(7s) Goals For 2010 Intro

Goals are important in life, and these are my personal goals for the year 2010. I had started a similar list last year as a 7-list and never ever finished it. Perhaps the same will happen this time too, because I never learn sometimes. 2009 was not the greatest year I've ever had. Financially, it was shambles, and I wrapped it up unemployed and on food stamps and probably could've qualified for welfare but the food stamp process was demeaning enough. But personally, my family is tight, and we got by, and we got animals now, so fuck it. It can always get better though. So here's what I'd like to percolate up for the next 365.

(7s) Magazines Subscriptions Wanted Intro

I know this is the online age and newspapers are shrinking away to nothing and magazines die weekly, but I'm an old school type of dude, who likes to lay on the couch with my feet by the woodstove and my head by the draft coming in from the unfinished front room, thumbing through a magazine, reading the light stuff at first, as I tease myself with sleep, saving longer more informative articles for serious bouts of chilling. I don't really read books too much anymore, not having the time (a likely excuse), and when I do, I tend to read non-fiction because I feel like I'm wasting my time reading made-up stuff. An odd ultimately self-defeating attitude for an aspiring writer, but hey, I'm nothing but confusing contradictions, wrapped up in 225 pounds of mostly solid, heavily bearded dude. Nonetheless, if I can ever get my personal financial condition back on stable and then improve upon that, I'd most likely blow discretionary income on magazine subscriptions galore, to keep my tumbleweed post office box randomly stuffed with shit that might actually give me something to ramble about. Here would be the Top 7 subscriptions on my wish list, some I've had before, some I've never seen.

NFL WEEK 19: Divisional Playoffs

I am the least excited about NFL playoffs than I can remember being in most of my adult life. I just don't care about, and actively dislike most of the teams left playing. Part of this could be the fact my team is the Washington Redskins and I am a well-bred playa hater because the Redskins suck so badly (although we are well on our way to another off-season Super Bowl with the hire of Mike Shanahan!). But at the same time, there's not a lot to like about many of the remaining teams. Shitty personalities and overhyped superstars and teams that were unstoppable five weeks ago that looked pretty normally mediocre as the season wound down. Oh well. I will watch, because I am an American, and it is my duty to love football, passionately, so that the rest of the World will not understand me even more...

#1: SAN DIEGO CHARGERS (13-3, 1st overall) - When the Chargers were up-and-coming young team full of skill position players galore and a wacky yet brutish defense with that guy that got busted for selling prescription cough syrup on their secondary (who I've always pretended was Quentin Jammer ever since, even though I know it's not, but every time I see Quentin Jammer, I smile and go, "That dude loves listening to DJ Screw"; but then Shawne Merrimanne will jump in the screen and I'll frown and go, "That dude loves exploring himself fully in a sexual way while hanging out with the longhaired Indian looking dude from Black Eyed Peas"). But somewhere along the way, and I think it was the overuse of the powder blue jerseys, or it might just be the fact I hate Norv Turner like Tennessee people hate Lane Kiffin, but for different reasons though just as passionately, but I just don't like the Chargers. Sad thing is there's a good chance they'll play the Colts in the AFC Championship game, and I hate the Colts worse than everybody in football except for the Cowboys. Actually this year's playoffs is like a giant parade of Teams Raven Hates. I should really get satellite TV now that I have a job again and just start watching hockey.

#2: NEW ORLEANS SAINTS (13-3, 2nd overall) - I think their last few weeks was just smoke and mirror laziness, and their offense will turn it back on pretty easily about halfway through this weekend's game against the Cardinals. Perhaps this will be out of necessity, because I don't think defenses can just turn it on or off as easily, far more rhythm oriented than people understand, especially with a blitz from nine angles attack like Gregggg Williams uses for the Saints. The Cardinals/Saints game could end up being even more high-scoring than the Cardinals/Packers one. That would be fun to watch. I missed most of the Cards/Pack game, and caught the overtime ending at the stupid laundromat drying our clothes since our dryer is still broke. (Should probably buy a new heater coil being I have a job again as well.) The laundromat on a Sunday night is a vast wasteland of bi-racial mongoloids and people of low mental aptitude with eyeballs slid too far apart like a rhesus monkey lab experiment on fetal alcohol syndrome.

#3: INDIANAPOLIS COLTS (14-2, 3rd overall) - Yeah, according to my mathematically brilliant season-long scoring system, the Colts are only ranked 3rd overall in the NFL. I know everybody is all like, "This is the team to beat. Peyton Manning is the greatest QB you will ever see in your life even if they cryogenically freeze you and you come back in 200 years and your job is to watch every football game ever played with the eyes of someone who was alive back around the year 2000 when the game was considered more brutal and repugnant and caveman-like." Fuck Peyton Manning. And the Colts have ugly uniforms.

