I could go on...but I won't.
As those of you who follow this blog may know, I've recently had a laugh about the stats page, wherein I can see how many folks stumble--drunkenly, I hope--into my little corner of the internets while searching for things like "pictures of men with jumbo or super-sized testicles" and "bart simpson is ficking." Not fucking, mind you, but ficking.
So I figured I'd play a little trick on the internet and just spam the fuck out of this post with a list of titillating (tits! titties!) smut keywords and see how dramatically my hits went up. While originally invented by Al Gore...oh wait, this just in: Al Gore did not invent the Internet. (Nor did he really even claim to.) Anyway, while the tangled e-web we weave was the brainchild of a bunch of eggheads at MIT and UCLA in the late '50s and early '60s--guys who had nothing better to do (i.e. they couldn't get laid) than to dream up with a world wide web, how could they have known that other guys decades in the future who also couldn't get laid would use it almost exclusively to fap to midget bestiality porn.
Yeah, they probably knew, huh?
I shall observe and report, dear reader, the veritable hit explosion, the orgasmic release of millions upon millions of big dick anal fuckdream accidental re-routings to a blog that, sadly, is only incidentally pornographic. And, if you've found the Magnet in a search to rub one out, why don't you just relax and sit for a spell before moving your well-lotioned fingers on to the next Sasha Grey video? Really, though, with all the free porn clearinghouses out there, you're a pretty inept jerk off if you stumbled here during a search for spankable visuals, so I don't feel too sorry for you. Leave an angry comment below.
Speaking of comments, how does one ask for them without seeming to be an insecure high school girl begging for approbation on her Tumblr or Mindspring page? I get more comments on the "hey, I have a new blog entry" status updates on Facebook than I do on the actual blog. And really, I care: I want to know what you're thinking out there. Who's that I see in my magic mirror? The quiet, delusional type reading this on her iPhone on a Minneapolis public bus, sitting across to the angry guy rubbing one out to Sasha Grey in the Land of the Ultramidgets?
Have I sent you closer to the edge or farther from it?
And while we're speaking of the edge, check out this upstanding young man, perhaps dubiously labeled a crackhead, from what can clearly be seen in background as the sparkling jewel of American metroplexes, Trenton, New Joisey:
I love it how the guy videotaping does nothing but question his own sanity for capturing the trainwreck on tape while he halfheartedly prays for a safe-landing. But the best part is, after the jump, when Flipdude is decompressing from his own insanity and marveling at his mostly functional extremities inside the fine establishment purveying ghetto goods (otherwise known as the "Shop 4 Ballers")--big shiny wheels, brightly colored Champion jackets that look like they're made for an overgrown five-year-old T-ball kid:
"That was super fun."
Fucking amazing. My hero. It's really too bad I don't live in the neighborhood (hell--looks like somewhere I can actually afford), because I would start a dead pool as to this dude's impending death date. He can't be long for this world, and why not make some scrilla on his clear lack of self-preservation instinct?
Only other person I've seen even remotely like this guy was an Indian named Sonny from the outer reaches of Northern Canadian Nowhere. By "Indian" I mean the feather kind, not the dot kind. I'd say "Native American," but that seems kind of weird in that he was from Canada.
I was 20 and working in the Nautilus salmon-processing plant in Valdez, Alaska. Sonny showed up in camp one evening around sunset, playing into the stereotype by carrying a mostly empty fifth of whiskey and screaming a bunch. Somehow he ended up with Roland's stun gun. Really, who knows how these things happen? It's like the Chekov saying:"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." Sonny existed, deux ex machina, to fire that pistol. Or, in this case, that stun gun.
A bunch of half-sick college kids looking for adventure and "easy money" (don't believe the hype) in Alaska, sprinkled with rail-riding hobos of the old school variety and lam-of-the-law misfits and n'er-do-wells, we gave Sonny a wide berth around the campfire that night. He started off by shocking himself in the neck with the device. His head bobbed back and forth like an electrocuted rag doll, but he kept talking. The words bubbled up from the back of his throat in a gargle: "These things," [gurgle gurgle], "aren't shit!"
That was the moment when I realized I, the aforementioned half-sick college kid, a product of waterslide suburban summers and cherry Kool-Aid, was witnessing someone who truly did not give a fuck. Not one. Not one half of a fuck. Not one iota of a fuck. If we hadn't been living in tents and cars, I'm sure he would've gladly flipped off a house.
