Mitt Romney? Seriously? “I’m sexy and I know it”? Seriously?

I’m glancing at the newspapers (various shades of bias) as I wait for my bagel. The deli has the radio on. I’m waiting for Brett (drummer, Virginia Is For Hoverers 1 & 2) to pick me up and take me to the studio. Cold diarreah falls from the sky. It’s nasty out. My laundry is tumbling in the laundromat next door. Lately, I run around New York nonstop, working, playing cafes, playing open mics, working on the Dirty Girls album, meeting people, “networking”. Mixing. Doing laundry when possible. Working out or at least playing on my phone at the gym. I only spend three nights, on average, sleeping at home. I’m wondering who will win the race: reason and progress or stagnation and bad politics? Beautiful new music or vapid, thoughtless jingles? Brett or my laundry?

My favorite artist in the Universe is a guy named Jim Woodring.

So, my mom gave me this comic book called Frank.  This was like, five years ago.  Paperface was hopeful and ready for Imminent Rockstardom (read: naive little bastards) and piled in a van leaving for California when she handed it to me.  She had happened upon it at a used book store (my mom is very big on used book stores) and apparently she thought it looked weird enough to be something I would like.  And I read it, and I was very confused and annoyed.  But then I read it again, and again, and probably fifteen more times by the time the van rolled into Los Angeles.  Ever since, I’ve been clinically addicted to Frank.  I’ve had to re-buy Frank collections many times because I’m constantly peddling the drug.  Check out this sample.

Anyway, Mr. Woodring is from Seattle and I wrote him a letter.  I wanted to get his mailing address, so my friend and I looked him up in a Seattle phone book.  I didn’t think it would actually be him…I’m not sure exactly what we expected to happen, actually.  But anyway, it was him.  I called Jim Woodring’s home phone, and here’s how the conversation went to the best of my memory (I’m not making this up):

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Mr. Woodring?”

“You….you fucking, little retard.  FUCK YOU.”

“Oh, sorry to bother you, I was trying to find your mailing-…”

“OH.  Oh!  I’m sorry, I thought you were my son.”

“…”

“He and I enjoy being rude to one other!”

Anyway, I mailed my letter, and he sent me a really nice letter back (needlessly apologizing for calling me a fucking retard), and included a pencil drawing of my soul!

Recently I played a gig in Seattle, and it was right near Woodring‘s comic shop!  I went in, and asked if they had any Woodring stuff, and the guy behind the counter got excited and said, “You know Jim comes in here all the time, don’t you?” And then he proceeded to re-enact Woodring‘s apparently consistent pathway through the store, narrating as he went.  Then he showed me his extensive Frank collection and I spent my last sixty dollars in cash.

Wodring.  Frank.  Jim.  This is pure truth, folks, but nicely wrapped in an knee-slapping, mind-massaging, pretty package.  It’s like peering at the fabric of reality through the disembodied eyes of Bugs Bunny.  Highly, highly recommended.

So I often tell people this: the first time I heard some of my favorite bands/artists, I hated them.  I hated OK Computer by Radiohead when I first heard it.  I only listened for a second and third time because my friend Wes swore by it and I felt stupid that I didn’t get it.  Well, that, and I could hear something there.  But it didn’t make much sense.  Now when I hear that album, it’s hard for me to understand that there was ever a time when I didn’t just enjoy it.  It seems obvious, now.  It seems like just a collection of fun, melodic rock songs.

The same goes for every Frank Black record ever made.  I excitedly rip open a new Frank Black CD and jam it in the player, and feel confused and annoyed within five minutes.  Every time, without exception, I think, “Oh boy.  Frankie’s really gone and bit the shark now.  Poor Frank.”  But two weeks later, it feels like the only record that even matters, or has ever mattered.

The first time I heard Weezer.  In The Garage.  Hated it.  Hated Bush for a week.  I remember where I was standing and who was in the room the first time I hated Ben Folds Five.  I honestly remember feeling sorry and embarrassed for Kent the first time I heard Isola.  Pedro The Lion.  Rufus Wainwright.  Pinback.  Wilco.

Anyway, I tell people this from time to time, and they always think I’m crazy, or they say something like, “Well, I always know right away if I’m going to like a band or not.”  Yeah, but you also paid four dollars for a fucking Killers ringtone, so go to hell.  Anyway, I felt an affirmation when I read this excerpt from the brilliant and hilarious Douglas Adams on The Beatles:

The next exciting thing was that they kept on losing me.  They would bring out a new album and for a few listenings it would leave me cold and confused.  Then gradually it would begin to unravel itself in my mind.  I would realize that the reason I was confused was that I was listening to Something that was simply unlike anything that anybody had done before.  “Another Girl,” “Good Day Sunshine,” and the extraordinary “Drive My Car.”  These tracks are so familiar now that it takes a special effort of will to remember how alien they seemed at first to me.  The Beatles were now not just writing songs, they were inventing the very medium in which they were working.

-Douglas Adams, The [London] Sunday Times, 1992

Guillermo del Toro has apparently written a screenplay for a film adaptation of the H. P. Lovecraft story At the Mountains of Madness.

I love del Toro.  I think he and Lovecraft both share this eery, hallucinagenic genius that would prove to be a good fit.  I would bet that this movie will kick some serious ass.  If it’s ever made.

I’m addicted to Neil Gaiman’s new collection of short stories, Fragile Things.

“Beetles,” said Professor Mandalay. “I once calculated that, if a man such as myself were to eat six different species of beetle each day, it would take him more than twenty years to eat every beetle that has been identified. And over that twenty years enough new species of beetle might have been discovered to keep him eating for another five years. And in those five years enough beetles might have been discovered to keep him eating for another two and a half years, and so on, and so on. It is a paradox of inexhaustibility. I call it Mandalay’s Beetle. You would have to enjoy eating beetles, though,” he added, “or it would be a very bad thing indeed.”

That’s from a story called Sunbird.  There’s another story in the book, called A Study In Emerald – check out the coolest short story I’ve ever read – read it or hear it.

From John Steinbeck’s East Of Eden:

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then – the glory – so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on the preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

“A camel is a horse designed by commitee.”