#4: DALLAS COWBOYS (12-5, 4th overall) - Oh man, Cowboys bring the hatred. I have a friend who is a classic cynical Philly-style Eagles fan, and in the last couple weeks, though our team allegiances are natural enemies, we have bonded strongly in our mutual distaste for the media hype machine being slowly cranked up for this Dallas Cowboy team, since they finally won a playoff game. The simple fact of the matter is it is still the Cowboys team coached by Wade Wiggum (a retard coach, so strike one), quarterbacked by Tony Romo (a closeted homosexual QB of middling talent, who wishes Jason Witten sang like Carrie Underwood, or that Carrie Underwood had an ass like Jason Witten, one or the other), and owned by Jerry Jones (who should be proud of himself because with Dan Snyder's recent forays into running blind circles, and Al Davis not dead, he's technically only the 3rd worst owner in the NFL). But the more complex fact of the matter is the NFL this time of year is pre-engineered like a Stone Cold Steve Austin vs. The Rock Wrestlemania bout, so things happen for a reason. And the Dallas Cowboys are a great storied franchise that can get hyped up at the right time, as the Vikings and Saints start to ebb backwards into a late season low tide, and such a great and storied franchise would make for a great Super Bowl losing opponent to Peyton's Colts, to make it seem like Peyton's won like 5 Super Bowls instead of just the one, as you flash through history and see all the Cowboy victories, and then those exact same uniforms losing to Peyton and the Colts. Really, I fully expect the Cowboys to go to the Super Bowl and lose to the Colts because I fully believe the league is crooked as fuck and fixed, not choreographed but fixed, and this will make Peyton Manning seem more God-like, which is the goal, as Tom Brady's knee did not stand the test of this season and the NFL figurehead superstar slot needs to be replaced, and without the same model good looks and charming smile, Peyton's gonna need to seem like the best QB ever forever plus two years to be the ultimate superstar.

#5: MINNESOTA VIKINGS (12-4, 6th overall) - Ol' Farvey and his new pack of schoolyard ballmates get to host the stupid Dallas Cowboys this weekend, in what should probably break down like this. First half is competitive, but not too exciting, more of a build-up than anything. Second half, early on, Farvey is hurt on a few rough sacks or near sacks, but plays on. This refers back to the previously established Farve/Childress stay in the game storyline. Then Farvey throws a few errant passes, makes a halfway comeback, almost there, but then an interception kills the tying drive in the closing minutes. This creates a good Super QB in the Big Game rub for Tony Romo, and the injured but refuses to quit angle plays well with Farvey's Ol' Gunslinger personna. Then he goes into mulling retirement mode until the first week of September.

#6: BALTIMORE RAVENS (10-7, 7th overall) - The Ravens are the only team left that I feel I can root for, and I don't necessarily like them in a franchise sense, with ugly uniforms and stoling my go-by name. But a friend is a Ravens fan, and I enjoy their style, at times, and Ed Reed's bushy Grady Jr. if Sanford & Son still existed beard fills my heart with joy. And really, their game with the Colts is gonna be made or broken by whether their defense can play up to the game, beyond the common sports media meme of "this Ravens defense is not as good as it usually is" and they can make some plays. Wouldn't it be awesome to see Ray Lewis piledrive Peyton Manning into the turf and he's out for the game and Jim Corgi or Ralph Blyleven or whoever the fuck finishes the season for the Colts? And man oh man, if ever there was a black dude who was more thankful for the whiteboy who worked for him than Jim Caldwell, I'd like to meet that black dude. Well, not really, because he'd probably be a dickhead capitalist fuckface managerial type black dude who felt he had come up in life by exploiting the talents and efforts of others who were below him on some sort of arbitrary chain of power chart.

#7: ARIZONA CARDINALS (11-6, 9th overall) - Usually I would root completely against Kurt Warner because of his whole Jesus Concussion thing, but I didn't when they were playing the Packers. And watching the game I realized what it was... Aaron Rodgers, with his dark sunken eyes and blank expression, looks 95% facial matching technology like my youngest sister's old crackhead boyfriend who wrecked their car on purpose, almost killed my sister, and went to jail for being a complete punk ass piece of shit. So as much as I hate fake ass Christian do-gooder asshole types, I hate crackheads who fuck up a few years of my sister's life even more. I'm not sure if that means I get into Heaven or Hell, so I guess I'm lucky neither of them even exist.

#8: NEW YORK JETS (10-7, 11th overall) - As much as I hate the San Diego Chargers, I don't much care for the New York Jets. It pisses me off a fat fuck loudmouth and loveable asshole coach like Rex Ryan is being wasted up in New Jersey. He'd be a much better fit in one of the North division teams, or better yet as the new coach of Tennessee. In fact, Rex Ryan is tailor made for the SEC, and his monstrous defense doing battle with Urban Meyer's finesse offense would be a tasty Saturday afternoon treat for years to come. Instead he coaches the stupid Jets, who hope Mark Sanchez doesn't get distracted by pussy so much he throws five interceptions and loses the game.

