Night of the Dead Living

Laundry Day

Testing

Hello nice people, you still alive out there?

Sure.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth - PEACED

So. First off, Marc, I'm sorry I didn't get to this until now.
For the rest of yas, Marc gave me the vinyl album of this thing like 3 years ago but since I had no record player in NY and since NY really does move just under the speed of Mach 3, prioritizing anything that is not directly in front of yer face is damn near impossible (impossible) and I never made it a priority to either get a record player (no $ nor space for such a device, that's fer you people's in them fancy towns what got bedrooms and such) and I never thought to look for it on freebies... just cuz I felt bad "stealing" something from a friend.
But what I should really feel bad about, is that I was missing out on some of the most BADASS Rock & Roll there was to be had in the continental U.S.
Check out Lil' Dinos and DL this shit FER FREE here
Love ya dudes.

Goodreads Giveaway!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Strongman

by Justin Skrakowski

Giveaway ends December 15, 2011.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

An Affair To Remember

Writing Is Dead

I <3 You More Than Anything

Don't Forget to Feed the Dogs

Check out my new story on Amazon!

 

The Wind Beneath My Wings

SMOOTH JAZZ NIGGER HOWLING

This is me reading a story I finished exactly 36 minutes before showtime. I'm pretty proud of the story, the reading maybe not so much, but for a story that took exactly an hour and 24 minutes to write, it ain't that bad.

Funny note is that this is at THE Gaslight, a recreation of the place where Kerouac and Ginsberg and Dylan and Warhol and Edie and all that happened, and it is recreated IN the original Gaslight! So I am officially a copy of like twelve movements boiled down to something between irony, nostalgia and monetizing (formerly known as commodification!).

Hope you like it.

YES, I know that this...

is old as Hell by internet standards, but I watch it frequently because I think it's great information to pass along and botch the minor details of... the way ALL information is passed along!

He doesn't mention however (or they edited it out for time and to make it punchier, remember, everything is in the editing so boys and girls don't ever let yourself be recorded where you don't have control over how it's sequenced/cut!!!) that the reason that radio was allowed to exist and keep going was that they figured out a way to get money to the performers/songwriters via ASCAP, BMI and the lesser known and much smaller SESAC which ensures that entertainers, writers etc. are compensated for airplay and public performances of their work. Something which in internet world is a seemingly MUCH more difficult task to calculate--not necessarily plays--but downloads (like I said, seemingly, I hardly doubt that they are clueless when people are downloading, it's just that say someone like Fleetwood Mac or Metallica has a much larger machine behind them to track and give a shit about people downloading their back catalogue than a S4LEM or Charles Bronson has to give a shit), which is the real difference.

The main thing to think about is that the ONLY people losing money are the inbetween people, or the "motherfuckers" as I've taken to calling them after having a VERY prominent agent for a matter of a few months who did nothing, was completely worthless and tried to fuck over all of my projects while not supporting anything I was doing and only promoting her own agenda.
My favorite fear-mongering phrases floating around media outlets today is "The (insert medium here, be it film, music, book, etc.) industry is dying." Um... EXCUSE ME?
Do you think that there are less movies than there have ever been? Did people stop writing? And it looks to me that everyone I know is in at least two bands, so it's not like there is any less music in the world.
The only people who are becoming obsolete are the people who DON'T create anything! The people whose primary jobs was either dissemination or promotion are no longer necessary thanks to the internet.

Now the only thing to be done is to be sure that the artists themselves are being compensated which should be part of either BMI, ASCAP or SESAC, or inventing new companies which ensure that "free" downloads are somehow paid for via a company that looks out for the artists not companies that look out for companies.

This post wasn't supposed to be this long, but I guess this is something that I feel very strongly about, especially after seeing how the "industry" works from the inside with timid agents, square as fuck executives and pathetic, nepotic "artists" who get to "create" all day because they don't have to have jobs.

It's sick really that this is what it's come to, but the great thing is that IT'S FAILING! That's right! I love that nobody is making money from art and won't for a long time until they figure out that art is nothing more than information, and have you ever tried to stop the flow of information? A bad rumor about yourself or maybe a picture that you don't find particularly flattering? The more you try to stop the more information you are creating about the information you want destroyed, therefore giving it more weight, essentially making the file-size larger and making people more curious about it in the process.

I was lucky enough to have a 3-hour conversation talking to cultural visionary Penny Arcade. She was talking about the work of severely underappreciated artist Jack Smith (who I had not heard of until she mentioned him),

a great friend of Penny's who died destitute and without recognition. She said, "If you could measure art like you measure sports, it'd be a whole different world. Who do you think would be at the top then? Right now it's measured by money, but that definitely doesn't show who's the best..."
And it made me think that the world is getting a little more egalitarian in who gets to make it and who doesn't.

Peter Sunde co-founder of the hopefully recognizable website the Pirate Bay, is a promoter of totally unrestricted flow of information and the dissolution of all copyright laws. Now, this has been demonized in the press to such an extent that all of this immediately sets off alarms in our heads--whether we are perpetrators of illegal file-sharing or not--of, "This is a bad guy who promotes theft and is taking money out of the pockets of artists."
Well... not exactly. Yes, if you download something for free you are currently stealing it. That is because most of the artists are owned by big management companies and Viacom or whatever who employ lots of talentless fucks to fly around the world doing God knows what trying to explain these artists to the masses, but other artists who only print 200 copies of a 7" single or (like your not so humble narrator) have to go through order-to-print websites to have a book published, free is the greatest advertising you could ever hope for.
And one of Peter Sunde's other projects is the website flattr which makes it easy to get money directly to the creators of content, completely circumventing any bullshit middlemen (and women!) who do nothing but extort people who don't give a fuck about doing anything other than creating. Is there money to be made in art? Apparently, yes, but real artists have other jobs and just happen to make money (if they ever do) whereas these hackfucks just flat out steal money from those who don't care where the money is coming from (and I hope you know that I'm not saying something as juvenile as "Why do we need money anyway?" I am not. I understand that there has to be money and all of that shit, I'm just saying that real people are going to create regardless of whether that's how they get paid).

