Flying Rabbit x Blaxsploitation

Not much to say about this, other than I wish I had shot it in better quality with my camera phone. At least I'm sort of learning video editing.


The Bearded Lady Flies Again from chris barry on Vimeo.

Enjoy.

Smells Like Tween Spirit

It all started on Monday. I bought a rug for my bedroom as somewhere nice for my feet to fall when I step out of bed. Martina Van Buren, my lionhead rabbit/devil's advocate/beloved roommate/perpetual antagonist/~8-year-life-partner, took to the rug immediately by pancake-ing herself down, stretching into lounge mode and laying down a few "this is my rug now" poos.

It's like diss:

clearly i am not in control of this situation

And like dat:

The thing is, she has her own rug in her pen. It's a $5.99 dollar store treasure, and she seems to be confusing my rug for hers when I thought that I had clearly indicated the difference. I need to show I'm boss. But if I retaliate in a way she'll understand — by pooping on her rug, for instance — I still lose, because she will just stonewall me into cleaning up the mess myself. She's very persuasive. So I don't have a solution yet.

But as the week progressed, things got weirder than the battle over rug ownership. She was racing in circles around my feet, honking at me like a little goose baby and demanding constant an immediate attention. Wherever I went, she followed, circling my feet and standing on her hind legs to stare at me. At first cute, last night the behavior became insane.

Martina would not leave me alone. Usually when I am working in my lounge chair, she will leap into my lap and sit for a few minutes, and I will move my laptop, put my work on hold and torture her with love and affection. Then she'll get restless and hop down, go eat some hay or my shoes or a wire or plot my untimely death or whatever it is that she does when I'm not looking. But not last night: She hopped into my lap probably ten times over the course of a couple hours and just stayed put, getting herself comfortable and buzzing at me, demanding affection. I also began to notice a smell in my room, not unlike the cloud of body odor wafting around Bonnaroo this time of year, but a little sweeter, and probably more beneficial to our society. After determining that the smell wasn't from my armpit or my dirty laundry, I started to ponder the bunny connection. The smell was wild and strange and mildly intoxicating, kind of like in that gasoline/turpentine way. It was then that I gave my shirt the sniff test, where she'd been nestled all night, and the odor was all over it. Perplexed, I turned to my Savior, the omnipotent omnipresent omni-sexual Internet, for advice, and came across this:

It was then that I realized what I had suspected: My baby has become a little lady, and it was time to release her into the wild. I opened the door and let her run out onto the patio, where she was swiftly dispatched by a large hawk that had been ominously circling overhead. I exclaimed, "that's nature for you" and spent the rest of the evening in a leather wing-back chair, smoking a brier pipe and reading Darwin, content in my actions. and she was flirting with the "man of the house." I then set out to find the corniest version of a certain Neil Diamond song to play over and over for her (and me), and I think I found it:



I am not unfamiliar with female advances, but 96-percent of them come in the form of doe-eyed flirtations from overweight black women in the Duane Reade check-out line, where I'm patiently waiting to buy blueberry yogurt pretzels. It happens often. Back home in Atlanta, I'm the WASPy love interest for the cashiers at Kroger — and the sketchier the neighborhood the better. But this was my first inter-species flirtation, and it kinda stunk.

I started reading more. Too much, actually. I saw things I can't unsee. I read things I shouldn't have read. Nature is weird and so is the Internet and so are people, so the trifecta was intense.

not all trix are for kids

This was seriously on a rabbit owner discussion board in a spay/neuter thread. It is terrifying.

I was going to say that things have calmed down, but for the last 30 minutes she's been in my lap. Every time I reach forward to the keyboard, she nuzzles my wrist up over her head to be petted. I am still not the boss.

Besides finding the above pornographic cereal mascot, I've found lots of useful information. Apparently this behavior is a good indication that it is time for her to be spayed. I don't really want to spay her, but it is in her best interest in terms of health and longevity. Hopefully she'll stop flirting with me once the spaying is complete; besides, even though I love my now-grown-woman bunny, my heart belongs to someone else. FREE DELILAH!!! I'm waitin' for ya baby.

 

Whoa, Maybe I Should Start a Heady New Brooklyn Music Blahg Brah

conduct breast cancer screenings every year on your friends

Or maybe not. But with the amount of time I have been wasting spending listening to music lately — both live and, er, dead? — I thought I would share a couple of recent thoughts and finds. In recent posts I have talked about rappers with interesting voices and the fact that listening to late-50s era Hawaiian records on cold gray rainy days could theoretically make you happier and more productive, but I caught a show last week (does that phrase sound like a euphemism for getting a venereal disease?) that revitalized my love of live music, especially "catching a show" that doesn't cost a ridiculous amount of money to see (or cure).

