SPAGHETTIBROS! TUES 4-29!!!

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

TUESDAY APRIL 29, 4-7 PM

Dimock Gallery (Lisner Auditorium, Lower level -- 21st and H St. NW -- Foggy bottom metro)

BREAKFAST MEATS Art Collective presents SPAGHETTIBROS: A three-hour-long performance of a wicked game of beer pong played with absolutely no beer. It's Kenny vs. Gina in an all-out war to see who gets destroyed when that old frat favorite is played with cold, meatball-infused spaghetti-o's.

there WILL be puking and crying. come on out and jam to your fave BRANTHEMS while BREAKFAST MEATS totally lives for the moment, bro!

inquiries? email us at breakfastmeatscollective at yahoo dot com.

spaghettiBROS

ok, so if anyone has any local-to-DC tipoffs about this, here goes...

kenny and i, who form a collaborative called BREAKFAST MEATS, are currently looking for a venue for a performance. performance will be really messy and probably gross, it will involve lots of spaghetti-O's and probably a little puking on my end but we'll bring a tarp and maybe a bacon-scented air freshener for, you know, 'after'. ideally, we are looking at willing frat houses, mainly because we could use a beer pong table and maybe a beer bong. eh, i guess we can provide those things if necessary...

more to come as this develops.

THESIS SHOW

COME TO MY THESIS SHOW.

Tibbott Family Pet
Burial Recovery
Project

GWU's Dimock Gallery
(Lisner Auditorium, lower level)
21st and H NW

(foggy bottom metro)

This is an excavation of 6 of my childhood pets...the closing reception is this Friday, Feb 29, 5-7 at the location above. So far this has been going pretty well, so anyone who is around should def check it out!

the death of the death of death

so i saw 'diary of the dead' this weekend. i was kind of looking forward to this in the first place, as i keep up with horror releases, but i never go to the movies anymore and i' on that self-omposed house arrest. yesterday, though, i had a visiting artist crit at school that shifted my focus momentarily.

one thing that is pretty awesome about my grad program is the visiting artist schedule they line it. it changed from month to moth, but sometimes it's really rigorous in a great way. anyhow, we all get half-hour chats with these people, and typically they really don't give a fuck about anything. it's fucking AMAZING. we've had a bunch of straight up weirdos come through here in the past 2 years, and they just LAY IT DOWN. rainer ganahl, austrian performance linguist for lack of a better description, ended a crit with me by smashing down my plans for an elaborate, pompeii-specific forgery project. he knew the area well enough ot mention the threat of the napoli mafia (probably not the first mafia i'd really wanna fuck with): 'they will decapitate you! they will decapitate you!' i abandoned the project, mainly because i work there as an archaeologist and i don't want to, you know, get banned or something. however, the crit struck a nerve: if even in an obtuse way, i might be able to create something that would possibly cause people to want to kill me (for technical reasons more so than personal, but still...), shit. maybe i shouldn't treat my foray into art school as just a phase.

yesterday was one of the more fun crits i've had; seibren versteeg, who does a lot of cool internet-and-programming work, checked out my thesis stuff and helped me out a lot. 'diary of the dead' came up, and he recommended it. i had just read a reaaaallly bad review but this dude seemed to be on a similar wavelength -- like how recently i realized that reigning in my oddities has done NOTHING for me in the way of other people thinking me to be normal for the most part, so why the fuck am i not just getting balls-to-the-wall strange? anyway, this is exactly what was suggested to me in this crit, and it made me super-aware that after all this time, i am busting at the seams with weird shit. it is what it is.

