All posts by Lambchop

Cookie cookie cookie

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Over the years, we have truly forgotten the roots of our tender innocence, our eager, good nature and desire to please. We were a wee tadpole chatting up old ladies in the park. We have struggled, and suffered, often voluntarily. Oh the things we have done to our hair and put in our mouths. We have shaken our puny fist at the heavens and screamed “Why me? Why *anything*?” Maybe it is moving back to the general neighborhood where I grew up and seeing friends from small times, but it’s all coming back to me. (Cue the Morrissey) Used to be a sweet boy!

I have quite a few things to be happy about at the moment. Showing work on the LES (opening is tonight at Dacia), at the Fountain Exhibit, and in the wilds of Bushwick to be determined. I moved into a slightly bigger studio, which is very conducive not only to painting and building things, but to sitting in an actual chair, having a cigarillo and a chat. I am still hemorrhaging rent money on the empty space but I can leave off caring about it for one measly week and buy myself a 4G, can’t I? Of course I can. Thanks, left shoulder demon!

I don’t always feel like I am doing what I am meant to be doing. Like when I am at work while the muse is alive, or when I am pulling something particularly nasty out of the bathtub drain. I am an artist! But today “c” is definitely for “cookie” and that’s good enough for me.

Moving the speed of OLD

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The sidewalk is extremely icy. And there are loads of people named “Dick” in the office today. What do these things have in common? INSTANT COMEDY. There is really nothing funnier than watching people slip and fall on the ice. Apart from dicks. Dicks are always good for a laugh, too. Once I watched an entire program on PBS, filmed in Sweden, that consisted of a camera trained on a spot of black ice on a sidewalk and a half hour of people falling on it. Oooh, down goes a lady with groceries, BAM, huffy man in trenchcoat WOW tiny old lady. You see, we are all equal when it comes to falling on ice, legs in the air, landing on our asses, having a yard sale. I don’t have anything to say about Dick and Dick. That’s just childish.

Oh what to do…

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I asked Steve Strange what to do about feeling blue, and he launched into a story about overdosing in a hotel whirlpool. So his friends order pizza and when it arrives, they pay the delivery man to shuttle ol’ Steve off to the ER. I said “feeling blue” not “turning blue.” But you can’t stop that cheeky monkey when he’s on a tear. But that reminds me of one of my favorite things to do when I am blue, eat pizza. So without further ado, a LIST:

Things to do when you are blue
1. Eat pizza
2. Klonipin (does not matter if you swallow it, look at it, or just think about it. it will make you feel better).
3. Wardrobe! (do something with yourself, for god’s sake)
4. Deep breaths (sexy ones, if possible)
5. Have sex (again, try to make it sexy, if possible)

Things not to do when you are blue
1. Listen to songs on repeat
2. Cry in a public bathroom
3. Hitch a ride to the ER in a pizza wagon (sorry, Steve!)
4. Look up the lyrics to Warlocks’ “Suicide Note”
5. Watch “Stroszek” (see how that turned out?!)

Please let me know if this list changes your life!

The internet soothes the heart

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Heartburn sounds so poetic. I cannot face the world today, not with heartburn. How can you expect me to be patient, when I have heartburn?! You callous, inconsiderate cretins! My heart, it burns! Whenever I have used Google to self-diagnose, it is like a Kevin Baconesque game of how many steps will lead you to some form of cancer. I don’t fancy dying just this moment, so I avoided the wisdom of the internetz. But after suffering for a week, I had to look into it. It seems to be heartburn, and I will stop myself from hopscotching to more fatal explanations. Now if only Brian Dennehy were lurking outside my window, so I would know what to do about it. It has been well established that I enjoy suffering, so that has been a fruitful course so far.

Enough about me and my transports of affliction. The internet is broken. While it is an awesome platform for complaining, it failed to deliver a clip of Mr. Dennehy in the role he was born to play- confidante, patriarch, bear, lurker-outside-of-homes, declaring “diarrhea is a storm that rages within…” How can this amazing speech not be recorded and written about? I will have to settle for Tom Waits panegyric on MEATS.

