There isn’t much in the world more interesting, at least to me, than subversion and secret societies. I’m not sure if it’s because I grew up in the waning years of the Cold War or that my love of history just took a random tangential turn somewhere when I was around thirteen, but the mysterious little things people do for reasons known only to themselves (world domination, free internet, kittens & porn…) fascinates me incredibly.

I’m sure I’ll end up writing several postings about the hows and whats of me becoming obsessed with the Illuminati and the Discordian Society, but this one is even more tangential.

I high school (when my obsession du jour was cyberpunk) I read a novel by Jonathan Littell called Bad Voltage. It had some pretty interesting concepts presented in it, but what really stuck with me was the presentation of the cataphiles who explore and organize mischief/mayhem/productivity in the catacombs underneath Paris.

Bad Voltage) made it even more enticing by putting a couple of maps of the catacombs in the front of the book and then proceeded to explain how it was illegal to go into the catacombs. How do you get a teenager excited about doing something? Tell him it’s verboten.

Most recently a gentleman who I am mildly acquainted with by the name of Sean Michaels spent some amount of time doing research on the catacombs and a seemingly clandestine secret society known as Urban eXperiences. Sean put his research and experiences into an incredible read for the literary journal BRICK.

Read this article as soon as you can.

What Sean uncovered is stuff you can’t make up. It was like reading a shortened version of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. It’s got mystery it’s got intrigue, it’s got secret(ish) societies and a wildly interesting mystery man/men.

After you’ve read the article, email it to a friend. Hell, email it to your entire address book. The Atlantic originally commissioned a shorter version of this article, but killed it. They are utter morons.

Now I just need an acetylene lamp and a ticket to Paris.

Yeah, so I’ve been a little lax in the writing these past few weeks, but I’ve got a good (if not lazy) excuse. Ladies and gentlemen, it is World Cup time!

Typically a large majority of Americans have to be reminded that this grand culmination of the FIFA championship is going on. This year, however, a couple of factors have conspired to bring the World Cup to the attention of Americans.

The first of those factors are the two goals that FIFA officials robbed the US team of in the first round of play. Nothing unifies Americans faster than the thought that we are getting screwed over by some foreigner. That combined with the general hatred of referees in any sport and you’ve suddenly got Joe Six-Pack talking about the World Cup with his buddies on their bass boat.

The second, and way more important, factor has been the ever-present drone of the vuvuzela.

Never before has a two dollar piece of mold-injected plastic generated such a buzz (see what I did there?) on such a grand scale. Broadcasters have had to create new audio filters to cancel out some of the noise, whiny players (I’m looking at you Cristiano Ronaldo) have complained that is breaks up the players’ focus and doctors have been all over the media warning about potential hearing loss due to the 144 decibels these little monsters can pump out.

At first I really didn’t think twice about the hub-bub. It was kind of nice having something to distract from the inane commentary while I watched the first round of matches.  After the third day of three-match-a-day footie (and yes, I’ve been watching every single match), I just began ignoring them.

Then I tried watching an MLS match.

The play was good, I had beer and grilled meats, but something was missing. That’s right, I wasn’t enjoying my footie because it didn’t have the constant drone of the vuvuzela. In just one week I had been turned into Pavlov’s bitch.

Lucky for me, however, I had a variety of means at my disposal for faking that vuvuzela feeling. The easiest was to just get on the internet and download an mp3 of the buzz. Next, I hopped into the iTunes app store and found a couple of free apps that filled my need (plus it’s a great app for confusing people in bars).

So, damn the naysayers. I can understand banning vuvuzelas at events like Wimbledon and the US Open, but these plastic horns are here to stay. Besides, I’ve been seeing them at high school and college football games for years.

Haters gonna hate.

I did something today that I haven’t done at all in my adult life: I didn’t leave a tip at a restaurant.

As someone who has worked in a variety of restaurant jobs over the course of my teens and twenties, I cut a lot of slack for a lot of the standard crap that goes on in the course of someone serving you your meal. I understand, to some degree, that omissions and substitutions can sometimes wreck havoc on the kitchen and I also realize that a ten table station is downright ludicrous.

What happened to me today at lunch was just a snowball effect of horrible management and apathetic self-victimization.