aaron and i entered the movie theater and for a while, it was completely empty. this was, like prime-time, friday night viewing so before it even began we knew it must be pretty shitty. after a bit, 2 douchebags entered; i hoped that the movie would just be the four of us, so i could get even more scared at the prospect of a zombie usher biting one of the douchebags and then that douchebag biting the other, and ultimately, we would be chased from the premises by two douchebag zombies until, of course, i ruined their skulls. this didn't happen, though, because one of the final crowds to arrive were also douchebags, and there were several of them, and they sat right behind up, telling bad jokes to the girls they were with and talking about the joys of being a downtown office drone. after the movie, aaron and i both acknowldged a little anxiety on both of our parts when we realized these new douches might be hecklers. generally, i don't mind a heckler -- hell, i even appreciate a good heckler, in most cases -- but there was something particularly annoying and -- dare i say -- douchey about their sort of humor. my game plan for addressing this was going to turn around and yell 'shut the fuck up' in a zombie voice.

but then, the movie started. look, i enjoy entertainment, even when it's shitty, so i did enjoy this estrogen-soaked bongwater. one line is...'it used to be us against us. now it's us against them...but they're us' or something.' the gore was generally on point; hospital scene featuring intestines dribbling out of a man's thoracic cavity and slurping onto the floor was a highlight, as was a videotape in which a zombie CLOWN showed up a little girls' birthday party, and her name was GINA. the girl's mother, on the video, says 'don't be scared of the clown, gina.' that was seriously like the story of my childhood! i know a lot of kids hate clowns, but like i said, my bar is low and i appreciated this as one would a cosmic shout-out. yeeaaaah.

however, i left that movie theater with a tinge of sadness. i haven't been so see a movie at union station since, shit, 2001 or something. i never thought i would miss that theater, but last night, i did. aaron and i both agreed that 'diary of the dead' would have been much, much better in a theater full of hecklers, so folks of washington, i suggest seeing this movie there. lesson learned, i guess. lesson learned.

new fave show: my SHOCKING story

a few weeks ago, oprah made the announcement that she had purchased discovery health channel for the purpose of turning it into some o-network shit. normally, such news would have left me reeling, devastated. however, discovery health, whose programming i once knew by heart, has faltered greatly in the past year or so and this oprah buyout, as a result, no longer upsets me. see, discovery health has weathered a one-two punch in the past year: one of the most eye-popping programs, MEDICAL INCREDIBLE, was cancelled, and dr. jan adams, host of plastic-surgery: before and after, was turned into a hollywood plastic surgery pariah following the death of kanye west's mother, for which he was apparently responsible. although this program had also been cancelled, the reruns, which were numerous, were played constantly. the news broke, then, and it was permanently pulled from air, with the exception of some weak, cobbled-together theme programs ('plastic surgery: best of facial reconstruction' etc. whoopty fucking doo).

so, yeah, discovery health is sucking these days. oh well. TLC, however, is kicking some serious ass with a show that has certainly upped the sideshow ante. 'my SHOCKING story' smartly does what medical incredible rarely addressed: the fact that, sometimes, when people are all fucked with a rare or bizarre condition, there IS no underlying story of healing and redemption. on 'medical incredible', the only story i can really recall that was honestly hopeless -- as presented to the viewer -- was the terrible story of a 19-year-old seattle woman whose muscles were slowly turning into bone. don't even try to tell me that girl is not completely fucked, discovery health! anyway, 'my SHOCKING' story' also profiles just one person for each hour-long segment, which means wayyy more time is given to medical consult and analysis. recent episodes includes the following:

-- TREE MAN -- a man with a wart infection so insanely bad that it caused gigantic, horn-like warts to sprout from his hands and feet. he looked like an ent. i have never seen anything like this.

-- 'MY GIANT FOOT' profiled a florida woman who, although she was not obese, had a localized case of lymphedema that caused her one foot to swell to NINETY POUNDS. hot shit! my roommate, who can weather crapola such as 'bad girls club' on a more-than-weekly basis, proclaimed this to be, finally, the television program she couldn't stomach. seriously, not for the faint of heart.