When I lived in Athens, GA, there was always so much music to be seen, and covers/tickets were always pretty cheap, otherwise I wouldn't have gone because I was a broke college student whose monthly budget — and how I spent my time — was usually broken down as follows:

~ 35-55% finding "things" with names like "Hawaiian Sativa", "Princess", "Grape-le", "Outdoor Indo"

~ 25-35% eating, trying to eat, driving somewhere to eat, grilling on the front patio, buying food

~ whatever % is left was for drinking, girls, drinking with girls, reading, drawing, listening to music and school (and school was always last)

But you could go out on a random Tuesday, plop down a $5 cover and see a great performance from a band you'd never heard of before (this link also shows the beautiful Georgia Theatre before it burned down). I even saw Kings of Leon (when they were good, around 2004, which was coincidentally when they could barely play their instruments other than make a bunch of noise and howl) and My Morning Jacket play at the 40 Watt Club, a small standing room only venue that only fits about 300 people. The MMJ show was a "costume required" show they called the Under The Sea Prom — everyone was required to wear prom or "under the sea" attire and they threatened to deny entrance unless you conformed to the dress code. They wore pastel tuxes and rubber Elvis hair, played songs like "Dancin' In The Moonlight" and "Johnny B. Goode" and even elected a King and Queen for the night: it was a three-hour dance party and the most fun I've ever had at a concert.

Pre-show dance party at my brother's apartment, listening to The Rolling Stones' Beggar's Banquet, the best pre-show album of all time:

At the show, random blond stickin' her finger in my nose, probably because I was groping her all night.

lookin' for love in all the wrong places

All that being said, (probably unnecessarily) I went and saw Morning Teleportation at Brooklyn Bowl last Friday for $5, and it reminded me just how great SOME of the music here in Brooklyn can be: Just like Athens, there is a ton of flotsam, basically the result of the ratio of available time slots at bars, lazy club bookers and underemployed twenty-somethings wanting to have a band and skateboard.

This was one of my favorite songs of the night, because I think it best represents the band's rootsy, picking guitar playing that doesn't come across as folksy, but instead modern and splashy.



The whole performance is up on the band's YouTube channel and is worth watching if only to look for the guy wearing the neon green suit; I think the "hit song" that you may have heard is Expanding Anyway.

An upcoming show that isn't crazy expensive and worth checking out if you're in New York is my friend Kurt's band, Country Mice, at The Knitting Factory on Friday. If you don't like the song "Ghost" (streaming from the link above), I probably won't like you. It's a damn-near perfect rock song, just like Kurt's mustache is damn-near perfect.

Also, my token African friend Jasper's band, North Highlands, is fresh out tha studio and is playing later this month at the Mercury Ballroom. Go see them immediately (later this month). I will be in Ohio filming a documentary about Lionhead Rabbits, but you should go and dance and twirl and go to Nice Guy Eddie's afterward to eat cheap hot wings, drink shitty beer and play Naked Photo Hunt and just have an all-around classy night out on New York's hip and trendy Lower East Side. (That is the grossest sentence I have ever written.) Here's their amazing video that features Jasper's amazing van.



Finally, for a band that I have no ties to but has come onto my radar (which sounds vaguely dirty porno sexual if you change the spelling a little) is a band with a relatively awful name, Apache Dropout, but with a lo-fi anthemic sound that I'm diggin' on right now. I want to listen to them while dancing with girls dressed all in black with bleach-blond hair, drinking whiskey and cheap beer from cans and making out while waiting in line for the single bathroom with a broken lock. You can download the first side of their LP at the link above: Listen to "Sam Phillips Rising" over and over and support your bad habits and theirs by buying the album.

Love the cover art, courtesy of Bull City Records:

Also, I think my rabbit's tail is getting too long? Does anyone have any information about this? How long is too long for a bunny tail?

Oh, three more things then I promise I'm done. One: You should save up your allowance and get cultured and smart by seeing my dear friend Cat on Broadway in War Horse, which officially opens today! It had a huge run in London and it is Steven Spielberg's next film, which is slated to come out in December. Congrats to Cat who is the hardest working woman in show-biz that I know, and here's to a long, multi-season run! While you're in that area of town gettin' some culture, don't be fooled by thinking you'll take a break from being smart if you follow this sign:

It is NOT a midtown location for the Insane Clown Posse but instead a bunch of artsy photographs, if you're into that kinda thing, so don't be fooled.

