SLITHERING ACROSS A FAÇADE / A REAL BARN-BURNER / INTRO TO THE PREAMBLE / A BANQUET ENLIVEN'D / NOTES / LINKS / HI

I haven’t touched my Orange White notebook in a few months but I do still add to it. Now and again a new idea for the project pops into my head, a smile slithers across my elegant façade, and I race for the notebook, which contains only riffs and riffs on the 1961 painting “Orange - White” by Ellsworth Kelly. One day I will link up and build with the Worcester Art Museum to take 6 months to develop as many of these concepts as I can for a real barn-burner of a exhibition. Until then I’ll keep filling the notebook, and when I’m done with this notebook, I will get another.

I posted about this before, and when I did I said I’d post again when I had 100 entries total. Well with yesterday’s drop of 9 new ones I think I’m at 101. So here we are.

Usually I save the links for the end but I’ll just link out the first post here. The intro post has the first half of this notebook, plus 2 levels of preamble, plus an appendix. You can skip the writing if you feel like you get the gist, and then maybe you’ll come back to it later when you’re like OK seriously what is the deal here.

[Orange White, 1961 - present (part 1]]

final ado, on a personal note:

I started the notebook in 2018 after thinking about it for years, then I wrote this initial post in June of 2020. At the time I was (we all were) cataclysmically indoors, and I remember posting with a feeling of resignation, or a sad acceptance that this exhibit is probably not going to happen. Now it’s 6 years later, wow, 6 years! and the world continues to end but I feel like the idea of this as a real thing (an IRL solo barn-burner at the hometown museum) has crept back onto the table. Sure, it’s far-fetched. But it’s back on the divine banquet of the dimly possible but possible nonetheless. I simply don’t see why not.

WHOOPS too many images for the email again!!!!! click through to read on the website: [read this in the castle at Fujichia]

i did it again, too many pics for the email! this is a part 2 of my previous post examining photoshops i made as part of a conversation, minus the conversation.

🯁🯂🯃 read this one in the castle ⬅⬅⬅

SUDDEN ONSET BITTERNESS / STRAWBERRY PICKING SEASON / ELITE WANDERER / FIELD OF STUDY / UNPROFESSIONAL STRAWBERRY / GRANTED THE DIGNITY OF ANIMALS / AHHHHHHHH FUCK YOU GUYS / I HEAR A SYMPHONY / JOYCE TWOFER / TOWERS OF YORE / NO RIDDLE / AQUABLUE POCKETBOOK / LINKS

Oooof, I got hit with an attack of Sudden Onset Bitterness, which this time around I’m treating as an occupational hazard for whatever my “career” “actually” “is” (walking around and bumping into people I know). All you can really do (all I can do anyway, unfortunately), is treat it with grace, wait for the edges to soften, and try to zoom in on certain details.

It’s Strawberry Picking Season

They tell you at the pick your own strawberries place that you have to wash the strawberries before you eat them and I feel like this is true but as a control technique to keep people from eating fresh strawberries in the field, I gotta say Ya Right. This might work on the rabble but not on elite wanderers like me. I ate a lot right there in the field, I’m an incorruptible menace.

The strawberry field has a beach-like quality, in that it’s a treeless outdoor summertime area in which you spend a lot of time close to the ground. Sonically this manifests as a shocking lack of echo, combined with the low frequency roll-off inherent in faraway cries of mostly joy. A sound thrown out over the field by a child to land nearby without a bounce. There’s also a smell of hay, which is strewn in the path to keep weeds at bay. Straw and strawberries are not related botanically or even socially, the commonality is that both are strewn about-- the straw is strewn and the berries are too, just scattered indelicately on the ground. That’s fine for straw but it seems insane for something so precious as a strawberry. The straw lends the field a bready smell, which mixes with the berry smell to produce a heavenly fragrance of sun-warm sandwich. Or like a car parked in the sun, with a jelly sandwich on the dash, wafting out right when you open the door. If you told me “so-and-so smells like a jelly sandwich” I’d probably place that information in the derogatory column, but at the same time if I ever met someone that smelled like a strawberry field, I’d probably follow them around forever. Same smell.

Unprofessional Strawberry

You guys are probably waiting on tenterhooks for my Bloomsday report but after a few days of writing I have to say that it’s not going to be that type of thing. One thing I will say though, and this is a lick that James Joyce never hit (exactly), is that after lunch at the Pickle Barrel and a heavy old mug of their delightfully weak coffee, me and Ali walked to Mike’s old boss’s house and ate strawberries off the front lawn. “I just grow the ones in front for the squirrels” said the man, days before, bragging about the strawberries in the back lot. Ali told him “well the squirrels [points to self] really appreciate it!”. What’s crazy is that being allowed to eat them with the dignity granted to wild animals really inspired our humanity-- we each only had 3 or 4 and left the rest for the next guy. They were so tiny but also incredibly powerful. Soft, sweet, and so flavorful that I cried out in the street, like a bird yelling AHHHHH FUCK YOU GUYS to everything that isn’t, in that moment, the bird itself. Or like Diana says after the key change on “I Hear A Symphony”: “I cry not for myself / but for those who’ve never felt the joy we’ve felt”. Not to undermine the appreciation of the professional strawberry, which is good, but this amateur model was probably the best cubic centimeter of food I’ve ever had in my entire life. And also, I must point out, totally 100% regular, not a special cultivar or anything.

One More From The Tower

OK, I’ll say one more thing about Bloomsday. I was excited to do Bloomsday in Worcester because I could start the same way Ulysses starts, chapter one, a tower. Just up the street from the house I grew up in is this classic folly, Bancroft Tower--

You can’t go inside anymore, it’s been chained shut for my entire life. Of course I’ve had a few different methods of gaining entry over the years, but they’ve since patched up those vulnerabilities and I haven’t put in the work to figure out a new one. But I sat behind it and read for a little bit, which was pleasant, and then just as I started to think “what now”, a small group of kids and teachers showed up waving foam swords (the kids) and clutching clipboards (the teachers) on some kind of field day or year-end event. I thought for sure the teachers would be bugged out that I was lurking in the shadow of a cold castle in monster mode, or the kids would be like “there’s a weird man here”. But no one cared. That I was doing my own thing was obvious and anyway the kids were on some type of scavenger hunt so they had a mission objective that probably elided any low-hanging fears. Plus they were emboldened by the narrative power of a sword. One of them came up to me straight up and asked if I’ve seen any rubies or gold rings. I really wish I had a riddle prepared, or that I said what was in my heart-- little bro, everything I see is a ruby or a gold ring. Instead I said no, which was true, but probably sounded like a lie, which I liked. Walking away I saw some gold foil that had been cut into stars but it seemed unrelated to the children’s quest, it was too far down the road. Then there was a discarded aqua blue pocketbook with items spilling out of it, but I didn’t want to get too close because it seemed like a trap. Maybe I should’ve checked? But on the other hand I did have a really lovely day. That happened last Tuesday, the 16th, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

links / misc

• The Supremes “I Hear A Symphony” [YouTube, 00:02:44]. It doesn’t get much better than this but I does get at least this good.

• more songs about music: Beach Boys “I Can Hear Music” [YouTube 00:02:28]. Carl is so sweet and lovely on this I can’t stand it!!!!

• my artists residency program has been really nice lately, apply if you’re in the area (of Providence RI), or you’re planning a visit! It only takes 90 minutes or so. It costs $250 but there’s a scholarship available which brings costs to the artists down to zero. We’ve given out over $30,000 in scholarships, at a 100% success rate-- what other arts nonprofit can boast such stats? [rf5.org/residency/]. Previous residents are welcome to apply for the alumni program. I’m available for arts non-profit panels and I’m honestly great at that sort of thing, I’m both pleasant and disruptive, and my speaking fees are competitive with my peers.

• I didn’t get this post up on the website by my self-imposed deadline of 11am Tuesday, but last week I did complete my goal of hitting that deadline 10 weeks in a row. As a result I don’t have to pay Greg Harvester $200, which was a penalty I created without Greg’s knowledge or consent, because I knew he’d hate that. And I am able to get the reward I had established for myself-- a yellow and black rugby shirt, which I’ve wanted for years but put off getting because it’s hard for me to buy things at full price. Sadly David Hockney passed away last week, he was a big reason why I wanted one of these shirts (also GeGeGe No Kitaro, and cartoonist Will Laren). I don’t know if I can get one now, it feels like cosplay. And it’s still kind of a lot of money for me right now, I’m still in austerity mode :( RIP to England’s cutest painter.

• leave me a comment in the castle, I love comments! [link to this post]

I did it again, there’s too many images in this one for Substack. Luckily you can read at this post in its native locale, a castle on the open internet: [link to post]

It’s kind of a weird one I guess (going through the screen grabs folder for searchterm: “hand”) but as I was talking myself out of it I realized that I would like to see someone else’s version of this, so I can’t fault it! If you’re self-editing too hard I recommend this elegant approach: “would I like this if someone other than me did it?”. This works on the other side of the equation too (not editing enough), it’s like the artist’s “This too shall pass”.

Again, the post is here: [link to post]

If you groove on this I’d love it if you left a comment :)

GERSHMAN CALLING / ONE MINT JULEP / TO DRINK THE PERFECT AMOUNT OF ICED COFFEE / WITHOUT CEREMONY / I WANT THE BRICK / THE FLOWER OF MY HEART / LINKS / BLOOMSDAY

You guys love it when I talk about BEVERAGES-- here’s a couple recent recent additions to the drinks menu over at the atelier, for you to enjoy, adapt, or reject.

GERSHMANADE
Dissolve honey in hot water, add a pinch of salt and a shot of apple cider vinegar, then pour over ice. RIP George Gershman- nudist, dowser, watch repairman, and new age beverage entrepreur. I loved his mildly carbonnated drink “Gershman’s Drink”, which you used to find at area health food stores. This version has more salt, and lacks the fizz, but I don’t miss the fizz to be honest, because this is a chug-style beverage anyway. Real talk I don’t know what an electrolyte is but I know that my brain needs them. And I love my brain! That’s where I keep my dreams.

MINT JULEP
I made a window box planter this year, just outside my bedroom, in the hopes that some foliage will lend a cooling effect to any breeze that may find me. The box is 2 milkcrates large, and one has my Worcester Mammoth Horicultural Beans, and the other has mint. The mint is there because I found some neglected in one of last year’s pots, and I wanted the experience of bringing something back to life. Also I thought the smell would be nice. But as soon as I planted it my thoughts turned immediately to julep. I did not get any sizeable leaves in time for the traditional First Julep, which is the weekend of the Kentucky Derby, the first weekend of May. But I have a lot now, and I’m doing it, and it’s nice.

In a small mug that an elderly relative made, put in a half tsp of sugar and 2 big mint leaves. Then put 2 ice cubes in your bare hand and crack them to the best of your ability with the back of a metal spoon. Add the shards to your cup. Then put in a shot of your house bourbon, and stir it around, crushing, or at least bruising, the mint leaves with the ice. I add a little tap water too. I make them small because I’m an extraordinary lightweight, and if I want another I’ll just make another. I have a personal rule for alcohol that I can only drink in celebration-- when it’s a julep in my hand I like to toast to either a place of birth or a horse (imagined or real).

ICED COFFEE
I talked about this the other day but I’m really into making iced coffee with instant right now. I fill an old Teddy peanut butter jar with ice, then add half soy milk half water, a wee drip of good maple syrup, and maybe a teaspoon of Folgers Crystals. Screw the lid on and shake the shit out of it, then put $6 in your own piggy bank.

I honestly think I’m drinking the perfect amount, and I drink them from the early afternoon until the edge of night. To “go Ayurvedic”, add very minute amounts of cardamon, clove, nutmeg, and even cinnamon. For “night mode” add bourbon.

FIVE GLASSES OF WATER
Every spell in my grimoire starts with “drink enough water”. Do not omit this crucial step or any demons you may manage to conjure will be foggy and listless.

ICED MATCHA LATTE
This is so easy. Follow my recipe for iced coffee but instead of instant coffee crystals put in matcha powder, which you get at that Japanese market downtown. The expensive kind says “ceremonial grade” but like, it’s OK to be unceremonious on this one. With some people, that’s what I love about them, their lack of ceremony. You don’t see them for a while and then you do and they don’t make a federal case out of it they’re just like yo what’s up dude and then you’re back together like “Last Splash” era-Breeders. Anyway you know what to do from here (with the beverage I mean), you put the lid on and shake the shit out of it. if the powder don’t want to blend just put it down for a minute and come back and give it another shake. There it goes.

ICED YERBA MATE
You’ll need to hunt around for where to buy yerba mate. You want the big brick, not the little teabags you get at the health food store. I order it online, and of all the styles I always get “elaborada con palo”: with sticks. Avoid getting the smoked kind because that causes your actual cancer. At first you’ll be like, I want the special metal straw, I want the gourd, I want the whole paraphenelia. I get it. But honestly you can make it in a French press and it’s great. In winter and fall, and some cool spring mornings, I like to add cocoa powder and a little sugar. When the weather is warm I pour the mate over ice and add lemon juice (and a little sugar). I had a roommate years ago from Uruguay and she was DISGUSTED by the way I prepared yerba mate. “It really sucks what you’re doing right now”. Then she tried my chocolate variation and said “it really sucks that this is really really good”. Shoutout to Teresa!

