deep-yet-macho.

Yes, it's just as easy as you'd think:

How to start your own nu metal band.

Jump on the bandwagon today and start sucking!

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the weekend, in a basket of rockin' nutshells.

What happened this weekend? I'll tell ya wha' happened.

getting the led out with Stairway Denied.
Friday night Jose, Candace, Sebastian and I went to see a local Led Zeppelin tribute band. The band's name comes from their decision to not play "Stairway to Heaven." The cool thing is that they played damn near everything else, and their sound was dead-on from start to finish. ...But they messed up the lyrics on "Going to California." Bastards.

modern rock education with The Fearless Freaks.
Chad, Luke, Alexio and I traveled to Portland and took in the new Flaming Lips documentary. We took notes on how Wayne Coyne got held up while working at Long John Silver's, and how doing heroin sucks. Superman can make the blood go back into your head.

Melt Banana's repeating subterranean plane crash.
After the movie, our band of dorks went to Dante's to see some hyper-rockin'. The first band played painstakingly composed instrumental metal (or instrumetal, if you will). They was good, but they didn't move much. The next band played a 20-minute noise orgy, featuring a soft-faced twerp wiggling around and screaming indecipherable things. Finally Melt Banana, from Tokyo, came out and showed everybody what the other bands were doing wrong. The bassist was tiny but tight, the guitarist was an electric guitar surgeon on speed (complete with operating mask) , and singer Yasuko was able to command the sound without constantly screaming and wiggling. She rode the rock like Slim Pickens rode the bomb, which made the band's sonic explosion all the more engaging.

the pissed off Portland cop.
So downtown Portland there was this flashing cop car trying to get around the Luke mobile, but we couldn't find a place to pull over right away. When we did find a place, the disgruntled officer drove around us and spouted out his window "Stop...Goddamn it!!!" It was the funniest thing we'd seen all day.

urine locomotives under the sky-bridge.
Our band met up with friend and comedian Aaron Ross, who lives a couple blocks away from a sky-bridge; that is, a little bridge that crosses over the train tracks. Relieving yourself on the passing trains below is fun, unless a single caboose happens to stop short of the bridge and make you nervous that the conductor is reporting your fun to the authorities, in which case you and your crew must high-tail it out of there.

move Night to Luke twelve. Checkmate.
If you ever have a friend that is sleeping late and you wish to roust him, I recommend throwing chess pieces at him from a secret location. This way he will become disoriented and think that the objects are falling from some kind of dream-hole in the ceiling.



Melt Banana will...um...melt your banana.

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free-air gravity anomaly.

Here's a little photo review of the last few weeks:


Octavio has a radio show, so one Saturday I went in to see how the ol' studio is doing. I was glad to see that the vault, with all its glorious vinyl, was still there. I played an Upsetters record.


My living room. Before the weekend's destruction.


The view from my table in the library coffee shop.


I am contemplating either Smithson's concept of site and non-site art, or that girl in the blue shorts. We shall never know.


These are just pictures of a shoe and a pretty girl. I don't remember who took the picture of my shoe.

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what's been making me laugh.


Perry Bible Fellowship comics by Nicholas Gurewitch

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'ectomorph' supplement.

I don't even need to say anything. Just read this.

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the mouth is an eye is a camera.



I draw your attention to Ann Hamilton's Face to Face photographs. She took these pictures by placing unexposed film frames in her mouth, then opening wide and staring at friends and family while her "mouth camera" got the shot. The results are slightly creepy portraits that echo the shape of the eye, with the subject's face as the pupil. I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Hamilton here on campus a few weeks ago. Most of her artworks are installation pieces, like this crazy red peacock room, but I thought the mouth photos were something I should share with you all.

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long hours at the library.

Candace: I smell butter.

Sebastian: I smell popcorn.

Brett: I smell the rampant funk of a generation in decay.

I'm currently writing a paper on avant-garde performance art in post-war Japan, which is much more interesting than it sounds. And I should get back to work.


The Hi Red Center performing "The Ochanomizu Drop", 1964

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the Fear.