I’ve been going to a Thai joint near my office every week or so for the past five years: my first time being about a week after they opened their doors. It’s a pretty simple place with a mere dozen menu items for lunch that comes standard with a little cup of soup and a tiny eggroll. On most days, about half of the fifteen or so tables are filled and the whole lunching experience takes about thirty minutes and it’s right back to the office again.

Not today.

Today I walked in and everything seemed moderately normal: about ten of the tables were seated and the normal Asian server/manager was hustling around from table to table. I sat in the corner and she immediately came over to get my usual order: Thai fried rice with beef, medium spicy and an iced tea. She shuffled off and sent the other girl who typically acts as food runner over with my iced tea.

From there, the circus began.

As is typical with most days I’m out at lunch, I had my Kindle with me and was reading the latest crap novel that I crave so much, so I don’t often pay attention to much of what is going on around me. After five minutes of reading with no sign of soup, I started to look around. I would guess that more than half of the ten tables had their food and were throwing down the nom while the rest of us waited. A table near me who, I’m guessing, had recently ordered, flagged down the server/manager type who was standing in the corner opposite me. From their gestures I gathered that they were curious as to where their soup was. At that point I was curious as to where mine was, so I made the “inquisitive” face towards the server/manager. Rather than wander over to see what I needed, she merely yelled across the room “No soup yet?”

She hadn’t brought me the soup, and her runner had made herself scarce in the kitchen, so yes, she knew damn well that I had no soup. She proceeded to take three more tables of orders and, as an afterthought five or so minutes later, brought me my damn soup.

When the soup was dropped off at my table I asked her if I could get a refill of my tea. She motioned to the other end of the dining room and told me it was over there. Not once in my five years of going to this place have I ever refilled my own drink. I looked her in the eye and said “Seriously?” and her reply was “Yes, it’s over there.”

At this point I was already starting to get a tad pissed off.

Another twenty minutes passed and Thai fried rice with beef, medium spicy, was still not in front of me. The remainder of people without food around me were also wondering where their dishes were and started signalling to the server/manager that they needed to get their food out now or packed up to-go. The server/manager would make these exasperating huffs and then go back into the kitchen only to return a few seconds later explaining that she told the cook(s) to make the order. She proceeded to do this five or six more times for five or six more customers.

Finally, someone who had been seated before I got there got up and said forget the order and he was going to have to leave to get back to work. The server/manager got really indignant and said that the customer couldn’t do that because the food was finished. The guy gave a little chuckle and then walked out the door.

I was still without my Thai fried rice with beef, medium spicy.

Two more tables say they either need to cancel or have the food packed to-go right now and stood up. The server/manager began scurrying around the restaurant like ants after someone upsets an anthill; and, like those ants, it seemed that nothing was being done.

Suddenly, a plate of pad Thai came out of the kitchen and was delivered to a table where three gentlemen were seated. I’m not sure where the other two dishes were, but the other two guys got up and left.  After another couple of minutes another plate came out and the food runner angled towards my table. “Fried rice?” she asked. “Yes,” I responded and she plopped the most lacklustre plate of greasy fried rice I’d ever seen in this joint down in front of me and scurried off. Sure, it was Thai fried rice, but it was chicken instead of beef and had a spicy factor of zero.

It had been about forty-five minutes since I had sat down, so, instead of sending the plate back and trying my luck with another hour of waiting, I began eating.

Another plate emerged from the kitchen and it was another plate of Thai fried rice; a plate that looked suspiciously like beef. “I ordered chicken,” said the gentleman server/manager tried to put the plate down in front of. “He took yours,” said the server/manager pointing in my direction.

That was it.

I shovelled a few more forks full of rice into my gullet and gathered up my stuff. As I headed towards the counter where the cash register was the server/manager scurried over to find my check. We didn’t exchange a single word as I gave her my best head-shaking stink eye and paid for my failure of a lunch. I’m pretty sure she knows that I’ll never be back in there again.

For the past couple of days I’ve been up in the mountains of New Mexico breathing clean air (a novel concept for most Dallasites) and tromping around at an elevation that would give most Texans vertigo.