-- 'THE MAN WITH NO FACE' -- this could mean so many things! did he lose it in an accident? bad case of crouzon's? nooo, this portuguese fellow had a slow-growing hemangioma that weighed like 7 pounds and was basically a jiggly, pulsating sack of blood that had slowly eaten his skull. sad episode; he was really terrified of surgery. you know what? if i had a giant dangly water-balloon of a face, i'd probably be a little wary too.

also highly recommended: national geographic has finally returned with more episodes of taboo. yay TV!

temporarily edge for thesis purposes

so right now i'm in a self-inflicted party exile as i have like a month to go before my thesis show. i have been working away, yeah, but i really need to stop fucking around. as a result, i will not be going out or doing anything fun, really, until tuesday, february 26. or maybe monday, february 25, as that is the day i finish installing. anyway, my home life for the past few weeks is as follows: camped out on a couch, swaddled in a faux-fur 'throw', computer, books, tray of tools, clay working shit. the work that i have to do -- namely, faithfully recreating the skeletons of my childhood pets from porcelain -- is tedious, but not exactly mind-bending. the ONLY thing that keeps my ass on that seat, semi-focused, is TELEVISION. maybe it's apparent, but when i have to really examine the passive interests that i truly and indulgently love, tv is pretty much winning by a landslide. anyway, on that note, what follows are my notes on weekend 'work' viewing...

THE BURNING (1981) -- on sunday nights, i think, IFC shows a bunch of grindhouse movies. sometimes they're worth the time, and i say this one is. friday the 13th rip-off with tons of gratuitous violence, including a dude getting his fingers snipped off by giant shears wielded by a burn-victim psycho. this is a summer camp slasher flick with lots of titties and all that. awesome music from yes's rick wakeman.

MADMAN (uhh, also 1981 maybe?) -- another summer camp slasher flick, but seriously, don't bother with this one. boring, not that bloody, not that summer camp-y...i forgot this was on after a while. maybe i took in something valuable through osmosis.

RUSH (1991) -- can't believe i never saw this, and i never knew it was about narcs. duh. i remember when this movie came out, i was maybe in fifth grade, and i was familiar with certain scenes due to clips being present in the 'tears in heaven' video. to my ten-year-old self, the scenes of two people rolling around in beds, on floors, etc., all sweaty and intense, read as the sort of sex scene that i didn't really 'get'. upon watching, though, i know that the bulk of these clips were more like withdrawal than sex...SAVE FOR THE SCENE WHERE JASON PATRIC RAPES THE SPEED RIGHT OUTTA JENNIFER JASON LEIGH. i mean, what the FUCK? anyway, 1970's texas drug rings, greg allman, a hot beardo. this movie is a total downer btw.

APOCOLYPTO -- perhaps the single awesome thing mel gibson has had a hand in.

NEW YEAR'S EVIL (early 80's?) -- uh tuned this off after like 15 minutes, and i NEVER do that because my standards are sooo low. anyway, i'm down with the presence of punk/metal in horror movies -- 1987's 'the gate' and 'trick or treat' (i think that's what it's called, with an alienated teen called 'the rag man' getting haunted by his fave dead rock star's demonic spirit) are awesome examples -- but new year's evil sort of failed to deliver on this, and many, fronts. in the first 15 minutes, anyway whatevs. like my head isn't filled with enough shit anyway.

also watched plenty of reality crap like 'rock of love 2' and more 'celebrity rehab' and maybe like 3 hours of law and order. and yeah, i did get a lot of work done. kind of.

celebrity rehab ep. 2 highlight

ahhh, jeff conaway, just when it seemed we were about to lose you to the great walk-outta-rehab move, dr. drew turned it around -- and how! he didn't have to rely on his extensive knowledge of 'addictionography' or whatever the fuck he calls it -- no, dr. drew didn't even have to utter a word. as soon as he entered the clinic, seemingly arriving from home or something as he was dressed all casual, conaway's glazed-over eyes lit up and he immediately mellowed, forgot about his withdrawal for just a moment, and genuinely complimented dr. drew on his nice arms, showcased in a laid-back black t-shirt and apparently invisible inside of his typical buttoned-up work gear. it was a jeff conaway i certainly hadn't seen before on this series; he was possibly coherent for the first time in two hours of viewing. this made me fabricate a bittersweet scene in my head, where a twenty-years-younger jeff and his boy tony danza would go to the gym together and then, you know, maybe sit down and drink a protein shake together as a little iron-pumping chill-out. couldn't you just see those two happily complimenting each others appearance, over and over and over? my suggesting to conaway, then...i'm not sure what recovery camp dr. drew subscribes to, but if he is, indeed, a 12-stepper, then he is familiar with the whole idea of replacing one addiction with another. if this is the case, i say, let the placebo be danza. danza!

