stolen skates for humor's sake.

Renob Control's first weekend performance of new comedy sketches, dubbed "Boz Scagg's Boss Gaggs", went quite well. It was my first time doing anything theater-related since high school, and working with the Renob crew proved to be a smashing time full of fun, challenges, and petty theft. The show will run for two more weekends, so if any of you care, come to the Brody Theater in Portland Friday & Saturday night for some balls-out comedy. Both nights feature sketches written by meself, but I only appear in Saturday's show. Peace up!


That should say NW 27th. The 21 is just another joke! Whoa ha ha ha! ...No, it was a mistake. We suck.
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ancient archives of video.

I recently found out that Myspace, in additon to being a popular networking/music/dating community, has a whole damn slew of music videos, old and new, available for quick and easy viewing. Here's what I've been watching:

The Beatles "Strawberry Fields Forever" - The wacky psychedelic video they made for their wacky psychedelic song.

David Bowie "Oh You Pretty Things" - Apparently an unaired 1972 performance from the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test.

Tom Petty "Don't Come Around Here No More" - A great classic video, full of extreme 80s postmodern formalism.

Tom Waits "The Piano Has Been Drinking" - Waits being his bad self on the 70s talk show parody "Fernwood 2Night." And check out the young Fred Willard.

Jackson 5 "Blame it on the Boogie" - This one speaks for itself. But don't let Wolfman Jack scare ya.

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like two heat-seeking missiles that seek out each other and then blow the fuck up.






Kendra & Brett can be found on your rooftop, cavorting in sunglasses.
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neu song #2















"Monsters" is now available for download on Caws Pobi's myspace page.

The whole world was astonished and followed the beast. Men worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, "Who is like the beast? Who can make war against him? (Revelation 13:1-4 NIV)
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pictures.

Octavio had a birthday, and we had a party, and it looked like this.


There he is, looking strangely like one of those laughing Buddha statues.



A whole slew of folks showed up, including some beers and a couple bongo drums.


Kendra's mussed locks are humbled by Octavio, God of Hair.


Sunday mornin' brought the dawn in.

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food for a gestating album.

1.

The Manticore (Mantichora) as illustrated in Edward Topsell's History of Four Footed Beastes

"A triple row of teeth meeting like the teeth of a comb, the face and ears of a human being, grey eyes, a blood-red color, a lion's body, inflicting stings with its tail like a scorpion...with a special appetite for human flesh." -Pliny the Elder

"The manticore was also attributed with having a voice that was the mixture of pipes and a trumpet. The beast is very swift and makes very powerful leaps. The manticore is reputed to roam in the jungles of India, and is known to have an appetite for humans. Like its cousin, the Sphinx, it would often challenge its prey with riddles before killing."
-quoted from www.monstrous.com

2. Butoh

Butoh performers being creepy, yet chic

"We are between sanity and insanity, beauty and ugliness. Good and evil don't matter; emotion lurshes from serenity to rage without warning. East and West, too, have merged: Leering Japanese ghosts waltz to Edith Piaf; a forest hag dressed for a Versailles ball strikes wild kabuki poses. Fear turns frolicksome at a soiree deep inside a nuclear-fallout shelter." -quoted from Eric Prideaux, www.pripix.com

"It was a short piece, without music, and it raised a scandal. In the piece a young boy (Yoshito Ohno) enacted sex with a chicken by strangling it between his thighs. In the darkness that followed a man - Tatsumi Hijikata - approached the boy. Since then butoh is called shocking, provocative, physical, spiritual, erotic, grotesque, violent, cosmic, nihilistic, cathartic, mysterious." -quoted from Dance of Darkness, by Harmen Sikkenga, www.butoh.net




more later.
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commercial break.

And now, a word from Timothy Leuers: Super Psychologist

"Most Americans think that they are in the top quartile of social intelligence and creativity. Americans will make false claims of self consistency as in the "I told you so" bias. Americans will tell you that they have knowledge that could not possibly exist (since it is knowledge about non existent events) and get angry when this fact is pointed out to them. In short Americans have a selective attention - they will ignore negative information about the self and concentrate on their positive, socially desirable aspects. Indeed, the only Americans that have given neutral self appraisals are undergoing treatment for depression. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, there is nothing surprising about this. This selective attention, editing, ignoring, and creating a positive self image is nothing other than the ego at work. However, all the above measures of self enhancement show neutrality or even self depreciation when applied to the Japanese.

"My own work on "visual self enhancement" suggests however that the Japanese do have a positive self regard when it is confined, literally, to the regard or the gaze. I claim that they enhance their self-image, or the imaginary representation that they maintain of themselves. Give a Japanese a piece of paper and ask him to write about himself and he will portray himself as the same as the next guy. Give him a camera and he will suddenly become appealing, positive and upright. There would seem to be a much greater importance placed on the visual sign rather than the phonetic. From this data I have suggested the existence of a mature "specular self" in Japan."
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neu songs & spectral locomotives.

