I know, I know — competency and a gong — what am I complaining about? Well, for starters, he took the stage with little white drummer gloves. And one of those headset vocal mics, the likes of which you commonly find attached to the hollow heads of boy band members.  He sang on a couple songs, but the main function of the mic seemed to be for him to act as an unneeded cheerleader. Throughout nearly every upbeat number he would hoot and whoop and yeaaaaah and yelp, and the soundperson saw fit to make it the loudest thing in the mix. He was “a little too excited about making us excited,” as my comrade put it.

Speaking of my comrade, he is my bandmate, and is somewhere around 6′8″.  I am about 6′3″.  Talls.  Talls in a world of shorts.  We often speak of the rock show ethics of being a tall.  Stand near a pole, or off to the side.  Last night we noticed a real tall shortage, the whole place was level, a sea of heads a foot below our own.  And what should happen?  The one 8-foot-tall swaying drunk bastard in the place ends up square in front of me.  I looked around.  A few more talls as well. We were trapped in a tall vortex. After one song, the 8-foot-tall guy (who in my own mythology is an ultra-tall, a whole different creature than us talls) moved on, and I enjoyed the remainder of the show unobstructed.

Yes, Wata is the riffmaster.  Atsuo is the glovemaster.  And bassist Takeshi?  He is the double-necked Steinberg master.

The repurposing of a double-necked Steinberger is a beautiful thing. It belongs on stage with Robert Plant, in some session guy’s wanky hands, not in a Japanese metal-noise-sludge-stoner-madness-escapade band.  Three cheers for Takeshi.

Boris’ album “Pink” is a good accessible place for the uninitiated to start. It’s rock and roll in the classic sense, a genre-jumping descendent of all these years of noisy stereo-exploding Japanese underground.  Try it sometime.

And the subject line was “Sleazy Christ.”  I thought you should know.

Create nonsensical comic strips like my masterpiece below (click it) with Commix.  It’s currently a “Beta” version, and you can’t yet save or email strips.  For now you can use “print screen” to share your works.  Great fun!