RIP renfro

so brad renfro's death on tuesday -- undoubtedly drug-related -- is totally bumming me out. to me, he will perhaps always stand out as one of the more fucked up celebrities. pretty much all of his recent roles, in fact, required him to play characters not unlike himself. he took the helm, along with ethan embry, of one of my all-time fave episodes of law and order: criminal intent. he played a psychotic, bullied, airport security worker who moonlighted as a comic book artist and serial killer/rapist. dude was a good actor, don't get me wrong, but even through the efficient melodrama of CI it was play to see that his turmoil was real. ahhh, renfro, remember that time you and a buddy got drunk and stole a yacht? the time you got caught copping heroin on skid row? i'm not trying to glamorize a life that ended tragically young, but seriously, the obsession with celebrities-gone-bad has some misplaced attention on the women of the industry. renfro's antics always earned media attention, sure, but in a kind of one-sentence-in-the-newspaper kind of way.

in light of a new show to watch -- celebrity rehab with dr. drew -- i've been giving some thought to the crisis state of drug abuse in the entertainment industry. while on one hand it makes perfect sense to me that certain creative types might be drawn to experimentation, regular use, etc etc, and these routines, coupled with money and access, make addiction almost a sure thing...i still can't help but think that most of these people are just bullshitters with little incentive to exercise self-control. hey assholes -- ever hear my man bruce springsteen? 'they say you gotta stay hungry'? anyway, celebrity rehab: so one of the guests is alec baldwin, and he's been sober for over a year now, and while i DO understand that recovery is a long process, and i DO respect the fact that this man has a long and well-documented history of definite abuse, and i DO get that just because someone is sober does not necessarily mean that they're thinking like a sober person dry drunk syndrome etc), i CANNOT respect his decision to enter rehab where he knows he is going to be placed in close quarters with crazytown frontman SHIFTY SHELLSHOCK.

shifty shellshock may very well be the walking, talking embodiment of cocaine. everything about him screams 'awful choices' rather than 'let's do a few bumps and party our asses off'. the mohawk that has little regard for his receding hairline? tattoos that rival only travis barker in their late-90's iconography? the fact that he chose 'shifty shellshock' for a name? baldwin, you're fucked. if you really feel the need to enter rehab a year after sobriety -- if that's how insecure you currently feel in your own recovery -- mark my words, by the end of this program's 'season', you will be smoking rocks in some hidden nook of the pasadena recovery center with a man who looks like 1997 took a huge, leathery, nu-rap dump into a pair of jnco's.

i won't waste your time with more personal attacks on this show's participants because i do truly believe that at least a few of 'em could benefit from some sort of treatment. like jeff conaway, who seriously almost scared me straightedge last week. ugh, chills. anyway, it's just a shame that renfro's just pretty much been a side note since he peaked at age 14 or whatever. i guess the injustice of the horrible things that we do to ourselves is sinking in, when i think about how i can never look forward to another renfro episode of law and order (you know dick wolf loves to recycle those character actors), yet i WILL have to tolerate the release of another crazytown album. in conclusion, kids, for the sake of renfro stay off of heroin. and if you think you might have the desire and motivation to pen lyrics such as 'come and dance with me, the smartest thing you ever did was take a chance with me' and cover your body like head to fucking toe with sick tribes...stay off coke.