Two, I want to once again issue a formal apology to my friend Stephanie for missing my call to be in Abel Ferrera's new film and get yelled at by Willem Dafoe. That was a mistake I'll never live down and I'm sorry.

Three, I am now going to start editing/programming my friend Matt's great website, Staccato, featuring the best micro-fiction available on the webz. What began as a literary mag in Athens is being reborn once again in Brooklyn and soon in paper form! But for now, check out the website where we will be publishing submitted stories twice weekly. Submit! Read!

Final non-sequitur, this disturbs me: What is corn up to? And what is Korn up to?

 

A Fruitful Use of My Time

I made this today. I don't know why. I rarely find memes funny, but somehow I stumbled upon a picture of a chayote squash or, as it's called in the South, a mirliton, and thought of how it looked like the face of a grumpy grandma with her dentures soaking in a glass on the nightstand.

Chayote squash are very delicious, I have had them pickled and also fried, which makes them taste very similar to fried green tomatoes. There is even a Mirliton Festival in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans every year, because people in New Orleans love frying things and hosting festivals.

While making this, I have been listening to some amazing old Hawaiian music, Leo Addeo & His Orchestra, Hawaii in Hi-Fi, that I found at that record store.

It's wonderfully calming and soothing, and although I can't find this album online, Stax-O-Wax has the follow-up album for download and it's great, too.

A rabbit is sitting on my feet right now.

Job Hunting: Just As Depressing As Regular Hunting

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Gremlins, Nazis and Bunnies: In That Order

I've been reading "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls over the last week or so. It's a memoir of her insane upbringing under her parents' lax rules and various artistically motivated escapades. They appear to have been creative geniuses, although the author was wary of this even at a young age, but they were not strong role models or good parents. Reading the book has me feeling youthful nostalgia because I can identify with a number of feelings the author expresses, although I was raised in a far more structured, traditional home environment. Eccentricity is very relate-able, even if my glimpses of it are not as powerful as Walls'. Also, working on a history of my grandmother's childhood has me thinking of my own.

One of my favorite movies was "Gremlins." I used to watch it on VHS when I visited my cousins. Without giving too much away about the design just yet, thinking about that movie inspired a T-shirt that I want to make. I've drawn some preliminary sketches, so now I need to find a screen printing workshop to get this thing done. It's going to be clean, minimalistic and nostalgic for the Eighties, all of which appeal to people around my neighborhood of BK (and hopefully the rest of the country). I sold T-shirts only once before from a drawing of mine, and made some decent cash from the deal. All told, in two days worth of work selling them on campus at UGA, I made something like $800. At the time, $800 made me rich.

I read listened to the audiobook of "The 4 Hour Workweek" recently. Tim Ferris seems like kind of a weird guy and I don't agree with or see things from his point of view all the time, but the biggest gem I gleaned from the book was in regards to revenue automation. If I had to change Ferris's subtitle, I would change it to "How to Sit on Your Ass and Still Make Money." I want to have more sources of revenue than I do now, and a tangible product available online would earn me money with minimal effort, because drawing and creating things is fun to me. My dad thinks that it is an outdated business model to claim that in order to make money, you need a product. I don't disagree with that, but creation and production are satisfying to me. They feel like work well done; I can't feel proud of myself without something to show for my efforts. That need for creation has driven me throughout my life. ("Alright already, we get it, you like to make stuff. Wrap this paragraph up and talk about Nazis already; I got to your stupid blog through a link from a white supremacy page!") I may have been reading too many books about art / artists / schizophrenics lately...

Speaking of books, I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about my grandmother and her displacement from Ukraine during WWII. My grandmother and great-grandmother (her father was sent to Stalingrad and they never heard from him again) had to walk west across Europe and were once caught between the Russian and the German armies for two days as shells flew overhead between the lines. She had a very difficult life. That life is the subject of a book I am writing as a keepsake for our family after she is gone, a kind of heirloom.

But in this conversation, my friend drops a bombshell of her own: When her grandmother died, she left her home to her and her sister, and in the course of going through the house and cleaning out many of her grandmother's and grandfather's personal belongings they stumbled across some Nazi paraphernalia. Let that sink in. Did grandma ever goosestep her way over to the window ledge to cool an apple pie? Did grandpa prefer sieg heils to hugs? I know I'd have some questions, too. They found a soldier's uniform and a Nazi propaganda book for kids. She said they were taken aback and considered the idea of burning what they had found.

