Tiny Treasures

It seems like we visited my Great Aunt Tiny and Uncle Norwood a lot when I was a kid.

I wasn't complaining - they had this awesome house on the outskirts of Fort Myers that Uncle Norwood designed and built.

The house was on a natural dam by Lake Orange. There was a family of alligators that would come up on the bank in the afternoon, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. The house was on a lot of land, so you could spend the day fishing, playing in the lake, exploring the woods, or driving the golf cart across the dam in the afternoon to feed the cows or visiting a little hollow in the woods that Aunt Tiny called her "laughing place."

Most of their house was dark and cool with some of the creepiness around the corners that fascinated me as a kid. There was a little pond out front with these scary tiki statues that I was drawn to, but afraid to look at too much. There was also a novelty bathroom trashcan in the shape of a huge stick of dynamite that absolutely terrified me.

There was also Uncle Norwood's study, full of old copies of  my Uncle Bruce's old comic collection  which included a ton of horrifying EC comics about people coming back from the dead to avenge murders or getting killed gruesomely in ironic twists. I also found a bunch of Playboy joke books that went completely over my head, but hey, they had cartoons of naked ladies in them.

I don't remember Uncle Norwood too much - maybe he was annoyed with the kids running around and tried to stay away from the house on our visits. And now, with the ravages of age on my memory, there's a lot I'm forgetting about Aunt Tiny.

Tiny wasn't really her name, of course. It was just a nickname that stuck. I mostly remember her telling me about St. Patrick every St. Patrick's Day, which is strange, since our family wasn't Catholic. I also remember the rainy days when we would paint.

Aunt Tiny loved buying stuff at flea markets and yard sales. One of her specialties was old paintings.
When it rained, she would let me help her improve them.

Like, say she originally had a painting of a field. She might decide it needed brighter grass. So we'd repaint the grass. Then with the grass that bright, the sun and sky needed to be redone. And the original artist really missed the boat by not adding any clouds, so we'd have to put some in there. And hey, how about some bunnies in the field, or a flock of birds flying around? Can't have an empty, boring field.

Birds in a big field of green

And after adding all that stuff, we had really done more work than the original artist. What gave him the right to keep his lazy name on it? So we'd paint over the name and paint our own on there.

Three bunnies meet an owl. I don't know what that grass curtain on the left is.

Sometimes the paintings would retain most of the original work, with our improvements enhancing whatever the now-anonymous artist had originally done, other times there was so much paint on the that they became completely new works, like the two paintings here that I've had for ...holy crap, probably over 35 years.

Our big mistake was not publicizing this stuff. I mean, an untaught senior citizen and a little kid manipulating other people's art? If we had thrown around enough bullshit and two-dollar words, we would have been the kings of American postmodernism.

So today when I see art repurposing someone else's original work, my first reaction is usually, "Eh. Aunt Tiny invented that stuff."

Watt's Up?

You gotta love Mike Watt. Co-founder of genre-confounding punk band the Minutemen, fIREHOSE, and a gazillion other projects including a long-running stint with the Stooges, he's always seemed a down-to-earth guy; humble, yet constantly trying to push his music further.

I was able to get a review copy of his new book of photographs through one of the sites I occasionally write for. Watt would take these as he rode his bike or kayaked early in the morning around his hometown of San Pedro. There's lots of cool shots of huge shipping cranes contrasted with the natural beauty of the bay that are pretty spectacular, even to a guy who can't really judge photography, like myself.

As I was trying to think of smart stuff to say to cover up that fact, I noticed that there was an opportunity to interview Watt. I haven't done an interview in years, but what the hell. We set up a phone interview.

I borrowed some recording equipment from my friend Matthew who does this sort of thing on the regular. It was this huge tape recorder like the one I used to record The Dukes of Hazard on when I was a kid (I don't know why I felt I needed audio of the Dukes, but it made sense in pre VCR days) that you would plug into the phone then record onto an actual audio tape.  I think they recorded the Watergate tapes on this thing.
Awesome. Without having to take notes, this interview would flow a lot smoother.

Then I realized something. I was doing this on my lunch break, and I was calling him from work. I couldn't use my office phone to make a 30 minute long distance call. I'd have put my cell on speaker and record him with the tape recorder.

I did a test that morning. Test went pefect. This was going to be great. I would take notes anyway, just in case.