weekend viewing

predator 2: last week i was in chicago for an archaeology conference, which was pretty awesome. the first night i was in town, i sat down at a random table of archaeologists and found one to be familiar. turns out we had a latin class together like five years ago, and i'm still impressed that i remembered him because that 8 am course, taken during my final semester of college, was embarrassingly punctuated by many a trip to the bathroom to puke as i was kind of in a party zone. anyway, this former classmate of mine reminded me of a sight that i rather enjoyed while i was an undergdrad. there was this girl, i never spoke to her, never knew her name, but she was awesome becuase her hairstyle can only be described as predator dreads.

so, yeah, yesterday i saw this was coming on so i watched it. for little more than the above association. i really don't have anything new to add to predator thought, i guess. danny glover danny glover danny glover.

squirm: this 1976 flick is AMAZING. big-city dude goes to visit his girlfriend in her sleep southern town, only to find that the whole place is infested with carniverous worms. this movie was clearly a huge influence for the decade-later bigger budget kevin bacon vehicle TREMORS; and i love me some tremors. anything that helped that movie get born is deserving of my love. it also lent quite a bit to arachnaphobia; lots of foul shower scenes. and a classic 'hick' who the worms cannot take down, but they do gnaw through his face, and when he rises up to 'get' people like a still-living zombie, the only thing he'd say is 'now YOU gonna be a worm-face!' i mean this had potential to be at least mildly, mildly disturbing but someone decided that, nope, that was not to be the tone of squirm. kudos. like, for real.

2008 should be epic...

...and this is how i know. when i awoke and turned on the tv, the first thing that came on was indeed terminator 2 and it had just started. immediately after that i realized that my thesis show is not even two months away, so this means some 'limits' being put in place. until now, grad school was, among other things, a pretty good justification for what most might call low-grade functional alcoholism. not so anymore! until this shit goes up on FEBRUARY 26, i will be largely laying low. today i broke it to my grad-school drinking pal that this was the case. he was crushed, of course -- who wouldn't be, i'm fun as shit -- but what can ya do. anyhow, yeah, thesis show coming up. i will be posting various deets of this as it approaches. come and buy my shit!

terminator 2: burning questions

ok, in 'terminator 2', it is indicated that in the future, both the risen machines and the revolutionaries have access to the sort of time-travel technology that makes it possible to send a terminator back in time. so refined is this technology that at least one side is able to send a force back to a very specific time -- hence, two opposing, and naked, terminators being birthed from lightining-spheres in random spots in LA at the exact same time. great. i get it.

i know what follows would render the need to make terminator 2 pretty pointless, which would be awful. but still...why not just send one terminator just a little further back in time? this is the obvious comment that will inevitably come up, and yeah, sure. why not? or is that just a waste of a terminator? if john connor only needs protection from, like, bobby budnik and being influenced to smoke weed because he's listening to too much GnR, i guess he can handle that on his own?...so, yeah, if someone's not specifically trying to kill him, this might suggest that yep, arnold's a waste of space. on the flipside, however, why would melted-metal terminator not just go a little further back in time?

what i gleaned from this, then, after much thought, is as follows: the revolutionaries, in the future, will clearly have a better grasp of time travel. not so much perhaps, of cyborgenics (or whatever), but SHIT, if you can time travel, and do so more accurately than a robot that's trying to kill you...you MUST have a leg up. somehow.

i haven't seen t3; frankly, i am hesitant because i know t2 can't be topped, and i don't want to ruin this solid run for myself. i first saw the original terminator when i was 4, and i'm pretty sure that's the reason why i'm an insomniac to this day. i am disclaiming because i really am curious if and how time travel is addressed in post-t2 sequels/fanfic/etc. anyway, time travel inconsistencies aside, holy SHIT i am glad this movie exists. it definitley cuts me to the core.

