Uncle Art

Uncle Art invented DANCE MUSIC, right? Yeah! And I'm in the process of inventing a logo for a company rising from the ashes, hopefully back to the forefront of computer game soundtrack composition. So far...

Tyred Out

Rob was in the kitchen and I was in the living room and "SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS", my Gatorskin popped my innertube. No glass or stones or anything to speak of. Full of full-on holes and they're only 9 months old. Biggest load of shit ever. I welcome my new Schwalbe Blizzards. Eat a dick, the Bicycle Gods.

It's the way you tell 'em.

Unfortunately Youtube won't let me embed the response:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgE9xVlfiq8

Thanks to the Vivian Girls for the heads-up.

Rollercoaster Road

We drove a rollercoaster road, Stephen and I.

I caught the eye of a man four hours into driving in fence posts.

Boots in the brambles.

August at his brow.

“Remember that man we saw whose job it was to shovel coal out of the North Sea?”

“Nope. I don’t, no.”

Back then we weren’t drink-‘til-we-drop types

or the flip-out-‘til-we-flop guys

who littered and locked teachers in cupboards.

I wasn’t the kid who rattled the tobacco tin full of old money

to scare the starlings from the bread left for a hunted Mallard hen.

Stephen still isn’t the boy who pulled the trigger.

Our talk at the table isn’t an explosion of feathers,

BB’s shot from trees or the breaking of a horse.

Rather, it’s just a mutter between brothers

As a cowboy hollers from a western on the TV:

“What a hell of a man a man might become!”

126 mph

"So you're all psyched up then?"

"That's correct, Roy."

Instant Chat Love-a-Likes

On the centipedes on a bathroom floor:
"I think we have loads of centipedes under our bath, you know."

On answering the question "How are you?"
"PRETTY DAMN, GOOD MAN"

On racing bicycles built in a specific era:
"bikes from 1950-1978 give me a full bore bonnerfied stonka!"

On boys in bands:
"No dummy spitting. That's a one way ticket to no need central."

On Russel Grant:
"Hey we met that Astrological poofta Russel Grant who strangely and enthusiastically joined in with our singing Happy Birthday around a sparkler stabbed into some desert pud or other, you know the routine."


This poor guy's brain: "Get smart watching Spock and dude, your wife got her g-spot chopped off."

Found a typeface in a book and wrote my band's name in it.

We got some records with this all up on the front, yo. Pretty stoked on the inside-out paper stock and a decent print. It got number 1 in NME tracks of the week, and it didn't even say we sounded like the Futureheads or that the north of England is out of fashion. Someone else reviewed it, got the words wrong and assumed a meaning from the words they'd invented, strangely:

"‘Dance a Ragged Dance’ kicks things off, urging the listener to cut loose in “days filled with pretentious times”. Presumably a jibe at an overly-serious music scene that’s forgotten how to have fun, the track doubles as a defiant middle finger salute to early critics."

The words are actually:

"Our days are filled wih these anxious times, if you didn't laugh I'd cry."

It's about being poor:

With eyes the colour of TV sets turned off I look into yours, wet with the tears of New York when New York starts to thaw. Curtsey firstly, I bow my bow, what can we do now but dance? In clothes the shape of a scarecrow’s shadow and a hand slung ‘round your hip I dodge the scowls and dive to catch a whisper from your lips “Our days are filled with these anxious times. If you didn’t laugh I’d cry”. So now what?

Dance a ragged dance in your most ragged rags. The paper crown with the drawings of thorns was torn up at the end of the night. Buildings above basement parties sat tight. The moonlight lit a kiss on the stairs. We’ll grow wild the way of wasteland looking up at the sky where sparrow clouds will bow and break as evening shuffles by. The greatest songs fill the saddest lives. We can either dance or die.

Here's a picture of my mates.

BCN 2

Suprise beer bill in a bar where the snacks get better the longer you take to leave. Break into the swimming pool after dark. Watch the watchdog watch you creep towards the water.

Who wants to live forever?

Throat wrecks. Singing into a can all day. I feel like I've been force-fed multiple dick baps minus the bread.

AND whilst on the subject of singing lots and lots of cock, I pretty much adore this T-Shirt by some guy called Gary Burgerlips:
For sale at African Apparel.

We should get eye patches made

So we can wink at each other in private.

In Pursuit of Digital Sadness

Saw King of Kong, Fist Full of Quarters a while ago in a cinema where the seats are well better than they used to be. Pretty much flipped-out for the KILL SCREEN concept where the game is too big for the machine and Mario dies and never gets the girl and everyone at the vintage gamers festival go the fuck home. So deliciously bleak. It's like spinning the wheel of fortune and falling over its decorative mounting in front of a live studio audience. I thought of a dowsed-in-beers conversation with a friend. I only have my half of it ("Yeah" and "Totally...") and just a little bit of his (the rest).

"Fucking, right. How bleak are old computer games?"
"Yeah."
"You drive forver to get nowhere."
"Totally. If you're lucky the mountains, like, change colour."

There is good art about it, but I couldn't help love it more when I asked my friend's 13 year-old son why he likes the games he plays in comparison to the games we play on the rare occasion we fetch the NES out from under the bed. "I suppose I just enjoy the freedom of them. You get to go anywhere." He's right. There's only one way through a game of Golden Axe. I want to eavesdrop on conversations between those identical giants with that fucking massive door, maybe perv on them calling their mother back home, but instead I have to waste the shit out of them every time. Furthermore:

"When you are raised on computer games
You grow accustomed to saying ‘I’m dead,’
Several times a day. Which is not to say
We are the first generation to feel
So comfortable with our mortality."

From And I Saw by Luke Kennard.

Speaking of Luke and since doing Paul Jones' book jacket, I was wondering if there were any more people that write books who like Guided By Voices? I looked on his blog for the poem that mentioned them but it's all gone. He left the world with an ancient cartoon instead.

The last time I met an artist I blogged about it on MYSPACE

And seeing as Myspace currently lives in the belly of the apocalypse:

I met a man. In a slow Californian drawl he told me that he was an artist:

Me: "What was the last thing you drew a picture of?"

Him: "An alien, doing this" (grabs crotch).

Me: "What was the last thing you painted a picture of?"

Him: "I painted lines whilst I was doing lines."

Me: "Did you use masking tape?"

Him: "I did, yes."

Me: "Have you ever seen Eddie Van Halen's guitar?"

Him: "I have, yes."

Me: "Did your painting look like Eddie Van Halen's guitar?"

Him: "Well, there were similarities, but there were also differences."

The Sociology of Architecture

One of my favourite Guided by Voices fans asked me to design his book cover. He writes proper books about proper things because he has a proper job. Got my dick all over a 1958 wallpaper sample book, cut the fucker into bricks. Something about architecture being invented in the late 50s.

Burn, BCN, Burn!

Steal a friend's mother's steel shopper bicyle and spill Estrella Damm down your dumb cut-offs when you shake down the staircase at the end of the promenade. Get in the sea with the phosophrescents and kid yourself for a second that it could be the reflection of the stars in the sky.

Reform your high school ska band...

...and hit up the local curry house before you get much older.

I suppose you should get this screen-printed on the back of your flourescent yellow windbreaker then ride your stupid fixie to the sea.

Nailed To A Post In Your Past.

Do what you need to shy child for you must now grow wild.
When winter comes, I'll be back and I'll find you.
Wait by the river, throw a prize to the ice.
Sew shirts without collars.
Scrub floors without carpets.
Scare crows from the brambles
and save a story for me
nailed to a post in your past.