So I called Mike Watt. Was I nervous? Yeah, a little bit. This was a guy responsible for "Double Nickels on the Dime," one of my desert island albums. The performance of "Contemplating the Engine Room" I caught in Gainesville on a whim still ranks as one of my top concert experiences ever. And hell, the guy has been interviewed in just about every music documentary ever made, and by real journalists in like, Rolling Stone and Spin and stuff. What was I going to bring to the table?

But I got over it. I've interviewed people, even famous people before, and from the interviews I've seen and read, I didn't think getting him to speak would be a problem, and he seemed like a genuinely nice guy.

So let's do this.

He was great - super friendly and ready to talk. Man, was he ready to talk. About a quarter through the interview I gave up taking notes because I couldn't keep up. It was like riding a mechanical bull while surfing on a word tsunami.

I mostly asked him about the book, since that was his newest project. It was great hearing him talk about his daily bike/kayak routes and his theories on how art has to bounce off other people,  his hesitation in presenting his photographs in the first place, and how he feels he is still just learning the bass, even after over 30 years of playing. I only asked two music questions - one about the reformed fIREHOSE, and another about his most memorable gig ever. To tell the truth, although I remained professional, I was sort of in awe of his language - while a regular guy, he has a unique way of phrasing and his own vocabulary that just sort of washes over and hypnotizes you.

When the interview was over, I told him what I knew about the publishing schedule (which reminds me, I really need to finish that review), and he actually thanked me for not asking the same questions he always got. He could have just been saying that to be nice, but holy crap. Mike Watt complimented my interview! That was totally going to be my new ringtone!

I sat in my office for a while, then took a walk around the building before listening to the interview.

I will now transcribe our conversation, as recorded on the tape:

"BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ."

Yep, I must have moved the phone too close or something, but the tape is completely unlistenable.

Normally I would be pretty bummed, and I do feel bad that I wasted a half hour of his time, but I have enough in my notes that I can salvage a review, even if it isn't the Q&A I wanted. Plus, I realize that while it was an embarassing screw-up, it's not like Ernest Hemingway losing year's worth of stories in a Paris train station or anything.

It was awesome talking to one of my musical idols about life, middle aged fitness, music and art, and if the results fall short of what I wanted, at least in the moment there everything went great. Plus, we're totally best friends now. We're going waterskiing next weekend with Iggy. I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm the Night Headhunter Searching for Some Head

I've never had sympathy for the bored. Maybe because I grew up knowing that uttering the words, "We're bored" would sentence me and my sister to never ending yardwork or cleaning, I learned to amuse myself, or at least not let my parents know how dull things really were around the house.

This attitude carried over through high school. While other kids were complaining that the lack of teen dance clubs made our city as boring as a doctor's waiting room, I was amusing myself by skating, fishing, hanging out in the woods, driving to Tampa, and all sorts of other stuff. And who really wants to hang out at a teen dance club anyway?

Once we got older, my friends and I still managed to amuse ourselves, even in the old folk's home that is Bradenton. As punk rockers, we knew that nobody was going to provide a teen club we'd be comfortable in; it was up to us to create, to entertain ourselves, to make the most out of our surroundings. Plus, we just really liked playing pranks.

One Christmas break my friend Curt brought down a styrofoam head he found somewhere in Tallahassee. We took it to my parent's garage and went to work - my dad had this spray that advertised how it would eat through a styrofoam cup (that's how you knew it was working). We used that to make realistic looking eye sockets and a nose hole. We sprayed the head a couple different shades of whatever spray paint we could find, giving it a somewhat realistic decayed flesh tone. For the final touch, Curt had saved some hair from a recent haircut which we glued on the head in different places.

The final result looked better than we anticipated. Hell, it creeped me out, and I helped make the thing. We hid it in the garage and forgot about it until my sister went out to get some ice cream, saw it, and let out a scream that shattered glass throughout the neighborhood. If we could pass the crucial 15 year old girl test, we had it made.

Now that we had this grotesque head, the only problem was what to do with it. Where would our artwork get the attention it so richly deserved?

Why not Wal Mart?

The next morning we mixed up a gallon of fake blood. We also found some weird plaster and chicken wire cylinder in the garage which we decided to hide under a tarp as a fake leg, sort of a bonus horror. The plaster "leg" was about 4 feet long, so it didn't really work, unless you thought Manute Bol got dismembered in a Bradenton parking lot, but hey, this was an extra, so it was good enough.

