Charlie Sheen Is My New Temporary Hero

Not only has he recently spit out some rather awesome semi-spontaneous poetry lately in these interviews he's been doing, but more importatnly he's being honest about who he is.  He's actually telling the truth and it is making the media feel uncomfortable. How can he be so brazen? Instead of taking the usual celebrity tactic of denying everything and not discussing personal things in specific ways or letting a publicist guide your public responses, Sheen comes out firing; admitting that he has been smoking crack and having wild runs with drugs and porn stars that he said would put Sinatra, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards to shame. He comes out brandishing a wild ego that yet at the same time seems reasonably justified. If you were making other people millions of dollars and you yourself as the highest paid star in all of television were making about two million per episode, you'd probably have a gunned up ego too. Let's be real here. To my way of thinking it's much more fucking annoying when celebrities try to act just like normal people. You know how they sometimes claim in an interview or talk show or whereever, "I'm really just an ordinary person." Sheen is saying, 'you go be ordinary. I'm going to be my wildly wreckless, passionate, loving, risk-taking moneymaker, star-self.' Why deny who you are?
From my perspective there is something noble and enthralling about embracing the the 'true you', something great about refusing for better or worse to live life in the middle.
Though I barely ever watched his silly show, I find him a more fascinating creature these days then ever before. At one point he says, "I'm an f-18 and I'm winning." Who wants to live life in the middle anyways? As Sheen said, "That's where you get slaughtered. That's where you get embarrassed in front of the prom queen."http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4Iz0p0E_RY

Why Do The Walls In Every Modern Art Museum Have To Be White?

I am sure the answer to this question maybe obvious to alot of you but I have been thinking on this and I can't quite figure it out. Every modern art museum has their reasons which I'm sure are valid and well founded and time-tested and all that but can we just try a place where the walls are uniformely Black? Black is a non-color right? What better way to say to the art hanging on its walls, "you are the special stuff in here, I'm just a non-color." Is the reason we don't do black walled museums because of the lighting? Is that it? The white walls illuminate the whole space, the floor, the people. Is that it? Would dark walls just be a big drag? Can't we try hanging a beautiful Keith Herring painting or an Edward Hopper or a Rembrandt or who the hell ever, on solidly dark walls yet properly lit with the right lights and see how it goes?
Has this been tried ad nauseum in the past and failed? Maybe it would feel more solemn at the Whitney if this were the case. Maybe solid black walls throughout would make everyone sub-consciously think about death. I mean even at moma we are re looking at dead people or things painted by other now dead people. And I know certain galleries that do not subscribe to this system and given the right context it seems to work out very well for them. And I'm sure there are a few art museums in the country that experiment with shades of colors on their walls but still.
Wouldn't the power of each indivdual painting supercede everything anyways? How does the wall color effect the way we look at a painting on the wall? Does it matter? It must, because every major art museum in New York and I gather just about all of the rest of the country does this whole, "Every modern painting must have white walls!"
It's the standard practice by now of course. I just wonder about seeing one of those big wall sized Jackson Pollacks with those flinging colors and popping whirls in a room lit up where everything else was complete darkness. Who knows.

Quote Of The Day

"You got to love violently and hate violently. I don't live in the middle any more.
That's where you get slaughtered. That's where you get embarrassed infront of the prom queen."

-Charlie Sheen (Radio Interview 2/24/11)

Public Submitted Poem For The Day

Scabborous Blizzard


No, not unless that Dairy Queen is open 24 hours.
 Like I said before, No, not unless that Dairy Queen is open 24 hours.
Queen's best song has to be 'Bohemian Rhapsody'.
If a Butterfinger Blizzard don't start giving me some real concrete answers on how to live my life I'm gonna be sick.
That's not Queen's best song.
"Let's all go hang down at the DQ" could be our new motto. We would say that every night to gather the gang.
Then we'd sing "We are the champions."-- and for a minute or two, we'd believe it.

(Dave Champana)
                               Grove Park, Illinois

The Color of the Day

Violet. This really is simply a beautiful color. Cool, non-violent, and because of its rarity in the everyday grind of life, it takes on a mysterious quality. Whatever the most beautiful flower in the world looks like, among its range of color combinations, must include violet.

Song Of The Day

Craigslist Ad In Dublin

I like my candles flameless group (Dublin)

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Date: 2011-01-21, 5:59PM GMT
Reply to: gobdodd@yahoo.com ^{[Errors when replying to ads?]}

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If you like your candles flameless, know someone with a flameless candle, or would like to be first in a group buzzing about it contact me!!