As it is, he went down to the glacial run-off river the next day and decided to "surf" on top of a four door sedan as it off-roaded by the side of the gray water. Off falls Sonny and breaks his spine, only to die in the hospital around 3am.
Every so often you have these moments of awareness. This guy is what? 22? 23? How did he make it so long? How is he not dead yet? Then, another drunken day in the Great White North, and Death comes ripping. Guess it's better to go find it then let it find you, right?
Nonetheless, dumb luck counts for a lot in this life.
So does having PMA, which I've got to dial in myself lately, after a couple aggravating street hassles in my 'hood of late.
[For anyone keeping track of my incessant linkings, I've probably linked to that Bad Brains video twenty times...and I'll damn well keep doing it, too.] While on the subject of PMA and the 'Brains, I came across an awesomely yellow 1985 Kuwahara Puma mountain bike frame and fork. Immediately, I thought of building a rasta-colored Bad Brains tribute bike. Well, not really--my lady Laura suggested the colors, and after that Bad Brains motif came to mind rather readily.
Kuwahara branded bear trap style headset, Puma logo:
Now it's a Bad Brains model:
Red brick pattern cruiser tires by Duro:
I dig these Mesinger/Troxel style waffle seats:
The bar tape is Cinelli in the world champion stripes. I over-wrapped the blue so it wouldn't show. Tektro levers and a cool Schylling revolving bell:
The Kuwahara graphics are the tits:
KMC chain, single speed adapter, Chopsaw gear and bolts, Wellgo plastics. Chopsaws are awesome American made CNC machined chainrings--super straight, available in a ton of different sizes and colors, in five bolt 110 BCD or 4 bolt 104 BCD. If you don't know what that means, then clearly I should be building your bike for you:
Frame is made from Tange chromo tubing, as you can see by the sticker on the seat tube. Cranks are Sugino A/T:
Dice valve caps are a must:
Rear wheel is a Sun Rhyno Lite with an XT hub:
Odyssey Slic Cables and sweet anno green Dia Compe cable hanger. If you look closely, you can see the cable end has a little green die on it:
Basket is a Wald 137. Wald is one of the oldest bike accessory companies in existence, and I've been diggin' the 137. Not too huge, perfect for one or two bags of groceries. Not too heavy. Cheap but sturdy:
Style for miles, G:
Can't you just see HR cruising around on this? High out of his mind and talking to aliens:
Colton bought it before HR had a chance to call me up:
I took the above pics on my iPhone because my beloved Nikon shit the bed. It's currently at the Nikon repair facility in El Segundo, looking for Q-Tip's wallet, I guess. ("Ali got the fruit punch.") When I get $260 to get it out of camera jail, I'll be able to take quasi-legit photos again. If you have a spare Franklin burning a hole in your pocket, I'll gladly take it off your hands.
On the serious tip, though, Tip--I got fronted some cash and I'm building about ten bikes right now--a few old rigid frame mountain bike conversions like the one above, an old Raleigh 3-speed ladies bike in root beer brown with fenders, a single speed city bike with fuckin' tweed brake cables (?!), a clean, workmanlike Lemond road bike, a Columbus-tubing chromoly Univega single speed (cooler than it sounds), at least one BMX...so get at me. I'll have a shit ton of rad stuff built up in the next few weeks, and if you're walkin', you're hurtin'. (Actually, if you're walkin', I'm hurtin'--I need to sell this shit.) Also available to do repairs, tune-ups, bachelorette parties, kids' birthdays, light housework, and drug deliveries. No windows.
Then again, I suppose you could always hire a child clown to build you a bike for less, or perhaps, to entertain you at a discreet adult party:
Okay, I'll do windows.
I've been posting about alternative, off the grid communities lately--Kowloon Walled City, Christiania, the Mesa, and a bit of Slab City--hopefully the desert road trip will go down in March, as I'm too busted ass to do it this month. The next installment of Experiments in Alternative Living is San Francisco's own, mostly long gone, Carville by the Sea.
The subject of a beautiful book by local historian Woody LaBounty, Carville was a community made of formerly horse-drawn streetcars located around what is now 47th Ave and Lawton, but was then sand dunes and dirt roads. When electric streetcars became prevalent in the 1850s and '60s, the old horse cars were sold for $20 a pop. A whole community sprang up of people living in the cars. Not only were houses made out of the cars, sometimes stacked into multiple story dwellings, but there were shops, a "coffee saloon," and a church.
