My Mother and My Brother

Peter Lee and Mary Lou

Sometimes my brother scares me a little.

But he's mostly harmless, and a likeable fellow.

We will return to our usual fare of scary babies, stark naked women in black and white and rude political observations

in posts to come, I'm currently thinking about finding a new nude model. One who is not afllicted with a tiny human parasite inside their body cavity, and one who does not look like she needs a sandwich or three, and comes in a full spectrum of colors.

Sophia's Hands, 1988

Not that it has anything to do with this photo of Sophia, but I'd like to take a moment to thank the universe, god or whoever the hell threw the first spitwad of creation across the classroom of the void of nothing

for setting in motion the forces that brought us The Harmony Bar, Lake Louis Beer, the potato, the deep fryer, and whatever primate/human who was desperate enough to not only suck on a cow tit, but then figure out how to make it into cheese, then be daring enough to eat that cheese when it turned blue and moldy, and his ancestor who decided that it would make a good cheeseburger topping and a good dip when mixed into a dressing.

And I'd like to be able to thank my producer and Jesus Christ for giving me a Grammy, an Emmy and a Nobel prize too, although that's less likely to happen than me eating fries and a burger and having a beer at the harmony.

Ok, maybe a pitcher with the LOUD band after practice...

More images from Sunday's recording session

Piano Hands

Bess recording her song Starling Blackbird

1/20/07

We're almost done with our new collection of songs, Tim and Bess came over yesterday and laid down tracks.

A few more vocal things need to be done, then we need to sit down and mix the damn thing, although half of that's done already.

It's much easier when you only have two tracks to record with at a time, and you do a lot of things live in the dining room.

I first recorded with my old band at a real studio in 1987, a little place in Ripon, WI that did a fine job using a used reel to reel tape on a 16 track machine.

Our little band knocked off eight songs in four hours.

We were ready for it, having played the songs out a lot.

But here at home, our three good mics, recording input device and laptop computer can do almost as much as that whole studio, and cost us under 2000 bucks, including the laptop computer.

Amazing how far things have come, how much more freedom to create with programs like Sony Vegas, Sound Forge and Adobe Photoshop.

Add in the ability to upload music to websites, burn your own cd's and print your own covers and discs, and you've taken the whole front end of the music industry out of it, and still have a kick ass quality to your recording.

No wonder record companies are shitting bricks. And three little music geeks like us would never, ever in a million years get a record contract.

Some things are better than ever, and the old methods were expensive, snooty and awkward. And now the smelly and scary sound person running things is me. I like that a lot.

1/20/09

One year from today, if he doesn't decide to be the decider for life, That Evil Bastard Grinning Swine of commander in chief will be leaving 1600 Penn.

Only three hundred and sixty five days left.

And I shudder to think of what he can do with the time he has left, and the spineless fucking democrats who cannot seem to understand that they could smite his political shit down instead of rolling over.

The list of things he could still fuck up is huge, from War with Iran, to decimating the last of the public services we have, from the FDA to The Forest Service to CSPA to Mine Safety, putting stooges in every government department and the Judiciary and Justice Departments.

Dick and W have already commited an order of magnitude more chaos and crime than all of Nixon and Reagan's hacks put together.

And whom ever takes his place will be bankrupt, facing a shattered economy, millions of defaults from every kind of loan and mortgage company out there, and a country gutted by free trade agreements and sweetheart deals to the Media, Defense, and Energy and Insurance industries.

We're facing multiple shitstorms. Peak Oil, Climate Change, and two messed up wars in Iraq and Afganistan.

And a serious need to change everything about the way we use the dwindling resources we have left. A need to start rethinking our whole approach to life, one that has more meaning and less crap TV, media, and a a lifestyle that doesn't revolve around even more useless crap from big box stores.

We now have a good sized part of our population that has never known anything but a Bush or a Clinton in the oval office, one that has never weathered a serious trial like my grandparents and parents faced, or even something as recent as the 1970's oil embargo or the Vietnam war.