• Location: Dublin
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Tell The Museums of NY I Want My Childhood Back

I'm sitting here trying to figure out why1980's pop culture is so prevalent in the museums right now. Not only that but I'd like to understand also why its beginning to bother me. As I have written earlier in FREEZE TAG, having the decapitated head of Chewbacca behind the glass at the Museum of the Moving Image is disheartening, unnatural, and ruins a childhood mythical figure only the way adults can do it. P.S. 1 in Queens has an exhibit by Chinese artist, Feng Mengbo, where he reconfigures elements of old Nintendoesque games and graphics to creates his own video game that takes up two walls  facing eachother and is of course interactive allowing the viewer to become the player as well by using a cordless controller. The scale is outrageous. I played it myself and had fun doing it. Rather fucking fun actually. But now let's shoot over to the The Museum of Modern Art. They have a whole exhibit devoted to 80's music and videos named 'Music 3.0' or some crap. Which isn't to say that the music was crap. I love many 80's pop songs and rap songs. I grew up with them. I know and love them. Believe me. But I guess I can't help but to wonder, 'Why is this stuff in a museum exhibition?'
I can go easily to the internet for all my nostalgic inclinations towards videos or t.v. shows or live concerts from the 1980's. Why mOmA? Not only that but what is the point you are trying to make? I wonder what Kirk Varnedoe would think? Enough already. I can see every video RUN DMC or the Beastie Boys ever made by clicking over to youtube. I'm sure as the season goes on I will find more examples of this weird museumizing of my pure childhood everythings.

Laurel Nakadate at PS 1

Laurel Nakadate at PS 1

http://www.nakadate.net/

Laurel Nakadate's retrospective at MoMA PS1 (Only the Lonely) has some of the most interesting video performance peices I can remember seeing in a museum context in a long time. What I like about her work is that she brings an element of real risk back into the equation. At times, she takes the video camera into the unknown, anonymous homes of middle aged men.

In one piece, she randomly asks three men, total strangers, if she can come over to their house and have them sing Happy Birthday to her around a birthday cake lit with candles. So we the viewer see three seperate t.v. screens with three different interiors with a different man singing happy birthday to her in their home and then her blowing out the candles. She looks like a teenager and the men are in their 40's and 50's. Are they perverted creeps or just down-to-earth living-alone-men being kind to a stranger? After that question swings for awhile, it appears that these men are happy to be singing to her for her birthday and the initial sense of menace is lifted. The video quality itself adds something authentic to the precedings as though we were watching a home made movie of a birthday scene. But this scene is sometimes akward, sometimes hilarious and sometimes debilitatingly lonely. And so it is in her other video peices where she goes into other strange men's houses(or young women's) to pose, dance and to play dead. Also in this exhibiton are copious amounts of large photographs of herself as part of a project where she documented her shedding tears everyday of the year calling it a, "Catalogue of Tears." The exhibit goes until MAY 2. 

Song Of The Day

What Film Should I Go Out And See Tonight?

Not only is the cinema still a great place to hide from the world but it is a two hour mithridate if you can believe it. It is little exaggeration to say it is that sanctuary where we can escape the rigors and bonestrong grunt work and commercialism and guilt in our lives. And since I live in NYC, a typical cinephile has a multitude of theaters and museums and screenings to choose from.
So how do I, being the conscientious movie viewer that I am, choose wisely? Of course we can exclude the huge chain-theaters since 90% of what they offer is garbage. ( I mean c'mon.When in NYC, never go see something that you can just as easily see at some mall in Ohio!)
Film Forum is showing Godfather 1 and 2. (I have actually never sat down and watched those movies from beginning to end. I need to.)
Film Anthology is showing a Spanish documentary about an elderly woman who returns to her native village after many years away.(Doesn't exactly fire me up although I know that in general, what Film Anthology shows, is worth it.)
Then we need to find out what's at IFC Center, The Angelika, Landmark Sunshine, All of the numerous museums, Lincon Center Film Society, and beyond.
Time Out New York does a good job of printing all the various schedules of all the various theaters in the city.
Luckily my roomie has a subscription. Being a serious watcher of great films takes a lil prep work in this city but for my time and interests and because I usually don't have very much money-- it's worth it.

Song Of The Day

Fact Of The Day

In the United States over half of the entire discretionary budget that our government works with (58%) is spent on the military alone.


source:  Congressional Budget Office.

Craigslist Ad In Egypt

Camel - EGP77 (Cairo)

Large arabian camel mare, used lightly and very healthy. Rides well w/ saddle and stirrs. 4 toes with no lesions. Consider trade for 4 goats or scooter. Toes are well cared for, coat is full. Fertile till March.