I feel incredibly fortunate for my choice to NOT go to college and to NOT give myself the option of having any options. The same reason I started getting tattoos in places that could not be easily covered, is that I never wanted to have the option of opting out of exactly what I wanted to be doing. Right now I am a bartender. I make maybe $18 a year off of royalties for a book which I spend none of my time promoting, so currently my taxable writing income isn't even enough to be taxable... and I could not be happier about that. Have you seen any of my pictures lately? I am living the rock and roll dream-life. Why? Because I never "invested" money in college and never felt that I owed anyone anything but myself.
I didn't have to show my parents that I was doing anything with my life and I never felt the pressure of wasting away a degree that meant nothing. I got to live how I wanted and create how I wanted to. It was not and is not easy. I don't know where I'm going with this other than to say that things are going in the right direction. I had enough sense to hook on to the universe I was interested in and not pay my way through someone else's version of "knowledge" and "experience."
And maybe the main point is that although I do not still love doing physical labor (yes, bartending is physical labor) I do love that I have a job that IS NOT writing. I love that I don't currently get paid for what I do best, and I have hopes that maybe one day art will be measured properly, and one of the statistics will be how much a person created before they got paid, not after. That I will have a higher batting average than all of the assholes I know who shit their pants wondering when their local version of The Village Voice that they write for is finally going to go out of business leaving them jobless and uncertain what to do with that piece of paper that says that they know how to follow the rules of writing (like there could ever be such a thing) and that I will also have the most tackles, the most three-pointers and definitely the most TKOs.

Nuclear Explosion Chart Thingie

Since there have never been two atomic bombs dropped at the same time (LAME!) you never really get a side by side look at what the different size thingers are... uh, what are those called... comparisons! So yeah, since some crybabies decided that it's not okay to drop more than one atomic bomb at a time we need a chart to show us how awesome it would be were people to drop more than one bomb at a single time.

And since there are no pictures of simultaneous nuclear weapon explosions we don't really get to see the difference in explosion size, all we see are really pretty mushroom clouds, but we don't really know what each one means.

This handy little chart shows us what the different size bombs look like.

The explosion that's labeled as "1" on the graph is the size of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima which was in the range of 15 - 18 kilotons (that means the equivalent of 15 - 18,000 tons of TNT), an explosion which killed roughly 70,000 in a tenth of a second... and look how tiny that little guy is on the graph--just a little guy!

The explosion labeled as "2" on the graph is the largest bomb ever detonated by the U.S., the Castle Bravo test which was 15 Megatons (the equivalent of 15 MILLION tons of TNT!), which was a miscalculation because someone forgot to carry a one or something as the original payload was supposed to be between 4 - 6 Megatons (our bad!) leading to one of the greatest nuclear fallout disasters in history (it was supposed to be a "secret" test, "Shhhhhh, be vewwy, vewwy quiet, I'm only detonating atomic weaponry in the middle of the ocean...").

But wait! There's more! That's not even the biggest bomb ever. The biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated was the Tsar Bomba (King Bomb, duh), by the (you guessed it!) Soviet Union on Oct. 30, 1961. It was supposed to be 100 Megatons (!!!) but some weiner decided there would be too much "fallout" from such "weapon" and the payload was reduced to a measly 50 Megatons (womp).

Watch this rad video with rad creepy music and be glad for treaties and signatures and things.

Dirty.

Oh... hello. I see you there. Yeah... you.

That's right, I see you, you little last Swiffer Sweeper Wet Mopping Cloth, overflowing with the cleansing juices of your long forgotten brothers and sisters--your entire family GONE but yet... you hang on to their stink, their belongings, their... essence, if you will, with all of your magical clinging powers which not only get up little tiny pebbles, but hairs and dust bunnies also... and you are the one I've really been waiting for.

Twenty-three of your brethren cast aside like so much floor dirt you so readily stuff your gaps with when they come anywhere near, like a microscopic Grand Canyon you are... but in reverse... and upside down... or something--BUT you are still a dirty little bitch when I get done with you.

I know you've been in there all alone for weeks--months now... but it is your time. You're so wet you're dripping out of your sides right when I pick you up, and yet... you say you don't want this? I can't say that I understand. You say no, but Wet Mopping Cloth--or as the French say linges humidifies--I know you want it... in America, wet always means "yes."

I place you gently over my wand, I can't... make it happen (if you know what I mean) unless everything is perfectly symmetrical, it's a problem I have and have recently learned about myself, when I am "in the moment" everything must be at 90-degree angles--and now that I have you draped, dripping onto my hands, perfectly lined up, I finger you into all four holes as fast as I can, so hard that I think you might tear, but as you've shown me, you may look innocent, but you learned much from watching your family grow-up... you stay. You are stronger than I thought you were.

The second you touch my floor (I've been saving months of dirt for you) you show me what you've really learned. Your juices explode onto the fake wood of my 200 square foot apartment and you begin lapping up everything you've released. I laugh, but you are not deterred, you are so wet that you get every drop, every last speck of dirt, pubic hair and dried semen that's been on the ground for however long the Misses has been away and you store it all away in your magical crevasses that I've been waiting to know through 23 of your less experienced and far less thrilling kin.

I've made a new mess for you... do you think you can handle it?

I <3 Blackholes