THE FLOWER OF MY HEART
You guys I had a very stressful start of the year, and one thing that happened was we had to take one of my beautiful cats to the emergency vet. This was in late January-- she stopped eating, and then the next day we had a blizzard that made it impossible to do anything about it other than wait and see, which we did, but it only got worse. The next morning we borrowed our neighbor’s big car and got there. Then we’re waiting around, stress, the economic realities of the vet, dividing a large sum into manageable pieces then walking around the nearby Michael’s while waiting for the x-rays thinking 26 custom birdhouses at $50 a pop seems possible, but if she needs surgery, then 100 birdhouses seems beyond the pale, what else they got. I’ll cut the tension here: she’s fine now (the cat). She ate something weird, but not string, which is what I was afraid it was. They gave her an IV of fluids and rubbed an appetite stimulant in her ear (!), and when we got back to the house she popped out of the carrier spry as anything and attacked a bowl of regular cat food. No throwing up, and days later, seemingly no complications. I hung out with her awhile that night, and then, in relief, and to be honest, out of necessity, I put pineapple juice, bourbon, bitters, honey, a whole raw egg, and ice into a jar, and shook it vigorously, then drank it on the couch while watching the movie Paddington in Peru (2024).

For loving friendship, and for kind strangers, I am truly and deeply thankful. Sometimes you eat something that hurts, and it scares you off food, and then that turns into the real problem. Everyone needs access to nice stories, utopic visions, pleasant dreams, and if need be, topical stimulants. To all artists out there: if you’re thinking about trying to increase joy in this maddening world, I would say go for it, it helps. To all bartenders, I would call this cocktail “the Flower of My Heart”. Garnish as appropriate.

links / misc

• Fuck dude, Last Splash is so GOOD... Honestly I was in high school when this came out and it was more important to me than Nirvana. Absolutely lovely for the summer. Looking for a shareable version I found this inspired YouTube that puts the full album over the movie “Splash Too!” (1988). [YouTube]. I can’t lie, I’m smilin’ :)

• OK my other favorite underwater music videos are Sade “No Ordinary Love” [YouTube] and Weyes Blood “Movies” [YouTube]. I know that Blood has more than one underwater video, I’m saying this one is my favorite. Look for me getting down on one knee in “Weyes Blood Parking Lot” (2038).

• Heads up, Bloomsday is next Tuesday (the 16th of June) so I’m probably going to post late Monday night. My plan is to go to Worcester, which is my personal Dublin, and spend the day having a series of interludes. I’m thinking I’ll start at Bancroft Tower and wind up at the Ship Room?? and in between I’ll write a little poetry, buy soap, go to the post office, have a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy...?

  If you do a Bloomsday celebration for the love of God send me a report afterwards. The rough itinerary is here: [Ulysses, by James Joyce]. More about Bloomsday here: [Bloomsday, on Wikipedia]. Wikipedia notes that on the first celebration of Bloomsday “the pilgrimage was abandoned halfway through, when the weary pilgrims succumbed to inebriation and rancour at the Bailey pub in the city centre“. So while that’s hardly the top score, that’s the score we’re trying to beat. I know what you’re saying-- “I’d never succumb to rancour”. Listen... everybody says that.

  Anyway I’m going to try and post something early because next week will be my tenth week in a row and I attached a personal reward to that accomplishment. Also I said if I didn’t do 10 weeks in a row I’d send Greg Harvester $200 and I can’t afford it! I can’t afford the money and certainly not the shame. Emails will go out on Wednesday as per usual.

• the Clovers - One Mint Julep [link]. Big tune!

• thanks everyone :) if you have a question or comment please leave a message on this post at Fujichia.com: [Recent Beverages]

WHERE DOES A NINJA STRIKE FEAR (THE HEART) / ROSEBUD KATANA / APPROPRIATE FORGETTING / CRISPY CINEMA / HAND STUFF / IT'S A DIRTY BUSINESS / ROBOT ARM / ROPE SOUNDS / VANESSA REDGRAVE INTERLUDE / THE CUP-UP TECHNIQUE / WIG USE / IRON CLAWS IN KETCHUP / GO GO IS A WAY OF LIFE

Ninja... the very word strikes fear in the heart of a person in a movie about ninjas, when it’s that same person who the ninjas are trying to get. And yet it’s a source of joy for a person watching a movie about ninjas, at home or in a movie theatre, or at a friend’s house, when the person is me, and the movie is, if not good, than at least fun, or there are some cool parts.

I watched a bunch of ninja movies in the past year, partly for a project that I wanted to do, and partly because I felt drawn to it mysteriously (an urge I respect). And as a Gen X / Millenial cusp, I grew up with ninja stuff, it’s in my cultural programming. So there’s a comfort food thing there too. My “Rosebud” is a smooth silvery weatherworn stick that looked enough like a katana sword, which I can still visualize *perfectly* 40 years later.

Anyway the ninja stuff is still marinating. The specific project idea I had is slipping away like a dream in the morning light, which is honestly appropriate-- some projects and some dreams are just like, a bunch of stuff, and you can’t get too hung up on the pursuit of every single one. Nonetheless there’s something there-- I’m still really enjoying thinking about ninjitsu and “the people of the garden”, and this is still an active space for me. I’m resisting conclusions but thoughts are starting to take shape. Anyway I thought for this week I’d just blast out some movie reviews. If you have a favorite ninja movie PLEASE leave me a comment below!!! Not just martial arts but like, ninjas. You know what a ninja is. I’m especially looking for ones where they use less-common historical weapons and/or do mystical shit. Goofy stuff is OK too. I didn’t mention Lone Wolf and Cub or the Ninja Turtles here, but yeah, obviously I’m into that shit. I liked the last 2 TMNT movies.

Ninja, Shadow of a Tear (2013)

There is a truly exceptional clarity to every shot and move in this movie, it’s kind of incredible. There’s no camera shaking or lightning-fast edits-- everyone on the team respects the actors’ abilities and the choreographer’s intent, and it pays off. Every single detail is so crispy, I loved it. There’s 2 good “getting suited up” montages, one where he finds the pajamas buried in the jungle, one he does the ninja version of shopping for bomb ingredients at the supermarket, but instead of getting fertilizer and milk or whatever he’s buying fish liver and marionettes and making poison darts. The fighting is a good mix of showdowns in full regalia and bar fights with improvised weapons. He does the ninja hand thing.

This is the sequel to Ninja (2009), and I chose to watch the sequel first because I felt like that’s the kind of movie this is-- your friend rented it and you’re like “what happened in the first one” and they go “this guy became a ninja”. “Wait, who are these guys?” “bad guys”. No problemo. Not “a great movie” or even “nuts” but if this is your favorite action movie I respect that.

what is our code?
TO HAVE NO CODE
what is our way
EVERY WAY
what is our goal
TO THRIVE IN THE SHADOWS AS OUR ENEMIES PERISH IN THE SUNLIGHT

Ninja Assassin (2009)

Pretty good ninja movie that I watched for a project-- I’m looking for movies where they use the kusurigami, a ninja weapon that’s like a sickle on a chain. That search led me here but what he actually uses is more like a knife on a chain (Kyoketsu-shoge). Starts off pretty gory and crazy but unfortunately doesn’t keep that energy up-- for the first 10 minutes people are getting chopped actually in half, but then the CGI budget runs out and for the rest of the movie people are mostly just getting sliced or stabbed. The main guy has a weird vibe and I learned later it’s because he was already a popstar, in the KPop domain. He did an OK job but it was kind of like every shot was just him posing for the poster. Nonetheless I thought this was fun. With Naomie Harris from the most recent James Bond movies, and Sho Kosugi, the ninja from Enter The Ninja (1981). Small role for Han from Fast and Furious. I think ninja movies sort themselves into ones where they do the hand thing (the Nine Hand Seals), and ones where they don’t. This one does.

Heroes of the East (1978)

Gordon Liu is like a rich little pretty boy who marries a Japanese woman and tries to shame her into not practicing her native karate. She ankles back to the land of the rising sun, and then he writes her a letter which is misconstrued. Next thing you know he has put his own Chinese boxing skills up against some of the deadliest fighters of Japan! YIKES! He holds his own against the sword guy, the judo guy, the nunchucks guy and the sai guy, all of whom are clear and distinct characters from the very start, with different builds, faces, and ways of moving and speaking. Compare with today’s action movies where it’s just Big Baldies by the busfull and they’re all trading haymakers. Well anyway these fights are all super-fun and everyone’s going all out, with an absolute bombast of techniques. But then it’s the ninja’s turn and it’s really not fair, I really think that shouldn’t count. Imagine a tiddlywinks contest that’s over the night before the match because one guy poisoned the other, or led him unawares into a booby-trapped corn field. Few would call that sporting. Aaaaaaaaanyway it was a great fight in a movie chock full of great fights, in which no one dies. How about that! LOTS of great lightning-fast hand-to-hand combat, really a thrill to watch, and no one dies. Everyone lives happily ever after!

Shoutout to Creature for the recommendation!

Revenge of the Ninja (1983)

IT TAKES A NINJA TO KILL A NINJA

A sequel of sorts to Enter The Ninja (1981), in that audiences wanted to see more of Sho Kosugi, and in this one he’s got his well-deserved top billing. Well it’s great. Swords, throwing stars, smoke bombs, spikey things, tiger claws, masks, zip lines, nunchucks, robot arm, mob bosses who say “capiche”, weird looking street toughs, it’s great. With Sho Kosugi’s real life son Kane, Punky Brewster’s real life dad, and a far too small role for Professor Toru Tanaka.

Probably going to rewatch this when I do my “robot arm” round-up later.

Ninja (2009)

This was cool, and I liked it, but at one point there’s an invoice of the treasure they’re protecting and I freeze-framed it and the total comes to $350,000. And it isn’t even magical???? That’s a lot of clams but compared to the value of a human life it’s hayseed. I’d be like bro, take it. It’s just stuff. Then they send it to America for safe keeping but it’s kept so unsafe and no one seems to care? The good guys have to break back in to the vault to get it out later and the security is so trivial, there’s just 3 guys pulling minimum wage, and they’re all reading magazines AND watching TV! If that was me up there obviously I’d do the best I could but afterwards I’d write a VERY stern letter to the dojo management.

Well anyway I had fun. Mostly sword stuff and kicking, some throwing stars, and brief moments with nunchucks and kusurigama. He does the hand thing. At one point a lady gets tied up elaborately, which is a traditional aspect of ninjitsu that I’m surprised we don’t see more of in these movies. Probably if you’re into rope stuff in a fetish way you have a lot of material to peruse and you know the best searchterms, you’re not sourcing it from clips of action movies like the quicksand fetishists. Still it was a little shocking to see, and the sound design for this part was extravagant. The sequel, Ninja: Shadow of a Tear (2013), is better.

Enter the Ninja (1981)

I think part of the appeal of the ninja to me is that they’re faceless, anonymous, and uncountable, like a horde of skeletons. So any movie that’s about ninjas is kind of false I think, because it’s invariably about just one ninja. But what are you gonna do, not watch a movie about ninjas?? Not me. Not me not doing that. I mean me yes doing the opposite of not doing it. ?? I mean I’m cool. In this one the main ninja is Franco Nero, I thought he did a good job but every time he was masked up, wow, he really put 110% fury into his eyes and eyebrows, the only part of his face you could see. He was an overfilled tea kettle spitting boiling water out the spout. Sho Kosugi was the breakout star here, he was acting alone too but his story was like “we should get a ninja to fight this other ninja” “ok, here’s one”. He had his own personal ego narrative but he was closer to this idea of being a cloud of particles of sinister dexterity.

Nero was married (twice) to Vanessa Redgrave, but this movie’s complete life cycle was in the long years when they were apart. I wonder if she saw this when it came out, with her then-partner Timothy Dalton... I picture her with a laugh and a sigh saying “oh Franco” softly while Timothy quietly bites his nails. She looks over at her handsome suitor and he quickly flips a superior smile, but when she turns back to the screen he resumes fidgeting in his tuxedo.

Ninja Terminator (1985)

Honestly I found this pretty inspiring.

wikipedia:

Godfrey Ho frequently created movies by filming scenes that he then added to pre-existing films, re-cutting it together and dubbing over the actors with his own dialogue in order to create a new story. Similarly, ninja Terminator reuses more than 50 percent of its footage from the South Korean film The Uninvited Guest Of The Star Ferry. IFD owned the international sales rights for the film and decided to insert Caucasian actors into the film in the hopes it would then do better overseas. Ho did this and added ninjas to the storyline, as he usually did

Ho had the insight to realize that if you’re dubbing an actor’s lines into another language then you might as well give them new dialogue, and if you go that far, you might as well free the clip from meaning altogether and use it as raw material, as a mineral, in new productions. His other great realization is that if you’re making an action movie and you make the main guy a ninja, you can conserve your star power by only using the actor for the mask off segments, and close-ups. With mask on it can and should be a stuntman. And the ninja stuff you can film in bulk. A couple days filming ninjas, a couple days filming faces, 2 weeks in the editing room, 6 movies. Release one a week while you work on the next batch.

