I love Solarsisters' Instagram: a vehicle for posts of these austere illustrations, photos, watercolors (many of which are printed on t-shirts for sale) that are perfectly simple and flawed -- like drawings by 8 year-olds (if 8 year-olds could channel the adult sensations of longing and sadness and ennui).
Of the three I posted here, the one with the woman + glass of wine is the only one with a title: Yeah girl me too. Yup. I feel that. In fact, I feel all three. Nice work, lady.
Dust Piggies is a collection of silly comics by Mike Bromage about hamsters doing and saying funny things. (Or are they enacting "a deep and searching exploration of the hamster psyche in contemporary culture" as Bromage says on his About page? Hehe. But, seriously. Tao Lin has a thing with hamsters, too, so. Yeah. Who knows.)
Anyhow, I put a couple of my Dust Piggy favorites below. Please see (and purchase!) more of these comics on the Dust Piggies website or Facebook page. Hop to it!
PS: Mike Bromage also paints art that could, you know, hang in a gallery. So, once you are done chuckling at the hamsters, I suggest you can check that out, too. I recommend his bird series.
Josh Mecouch is the illustrator/writer of Formal Sweatpants, a hilarious comic feed. I particularly lol'd at the content I discovered in his Illustrated Twitter accounts Tumblr, which is a collection of illustrations based on people's funnyweirdass Tweets. Here are a few of my faves. Please go see more of them.
Hunter lives in Florida. He seems to have a lot of fun making silly images in MS paint, labeling holes in the ground, taping plants to things, and the like in his realm of palm tree-ed concrete Peninsula suburbansprawl. Because I kept laughing out loud while looking through his site, I decided to put a few of his images up here.
You can see more at his website on which you can also buy prints. Enjoy!
Look out, ladies. Among the things Handsome Dick Manitoba claims to be able to do faster and louder: talk, eat, screw, mow the lawn, walk the dog, and so much more!
Lately, I’ve had the feels. They’re like happiness-draining remoras that suck my life meter into the red zone. To combat this, I stuff my brain with content (movies, books, articles, Twitter, TV).
Consuming this content one Sunday, I read Calvino’s Invisible Cities the same day I watched the Parts Unknown episode in which Anthony Bourdain goes to Sicily and has a breakdown because some man on a boat tossed stunt octopi into the water above his head while he was supposed to be snorkeling for live octopi, which he was supposed to be eating for dinner that night. Apparently, these dead cephalopods caused him to slide into a “hysterical depression.”
“Is this what it's come to,” he asked, “back in the same country almost a decade later, and I'm still desperately staging fishing scenes?"
Okay, so. If you don’t know this already, Anthony Bourdain has probably the best life ever.
He gets paid a ton of money to eat, drink, and travel to hundreds of cities around the world, ad infinitum. Beautiful, intriguing, mysterious, dangerous, austere, ancient, charming, bustling, urban, rural cities. American, Chinese, Canadian, Colombian, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Peruvian, Chilean, Mexican, Argentinian cities. And though he does the same five things on every show (eat, drink, fish, walk around, talk to people) in every city, I’ve watched him go to every single one. Because I am obsessed with cities (every city I go to I daydream about living in) – their history, their aura, their varieties of cultures and people and architecture. Maybe I love cities for the same reason I ingest so much content: an inundation of details and experiences can tamp down the feels.
In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo recounts his travels of 55 cities to an aging Kublai Khan. Similar to watching Parts Unknown, reading Invisible Cities is like travel porn for the restless. It’s intensely satisfying to read Polo describe dozens of distinct and wonderful cities to the great Khan – for instance: Laudomia where inhabitants “frequent the house of the unborn to interrogate them,” or Octavia, “the spider-web city … [hanging] over the void.”
Though Polo and Khan speak as if Kublai Khan has conquered all of these cities, Polo mentions so many of them – including modern-day cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles) – that (we realize) he’s not exactly describing only the cities in Khan’s empire, but cities, generally (real, imagined, and dreamed) and the ways that cities as corollaries of human life grow and die and morph into unrecognizable versions of their former selves even as those selves refuse to recognize the change because of nostalgia or fear or lack of self-knowledge.