It's gonna be interesting. I'm glad I know how to live cheaply, share a house and life with other people besides my blood family, and know enough to get through hard times without falling apart.

And I know how to survive when the rug gets pulled out from under my feet. It's happened to me before.

I may sound like a fatalistic preacher of doom, but anybody who's not a bit freaked out is just not paying much attention.

But at least it won't be boring.

Hungry baby

Every three hours, one of my pals has to feed one of these human baby devices.

No matter what time of day or night, the little gland suckers need somebody to shove a nipple of some sort in their mouths, and gurgle away.

I'm glad it's not up to me to keep the human race going.

Bleeeech!

Now there's six billion of us on this planet, and an amazing number of those six billion are either programmed against preventing more and more by godbags pushing patriarchal sky god bullshit or they can't get access to methods to prevent having more, or are busy pushing out kids because, well, everybody loves kids, and you can't tell people they can't have kids.

You know, it's a god given right.

I'm glad that I have smart pals, and that those smart pals are choosing to have a few smart babies. But at some point, we need to find an off switch

for the human fertility issue, because we're already four or five billion over the number we can support with our little blue planet.

I forget which one of my pals pushed this little sucker out, I think it was Susan and Greg. But after I get done with photoshopping the little parasites, it's sort of moot.

Given how the economy is going, I hope my pals have houses and food to give these little joyful bundles of love when they're done being milk gland junkies.

Rainbow, 1997

We had been driving for days through the summer heat, the little truck rattling along the broken interstate across the heart of the country.

It felt more like the asshole when we stopped in the small towns, all filled with Pentecostals and other life forms afflicted with a virulent strain of fundamentalist thinkers.

Sometimes I was glad people thought we were sisters. I suspect some of them would have had a whole different way of talking to us had they known we were lovers.

We were long haired women in their 40's, scruffy looking hippie dykes who had Seattle Grunge written all over us, driving back to the urban hipster neighborhood we lived in on Capitol Hill, along with all the rest of the junkies, punks, handsome gay boys and general queer crowd.

The storm was huge on the horizon, a towering pile of clouds and sideways lighting that roared along nearly parallel with us as we approached the long flat stretches of land between Bismark and Boise. It felt like we were pushing it along with us for an hour or so, then we drove through the edge of it.

The blacktop was steaming from the rain, the ground around us gulping down the newly fallen rain. We pulled over to the side of the road as the sun was setting and stared at the double rainbow, staring at the wide open plains and the big dark sky making those rainbows.

It's been a long time since I drove across the country. Now, with gas about to shoot up to four or five bucks a gallon, it's going to be too expensive to run off and have long distance adventures.

Maybe things will change and we'll finally be able to convince our stupid government that the money pissed away on airports and wars of choice and the big town killing clot of highways should go to high speed rail.

I hope they do, but I get the feeling that what I ask them for doesn't mean shit to them.

Soo, 1/17/1988, 9 AM and at 11:57 AM

Mother and Child, 1986

MJ and the Baby

4x5 view camera, Tri X film, printed on Portriga Rapid paper.

Scanned down to something too fuzzy to fit the needs of the low res and high tech age we live in with a cheap ass scanner.

Peter M. commented to Sweetie on the phone the other day he'd like

to see more nude women, I post this, per his request.

Sarah and Sarafina, 1997

It was Valentine's day, and most of my Seattle tribe was down at the Coffee Messiah celebrating a Hallmark holiday with freakish fun. A whole bunch of us got married that day by Sister Helfire N. Dalmatians, a mustachioed

member of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Sara and Sarafina were wild young freaks, barristas, fire eaters and dancers who traveled Central America on no money, rode freight trains, lived out there on the edge where things were broke but alive as hell.

I think they're both in California now, Sarah had a baby with her boyfriend Jim a few years ago, and Sarafina moved down to California to do all sorts of fire eating and flame spinning.