There are a couple Carville houses known to exist today, one of which used to look like this inside:
But has since been unfortunately remodeled to remove all traces of the streetcar it once was. The other is made of three cars, and still shows it's origins:
The above is the only picture I can seem to find, and I can't find any exterior shots of this house, so if you happen to know who lives in this Carville gem, or it's exact location, let me know. I'd love to bug the current residents to let me take a few shots inside.
Finally, I'm reluctant to include in this post any mention of my daughter, seeing as how it started, but I came up with my porn keyword spamming scam a week ago, and today's my kiddo's birthday. (Happy birthday, D!) I normally wouldn't feel compelled to share that, necessarily, but yesterday I visited her classroom to see her act in a play about Cesar Chavez.
She did a great job, of course, though I didn't bring it up to puff her up with fatherly pride. The charts on the wall behind her are about how to read and respond to literature. Now, in my motley "career" as a drifter and layabout, I've made a dollar or two as a writer and editor, a TA in a college lit class, and a substitute teacher. Which is only to say, I am keenly aware of spelling. You can't see in this photo, but in these charts, D's teacher misspelled "judgment" seven times, and also fucked up on "preposterous" and "assassination."
For "judgment" she wrote "judgement" and for "preposterous" she wrote "prepostrous." The first is a commonly misspelled word, which makes it especially grievous to my busybody, spelling Nazi way of thinking in that, hey, if it's fucked up on often, you should know that as a teacher. And fucking the same word up seven times on one wall means it's not a mere typo. The problem I have with the extra "e" in judgment and the missing "e" in preposterous is that, in both cases, they lead to a change in the syllable count. The two syllable judj-ment becomes jud-jeh-ment. The four syllable pre-pos-ter-ous becomes three syllables when you drop the "e": pre-pos-truss.
My babymama Kristina was sitting in front of me for the play, and I know she noticed "judgment" since she's a lawyer and probably sees that word fairly frequently. She did notice it, along with a botched "assassination" attempt, and it also drove her batshit. Without trying to bust her out in front of her class, I quietly mentioned something to the teacher before I left.
"Um, it's not a big deal or anything, but I noticed you spelled 'judgment' wrong."
"I did? Where?" she replied, scrutinizing all the instances where she'd spelled it incorrectly and seeing nothing.
"It's J-U-D-G-M-E-N-T. There's no 'e' after the 'g.'"
I don't think she believed me on this count, and she definitely seemed annoyed. I can't blame her on one level, in that she'd had to wrangle fourth graders all day. (Though the major wrangling during the presentation was done by the beleaguered outside drama teacher, who had to feed some kids all of their lines.) I know I must seem like a horribly pinched busybody to some of y'all reading this, and I probably seemed that way to her.
On the other hand, was I really so out of line? I mean, what the fuck? This is the fourth grade, not grad school. She wasn't spelling prestidigitation or antidisestablishmentarianism. Plus, there's the matter of it being her job to teach my daughter how to spell (as well as mine, and her mother's, granted). Beyond this, she's also at least partly responsible for instilling good writing habits in her pupils, one of which is looking up words you're not sure of. In Ye Olden Tymes when I went to school (which was probably around when she went to school, as we're about the same age), we had to check our spelling on these old fashioned things called dictionaries that were made out of trees and had little black splotches called "ink" on them. Nowadays, with the new-fangled compuboxes everybody seems to have, you can check it by simply sending an electro-mail to God or whatever you do.
Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And yes, folks--spelling counts. It may not be the most important thing a teacher does during the day, but it counts. And to D's teacher: I ain't mad at ya. Pedagogy is a hard row to hoe: I discovered this while teaching summer school math to inner city kids going into the 7th grade. Their hormones were going batshit, it was a nice summer day outside, and they spent most of their time drawing spurting dicks in their math workbooks and eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos. One girl raised her hand and quietly told me, "Deanna is lighting a fire in her desk." So, you, know, I feel your pain to some small extent. But it shouldn't be beyond the pale to expect a teacher to spell words correctly.
And, while I'm being totally righteous, what about bicycle rights?
Portlandia is the raddest show going right now, hands down. Makes me want to visit again soon.
