Help me sing this song

Maize!

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Spoiler Alert
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The unplayable symphony

These are musical compositions. A selection of musical instructions on the bottom composition at different points include:

Light explosives now.....and... now.'

'Duck'
'Slap thigh'
'release the penguins'
'add bicycle'
'If there is a third clarinet some violins may go'
'Drive it!'
'Coronet use ice'
'mute out, mute in'
'Have a nice day'
'rests are imaginary'

The composer's name is John Stump.

Tremblewood

Last year I fell in love with a silver machine

It's a tupolov tu-142.
It flies with eight contrarotating propellers fitted to four turboprop engines.
These amazing engines propel it to nearly supersonic speeds.
It is the fastest propeller driven aircraft ever to be manufactured.

Not only that, but it's arguably the loudest aircraft ever to be manufactured.
People say It is so loud that submarines often hear it with with their sonars.

I bet it sounds like this

Hotel lettuce

Lao Tzu and the third cod war

There's a lot of disagreement among scholars as to the circumstances under which the Tao Te Ching was first recorded.

I am fortunate to know the real story.

It was November 11th 1975, just outside the Icelandic port of Seyðisfjörður. Lao Tzu, a very old man, decided to die in the sea, somewhere between Iceland and Great Britain, commenting quite profoundly on the senselessness of the third cod war.

At one point, he was spotted in the middle of a graceful backstroke alongside a lengthy fishing trawler with 81 people aboard.

The people all lined up along the starboard side to see this ancient bearded Chinese man swimming effortlessly in force nine gale winds.

To each crew member he issued personal and relevant wisdom.

To the eleventh person lined up against the guardrail on the starboard side of the ship, he recited the following passage:

Thirty spokes will converge
In the hub of a wheel;
But the use of the cart
Will depend on the part
Of the hub that is void.

With a wall all around
A clay bowl is molded;
But the use of the bowl
Will depend on the part
Of the bowl that is void.

Cut out windows and doors
In the house as you build;
But the use of the house
Will depend on the space
In the walls that is void.

So advantage is had
From whatever is there;
But usefulness rises
From whatever is not.

When he had spoken briefly with all 81 members of the crew, he swam further into the ocean and died. The third cod war ended soon afterwards.

Efficiency crag

This last week, I saw all sorts of good people while I was awake.

Rightfully so, my dreams, (respecting the uncompromising duality of nature) saw to it that I was incapable of seeing people while I slept.

I had a dream two nights ago that involved following a man carrying a very heavy guitar case up a coiling crag staircase made out of loose limestone and shale. The stone staircase was very dangerous, it coiled forever upwards and was contained within a multi-leveled pagoda without a roof. I had to crouch very low and travel very quickly just to keep up with this man. No matter how quickly I traveled I could only ever just grasp the back of him, his shoes dancing up just out of sight. I was also carrying a large suitcase, like the one I normally carry between cities.

Haifa Girl

I had another dream.

I was wearing horn-rimmed glasses.
I felt very good about the shapes I was presenting to the world.

I pointed at a bird and identified it as a pileated woodpecker.
A jerk laughed and said it was a seagull. When I lowered my head and looked over the tops of my horn-rimmed glasses at the sky, sure enough, it was a seagull and not a pileated woodpecker.

I began to question my sanity and I thought taking off the glasses might help.
As soon as I thought about taking off the glasses I woke to the sound of an amazing windstorm outside that turned out to be a very large truck.

The silent era

That is a picture of Buster Keaton who is world famous for a really good deadpan face.

People called him 'The Great Stone Face' presumably, because his expression was quite immovable when something was funny. That being said, I will not rule out the possibility that there might be more reasons why people called him the Great Stone Face.


Anyway, it's not as if he never smiled. This is a certified hard-to-find picture of him both smiling and laughing.



The important thing to remember here is that he played cards the night before he died in 1966.
I imagine he would be very skilled at a number of cardgames.

I wonder if conclusions can be drawn between the cardgame and his death the following day.






After pressing the Enter button six times and thinking it over,
I'm quite convinced conclusions could and should be drawn.
But I won't draw them, I drew this instead.
I'd like to eat raisin bran.