Handsome lead Caucasian Richard Harrison went to Hong Kong to film what was supposed to be a small number of ninja movies and wound up inadvertantly starring in at least 24 of them. Like how the Winston Brothers drummer “played on” tens of thousands of records (via the collosally sampled “Amen” break). FWIW Harrison hated it, he said it ruined his career. The Amen drummer died poor and destitute and totally unaware of his impact, but at least he didn’t lose anything.

Anyway this was fun to watch, and honestly I thought it worked pretty good. When I imagine myself in the primary audience for this, a loud theatre filled with screaming children and drunk losers on a Saturday afternoon, I can see that this is not only adequate fare but fun, wild, cool action, a little bit of kissy kissy, a lot of hi-ya. Totally cool. Cool (and absolutely stolen) soundtrack. Me and my friends afterwards fighting over who’s going to get the new nickname “Tiger”, and maybe reassessing wigs as a viable part of an outfit. As an adult watching this in the 21st century, zoning out on a couch, this gave me a lot to think about, though to be completely honest I was like “wait who is this guy” a lot of the time. Bottom line, I had fun.

As we enter a new era of AI movies shemping smoothed-out actors infinitely I must note that I find automated versions of this material/mineral sampling idea pathetic, unwatchable, a crisis, an unpardonable sin against the spirit. But in the elbow grease era, and as an anomaly, and as, ultimately, a failure, with rough visible edges, there’s something special here. Something new is being created.

Duel to the Death (1983)

★★★★★

ANOTHER really good Chinese vs Japanese martial arts duel movie with ninjas, and this one is maybe the best, it’s so sick. They DON’T do the ninja hand mudra but they DO slide a single drop of poison down a thread. They DON’T have nunchucks but they DO swarm in to the battlefield silently on huge kites (!?!?!?). All the ninjas in this movie are perfect, they’re quiet, sudden, flip in flip out, you don’t know how many of them they are, and their collective bag of tricks is seemingly inexhaustible. In this one both the honorable Chinese fighter and the honorable Japanese fighter are like “hmm... kind of... dishonorable???” about the ninjas, which appeals to me. It’s a dirty business!!!

There’s a lot of pretty unreasonable stuff here in terms of like, how far can a person jump, what would you do if someone cut your arm off, etc.. But it’s kind of like if someone told you the story and then you told someone else. Like yeah he punched the guy’s head OFF like totally OFF and then it said something ominous and THEN it blew up. I 100% believe that if actual ninjas swarmed my IRL temple there’d be so much crazy shit going on that my mind would sort it out later as “they flew in on kites, then it was just one huge guy, then he dematerialized into 12 guys, then they all turned into leaves” and I would swear on a sacred scroll to the veracity of my statement. Anyway this was super sick, strongly recommended!!!! Great choreography, great special effects, great editing, great sound, loved the two cute main guys, imaginative and joyous, this rocked. Shoutout to Lee for the recommendation!!!

Five Element Ninjas (1982)

Totally bonkers Shaw Brothers movie with color-coded ninjas in a villanous role. The heros are these corn fed nice boys with high pony tails and wide “hi how are you” stances, always in white, and then in contrast the faceless villains leap out of holes to stab you unawares with iron claws, dressed like a box of crayons. Recommended!!!! CW: this is the one where the guy’s fighting with his guts hanging down below his shorts, and then he steps on his own guts by accident. YOWTCH!

Black Tight Killers (1966)

A fun and stylish romp with go-go dancing lady ninjas who use almost Bondian updates to the traditional ninja weapons-- instead of gardening tools of the 9th century we got bubblegum darts and exploding falsies. There’s a few really great shots but this falls short of being bonkers enough to trancend the genre. But if you like go-go dancing lady ninjas, this is a must. I liked it. Feels like it could only have been made in 1966, though I can’t really elaborate on that. With Bokuzen Hidari, the droopy guy from Seven Samurai (1954) and the Human Vapor (1960).

please leave your recommendations in the comments in the castle!

[this post at Fujichia.com]

I did it again! This week has too many images for substack!! Good thing you can read this whole post in the castle at Fujichia.com. This one is mostly just cute drawings, hopefully some of you can vibe on that :)

[link]

also I’m playing a show on Saturday!

<3

[read this post in the castle at Fujichia.com]

LOGO GARAGE / GOBBLE UP DOTS / EFFORTS IN DESCRIBING THE MYSTERY OF A TIGER PART ONE / FILE A TICKET / PATH TO THE APPLE / LOOKS LIKE YOU GUYS ARE REALLY HAVING FUN UP THERE / REFINEMENT MODE / BABYLON DOWN / ME VS ME / MOE HOWARD VOX / GET OUT OF MY WAY ME / LINKS / LE DOUANIER

I made a quick and dirty website for Tigers On Vaseline, mostly because we had pins made and there was space on the back for a small amount of text. Also I wanted to have a demonstration model for a simple band website, that I could show other bands. Mainly we’re looking for a list of shows, links to other profiles if relevant, and a way to listen to recordings, if any. Also if you have a band logo or font, it wouldn’t hurt to have a nice big version for promoters to paste on to a flyer. All bands should do this, in my opinion. It’s fun.

Anyway I did a great job and then while I was at it I decided to wing up a little bonus featurette, and I made a band-themed version of the game Snake, which you’ve probably played if you ever had a Nokia phone. You gobble up dots and each dot you gobble makes your tail longer, until it becomes a problem. Our version is called “Tiger Tail”:

I didn’t program the game, I just found someone else’s work and adapted it. It was a cakewalk to get the stripes in the tiger’s tail, and to make it kink a segment now and then. The movement is a little crazy because it doesn’t move so much as it repeatedly grows a segment at the tail and destroys one at the head. You wouldn’t really notice this if it was all one color, but how it is now it seems like the stripes stay where they are while the tail zags around underneath them, like a creature moving under dappled light, or a parasite squirming behind a colorful tattoo. It’s a little distressing, and my mind moves constantly between a viewpoint from which the tail has agency but its stripes are blinking, and one in which the pattern is eternal and the tail just makes it selectively visible, a wave on painted water. If someone else asked me to make this for them I would imagine them filing a ticket about the stripe movement. But it’s my idea and I like how it is.

Dropped a nice little Rousseau painting as a backdrop, we love him here. And it’s really nice to have a wavy background under such a gridded game, it makes it more confusing. It’s not always obvious that you’re on the right path to hit the apple. Just like in real life!

I also made it so you can listen to our demo while you play :) I play “other guitar” and do not sing. I hope you like the recording IF you generally like this kind of thing: a basement demo of a very noisey punk band. If you don’t like that sort of thing then I accept “not for me” as a value judgement. I would also accept “seems like you guys are having a lot of fun”, which is a graceful response to something that doesn’t do it for you, and oftentimes true.

But the big innovation here (with the game) is that I introduced (I think) a new mode, which I’ve decided to call “Refinement”. Refinement starts off fast and gets slower over time as the tail gets longer. It kind of feels right, like of course its slower, you’re dragging way more material now. But from a game perspective it’s weird-- few games get easier as you play them. Or, they get easier because you’re actually getting better. In this version, that feeling is manufactured devilishly. It gets easier on its own, and even though I’m telling you what’s happening, you’re going to feel a boost by thinking that you’re getting better.

For this reason, Refinement mode is a little addictive. Getting better is a great feeling! Of course, addictive video games are Babylon material, straight up. But in my game, after you play for a while, and assuming you can make it past the first dozen stages, it gets slow enough that you kind of get bored, and then hopefully you quit. Again, if someone was paying me to do this they’d be like “make it so people want to keep playing it all day”. But that’s not what I want to do with my life. Especially as spring moves towards summer, I want “hmm, this is fun!” and then shortly thereafter “let’s go get ice cream”. Babylon down!

Beyond this pleasant consideration, there’s another nice quality to refinement mode-- it really is difficult at first, so in order to play at all you’ll (probably) have to start over, over and over. I think that’s a good lesson! Anyone setting out on a novel enterprise should tolerate and expect massive amounts of failure early on, and if you want to achieve true success (in a video game, in stand-up comedy, in skateboarding, in playing the guitar) you should condition yourself to experience failure as a ticklish but mildly burning sensation. I know that we can’t address every obstacle in our lives with this flavor of sparkling irritation, but when I look back on my most fruitful times of trial, even when it’s me vs me, my most common refrains are in Moe Howard vox: “C’mere you”, backed with “Oh, a wiseguy, eh???”. If you wind up playing this game for more than a little bit, please take it to heart that small regular failures can be fun and enlivening, and bring this energy into your next endeavor.

The other life lesson I’m taking here is that as the game proceeds and your tail gets longer and longer, it stops being about simply piloting a shape and gobbling up apples. The real game is about simply not getting in your own way. Fail often, get nice and slow and old, get out of your own way. Peace everyone. Keep getting those apples.

links / misc

• Tigers On Vaseline website: [link]. The link to Tiger Tail is at the bottom. Attentive readers will note that I rolled out a new pseudonym for this project. :) We’re playing this Friday at Ask A Frog [link], and at Myrtle in East Providence on the 30th [link]. Our new demo is out, and as is required by punk law, there are copies at Armageddon (shop).

• I’m starting a new thing in the castle where certain rooms will collect writing on a particular topic. I’ll be putting all the posts about games in the games room, which is on the second floor. I’m thinking it’ll be nice to see things pile up in various places. I mean that’s a very reliable source of delight for me, to see things pile up in various places. Take the stairs up and it’s the first door on the left, next to the haunted mirror.

• The orders for the Iron Maiden “Eddie With Ice Cream Cone” t-shirts really took off, thank you everyone!!!!! I’ll be taking orders for one more week, till this Saturday the 23rd, then I’ll be taking it down. Read about it here: [link] or order one here: [link].

  

• If you want to mess around with making a website for your band, I’d probaly start with neocities: [link]. It’s free, and it seems like they make it easy to make a fun little website.

• No one asked but if you’re looking for a nice little book on Rousseau, I really enjoyed “The Banquet Years” by Roger Shattuck, of which roughly a fourth is dedicated to our patron saint, le Douanier, Henri Rousseau, with further sections dedicated to his contemporaries Alfred Jarry, Erik Satie, and Apollinaire. It can be readily found in paperback form for single digits, and makes a great beach read.

please leave any comments on this post in the castle, I love comments! [link to this post on Fujichia]

A STATEMENT OR AN ANIMAL NEST? / SO I SAYS TO THE KID I SAYS / SOMETHING FOR THE MONSTERFANS / I SCREAMED / PRE-SALES OPEN / COOKIES & CREAM / POSEURS WELCOME / FIRST GUY TO PUT A MONSTER ON A T-SHIRT / FRENCH COOKING / LINKS

The year was 2008 and I was running a completely insane junk store in Worcester MA, called HBML. My idea for the store was that there would be used stuff and artist-made stuff, and also some things that were confusing, where it was unclear if it was an object d’art or just two pieces of trash that fell in paint, or maybe some type of animal nest.

That’s a whole story but anyway one day I’m there, it’s a Wednesday afternoon, and this kid comes in, I had never seen him before, he’s like 11 or 12. He walks in and gets right to the point:

- - - - - -

“Do you have any Iron Maiden t-shirts?”

I say no, we don’t.

“Oh. When are you getting them in?”

I’m kind of amazed by this leap in reasoning but I roll with it. I say Saturday, the truck with the Iron Maiden shirts is coming in Saturday. But, I tell him, the shirts look a little weird.

“What do you mean?”

Well... (and here I’m trying to think about what I’m going to do when I go home and make these shirts later) it says IRON MAIDEN in that font... You know what the font looks like right?

“Yes, it’s pointy”

Yeah, it has the pointy font, and it has Eddie... You know who Eddie is right? (I’m stalling for time)

“Yeah, he’s their mascot, he’s like a zombie”

Yeah... it has Eddie, and-

“Is Eddie holding a big knife that’s dripping blood????”

No... (now I have it) Eddie’s like, eating an ice cream cone. That’s right (now I’m psyching myself up) it says IRON MAIDEN, in the font, and Eddie’s there, and he’s eating a pistachio ice cream cone, and it looks sick as Hell!!!!

- - - - - -

The kid says cool, Saturday then. He leaves, I finish my shift, and when I get home I knock up a design and then the next day I print 2 or 3 dozen shirts-- one for the kid and the rest for any metalhead or monsterfan that likes ice cream. I also put a tag in there for the junk shop--

The kid comes in on Saturday and I’m like here you go, he’s like cool, buys one, and leaves, no questions or comments and I never see him again. God, I think about this all the time!!!!! Did he ever look back on this moment as odd? Is this just a vague dreamlike memory??? I like to imagine him as a teenage metalhead getting stoned with his friends telling them that he had the one with the ice cream cone on it, and they’re like what the hell are you talking about dude. “you know, the one where it’s the Killers Cover but he’s eating a pistachio ice cream cone”.