I’m not sure if it was the hypoxia or the ethereal creativity that seems to float around in the air like the damn cottonwood fluff is right now, but ideas seemed to come to me pretty easily while I was slacking off. It might have also been a type of vision quest brought on by the sheer amounts of chile (red and green) that I consumed over the three day period. Either way, I don’t care.

The first of my ideas that I was really excited to commit to paper was my ace in the hole: a treatment for a television pilot that would be a guaranteed grand-slam. A cross-cultural buddy cop dramedy hit that has the potential to change the way the world looks at itsself: “Hyde & Sikh.”

The concept is pretty simple; in a freak accident, Dr. Henry Jekyll is transported from Victorian England to the 1970’s stuck in his Mr. Edward Hyde transformation. After wandering the Earth (like Caine) for more than a decade, Hyde settles in San Francisco and joins the police force. After quickly making detective, Hyde is partnered with the new hotshot transfer from Hong Kong by way of Punjab: Vikram Gony. Together they are Hyde and Sikh: dispelling prejudices and squashing crimes in the Bay Area.

The episodes practically write themselves.

Dear plainskin™ stranger,

I’m glad you have the courage to talk to people you don’t know in just about any locale or circumstance, and I’m glad you appreciate the artwork that adorns my skin, but please, please oh please, don’t waste my time telling me about the “bad ass” tattoo that you are going to get or that your cousin or your cousin’s step-mother’s boyfriend’s parole officer has. I couldn’t give less than a rat’s ass.

Don’t get me wrong, I talk about potential tattoos and the tattoos of individuals’ relatives all the time, but those are people that I know. Much as back in article number two, while you are not touching me, I also don’t need to know your genealogy.

You would honestly be surprised at how often this actually happens. It even can be predicted by some telltale gestures and facial expressions as the person is moving towards me screwing up their courage to regale me with fantasies of giant tribal pieces “not like that other crap you see,” and un-ironic armbands of barbed wire. In fact, I would dare to say that the conversation almost always starts with: “Those are some pretty [insert modifier here] tattoos. Are you an artist?” Then they launch into the usual drivel.

I can only think of one instance where this conversation was ever fruitful: a plainskin™ stranger was telling me about what her boyfriend was going to get while I was waiting for a drink at some bar, and, before I could entirely glaze over, she got to the point and asked me where I got a couple of my pieces because she really liked the strong colors. That one was borderline.

Just remember, by attempting to keep my attention with your story that I don’t care about, you leave the door wide open for ridicule and mocking. Generally I’m a nice guy and will put up with a bit of that crap, but, every so often, I have one of my days where I’ll move straight into mocking mode. Because you engaged me in a conversation I would rather not be having, it is your fault that I’m making fun of your and/or your family. I realize that this truth will do nothing to quell the immediate anger you will feel towards me, but didn’t your mother tell you to not talk to strangers as a kid? There, lesson learned.

There is one and only one exception to this rule: if you are bringing me food and/or alcohol, I’ll listen to your stupid story. That’s right, my time can be bought. I do, however, reserve the right to waive this exception because while I may be a whore, I am not a cheap whore. For reference, I tend to enjoy pints of English and Irish ale and good Irish whiskeys.

Think before you speak, I may indeed bite.

justin.

I’ve got to be honest, this one came after a lengthy conversation with squeezle over some tasty breakfast tacos, but it really should have been the second in this series rather than the sixth. I’ll claim the fail on that one.

If you are here because of this article then I’m glad you visited. This is the fifth “article” in this series and you could probably stand to read the other four. You are probably what I refer to as my “target market” when it comes to little thing like being in contact with the modified (especially in Dallas).

First, and foremost, kudos to Teresa Dennis for getting out there and kicking off a new shoppe in town. Now that I’ve said that, I’m really wondering why she went with her own concept instead of franchising a Hart & Huntington shop here in Dallas. What, Dallas is just too cool for H&H to put out a shingle? I really doubt that. I expect Ms. Dennis to make a metric craptonne of money from her endeavor with almost zero repeat business. Why, you ask? The answer is simple. Hers is the land of ankle tattoos and tramp stamps. More kanji will make it’s way out of Subkulture Klothing and Ink than is in the Japanese Constitution. Part of me wants to grab my camera and just wait to be a paid contributor to Hanzi Smatter after what I expect to come out of this Uptown “experiement.”