Kori and I got married by Sister Hellfire that day, too. It's as close as two folks like us can come to a legal marriage, and we've gone on to prove what a threat we are to marriage by being happy, childless and solid in each other's lives for almost 13 years now.

I keep hoping someday that a brain virus comes along and rewires all the fundamentalist thinkers out there to be something besides scared of people like us. You know, accepting and open and non judgmental like all the left wing Jesus people claim their dead guy on a stick was.

Still Snowing

There is still snow falling this morning.

Yesterday we were going to walk to the farmer's market downtown and have a fine breakfast and maybe buy some of that fine frost sweetened spinach and some root vegetables.

I fell down on the ice twice before we got half way, so we bailed and went to EVP just like we usually do.

And it seemed like everybody was there.

Owen, the man with the nice skull made us coffee, a fine pair of espresso shots for me topped off with very dark Guatemalan French Roast.

Tim was there, or at least most of him since he had that farm accident a decade ago there are a few digits missing.

He's my bass and guitar player and does more with three fingers on his

fretting hand than most people do with ten.

Coffee, a working furnace and handsome women and pretty men,

what more does one need on a Saturday afternoon in Wisconsin in January?

Aside from a ticket to a warm place like Bermuda and a few hundred million bucks and a new pair of 18 year old bodies for our cranky, middle aged brains to be in, anyway?

Dobro

I love photoshop and the filters you can use to push images into paintings.

This is a very low res shot of me playing my dobro, and messing with it using the fresco, sponge paint and saturation tools, it becomes almost a painting.

I finished up a guitar today out in the shop, a junker Les Paul style electric with a blood spattered look. It was a basement salvage thing from my pal Mark's pile o' shit, and it's pretty far removed from the original look and feel.

The further things get from normal, everyday mass produced crap, the more likely I am to use/enjoy/wear out.
Fuck normal. It's a setting on a washing machine, and a mythical state that humans never reach, but that most conservative people crave.

I prefer to swerve from one side of the ditch to the other, with a few terrifying moments in the middle of the road to wake me up every few years.

And hey, it's still fucking winter, I still have no furnace, and my relationship with burnt and unburnt things is starting to make me wonder if the semi-regular burning/exhaust smell I am getting is also in my brain, as I struggle with my long winter of grumpy discontent.

Time for a shot of some fine whiskey my cohort/drummer/madman savant gave us for ho ho ho season.

Bleeeech!

It's Gonna Get Cold In Here

Joel and Maggie, 2004 or 05

Our furnace was making strange odors. The kind that make you think somebody's set up a foundry in your basement, that odd, half burned smell.

The night before last I dreamed I was sleeping in a metal foundry, inhaling fumes and metal dust. A disturbing dream, filled with refugees and orphans and old sweethearts. I kept thinking, where are these strange dreams about toxic emissions and odors coming from?

Yesterday I decided things really smelled wrong when I turned up the heat. I called a nice guy from a HVAC joint to come check our furnace.
It's dead. He took off the front panel, spent five minites poking it, and said he wouldn't even turn it back on. I belive him, too. It's an old oil burner converted to a gas burner, and almost as old as I am.
So Monday we're having a new furnace put in. And it's going to cost us four grand. Ouch.

But it's better than dying of carbon monoxide poisioning. But damn, it's going to get cold in here. And I think I understand why I had dreams of unburnt carbon and of old sweethearts. It was toxic gasses!

Onion Flower in My Garden, July 2007

I miss my garden. I miss summer, everything all green and lush and fragrant. I miss long hours of sunlight making my garden leap into a lush jungle that scares the children and horses.

I miss a lot of things these days.

I guess I and many of my pals are deep in the winter of our discontent, as Shakespeare said.