Well anyways I printed up more for the 18 year anniversary, they’re in the gift shop, to the right of the castle (stage left) and the link is below. I have sizes Small to 2XL, printed in black on “natural” color (unbleached) shirts (Gildan Heavy 100% Cotton). For the ice cream cone there are two colorways available-- pistachio and cookies & cream. I can’t really manage backstock right now so I’m doing this pre-sale style-- I’m taking orders and printing what I need, no more. I’m going to print on Saturday and then again the next Saturday, and then I think I’ll take it down from the storefront. So if you’re interested, get that order in! Makes a great gift!

Cookies & Cream variant. I cannot stop you from getting this black and white version and coloring it in yourself, bound only by your imagination and the markers available to you. In fact I would love it, and I would humbly request pictures.

Furthermore

1.
Iron Maiden is one of those bands where I see people wearing the shirts all the time and it kinda seems like the person in the shirt doesn’t know the band at all. Honestly this doesn’t really bother me, because Iron Maiden is so sick that if someone were to finally look them up, I feel confident that they would be like “wow, this actually rules”. Maybe even “I didn’t think I’d like this but I really do”. Furthermore Maiden seems like actual nice people. No problemo.

2.
I realized after the fact that this hatchet-to-icecream pivot had a precursor, in the work of t-shirt pioneer and hot rod maniac Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, who became a Mormon later in life and edited the weapons out of the more violent of his designs. I definitely knew about this but I wasn’t thinking about it consciously, I was just pulling thoughts out of the aether, at the scintillating knife edge of the moment. This blurry pic is via a book on E”BD”R that was on Google Books, which my 2008 roommate Nik Perry definitely had:

I’m not ashamed of this lineage, we love him! Anything touched by rockabilly turns declassé but honestly, Big Daddy Roth is a huge inspiration to me on a couple different fronts. At a minimum, he was the first guy to put a monster on a t-shirt, you gotta respect that.

3.
Way way later I realized that there is a hand gripping Eddie’s shirt in the picture, which in the context of the original art looks like the murder victim, but outside of that violent context, some people^[who?] think it kinda looks like something else. French cooking. Listen, would you rather your children see a drawing of a person getting killed or a drawing of a cartoon ghoul getting oral sex while eating an ice cream cone? OK, sure, but what if you can’t say “neither”?? OK but what if it’s tastefully done??

links / misc

• link to storefront [fujichia.com/store]

• Iron Maiden “The Number Of The Beast” (full) on YouTube [link]. Ugggggggh this riiiiiips!!!! UP THE IRONS!!!

• I’ve been building up a repository of pics of HBML, if you have anything please email me!!!! This is amazing to think about but I didn’t have access to a camera until the last couple months of the project. So even though there’s a lot of photos, it’s only the merest glimpse of the true madness of the project. [link]

• The only video I have of HBML is this Russian Tsarlag instore performance: [link]

• leave any comments in the castle: [Fujichia.com] :)

STUFF IS BACK IN FASHION / LANDSCAPING APOCRYPHA / LOUD MOUTH I / COFFEE DEEDS / NUMBER GO UP / YOUR FAVORITE BRAND IS SENDING YOU DEALS / COMMENTMANIA / LINKS

Sorry for the clickbait title, just a couple items today.

ITEM!

I’m selling a bunch of my homemade stuffed animals at the Speed Shop in Providence this Sunday. It’s not really “an event” other than I’m doing this, and Toasters Bakery will be set up with bagels (and more???), and the coffee’s slamming. Maybe the weather will be lovely and it’ll be a great day for a bike ride? Maybe it’ll be overcast or even a chance of light rain-- a wonderful day to sip a coffee in an old mill? Either way you can’t lose. I’ll be there 9am to 2pm. There’s a nice little bookstore in there too and God I hope it’s open... It’s great but he keeps casual hours, kind of unpredictable. To keep myself from spending too much money in there (or any, actually) I gave the guy (Goldy) a divers stack of Mothers News back issues on consignment for store credit. Last week I got there kind of early and he had only sold one, so I could only get this single quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore:

If more people buy more back issues I promise to get some books that are like, regular good. And if you can’t make it out but you want to get some stuffed animals I’ll put them in the storefront next week!

Longshot but if any funky landlords are reading this I’m trying to push Goldy to open his store in a location that isn’t like the Foot Clan lair in the original Ninja Turtles movie. Looking for a place where he could be open for more than less than one day a week, somewhere someone like for instance me could go on for instance a Tuesday and get (by way of example) an occult book or scuzzy paperback. And more people would see the store and bring him their occult books for buy or trade, and then we could have, you know, world peace. No agents but if you have a commercial property that would benefit from an extremely nice little bookstore please reach out and I’ll put you guys in touch. I’m trying to tell him that in informal networks like Rhode Island the first step is to broadcast your intentions until you find A Guy. But he’s not such a loudmouth. I, on the other hand...

ITEM!

My artists residency program is chugging along nicely, and with the warm weather there’s been a clear uptick in applications. Definitely apply if you’re planning to come to Rhode Island / New England any time. Instead of taking place at a rustic farmhouse or something this residency takes place at a coffee shop (location to be determined), and it only lasts about 90 minutes, or longer if we’re really rolling. You can apply online. I buy the coffee (or tea). This is open to artists at any stage in their career but it is only open to artists, not people who tell me “I’m not really an artist”. I will not gatekeep who gets to call themselves an artist, but you do have to be like “I’m an artist”. If that makes you uncomfortable that’s OK!

Each residency gets its own little writeup on the official website:

Met up with printmaker / sculptor / cool website person Jaeyon Jo at Reprise Coffee. Jaeyon had been talking about applying for a while, I’m happy they persevered and got over the inumerable hurdles that can materialize when you have a 2 minute item on your to do list for several months. No shade, I’ve been there! We all have. I’m like, never not there. Anyway we had a really nice talk about upcoming travels, carpentry, the Aeron chair, the Art Farm (Nebraska), bookstores, taking time, “long-legged beauties” (talking 100% about myself here), life stuff, stability, and the desire to avoid talking about what you’re working on so you don’t pull motivation away from it. We both got coffee with cream, it was very good. After a while we got up and then walked in the sun to get ice cream cones! The conversation continued of course but at that point we went off record.

As with many artists residencies there is a cost, and this one is $250. Also similar to many residencies, there is a scholarship program-- mine has a 100% acceptance rate and is available to everyone who indicates that they want it, bringing the cost to the artist down to zero. So far in the blessed lifespan of this project we’ve awarded over $27,000 in scholarships. Real talk: if any non-profit arts admin types out there have any tips on how to turn this basically imaginary sum into actual money that I put in the literal pocket of my physical pants please reach out, I will drop everything to talk to you. I will move the sun and the stars. Or at least I will allow them to move of their own accord.

ITEM!

I’m dropping something special next week and maybe this is silly but I decided as an experiment to offset the website update and the emails by 24 hours. There’s no real reason for this, I just want to make it a little bit more special to check a website on your own time, without a notification. Personally I had a great week of randomly running into people in the street and having a nice little chat, and I guess I want to make it more like that, and less like Your Favorite Brand Is Sending You Deals. Even though I am your favorite brand, and I am sending you deals. Anyway if you want to just read the emails on Wednesday that’s totally fine but if you want to see it a day early just check the castle on Tuesday after 11am East Coast USA time.

Also on the “dollhouse news” tip, I put a “Recent Comments” section on the main page so you can quickly see what’s happening in commentsworld. I’m also thinking about installing comments retroactively on the old posts. I was clocking YouTube recently and I thought how nice it would be to get some “who’s making sauerkraut in 2028” type comments on here. Probably going to chip away at that this week. Shoutout to everyone leaving comments! It causes my brain to release a chemical reward. :)

links / misc

• link to my residency, CTRI Innovations: [link]

• email me if you’re in Providence and you need directions to the Speed Shoppe :)

• Hi! 👋️ leave comments in the castle: link to this post

A HIGH-VIBRATION THOUGHT / PUTTING WORDS IN PEOPLE'S MOUTHS / LET ME BANG / WHO REMEMBERS THIS GUY? / A SINGLE MILE-LONG HAIR / ROBOT REALITY CHECK / A SNAKE BEING SLOWLY EATEN FROM THE TAIL END BY A TINY MAN / SEMI-FORMAL REALITY CHECK / MOHAIR LOOK FOR PUNKS / KISS MY ROYAL BLUE ASS / WHAT IS MUSIC / LINKS

An extraordinarily high vibration thought led me to remember, this morning, an extremely fun and weird interview I did a few years back, which never saw the light of day. I’m re-reading it and finding it good, so I’m sharing it with you all explicitly. It’s not a regular interview in a couple ways-- first, all the questions are nuts, which should be expected because the man behind the mic was none other than Fat Day’s Doug Demay. But the main reason it’s nuts is that it isn’t even an interview of me, it’s an interview of the band Funeral Cone, for Maximum Rockandroll magazine, which the band asked me to do, pretending to be them, for chaos reasons. I love these guys, and I appreciate a little prank at this level, I said sure.

Well no surprise but I did a great job. It was fun to pretend to be several people talking over each other in a pizzeria, and I recommend other writers give this format a go. Sadly this never appeared in MRR-- my understanding is that on the cusp of clicking send, the magazine changed their policy on goofy shit from “Nahhh....” to “No”. And that’s their right!

Funeral Cone is not playing anymore but they have recordings online, which I will link to at the end, and I will post their other bands too. Oh what links I’ll post, I’ll post, at the end, at the end, at the end of the post.

OK, here you go. Again, this is me, answering as other people, but saying things I would say. I did say. The only section the band really answered is the part about cool shows. Most of the questions are from the poison pen of Doug Demay, who is the band’s label boss and Dungeon Master. Shawnecee facilitated the interview and also had the idea “let Jacob do it”.

Illustrating the text are advertisements the band took out in Mothers News :)

Answered as a group with everyone talking over each other and finishing each others sentences.

HI FC, Please introduce yourselves and your deal?

- I’m Cory, I play drums, I’m the handsome one.
- I’m Kelley, I play keyboards and sing, I’m the smart one.
- I’m Dan, I’m the singer, I’m the cute one.
- I’m Matt, I’m the quiet one. Also the cute one. Bass.
- I’m Frank, I play guitar, I’m the one with glasses that isn’t Dan.

Suppose you once had a job making inspirational posters, describe the one that got you fired.

- It’s a cat in box and the text reads FEED ME UNTIL I DIE & PRETEND I LOVE YOU. The cat is clean-looking but has a repugnant aspect, like the child of a banker.

- It’s a picture of a snow-capped mountain and it just says WELL HERE IT IS.

- Mine’s a picture of a snow-capped mountain and it says WHO REMEMBERS THIS GUY?????

If there was a hair on your body that would not stop growing and could get really, really long, like, say, a mile long or thereabouts, where would you want that hair to be located on your body and would you trim it or let it grow and grow and grow?

- That’s a great question but what I want to know is how do I know I don’t already have such a hair? I’ve never really tried to grow my hair out as long as it could possibly go. How many of us have? I hear people say “long hair don’t care”, but if you had a single hair that was a mile long, I promise you you’d start to care. Maybe it means you’ve been caring the whole time? You can’t have a mile long hair that never splits or gets brittle without maintaining good calcium in your diet. Maybe my motivational poster is LIVE LIKE YOU’RE TRYING TO GROW OUT A SINGLE MILE-LONG HAIR.

What kind of 5 person giant robot would Funeral Cone form? What is the name of your worst giant reptilian adversary?

- I gotta say, first, right off the bat, before we get into this question, I love everyone in the band. I feel like we all have a really good relationship, we enjoy each other’s company, we go on vacations together, we play Dungeons & Dragons together every week, and within the constructs of a band we do pretty well. I mean we get to the shows reasonably on time, we load in and everyone in the band helps carry the heavy stuff, we communicate with the sound person, we take care of people in the crowd, we work to solve any problems that may arise. That said, if we formed a giant robot, I really doubt we’d be able to coordinate enough to take a single step forward without falling down, much less fight and defeat any comparably sized villain that didn’t happen to be under us when we fell. I would go to the ends of the earth for these people, but based on how we try to split up a check at the end of a simple meal, I have to say there’s no way, absolutely no way we could direct a 5 person robot in any meaningful way. Adversary’s name would be Gilganto.

Suppose your neck was like, 6 feet long, what then?

- What’s with the questions man, do you have like, regular band stuff to ask, or is just going to be goofer’s night?

Yeah. OK. So you just played your 100th show, what were some favorite shows so far?

- Thee Tsunamis were cool, Dead Pressure from San Jose, The Holograms from Sweden.

- Any show with Black Rainbow.

- When Neon Piss came out here and we played Boston Providence Worcester three days in a row with them, that was really special. It was when we first started playing with Cory and it was when we really started to feel like a solid unit. Also special shout out to Harvester for helping us so much with touring and being such a good friend and Barker, RIP, for helping us a lot with Bay Area shows and being such a kind person and supporter of our lousy wonderful band.

