shelflife by visitor

I’ve received a lot of email about a shirt that Thurston Moore wore on the Jimmy Fallon Show last night. That shirt was the fallout of the Choir Practice watercolor edition I released earlier in the year. That edition was the fallout of the wallpaper designs that all of the pages of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK are hand-painted atop.

Since I picked up my laser engraver, I’ve gotten into the habit of creating vector artwork from all of my ink drawings. I repurpose the artwork into all sorts of one-off projects that never *really* see the light of day. The shirt Thurston wore is exactly that. It doesn’t exist. It’s not a product. It isn’t for sale. In fact, I’m so perplexed by people’s infatuation with the issue that I’ve been addressing it via the following reciprocally confounding statement:

“It’s a graphic about america’s collective willingness to roll over and take it in the ass from industrial agricultural corporations. Eating, much like sex, should be an exciting interaction between two people–the consumer and a local farmer. Failure to pursue such interactions leads to freakish displays of primal boredom which, when finally placed beneath the microscope of tabloid gossip columns, generate whispers and speculation about the lifestyle choices we make–be they food, sex, fashion or art.”

My girlfriend responded to that with, “I thought it was about taking a shit in your partner’s ass as an alternative to procreating.”

I revised my perspective. “Well, yeah, but that’s more or less the same thing as factory farming.
They take a shit on your dinner plate as an alternative to sustaining life.”

a freakish display of primal boredom

So, that brings us to handcrafted leathergoods etched into deerskin likely churned out of some vile deathfactory somewhere–leathergoods featuring the design on the shirt Thurston *almost* wore on the show…

[ more custom bike saddles here ]

I don’t really recall the context of the request–which isn’t unusual of anything involving Dylan Nyoukis, but I was asked to provide Chocolate Monk with an album of my tracks. Tracks? What the fuck?

I don’t know how exactly Dylan was made aware that I’d been recording anything. I may have slipped him a CD-R at a show at the Knitting Factory that he was in town for, but for the life of me, I have no recollection of the details on this one.

So, tracks… I had these microcassette tapes I had been recording. They were analog synth and vocal experiments. There were two distinct avenues I was exploring–pedal processing (usually just delay and phase) and pedal/synth processing, but in both cases, the fundamental signal being manipulated was just voice–none of this bleep-bloop synth stuff. I wanted to keep everything human.

I pulled together a set of tracks–evenly split between the two concepts I’d been playing with. I named each track for the designer of a chair that best suited the sounds. Dylan actually released it. I couldn’t believe it.

I’ve only ever performed the material live once–at the No Fun Fest. It was a battle between Mokinox and Glamorous Pat. We both ended up naked in a room full of a couple-hundred confused onlookers. I had an inverted crucifix taped to my dick and was smashing Jesus on a contact mic. I lost him that night–Jesus. I still have the cross, but I don’t think it’s technically a crucifix anymore if ol’ J.C.’s given up the ghost.

A little-known tidbit is that the interstitial, title and credit noise on the FUN FROM NONE No Fun Fest DVDs I did for Load Records is from the unreleased Mokinox cassette, Cherbourg.

STARCK.MP3

VAN DER ROHE.MP3