This leads me to the fifth, and horribly late, lesson in our series: trend kills art.

I used to be a huge fan of the works of Don Ed Hardy. Hardy took a degree in printmaking and a relationship with Sailor Jerry Collins and managed to pull together an iconic catalog of style and form that helped to define “old school” tatoo art.

Then 2004 rolled around and the douche that killed the Von Dutch name decided to destroy yet another American icon. Yes, that would be Christian Audigier. It’s not coincidence that squeezle and I dressed as douchebags for Halloween in 2009 by decking ourselves out head-to-toe in budget Ed Hardy/Christian Audigier clothing.

Even Andy Warhol couldn’t mass produce that much cultural pap to be slurped up the the “undesirable elite” to be worn at exclusive clubs and events that would probably rather not have me in attendance. Hell, Andy is probably touching himself lewdly in the grave at the mere thought of having his work reach the ontological and improbable (near impossible) pinnacle that Hardy, err, Audigier has done: killing an American artform.

Sure, I’m more than willing to recognize that I have a severe degree of bitterness in this regard. For years and years I’ve wanted nothing more than a gigantic “Aloha” monkey tattooed on my torso (if you don’t know what it is, look it up). Squeezle has pretty much forbidden me from getting this, but it has been our little back and forth for the last decade. Now, sadly, it’s a cliche. I still want the little guy, but getting it now would be akin to getting the McDonalds arches put on me and declared subversive art. For that I am pissed. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Mark Ryden and Simone Legno (tokidoki for those not in the know) works become as prevalent, but I can, at the very least, still enjoy these gentlemen as pre-co-opted artists.

Above all, I want you, gentle reader, to know that this drivel is my personal opinion. Blogs are like assholes, everyone knows someone who has a stinky one. Sure, my bidet is on the fritz these days, but I still keep ordering the red curry and hoping for the best.

I honestly hope Ms. Dennis makes a good go at her “Subkulture” effort. I don’t imagine I’ll know any of the artists or clients of the joint, and I expect it to do as well as any of the trendy “boutiques” in Uptown, but I hope she learns a lot out of the exercise. Normally I’d throw in a nasty remark here about the potential for a Kat Von D guest spot at Subkulture, but I think that’s just a little too soon for Dallas’ fragile psyche.

Just a parting thought, though, what’s the over/under for the “buy the shirt, get the same tattoo for 75% off” sale at Subkulture?

For the past couple of years, squeezle and I have spent our Memorial Day weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We are big fans of Santa Fe (read that as “we like to drink and eat a lot in Santa Fe, NM”), and we try and make a trip at least once a year to relax, throw the munch at some of our favorite restaurants on the planet, and spend money on art that one would usually not expect to be showcased in Santa Fe.

In fact, the Memorial Day Weekend is when we travel to Santa Fe for a very special event. No, it’s not Pancakes on the Plaza (which falls on July 4th and is pretty damn awesome), rather, it’s POP Gallery’s POP Femme Sugar Coated Strange opening and reception. Squeezle and I have been incredibly impressed with Michael and Sharla McDowell’s little shack of wonders since they opened it back in 2007. We had known both of them from their work with the Chuck Jones Gallery in Santa Fe, so we were both delighted that they cut out on their own to showcase artists and works that were more in line with their own tastes, and, subsequently, ours.

One of the best things about the Sugar Coated Strange show is that it really bucks the mentality of a typical art gallery “opening.” Sure, there are loads and loads of fabulous pieces of art, patrons swigging back glasses of champagne, but where it differs is that it really seems to be more like a reunion than an opening.

While this year’s show is just the third, it seems like it’s been going on for just about forever. Squeezle and I have been fortunate enough to meet a gaggle of very talented artists and really get a better feeling of where their art really comes from.

One of my favorite things about this show is that it involves artists who do an incredible amount of “crossover” work into the realm of vinyl and resin toys (one of my other obsessions), as well as other media. See if you recognize some of these names: Kathie Olivas (and, by proxy, Brandt Peters), CJ Metzger, Miss Mindy and (former Dallasite) Marie Sena.

Squeezle and I have purchase multiple pieces from each of these artists and consider ourselves very lucky to have had the opportunity to have met them and spent some time chewing the fat.

