Mug Shot...

Yeah, shameless self-promotion. But hey, the image came out great, despite my neophyte status with Illustrator (of course, it helps to start with pen and ink). Gotta hand it to Cafepress.com for making a one-off possible at a relatively affordable price. Image transfer is spot-on, mug is solid and capacious (15 ounces!), and the artwork is one of a kind, for what it's worth. And yes, that's coffee in the mug in the pic, though it seems to hold beer quite nicely, too.

Speaking of which, also available here is a pretty husky, 22 ounce beer stein sporting gold trim, for those of you who prefer downers to uppers. If you rode it, own it, at cost. Remember, when my oeuvre is hanging in the National Gallery of Art overlaying the Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein pieces (hell, this mug would be the perfect accessory to Duchamp's Fountain, n'est ce pas?), you won't be able to afford me, and I sure as hell ain't giving you a price break then, even if you're cute and charming. It'd be beneath me, and I ain't stoopin'. You've been warned.

Whaam!—indeed.

(Just got back from my first team meeting at The Bicycle Escape in Frederick—more about which soon.)

"Art is a form. A form is something that does not exactly have a history, but a destiny. Art had a destiny. Today, art has fallen into value, and unfortunately at a time when values have suffered. Values: aesthetic value, commercial value...values can be negotiated, bought and sold, exchanged. Forms, as forms, cannot be exchanged for something else, they can only be exchanged among themselves, and the aesthetic illusion comes at that price. For example, in abstraction, when the object is deconstructed, when the world and reality are deconstructed, there is still a way to exchange the object in itself symbolically. But abstraction later became merely a pseudo-analytical procedure for decomposing reality, not deconstructing it. Something has fallen apart, perhaps through the sole effect of repetition."
—Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art

Canine Cravings...

Iggy and the Stooges performing "I Wanna Be Your Dog" live at the 9:30 Club last Thursday/Friday. Unfortunately, the video fades before the song ends. Oh well.

Thanks to the Outlaw for tracking down this one.

Power's Still Raw!...

Met up with the Outlaw last Thursday evening at the 9:30 Club and pedaled over to trendy hipster Adams Morgan to hit The Reef for some preshow beer and eats. Zack managed to join us, and the three of us threw down several pints (Maredsous, Allagash Dubbel, Bell's Two Hearted Ale) and a bison burger before heading back down U Street and splitting up near the Club. Zack went his own way, and Joe and I locked up the CrossChecks outside and headed in for the show.


Iggy Pop turns 60 this month. But with the energy and physique of someone half his age, he delivered almost 90 minutes of raw power, highlighted by a couple of trademarked stage dives into the pulsing horde and backed by some of the original Stooges and the venerable former Minuteman Mike Watt on bass.



The voice was strong, the presence formidable and unrelenting, and the volume knob cranked to 11. If I had been rendered deaf before the show and could only witness the visual spectacle of this octo(soon to be sexa)genarian, it would have been well worth the price of admission. Even with the midnight start time.


Indulge in the audio portion now, courtesy of NPR.

The show set drew heavily from the Stooges latest release, The Weirdness. Memorable verbal interludes include:

"Turn those cheesy lights down, asshole!" (14:25 on the NPR recording)

"Sometimes, in the course of human events, people will say that you're fucking dirt."

"Fucking thanks for fucking showing up. We are...the fucking Stooges. We're happy—very, very happy—to be here; we'd be happy to be fucking anywhere!"

"I can't stand this bullshit anymore...I want a crazy invasion! Get up here, get up here...c'mon, break this shit down!...I want action! Action!"

Below are the best pix of the lot. Low light, a shaky hand, and an at times fiercely moving target conspired to render execrable (okay, shitty) my efforts to capture the magic. Gary, where the hell are you when I need you?

Selling, But Not Selling Out...

Okay, shameless self-promotion without the profit. Art for art's sake. Whatever.

Tee shirts featuring the 2007 Punk Bike Enduro image (Iggy Pop w/ Biker Babe) are now available at my "store" on CafePress. There are two styles of shirts for chix and one for dix. All are white. All are made in the USA. What this last bit really means is that to make this tee shirt, no child of asian descent was interrupted while gnawing off a limb to escape the manacle binding him/her—in accordance with the unassailable rules of globalization and its noble race to the bottom—to an aging Singer. That's meaningful.

Oh yeah, the reason the word store appears above in " " (besides the obvious): I make nothing from the sale of these shirts. The prices reflect the same amount—and not one kopek more—that Cafepress would charge me if I were to buy one myself, which I just did, size L (kiss me, I'm a non-fucking-profit). That's meaningful too, at least to me.

Full disclosure: If you're not familiar with CafePress, it costs me nothing to "sell" these shirts, either. And anyway, given the small audience for which this item may have an appeal, any profit from sales likely wouldn't even cover my tab for one night at the local pub. So, there you have it.

Also, I have not yet seen the final product in the flesh, so to speak. However, if you zoom the image at CafePress, it looks like all the details (e.g., skull-filled background) will show up nicely on the shirts. At the risk of beating this all to death, I'll post a pic when mine arrives.

Personally Famous...

Ah, fame at last. Never imagined it could feel so edifying.

Wait, that's not the word; so, uh...so... pedestrian. Yeah, that's it.

Seems one chap who rode in the recent Single Speed Punk Bike Enduro appreciated the years of sweat equity (and strict asceticism normally reserved for trappist monks) that it took to raise my drawing talents to their material apogee, as represented in my latest artistic reification seen at right (with a dash of pink) and here.

So he approached me to ask for the rights, which I shamelessly granted. The result is shown in the pic above, artfully cropped to preserve his anonymity. Immortalized through the magic of the old school iron-on transfer—a DIY one-off job that seems to have turned out quite well—the image now adorns a canvas à trois dimensions in this world, having narrowly escaped the simulated, absolute zero confines of cyberspace. Nice work!

Did I say immortalized? I meant briefly rescued from shameful obscurity (damn 13¢ words!). The bane of iron-ons, of course, is their tendency to eventually peel away from the fabric like an old scab—hence their near annihilation beneath the bootheel of more technologically advanced processes such as dye sublimation and screenprinting.

But the iron-on's strength lies in its immediacy (as Hakim Bey uses the word), in the fact that it can be created at home with only a modest investment of time and equipment—the same intangible quality that makes all DIY projects ennobling. And its ephemeral nature offers another advantage, at least in this case: if it does self-destruct, it will probably happen before the tell-tale year included in the design renders it passé. Heaven—and all Hell's minions—forbid!

(The iron-on is sort of the fixed gear of the fashion world...long live the iron-on!)

Again, nice job, my friend.

Speaking of the Enduro, here's the GPS data for the ride, flagrantly stolen from Big John of Empathy Test fame. (Hmm, I recall a couple of miles that didn't seem to make the graph—then again, the lines I usually pick can't exactly be called straight.)

The Chairman of the Bored...

...and a rather nubile riding partner.

Yeah, it's on, baby, after being postponed for bad weather a couple weeks back. And though I no longer have the cold that left me with cramped lungs that wanted nothing more than to deflate and roll up like a pair of flaccid hyrdration bladders, I still haven't managed to get much dirt under my treads this year. Gonna be a tough ride...

Coming up next: A springtime Bliss?