This is our Music from A Bachelors Den- the sound of loneliness turned up to ten. A horror soundtrack from a stagnant water-bed, and it sounds just like this. This is the sound of someone losing the plot; making out that they're okay when they're not. You're gonna like it, but not a lot. And the chorus goes like this:

Oh Baby, here comes the fear again. The end is near again. A monkey's built a house on your back. You can't get anyone to come in the sack. And here comes another panic attack. Oh here we go again.

So now you know the words to our song. Pretty soon you'll all be singing along. When you're sad, when you're lonely, and it all turns out wrong...When you've got the fear. And when you're no longer searching for beauty or love - just some kind of life with the edges taken off. When you can't even define what it is that you are frightened of, this song will be here.

Oh Baby, here comes the fear again. The end is near again. If you ever get that chimp off your back, if you ever find the thing that you lack, but you know you're only having a laugh, and here we go again... Until the end. Until the end.

-written by Pulp

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blogging in the classroom.

One of my art history instructors began a blog this term for the students in his classes to post and discuss issues in art. Today I made my first contribution to the site, expectedly something about art and music. I also shamelessly plugged Momus. But not myself! I'm not that arrogant.
See the blog here.

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new song.

I've been busy lately. I've lots of reading to do for my classes, and this packing in of knowledge from Monday through Thursday makes me want to party more from Friday to Sunday. So this weekend I consumed a bunch of brain-dissolving liquids, and now I'm back in the library starting another week of schoolish things. The thing is, I've recorded virtually nothing since Spring break. But I was musically productive over that break, and I bring you the product today: Grow Fins

This is the first cover I've ever done. I really would of had fun doing anything off of The Spotlight Kid album, on which Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band reach their peak in mind-melting, bluesy freak-out jams. I took some liberties with the theme of the song, injecting more bitterness and making it more about emotional resignation than bluesy lament. The added verse could be hinting at the one-sidedness of the dating game: "These women, with their copper heads, and their magazines, and their guillotines/Always doing the talking, never the hunting." I threw in the Jim Morrison sample because...it's great, but also as a kind of sermon to all the men who have been led on, manipulated, or "pushed around". We're gonna grow fins, go back in the water again, 'n leave you land-lubbin' women alone.


Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. And a vacuum..

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old-fashioned post: ectomorphic revolution.



I am a skinny bastard, and science has a name for people like me: ectomorph. Cancerweb's medical dictionary defines ectomorph as:
"A constitutional body type or build (biotype or somatotype) in which tissues originating from the ectoderm predominate; from a morphological standpoint, the limbs predominate over the trunk."

That definition may work for all you anatomy students out there, but I prefer the explanation provided by a bodybuilding website I found:
"The extreme ectomorph physique is a fragile and delicate one. The bones are light, joints are small and muscles are slight. The limbs are relatively long in proportion and the shoulders droop. The ectomorph is a linear physique. Straight up and straight down, and may appear longer than he or she really is, due to the length of limbs coupled with lack of muscle mass developed on those limbs. The ectomorph is not naturally powerful and will have to work hard for every ounce of muscle and every bit of strength he or she can gain."

I like how they explain the ectomorph like some kind of wild animal. This particular website goes on to paint a virtual picture of me, describing details like "The features of the face are sharp, and the shape of the face is triangular. The lower jaw is somewhat receding." They even mention "fine hair that grows quickly", and I don't even know what that has to do with bodybuilding. But the facts are all there; I am 100% ectomorphic.



In American society ectomorphs take a lot of flak. We get pushed around on the playground, made fun of in PE, overlooked by women, and are constantly told that the only way to make it in the world is to beef up and try to achieve mesomorph status. But why should we? What's so important about being physically larger? We don't need to hunt down and wrestle our food like our ancestors did. We have guns. We have restaurants. We have wallets. Size no longer indicates power in this day and age of billionaire nerds.

The time of the ectomorph is upon us. Our revolution is at hand. Let's face it; big is out. We're living in the future, one in which smaller is better. Smaller things, compact things, the application of intelligence and problem-solving to make things more convenient. Smaller cell phones, smaller computers, smaller cars, smaller people...Wait, it almost sounds like I'm describing Japan. Yes, that will be our headquarters, our base of operations, our haven. Japan is a place where ectomorphs like Satoshi Tsumabuki and Ryuhei Matsuda can achieve fame and fortune (and have Japanese girl's devote fan-sites to them). Even Momus has a place in Japan, where skinny guys hold just as much power as non-skinny guys, thanks to a recurring underdog theme in Japanese culture and narrative in which the "smaller" man comes out on top. Sure, the big guys may have power and status, but the little guys can build spaceships and tell better jokes. And they are more kawaii.