- Melt Banana!!!!

- We played a beach bar in Provincetown once and it was super fun-- there were like 8 people there (including Dan’s parents! And a super fan who made their own sparkly Funeral Cone shirts!). We played our set twice. It was weird and fun and super New Englandy: things I feel that represent Funeral Cone at our best.

- Now as far as the 6 foot neck thing, you’re looking at back problems. Lots of lying down. Unscrupulous relatives charge villagers to look at you. A short life of mostly drinking. I think the most any of us could hope for in that situation is to befriend a novelist.

- If you had a 6 foot neck, you might just be a giraffe. Or a snake being eaten slowly from the tail end by a tiny man.

What are your songs about?

- Mind control. Beatlemania. Punks. Skins. Ummmm sort of... being caught in a loop of insanity, uh, somebody at the show wearing cop shoes, and maybe they’re a cop, maybe they aren’t, uh, being nervous, perfect teeth... we have a new song about listening to the ABBA discography on a long car ride, it’s called “Cory Didn’t Like It”.

- Jacob from Mothers News wrote that one for us. He’s truly a national treasure.

Funeral Cone have been asked to play one song at the middle school prom - what song do you play and why?

- Ok back to this. Well, first off, middle schools don’t have proms, they have semi-formals, right? What song though? Great question. Well, OK, first off, you gotta load in, probably well in advance like 5pm, load out after the shindig is over, that’s your whole afternoon and night, shot to hell for one song. OK so first of all what does a job like this pay?

Pro-bono. Free gig. It’s your niece’s semi-formal, she asks you.

- That’s very suspicious. Personally I would’ve been mortified if my weird-ass aunt or uncle played a single song in the middle of my middle school semi-formal. It doesn’t seem very likely. Major red flags here. Maybe she was coerced into asking? In which case you gotta ask yourself: “Why?”. Maybe someone’s trying to Carrie one of us? Not gonna happen, not on my watch. Fuck off, that’s what I’d say. Not going to happen. Fuck. Off.

What is the most punk insect? If it were 10 feet tall and chasing you would you still think it was punk?

- OK, the punkest insect is not necessarily the one with the most spikes, because the notable thing about spikes on a punk is that they are an aftermarket addition. It’s reprehensible to sell or buy a pre-studded jacket, because the act of spiking the jacket, or at least stapling garbage to it, is important. Anyone that buys a pre-studded jacket is just a prep in punk clothes. Rhinocerous beetle is not the punkest insect.

- The punkest insect is a bee, because a bee is named after the punkest verb: to be. Also when it stings you it rips its own guts out. But that doesn’t keep it from stinging! And remember that UK striped mohair look for punks? I loved that look, that’s a bee look. Changing your threat value doesn’t make you more or less punk. That’s totally orthogonal.

[at this point we stop to look up the word “orthogonal”, which means “unrelated”, or “related to a linear transformation that preserves the length of vectors”]

I know you guys invented a machine that shrinks bands and allows them to play directly inside people’s ears, what other inventions are you working on right now?

- Working on a new way to drive where you don’t just fucking pull out in the damn middle of the road then wave at the person that fucking screeched to a stop like “thanks for letting me go”! That’s something we’re currently working on and trying to get funding for. Hopefully it catches on.

You are asked to come up with a new catch phrase for a hit TV sitcom about a lonely 9 year old kid who discovers that his parents are aliens who only fattening him up to eat him on his 10th birthday - what is the phrase? Can you describe the scene where it is first used?

- OK, again, sorry to be a broken record here but I gotta ask: what does a job like that pay? The sitcom’s already a hit and they want us to juice it even more? They can payyyyyyyyyyyyyup! They can call my agent, my agent will call me, I’ll hang up on my agent, I’ll call my agent back when I cool down. That’s how this works. Not trying to make free money for the network that helped put fucking shitface in office. Those guys can kiss my royal blue ass, and you can put that in writing!

- Catchphrase is “kiss my royal blue ass”

Do you think someone should make a record that is also a decent Frisbee or other lawn toy? What other things should records be able to do in addition to playing music? Could music be recorded onto a Wham-O Slip ‘N Slide?

- Hmmmmmmmmmmmm gotta say that sounds like a pretty bad idea! Records play music, and that’s a lot! You want a frisbee? Get a frisbee. You want a croquet set, bocce ball, badminton, lawn dart, hibachi, flamingo, keg, hammock, moldy armchair, drunk roommate passed out nude, a pentagram burnt into the grass, bros driving by asking when’s the orgy, cops throw trash at you, neighbors ask if everything’s OK, you’re like what are you talking about, trying to cook an egg on an engine block of a car with no windsheild? You want that shit it’s already in the yard, OK? If you want a record, you have to get a record. Or download it.

TOUR? WHY?

Yes to tour, we love tour. Why tour? Great question. Why is there music? I do not know. Music seems important. It brings people together? It’s nice, even if it isn’t nice? We’re trying to figure out why, I guess that’s the why for now. Why we do it is we don’t know why we do it. There’s no good way to get to the one millionth digit of pi without knowing every digit before that. I’m sorry but there’s no way. Sometimes you have to do the legwork. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know- almost completely everything! Yet we’re out here, having lunch, doing sex, playing music, studding our jackets, studding our food. Why? I don’t know! That’s why!

links / misc

• OK I was not in this band but I truly love them all and contributed whenever I could. Here’s me and Mori on the cover of the LP (art direction by MZ), and a patch I designed for them, based on the old Mass Pike signs:
  

• Here’s their version of a song I wrote for them, mentioned in the interview. I called it “Cory Didn’t Like It” and it was like a We Didn’t Start The Fire of all ABBA titles.

  They made it their own and called it ABBA.C.A.B., and honestly, it slaps :) With a great video by Dan Wars. [Funeral Cone - ABBA.C.A.B, 2min]
  

• FC has almost all their recordings up on Bandcamp. This live record was cut at the same show as the Strawberry Band recording! Oh What A Night! [funeralcone.bandcamp.com] There’s also a fair amount of live vids on YouTube, if you can’t get enough of Dan running his mouth between songs (he’s great at it, I love it).

• ex-Cone bands include Orange Whip [orangewhip.bandcamp.com/], the aforementioned Strawberry Band [Ichi-Go Ichi-E], Tigers On Vaseline (website tba), and Out Of The Blue (no website but you can call their toll free number to hear the record and leave a message)

• Cory and Uncontrollable Frank are also in Ancient Filth [link], and Mike, who had moved to California before this interview, is in True Freak [truefreak.bandcamp.com]

• I did successfully get an interview in Maximum Rockandroll, in re: Mothers News. Shoutout to Greg Harvester for that! You can read it here: [link]. Very happy about this, although they edited out of the print copy every time I started an answer with “great question”. I was delighted to get a Bible quote in there, because I gotta swim upstream everywhere I fuckin go apparently. There’s also a Japanese translation of this-- shoutout to the Mothers News Fanslation Squad! [mothersnewsjapan.tumblr.com]

• I would be remiss to not shoutout out FAT DAY, one of my/our favorite punk bands of the 90s / 2000s. Their label 100% Breakfast put out the FC LP and honestly I wouldn’t be who I am without them. When Mike told me that Doug was going to put out their record I jumped up and down, saying “we did it!!!!”. Great band, great records, and really innovative shows!!!! Here’s my favorite LP of theirs: [Cat of the World, Youtube, 13min], and here’s them playing at Fort Thunder [youtube, 17min]. And while we’re at it, here’s DJ PICA PICA PICA (EY∃ from Boredoms), the mix that uses the drums from “Burrega” [Planetary Natural Love Gas Webbin’ 199999] :))))))))

comments????? leave them in the castle! [link to post]

BEST GROUP / TIN MACHINE / ENEMIES LIST / JIZZ MOTIF / HOW ROTTEN IS ROTTEN / COME ON / TCHAIKOVSKY MENTIONED / TRIUMPH OF THE TIMBERDOODLE / BARF CITY ETERNAL / FOOTBALL RABBIT / LINKS / GREG TREASURER

📝️

📝️

📝️

Full disclosure this was inspired by bitterness. And might I add with malevolent pride that from my single addition these scare quotes have propagated throughout the document like a noxious weed.

📝️

This one really didn’t last long but that’s not why we do it (why we make art I mean)

📝️

OK this was the original text:

I’m a certified mobile games hater so I had to click through to the source on this--

I didn’t draw the same conclusions here. Maybe “a major player of iPad games” is sufficiently pathetic but I wanted things to be clear as crystal:

I don’t remember why I was looking at Johnny Rotten’s wikipedia page, but I will not be judged for my browsing history!

📝️

I appreciate the hustle here, and honestly I feel like if you’re in a band you should be saying dumb shit like this, but at the end of the day, this isn’t CREEM ok pal, it’s fuckin en dot wikipedia dot org. Come on.

📝️

Maybe this seems against character, but I felt like I had to remove a great little detail from the entry for “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad (song)”

I wanted to let this slide but the vandals got too greedy. Credit for writing out Tchaikovsky’s full name though!

📝️

I’m not sure why I was on this entry initially but I loved the list of nicknames someone gathered for the American Woodcock (bird). Weeks later I went back (I was talking to someone about nicknames) and I was horrified to discover that someone edited that particular part out. So I undid the edit, only to have my undo undid like 30 seconds later. Wow. So I did my due dilligence and found a source...

I think probably what happened is someone stumbled across this list of names and thought it was just someone having a laugh, so they scrubbed it out. Well it struck a nerve with me-- you know how many things in this world are weird, or are outliers, or don’t really make immediate sense to the layperson??? MOST THINGS!!!

Incidentally my source had one more nickname than the original list, so I was able to not only protect but expand. Cut off my head and 7 more will grow in its place. I’m the timberdoodle, the mudbat, the bogsucker. I’m the night partridge, the Labrador twister. Fuck with me.

📝️

I forget if it was Carlos or Robert who said this the first time, but I added it to the list and it flew for two years before getting flagged as original research. Which is fair. But for the record we did say this on Citizens Band radio, and I am after all a citizen. This is Hi Hat waving a hand to all the Barf City CB nuts on the Broom Closet, Channel 13. 73’s 88’s and all the good numbers to Sixer, Cool Dog, Little Biker, Sneakers, Hobgoblin, Toenail, Coffee Cup, and of course, C-C-C-Count Zero!!!! Hi Hat and I’m back quiet...

📝️

I was thinking about Football Rabbit the other day so I took a sec to add them to the entry for Prurient (musician). And I threw in a little smiler while I was in there. I was satisfied to get this note when my personal opinions got justly nipped (though the factual data remained) :

:)

links / misc

• To mark the anniversary of this small occasion of triumph against dull creeping oblivion I made a “Nicknames of the American Woodcock” mug, and you may purchase one as well, if you like. It’s a shortie, 11 ounces. That’s a nice size. [tigerunlimited.com]

• I’m going to be selling stuffed animals at the ANTI-ROBOT VENDOR MARKETPLACE this Saturday, April 25th, from 4 to 8pm, at Farm Fresh RI, 10 Sims Ave.

Last time I went to this, someone dressed up as a robot and no one did shit about it except ME. I held the line. I don’t play.

• My noisy punk band TIGERS ON VASELINE is playing a show at Myrtle in May, come on out! Actually we’re not really a band, it’s more like a cadre of monks from a high mountain monastery who hone their bodies minds and spirits into iron daggers of sinister dexterity. I play “other guitar” and do not sing. Shoutout to Jeff Poot for the flyer, he’s the Pen & Pixel of New England punk!

This show will make the 3rd flea market we’ve played, out of 4 shows total. 5 shows if you count Mr Mitten’s birthday party.

• Here’s a great song about contemporary CB radio by Count Zero himself, with Ms Mirror Memory. of course i’m talking about [Rogue Fate by Daily Life, youtube]. This whole record is dynamite! “All cowards get stuck in a hole”.

• OK from now on new posts will be on Tuesdays, dropping before 11am Barf City time, though the substack might go out a little later (but still before 2pm). If I miss one in the next seven weeks I will send Greg Harvester $200 to dispose of as he sees fit. If I get all of them I’m going to get one of those classic rugby shirts with the yellow stripes.

• Speaking of Greg Harvester, I redid his website recently and I honestly did a great job, check it out. I take my webmaster duties very seriously!!! [https://remoteoutposts.com/]

• Oh yeah, and I’m FINALLY trying to dial in the settings for “reading these posts on your phone”. I can’t promise that the rest of the site will look OK on a phone, but I’m trying to get to a point where the posts are a viable long read if you’re stuck at a bus station or something, or you caught yourself scrolling scrolling scrolling and you’re like Jesus CHRIST ok let’s find something calm to look at for 5 minutes then I can get the hell out of this phone.