• Location: Cairo
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Overheard in Pizza Shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

"I smoked my first cigarette at age 8. By the time I was a freshmen in highschool I smoked a pack a day.
When I was twenty I stopped. Haven't had a cigarette in almost twenty years. Even the worst habits a man has ingrained in him, he can still break them."

The Introduction To My Novel, 'Valhalla House'

                                                   

    Valhalla House

Valhalla House is a voice, a place, more voices, a smell, a sanctuary, more smells, shufflings of men to and fro aching with blistering neglect they have accrued and sometimes caused over the years. It is the underbelly of a national landscape in a jewel point construction on the outskirts of a college town.

It is a house. It is walls and roof and innumerable insulations between walls and the outside. It is a warehouse of psychoses. It is both temporary and permanent—an active structure from the wants and talents of young, open-minded, non-judgmental social workers of the 21^st century in Ohio. Why Valhalla House?

It was dragged into the need of existence via the terrible actualities and perpetual machinations of war time in this country.

It is a House strengthened by the last vestiges of community participation. It is a house whose residents are men of this American soil, a desperate and at times beautiful olio of the lost and dying, sighing and fighting; regretting and distracting themselves-- a home for men with no home-- no home and wounded. No home yet alive--Blood still pumping--Dreams still twisting themselves like knarled apples into the belief that a new day, a new year, a world with a center is possible.

A place for those voices--those un-televised exhortations of torment and fervor and fury and bewilderment; of love for women and food and warmth. All that was found and lost and grasped at—all that would never be recovered—(And it is swarming all of America--out of sight and mostly out of mind.)  Here then; a glimpse at the cycle with an ear to the bend of the force; All Un-televised. 

The Bleak, Unromantic Time Of Living In NYC

These are the cold days walking thru the sludge and mud snow leaking and uncollected garbage scattering about and landing in slush piles that freeze at night. These are the days waiting for the bus in the mornings and in the evenings, and waiting for trains above ground in Queens before it dips under the East River and into Manhattan, with the wind biting at your ears and my socks are already wet from sweating at work and so they get cold too and the schedule says the bus should have been here almost an hour ago--waiting-- waiting--and its day after day of this gray slush and bitter cycle. Someone is always waiting for a train somewhere in New York City every minute of the day.
 On the way home in the train, where its warm and relieving, we get drowsy, I see the rest of the hoi polloi gently slumber as they doze off and dream in a language I'll never know.
But the train doesn't pull up to your driveway so you get off at your stop and its back out to the darkened wintery mix that lays on top of all this concrete.  Makes a man wanna sing along to Twin Shadow, "I can not wait for Summer. I can not wait for June." Then it makes him wanna walk down to Jolson's and buy a bottle.

Words Overheard at Tahrir Square As Translated By A Punk-Ass Young American

"Get the fuck out Mubarak, you cocksucker!"

"Time to hit the showers you punk-ass bitch."

"Time to check yourself, fuck-head Mubarak you mother fucker if you had any of that real dignity you chatter about, you wouldn't keep up this puppet show that is tearing apart our country, you sloppy old geezer, your time has arrived, you trick-ass bitch."

"Old stankin' ass Fogey."

 " Mubarak I'd like to jam this shoe right up your stankin ass back door."

-(Freeze Tag LTD. can not vouch for 100% translation accuracy in each instance and may not be held responsible for the whims and honeygrams of each degenerated tentacle its multi-limbed industrial wordsmith complex of love may operate under--However, nor shall such whims and wonders be discouraged in any manner at all any time soon either. A Freeze Tag Citizen Journalist Translated from the Arabic and these quotations are generally believed to express the sentiments of the men, women and children in Tahrir Square right now.)

Very Short Story

Scene:  A field next to an old wooden church. A man kneeling down in the weeds with his young son by his side.

"Papa, why are you weeping?"
"My child, I weep because the Church has banned me."
Papa, why did they ban you?"
"My child, they banned me because I presided over the funeral of the assassin, John Wilkes Booth."

Todays Fun Fact

                 The U.S. gives $1.3 billion dollars in military aid to Egypt each year. The only other country we give more military aid to?  Israel. And they are merely the top tier of an all encompassing group of even more countries that we give exorbitant sums of tax-payer money to annually. Yet, since apparently the President himself agrees that we must cut the budget and initiate a series of actions to begin to bring down the overall deficit,(for political reasons I think) they chop away and what gets cut is the funding that allows the autistic teenager to get the community support he needs or the after school art program where economically disadvantaged kids are encouraged to keep diaries and take pictures of the world around them--what gets cut are the programs of the poor folk; the ones who can't find a job or are too fucked up mentally to work and be happy. This is no glittering generality. Though maybe its a bit oversimplification.
No, not really.