Hot yawn

Doesn't really look like it, but this is the nightmarish ending to a dream I had last night.
I woke up freezing in a thick terrible sweat with very tight dread in my chest.

I think those're large containers full of individual soda cans slipping out the back of that plane.

Stubble, stubble, soil and rubble!

-

-


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That is not a rainbow in the distance.

That is a physical manifestation of ideology.

That is a massive WD40 nozzle-straw tapped into an otherworldly lubricant source
It is aimed directly into a distant Chinese railyard. Its nozzle greases the rails of reality.

These rails were so greasy that the locomotives, heavy with the hopes and dreams of people,
hardly touched the rails.

2000 uses for WD40

Seafood barricade

Alabaster disaster

These last few days
When I get out of the shower, something awful strange happens.

I've been grabbing a little bottle of drugstore painkillers.
Acetaminophen or ibuprofen, something like that, I'm not even sure.
It's there, right off to the left of the sink. They've been there for months.
Sometimes I use them, if I have some mild pain, say, a headache.

But when I get out of the shower, I am not in pain!
This is a great mystery to me.
It's reflexive, it seems!
I don't even realize I'm doing it until my hand is on the bottle.

The first day it happened, I actually had two in my mouth before I realized I was doing something I didn't plan.

It's strange. I normally take time in the shower to plot things out.
To arrange a short term set of motions I will perform while I think about something else.
I usually plan to shave, brush my teeth, take out the garbage, put on the laundry, wash some dishes, close the windows? You know?

It is not unusual that I leave the shower and do some things without really thinking about them while doing them. But they're planned in the shower, I've approved them all.

But I don't even remember thinking about painkillers in the shower. Or when I wake up.
Or in my dreams, even.

So,
query:

Is my body trying to tell me something?
Am I in a pain I do not recognize?
Maybe I've been wounded on my back and most of me isn't registering the pain?

Do I dream in headaches?
Have pharmaceutical companies placed a bet?

Half of this is a silly joke for the Internet.
Half is very serious worry.

I

don't even know which half is which anymore.
Because I have a headache.

Talking to shoes

Right, so.

When I converse with a person,
They shoot out some language and it makes some sounds in my head.
If it's one I know, I'd like to think I understand it.

That's how talking works.

Given this, plenty of other things speak to me.




When I learned to read in English, I discovered much to my horror, that I couldn't look at words without reading them anymore.
That's the way it works.

From that point on, I could no longer simply look at words.
They spoke to me, made sounds in my head and I understood them.

So, I found my shoes today to put them on so I could leave the house.
There were words right on the soles looking up at me. They were printed on orange and yellow card, sneakily behind a clear layer of some sort of Technocomfort gel.

I found them speaking to me.
This is what the left and right shoes said to me respectively:

Left Shoe:
"proStyle.shoes
These shoes do it all!
ALL MOTION COMFORT"

Right Shoe:
"proStyle.shoes
These shoes do it all!
ALL MOTION COMFORT"

Thanks, shoes.
Talk to you later.

Live without dead shoes.

These're my old shoes.

They died.

I went downtown and purchased new ones.
It took me exactly six minutes.

Organigrammes pour tous les âges!

More organigrammes:

And Time Well Spent

From the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest

Time travelling meals

All quiet on the colour front.

Furthermore: Hideous art is a necessary emissary.

Make something hideous!

A torrent of stork

This is one stork for you, Kate

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The modern colours

I've been wondering where the colours go.

There's alot of colour in food and drink.
It must go somewhere.

Is it reflected in what I wear?
Maybe the direction in which I brush my teeth?

The palette I use?

Maybe the mood I sport?

If I were a scientist, I'd fully document my nutrition.
I'd chart the colours, quite scientifically.
I'd recalibrate my monitor, so as to be sure to represent the colours accurately.
Luckily, I am not a scientist. As an artist, I ask questions and eat pasta.



































I intend to gently leak the colours of food and drink into drawings.
Otherwise, there's no telling when my body might explode, blowing rainbow shrapnel into good people's faces.

The end of history for Frank and Mortimer.