All-in-all, it’s a party with just about everything I love about a nice chill weekend. It’s got booze, it’s got green chile, it’s got art, it’s got friends and it even has tattoos (Marie is an incredible tattooist as well as an incredible artist). If you throw in a soccer match, I’d think I had died and gone to heaven.

What I’m saying is that you should go to Santa Fe and definitely go to POP Gallery. At the very least, spend some time with their website and pick out a piece or dozen you’d like to add to your collection. What, you don’t have a collection? Well, it’s high time you got in touch with Michael and Sharla to get one started for you.

If you’re there on Memorial Day Weekend, let me know and I’ll buy you a beer.

There is a special place in my heart for the relationship between the microwave oven and the potato. Such an innocuous combination was responsible for the beginning of an amazing friendship and the formation of the Forkers.

With that in mind, I approached the melding of microwaves and starchy tuber after reading Savory Sweet Life’s article on “How To Make Potato Chips In The Microwave” for a new approach on things to make with potatoes in a magnetron environment.

Unlike most endeavors I undertake, I actually wanted to follow the instructions on this one. The last thing I needed to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon was to have to explain to squeezle why and how I’d managed to blow up the kitchen and set the microwave on fire. I realize most modern microwaves are smarter than I am, but I’ve been very wary of them since the incident I had with the microwave that was in our house when we first bought it that operated just fine with the door open. It took one good burn on my hand to figure out that I probably wasn’t smart enough to operate that particular machine.

We’ve since replaced that oven (a couple times, I think), and our current microwave presented me with a few “challenges” when approached from the chip-makers perspective.

First and foremost, the instructions say to turn off the rotation in your oven if it does that. Since mine rotates and doesn’t have the ability to disable the rotation, I pulled out the gigantic glass tray and elevated it using some prep bowls to inhibit the rotations. From there I was able to follow the instructions: putting down parchment paper, covering the paper in thinly sliced potatoes (thank you scary mandolin cutter), spraying the mess with cooking spray and applying a sprinkle of sea salt.

Now came the scary part. I was about 50/50 convinced that the microwave was going to implode when run for five minutes with not much other than a quarter of a potato and a sheet of paper in it. To my surprise, it did not. What it also did not do, however, was crisp up those chips. I had to add an additional two and a half minutes to the time in order to get crispy chips with the stationary setup. It was vitally important to monitor the chips after the first three minutes because they all pretty much cooked at different rates.

For the second run (you honestly don’t get that many chips down in a standard-sized microwave), squeezle suggested I yoink out the elevator bowls and let the stupid oven rotate. This worked infinitely better than the stationary chips. After about three minutes, chips were crisping up and my speed to delivery (aka, squeezle’s belly) was way faster.

One potato about the size of a pint glass generated four and a half runs through the microwave and a pretty normal serving size to go with sammiches that squeezle made for dinner. We were about to embark on a second potato, but figured the oven could use a bit of a rest since the glass tray was close to lava hot and the kitchen reeked of potato steam.

That being said, I found it a bit too easy to make these chips. They were a snap to make and remarkably tasty. Usually when I set out on a “project” such as this, I make a huge mess and usually end up hurting myself or causing some sort of trouble that I, then, have to resolve.

None of that was true with this. Even with my liberal applications of cooking spray (a potential for me seriously injuring myself in a plethora of ways), nothing bad happened. I didn’t start any fires, I didn’t cut myself on the razor-sharp mandolin, and I didn’t leave the kitchen looking like the Swedish Chef had done a guest spot.

I guess there is always next time.

I spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in front of a computer. I realized last night while going through my typical Facebook/blogs/forums routine that, even when I’m not at work, I spend a crapload of time sitting in front of my monitors.

Ultimately, I’m all about getting my daily dose of rads while I rot my brains chuckling at lolcats and maybe even popping out a line or hundred of code. What I’ve never thought about, or even had to think about is how much I’m moving around while I’m “moving about” onscreen.

That sounds weird doesn’t it? Well, let me set up why this concept suddenly became my biggest daily issue.

