portland art lovers

The Dark Knight...

a

ma

zing!!!

<333








May go see it again this week. Anyone wanna come?

Theseus Donut's favorite toys are those little real-fur mice. We have to get him the kind with the hard plastic inner shells that have a rattle inside, because he will tear apart and actually attempt to eat the interiors of the ones that have the white foamy stuff inside.

His favorite games with the rattle-mice involve flinging them up in the air with his head or claws and then going after them--especially around areas where the rattle-mice fling underneath furniture or other "hiding" places. Occasionally he hides them underneath the carpet. Perhaps he is imagining them "getting away?"

I keep one rattle-mouse of each color around so I can track which ones are missing and then go on the Grand Rattle-Mouse Hunt to locate rattle-mice which have "hidden" beneath the TV or in the heating intake where paws can't reach.

Thus I was aware that the green rattle-mouse has been missing for about 2 months. I knew it was in the house somewhere but it had not turned up on any of my Grand Rattle-Mouse Hunts.

But this morning, I woke to find the green rattle-mouse at the bottom of the stairs. In the kitchen, near the refrigerator, was an enormous pile of dust. We can only assume that Theseus Donut finally discovered the ultimate hiding place of the green-rattle mouse himself, slew the Dust Beast which guarded the entrance to the rattle-mouse lair, and under cover of darkness claimed victory over his prey.

The 70s were good to me, 2008 Mark Jondahl

What drives MySpace, LJ, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Last.fm, and personals sites...

My first week loading trucks went by uneventfully. The middle of my back is a little twingy right now and my legs feel a little weak. We'll see how it goes when I'm expected to handle more volume this week. I'll either be ripped in a few months time or I'll break my back by August 1st. Not counting on the money yet.

I'm working 60 hours a week now. It is totally butt. I have a half hour at home at 5pm to eat something before I go to shower myself in my own sweat at FedEx. I get home at 10:15ish and have no energy to do anything other than drink a beer and check my email and ME-sites. At least it's all confined to weekdays. I really need to get a better paying full time job so I don't have to deal with this.

Due to transmission problems with my sisters car, she is not arriving until tomorrow morning.

And that means... I can procrastinate on cleaning!!! Woooo!!!!!

i finally made a deviant art page.  wow

here you go

http://whimsicalice.deviantart.com/

fire flower, 2008 Mark Jondahl

Notes: I started with a digital photograph, then while playing around with it, doodling on it, I zoomed in on a detail and enhanced the emerging iconic shape.

i've been looking for work.  i'm so broke.  i'd be starving if it weren't for food stamps.  i'm not really sure how i'm going to pay my bills.

i'm a little worried, yeah.  but you can only do the best you can.  there's not much more that i can do other than apply for work, because welfare or "temporary assistance for needy families" is a fucking joke.  i tried to get some of that temporary assistance last summer and they told me that i would have to go to their "job training" thirty hours a week and find daycare for my daughter (and pay for it... they would pay some small part) and THEN they would give me 400 bucks a month which basically doesn't pay for anything except maybe the daycare.  hahhaaa, thanks... yeah that sure would be a lot of help *scrunches face disapprovingly*

i'd like to sell some prints of my artwork at all of the many places and times that there is available to do that in portland but i can't even afford the initial investment.  shit i'd like to sell the originals, most of them need either frames or some simple prepping that would take just a few minutes to be ready to mount.  anyone want to buy a painting?  how about a portrait?  i could draw or paint portraits from pictures or from live peoples?  maybe i should do that.  just go to those places where i could sell my prints if i could afford to make them and then offer to do portraits?

today i am going to clean my apartment.

*sigh*

Hurricane Bertha hung out in the Caribbean for a while and made Bermuda all jittery, and then for some reason decided to turn completely around and head thousands of miles in a straight line toward Iceland, where apparently it will land tomorrow, downgraded to a tropical storm.





Isn't that weird? What the hell Bertha?

"The human spirit is diminished every time Coldplay release a record. Soon, we will all have the souls of slugs, and it will be their fault."

-Warren Ellis, July 14, 2008, otherwise known as Bastille Day

Right? Pretty sure Warren was not trying to make a connection to French liberation when he wrote that, the fact that it was posted on Bastille Day could have reasonably just been an accident. Maybe I am wrong, but I should be careful not to read too much in to some statements. Safety first!