Things are weird. The weather's been all over the place, we're being governed by thugs, the war merchants and neocons are trying to get us into a third or fourth war, depending on what crap they're ranting, our rights have been steadily eroded by the rethuglicans, and we live in bozo times where people who try and talk about issues seriously are called angry

or liberal scum, where the incompetent fall upward and get medals of honor or giant bonuses for wrecking companies or laying off thousands, and in a time where people measure the quality of their life by their car, ugly McMansion or the amount of money they can make.

All of that weighs pretty heavy on a lot of us these days.

Maybe that can change when we get rid of the evil power drunk clowns in the next year or two.

It makes me feel a little bit of hope to see the record turnouts in the primaries on the Democratic side.

I still think the democrats are almost as blind the shit in the wind we're going to have to face, but if they can sweep in a bunch of new people, there might be at least a hint of sanity creeping back in.

I think it's time to go watch some post apocalyptic movie so I can feel better about how bad things aren't. And one never knows what practical information you can get about killing viral infected zombies.

I think we have got a bunch of them in our local Walmart .

Heidi's Head Is Not This Big In Real Life

Heidi, July 2007

She's got a new kid. Named it Odin. Or maybe Caleb, her sweetie named it Odin. That's a big name live up to, since Odin was a one eyed father of the Norse Gods. But I liked this photo, so there it is.

Oh, and besides actually having a normal sized head, she's also not three feet tall like she looks here.

But I am addicted to wide angle lenses and getting in people's faces. They don't seem to mind. Or maybe they're scared of me.

Or perhaps my subtle and hypnotic personality seduces them.

I sorta doubt that, though.

Melrose, 1987

It was one of those incredibly hot summer days, the heavy wet air

clinging to everything like a blanket of steam.

There wasn't a wisp of breeze to be had, and it felt like that strange kind of weather that could swing from sauna to green skies and tornadoes at any moment.

The farmhouse was a crumbling old place on the edge of town, filled with old yellowed wallpaper and cracked plaster walls, the echos of all the people who lived there bouncing, filling you with a sense of place that once held something vital.

My pals were living there for the summer, doing restoration on some strange and crumbling cement scuplture folk art park, one of many renters to move in and out over the years.

The place was mostly empty, had that feeling that nobody lived there, that they were just camping out for a few days and moving on, leaving the place to the ghosts once again.

Or for the next bunch of rootless people to use it and move on.

Small towns in central Wisconsin are filled with old houses slowly crumbling away with no family there to care for it and no people moving in and gentrifying the neighborhood.

Eventually they just burn or fall in on themselves and somebody

puts up an ugly two story ranch, or the basement fills up with rotten wood, scrub trees and weeds.

I wonder if that house is even there anymore.

I know almost all my tribe from those days have moved on from my life, leaving a love for doing art to become computer geeks, jesus freak school teachers or seamstresses or stockbrokers and project managers.

Very few of my artmob kept doing art. It's a shame too, because for a time, we had some seriously good scultptors, painters, potters and printers doing something magical.

My tribe tends to be musical these days, and I still have people around me doing fine things, but that group in Oshkosh in the mid 1980's was sure an amazing bunch.

Shot with a large format camera on my favorite old film, Tri X using the available light.

Touching Passion and Playing it Safe

We're here on this mudball planet for a short time, a good 50 or so years of relative health if we're lucky. Viewed in a long term perspective, it's less than nothing.

So I think it's important to live out on the edge, to truly live like there might not be a tomorrow. I think seeing a good friend bash her head in and die in a horse accident when I was 18 had a lot to do with making me be aware of how quickly everything I am can vanish.

Add into that my intense Norwegian/Swedish decent, a family genetic disposition to being a smart ass bundle of energy fueled by coffee and sugar and restless discontent, and one gets a reputation for being a wild woman, a pain in the ass, a live wire, a free spirit, all those terms people who play it safe like to use to describe someone alive enough to make things complex.

It's gotten me in trouble, ejected from friendships and bands and jobs over the years. It's also allowed me to light things up, step loose from the safe road and figure out how to make peace with what I am.