Another thing happens while Polo describes these myriad beguiling, oddball, distinct, wonderful cities: they meld in the mind into one soup of City. They become the city of Trude, whose inhabitants say to Polo:
“You can resume your flight wherever you like," they say to me [in Trude], "but you will arrive at another Trude … The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.”
Trude, soup of City. Now, that’s a weird nightmare.
Kind of like the weird nightmare of eating exquisite cheese after exquisite cheese (always with a breathtaking view in the background) after finding meat on sticks after meat on sticks after meat on sticks from streetcart after streetcart after streetcart after getting hangover after hangover after hangover from expensive pinot noir after expensive pinot noir after filming fishing scene after fishing scene after fishing scene for dead fish after dead fish (as the stooge for the Food Network, now CNN).
“I may look normal,” says A. Bourdain at the end of the Siciliy episode, “but I'm not barking uncontrollably or running around shrieking with my pants wrapped around my head. Which is what my instincts tell me I should be doing."
Yup. Humans are cray. We break down for no apparent reason – sometimes not in spite of abundance, but because of it. Even the Great Khan is not immune. At one point while listening to the fecund details of his empire, he breaks down with:
“a sense of emptiness … a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble … the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.”
Emptiness. Desperation. Dissatisfaction. Breakdowns. Dead fish. Exquisite cheese. Too many people on this earth making us feel insignificant. Fecundity of detail. What are we to do?
*looks around for answer … continues to look with obsessive concentration … keeps looking … looks into the sky … looks in books … looks under cat … looks under the couch … looks under fingernails ... gets distracted by fingernails; cleans them … forgets what she's looking for ... grabs a beer … sits down with friend to watch Anthony Bourdain visit Paris ... dreams about living there.*
Here is a Monday roundup of some collective nouns for groups of people:
More collective nouns pending inclusion. Thank-you.
quetzalcoatl_toxtli_atl's Instagram feed is full of these posts of photographs layered with groovy universe-scapes, portraits, patterns, and other beautiful images. From Googling #sanjoseblackberet, I discovered that this image seems to be commemorating a sunrise ceremony and walk for peace and solidarity in San Jose, CA, where the walkers ended up at the Mexican Heritage Plaza to observe a pipe ceremony and Mexica (Aztec) dance.
Because I'm an outsider, culturally, I can't and won't comment on the message of quetzalcoatl_toxtli_atl's pieces. I will, however, comment that these pieces are lovely and haunting and mysterious. Don't you agree?
Among other things, Paul Rizza writes poetry on top of jpgs of art masterpieces you learned about in art history class. On the first one I posted (René Magritte's Golconda), Rizza writes about slipping through the sidewalk into a secret place underground, which I'm almost positive is something every little kid sort of thought about when trying not to "step on cracks." Or was that just me? Anyway, it's beautiful and I love it.
The second one written over Degas's L'Etoile is about accepting yourself as you are with all of your beautiful flaws because you are a beautiful ballerina princess dancing for all the world to see with a cute crooked snaggle tooth that is cute, damnit, and if anyone disagrees about that then, well, they can go fuck themselves! Tra-la-la-da-dee.
Want to see more? Go to his Tumblr.
noclip through the pavement
something just snaps in physics
there is an open world underneath
falling unimpeded toward some
secret place under the ground
inaccessible by conventional means
but miss it by an inch and continue on
dropping to the furious molten core
the nice thing about embracing narcissism:
the flaws you have become assets
as your standard of beauty resembles
more and more your reflection
a single crooked tooth
not only stops being bad,
it’s actually quite cute; don’t you think?
the ideal crooked tooth: mandibular central incisor
mine’s on my right but either’s okay
RT if you’d go gay for yourself
Dawn Black makes these evocative collage paintings. In this one, someone wearing one of those creepy red Spanish inquisition hoods holds what looks like a California king snake over the shoulders of a bejeweled soldier to whom a young man who looks like a slave from ancient Rome tips a stag head.