  PLEASE if you’re reading this email on your phone, click through to the link (link) and let me know in the comments does it look OK, or does it look weird. It should look different this week than last week, and if it doesn’t try deleting your browser history. THANK YOU 😘️. If it’s much better to read on your phone via Substack than on my beautiful website, that is also useful information, tho it may seem cruel to say. 🙏️

this week’s one isn’t a lot but it’s too much for this framework, so i have to ask you to click through. it involves everyone’s favorite, mickey zacchilli.

BRAINSTORM / IT WASN'T ALWAYS ROMANCE / MORE BEATNIK COMICS / THINGS THAT CAN BE NAMED / ONE LAST PUSH FOR OCELOT SALOON / LINKS / SIMON'S QUEST

read "IDEAS FOR MICKEY" in the castle at Fujichia.com

oh yeah and i am WORKING on making these posts more legible to the phone people!!! Sorry to everyone who is super bored at work right now.

SOLID SAM | RETURN TO EDEN | OBSOLESCENCE WINDOW | BIG TALKER | ORGANIZED SOUND | FIREFLIES AGAIN | FINGERTIPS | VOLUME TWO | LINKS

A few weeks ago I was talking to Solid Sam at the coffee store and we were talking about music projects we’re both working on. I was really hyping up the idea of CD-Rs, which are 1), the best format for underground / independent music and 2), due for a comeback.

1). CD-R’s (Compact Disk - Recordables) are cheap to make and cheap to ship. You can get a CD-R drive for your computer for like, $20, and the blank disks are what, 25¢ each? Burning them is fast, way faster than making tapes, and if you don’t want to sit there and DIY (Do It Yourself) there’s a whole host of DIFM solutions (Do It For Me) if you look around. Unlike tapes you can make them at any length and it’s not weird. And if you’re an mp3 head like me you can rip the CD to mp3s easily, no download code needed. For packaging you can get regular plastic cases or just like, be creative! It’s hard to be creative with tape packaging and it’s expensive to do so with record packaging. And doing things cheap increases the liklihood that you’ll do it at all.

2). Records and tapes came back, why not CDs??? Unlike tape players you can still reliably get a new CD player. Incidentally I just bought a new one and it was actually cheaper to get a DVD player that plays CDs. And for some reason there’s a jack for a microphone on the front of the DVD player???? which I will definitely be using. Looking at the timelines for record obsolescence 🡆 record comeback and cassette obsolescence 🡆 cassette comeback, I think we’re right about there for CDs and CD-Rs. As with tapes in 2008, I’m hearing a lot of 2026 people saying of CDs “I need something to play in my old car”. It’s a great time to be ahead of the wave!

Anyway we were shooting the shit (me and Solid Sam) and I was laying it on kind of thick I guess, because they said “OK, well when’s your CD-R coming out?”. This was on January 20th, when we had this conversation, and I said “February 14th”. We laughed a little and then I realized that I was suddenly in Big Talk territory. Was I making a promise just to get a laugh, knowing I could bail at any moment, maybe even subconsciously planning on bailing??? I don’t like that. Sure, not every plan that gets voiced can or should make it to drop day, but I don’t want to be the type of person who says something wild just to get a reaction, and then the story ends. I want to be wild but for my wildness to be dependable. If I should talk myself into boldness, let me then walk into eternity. So in order to put more interpersonal oopmh on the matter I told Sam that if I didn’t have a new CD-R for them, on or before February 14th, I’d give them $100 cash. Admittedly I shocked myself with this, but having said it, I had no choice. I’ve had other people challenge me on my shit before or make a bet that I won’t do something I said I’d do, but I’ve never made the bet myself. It felt inspirationally dangerous to impose stakes like this, and it worked like a charm, I did it. Recommended for any of you Big Talkers that actually want to get something done now and then.

I didn’t talk about the new CD on here yet because at first I only made a couple copies, but now I have more, and they’re in the Fujichia storefront. And of course I brought them to Armageddon Shop too. The first edition is just 30 copies, numbered.

MESSAGE FROM SPACE
NO TALKING

OK it’s not like, “music”, it’s just sound. But what it is is a reduction of the audio from the movie “Message From Space” (1978) without any (or nearly any) of the talking. I wrote a short script that looks at the subtitle file from the movie and uses that to get information about when people are talking, and output all the non-talking parts to a file.

The method is pretty elegant, I think! The subtitle file shows when to start displaying the text and when to stop, plus of course what the text is. My program takes this:

00:08:46.573 --> 00:08:47.365
Hmm?

00:08:48.408 --> 00:08:50.660
Oh! Those are space fireflies.

00:08:51.786 --> 00:08:53.413
- Fireflies?...
- Mm-hmm.

and saves to a separate file only the audio BETWEEN the last timestamp (after the arrow) and the first timestamp of the NEXT subtitle (before the arrow). So I’m getting only the parts of the audio where there aren’t any subtitles, aka no talking. Then I broke that huge file into chunks of 1 minute 40 seconds. That’s it.

Here’s an arbitrary track:

[link to mp3]

The cuts can be a little sloppy so there is some vocal sound in there, but I’m fascinated by those parts where the cuts are dead on and you only hear the echo of the word!

OK, here’s another track:

[link to mp3]

Starts with some primitive electronics / harsh noise, then a phaser solo, then there's a sort of microsound / Wandelweisser part, then a sudden vocal hocket hit??? If this was a band I'd be really into this band. Imagine writing, practicing, and playing this in front of a throbbing crowd!

As an album, I don’t know if this is very rewarding listening but I put the mp3s in my library and it comes up on shuffle sometimes and it’s nice. That might be the ideal listening situation for this actually, it comes up randomly and you’re like wait what is this? and then you’re like ahhhh hahahaha right. It’s this. Would also be a great CD to play on your porch on Halloween.

Or it could also be a nice source for those new sounds you’re looking for!. While I was making the insert for this I had the idea that this cd would be Message From Space No Talking volume 1, and volume 2 would be music that uses samples from volume 1. Or like, “music inspired by the legendary second-wave CD-R ‘MESSAGE FROM SPACE NO TALKING’”. I’m thinking it’ll be a compilation so if you make music of any genre and that sounds like something you could get into, get to work! I set the deadline for this at September 20th, 2026, that should be enough time, unless you immediately forget. Please try and keep your track under 4 minutes. Email WAVs to jacob@fujichia.com or mail CD-Rs to Jacob B PO Box 29081 Providence RI 02909. Full disclosure: if it winds up being just me on volume 2 I retain the right to mint some new pseudonyms to save face. But if you know you want to do this, or you need a personal invitation, or you want to commit before you can really think about it too much, leave a comment on this post and include your email in the email field and I’ll send you a reminder later :)

Links / Misc

• This release is available in the storefront that’s tacked on to the outside of the castle. If I sell out I’ll change this message, or realistically, I’ll forget. [link]

• Download the entire release as mp3s, for free: [zip file, 92.6mb].

• Sam’s band is called Baby; Baby: Explores The Reasons Why That Gum Is Still On The Sidewalk. Cool band! Website is here: [https://babybabyexplores.com/].

• relevant to the sound-world at play, friend-of-the-castle ASUNA has a new record out with Yasushi Yamashita (from INOYAMALAND) and it’s really nice! [bandcamp]

• Here’s my movie review:

  • Message From Space (1978) - I could imagine seeing this as a kid and being totally uptight about “this isn’t Star Wars” but I’m an adult now and I enjoyed this. It’s fun, it looks cool, great costumes, no problem. “You have to dress like this movie” would be a great setup for a party I think, and if any slobs show up without a costume you can just wrap them in a sheet, give them a schmear of Seven Seconds eye makeup, and plonk a crown of plastic leaves on top-- the host could purchase these items in bulk.

    As MDF pointed out in his review, this isn’t better than the Star Wars trilogy but it’s definitely better than the prequels. We got 3 Han Solos here, one of whom is 30% Luke Skywalker. Then there’s a lady that’s like Luke plus Leia, then a lady that’s Leia minus Luke. Then there’s a Ben Kenobi divided by Han Solo, he’s been drunk since his C-3PO died in battle, but he’s got a little R2 unit that’s 20% Ewok. Darth Vader, the emperor, John Williams, Space Shintoism, they’re all here too. They even did a little franchise on this, spinning out to a TV show, which according to IMDB was very popular in Peru. Chris Isaak is in this for a split second (playing space poker in the cantina) so if you’re having an Isaakathon (Married to the Mob, Silence of the Lambs, That Thing You Do!, Little Buddha, Fire Walk With Me) you gotta watch this too. In conclusion yes I enjoyed this movie. If anyone does this party concept please call me up or at least send pics.

  There’s more movie reviews in the TV room, that’s on the second floor on the left, past the game room and the haunted mirror. I just updated the Movie Diary, it’s current up to today.

• full movie: [Message From Space (105min) on YouTube] in Japanese with subtitles

• If you want to leave a comment on this post, please do so on my actual website, not on Substack. :))) [link to this post on Fujichia.com]

To all my new followers on Substack: Hi! Please check out the rest of the website when you have a chance! [Fujichia Castle]

:)

WHO IS JAMIE LEE? / WHY NOT A BRIDGE / PRESSURE PRESSURE PRESSURE PRESSURE / THE TITANIC YEARS / AFTER GENESIS / SCREAMING LORD / MPC FOR PRESIDENT / THE ULTIMO / LINKS / WHAT'S MY MOTIVATION

There’s a new café / bar on my block and I have a bunch of friends who work there so I go all the time to get a single shot of espresso or a beer, sometimes both. I call it Jamie Lee’s because they built it for the filming of a Jamie Lee Curtis movie, then someone else (not the movie studio) opened it up as a real bar a few months after the shooting wrapped up. It’s kind of mindblowing that the Hollywood organism can just terraform a neighborhood for one (sadly not very good) movie! I’m not complaining, I love it over there. But if they’re going to build something out for a movie, why couldn’t they make the movie about a cute little used bookstore??? That’s more up my alley. Or make it about the Washington Bridge? I mean that actually needs building, it’s a wreck. Make the exact same movie but Jamie Lee lives on the bridge, which for movie reasons is now totally functional and pleasant, not in a state of life-threatening disrepair due to years of corruption and mismanagement.

Well anyway something I like over there (Jamie Lee’s) is that the tunes are worker-controlled, and the workers and I are aligned with what we think might be good for the place and time. So I decided to take a page out of John C’s book, and do a public listening challenge-- here’s some notable audio moments from the last couple times I was there.

Unnamed 90s Drum and Bass mix

Went there the other day and Mickey gave me an espresso but then insisted on making me another one because it was raining and that messed up the consistency of the grind. We’ve all had that experience I’m sure, when the rain messes up the consistency of your grind, but this was special because it wasn’t even a metaphor. Anyway both cups were honestly great, and THEN she’s like wait try this and made ANOTHER ESPRESSO dropped on a few tablespoons of sweetened condensed milk. It reminded me of the first time I had a Milky Way Midnight. The playlist was 90s jungle. God that shit still sends me. Dubdubdubdub stepstepstepstep pressure pressure pressure pressure.

Freestyle mix

Flashback number 2: It’s 1997. I’m working at the movie theatre for one miserable Autumn and one day this dude asks me suuuuuch an easy math question that we both feel embarassed afterwards. I make a note to ask him later about something that he has expertise in, so we can transform the landscape from a knowledge-based hierarchy to an open field. Well the next day we’re talking music, and he tells me he likes Freestyle. I have completely no idea what that is, which makes me so happy, this is exactly what I wanted. “You mean like Freestyle Rap?” “No no, just ‘Freestyle’”. I said “what’s that like?”, expecting something like “it’s a genre of electronic dance music that fuses melodic vocal styles found in disco with the synth instrumentation of electro and early hip hop”. Instead he steps back, squints, looks up towards the skylight, deep breath in. “It’s like... flying.” Fuck dude.

Phil Collins - In The Air Tonight

Went in in the afternoon and there were a couple people spaced out at the bar with just a seat between them, I didn’t want to crowd any individual so I sat at a small table by the window. Dude near me was drinking an iced coffee and watching a video with no earbuds, with Phil Collins audio. Come on man. Cheers to Phil Collins for pioneering gated reverb, otherwise yuck. Or anyway, not now, and not like this. I got up and squeezed in at the bar.

Scream Audio, Alice Cooper

They tried this thing were on Thursdays they were showing movies, which is nice, but I don’t want to watch a movie, I just want to ask for and be given a half a beer, and to talk to my mate behind the bar. Luckily I get to have this experience a lot, regardless of whatever else is going on in the room. In one notable instance, my homie ate a shift salad and we talked about jewelery, punctuated by loud screams from the movie, Scream (1996). The only song I caught was School’s Out by Alice Cooper. Every time a school gets out for summer, anywhere on Earth, Alice Cooper gets 60¢ per school. When someone turns 18 he gets a dollar, and when a Frankenstien needs to be fed he gets $1.75.