My Seven Favorite Albums of 2010

1. Ariel Pink--'Before Today'
2. Sufjan Stevens-- 'The Age of Adz'
3. Kid Cudi-- 'The Legend of Mr.Rager'
4. of Montreal-- 'False Priest'
5. MGMT-- 'Congratulations'
6. Infinity Girls--'Snow and Cherry Blossoms Fall Simultaneously On Our Street'
7. Jericka-- 'Retronome'

Neo-Surrealistic Prose Poem Of The Day

During the Civil War, at intermissions, among the soldiers favorite things to do was to engage in friendly games of
Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo. The men would sit around the campfire and be playing the Nintendo with the hand-held controllers allowing a wide range of physical actions for its characters; Jumping, Ducking, Sliding, Turbo Running, etc.
Taking turns, with the flat screen. embedded in a tree trunk,  they'd stay up all night.
Then one day a giant hand came out of the sky and plucked them one by one and gobbled them up and they disappeared and nobody knew what became of them. Text messages were sent and recieved for three days straight.

Why I Was One of the Very Few People Not To Watch The Superbowl

This year's Superbowl between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers was watched in the U.S. by 111 million viewers which made it the most watched program in U.S television history.
 Here is why, this year, I was not among them.

1. Because I am a Cleveland Browns fan. That's my team from when I was a young kid and Uncle Bill would teach me all the complexities of the game and we'd watch the games every Sunday at Gran Downs house. (Bernie Kosar was a star!) If Cleveland had been in the Super Bowl, you could have bet your mother's sweet apple pie I would have been firmly, and with due reverence, planted in one of NYC's inumerable establishments with their hi-def flat screens t.v.'s, and overpriced beers and jubilent fan-folk. (The Browns finished 5-11 this year so the only way were going to the Super Bowl was if the luxury jets flying almost every other team crashed in fiery wreckage's.)

2. Because instead I went with a friend to a dive bar in the East Village where we sat down at a table in the empty side room and over the course of three glasses of Stella Artois, talked about family and books and writing and occupations and ambitions and museums and a whole spectrum of living life tossings back and forth to such an extent that time seemed to just fly on by. When we left, the game was already in the fourth quarter. By the time I got to the subway, the game was over.

(Though I am a die-hard Browns fan, I usually do watch the Super Bowl for the built-in drama, the mass spectacle of it, for the hell of it basically, but now that it's over and done with, and given the quiet, unforced conversation I had with another human being in the real physical world, I'm not sorry I missed it one bit.)
Whats more, at least I wasn't subjected to the pollution of the Black Eyed Peas at half-time or the overly-hyped commercials from corporations selling us things we really don't need while trying to make us laugh.
Next year I hope the Cleveland Browns get there. If they do, then I might just become ecstatically inebriated and hang on to every play with other fans and roar with wild gridiron abandon and point at the commercials in between and mutter once and awhile with a smile, "OK, that one was actually kinda funny."

Winter Reading List

Sam Shepard--'Day of out of Days'
Sarah Vowell--'Assassination Vacation'
Dietrich Bonhoeffer--Selected Writings
Banksy--'Wall and Peice'
David Foster Wallace--'Oblivion'
Reif Larson-- 'The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet'

slate.com, cnn.com, salon.com, nytimes.com, starbeacon.com, cleveland.com, boingboing.net, brooklynvegan.com, timeout ny magazine, L magazine, Village Voice, signs on the street, advertisements, transit information, own private writings, ingredients on packaging, nutrition(or lack thereof) information, random celebrity tidbits from random news and entertainment web-sites, facebook messages and updates, emails, scribbled notes to my self on my desk, text messages on phone(I don't like texting.), Film Anthology Calender for February and March, and last but not least the 'E' for Egypt we markered on our hands last night being drunk and silly and dancing around the apartment in a sorta fun, yet in reality, detached solidarity with the Egyptian protesters listening to 'of Montreal's' 'False Priest' album and at times, being goofy as hell.

