Enough Of The Fish Already.

That picture of my cod (not to be confused with my codpiece) has been headlining VTK for far too long. I was preparing to do a post on how stupidly the Cambridge police acted, but what's there to say? The Cambridge police acted stupidly. Barack Obama may be forced to backtrack from that statement, but I'm happy to give it a new home here. I've been living in Cambridge for 9 years and I have no reservations saying they acted stupidly, because I've seen them act stupidly - and lie about it - on more than one occasion. I'd be happy to discuss this with anyone who disagrees in the comments, but that's all there is to say on the post itself. [update: said discussion did ensue in the comments.] Now on to some pictures of the insane trail BV and I hiked in New Hampshire's White Mountains this weekend:







That's not us in the pictures (and the rocks weren't that dry). I found these on google images and borrowed them since we were too busy being exhausted, discouraged, terrified, and disoriented to take any pictures when we were on the "trail". What you see there is the Flume Slide Trail up to the top of Mt. Flume, elevation 4300 feet. According to this hiker/blogger who gives a good account of the hike, it's about 3000 ft of total elevation gain up Flume Slide, to the peak, and over/up to the adjacent Mt. Liberty. 1800 of that is on the 0.7 miles of Flume Slide rock wall that somehow qualified for the name "trail". We got some advice from a couple hikers who had just climbed down "suicide hill" and suggested that we pull ourselves up using the trees along the side of it and climb through the forest where possible. Somehow, that description didn't deter us. The Appalachian Mountain Club tries to stop people from climbing through the forest next to the wet rock trail by laying trees across the paths that people bushwhack. So, while climbing up the wet rock wall is practically impossible, climbing up through the dense and obstacled forest with a big 45 pound backpack is merely almost impossible. I couldn't figure out how the AMC expected us to climb up the wet rock walls without dying. There were no warnings or anything. The only way we could do it was to crisscross the face of the trail, burrowing through the side trails. Eventually we stopped seeing the blue blazes that marked the trail. We were lost in a dense, steep thicket of trees and rocks. Every 25 feet or so, it would look like we had no option of where to go. We would pick the most tenable passageway and go up another 25 feet. While we were demoralized and starting to get concerned about light and water, we were heartened to see that other people had clearly gotten lost and passed through this way too. It wasn't a marked or approved trail, but it had become a trail of some sort. We also knew that it couldn't go up forever. Eventually, we'd get to a top, if not the top of Mt. Flume. We'd be able to put the tent down somewhere, if not on an approved campground platform. After a couple hours, the incline decreased and I came over a small ridge to see an AMC sign! I chucked my poles and screamed in triumph. Here's the sign (obviously without the snow):


It doesn't say anything about the "Flume Slide Trail" and we didn't see it on our 0.1 hike to the peak of Mt. Flume and beyond. That unmarked bushwhacky madness might have actually been the trail the whole time. When we finally got to the campsite, the ranger dude who supervises the site said he'd never climb the Flume Slide Trail in these wet conditions. So, that answered my question as to how the AMC expected people to climb the trail: it didn't. Not unless it was bone dry, anyway.

What's really funny to me - in retrospect - is that when we chose the trail, it did not occur to us at all that we were about to climb a trail NAMED AFTER A FUCKING WATER SLIDE. This only occurred to me when I was doing a google image search for "flume slide".

Going Back To New Orleans

When the clock strikes midnight Central time, I'll be back in the Big Sleazy cracking a cold one at Molly's At The Market!


Molly's - where, depending on the time of day/night, the crowd can range from this:


To this:


Our long national nightmare of me not going to Jazzfest and returning with a comical picture diary is over. Thanks to some commission work from MCSmackdown, I'll be frolicking at the Fairgrounds and queasy in the Quarter once again. Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Inaugurama v.Obama

DC, meet VTK. The last time I was in the nation's capitol was exactly 4 years ago, several months short of the advent of VTK, for the same event - the Presidential Inauguration. Of course, that trip was in a protest organizer capacity (the Turn Your Back On Bush action), and this one was in more of a celebratory capacity (my cartoons and flipping birds at federal agencies notwithstanding). BV has a close friend in Arlington VA, so we carpooled down with a few friends and crashed just over the river for a few days. The hospitality was great and I've been assured that my paranoid certainty that the 8 year old son of the hosts had stolen my toiletry bag was unfounded. I'm still not convinced, but I'm letting it go. This is me, letting it go.