But say you're Coldplay, say you've named your band after this idea of cold as a toy, say you've even named your child Apple and then in your meanderings you find this journal and everything I've written about Apples, and playing with the cold, and about our shared loathing for this band... and then you're me and you start to look at this album cover and begin seeing the word "David" in there where "La Vida" is written, and you start to wonder if Coldplay is trying to say something, like maybe even something nice, perhaps almost friendly. And you realize in revulsion, no it can't be true, no, take it back, Coldplay DOES NOT WANT TO BE MY FRIEND, no, I will not start being nice to them now after what they did to all those helpless listeners... and you realize that this makes no sense, of course Coldplay is not trying to be nice to me, to me here, to Dave, they haven't put my name on their album cover and they're not trying to make overtures toward this monstrous thing I've become, that would be ridiculous, that's a narcissistic personality disorder right there, that would be like if Coldplay used artwork for their album cover that they found on my own Livejournal or something and then named the album after some kind of new appreciation for life despite inescapable struggle and then exploited the music industry machine to somehow achieve one of the most successful album debuts in music history simply by copping my style and giving me no credit whatsoever.

Because that sounds pretty stupid, only a crazy person would think that. No, I should think sane thoughts like "paving the entire Earth is good because it seals in the nutrients".

This Week's wonderful dance.

We all knew The Dark Knight was going to be good. So what if it's one of the best films I've seen in years? The point of interest is the Watchmen trailer that debuted with it:



So I've settled on the fact that this is still going to be a piece of shit. BUT, the trailer itself looks amazing and I kind of wish that this would be all that they would release. Just these snippets from the comic that are brilliant when brought to life, but before hey can be expanded into a whole film that will probably miss the mark entirely. I could even care less about The Smashing Pumpkins, but for some reason the song really works for the trailer.

My friend Gillian used to work with Hand 2 Mouth Theater, apparently they're all a bunch of catty bitches, but last night she took me to see a show of theirs and I enjoyed it. They passed out cans of beer to the audience at the very end of the show and I drank one, a rare violation of my rules, and grabbed five more to give to my friend Late Stage Alcoholic Tim, the brilliant suicidal homeless person who uses the same computer lab that I do.

The H2M show is apparently going on the road and last night was the final chance to see them before they took off for Montana and elsewhere, bringing their mockery of patriotism out to the dustbowl to see who they can piss off out in the field. The show is a little more subtle than that actually but that's a fairly quick description of what I saw last evening. I guess the idea is to examine what being "American" might actually be in about an hour and a half, by lashing together every song with the word "America" or "USA" in the lyrics with a bunch of other power rock standards and trying to sing like they really mean every verse, but because that's impossible, because those songs are ridiculous even with Neil Diamond thrown in, the five actors wind up seeming every bit as insane as the culture which produced those songs in the first place. Songs such as "Night Moves" by Bob Seeger and "God Bless the USA" by that skinny bald guy with the beard. Fuck that guy, whoever he is.

I felt like shit a few hours later and then still like more shit in the morning, I assume the result of the very American can of Pabst Blue Ribbon comped to me as an audience member.

It was strange hanging out with the actors after the show because suddenly they weren't excruciatingly cheerful anymore and seemed kind of dour and straightforward as they had to take down the entire set and load it into a truck bound for Montana in the morning. Hearing them use their real voices instead of their stage voices was a bit bizarre, and my favorites during the performance were just completely out of emotion by the time they got to speak with the crowd afterward.

But anyway, I saw a play, got to meet the people who staged it, drank a beer (which I'm still very happy doesn't happen very often), ate some sweet and sour soup at the Republic Cafe afterward (of course) and then walked home choosing not to steal a houseplant from the display in a local store even though I really wanted it. A block further on someone's truck had its window smashed open and around the corner its owner was chatting with the nice police officer about this incident, so the spidey sense served me well again as I walked past with exactly zero stolen foliage in my mitts.

Today I located my friend who killed all those Cambodians before being nearly bisected in an explosion in 1971, before he moved back to the Pacific NW and ran with a biker gang called the Iron Lords. I asked him about some biker trivia I'd been hearing lately (there's an ex-member of the now defunct biker gang "The Disciples" hanging around Portland State these days) and found out that the Gypsy Jokers, a biker gang second in renown only to the Hell's Angels, was started here in Portland originally, in St. Johns before they moved south. No shit. My friend from the Iron Lords had previously been in the army during numerous illegal episodes of the Vietnam conflict, hence the killing of all those Cambodians, who were not technically combatants in that war. Kissinger is still alive you know, you can ask him all about it.

My friend's name is Walt but I call him Santa Claus, I wondered what he would think about the play I'd just seen. I decided that he really would have enjoyed the beer, and the female actresses because he's basically a perv, and a few of the songs, unironically. I get the feeling though he would have bludgeoned some people rather than hear all the singing, I get the feeling that if the beer were handed out at the beginning of the show and not the end that Portland would have one or two fewer actors in general circulation. Thankfully Gillian is around to point out which ones are the worst of the catty bitches.