Julie Ruin - Apt #5

pre-Le Tigre 4-track jams from Kath. You know Kath? Kath Hanna? She’s in that band now with Erica (Humblebees / Black Rainbow / Onion Flavored Rings). This was my jam when it dropped, I loved this whole record of sample based bedroom pop songs. RIP Sampledelic, my favorite music genre, litigated into the netherworld, to be replaced by the big money non-transformative sampling of Bad Boy Entertainment. They play a lot of sampledelic at Jamie Lee’s-- Cibo Matto, Tricky, Deee-Lite, and NO Fat Boy Slim! It’s a real chicken soup for the Gen X / Millenial Cusp soul

Charlatans UK

I feel like Andy Capp going over there sometimes, yelling “GOIN TO THE PUB FOR A PINT LUV” over my shoulder as I’m throwing on a scarf in lieu of a jacket, hunching up against the chill evening air, hands in pockets. “Brisk out there lads”. The other day I popped over and ran into Liquid Sam. We talked for a long time, and favorably, about her childhood idol Elvis Aaron Presley. I know that having a pleasant conversation at a bar isn’t a big deal to anyone but I’ve never had a bar era before, and I’m having a mild one now. It’s nice. Anyway Charlatans UK came on the mix (I think it was “The Only One I Know”) and Sam cried out in joy. “I’ve been trying to remember this song but I can’t because it’s too much like exactly the type of song I like!!!!!!”. I can certainly sympathize, though of course I can’t think of my own example of a song that sounds like me thinking about music when it’s good. Related: when Dolgoff had Tumblecat write “ULTIMO” on the cd of Dopesmoker that was floating around the warehouse. “So I’ll know which one is the Ultimo”. Cheers to the stunning unplaceable music of the inside chambers of the heart.

Links / Misc

• John C’s “John’s Music Blog” has been going steady for a BIT now, and even though when I click through onto a track I actually don’t like it 80% of the time, I find that I still love to read about it 100% of the time. On Substack: [John’s Music Blog]

• How many times am I allowed to say “I’m trying to get back into regular writing on here” on here? A dozen times? A hundred? This time I’m thinking it would be good for me to have a reward, something where I do 10 weekly posts in a row and then something happens, I get something pleasant. Or alternately, maybe there’s some type of punishment, something unpleasant that happens if I fail to achieve my objective. It’s not a major thing, but does anyone have any ideas???

  I was thinking I could use this to justify an unjustifiable expense, so I’m brainstorming “things I want but will not buy” and it’s like, a Ciat Lonbarde “Plum Butter 2” ($2,000) on one side and “those yellow scarecrow balloons they have at the blueberry farm” ($20) on the other. There’s not a lot of irrational rewards on hand in the 10-week-equivalent midrange. Then as far as punishments go, I’m having trouble thinking of fun-bad, all I’m coming up with is actual-bad, like washing my clothes in fragrant soap, or starting smoking. I’m quite certain that no one wants me to do either of those, not even for sadistic laughter reasons. Well anyway please leave a comment on the post on my actual website if you have any ideas. Angelic and demonic concepts both welcome. Ten weeks from now is the week of May 10. I don’t use Substack as “a platform” beyond sending out emails so if you leave a comment there, I’m sorry but I just won’t see it.

  [this post on Fujichia]

1:

I put 9 stuffed animals online for sale. I wasn’t going to do any online sales this year but I decided to do just these 9! they’re up now on the Fujichia storefront, just to the right of the castle entrance, or go there direct from this link: fujichia.com/store

I’m trying to sell all 9 of these to fund a sort of ridiculous idea that unfortunately this margin is too small to contain.

2:

If you’re around Providence RI this weekend, I’ll be doing 2 wonderful sales events, with lots of stuffed animals, among many other cool artists. Saturday December 20 from 9am to 2pm I’ll be at Fuller’s Speed Shop in Building 8, and on Sunday the 21st I’ll be at the Dirt Palace in Olneyville Square, from noon to 6. The Dirt Palace is the most public-facing of these, if you’ve never been you gotta come check it out, and it’s OK to bring a kid if you want them to have an inspirational moment along the lines of “life can be like this”. And of course if you’ve been there before you need no inducement. The Dirt Palace is right in Olneyville Square, you can’t miss it, it’s the place that most looks like it might be having a crafts fair. If you’re looking for lunch nearby I recommend La Lupita, I love it.

str8 up this is how I do crafts fairs in this city, I tie the table to the bike and the box to the table and walk next to it like it’s a donkey.

3:

Thank you to everyone that came out to the opening at World’s Fair a few weeks ago! my quilts will be up till the end of the month if you’re trying to go see them. upcoming hours are:

Thursday, 12/18 5–7pm

Friday, 12/19 5-7pm

Saturday, 12/20 11–2pm

Monday, 12/22 5-7pm

Tuesday, 12/23 5-7pm

:)

— Jacob

Fujichia Gift Shoppe: https://www.fujichia.com/store

Dirt Palace: https://www.dirtpalace.org/

World’s Fair: https://www.worldsfairgallery.com/

WOW YOU GUYS / MEETING GREG / OI FROM RHODE ISLAND / ADVERBS ON TAP / MY LIEGE / HACK AND SLASH / A SMALL LIST OF COMMON VULNERABILITIES / WHAT’S FOR DINNER / SOMETHING HAPPENED AT THE WORLD’S FAIR / LINKS

Wow you guys I’m actually giddy to announce that I have COMMENTS on my website again! I know people used to say “never read the comments” but back in 2006 we had a healthy comments scene on here. I could be mistaken but I feel like I met Greg Harvester in the comments on Fujichia.com? Specifically in the guestbook section?? Anyway after many many many years without, we are now back in business. I haven’t yet installed comments on the posts because I’ve been very busy (see “Other News” below), but the guestbook is live, for saying hey, asking a question, saying “Oi! from [your location]”, and probably for some other use case that has yet to be discovered. I’ll put the link below but if you’re looking for it later it’s a large blue book in the castle lobby.

I quietly re-launched the guestbook 2 weeks ago and I already have a bunch of comments on there, which is so nice. Some special features of the guestbook include some randomized text inclusion buttons, so if you’re lost for an adverb or adjective, you can hit “ADV” or “ADJ” and it’ll inject something useable into your comment. There’s also an “opening” button if you have a hard time getting started. There’s about a one in 12 chance you’ll get “My liege--”.

It kind of feels nuts putting comments on here again-- I think I covered my ass in regards to getting hacked, and warding off robots and spiders and code injections and so forth. I got hacked in 2010 when this site was running a WordPress install, so that’s in the back of my mind. Or actually like the edge of my mind, to the side. Getting hacked was pretty destabilizing-- the entity that infested the website was operating on its own logic, foreign to my own, spreading little bits of code all over the place that linked to paid advertisers and seemingly random wikipedia articles. Surrounding the links were bits of text randomly generated from a base material of bodice-ripping erotic fantasy fiction. It also installed numerous backdoors for itself in innocuous little files like these:

Sadly I didn’t save any of the fanciful link text, I was too freaked at the time, running around wringing my hands saying “spiders! spiders! spiders in my house!”. Kudos to the machine intelligence circa 2010 that hid its nefarious plot in files marked cash, fame, houshold, impressed, warmth, etc.. I’d be lying if I said I don’t still have these vulnerabilities installed, in my brain, by society.

Anyway, if this comments structure becomes a problem I’ll change it. For the time being it’s worth the anxiety of being open to calls in order to see who’s out there. To all regular readers-- it’s OK if you want to periodically drop a postcard amount (or even a fortune cookie amount) of info on me, regarding what you’re up to, what the scene’s like where you are, what’s for dinner, etc.. I would honestly love to hear it. Please be aware that whatever you write might get read by as many as 12 people. If you have a message for me that you would like to remain private, please send an email or use the contact page (which also now works again).

Other News

The other news is that I have a show of my quilts coming up, on December 4, at World’s Fair Gallery in Providence RI, on Broadway next to the Columbus Theatre. Reception is on the 4th from 6 to 8pm. It’s a split show with Anyhow Ceramics, featuring my old drinking buddy Jen Corace. I hope to see some of you there! Yes I will take pictures and post them here. Yes I will put some quilts online for purchase, but maybe not until January.

:)

Links

• Guestbook: [link]

• Contact page: [link]

• Tom sent me this video of horror-themed DJ Chainsaw where he does an incredible opening spiel with wrestling promo vibes, relevant to the topic at hand. It’s funny to be villain-styled with this victim-coded “please” energy, but I deeply understand. Just another honest unstable psycho caught between channels of the pleasure matrix... TBH this is not my preferred flavor of gabber/hardcore (which is unrelated to the punk variant also called hardcore) but please watch the first minute of this because I’ve been working on my version of this voice and I don’t have anyone to say it to. Hardcore isn’t just music, it’s a lifestyle... Show me who’s out there... write it down... by using the comments section... [youtube]

A TOUCH OF THE MACABRE / ENGAGE WITH THE ETERNAL / CONCORD GRAPE / LOSER SHIT / A STARLET’S MASCARA / A GRASSHOPPER FOR THE COUNTESS / PINK AND PURPLE / LANGOROUS SWEEPS / BOOKS IN MOVIES / I SAID NO ONIONS / LONG POINTY FINGERS / LINKS

Damn it’s already late October and I’ve barely even gotten into the spooky feeling... I haven’t carved a pumpkin, walked in a graveyard, I haven’t even said “a touch of the macabre” out loud to anyone, that’s like bare minimum for me. I guess I could blame the horrors of the world, which are abundant, but that’s a cop-out. I mean the horrors of the world, at the moment, it’s like there’s fear all around, but no mystery. It would probably be good for the psyche to engage in something spooky, which is an eternal feeling. “Engage with the eternal” is a good year-round coping strategy actually.... Gotta remember that. “Eat seasonal fruits” is also relevant here but I don’t need help remembering that, that’s on lock.

Well anyway I don’t have a whole day to craft a post right now-- of the 10,000 hours alloted to us in every day I have to put a few of them into helping my friend Mr Z with a photoshop project for his next record, and then I have to go to the ice cream store to get a boutique flavor I pre-ordered (Concord grape - a current household obsession), then I have to go to band prac. We’ve got a gig coming up playing with an Elvis impersonator at a friend’s birthday party so we’ve got to get our game up. I’m not going to go all the way out there just to get hosed by a living shadow. Anyway today’s post is a spotlight on a few recent spooky movies I’ve enjoyed. Recent like I watched them this year, not recent like they came out this month.

If you crave this kind of thing you can check out more (too much more) in the castle’s TV room, where I’ve moved all my Movie Diary data. I’m still working on my tagging system but for now you can click a button and see only the spooky movies. Or you can leave the button unclicked and see everything since I started keeping this kind of data (2019). If you do check out the Movie Diary you may notice that in the notes below I skipped over Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies Go To College, even though it was well within my review period window. That is my right to do so, as every rule and law is meaningless against my evil will. Take the stairs to the second floor, to the left, past the haunted mirror, and the TV room is behind the second door.

Recent Spooks

• The Boxer’s Omen (1983) - Really fun puppets + entrails movie ala Brain Dead (1992), but produced in 1983 on a Buddhist horror motif. Maybe Exorcist (1973) was the jump off? A boxer-turned priest fights a demon and it’s not even his fight. But it’s durian this time, not pea soup. Kind of a stretch I guess but it’s not hard to imagine the Shaw Bros boardroom looking at the box office receipts for the Catholic horror subgenre and deciding “Let’s make a stern religious pukefest for a Southeast Asian audience”. I could be way off here. Anyway I loved it. There’s no (or not much) “gore” (in terms of someone getting slashed and their guts fall out), but there’s LOTS of really gross stuff with ACTUAL entrails and a great supporting role for black soldier fly larvae. My favorite part was when a guy peels a banana, throws away the fruit, and eats the peel. Unlike a lot of black sorcerer media, this one makes the occult art really seem like loser shit compared to the True Path, although I did get swept away by the brief sequence in which a small crew toils in their garage to perfect a device (in this case a beautiful ghoulie). With Bolo Yeung Sze from Enter The Dragon (1973) and Phillip Ko Fai from Magic Crystal (1986). If you’re picking a snack for this choose something dry, like popcorn or chips. I had a small bowl of concord grapes and I got yucked out.

• The Brides of Dracula (1960) - Warning! No Dracula! Peter Cushing says “Dracula” out loud, as an afterthought, and that’s it. And there’s vampires. But this isn’t a problem with the movie per se, that’s a problem with the promo department. If you love lush castle interiors and zooming in on a starlet’s mascara you’re really going to dig this. I do and I do and I did.

• Daughters of Darkness (1971) - really great lesbian vampire movie that puts most of the vampirey details in the background. You never even see a pointed tooth! Delphine Seyrig is extraordinary as Countess Bathory (via Marlene Dietrich), a splendid addition to the proud canon of glamorous movie vampires. Her gowns get better and better, and I’m not ashamed to say I gasped when the penultimate gown rolled out. I hated the main guy (CW domestic violence) but it’s productive to speculate about “what’s his deal”-- he’s not just some jabroni there for contrast, or an impulsive agent of chaos on whom the story relies. Leaves a lot of questions, a move I respect! An absolute MUST for any lesbian vampire fan, old hotel aficionado, gown buff, or films-set-in-Belgium completist. If you want to drink along with this one you’ll need equal parts crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and cream. Pour into a cocktail shaker with ice, shake briskly, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

• The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) - love it when a movie has people puzzling over a tiny sound. In this case the answer to “what is that sound” is so outlandish they had to put it in the title so it would hit like a memory and not like simply an unusual decision on the part of the filmmaker. Also there’s both a spooky painting AND a deadly sculpture, by different artists. I feel like painting in a movie is a stand in for film itself, and painters are the directors-- in that regard I loved the painter in this, who is both extraordinarily closed-off and also very open. “I’m in a mystical period” why? “BECAUSE I’M FEELING MYSTICAL”.