Snowpocalypso

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It has come to my attention that in spite of my recent ramblings on matters purely of interest to my psychiatrist (if I had one), prostate there are in fact people yet reading this space.  Please feel free to glory in my mudpuddle of problems like a pig in slops. 

Thusly encouraged, physician I am liveblogging to you from the very epicenter of the snowpocalypse, midtown Manhattan.  Last night I went to a premiere at the Anthology Film Archives for Rufur, starring my pal Remy Bennett. The blizzarding was in full swing by the evening. At 10:30 pm you could just make out lightning and thunder in the muffle of snow. Downtown with few people and even fewer cars, you could barely recognize the city. I was hungry and I got a burrito, which I ate on the way home. Like a lunatic, all munching burrito in the snow, as though a blizzard were not falling on it. Burrito, I can remove you from the southwestern sun, but your deliciousness remains intact!

Today, the workplace is empty but I was not given permission to NOT be here, as usual. Carte blanche for whingeing, though, it would seem.

Please enjoy the trailer for Rufur, below.

RUFUR Official US Trailer from Remy Bennett on Vimeo.

Whether t’is nobler in the mind to suffer

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The First Noble Truth is that life is suffering.  You ain’t kiddin’, bub.  (That’s my pet name for the Buddha.  He calls me “Hank” so that’s cool.)

I don’t work in a very social environment, and I can’t add any more detail to that without saying something potentially mean, which is impermissable on the internet.  As you know.  Anyway, it is clear that I am steadily losing ye olde marbles, spending each day in silent contemplation of my screen, alternating with half hours of silent contemplation of salad.  (My lunch buddy cruelly defected to Korea and is never to be forgiven.  Not ever.  And when I write to him on the 15th of February, as I do every month, I will be sure to tell him.  Again.)  Since I am a mute cog on an equally dumb wheel, the days pass by without sensible converse.  Today I had the following exchange with myself:

“HELP ME”, the brain telegraphs.  “With what?”, I reply, rather innocently.  “WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?”,  the brain parries, as though I had said nothing at all.  “About what?”, I ask, getting annoyed.  Because the brain does not know.  The brain has absolutely no idea.  The brain does not even know what’s on its own mind.   “I HURT” is the only reply.  Or, more to the point, “I WANT”.  Poor child.  Actually, it’s more like “I WANT I WANT I WANT”.   Bloody nuisance.  And this is how Lambchop arrives, on January 26th at 12pm, between bitefuls of grilled eggplant and nicoise,  on the First Noble Truth, that all life is suffering.  This suffering is the constant dissatisfied search for…something.  And here you can fill in the blank, choose your own adventure style.  Wealth, sex, fame, the phone number of a drug dealer who delivers?  You know, whatever.  Extra bacon.  You love that.

How does one celebrate such a realization?  I suppose that depends on whether or not you got that phone number!

The cheery fact is that no matter what I do- still my brain with pills or quieting words or let it run amok like a Charlie Sheen Vegas holiday, the snow will continue falling, falling, falling just the same.  So I turn to my most trusted friend and spiritual guide, and ask the universe, as I like to do- what would Morrissey do?  This:

Along comes reality, goodbye to space

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Our nascent year is proving very eventful.  Why, I have received 12 text messages in the last 3 minutes alone!  Sometimes you just wish people would stop communicating with you. Up until the moment they actually do.  

I got a half dozen separate emails today from some lady with questions about the available studio (do emails have twitter-style word limits now?) and I patiently provided the information, before she asks me if it is ok if she has a dog in there.  UH.  I picture a little, sausage-shaped body waggling and sniffling around AROO AROO AROO, its chubby nose on the edge of my pallette, rose madder paw prints.  I don’t know if that is ok, because no sane human being has ever asked. 

But there is more going on than doggy applicants to my studio.  I have a new roommate.  She is a hairdresser, so maybe we can turn our place into the Beauty Bar, home edition.  I showed up to be an extra in a music video by someone I befriended through my roommate ad.  I have 2 shows upcoming, which I am very excited about, but do not yet have details.  I also have a headache.  My “to-do list” has gone from an inky scrap, to a lengthy scroll.  