Watching Images of Egyptian Uprising on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64NXt1iCs7I&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fresults%3Fsearch_query%3Degyptian%2Bman%2Bshot%26aq%3Df&has_verified=1&skipcontrinter=1The worst thing I saw on a video obtained by the associated press or filmed by an associated press cameraman, showed a man apparently being shot from far away and collapsing and then other men rushing to him and carrying him off. Who knows if he died. By the looks of it, the man was shot and killed.
 Then there's the Anti-Mubarak protesters raging and chanting about ending the corrupt regime. There's people running every which way, yelling Arab slogans I couldn't understand. But there was also on youtube today, footage of Pro-Mubarak supporters(or paid thugs) riding into the middle of the square on horses and camels with knives(stuck in the Middle Ages, perhaps?) and trying to bust up the massive crowd. Even foreign reporters were being attacked by those accusing them of not telling the truth about the situation. Tahrir Square(literally translated as 'liberty square') looked to be escalating its levels of violence with every three minute clip I watched. Some groups who were neither pro-Mubarak nor Anti-Mubarak were angered that the protests were debilitating the normal business of life in Cairo. Shops were still closed. Windows boarded up. Then the footage I was watching on youtube came to a particularly weird sight; a still shot of the front of a KFC restaurant. It too, was closed down. I imagine the ones who were in open revolt, who were being shot and beaten were demanding more than just the unabashed pleasures of the prolifieration of American Fast Food Corporations.

God willing.

Lazer Beams Can Shoot From Far Far Away

My friend lives across the country and being the young adults that we are, we communicate with our cell phones. But see, he can only talk for more than a few minutes after 9pm because earlier than that is when some electrochip on some satellite high above in outer space is digitally stimulated and made to secretly shoot a lazer beam down through the Stratospheres and Atmospheres, all of 'em, down into the minute robotics and digital signals, into the intangible guts of checking acounts stored on Microsoft computers, subsequently burning a red hot hole thru his own dollar bills for every minute he gabs on the phone to me about our mutual frustrations as people who want to be making a difference in this world and living our lives to the fullest but who just couldn't shake the feeling that we weren't living up to it, that the focus of our lives needed to be sharper. (And this is all approved by Homeland Security as well.)
 Guess I better wait to call until after 9pm west coast time. It's 11:57 here and so it is 8:57 there.
 Ah hell, why wait three minutes. Might as well.

The Cleveland Cavaliers vs. The Dogs of Oblivion

One year ago, my beloved Cleveland Cavaliers Basketball team was in first place and riding high. We had, as our fearless leader and guide, the best basketball player in the world. For two years in a row we had more wins than any team in the entire league. We were the envy of all other teams almost.
It is one year later. Only in Cleveland Sports would a nightmare so hideous, so viscious, so bitter, be playing itself out thru a grueling puragtory of this present season and actually come true. (It's happened before.)
The best player in the world is long gone. On thursday the Cavs play in Memphis and if they lose, they will tie the NBA record for consecutive losses in a season. We have the worst record in the league by far. In the depths of this bleak tundra of a basketball season when it could drive us to emotional hibernation, must we keep propped our bruised facade? Our cheerful attitude about next years draft? Our rational calculating self that figures we'll be contenders in three to four years if we draft the right guys?
 My dear Northeast Ohio sports fans, when will we be allowed simply a night alone to weep?

Quick Appreciation For Cinematographer Dean Cundey

This is the guy that has given that certain look that I really love to some great 1980's films not to mention the classic 'Halloween.'  So to Dean Cundey I say thank you. Having just recently re-watched The Thing, I was reminded of those deliciously spooky moods you create and in a way that is always your own. You can recognize the quality of a film where Dean Cundey was your DP. The list below is only from the 1980's. 
Escape from New York (1981)
The Thing (1982)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Psycho II (1983)
Romancing the Stone (1984)
Back to the Future (1985)
Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)  (I don't really care for as a movie)
Road House (1989)
                                                              DP= Director of Photography

Laurel Nakadate at PS 1

http://www.nakadate.net/

Laurel Nakadate's retrospective at MoMA PS1 (Only the Lonely) has some of the most interesting video performance peices I can remember seeing in a museum context. What I like about her work is that she brings an element of real risk back into the equation. She takes the video camera into the unknown anonymous homes of middle aged men.

In one piece, she randomly asks three men, total strangers, if she can come over to their house and have them sing Happy Birthday to her around a birthday cake lit with candles. So we the viewer see three seperate t.v. screens with three different interiors with a different man singing happy birthday to her in their home and then her blowing out the candles. She looks like a teenager and the men are in their 40's and 50's. Are they perverted creeps or just down-to-earth living-alone-men being kind to a stranger? After that question swings for awhile, it appears that these men are happy to be singing to her for her birthday and the initial sense of menace is lifted. The scene is sometimes akward, sometimes hilarious and sometimes debilitatingly lonely. And so it is in her other video peices where she goes into other strange men's houses(or young women's) to pose, dance and to play dead. Also in this exhibiton are copious amounts of large photographs of herself as part of a project where she documented her self shedding tears everyday of the year calling it a, "Catalogue of Tears." The exhibit goes until MAY 2.