  Got to see an original 35mm print of this at Brown University, which looked so fucked up, I loved it. Lots of scratches from thousands of showings in sub-par conditions, and an overall color fade that turned all the black into purple and pink, giving it a “Hot Rats” look. Of course I’m happy that downloading a beautiful restoration is only a few clicks away, but it’s nice to see the primary documents, be they pristine or absolutely partied to shit. With Reggie Nadler from Mark Of The Devil (1970).

• Death Line (1972) - Donald Pleasance is so unpleasant in this it’s like he’s a big guy named Tiny. He’s great but he really underscores the fact that you should avoid talking to cops whenever possible, as true today as it was in the wet brown England of 1972. This movie has a few verrrrrry languorous sweeps across an interior landscape of gross-outs-- horror fans of the current era might be like “enough already” but I admired the trust that the filmmakers put in the props department and indeed I got yucked out. Watched this for Mr Mittens’ birthday and then crashed out on a couch where I had a dream about a zombie Jesse James. Then I looked in the fridge and there was a small piece of hand in a Tupperware container and I thought “I should eat that and turn into a horrible ghoul”. Then immediately “no, I should actually avoid doing that”. Then I woke up. Your mileage may vary.

• The Church (1989) - Nice comfy Italian Catholic horror / architecture flick with a good role for 14 year old Asia Argento, produced by Dario Argento. There’s enough weird stuff to make it worth your while but I have to say that the monsters and effects didn’t have enough oomph behind them, they just sort of show up and disappear, on a “thought I saw something” vibe. I would’ve liked to be a little more engaged with that stuff. Someone worked hard on that fish monster, I want to have more than a second to watch it glisten and pulsate. Or I don’t know, maybe they’re right, maybe there was a “too much fish man” cut that bombed initially. “1 sec max fish” double underlined on an index card and handed to director Michele Soavi. Cool score with Philip Glass and Goblin. I eBayed the book by Fulcanelli (alchemist circa 1920) that is onscreen briefly in this. It’s a cool book, and tangential to castles, I’m enjoying it. A horror movie with a real book in it that makes you seek out the book, that’s an underutilized vector for sure. I mean the Necronomicon is fake so that kind of doesn’t count but why isn’t there a movie with Maldoror or Story of the Eye or Against Nature or even Catcher in the Rye as a legible prop in the chamber? I can’t see a downside to this. Teenage edgelords reading Walt Whitman Leaves Of Grass because of Slender Man 3 The Slimmening (hypothetical).

• Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) - something crazy about these Hammer Studios Dracula movies is that Dracula isn’t even having fun. If that was me up there and I was accidentally resurrected in this preposterous fashion, wow, I’d be so psyched. I’d leap and frolic and laugh with my entire body. I’d run to a mountain stream and stick my face right in it and drink drink drink. But Dracula immediately and intractably becomes full of searing rage at a pretty basic slight. Someone essentially parked in his parking space, forcing him to park somewhere else for a short time, and he spends 87 minutes nearly paralyzed with indignation. It’s pathetic. Others are carousing, drinking beer, kissing, eating big hearty loaves of fresh bread. And then there’s Dracula, fuming silently for no reason, even though he was very recently dead and frozen in ice, and now he’s not. I wonder if that’s what it’s like being family rich-- getting zero pleasure from your palatial estate and then blossoming into horrid spasms of life only when someone brings you the wrong beverage or forgets “no onions”. He’s not even getting revenge on the people who killed him! Come on guy!!!!

• Subspecies (1991) - All I could get from my beloved torrent community was a 4gb copy of this, and when I sat down to watch it with my buddy my ancient computer couldn’t do it. Luckily my buddy had the fix, which was one of those websites. Remember when everyone had some fucked up movie website that seemed to have almost everything and it was chill as long as you didn’t click anything on the page other than the play button? Those sites are still out there and they still work, even though the landscape is forever shifting. Anyway great movie, I’m guessing the inspiration for this was Bugles corn snacks? I could immediately relate to the feeling of “I’m a spooky creep with long pointy fingers” and I recognize the childhood genius of “my fingertip broke off now it’s a little guy coming to get you”. There’s a few points like this where they added to a legend in a cool way, another one I liked was like “everyone knows about driving a stake through the heart, our thing is we boil the heart and drink the heart’s hot dog water”. My viewing party loved these embellishments, loved the little claymation guys, and loved that the main guy looked like Lux Interior. The only thing we didn’t like was that the grizzly old familiar was terrible at his job. They kept saying “let’s find his coffin during the day and get rid of him” and the dude’s like “yes, let’s”, and then he spends all day sharpening a stick (which was already sharp) and then it’s almost nighttime and he’s like “OK let’s go”. Would’ve been no problem if he just did what he said he’d do when he said he’d do it! To be honest, I have this tendency too, I can’t pretend like this is unrealistic. And I guess it’s ultimately helpful for me to see how annoying this is for other people in my life and how much it holds me back. Let’s get that bread everyone.

Links

• Fujichia Movie Diary: [link]

• if you want some killer SPOOKY TUNES for this or any season I HIGHLY recommend Flan’s radio show “New Flanland” on WFMU. it streams live on Wednesdays at 8 Eastern, but every episode is also right there for you in the archive at any time. She does a whole month of spooky shit every October and it rules, but also every episode rules. The genre is like... cool music from anywhere :) [New Flanland on WFMU]

• I have a couple copies left of Mr Z’s band’s first 7”-- the band is called OUT OF THE BLUE and features members of Big Kids, Tiny Hawks, Nadir, and the Goonies. Let me know if you need one and I’ll try and get it to you. You can also listen to the record on their toll-free phone number (!!!!)

  Leave a message!!!!

• The wikipedia entry on Fulcanelli is a trip. I love reading biographies of magicians, and if you do too then run don’t walk. [wikipedia]

• OK I am not made of stone. In lieu of a review and as a reward for getting to the bottom of this post, here’s 2 screengrabs from Ghoulies 3. [EVIL & POWER]; [the hand of the puppeteer]. This is not an endorsement!!!!!

FREQUENTLY ASKED STATEMENTS / TWO WEEKS / MY NOTES COMBOBULATED / GENERAL BASKETBALL / REPETIION AS CHANGE / SKRAMMELLEGEPLADS / DEFAULT HERO / POEMS REQUESTED / LINKS

I talked on here a few weeks ago about my artists residency program CTRI Innovations, where we go out for coffee and that’s it, and I had a few people reach out recently with the same question so I thought I’d just share that on here before getting to this week’s featurette.

The question is: Oh No, I Wanted To Do This But I Missed The Deadline! or I guess that’s a statement, not a question, but the implied question is Is That OK? and the answer to that question is yes. Usually I try to be a stickler for deadlines, or at least personally I try to maintain an attitude of taking them seriously. But in this case the deadline (as listed on the CTRI Innovations residency) is fake. Using a small bit of computer code, the deadline changes constantly, based on the last time you visited the website. If you look at it today or tomorrow or three weeks from now, it will display as 1 week into the future (from today or tomorrow or three weeks from now). I did this as a service for those people that can’t do anything without a looming deadline. Those people should treat the deadline as serious, as long as it inspires them to act. But at the point when it provides an excuse for inaction (aka when you blow the deadline and are unchained from the obligation of actually trying to accomplish something) it becomes null and void. I’m sorry to anyone that got tangled in this snare.

The featurette is as follows:

As previously discussed, I keep notes on each instance of the residency, just a short little roundup of some of the things we talked about. I don’t write down everything, and I don’t know why I write some things and not others. Well anyway, once I had a few months of these notes together I realized I had a funny opportunity to look and see, what are the sort of things I talk about all the time?? If a topic is like a song in the set, then what’s the complete repertoire? so I sorted through the text of the website for “we talked about” and then made a list of every comma-separated value that followed. Then I sorted them alphabetically.

There’s something very funny to me about the list format. It’s just a string of objects whose context is underdeclared-- when I read it my mind goes into overdrive trying to pull out some type of narrative, or looking at the poetic qualities, the rhythms and rhymes. In this case (scenes from a conversation), it’s funny to imagine that these alphabetized nodes were reached in this order naturally.

• bags and backpacks

• Baile Funk

• Baltimore

• band names

• baseball

• Bashō

• basketball in general

• beaches

• beaches both non-magical and magical

• being a character in someone else’s story

• being a consultant

• being “a good drawer”

• being a kid and starting to develop class awareness

• being a metal head that gets into disco

I love that this one has “basketball in general”, when “basketball in general” is more specific than just “basketball”. But you wouldn’t think of it if it wasn’t preceded by “baseball”. You could imagine that when we talked about baseball it was pretty concrete, like “I was a fan of the Red Sox up to 2004”, but then something happened in the conversation when we pivoted to (17th century Japanese poet) Bashō that caused this very intentional zoom out into a purposely abstracted view of a different sport. We stop talking about personalities and we’re just cataloging sensations-- the squeak of shoes on the parquet, sound of a brick on the rim, a still moment before a foul shot. Again, these topics did not occur in this order originally, this is a conversation we’re inventing, based on an arbitrary chunk of a needlessly alphabetized reduction of over a hundred conversations with nearly as many people.

There’s a lot of repeats, because there are some things that come up often. It would be easy for me to put a number next to repeat topics, like grants⁵, goth ASMR³, Jervyn’s Clasp¹¹ but I decided to leave them in, for poetry reasons.

• boats

• boats

• boats

• body builders

• books

• books

• bookstores

• books you read in the fifth grade

• Bowie

• Brancusi

• bread

• breakfast

• breakfast

• Breton

• Brian Blomerth (he’s great)

• bricolage

• bricolage problems

• bricolage problems

• bringing back old work

• Bromp Treb

• brush pens

• Buckminster Fuller

• building an incorruptable chariot for your immortal soul to ride

or

• donuts

• double A batteries

• drawing

• drawing

• drawing

• drawing

• drawing as a form of high-stakes meditation

• drawing backgrounds for a cartoon show

• dreams

• dreams

• drinking coffee

• dub music

• Duchamp

• Duchamp

• Duchamp

• Dwarf Fortress

• Dwarf Fortress

• Dwarf Fortress

• Dwarf Fortress

the how-to section is rich:

• how architecture shapes your life

• how being a rock star is actually a lousy job

• how great it is to not be in school

• how he got into machine work

• how scenes can default to shitty and/or mean when there isn’t a nice option

• how to find a four leaf clover (we each have a method)

• how to get back in the habit when you’re out of the habit

• how to get lore of an area

• how to meet people

• how to stay loose in a sketchbook

I love making/finding these little poems within any large enough list, deciding where each one should begin and end. It’s a creative type of reading that requires you to be both reader and editor at the same time. Once you’ve pulled a poem out, it’s hard not to infer some sort of character arc or Hero’s Journey to it. Something leaves home and returns changed. OK when I started writing this post, the ones above were initially just examples. But now I think they’re actually poems. They’re all poems.

• memory

• memory

• mental health

• merch ideas

• metal

• metal

• metal dudes

• MFA pros and cons

...

• Sir Richard Burton

• Sister Corita Kent

• Sister Corita Kent

• Sister Corita Kent

• skateboarding (neither of us skate)

• sketchbook methods

• sketch books

• sketchbooks

• sketchbooks

• sketchbooks

• sketchbooks and sketchbook strategies

• sketchbook strategies

• sketchbook styles

• slam poetry

• slam poetry voice

• Slayer

• slime

• small birds

• small museums

OK I promised myself I wouldn’t be here all day! Here’s the link to the whole list: [CTRI Innovations: all topics discussed]. I’m still (still!) fiddling with how to get comments on my website but in the meantime, if you get these posts via substack, and you find any good poems in the list, feel free to post them on the substack comments. But I insist on the rule that you can’t edit the poem beyond selecting the beginning and endpoint! Don’t worry about aligning them to the Hero’s Journey, I think that just happens regardless.

Links

• the CTRI Innovations website is here: [link] and you should apply if it seems interesting to you. We do not have to be friends or know each other in order for you to do this.

• the previous post on this subject is here: [link]

• I reserve the right to do “more favorite lists” at a later date. I know that Greg Harvester loves stuff like this, that’s all I need really. Cheers Greg, and cheers to any Greg fans on the timeline tonight.

• if you’re zooming in on my notebooks and wondering what is “SKRAMMELLEGEPLADS”, I just re-looked it up and I was pleasantly surprised. Not entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. [wikipedia]

sorry for the insane subheading on this post, I couldn’t think of what to write and I suddenly felt ashamed at making such a boring title.