I know it is obnoxious to complain about being busy.  But I want to be busy doing what I love- smearing paint around, writing fake Morrissey tunes (“The Last One In Is the First One Down”), being “extra”, gluing things to other things for humorous effect.  Not fielding inquiries from Ms. Thick and her hellhound. Or staring at my pager, hoping that it will not go off so that I have to work this weekend. Certainly not working.

But I soldier on in inspired fashion, just having learned that the Jersey’s Shore’s mannish whorelet JWOWW actually studied art in college.  And, laugh till your milk comes out of your nose if you will, but her work was entirely competent.  I certainly never produced any still life that orderly while I was in school.  She must also be clairvoyant, having the forethought to throw a pink elephant in there.

(Photo totally cribbed from Gawker, my source in all things Jersey Shore)

You are my reality

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By popular demand (re: one, lone request in my inbox), a screed on the nature of reality.  I must say, I hope you have not come to these pages hoping to learn something.  We’ve thrown our homework onto the fire!

But this does not stop our musing.  Now that your expectations are lower than a North Shore whore, I turn to the question at hand: what is real, what is really real?  Perhaps you think you are a real person who likes to eat potato chips and listen to MIA and that these are incontrovertable factoids, proofs that your wee brain is capable of quantifying the nature of existence .  Maybe you like science.  Or, like me, you like  handsome science gents like Richard Dawkins in elbow patches.  Then you might take an interest in quantum theory.  Supported by measurements of the observable universe, quantum theory posits the multiverse, infinite universes strung together like so many holes in swiss cheese, in which all possibilities are realized.  Think of it!  An infinite number of Lambchops swizzling on an infinite number of lollies.  Flavors of which I cannot even conceive! 

If every permutation of matter is out there, trudging through its own weary life like a flatworm crawling from the ooze, some of the universes are bound to be simulations.  Who is to say that this is not one of them?  I am not bothered if what we call reality is actually a simulation, though I wish I had been programmed today off.  Even though I am but a mote of dust in the infinite universe, I love a holiday! 

We all think we are somebody, something immutable and permanent that our reason can define and conquer, though every moment nature provides evidence to the contrary.  We are but fingers on the hand of the universe, waving.  Hello?

(If you enjoyed this reflection, please stay tuned for part two of this extremely well researched series, On the Nature of Identity.  Hint:  it is all relative, you baboon!)

Authenticate!

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This pictogram probably warns of some kind of accident regarding a wheel.  But I prefer to think of it as this poor fellow being crushed beneath the weight of his own existentialism.  He does not cry out, only barely manages to raise a weak appendage.  Clearly, he is doomed.

Of what were we talking?  Oh yes, the fruitless course of our natural existence.  Was that not it?  No?  Oh you were about to pass me some xanax and a Hendrick’s mule.  You’re true blue! What would I do without you?  Chew apart my splendid manicure, for one.  Which would be a shame, because it took patience and care to make my finger tips spell “unloveable”, as Morrissey would have them.  Sanity may be shattered but the dirty glamour, saved.  We have our priorities. 

I am still searching for the right extraordinary human artist to share in my studio space odyssey.  My favorite inquiry so far said, in its entirety, “Do I hoave to authenticate?”(sic).  I have zero idea what was going through that individual’s mind.  Probably very little, but the answer would have to be “yes!”  Authenticate, sir, or be gone!

Long day’s journey into the next long day

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The post holiday malaise is upon is, and it’s a corker.  I want to float away in a nitrous balloon.  Can’t we just move straight to egg colouring and double rainbows?  Christ on a cracker.  What is there to look forward to in the next next?  Another snowocalypse, goodie. 

The prognostications of weather-related gloom and despair for tomorrow have been a-chattering all day.  The frenzy would suggest I should burrow beneath my desk with a flask of Jaeger and not attempt to leave the premises.  It is appealing to join in the anticipation of a white out, for a snow day in the studio would be lovely. 

I don’t count on it, though.  The more people talk, the more I expect that there will be the merest waft of powder, like the dust settling over my heart lo these bleak months.