Moving on. We made our way into DC for the Inaugural concert mid-afternoon on Sunday, with a brief stop to greet the new Department of Interior.


Unfortunately, security stopped letting people into the concert area at the beginning of the show so we milled around the Washington Memorial, trying to get a good view of one of the jumbotrons. We made it in time for Stevie Wonder and Obama, which was good enough for me. Apparently, I am too cynical, snobbish, whatever, to enjoy Pete Seeger singing This Land is Your Land like everyone else. Just didn't do it for me. We walked around DC after the show and ran into Obama in a CVS. We discussed our eyeglasses.


The evening was spent feasting on Ethiopian food (everyone) and sneaking peeks at the Steelers' score on BV's blackberry (me).


Monday was pretty chill as we met friends at the Native American Museum for lunch (I had the buffalo steak mid-rare, with brussel sprouts and wild rice) and dinner (roasted chicken with date stuffing on a bed of sauteed chard). We topped it off with some vodka gimlets at VTK reader lc's "Eat My Balls" Inauguration Party, which featured cheese balls, popcorn balls, meatballs, etc. It was a good night for city roaming.


We got up before the crack of dawn to head into the city on Tuesday to meet up with everyone and make our way onto the Mall to watch the Inauguration. That plan fell by the wayside immediately as we realized that we were in trouble after standing still in line for 20 minutes with 1000 other people trying to get into the Subway station in Arlington. We decided to walk the 3 miles to the Washington Monument. It was 10 degrees, but at least we weren't trapped underground for 3 hours.

We crossed the Memorial Bridge into DC and were excited to find that we were at the Lincoln Memorial and that while we weren't likely to meet up with our friends, we had thousands of port-a-potties at our disposal, plenty of time, and our pick of Jumbotrons. In other words, I was unlikely to have the claustrophobic panic attack that I had been predicting. Best. Case. Scenario. I took this photo of what I called the Inaugural Layer Cake (sky, federal building, trees, buses, port-a-potties, people):


The ceremony itself was great, with ubercreep Rick Warren being the only downside. Fortunately, his hypocritic blather was followed immediately by Aretha Franklin's transcendent rendition of My Country Tis Of Thee. I'm not so cynical/snobbish/whatever that I couldn't appreciate this:



And then, of course, there was this:



And Dick Cheney was in a wheelchair. Great day. And traffic was a total non-issue on the ride home. Great trip. And BV's new New Yorker was waiting for us when we got home. Great fun:



Go Steelers!

Lebowskifest 2008 - San Francisco

Your Venerable Typing Krafwerker is safely back on the East Coast after two great weeks in Northern California. I went to work on some art projects and hang out with friends MCSmackdown and AKBoognish, and let me tell you: it's good work if you can get it! What the fuck do I care about the market crashing? I live below the federal poverty level and I'm jetsetting (jetbluesetting (love that direct tv for 6 hours)) all over the country. The majority of the time was spent up in Napa working on the art projects, hanging with MCSmackdown and his heart-melting 4 year old daughter, and eating like a king from his garden, his 15 chickens' fresh eggs, his tasty wine, and his phenomenal cooking. (Also, the weather in Napa? It's like completely cloudy and 60 every morning (got up around 8), then completely "not-a-cloud-in-the-sky" blue sky and 85 by 10:30. Then clear starry nights and 55 by 10 PM. Every day was like that. Great climate this time of year.) Sandwiching my great and productive time up in Napa were a few nights in San Francisco with Mr. and Mrs. AKBoognish and friends, their hospitality and good times. I've been debating whether to blog about the art and shenanigans of the predominant Napa time or what I think you'll find most entertaining, what happened to be going down the weekend I flew out there: The San Francisco Lebowskifest.