The raddest poster going right now is this pie chart punk rock comparison by Dan Gneiding:
Actually, it's the raddest poster gone, as the pre-orders sold out, though he's thinking about doing a reprinting. I hope so, because I shit the bed on pre-ordering one. Curiously, Mr. Gneiding is a senior graphic designer at Urban Outfitters. This isn't curious in and of itself, but only curious because a certain Stevil Kinevil hipped me to this poster and to Dan's work, and he fuckin' HATES Urban Outfitters for doing reproductions of his favorite Budweiser sweater, and, basically, for co-opting anything remotely cool and mass-producing it for style-challenged assholes.
I had my own experience with this when I was getting a tattoo done about five years ago at Black Heart Tattoo. Jeff Rassier was wearing a ring-necked T-shirt with none other than RL Osborn doing a table top or something on it.
"Yeah, nice BMX Action Trick Team shirt," I told him.
"Huh?," he replied and stared at me blankly.
"Your shirt. It's RL Osborn."
"Oh, yeah. I guess. I got it at Urban Outfitters. I just thought it looked cool."
Which is not to say that it didn't, or that Mr. Rassier is one of the aforementioned style-less assholes. But, c'mon--know what you're reppin'. My friend Tony met a guy at a party once with a tattoo of the Einstürzende Neubauten logo.
When Tony commented on the tattoo, the guy replied, "Huh? Oh--you mean the Henry Rollins guy?"
If Hank had a tattoo of a target-headed, squiggly-armed stick figure on him, then heck, this guy was going to get one too. I just hope he likes taut, German industrial weirdness. Or not.
The funny thing is, Bob Osborn, RL's dad, already sued Huggies (or was it Pampers?) for using one of his photos on some pull-ups (Extreeeeeme pull ups! no doubt) and came away with a shit grip of money. Wonder if he knew about the UO swipe? Assuming he took the photo, that is. Who knows, he might have just sold them the image. Then again, maybe he sued Urban and Mr. Gneiding, assuming he worked there five years ago.
What I'm saying is, it's a small world, and nothing is new. As a blogger who routinely jacks images from the matrix, I can say that intellectual property ain't what it used to be. It reminds me of the Associated Press vs. Shepard Fairey throwdown.
Was the photo the iconic image, or was the artistic reworking that made it iconic? I'd argue for the latter, though as a photographer with no drawing/painting/printmaking skills whatsoever, I'd better watch what I say before my work ends up on a Urban Outfitters shirt. (Who am I kidding--Hey, UO, wanna buy a photo?) And isn't the job of a street artist/graffiti writer to re-purpose what's already there? Marcel Duchamp did not invent bicycle wheels or stools, but he re-purposed, or, more accurately, de-purposed them into art:
Does Campbell's have a case against the estate of Andy Warhol?
If you put a bird on it, is it art? Maybe, but is it yours?
While on the subject of bikes, Portland, art, and intellectual property, Stumptown's mighty Shad Johnson recently had his shred boner decidedly deflated when GT, or whatever mega-conglomerate owns Gary Turner's name nowadays, issued him a cease and desist order over the appropriation/homage winged Goods logo.
This stirred up some shit on the innerwebs, mostly to the effect that you can't make a dead brand relevant by suing the balls off of a local BMX shop. I'll remind Shad that parody counts as fair use, so he might consider reworking the GT wings into something like Mark Gonz's elbowing of the first skate conglomerate, Powell Peralta.
Before:
After:
I feel a T-shirt coming on: picture a giant spurting cock with little arms and legs tabletopping on a BMX bike with GT-style wings around the outside of the whole thing. The Shred Boner, anthropomorphized.
I'd buy one.
One intrepid reader of The Come Up--it's not hard being "intrepid" when 90% of the comments are 13-year-olds calling each other "fag"--suggested that the GT wings might not be as original as they claim:
Somewhere, at this very moment, a lawyer has a record-setting, pants-splitting, sue-happy shred boner.
Well, we started with dicks, and we finished with them. Funny how that works. Now for the randoms:
Nope!
Bo dog, beach time:
Tits! Don't forget the tits!
Stand proud:
"That was super fun."
Fucking amazing. My hero. It's really too bad I don't live in the neighborhood (hell--looks like somewhere I can actually afford), because I would start a dead pool as to this dude's impending death date. He can't be long for this world, and why not make some scrilla on his clear lack of self-preservation instinct?