In my office at work my area used to be a gigantic open section of floor. At some point very flimsy walls were hung from the ceiling and doors were hung on some of the holes in these walls to form rudimentary offices. One of those caves is my office. What didn’t change, however, is the lighting. The lighting setup for the gigantic open area was left as-is for the current setup of five offices, one conference room and a whole crapload of cubicles. What this means for me is that the single switch that controls the lights for my office, and all the areas in-between, is about fifteen yards away from where I sit and around all of the cubicles.

That really never bothered me. I’m at work, the lights are on, it’s time to get crackin’ on what needs to be done. Sure there have been a couple days of severe hangover that made me wish I could turn out the lights and just curl up, but it really hasn’t been an issue.

Last Thursday night, however, everything changed. Apparently a crack team of commando electricians spent their Thursday night rewiring my little area with motion-detecting sensors for all of the lights. Now my office can be dark while the rest of the floor is lit up.

All in all that’s very responsible of them. Mythbusters has proven that it’s more economical to turn out those nasty fluorescent lights rather than leave them on all the time, so I’m a believer in the off switch. What I’m hating, however, is the fact that the damn motion detecting sensor is a low-bid piece of shit.

Three times, yes one, two, three freakin’ times the lights have gone out while I have been writing this piece.

If you’ve been around me for any given amount of time then you know that I’m not really one to stand still well. I’m a fidgeter and it’s genetic. I almost always have one or both of my legs bouncing like crazy whether I’m sitting or standing. When I’m working and my brain is pretty much just wired to my fingers, it gets even worse. Here I am, wriggling like a puppy and the damn lights are still going out.

The ultimate beauty of this change, however, is the fact that noone is stepping up and taking responsibility for it. I’ve talked to three different “people of authority” and each and every one of them has pointed me in a different direction: all wrong. Times like this remind me how laughable bureaucracy really is. Something major happened yet nobody knows who did it or even authorized it.

This afternoon, I am going to stop bitching about the lights that keep going out on me. The way I look at it, lights on means business and productivity and lights out mean nap time. When I crawl back into my hole after lunch and the lights go out on me, I will take that as a sign from the mysterious “Powers That Be” who authorized the installation of our wonderful new lights as a signal to take a nap. I guess they really do care about employee engagement around here.

I’m not sure if a recent head injury (reference my zombie hammer posting below) managed to rattle loose the plaque clogging up my artistic side, but I’ve been scribbling on just about everything for the past week or so.

I have one gigantic stumbling block when it comes to artistry, however: I can’t draw a straight line to save my life. Sure, everything looks just peachy in my head, but transition to paper is a Herculean effort of “over-the-mountains-and-through-the-woods” between my brain and hand. To make matters worse, the frustration of the effort makes my lines even shakier than they normally would be.

If, by some chance, I do indeed manage to get out a decent representation of what I was attempting (typically on the piles and piles of random scrap paper I keep in my office), I am often hard-pressed to duplicate whatever effort I just made look acceptable.

Even more scary is that the current things I’ve been doodling out look like stuff that Martin Ontiveros has done whilst having a seizure during an earthquake.

By no means do I let any of this distract me from putting ink and graphite on paper: it’s just adjusted my approach a little. I spend much more time experimenting with lines I normally draw straight and seeing if I can duplicate the opposite side of a curve. It’s frustrating as all hell since I’ve been spending the better part of the last decade popping out computer generated graphics like crazy. Photoshop and Illustrator are much more forgiving that good ol’ pen and paper.

I’ve got no problem with computer graphics, and still rely on using the computer for almost 90% of ideas I’d like to move forward into any semblance of a physical manifestation of my creativity, but there is just something fundamentally different between printed images from the screen and something that was plotted out and drawn on a given surface.

Recently I’ve begun playing around with customizing the paint schemes on designer toys (my beloved RealxHead mini fortune cats in particular). The challenges of working with a two and a half inch tall piece of vinyl really turn into a matter of scale. I’ve got grand plans that need to be executed very small, so I’ve turned to working with stencils and my newly acquired airbrush setup. On the screen everything seems just perfect, but trying to cut out wee tiny stencils after printing is just about one of the most annoying things I’ve ever done.

I realize that the more I practice, the easier this will all go and the better I’ll eventually get. It’s a painfully slow process, but I’m willing to stick it out (for now).