I think passion and conflict and intensity are pretty much required for a vital life filled with music, art or whatever you pursue.

So it makes me a little crazy when I get surrounded by people who play it safe, who need rules and arrangements and who avoid conflict because they're weasels, chickenshits or frail vessels.

I even understand that fear of the unpredictable, that need to lock things down, although it taxes my patience to accept it in my pals.

But when it bugs me most is when something happens and people I thought I was communicating with and spent a lot of time working with just clam up, avoid dealing with anything uncomfortable.

Who don't tell me what they're thinking, or speak up and clear up things before they become big issues.

There's a cliche that friends help you move, but real friends help you move bodies.

I can understand that. But I think real friends tell you what you need to hear, don't shy away from listening to input and giving it back, and agree to disagree.

They sure as hell don't just vote you out of the tribe and then pretend nothing happened, or act like they're your friend while working against you.

I prefer a clean fight to sneaking around, would rather clear things up before they become real problems.

I guess that today's rainy foggy freakish weather and the conversations I had yesterday with some old bandmates has made me think about these things.

One of them standing right in front of me yesterday still didn't have the courage to actually say out loud she'd voted to remove me.

I wonder if she and the others got what they want, a nice safe band with no tension, no conflicts. And more than likely no chemistry, moments of great stupidity or bliss or connection.

I've got new music now, making last year's ugly seem less damaging, and I'm pretty happy with where I am musically. But I still miss the fire of playing with my longtime pal Bob up there on stage at the High Noon, ripping things up and feeling the big alive.

I guess what a lot of what I'm feeling boils down to thinking you should shoot your own dog when the time comes to end things, metaphorically speaking. Not be a sneak, a weasel or play the victim just because you're timid or uncomfortable around intense and passionate people.

One week's Difference

Joyce and Emma, 1989

Taken one week apart.

They Walk Among us ,September 2008

You never know who you're going to run into at

the Willy St. Fair.

I love this town. They say Madison lives in it's own bubble.

I think that's pretty cool, bubbles rise to the top instead of staying sunken in the mud like the inbred little tourist town folks I grew up with in Northern Wisconsin.

The ones who stayed mostly became drunks, jesus freaks or both, if they didn't drive into trees and die.

Metal Man Scupture in da UP

It was early October. We were in between my peak experience with a chili dog and our visit to the Porkies, just about dusk.

The sign said free family park tour, so we dived off the highway into a freakshow of fun metal sculpture. These guys were part of a half mile or so tour of great weirdness.

And on another unrelated note, if Obama becomes president, I hope he's a ruthless bastard when it comes to dealing with the swiftboating, bible slamming, kneecapping and devious slime known as hardcore rethuglicans.

They need to be treated with the same charity and kindness the give others.

Or killed, but I'm not quite ready to advocate for that. Give me another year or so of Bush and I might consider it.

Go read The Lost Albatross

http://thelostalbatross.blogspot.com/

Emily Mills is doing some very good writing, a lot of it on local issues here in Madison. I found her site as a link on Dane101.com, another good local colaborative blog.

Sleeping on the couch, 1989

I loved watching her sleep. It was one of the few times

she ever looked really at peace.

I somtimes wonder who's watching her sleep these days.
I hope she's happy with who ever that is.

Emma, 1990, Emma, 2007

The first time I met Emma, she was pretty boring. And she took a shit on my lap and then threw up on me.

She's changed a little bit since then. She also spent four or five summers sleeping on my front porch, learning to argue in a creative way, and becoming addicted to Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

She's the daughter of Joyce, whom I posted a photo of the other day,

and Bill, my long time pal/roommate/art mob member.

A Nude Photo and a Quote I like

A floating Sophia, 1986

Sophia was one of my models when I lived in Oshkosh. She was an artist, made jewelry and the last I heard, she was living in Florida somewhere. This was shot on my birthday in the crumbling back room of our band's practice space above a music store. I miss her, I hope she stumbles across this and gets in touch with me.