I think it's a fairly safe assumption that most of the readership of this blog will have seen The Big Lebowski, the now cult classic Coen Brother's movie. Most of you can probably quote it like an old Monty Python movie at this stage. The Cult of the Dude is alive and well ten years in. In fact, it was alive and well four years after the movie came out, when the first Lebowskifest occurred in Louisville KY, and the Star-Trek-Conventiony, Rocky-Horror-Picture-Showy, White-Russian-soaked event has exploded over the last 5 years and is now staging fests all around the country. There is usually a movie viewing, bands, a bowling event, trivia, and costume contests. There are special celebrity guests from time to time (including one appearance from Jeff Bridges which he later called his "Beatles Moment"). A common "celebrity" is the original Dude, the inspiration for the character, Jeff "The Dude" Dowd. Just imagine the rock-star status he enjoys at these fests. Here he is, flanked by two of the Dudes we were hanging out with:


I got into San Francisco too late for the first night's concert/movie viewing, so we settled for the costume bowling party on the second night. We fashioned "Jesus" inspired bowling outfits out of some jumpsuits that AKBoognish had, met up with his friend (above left) who had a good "Dude" look going (complete with rug to tie the room together), mixed up 2 thermoses of white russian mix, and headed off to the alley. As we waited in line, we met some guys who were dressed up as Jackie Trehorn's party guests (complete with a blanket that they used to hoist up their full inflated and sexy blow up doll), some nihilists, and a top notch "dude" who said his name was "Dog" (above right). We ended up bowling with Dog and a couple other TBL enthusiasts (one who had an official "Achiever" t-shirt and one who had an official Tampa Bay Devil Rays jersey that had "The Dude" stitched on the back (this was no costume - he actually purchased this. I was impressed)). It was a great crew and both Dog and the Devil Rays Dude have their photosites/blogs linked to from the official Lebowskifest recap of the SF event.


The evening was general madness. There were two bars devoted strictly to serving white russians. The human body is not designed to have double digits of the caucasian cocktails. It's just not. (it's definitely not designed to have a few glasses of wine on top of that) But it was a blast. I don't have any of the AKBoognish photos or videos on my laptop, but here are some I culled from the websites linked from the main site. Be sure to check out the Devil Rays Dude's blog entry, which includes a video that has AKBoognish and I doing our Hotel California Bowling Ball shining impersonation.


yeah. And a few more I found online of us in our costumes:





and some other costumes that you might recognize:











and finally:


"You see? You see little Larry? This is what happens when you ..."

VTK Midlife Crisis?

Is that the chief scribe of the venerable VTK wearing a 7 year old Mooney Suzuki shirt in the bathroom with a freshly shaved mohawk and a Narragansett in the background a scant 8 days before his 35th birthday and the absolute end to any pretense that he's not in his mid thirties? Well, um, yes, I guess. Sounds like a textbook midlife crisis, doesn't it. Not so, in this case. For the unlikely story, read on:

A high school friend and Pittsfield Generals soccer teammate of mine is getting married in a couple months and is having his bachelor party this weekend. Whiskey and strip clubs? Waking up in Vegas to your roommate banging a hooker in the bathroom? Football game and pub crawl at the alma mater? Nay. This old friend isn't into that sort of debauchery and derilection. Instead, we're headed to Camp Thunderbird outside of Charlotte, NC, for a two day competition of physical and mental endurance tests. The marquee event will be an olympic style hammer throw competition (see video below). In addition to that, there will be several other events (all of which are top secret), opening and closing ceremonies, and "bunks" for us to sleep on in cabins. Also, fyi, it's January.

So, in order to maximize my intimidation factor, I decided to take advantage of my self-employment and topped of my 220 lbs. with a mohawk. And let me tell you, VTKids, nothing says punk rock like a salt and pepper mohawk with a balding spot on the turn from the top to the back. Balding!?!? what!? Thinning, maybe. Balding, no! As for the Mooney Suzuki shirt and the 'gannsett, what can I say. It's a great shirt (tarantula with a human skull on it) and I'm broke.