I have friends who continually tell me that I'm "too" skinny. Is my thinness really such a problem? My health doesn't seem to be at risk. If anything, I'm happy to be skinny rather than the alternative. I am in no way anorexic or worried about my eating habits, goodness no. I take advantage of my ectomorphism. I eat whatever the hell I want, and in firm defiance of the laws of weight-gain my body shows no signs of it. Am I blessed? I like to think so! Or perhaps this is evolution. As makind grows out of the need to physically defend themselves daily (against dinosaurs and barbarian hordes), humans are evolving into thinner beings with larger brains and better metabolism. We're virtually one step away from becoming floating telekinetic heads.

I warn you now, the world is ours. Join us in our revolution!
Too good to be true, but this could be you/The ectomorph, our hero, is the male sex, Release 2.0*

*lyric altered from How to Spot an Invert, by Momus, 2000.
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Happy Birthday Wes!

Blogger was being difficult, so this is a bit late, but last Wednesday was my cousin Wes's big bad birthday. Everybody find some cake and eat it in honor of him.


Here's a picture of him getting shot for a film. Don't spill the beer!

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...and the bad news.

I was saddened to learn that Hideaki Sekiguchi, aka Billy, aka BassWolf of the band Guitar Wolf passed away last weekend. I drink to you, Billy, on your rock 'n roll UFO.


"In near future, we would have our own UFO. There'd be a pub with bunny girls, sushi bar and ramen noodle restaurant in the UFO. Each one of us has own room, too. We'd enjoy touring the world by flying the UFO. That's our success." - Guitar Wolf

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lack of clever title!

A couple days ago I wrote a post about the poetic campiness of Its All About the Benjamins by Puff Daddy and the Family, but Blogger screwed up and it never got published. So that just means you all missed out, as now you will never appreciate the beauty of lines like "rockin Bejor denims with gold zippers" or "I'm strictly tryin to cop those colossal sized Picassos/And have papi flip coke outside Delgado's." But wait...How can one not appreciate those lines?

Sin City, for those of you who have not seen it, is an artistic achievement, a landmark in cinema, the brutal product of our times, and a really damn good movie. I give you all the homework of seeing it, and if you have already, then seek out Frank Miller's original comics and see just how genius the movie is.


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back to school, back to art.


"Young Goose in Teacher's Chair", a student work on display.


I found Jose paroosing the gallery.


I picked up one of my final drawings from last term, a portrait of "the evil me". The class was figure drawing, but I turned in this experimental caricature and still got an A. Nobody caught the cross-hatching joke.

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Christmas again!



You may recall me mentioning some Christmas songs I recorded at the end of last year. Well, the two highlights from those experiments are now available for download on my music site. I think "Secret Santa" deserves its place on any Ultimate Christmas album.

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if you look up "super bad-ass crazy" in the dictionary...

Holy shit. You've gotta check out the preview of this new game by the creator of Parappa the Rapper: Mojib Ribon (windows media player)

It blew my mind like a kleenex.

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today you are something.

I've a new song for you. Check it out, if you wish.

The title comes from a senseless rock opera I thought up a couple years ago, which I never wrote, called Yesterday you were nothing, today you are something. It was a rock opera about a 70s rock opera about nothing. And that's what it became. But I always liked the title.

I'd also like to thank my Coby mp3 player for its microphone capabilities. (Love that telephone-chic!)



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for Tristan.



N-E-S-T-L-E-S, Nestle's makes the very best. CHOC-laaaaaate. (*thup*)


But guess what-- It turns out this terrifying hell hound is an old 1950s mascot. Here's a creepy picture of the creature from that era.



So he returned with his family one last time in the '90s to emotionally disturb a whole new generation. Now you know.

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"Ruci In Za Sukai."

Just when I was going to mention Japan's influence on my neo-Bretto-psychedelic songs, I find this on Momus's livejournal. So just think of the first paragraph as a supplement to my State of the Music Address posting.
...And check out the song, too. The sound reminds me of a song I am writing about Sir Andrew Monopolis.

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