We drove to Wal-Mart and set up the leg behind the store, pouring fake blood liberally around our crime scene. Since the leg was our lesser artwork, we gave it a less prominent billing, figuring the head would be found first.

The head went into a plastic bag soaked with fake blood which was placed into a shopping cart. Then like cops on a stakeout, we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Hey, how long was it gonna take for someone to notice a blood-dripping plastic bag in a parking lot, anyway? These unobservant people were totally messing up our opening.

After a while we figured we should make our own publicity and call the cops on ourselves.

In the days of payphones this was easy. I called the non-emergency number and tried to disguise my voice.

"Uh...yes, officer? I'm here at the Wal-Mart on Cortez and there's this...this thing. It looks like it's bleeding."

"Bleeding?"

"Yeah, it's in a shopping cart and it looks like there's a lot of blood around it. I mean, it's probably nothing and all, butmaybeyoushouldtakealookatitOKbye."

Then we settled back to wait.

We didn't have to wait too long. Actually, let me quote the Bradenton Herald from the article titled "Prankster Hits Bradenton Store:"

...When an officer opened the bag, Watkins said, "He turned his head and said, "I think it's real."

It wasn't. The head, it turned out, was made of plastic foam.

"They did a pretty good job as far as making it look like a decapitated head," Watkins said.

The practical joker apparently took a mannequin head, painted and molded it so that it would appear to be decomposed and put a wig on it, Watkins said.

So there you have it, our first review. The leg was found later, and just as we expected it was sort of anticlimactic.

Who says artists aren't appreciated in their own hometown? As a bonus, since Curt was in art school at FSU, he could count our juvenile prank as actual school work, so it was a win-win for everyone involved.

The Reason for the Season

This graphic design association, AIGA, sponsored a toy design and remake ...event for Christmas. Basically you could make a toy or redesign one and put it up for sale. One of my coworkers decided to enter. Instead of making a toy, he decided to remake one. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you "And That's What Christmas is all About, Charlie Brown:"


Here's a view from the top:



You could say it's a meditation on childhood innocence and the evil lurking slightly below the surface or an ironic take on the Norwegian Black Metal church burnings. Or you could just say it was a funny way to mess with Charlie Brown.

Portrait of the Artist as an Old(er) Man

I'm terrible about uploading pictures from my camera. Probably as bad at taking photos in the first place. These are from last month's artwalk. I had a couple of decks in this skateboard art exhibition. I am now an established local artiste.

Here's Jacksonville's newest artist displaying a skateboard deck which has sat in his closet for 20 years.



Second deck on a brick wall. It makes it classier.



Oh crap! I totally forgot! There were Asian breakdancers. Yeah, no shit. I felt they were distracting the masses from my artwork, but nevertheless, they were pretty cool. I got a lot of pictures like this, right before or right after someone would bust a move.

Hey, now that I think about it, I wonder how I get my boards back? Well, for a while you can go see my decks, along with a bunch of other cool ones at the gallery downtown above the jewelry store. Listen for the breakdancers. I don't think they let them out yet.

Have You Played Atari Today?

I stumbled across this site a couple weeks ago that reviews Atari 2600 games. It's pretty funny that they'll say things like, "graphically, the game leaves a bit to be desired, but gameplay..."
Of course it leaves a bit to be desired graphically! It was made in 1982! That started a coworker and I to start talking about those awesome graphics on the Atari cartridges. They were all Frank Frazetta looking, usually with a guy in the foreground screaming at you.
This also prompted the following conversation:
Coworker: "I had one game, I can't remember what it was but there was a big square and you had a ball that you bounced against it and..."
Me: "That was every Atari game!"
C: "Yeah, I guess so."
M: "That's totally a dad game. 'I got a game for you. How about bouncing a ball against the wall for a couple hours?'"
C: "Just do it outside away from me."
M: "If you're bored you can help me dig holes for a fence today."
C: "Now that's a dad videogame. It would be called Fencepost! with an exclamation point.
M: "And the cover would have a guy in a hardhat up front screaming while in the foreground some other guys were raising a fencepost like in Iwo Jima."
C: "From the Dadgames laboratories, makers of such previous hits like Mowing! and "Keeping Quiet in the Car!"
M: My dad was always hard at work on his game, "Stop Slamming the Door!"
C: "Man, imagine coming home from Sears all excited with "Saving!" only to find out it's about saving electricity by shutting the door when the air is on."
M: "The cover would be a lineman in a hardhat screaming while some kids throw money out of an open door."