Paper Rad are an art collective of wanderers who make cartoons, comics, paintings, videos, clothes, pizza, work on peanut farms, own two glitter factories, carve star charts in cactii, run a professional scab-picker’s service, respect the earth, breed oxen, respect oxen, love life and wrestle invaders in grand mal, glitchy glory.

They live in a reddish-magenta house and gather around green mac n cheese.

Strap your tentacles in and find them here.

Now, these folks also created a team of six adventurers called the Problem Solvers: Pandemonia, a witch who is angry & a black cone, Dewey a hairy free spirit, Riviera a floating gelatinous cube, T Bubbles who is cool, D-O-G who is canine & powerful, Buck a stern Duck.

The image below is of Dewey with a Pizza Cape, alarmed. It comes from the Problem Solver’s video #1211: “Give Pizza A Chance” (also below):

I’ve watched this video many times. Maybe too many. I get a warm honey-knot somewhere in my chest in response to the garish color-bursts, the video game bleep-tunes, the jerky robo animations, the 80’s nostalgia (day-glo outfits, trolls, the very name “T Bubbles”), the dream-like narrative skips & stretches, and the finale: candy-raver peace-symbol triumph/blossom/burgeon all over the city.

More favorite parts are: Dewey’s Scalding Pizza Cape, Riviera’s impassioned & rambling love of the “number one day” he’s ever seen, the slow rise and fall of the hat-wearing bucktoothed monster at the end.

The video’s style: blunt & cartoony-brutish, fluoro-mallet, magenta-concussions. Reminds me of the scene in I Heart Huckabee where men are beating their own faces with red rubber balls.

As for the rest of Paper Rad’s productions — I eye-lap the fit-inducing strobe of their site, and the layered, massed impact of their printed works — dense with fluorescent ephemera, half-narratives & scrawls & repurposed cartoon characters. It all taps into the same hunger for sensory overload in me that I spend most of my waking time vehemently decrying as an inescapable blight upon the modern world.

Secretly of course I want to go on a neon bender staring at 116 youtube videos at once, 13 of which are playing obscure berlin disco, the rest of which are toxicolored beautiful beepy Paper Rad.

There is a comfort in noise, in the staticky womby bath of it. Paper Rad (not so much the Problem Solvers videos, but their site, cartoons & books, especially “BJ and Da Dogs”) offer the visual and color & nostalgic analogue of that noise & static: massed strobing mess, sheer assaulting saturation:

All the chunky pixels, all the pummeling graphics, all the Alf & Popples & Garfield cameos, and all the scraping-loud day-glo cascades — all this array massed and deployed on a monitor the size of the sky could never fully blot out the painful reality of being alive.

But it sure as hell helps (me, at any rate).

   
Go to Paper Rad & bleed a little play-doh.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

Another semi-impromptu. Like the first, this one began with a complete improvisation, but the “semi-” comes from the fact that I edited it, overdubbed a lead guitar line, and played with volume levels and stuff to get it right.

Feel free to download and share. Let me know what you think.

C. Way - “Semi Impromptu No. 2″

Another new instrumental, this one only partly improvised. Backing tracks were overdubbed after the original completely improv’d track was laid down. I thought I’d call these “semi” impromptus to distinguish them from the pieces I record that are completely off-the-cuff, without editing or overdubbing.

Feel free to download and share. Let me know what you think.

C.Way - “Semi-Impromptu No. 1 (From My Limbs)”

Here’s a new instrumental for everyone, completely improvised with my mac’s internal mic running.

Feel free to download and share. Let me know what you think.

   C.Way - “Impromptu No.1″

Another installation of this game I play where I open Itunes, enable Shuffle, listen to the first song that comes up, and write whatever comes to mind about it.

This time I was served up a song from The Knife, off their record “Silent Shout”, called “The Captain”. I love this song — it always settles & unsettles me with its cold vistas & brittle expanse.

First, the song:

The Knife - “The Captain”
   

And here, a poem I wrote for it:
   

Spray of marbles skipping
along vast mesa of chrome.

Slow fanning wingspan of
hungry metal owls
sweeping over stone.

A long thunder, away.

Measured avalanche of
straw, sand & aluminum
upon meadows of
magenta blossom.

Old indigo geysers,
dusted with crimson flakes.

Gray coral spiking up from pink ponds.

The distant throaty lowing of beasts.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
   
   
Buy Records from The Knife at Insound.com

New song (zipped — sorry, my site host doesn’t let me upload mp3s):

“Now I Can Move” - C.Way
   

Lyrics:
   

Now I Can Move - C.Way

3 o’clock in the Morning I can’t move
   Black rose Blooming in the middle of my Forehead
Dread, anger, belonging to Nothing, collaring my Throat
   Skin thick with Centipede feet, make me Twist my sheets
Now i can Move

2.5, 5, 10 milligrams
   2 glasses, 3, half bottle, I can’t move
Chart it, log it, Scattergraph
   Cardboard instruments dissect, disentangle
This thickening Knot of Days
   But now i can move

Planet of Ocean
   No land, No land
Wrap me, Foam me, Carry me in

There’s a copy of me
   Waiting in you
There’s a copy of me
   Waiting in you

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008