Good show though, I enjoyed it.

Meanwhile I have stage fright and basically have no idea how I'm supposed to lead some huge public discussion at the Water in the Desert festival next weekend. I always have so much trouble explaining some of these concepts to others even when they're eager to listen, "look" I would like to say, "I have mistakenly become central to your history by killing millons of people in various storms and floods around the world and I am nowhere even close to old yet. I've been mistaken for numerous deities and elementals throughout history and none of my 'followers' ever had any way of knowing that I was just some broke guy in the 21st century broadcasting depressing prog rock throughout linear time on most of the useful mental frequencies. We are all fucked and I would like you to roll me a joint now please."

Should work I hope.

Optimistically though, if I had a gun I would have blown my brains out this morning finally, so if we get lucky some nice American might show up with the adequate weapons for such an exercise, I think if I sever the spinal column there's no way to come back this time. Kind of selfish though, considering what would happen to all you delightful survivors. What's that thing Napoleon said? "Apre moi le whut?"

I've got a story idea rattling around in my head but I need your help. I want to write about your experiences with childhood friends. Did you have friends when you were a kid who left a lasting impression on you? Who were they? How did you meet? How long were you friends? I want to focus more on those childhood friends who you are no longer in contact with for one reason or another. Do you still think about them? Have you tried to get in touch with them and if so, how'd it turn out? Any and all imput is appreciated.

Bees swarm motorists on N.J. Turnpike

CHERRY HILL, N.J. - Drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike have to cope every day with traffic jams, pollution and even the occasional deer.

They ran into a new obstacle Saturday as thousands of honeybees swarmed around their vehicles.

Turnpike Authority spokesman Joseph Orlando said the swarm came from a beekeeper's beehive that apparently fell beside the highway in Cherry Hill.

The Turnpike Authority was looking for a beekeeper to deal with the problem.

Sometimes people call on the telephone and ask me to do these telephone surveys about things. This is always horrible because I have HUGE problems with the phone and I have to make the people pause every few words while I write down everything they're saying and half the time I can't make out either the words or the meanings or both. But I can't figure out how to get off the call either so I muddle through and it's typically confusing and upsetting and difficult for everyone.

However, that's not actually what I wanted to write about.

What I wanted to write about is this really amusing thing that happens with these calls. Often a question will involve some block of text that I have no idea what it means, even after I've figured out what all the words are (often by requesting the person spell them for me) and spent an uncomfortable amount of time trying to find meanings. For example, today's block of text in this category was "...the majority of union employees at companies sign cards to..."

To which I of course asked (after needing it spelled out C-A-R-D-S), "What are these cards? What does that mean?"

The answer I got, which is what I get over 90% of the time, being, *shocked pause* "Um, I actually have no idea what that means."

So this makes me think that most people must go around answering questions without having any idea what the questions are actually asking. How do people do this? Why doesn't it bother them? How could someone ask a question over and over on a telephone survey and not notice that they had no idea what they were asking?

I don't really need answers to the questions I just asked--they are just things I wondered. I don't know how people are able to answer questions that they don't actually understand. I run into this a lot when I don't understand a question and ask someone to explain the meaning for me--the person finds that they actually don't know the meaning well enough to explain it to me. And yet, those same people will answer the question themselves without being bothered by not understanding the meaning. This is very curious to me.

I am out of town visiting family in Maine 7/21 - 8/5. While I will have some Internet access while I'm away, I don't know how much or when (and how much is this freaking me out??? A LOT!!! LOL), so if I either 1) don't post much or 2) don't respond to emails, that is why. I will just be unwired not in trouble :-)

Two random things that happened the past few weeks on the Changes In The House Department.

1. I found a very soft lazyboy recliner rocking chair in excellent condition at a yard sale a few blocks away from my house when I was on a walk for $12. I'm so excited to have this chair--I practically lived in a chair like this as a child *grin* I set up the chair as a "Reading Station" in the living room.
   

2. J put in a new counter for me in the kitchen nook to use as a "Smoothie Station" for when I make my smoothies. Coupled with the wire kitchen cart that we got from royalbananafish, the previously useless-for-anything-but-tossing-recycling kitchen nook has been transformed into an actual functional work area in the kitchen.
   

And speaking of recycling, for anyone who hasn't heard the good news yet, you can now recycle plastic containers that have a lip bigger than bottom (e.g. yogurt containers) in Portland! Yay!

Check out Stanley Lieber's blog. It really is Stanley Lieber, and he is a brilliant multimedia artist. He is an inspiration to me.