CHRONIC NIGHTMARES THE ZINE

people who know me will argue that i loved the 90's more than most. a few weeks ago, roomie dan managed to dredge up a vhs that features a greatest live performances episode of my old staple, mtv's 120 minutes. while there was a lot of pointing and laughing at the tv set -- i mean, everyone looked soooo bad in like 1994 or whatever -- the tables eventually turned when other roomie stacie called me out on being 'frozen in time' and totally dressing like one of the girls in luscious jackson. ok, fair enough. true. although i could largely give a shit, one aesthetic i never, ever wanted to hit was the classic, old navy swathed, baggy-panted, mousy-haired, sort-of-looking-like-a-hippie-but-not-really TURD. i remember kara warning me about this a few years ago, and the warning stemmed from her admonishing me for dressing all 90's. i have to accept the facts. i look like an extra from 'airheads'. at BEST.

getting back to the roots that i apparently can't leave behind, i decided to resurrect a hobby that was semi-entrenched in 90's culture. i am launching a zine. when i was a freshman in high school, my older sister created one herself that was called the singlet. it proliferated throughout the lehigh valley and our town in jersey, and it was awesome. my own contributions were usually dumb drawings of crying punks or anything with lots of blood and for some reason i made a dumb fake russian comic strip for a while. not sure what that was all about in retrospect, but at any rate, i really liked doing that shit!

anyway, i just finished laying out and photocopying the first issue of CHRONIC NIGHTMARES today. each issue, i've decided, will be a single short story, fiction or nonfiction, whatever. the first issue is titled 'the hair' and, um, let's just say that it might hold the interest of anyone who has a zit-popping fetish. anyone else who reads it might puke, but hey, it's free! i'll probably be distributing it at a few bars, venues, etc....ideally, places where semi-literary degenerates hang out. i will also be posting the content on this blog so anyone who is NOT a degenerate can have access to the fruits of my imagination, as well. obviously, feedback will be very welcome, even if your 'feedback' consists of shaking me like a baby and yelling 'GET A GRIP, IT'S 2007.' that's cool, i guess.

the creep

looking at old photos today and found this one, taken last summer when italy won the world cup. i was in pompeii working at the time, and for a small town that place when totally apeshit. it was awesome. the picture above really si pretty indicative of the general vibe, which is to say it's like the gates of hell themselves opened up, but, like, FUN hell, not bad hell. there was a town-sanctioned rave complete with giant speakers blasting some techno remix of 'we are the champions'; there were fires and motorcycles and feral dogs everywhere. one of my coworkers, in a drunken celebratory frenzy, hopped on the back of a fruit truck that had been re-assigned to the role of PARTY TRUCK and had to find his way back to pomeii from some other town. there was a guy giving away free hotdogs; there was a girl passing around a bottle of sardinian fire water, which kind of made me want to die but, you know, WHEN IN ROME. or something. anyway, there were actually two kinda of bad-hell things that happened that night, but neither had permanent repercussions. the first, shockingly, involved fireworks. anyone who's been to southern italy knows of the local penchant for explosives; this night was like a motherfucking showcase. upon leaving the bar where we watched the game that night, my pal aims and i walked right into an in-session firework party, which consisted of a senile man lighting shit and throwing them backwards over his shoulder. i took one to the back, whicvh was more starling than anything, although it did toast my shirt a bit. whatever. aims, however, took one to the FACE, and it could habe been gnarly but it totally wasn't! after she recovered we all made sure she got an extra hit of that sardinian firewater and then we partook in aforementioned rave, where i then got pinned down by a group of four 16-year-old italian lads, two of whom licked my face. normally, i'd be all about this sort of young-man-ness, but these kids were pretty rough. anyway, i wriggled out of their slimy hands, and when i got home i found that one of them had unzipped my pants! i mean, i was pretty wasted, so i guess the possibility remains that i just forgot to zip after pissing in an alley, but i gotta save face, ya know?

anyway: being in winning world cup country when world cup is won: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. yep.