And now, a completely unrelated quote I like:

“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” — Robert A. Heinlein

Tim framed in Pink

Tim on Robin's back porch, Summer 2007

Graffiti, Minneapolis, 1983

This was spray painted on the wall near my crappy apartment building

off Franklin Street in Minneapolis. It was a rough neighborhood, filled with a weird mix of immigrants, native Americans and low rent artist types like myself and my sweetie at the time.

It reads:

"You must have a flaming moral purpose, so that greed, oppression and exploitation shrivel before the fire within you"

Never has that quote made more sense to me than right now.

This country has moved into ugly, dangerous territory, a time when rich thugs own the news and piss on the idea of truth, when greed has become a virtue, and when ideas like the rule of law and the common good have been made into a joke by the thugs running the country for their own uses.

I think the coming economic and environmental shit storm is going to change the way we deal with authority, and I sure as hell hope we can get some of the things we used to be back.

I don't want things to fall apart, but damn, I'm sure getting nervous waiting for it to happen.

Joyce, 1986

Shot on a 4x5 view camera, natural light in the

Witzel Street studio.

She makes the best apple pie, ever. She grows huge gardens full of flowers, and she's passionate, intense, sometimes cranky and even though we don't talk that much because we moved far apart, my life would be a hell of a lot more boring without her and her kid Emma in it.

My Father, His Pet Bear, and His Fishing Posse

My father is the guy in the center, with the baseball hat.

I think this was around 1963.

My dad would be considered pretty intense these days, the way he spent his life hunting, fishing, working and laughing harder than anybody around him.

He could yell, argue and give dirty looks pretty well too.

He and his pals would go up into Canada, up to Lake Nippigon with some pals every year to haul home big loads of fish.

One day he and his buddy caught a bear, out there fishing for pike or whatever else would bite. They saw this little bear swimming around in the middle of now where alone, and decided to rescue it.

That's the story they told us, anyway. They smuggled it back across the border, sound asleep in a gunny sack behind the driver's seat of the family Station Wagon, and my dad kept it as a pet in a spare room we had in the basement for about six months.

It made us popular in school that year, We'd say to our schoolmates, Hey, wanna come see our pet bear?

My dad would take it out on walks in the yard on a chain, let it climb around on the scrub trees in our yard, feed it bakery and donuts leftover from the big commercial bakery up in Appleton.

I remember that bear biting at the chain, trying to bite my dad through thick gloves, and I don't doubt he did bite my old man, who would have just shrugged it off with a grin and a band aid.

Eventually my mom decided the bear should go or she would, since it was getting pretty big and was between her and the washing machine, and they gave it to a game farm in Northern Wisconsin.
All that bear did for the rest of it's life is screw other bears, eat candy and live a life of captive leisure. It got huge, fat and older than dirt as far as bears go, and sure seemed content.

I know a lot of guys that would love to just eat, screw and lay around all day, and I think they wouldn't mind the cage either if it had cable and a wide screen TV.

Sometimes people don't believe us when we tell them about the bear in the basement. This photo is from my dad's photo album, a crumbling book filled with only photos of his hunting and fishing exploits. He loved his family, but the only thing that he ever seemed to take photos of was things he killed.

I feel like I grew up in a John Irving novel when I think about how strange my home life was. That's a good thing.

Soo, Marcy's House, 1989

It was cold as hell outside. We shot a bunch of photos early in the morning in Marcy's guesthouse, then went out for breakfast.

I miss Soo, or Sue or whatever she calls herself these days. She was a great model and a good friend.

This Man Roasts All The Good Coffee I Drink

Mathew at my Solstice Party that I did not blog about.

He roasts almost all the coffee down at EVP, the place that I spend at least three h0urs a week in drinking coffee and yakking at my tribe. We've gotten quite the table full of strange people built up over the last four or five years, a real mix of all sorts of dykes, firefighters, poets, musicians, teeth gnashers and political activists and cranks and loons.