In medieval folklore/allegory, stags and snakes are enemies. Says the Medieval Bestiary, "When the stag discovers a snake, it spits water into the hole where the snake hides, draws the snake out with its breath, and tramples it to death. If the stag is ill or old, it draws the snake out of hiding and swallows it. The stag then finds water and drinks large amounts of it to overcome the poison, and is renewed. When the stag is renewed it sheds its horns. Some say that the stag cures its ills by eating crabs it finds in the water."
Allegorically, the stag is supposed to represent Christ who is renewed (and renews others) when he and they shed their horns (e.g. sins) after drinking water. And eating crabs. I hope that's what is going to happen here, but one cannot be too sure. Hm. many thoughts. much inquisition. wow. such snake. peligro gallows. so crabs.
You know when you read something and you're like Oh-eM-Gee I totally feel this? Well, that's how I felt reading this excerpt from New Tab, which I found here. I am now going to go buy the thing.
Anywho, I Snagit-ed this excerpt from the excerpt I found online because this Snagit-ed excerpt particularly stuck to my ribs. Some people call it the feels, some call it existential despair, Louis C.K. calls it that forever empty. This character calls it reality (reality that is "inside every raccoon," hehe). But, seriously. The feels, man. Not cool. At least the character understands? This is why I love fiction.
So, here's the excerpt. Please also buy the book, thank-you.
I like Jacob Canfield of Hoob Han's comic, "i woke up with laser eyes." The comic is chock full of anxiety and humor -- a mix of bad dreams and lack of sleep and the absurdity of paying tens of thou to live in a dorm room with strangers and read Machiavelli and Proust and the like for four years while worrying about how much dealing with the real world is going to suck (spoiler: it does). Interestingly, "I woke up with laser eyes" is just one of many comics Canfield's written about waking up with laser eyes.
Though "I woke up with laser eyes" is drawn with lasers that look like lasers, the other laser-eye-themed illustration's lasers are drawn like shards of wood coming out of the characters' eye sockets. This theme disturbed and interested me, so Interneted a psycho-analysis for what lasers + eyes mean in dreams. I found out that, apparently:
So, there you have it? Dreams of laser eyes = clarity and truth + uncertainty and choices + refusal and truth + deep pain and conflicts. Yes. Thas deep. Lots of truths in there. Thanks, Internet.
Please visit Hoob Han's site to see more of his comics. If you cringe easily, avoid Samantha Back 2011. Or, don't avoid it? It may be good for your truth + uncertainty + refusal issues, or whatever.
While romping through the Instagrams as I do, I found Wayne Chisnall's cute little monster illustrations and sculptures. When I clicked into his site, I found something much different: this incredibly evocative (uncomfortable?) series of paintings Chisnall is creating for new horror film, Blaze of Gory. This beautiful composition of a skull lined with maps is, apparently, #9.
So what is Blaze of Gory, you ask? In Chisnall's words, Blaze of Gory is a series of: “short films ... based on the writings of a teenage girl called Blaize-Alix Szanto, who wrote these stories between the ages of 12 and 15 ... The section that [he's] been asked to produce the work for is called "Monster" and is about a young girl locked away in a high-security mental hospital for a series of brutal crimes."
He uses autopsy photos to help himself create these paintings ("always a pleasant way to spend a relaxing Sunday!"). You don't say ... Yowza. Anyhow, you can check out these gory, vivid, spooky paintings on his portfolio. Good luck! (Enjoy?)
In this piece Jim Rugg created for UDON's Street Fighter Tribute book (a book full of hundreds of illustrations of Street Fighter characters), a pop art-styled Ryu is beating down a shirtless Street Fighter character I don't recognize. While doing so, he's making that sound that's like: adoooeuukehh, addoouookehh! (Eh? Know what I mean?)
If you like this piece, chyeckkk out Rugg's other work, which includes comic books and zines and stuff. (Disclaimer: depending on the workspace's prudity scale, site possibly NSFW.) Have fun!