Only other person I've seen even remotely like this guy was an Indian named Sonny from the outer reaches of Northern Canadian Nowhere. By "Indian" I mean the feather kind, not the dot kind. I'd say "Native American," but that seems kind of weird in that he was from Canada.
I was 20 and working in the Nautilus salmon-processing plant in Valdez, Alaska. Sonny showed up in camp one evening around sunset, playing into the stereotype by carrying a mostly empty fifth of whiskey and screaming a bunch. Somehow he ended up with Roland's stun gun. Really, who knows how these things happen? It's like the Chekov saying:"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." Sonny existed, deux ex machina, to fire that pistol. Or, in this case, that stun gun.
A bunch of half-sick college kids looking for adventure and "easy money" (don't believe the hype) in Alaska, sprinkled with rail-riding hobos of the old school variety and lam-of-the-law misfits and n'er-do-wells, we gave Sonny a wide berth around the campfire that night. He started off by shocking himself in the neck with the device. His head bobbed back and forth like an electrocuted rag doll, but he kept talking. The words bubbled up from the back of his throat in a gargle: "These things," [gurgle gurgle], "aren't shit!"
That was the moment when I realized I, the aforementioned half-sick college kid, a product of waterslide suburban summers and cherry Kool-Aid, was witnessing someone who truly did not give a fuck. Not one. Not one half of a fuck. Not one iota of a fuck. If we hadn't been living in tents and cars, I'm sure he would've gladly flipped off a house.
As it is, he went down to the glacial run-off river the next day and decided to "surf" on top of a four door sedan as it off-roaded by the side of the gray water. Off falls Sonny and breaks his spine, only to die in the hospital around 3am.
Every so often you have these moments of awareness. This guy is what? 22? 23? How did he make it so long? How is he not dead yet? Then, another drunken day in the Great White North, and Death comes ripping. Guess it's better to go find it then let it find you, right?
Nonetheless, dumb luck counts for a lot in this life.
So does having PMA, which I've got to dial in myself lately, after a couple aggravating street hassles in my 'hood of late.
Kuwahara branded bear trap style headset, Puma logo:
Now it's a Bad Brains model:
Red brick pattern cruiser tires by Duro:
I dig these Mesinger/Troxel style waffle seats:
The bar tape is Cinelli in the world champion stripes. I over-wrapped the blue so it wouldn't show. Tektro levers and a cool Schylling revolving bell:
The Kuwahara graphics are the tits:
KMC chain, single speed adapter, Chopsaw gear and bolts, Wellgo plastics. Chopsaws are awesome American made CNC machined chainrings--super straight, available in a ton of different sizes and colors, in five bolt 110 BCD or 4 bolt 104 BCD. If you don't know what that means, then clearly I should be building your bike for you:
Frame is made from Tange chromo tubing, as you can see by the sticker on the seat tube. Cranks are Sugino A/T:
Dice valve caps are a must:
Rear wheel is a Sun Rhyno Lite with an XT hub:
Odyssey Slic Cables and sweet anno green Dia Compe cable hanger. If you look closely, you can see the cable end has a little green die on it:
Basket is a Wald 137. Wald is one of the oldest bike accessory companies in existence, and I've been diggin' the 137. Not too huge, perfect for one or two bags of groceries. Not too heavy. Cheap but sturdy:
Style for miles, G:
Can't you just see HR cruising around on this? High out of his mind and talking to aliens:
Colton bought it before HR had a chance to call me up:
I took the above pics on my iPhone because my beloved Nikon shit the bed. It's currently at the Nikon repair facility in El Segundo, looking for Q-Tip's wallet, I guess. ("Ali got the fruit punch.") When I get $260 to get it out of camera jail, I'll be able to take quasi-legit photos again. If you have a spare Franklin burning a hole in your pocket, I'll gladly take it off your hands.Then again, I suppose you could always hire a child clown to build you a bike for less, or perhaps, to entertain you at a discreet adult party:
I've been posting about alternative, off the grid communities lately--Kowloon Walled City, Christiania, the Mesa, and a bit of Slab City--hopefully the desert road trip will go down in March, as I'm too busted ass to do it this month. The next installment of Experiments in Alternative Living is San Francisco's own, mostly long gone, Carville by the Sea.