I'm glad they didn't. For one reason, right now, to my left, sits a book called "Kampf um's Dritte Reich" with a subtitle of "Historiche Bilderfolde." It means "Struggle for the Third Reich" with historical pictures. It is essentially a sticker book for children, like this one for Disney's "Finding Nemo", except that instead of children placing stickers of animated sea creatures into a cute story about a fish adjusting to ocean life, this one has stickers of Hitler, Goebbels, and some other of the worst human beings in history for licking and sticking in a propagandized history of the Nazi party. Now I don't speak German, but I can read some of what is in here. Everything is represented: Hitler's early years and the Beer Hall Putsch; a chapter on Dr. Geobbels; Hitler on vacation in Bavaria; and more, culminating in the current events of Nazi Germany in 1933, which is when this book was published. This thing is creepy. There are sections on the different branches of the military and the government, including the SS and the Hitler Youth. The children are probably the part of the book that disturbs me the most. (Well, those kids and a couple of fruity poses from Hitler.) In one photo, a mother holds a boy wearing a full Nazi uniform (with armband) as Hitler walks by. That kid could still be alive today. He'd be maybe 85 years old, but he could be alive. Here are some shots: Sorry for the crappy cell phone pics, I am going to scan some of this eventually.

So insane. Look at the little boy in his mother's arms wearing full Nazi uniform and waving a flag. He has no idea what he is so proudly representing. Also note the DJ swastika insignia; that's the Hitler Youth branch of the Nazi party. Not all DJs are Nazis, but next time you hear 99 Luftballoons, go ahead and wonder.

The girls in flower headbands and saluting the Nazi salute are just barely creepier than the number of propaganda songs that are found throughout the book.

Walt would be der Fuhrious with me.

I feel lucky in a way that has nothing to do with fascism or supremacy, but simply because I am better than you. I'm holding a piece of history that belongs in a museum. It shows the early indoctrination of children through what basically amounts to a toy, an activity, a game. A Nazi game. This was published in 1933, so by 1942, the child who read it, learned the songs and placed stickers throughout its pages as a 9-year-old could have been old enough to enlist in the army. Insane.

My friend says she wants to donate this stuff to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but that she's been too embarrassed by the fact that this was found in the house that she grew up in. I hope she does so eventually. It isn't her fault; she doesn't know much about her German ancestry. 

To lighten the mood of this post a little, which seems to have gotten a little dark, I will say that I decided to buy a dwarf lion head rabbit today. My friend called and told me I had to come over to the pet store near my apartment because they had just gotten the best lion head rabbit ever. She has a bunny, too, and she knows how much I love him. Her lion head bunny's personality is like some strange mix of dog and cat, and he is hilarious, mischievous and sweet. One time, we were lying on her bed and eating a chocolate bar, and the bunny kept trying to snatch it out of her hand. I kept grabbing the bunny and putting him on my chest to pet him, but he'd just get up and go back over to the chocolate bar. This little sequence took place three times, and on the third time he didn't go for the bar. Instead, he hopped right over, squatted down and peed right in the center of her chest. The bunny golden shower was totally intentional! So bad! So funny! So gross... Anyway, once I got there and saw her beard, I knew she had to be mine. Here I am holding her at the shop.

It's like a cross-breed of a squirrel and Martin Van Buren.

I haven't had a pet of my own since I had fish in high school. In college, my brother and I found a kitten in our apartment complex parking lot and chased her out from under cars for nearly two hours before finally catching her. We brought her to my brother's apartment and fed her milk and tuna fish, the two most obvious cat food items we knew. We had dogs growing up, and even though my grandmother had a cat that I really liked, we knew nothing about caring for cats. She lapped up the milk, downed the tuna fish and fell asleep on my shoulder. We thought we had done the best thing ever. That cat let out probably the most horrible funk to ever find my nostrils. She farted without prejudice, without care, without consciousness, without conscience. She stunk up the entire apartment. We took her to the vet the next day: Cats are lactose intolerant. But she's cool now, and lives with my brother, so I figure if he can take care of a cat then I'll be fine with the new bunny, the Nazi book and my Gremlins T-shirt. The things I must do to get through the month of January...

(P.S. How could anybody get through reading all this nonsense??? How have I become so prolific and simultaneously so boring???)