They also make the best damn espresso, anywhere. I know, I lived in Seattle for six years, and the only place that came close was Coffee Messiah or Cafe Vivachi on Capital Hill.

Mathew is also a musican, enjoyable freak and very sweet guy.

Merry Christmas, What's That Burning Smell?

The Charred Remains of my Coffee Maker1997-2007

RIP

So, you wake up at home on Christmas morning, just me and sweetie lounging around watching Charlie and The Chocolate factory, waiting for the coffee to be done. Your nose picks up the scent of burning plastic, and, being more awake than you thought you were, you stumble down the stairs at high speed, walk into the kitchen and look to see what's going on.

You look out into the sunroom and see two feet of black smoke above two feet of grey brown smoke, and see that the switch on the ancient coffee maker you've been trying to wear out before buying a new one has decided to short out and melt the whole damn thing, then light fire to the melted remains, the plastic tablecloth it's sitting on, and is about to light fire to the whole house, and you think three things.

one: HOLY FUCK!

two: WHERE'S THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER?

three: TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND BLAST THOSE FLAMES!

Then you spend the rest of the day airing the house out, cleaning the sunporch and thinking about just how much too close to disaster you were.

On the plus side, my firefighter pal did give me a new fire extinguisher this afternoon, and said I did ok.

And I thought this christmas was going to be drama free because I stayed home with sweetie and didn't do blood family stuff. Go figure.

And yes, I know I should have not waited so long to blog again, Tom. What can I say, I'm a bum.

My New Computer Fan Being Humped By A Punk Barbie Clone

My new motherboard and my favorite Barbie Get It On

11/30/07

My computer died last week. After ten years of using the same box and five or so of the same motherboard and chip, it just died. No sparks, no drama, it just refused to get out of bed and be something usefull, dambitt!
It's puritan work ethic died, or maybe the endless hours of my life I spent pissing it away reading blog posts and depressing things made it just stroke out.
So Kori and I have spent the last week froggin' around with building a new one, one with more hard drive space in a new box.
I'm going to sort of miss that big ugly tower box my old roomate gave me in Seattle, all painted up with gold sunbursts like a cheap Japanese electric guitar from the early sixties.
But I'm hoping the new one works as long, and it's sort of sexy in a black gleaming darth vader sort of way.

Stench

some days you find the stench
in your mental existential trench
some days are like shoveling dirt
heavy wet dirt until your arms hurt
fall days can be sweet

the cool air makes

pie and coffee

a treat
but these gray skies
make me want

to accept defeat
my body aches
from my arms down to my feet
and it seems like
the cloud filled days
are stuck on repeat
this too shall pass
becomes your mantra

Thanksgiving

I sometimes think the human brain is like a giant thrashing machine. We dump loads of stuff into it, be it Jenifer Lopez videos or limericks or old phone numbers and odd little bits of semi-worthless knowledge, and sometime later it shakes out into something that might actually make some sense. Might be turned into art or some form of expression our screwed up human pool of knowledge might find some beauty or use for.
Sometimes I think I've trained myself to think in terms of guitar licks, flavors of coffee and beer, and smells like sawdust and garden dirt and peeled onions and garlic.
It's Thanksgiving day, one of the most hipocritical days we celebrate. I have ten people downstairs waiting for three or four more to show up so we can stuff our faces. I'm happy as a clam in clean mud.
Back to my tribe now. Happy dead turkey and opressive invader society day, everybody.

William Gibson quote on his writing

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics

You made your name as a science-fiction writer, but in your last two novels you've moved squarely into the present. Have you lost interest in the future?

It has to do with the nature of the present. If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It's too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they'd not only show you the door, they'd probably call security.

Big Happy Funouse, Sigourney Weavers MP3, Brewing beer

You know, it's bad enough to live in the time of Bush the Younger and his bunch of soul sucking thugs, but day two of this crappy Seattle style weather when it should be crisp and cool and blue skies really is not a happy thing.