First of all, if you haven't yet, you gotta check out that last link I put up. It's one of those shining stars of the internet.

Now that I have my neu apartment and my DIY studio set up again, I'm working on a neu album, and I have a brand neu song up on my Caws Pobi page. The title I pulled from an old Elton John lyric (though my song isn't about Sir Elton). The samples I use in the song are from Ennio Morricone's soundtrack for Dedicated to the Aegean Sea, a mildly sexploitative Italian-Japanese 1979 film. I haven't seen the movie, but the music sure is funky.

A vanguard of innovative production methods, Morricone incorporated a lot of electronics into his soundtracks as his career progressed. He said this: "In my opinion, the use of electronic music and synthesizers should serve to change the concept of the music itself. One is dealing with a different kind of music here, something that is born from the instrument itself, full of new sounds and colors." I like that.


(No naked women were squished in the making of this music.)
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I found it.

It's A Trap!

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chitlin circuit style of humor.


Robert A. Pruitt, Just Do It!, 2004

More about Pruitt here.
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I like my new apartment (and it likes me).
































Joseph Beuys, I like America and America likes me (coyote), 1976
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queen bitch.

Who can find 5 things wrong with this picture?



...Give up? Or did you find more than 5? Well, let's have a look...

1. Gwen Stefani sucks as a musician, artist, and icon.

2. Oh, the white queen! Gwen is given a disturbing racist dominance in the photo with her white outfit, white skin, and flowing blonde hair, while the dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-dressed Japanese women are posed around her like servants. Servants to what? She certainly doesn't need any help being an overrated, pompous tart.

3. Parading around America in supposedly 'Harajuku'-style outfits with four Japanese girls on leashes would make one think that Gwen's solo album was more Japanese influenced. Instead, the record is more reflective of America's own brand of obnoxious R&B-pop-crap. Why isn't she wearing FUBU jackets and being flanked by young black men?

4. Usually, rock stars trying to show off their iconic sex-symbol status surround themselves with members of the opposite sex (remember Robert Palmer?). If Gwen were really trying to make a statement about gender and ambiguous sexuality in the pop music world, I could respect that. But I don't think she is. She just comes off as a creepy lesbian dominatrix.

5. Gwen's whole "gang of silent Asians who back up my ego and illustrate my creative decision" thing reeks of old fashioned imperialism. When David Bowie found himself influenced creatively by figures such as Klaus Nomi and Lindsay Kemp, he brought them to the forefront while collaborating with them, acknowledging their presence in his art. Gwen is posing more like a conquistador, enslaving the natives of a foreign land and bringing them back to America so they can be used as props in her stage show. "Look what I have discovered! Don't they make me look good??"

But don't take it from me. Take it from Yoko Kukuri, a free, non-silent girl who had this to say on a web thread about Stefani's song Harajuku Girls:
"I am usually liking Gwen Stefani but this song is horrible!!!! even if it is dedicated 2 japanese girls. I myself am japanese and I feel like she is letting our culture down!!! please no"

There you have it. The desperate plea at the end says it all- "please no".
Here's a bonus one:
6. Gwen Stafani isn't Japanese. Bitch.
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the removal of anxiety.

The website for Blackbook Magazine has a featured dialogue between two of my favorite artists, Jeff Koons and Matthew Barney. Read it here.

Barney has several good things to say about his own creative process (and his experiences in modeling), but I am able to identify more with Koons's statements, if I consider my songs to be my 'sculptures'.


Ushering in Banality, by Jeff Koons


film still from Cremaster 1, by Matthew Barney
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the Hit, and soup.



Remember when I mentioned a song I recorded with my cousin down in LA? Well, the song can now be heard on Caws Pobi's myspace page. Bend an ear.

Also, if there is anyone in Corvallis that does not have my Brettrospective book of cartoons, there are a few for sale at Interzone cafe on Monroe. Supplies are limited!

And it just so happens that Interzone is right across the street from a new soup shop that opened not too long ago. The soup there is good, and I endorse the place, but Cody and I had the idea of opening a soup restaurant on Monroe a loooong time ago. Someone must have overheard us.

I just typed in the word "soup" into Google's image search, and it brought up the pictures above. Go here to learn about pixel tiles and the art of mariosoup. If you are an art nerd like me, they probably remind you of Alfred Roller's Vienna Secession posters.


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Royal Robertson.