The subject of a beautiful book by local historian Woody LaBounty, Carville was a community made of formerly horse-drawn streetcars located around what is now 47th Ave and Lawton, but was then sand dunes and dirt roads. When electric streetcars became prevalent in the 1850s and '60s, the old horse cars were sold for $20 a pop. A whole community sprang up of people living in the cars. Not only were houses made out of the cars, sometimes stacked into multiple story dwellings, but there were shops, a "coffee saloon," and a church.There are a couple Carville houses known to exist today, one of which used to look like this inside:
But has since been unfortunately remodeled to remove all traces of the streetcar it once was. The other is made of three cars, and still shows it's origins:
The above is the only picture I can seem to find, and I can't find any exterior shots of this house, so if you happen to know who lives in this Carville gem, or it's exact location, let me know. I'd love to bug the current residents to let me take a few shots inside.Finally, I'm reluctant to include in this post any mention of my daughter, seeing as how it started, but I came up with my porn keyword spamming scam a week ago, and today's my kiddo's birthday. (Happy birthday, D!) I normally wouldn't feel compelled to share that, necessarily, but yesterday I visited her classroom to see her act in a play about Cesar Chavez.
She did a great job, of course, though I didn't bring it up to puff her up with fatherly pride. The charts on the wall behind her are about how to read and respond to literature. Now, in my motley "career" as a drifter and layabout, I've made a dollar or two as a writer and editor, a TA in a college lit class, and a substitute teacher. Which is only to say, I am keenly aware of spelling. You can't see in this photo, but in these charts, D's teacher misspelled "judgment" seven times, and also fucked up on "preposterous" and "assassination."For "judgment" she wrote "judgement" and for "preposterous" she wrote "prepostrous." The first is a commonly misspelled word, which makes it especially grievous to my busybody, spelling Nazi way of thinking in that, hey, if it's fucked up on often, you should know that as a teacher. And fucking the same word up seven times on one wall means it's not a mere typo. The problem I have with the extra "e" in judgment and the missing "e" in preposterous is that, in both cases, they lead to a change in the syllable count. The two syllable judj-ment becomes jud-jeh-ment. The four syllable pre-pos-ter-ous becomes three syllables when you drop the "e": pre-pos-truss.
My babymama Kristina was sitting in front of me for the play, and I know she noticed "judgment" since she's a lawyer and probably sees that word fairly frequently. She did notice it, along with a botched "assassination" attempt, and it also drove her batshit. Without trying to bust her out in front of her class, I quietly mentioned something to the teacher before I left.
"Um, it's not a big deal or anything, but I noticed you spelled 'judgment' wrong."
"I did? Where?" she replied, scrutinizing all the instances where she'd spelled it incorrectly and seeing nothing.
"It's J-U-D-G-M-E-N-T. There's no 'e' after the 'g.'"
I don't think she believed me on this count, and she definitely seemed annoyed. I can't blame her on one level, in that she'd had to wrangle fourth graders all day. (Though the major wrangling during the presentation was done by the beleaguered outside drama teacher, who had to feed some kids all of their lines.) I know I must seem like a horribly pinched busybody to some of y'all reading this, and I probably seemed that way to her.
On the other hand, was I really so out of line? I mean, what the fuck? This is the fourth grade, not grad school. She wasn't spelling prestidigitation or antidisestablishmentarianism. Plus, there's the matter of it being her job to teach my daughter how to spell (as well as mine, and her mother's, granted). Beyond this, she's also at least partly responsible for instilling good writing habits in her pupils, one of which is looking up words you're not sure of. In Ye Olden Tymes when I went to school (which was probably around when she went to school, as we're about the same age), we had to check our spelling on these old fashioned things called dictionaries that were made out of trees and had little black splotches called "ink" on them. Nowadays, with the new-fangled compuboxes everybody seems to have, you can check it by simply sending an electro-mail to God or whatever you do.
Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. And yes, folks--spelling counts. It may not be the most important thing a teacher does during the day, but it counts. And to D's teacher: I ain't mad at ya. Pedagogy is a hard row to hoe: I discovered this while teaching summer school math to inner city kids going into the 7th grade. Their hormones were going batshit, it was a nice summer day outside, and they spent most of their time drawing spurting dicks in their math workbooks and eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos. One girl raised her hand and quietly told me, "Deanna is lighting a fire in her desk." So, you, know, I feel your pain to some small extent. But it shouldn't be beyond the pale to expect a teacher to spell words correctly.