Time to warm up the house and brew beer, I think. A trappist ale and a fine Brown Ale, Irish style.

There's something very damn satisfying about brewing. To tap a keg of your own brew on a cool fall night, kick back and crank up the tube amp and telecasterish thing really takes the edge off.

Speakin' of telecaster disaster, here's a link to an MP3 of my loud band doing a little number for your listening pleasure called Crazy Little Pixie. A recording of practice that is far from suck, I'm told.

Click on the link at the top.

http://www.snowdancer.stormshadow.com/mp3s/mp3index.htm

I stole the photo from one of my favorite blogs, BigHappyFunhouse, run by a dude who buys and finds old photos and posts them. I love old found photos. He also advertises free pie, although I haven't been able to download it.

http://www.bighappyfunhouse.com/

Nice To See Your Back

Soo's Back, 1985
We had a long photographic realtionship. She was a slender young art student who was part of my art mob back in Oshkosh in the mid to late 80's.
For a long time she'd come over to the studio and we'd shoot some nudes, or we'd go off and shoot somewhere on location.

She, like a lot of people liked to drop into the photo studio I worked at, check out the new artwork we did in our off hours when we weren't photographing garbage trucks or Tampon boxes or cop shoe catalogs.

After a while she became a big part of my photographic artwork. She loved to model nude, and she was good at it.
This was one of my first times shooting with a 4x5 view camera. I really had a love/hate relationship with the big camera. It was slow, clunky and awkward, but it taught me to slow the hell down and focus on the images I wanted to make instead of just blasting away with a Nikon with a motor drive and picking the best image.

I also loved the amazing quality of the big negatives.

Ironic that here on the web they're chopped down to tiny and low res images. But when you start with that sort of quality, it still keeps a lot of mojo.

Beer Drinkers and Breweries are Lame

I like to brew my own beer, and keep it on tap in recycled soda kegs. I never have to wash bottles or bottle the beer.
But when I run out of homebrew, I like to go to Woodman's or the liquor store down the block and get the old style cases of returnable bottles. I like the idea that bottles get used over and over along with the beer cases.
But now it's getting harder and harder to find, and this trip the only beer I found was Point.
I like Point, it's not bad for a store bought lager. And I really hate the idea of using something once and tossing it. Reduce and reuse are a hell of a lot smarter than recycling.
I imagine mass market distrubution makes all of this much harder and messier, even though in the long run it's much smarter.
And I suspect a lot of consumers are too short sighted or just too lame to deal with returnables. Most people can't even remember to stick a bundle of used grocery bags in the trunk or backseat, and then have to get new bag every trip to the store.
That's fucked up. I'm not sure bitching about it matters though. I think the coming shit storm of environmental and financial problems is going to make a lot of this moot.
But at least I know how to make my own hard cider and beer when I'm totally broke...

Dreadlocked Mona Lisa

Today I photographed a dozen roller derby women. I am a sucker for taking photographs of big eyed, tattoed and dread headed roller derby queens.

So I shot these very serious looking photos in between doing some very funny ones for the team.

Love that tattoo.

Motor Primitives at The High Noon

A bunch of dirty hippie peaceniks threw a benefit today at the

High Noon. The kind of people my retuglican brother thinks have "nancy pelosi liberal values".

I call them my tribe.

I think my brother's pretty stupid sometimes. Something about living in the Fox Valley makes a lot of people spiritual thugs and cranky fucks.

I think it's better to have a bleeding heart than none at all. But I'm a dirty hippie and a queer too, so what I say doesn't matter much.

John Lennon said that living is easy with eyes closed, although the clenched assholes of a lot of those same people must get sore from being scared all the time.

But anyway, my pals Pam, Robin, Jeff and Ed rocked out to raise money for the Madison Peace Coaliton, and I went down, drank fine IPA and shot these photos.

They rock, these four. I may be biased, Pam and Robin are in a band with me too.