Today I stopped by the OSU bookstore to check out the new art books, and I found a fascinating little book about How to Look at Outsider Art. For those of you who aren't in the know, Outsider Art is a loose term used to group together art created by social outcasts, the homeless, the mentally ill, children, or anyone else lacking academic art training or working outside the established fine arts world. Primitivism is often linked with Outsider Art.

Flipping through the book, I was really struck by the art of Royal Robertson. Robertson was a sign painter in Louisiana who's drawings jump between his interest in futuristic fantasy and his obsession with his adulterous ex-wife, Adell. There is certainly something tragically funny about his art, but I also feel that his drawings represent the fundamental compulsion to express, a compulsion felt by every artist. Robertson's emotional turmoil over his lost wife drove him to create his art, and while his aesthetic taste for streamlined spaceships and castles dominate his visual style, the anger he felt towards Adell is an ever-present theme. His personal fantasy world becomes a bizarre mix of cosmic imagery, bitterness, biblical threats, and calendar-like numerical grids. (click for a larger image)































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I am left-handed.

Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left handed people do. But only 7% of the population is left handed.
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everyone is famous for fifteen people.



So what's the deal with this Myspace thing? How come everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and creating their own stupid little page? And how come Caws Pobi has 40 friends while I only have 21?

Shucks, kids. Everyone is jumping on the Myspace bandwagon because that's what the internet is all about: information. Since the dawn of man, the world-wide-web has always been the easiest source of information on products, places, public icons, music, academics, economics, entertainment, porn, stadium mud buggies, crazy hats, jazz flute, and everything else. Thus, it is a logical step that it become your premier source for finding information on random people.

It was Momus who first said the "everyone will be famous for fifteen people" quote that I love so much. It suggests a leveling of the social spectrum brought about by the age of information. Fame become relative. The more you know about people, the more interesting/famous they become to you. Regarding his song The Age of Information, Momus wrote "Maybe the new transparency will mean a new tolerance for the complexities of human behavior. Nixon got impeached when people heard his secret tapes, but the more people learn about Clinton's immorality, the more they seem to like him." If this is getting too far from the subject of Myspace, let's all look at some lyrics from the song:
...Your reputation used to depend on what you conceal, now it depends on what you reveal.
...Somebody's hand is in your tin of Netscape magic cookies, but relax: if you're an interesting person, morally good in your acts, you have nothing to fear from facts.
...These are different times, now the bottom line is that everyone should prepare to be known. Most of your friends will still like you fine.

You are given the free opportunity to customize a profile of yourself, complete with pictures, interviews, hobbies, pet names, favorite song, favorite works of art, who you'd like to meet, what kind of food your dog likes, or how often you sneeze, all in the anticipation that people you know (or people you don't know!) will read about you and become fascinated. There are many who really become quite narcissistic with the whole thing, such as the guy I love to hate, Number1Hater. This guy isn't on TV or even radio because, seriously, he's a complete tool. But he's got 253987 friends, and to all of them, he's famous.

In contrast, I give you this girl, who has set her profile to 'private'. Apparently she doesn't want to be famous. Myspace is a useful networking tool, allowing you to arrange a small (or large) online community with which to keep contact with and alert of events or gatherings, so creating an extensive profile is optional. But it makes you wonder; what aspects of this girl's life is she so afraid of revealing? Perhaps she just created the page to poke around at the profiles of her friends while she chooses to remain anonymous, closed and uninteresting.


webspace...


...myspace

When I first created my profile I didn't see much of a point to it. I took my time making it look visually pleasing, but when I was finished it simply gathered e-dust. I didn't need to update it, because nothing about me was changing very drastically. It wasn't until I found the 'music' section of Myspace that I really saw the significance of the whole system. If you're an amateur musician, the one thing you need is an easy way to get your music and your band info to the world. And here it is: an easy-to-make profile that allows you to upload 4 songs for visitors to listen to. It's simpler than a band homepage; more like an apartment-page. Small, practical, and cheap, not to mention easily refurnished. A musical act without the website expertise to build a homepage can easily 'rent' a Myspace site and start networking. The best and most addictive part of this whole thing for me is browsing through other musicians pages. By searching for other experimental groups in Oregon I discovered the strange songs of Anbot Rodroid and Antonio Granite. I mentioned that Caws Pobi has 40 friends, and 12 of them are strangers and musicians who apparently found my music interesting enough to invite me to be their friend. How refreshing to know that there are other unfinanced young people making great music! You're finished, MTV! I prefer Squeeze Me I Squeak and The Stan McMahon Band to your boring bands!
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invisible influence.



Caws Pobi is listening to Honky Chateau by Elton John. He feels like he's always known the album, even though he just discovered most of it a month ago. In fact, he wishes he had made Honky Chateau himself. Oh well. Now he doesn't have to.
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alternative holidays rock.

!!!HAPPY STADIUM MUD BUGGIES DAY!!!






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