But in any case, I'm feeling strong for the big weekend. I'm just hoping that the hammer throw is the last event, so that I can make it through the rest of the events before severely fucking up my shoulders:

Zeitgeist! Standortgeist! Kunst, kinder!

I'm basically an athiest. Technically, I guess I would be defined as an agnostic since I don't claim to know whether or not god exists. But agnosticism is like a slippery tight wire - you always end up falling to one side or the other. You can claim to be in total disinclination to belief one way or the other, but eventually, in real life practice, you find yourself tending towards belief or non-belief. So, I'm a non-believer, an athiest basically. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that. All a bunch of neurons firing or not firing, creating a highly developed collective consciousness. I don't know but that seems to be the case. And yet, sometimes coincidences, connections, serendipities, etc, give me pause. They float me into thinking that something's pulling puppet strings around me. But mostly they make me appreciate the poetic randomness of the world, rather than believing in some otherness operating in mysterious ways. Sometimes you are just in the right time and the right place for something.

For example, I've been working on my graphic novel, Business Casual Stag Devil Death Boy for quite a while now. There are probably a lot of people in the world working on graphic novels right now, but I don't know any of them. I have friends who read graphic novels and who appreciate the nature of the medium, but it's not like there are people I hang out with who have been going through this particular interesting/pain-in-the-ass process over the past [___] year[s]. It's taking forever and while I'm probably 95% through the whole process, that 5% is daunting. Then on Monday, I went back to Pittsfield for Christmas and my mother mentioned that they were having some sort of exhibit on graphic novels at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, 25 minutes from where I grew up. I borrowed the car and 25 minutes later I was looking at the only museum exhibition of the art form of the graphic novel that I'd ever seen. (There was a comic book museum in Northampton 45 minutes away, back in the 90's, but that wasn't specifically about the graphic novel, as opposed to the comic book. This was about graphic novels, not just superhero comics. I don't make the distinction to make a qualitative statement; they're just different forms in scope and content.) There - out of all the places in the world, near the house I grew up in. Then - out of all the times in my life, when I'm embroiled in the middle of just such a project. I just found it odd. Like I was smack dab in the middle of the zeitgeist (defining spirit/mood of a time) and standortgeist (defining spirit/mood of a place). Like I was meant to grow up there and to cycle back there, then, now. Random or not, the whole experience has pumped me up for the final five%.

Random. Paper salesman Papa VTK was relocated from Chicago to Pittsfield in 1974 or 5, so we ended up a few minutes away from the home of one of the greatest artists (not just "illustrators") of the twentieth century - Norman Rockwell. In his life, Norman Rockwell was ridiculously prolific in making some of the best portraiture work of his generation, of his century, in the conversation of of all time. Yet he received no respect from the despicable "Art World". Oh those were very nice illustrations, technically impressive; he's a fine draftsman. But it's not cubist and it's not dada and it's not surrealism and it's not futurism and it's not abstract expressionism and it's not minimalism. So, it's not something that should be thought of as art in the modern era. It's been done, so it's irrelevant. In recent years, the Art World has been so charitable as to recognize the skill of Rockwell, and has begun to recognize the skill involved in the artform of the graphic novel. But comic artists and illustrators have been disrespected similarly to Rockwell for decades, which is certainly why the museum chose to do this exhibition. But there I go railing against the art establishment (fuck you) again. Sorry.

The point is that if you are within striking distance of Western Mass (and Stockbridge is next to Lee, which is an exit off the Mass Pike) you should check out this exhibit and the rest of the museum. It has lots of original drawings, sketches, and gives great insight into this particular creative process. It features the works of R Crumb, Dave Sim, Frank Miller, fellow Progressive collaborator Sue Coe, and to my surprise and excitement the work of my favorite graphic novel artist, Marc Hempel, who did the artwork for The Kindly Ones, the best illustrated of Neil Gaimon's Sandman series, in my occasionally humble opinion. (that's his work to the left and up at the top)

Kunst, kinder! Art, children!

