Impromptu No. 5 (”Never Know”) is fairly upbeat. As is typical for me lately, some spontaneous vocalizing right away.
Semi-Impromptu No. 5 (”Nests”) is a darker affair. First track was totally improvised, me on rhythm, spontaneous vocals, tapping the microphone stand with my foot to create the bass-effects. Then I overlaid the guitar line, added some echo, edited a little, and tripled the initial track to end up with what I have below.
I worked out the theme to this last night and immediately set to recording it. I doubled the track, added some foot-stomps and eggshaking, and a little vocal, cleaned up some errors (again, thus the “semi”). I hope to do some actual impromptus, warts and all, soon.
Feel free to download and share. Let me know what you think! Stay out of the sun, it’s blistering out here in upper Manhattan.
Stinking Bishop is a soft, creamy cheese from the U.K, made from the milk of Gloucester cattle:
It is also liquefied death in the nose. Old flyblown duck embryos. Warm hippo eye stuffed with fermented melon rind.
When I was six or seven, while walking to 7-11 to buy candy and Garbage Pail Kids, I decided to take a detour through a gravel ditch running parallel to a newly-built shopping center. Suddenly, before my nostrils had even registered what was happening, I reeled, and I saw at my feet, against the blinding-white sunstruck gravel stones, a pale, wet, hairless flesh-lump.
It was a baby bird. It had fallen from its nest and was boiling under the south Florida summer sun, eyes crammed with crawling things.
What I smelled at that moment — that’s basically what catching a waft of this cheese is like.
Odor aside (if one can, even intellectually, shift aside a sensation as brutish as this cheese’s funk), the taste actually offers layered savor: flan, nuttiness, traces of buttery caramel. My senses were confused trying to match up malevolent odor to nuanced taste. But since my senses like all that jostle, I was happy to be lost in the reek/flavor disconnect.
That pleasure didn’t last long though, as the nose coda hit about 5 seconds after the bite: coming back up through the palate and nostrils, haunting the mouth like a nightmare haunts a freshly awoken mind. It was at this point that the briefly-inviting flavor was totally ambushed by the reek. I put my knife down & left the rest of the wedge I had cut untouched: I’d been bested by the Bishop. My tongue hadn’t lolled in enough gutters to lap up & love curd like this.
I drank some water, I drank some lemonade. I ate some mustard on celery. I ate an orange. I bit into an orange peel.
Five more minutes passed. I glanced back at the Bishop. I got nervous. I fidgeted.
Then, automatically, as if in a trance, I reached over and ate the rest of the cheese in one bite.
Part 2: Why I Stay with Stink
What’s wrong with me? I wondered, as I sat there rolling creamy horror around in my mouth.
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.
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.
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