when i turned rotten

talkin' bout shaving...a little while ago during a semi-serious beer-drinking session, the conversation turned to middle school awkwardness and typical female rites of passage, such as shaving one's legs for the first time. i remember this particular event very clearly because it was minorly traumatic. it was the summer before fifth grade, and i secured a manual razor and hit the showers. pretty much the first thing i did was slice the shit out of my knees -- both knees. shaving wounds being so superficial that you often don't even feel them still bleed a lot, though, and when i was ten, this accident was the first i'd had involving water and blood. of course i thought my injuries were, like, infinitely worse than they actually were; the water helped turn the shower into a scene out of carrie and the fact that i felt no pain was really distressing, since i could only assume that i must have inflicted such intense nerve damage upon myself that i had lost all below-the-knee sensitivity. after my mom assured me that, no, an entire vein had NOT fallen out of my leg, i began to chill the fuck out. something had changed, though. maybe i can chalk that moment up to the very instance that i became my own biggest problem, the most unintentionally destructive thing in my life; maybe there's something to be said for shedding a little blood being a metaphor for loss of innocence. whatever the case, after that moment, not only did i think i was tough for some reason -- i also thought i was a total badass who knew that the world was a bloody, godless, scary place. yeeaaaahhhh.

anyway, summer carried on and my knee wounds began to heal. i also got better at shaving. on one memorable evening, as i was still rocking some crucial scabs, my older sister and i accompanied our mom to a bible school recital in which our younger sister was performing. because of my preadoloescent crisis of faith very shortly before this event, church was probably not the greatest place for me to be. the older sis and i parted from the herd and made our way to the choir loft, where we were gloriously the only spectators. we had a great view of the church, for sure; down on the altar, we could see the twenty or so kids in the first-grade vbs class, with our baby sis front and center, the tallest kid in her age bracket by a foot. i can't emphasize enough how freakishly large she was compared to the other kids; she was easily a focal point, and this fact we exploited. when she was little, she would do anything we encouraged; in this case, she chose to imitate various obscene gestures we directed her way from the balcony, where we remained invisible to the audience. somewhere in the video archives of suburban new jersey home movies, i like to think that some parent has a tape of a tall, gangly kid breaking the choreography of her scheduled bible school performance to flip off some unseen hecklers and snarl and gesture through the entire performance.

the closest i've ever come to an abusive relationship.

about a month ago, my roommate dan turned me on to some life-altering tv: RAMSAY'S KITCHEN NIGHTMARES. i've never really cared for shows of the culinary ilk because i hate to cook. however, i will make an exception for this guy. he's captivating and utterly unnatural -- dan and i always chuckle over the gratuitous 'gordon-changing-into-chef-costume' scene, in which the viewer is treated to a quick peep at the wildman's furious torso, and it really serves to show that although his craggy face may look 50, his body can still KICK YOUR ASS. weirdly, though, i recently found out that gordo's only like 38. 38! all of those crags, at 38! that's what plugging lines of coke cut with pure testosterone will do to your face, i guess.

anyway, anything this guy does now, i'm there. a new, not-so-secret fantasy of mine is that maybe one day he can be my life coach and, you know...'scare me straight', or something. getting screamed at by an insane bristish dude is not something i ever thought i'd really want out of life, but man, how i would love for him to pop my eardrums with some well-directed cussing and get little flecks of hot spit on my face and maybe even bust a tiny vein in his eyeball, only to calm down and take me on a walk through some sort of courtyard and apologize more convincingly than ike turner. i'll be the first to admit that i feel kind of weird when i think about how much i love gordon ramsay, especially when he represents so many things i should despise, but i think i might have what it takes to be his personal assistant. i kind of think that he's too tough to actually have one, but i ever hear he's in the market for that sort of thing, i plan to preemptively go on anti-anxiety meds and try my damndest to get him to pick me!

vitamin water is for douchebags.

i'm currently pounding a giant jog of 'power-c'-flavored vitamin water and i took a moment to read the quirky text on the side of the label. it's sort of like the advertising, printed media equivalent of, say, people who constantly -- and often awkwardly, to me - proclaim their own awesomeness 'just because they're awesome.' there's a song for people like that ('this is why i'm hot', which, aside from that association, is pop genius), and that makes sense, but a soft drink, too? jesus. anyway, the write-up on the label contains a michael jackson refernce for some reason, and it's not really thoughful or creative so much as off-putting. sometimes i see something on the news, something horrible or violent or tragic, that makes me think 'what the fuck kinda world do we live in?' this has a similar effect, for some reason.