Most surf bands were huge phonies (NOT DICK DALE, NEVER, EVER, SO SHUT YOUR DAMN MOUTH!), but land-locked groups like The Astronauts (Colorado) and The Trashmen (Minnesota) took it to a new level. Aww hell, who am I to tell these boys they can't have a surf party? Perhaps the TRUE surf party is in the mind of the partier—as long as the mind has cleared out all distractions, all music theory, and all non-party desires, surfness can take one over completely, an endless summer of lapping waves from womb-to-tomb / birth-to-earth / sperm-to-worm, etc.
In honor of Andrew Lau's great essay on the recent Miles Davis @ the Fillmore release (from his set of concerts in 1970), here's a Miles tune from that collection paired with a tasty Grateful Dead Fillmore jam from 1969.
This past March, Sony/Legacy released Miles At The Fillmore, a four CD set of Miles Davis’s run of shows at the Fillmore East from June 17 – 20th, 1970 and three songs from a Fillmore West show on April 11th of that same year. In the blur of our hyper-reactionary, oversaturated musical culture, this release has been quickly passed over. That’s a shame. Let’s explore its significance.
The seeds of the performances on At the Fillmore (and their residual historical value) date back to Davis’s 1965 record, E.S.P., which started moving Davis’s music subtly into new territory until he really started raising eyebrows with the release of In A Silent Way (1969) that put electric instruments (guitar and piano) at the forefront of his music.
Then came the watershed moment with Bitches Brew in April of 1970. With its long tracks (only six titles spread across two albums), multiple instrumentalists (two bassist, three drummers, a percussionist) and Davis’s own aggressive playing, Bitches Brew scared and angered the jazz cognoscenti who lambasted him in the press as a sellout. Worse still, they thought, Bitches Brew showed Davis was moving into the much maligned Free Jazz movement. None of this was true. However, for all the people the record isolated, it gained perhaps as many new coverts.
Anyone who knew about the trumpeter’s absolute contempt for being pigeonholed shouldn’t have been surprised at this shift in direction. Additionally, he had been playing some of this material live a good year before the record’s release. Yet, it’s often difficult for fans and critics of any genre to wrap their heads around a new direction. And, for some reason, jazz fans (be them purists or critics) have been known to be unusually reluctant to adapt.
At the same time Davis was moving his jazz further, the genre itself was quickly losing popularity to rock. No one was wiser to this than Davis. Through the mid 60’s, his “second great quintet” was part of the jazz vanguard mixing minimalism and modal concepts (instead of chord progressions). Though they were one of the greatest of the era, they played to ever-dwindling paying customers as the decade wore on.
So, of all the 20th Century jazz musicians, who better than Miles Davis to investigate rock instead of ignoring it—to shrewdly react with instead of against? Under the influence of his soon-to-be second wife, Betty Mabry (who would also release three fantastic funk LPs as Betty Davis), Miles turned his attention to rock and funk bands. He soaked up their ideas and fed these new influences into his own craft to create a completely new form of jazz, which is often referred to as Fusion or Jazz Rock. Bitches Brew was the result.
While a majority of the intelligentsia was thoroughly unimpressed, the kids loved it. His label, Columbia Records, quickly geared the marketing plan toward this new audience and took out advertisements for the LP in Rolling Stone as well as the jazz bible, Down Beat. Instead of playing clubs, Davis was to appear at festivals and venues normally frequented by rock bands.
Which brings us to how Davis came to play the Fillmores. Bill Graham, proprietor of both Fillmores, liked to mix genre on his bills—give the kids some vegetables before dessert (in this case Davis shared the bill with Laura Nyro for the June Fillmore East dates and Grateful Dead and Stone the Crows for the April Fillmore West gigs). These shows were likely the bands’ fans first live exposure to Davis. Many in attendance thought Davis would serenade them with the cool jazz their parents listened to. Far from it. The combined effect of rock and funk along with Davis’s love for modern classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen created music far from that heard on, say, his seminal 1959 album, Kind Of Blue.