And, while I'm being totally righteous, what about bicycle rights?
The raddest poster going right now is this pie chart punk rock comparison by Dan Gneiding:
Actually, it's the raddest poster gone, as the pre-orders sold out, though he's thinking about doing a reprinting. I hope so, because I shit the bed on pre-ordering one. Curiously, Mr. Gneiding is a senior graphic designer at Urban Outfitters. This isn't curious in and of itself, but only curious because a certain Stevil Kinevil hipped me to this poster and to Dan's work, and he fuckin' HATES Urban Outfitters for doing reproductions of his favorite Budweiser sweater, and, basically, for co-opting anything remotely cool and mass-producing it for style-challenged assholes.I had my own experience with this when I was getting a tattoo done about five years ago at Black Heart Tattoo. Jeff Rassier was wearing a ring-necked T-shirt with none other than RL Osborn doing a table top or something on it.
"Yeah, nice BMX Action Trick Team shirt," I told him.
"Huh?," he replied and stared at me blankly.
"Your shirt. It's RL Osborn."
"Oh, yeah. I guess. I got it at Urban Outfitters. I just thought it looked cool."
Which is not to say that it didn't, or that Mr. Rassier is one of the aforementioned style-less assholes. But, c'mon--know what you're reppin'. My friend Tony met a guy at a party once with a tattoo of the Einstürzende Neubauten logo.
When Tony commented on the tattoo, the guy replied, "Huh? Oh--you mean the Henry Rollins guy?"
If Hank had a tattoo of a target-headed, squiggly-armed stick figure on him, then heck, this guy was going to get one too. I just hope he likes taut, German industrial weirdness. Or not.The funny thing is, Bob Osborn, RL's dad, already sued Huggies (or was it Pampers?) for using one of his photos on some pull-ups (Extreeeeeme pull ups! no doubt) and came away with a shit grip of money. Wonder if he knew about the UO swipe? Assuming he took the photo, that is. Who knows, he might have just sold them the image. Then again, maybe he sued Urban and Mr. Gneiding, assuming he worked there five years ago.
What I'm saying is, it's a small world, and nothing is new. As a blogger who routinely jacks images from the matrix, I can say that intellectual property ain't what it used to be. It reminds me of the Associated Press vs. Shepard Fairey throwdown.
Was the photo the iconic image, or was the artistic reworking that made it iconic? I'd argue for the latter, though as a photographer with no drawing/painting/printmaking skills whatsoever, I'd better watch what I say before my work ends up on a Urban Outfitters shirt. (Who am I kidding--Hey, UO, wanna buy a photo?) And isn't the job of a street artist/graffiti writer to re-purpose what's already there? Marcel Duchamp did not invent bicycle wheels or stools, but he re-purposed, or, more accurately, de-purposed them into art:
Does Campbell's have a case against the estate of Andy Warhol?
If you put a bird on it, is it art? Maybe, but is it yours?While on the subject of bikes, Portland, art, and intellectual property, Stumptown's mighty Shad Johnson recently had his shred boner decidedly deflated when GT, or whatever mega-conglomerate owns Gary Turner's name nowadays, issued him a cease and desist order over the appropriation/homage winged Goods logo.
This stirred up some shit on the innerwebs, mostly to the effect that you can't make a dead brand relevant by suing the balls off of a local BMX shop. I'll remind Shad that parody counts as fair use, so he might consider reworking the GT wings into something like Mark Gonz's elbowing of the first skate conglomerate, Powell Peralta.Before:
After:
I feel a T-shirt coming on: picture a giant spurting cock with little arms and legs tabletopping on a BMX bike with GT-style wings around the outside of the whole thing. The Shred Boner, anthropomorphized.I'd buy one.
One intrepid reader of The Come Up--it's not hard being "intrepid" when 90% of the comments are 13-year-olds calling each other "fag"--suggested that the GT wings might not be as original as they claim:
Somewhere, at this very moment, a lawyer has a record-setting, pants-splitting, sue-happy shred boner.
Well, we started with dicks, and we finished with them. Funny how that works. Now for the randoms:
Nope!
Bo dog, beach time:
Tits! Don't forget the tits!
Stand proud:
1 comment:
that bad brains bike looks like ronald mcdonald
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