soft tissue

I didn't bother to fix the semi-shitty image above, but it's a detail of a wall piece I have up at a show at Project 4 now until April 21. It's a conglomerate of things that are supposed to be like demoid cysts, which are mutated ovary cells, or something -- I've heard that the outer layer of an egg cell is the area responsible for the development of skin, teeth, hair, and nails, so when that shit mutates and goes haywire -- when it tries to turn into a spermless baby -- the dermoid cyst is the result. When I was in high school, one of my teachers took some time off to get a tumor removed, and when she came back to school it somehow got out that it was one of these, and really large. Chock full of hair and teeth, this thing grew inside of this really sweet lady for, what, like years probably. The human body's weird enough without anything going 'wrong', but stuff like this blows my mind. I know places like the Mutter Museum in Philly have a preservative bent, and historically we've been capable of maintaining soft tissue samples for thousands of years, but let's get honest -- I can never get close enough, what with the 'glass vitrines' and 'museum rules' standing in my way. Although it might make me puke, I want to handle this stuff, pick it up, maybe even cut it up. At least when I make this shit out of clay I can pretend it's real for a minute.

On the living-vicariously tip, though, there's a great special on Discovery Health now that is about a young boy from Pakistan (I think) who was born with a fully-enclosed parasitic twin. Unlike the cases where, say, a baby is born with an extra set of legs jutting out of its torso, this kid went undiagnosed for years because he just looked like a pregnant baby. That's fucked-up imagery I guess, but anyway, he underwent surgery and this monster was pulled out of his thoracic cavity. The best part of the show, by FAR, was when they brought in a pathologist and set up a sterile lab for her and she did a step-by-step autopsy of the parasitic twin. She fully cut it in half and everything. I think it's safe to say that I have the extreme desire to jump inside the TV on a daily basis. Sad but true, sad but true...however, this moment was probably the most intensely I have ever felt this totally first-world emotion. What a moment.

Fungus on a tree.

CSI:NY sucking yet again

Last season, Law and Order: Criminal Intent boasted a fine, fine supporting cast for a really twisted episode involving some maladjusted cousins who shared a penchant for rape and torture. The cousins were played by childhood-star-cum-junkie Brad Renfroe, and Ethan Embry, who was so delightfully fat he wasn't even recognizable (no, really, he carries it well). This was a brutal, brutal episode, and once again I need to applaud the Law and Order franchise for really indoctrinating a rather common practice in television character acting today -- utilizing 'washed up' stars of yesteryear in one final sweet, desperate act of NON typecasting. Even one who is not a Law and Order superfan might recall the use of, say, Christine Elise (aka Emily Valentine from NINER and Harper Tracey from ER) or Big Pete from the Adventures of Pete and Pete or, well, whoever from whatever. Point is, Dick Wolf and Co. have been doing this for years, and, like nearly every practice the franchise pioneers, they do it well. Seriously, mad props to the casting directors.

This week it came to my attention that Edward Furlong (formerly Eddie Furlong of T2 fame) was a guest star on a recent episode of CSI:NY. I didn't see the episode in question -- I mean, I despise the show and everything it represents, barring entertainment value -- but it didf make me shake my head in dissappointment, as usual. Whgen will Bruckheimer get it? 'Anything you can do, Dick Wolf, I can do better,' he taunts, but really, nothing he produces within the CSI franchise will ever hold a candle to the Wolf empire, and this has little to do with forgettable leads. Oh, wait...well, anyway, Eddie Furlong: That dude was fucking HUGE back in the day. Like, EPIC. Maybe he needs work nowadays, that's cool, but Law and Order is not distracting in its character actors precisely because they never opt for those whose careers REALLY took a tumble. Or a dive. Once again, Bruckheimer's that dude who shows up to a party with all this coke when all you wanna do is drink a beer and watch Survivorman.

And yeah, I do watch TV at parties.