Davis’s band at this point was made up of Dave Holland playing bass, Steve Grossman handling horn duties, Jack DeJohnette drumming, and Airto Moreira fooling around with exotic percussion. Add to this mix two keyboardists: Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, both of whom were filling the gaps with amazingly adroit tapestries. Corea invented brilliant textures by using a ring modulator, which turned his notes into electronic noise. Each night these men played almost the same set without breaking between songs (each night sounding different from the other as per the usual non-structure of improvised music). The show was one giant blanket of sound falling over the dumbfounded heads of all those in attendance. It was the future.
Yes sir, them dirty, stinking hippies ate it up; a rapturous applause followed each show and, in the case of the Grateful Dead, headlining bands shit their pants (not literally) having been put in the amazingly unlikely position of following the legendary musician. As Dead bassist Phil Lesh would later remember:
“As I listened, leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape trying to comprehend the forces that Miles was unleashing onstage, I was thinking: ‘What’s the use? How can we possibly play after this? We should go home and try to digest this unbelievable shit.’ With this band, Miles literally invented fusion music. Of all of us, only Jerry [Garcia] had the nerve to go back and meet Miles [who] was surprised and delighted to know we knew and loved his music; apparently other rockers he’d shared the stage with didn’t know or care.”
Originally, the tapes of these four shows were taken into the studio and heavily edited by Davis’s longtime producer, Teo Macero, and released as a single LP: At the Fillmore in December. Now, over forty years later, At the Fillmore gives another example of Davis’ already immense musical stature.
Because we have the luxury of hindsight, we can see that Davis quickly moved on even from these groundbreaking shows. In fact, they were fairly benign in comparison to what he had coming in down the pike. Yet, the importance of Miles At The Fillmore cannot be understated; this is a fantastic document of changing times, the sound of a line drawn in the sand.
For most musicians, iconoclastic creative achievements are a lucky ending point to a career. For Miles Davis, it was just another beginning in a career of many beginnings. During the next five years (until his brief retirement from 1976-1981), Miles pushed his music and challenged those willing to listen. He revolved musicians in and out of the band, looked for fresh talent, and experimented with different instrumentations (including drum machines by 1973). He stretched his music into ropes of experimental wonder until it was no longer jazz, but simply Miles Davis music. For those willing to follow him on this new journey, the sky was the limit.
Not all were willing. This crowd included an elderly gentleman who strolled by one afternoon while the trumpeter sat on the steps of his New York City apartment building on West 77th Street.
The elderly man stopped him: “Miles Davis, you’re my man!” he exclaimed. “But this new shit you’re into, I just can’t get with it.”
Miles Davis turned to him: “Should I wait for you, motherfucker?”
I like this spinning gif made by Ukrainian artist Yuriy MiRon. It's like the Bowser Boss's circle of hell -- the level where villains must turn and turn and turn and turn around and around again and again for all eternity. Will teach a dude not to mess with Mario, if you ask me.
See more of MiRon's spinning (and still) creations here. It's particularly fun to open up the archive and look at all of the thumbnails movin' and groovin' at the same time.
I found this image, "with a voice like sand and glue" in the #thedanceof1000faces hashtag of David Shillinglaw's Instagram (@davidshillinglaw). It's like a Basquiat tribal mask worn by a dancer on a holiday to celebrate the dead. (Maybe?) I like that there's a piece in the upper-right corner that looks like his exposed brain. I also like that it looks like teeny crows walked tear drops near one of the face's three eyes. Very cool. Go to cargocollective.com or his Instagram to see more of his work.
When driving through America, I like to look at the houses next to the highway. Some are pre-fab, most have chain-link fences or no fences. There are usually a lot of cars out front, which makes me think people are home. Why are they out here so far? I think of a handle of vodka or rum. Do they get the Internet? Oh. That house has a black lab sitting on the porch. I kinda envy their view of the mountains. How much are they are paying to live there: $100/month? $250? Do they own the land? There's so, so, so, so, so, so much land. It's covered in blonde grass. There are deer with little white butts and tails. Beautiful little deer. "Hey, did you see the deer?" I ask.
---
Because of puddles after hail, our car fishtailed and turned a 360 going diagonally across the freeway. We were going 75. There were no cars around. We did not flip. The cops were pretty nice. We fucked up our bumper, but drove away. My back hurts a little. But, it always hurts a little.