Savannah's Savannah

"You wan'a spend 60 hours in the next 4 days doing a mural for me? You wan'a?" Yes I do, little Savannah. In fact, that 3 year old girl could get me to do nearly anything by flashing those big brown eyes at me, grabbing my hand, and saying "You wan'a?" in that sweet little voice. You wan'a watch a show with me, you wan'a jump in a circle with me, you wan'a eat oatmeal with me, you wan'a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge with me? Anything you say. Yes. When the coffee and the diet cokes and the whiskey and the corndogs wore off, that was the voice that kept me going in the 18th hour of the 4th day of this ridiculous project.


But let me start by saying that customer service at airlines and airports in the US is at an all-time low. I know. That's obvious to anyone who flies these days, but they really took it to a new nadir on this trip. I won't go into the details of the way in which they screwed me on my flight to San Francisco on the way over a week and a half ago, because they were many and varied, but let's just say that it took me a cool 15 hours to get to my destination. Once I arrived, everything was great though, as akboognish and wife sc showed me a great time and some first class hospitality. We got some quality Cali-Mexican food and hit some fun hip spots in the Mission before calling it a PST night. The next night, we headed back down to the Mission (an area known for its murals, incidentally), met up with a handful of former Massholes, and partied it up at the bars and at a hopping house party. After a couple nights of partying, we were happy to take a leisurely drive up to Napa to hang out with MCSmackdown and his lovely little lady.


The room is 11 ft x 12 ft x 8 ft high and MCSmack had primed it with a metallic paint that was going to allow magnets to be hang all over the mural. We weren't sure how well that was going to work with 2 coats of semi-gloss on top of it (that was back when I thought I was going to be able to do two full coats of the entire mural in 3 days and change) but MCS'down thought it would be worth it to try. Here's what it looked like when I got there:






On my 4th day in Cali, I got right to work on the mural (well, after eating oatmeal and playing house with Savannah - can't say no. can't do it). She was in and out, being run around on errands and playdates, but when she did pop in, she was happy to identify the animals I was penciling in on the wall and didn't seem to have a problem with what I was doing to her room, despite not really understanding it. She even helped by drawing a bird on the wall, which I later painted in (see the photo at the top of the post). Later in the day, she came in to give me a big hug goodbye (she was going to her mom's for a few days), and she asked "wha's that?" about the drawing on the wall at her eye level. I told her that it was a rhino. She looked at it, gave the wall a hug, and stomped out of the house shouting "klop a pop pop! klop a pop pop!"

the exact moment that my heart disintegrated.

at which point, I resolved that she was going to get a kick ass mural no matter what. Well, I don't know if it's "kick ass", but the "no matter what" on the mural turned out to be 60 hours over 4 days, including an epic 18 hour painting session that spilled into 4:30 AM on Thanksgiving morning (which was the last possible morning I could leave to go back to SF). Here it is:








If you want to see what it would be like for a 3 year old to walk into the room, including my impression of how she would say "Wan'a see a mural?", view here:



I could've easily put another 10 - 12 hours into it to get it to a point where I would've been satisfied, but that's all the time I had, so some of the things I wanted to do didn't get done, or got done insufficiently. But I got it to the point where all the animals were done to my satisfaction and all the mistakes and drips were touched up. Hopefully, Savannah's going to "wan'a" hang out in her room. I'm pretty sure she'll like it. MCSmackadoo said that she's not scared of any animals so that wasn't an issue and he was very happy with the final product so that's that.



Postscript: A few hours later, I was back in San Francisco, physically and mentally exhausted, with a 15 person Thanksgiving dinner on tap. Good company and free flowing beer and wine assisted me greatly in making it through that. Not that it was particularly stressful. But it's the holidays. And I was 100% out of gas. But I got my wind (fumes?), and the next day brought a little leisure (including a stop at the mystery book store pictured at right) until I decided to go online and reconfirm my 9:39 PM red-eye, non-stop, first class flight back to Boston at around 3:00 PM. I couldn't seem to get any results from my search of the confirmation number so I called the 800 number. Turns out that they had cancelled the 9:39 flight and I was supposed to have been on the 1:30 PM flight instead. A solid 8 hours earlier than my flight. And they didn't feel the need to inform me of that in any way. Moral of the post: airlines suck, murals are hard, Savannah is cute.