100 VINYLZ: #54 - Journey to Love LP by Stanley Clarke

(1975, Nemperor Records)
I will not swear by the jazz fusion, but at one point in my life I used to get high as fuck a lot and drink Miller Genuine Draft while playing Mario Kart on a Super Nintendo, and this dude I would do that with who was a stay-at-home dad because his wife did all the moneymaking, much to her chagrin, he would play jazz fusion to try and open my narrow musical mind, because he was one of those super-knowledgeable musical dudes that are real dicks to be in a band with or have them control the playlist for too long on a long road trip. But he used to play this a bit, and turned me onto Stanley Clarke, and there has been many a night I spent baked to my last molecule where I'd have the fucking Journey to Love LP pumped as loud as whatever haphazard sound system I was rocking could handle without muffling itself up, and just vibe. Stanley Clarke ended up being some sort of movie soundtrack type guy, and that's either a shame or a testament to how if you're going to be a musician you should stay fucked up and not try to settle down and get a real job. Music is not a real job. Cut your hair and get a real job and make retard stoner music in your basement during your every free moment. That's the only solution to Stanley Clarke's dilemma. He failed us all.

100 VINYLZ: #55 - Fly Like An Eagle LP by The Steve Miller Band

(1976, Capitol Records)
Dazed and Confused was a great movie, and for better for worse made a lot of sense to me as to how I had grown up as a young teenager, getting high at the arcade, drunk as fuck, riding around thinking about sex but mostly sucking reefer smoke more than young titties. There were plenty of people in that flick that I could straight up identify with people back home (for the record, I was probably a mix between the cool younger kid who threw the bowling ball through the windshield and the nerd dude who dreamed about Abraham Lincoln), but the one thing that made no sense to me whatsoever was the hazing bullshit. I mean, there was an older kid named Barry who fucked with me all the time, but that was more because he was a fucking dick than any sort of hazing rituals. God I hated that dude. It didn't help that the girl I lost my virginity to, she had only had sex with one other person, which was Barry's older brother, who was like 7 years older than me and her. Trust me, a 12-year-old dick first time dipping does not have the power that a 19-year-old dick seducing the neighbor's daughter has. But what are you gonna do? I can't make someone else's sexual abuse be my psychological shortcomings.
The second thing that freaks me out about that movie is that the nerd Linklater dude that made it put together this meticulous soundtrack of late '70s classics, and there is not even a mention of Steve Miller in there. I remember as my parents and their grown delinquent friends constantly got their crooked walks on at the kitchen table back then, Steve Miller was in heavy fucking rotation, at all times. Shit, they even had some sort of UHF Steve Miller concert special back then that was a big deal and they all got together and got tore up. The people's house we went to for that, the dude of that family, Tony, he had this huge album collection, all in order, on a shelf, and I remember just gazing at it. All those records. My folks LP collection was more skitter skatter and not organized at all, just a pile that good things made it to the front and shitty things would get buried and occasionally good things would get lost in the much of the back of the piles leaning against the wall.
Steve Miller, and his band, has stayed relevant amongst the young pot-smoking sect, mostly with his Greatest Hits collection, but this album, which has four or five of those Greatest Hits tracks (I think dude only had like three albums when they put that collection together), is my favorite, because it lacks the Greatest Hits collection style of pauses between songs and disparate nature. This is an album, interconnecting, and the songs lead into each other a bit. Now there is some serious ass crap on here (whatever the fuck that "Mercury" song is), but overall, I find it more enjoyable than the Greatest Hits. Shit, I like for nothing more than the "Space Intro" to "Fly Like an Eagle" which we sampled and turned backwards when I was in stupid Solaris Earth Pipeline with the faggot Psyopsogist for a time travel song called "Time Travel" where I went back in time and ended up beating up my own self outside a Mexican restaurant, but then my wife didn't like me because I wasn't me then, I was me now, and she fell in love with me then, so when I drove my Chevy Nova time machine back to now, all my kids and wife and everything was gone. Monkey's paw, with technology yall.

Key West Sunset Ale

AFFORDABILITY: I had visited family in south Florida, actually my wife's family, and they are of an economic situation I am not familiar with, like their shutters in their house probably cost as much as our whole property did. But we went out, me and the other dude and another family member who was unmarried, and we drank some beers at a bar, then wandered through suburbia in a Mercedes CLS, and the brother-in-law who was hosting, his credit card had gotten left at a spot me and him took the kids to lunch at the day before. They called because his card had been found, which of course was, to him, an excuse to go down there and snag a few more beers before us menfolk returned home on Thanksgiving Eve. He made a call to the wife's unattended cellphone first, checking sunset times, to make sure he beat some sort of sunset rule for short attention span meanderings they have established between them, and we went to the dockside bar and drank up a few Key West Ales apiece, being it was the local beer on tap. And his magically returned credit card covered the tab, meaning these were as affordable a slew of brews a dude like me could come across. 5 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Me and a pair of brothers-in-laws, in a faraway wealthy place that I did not feel at total ease in, we drank down a few of these Key West Ales in a rambunctious manner. I led the way, being at unease, and my host bro-in-law told the waitress, "He needs another, his must have a hole in it." And then he finished his off too, and made the same joke about the hole in the glass, and the waitress, who was a vivacious buxom overtly friendly type, looked at the third member of our party and his barely drank beer glass, and I said that his doesn't have a hole, and she went, "Yeah, it has a diaper." We was rolling. Then we went home to the rest of the family in the big house of the host with mahoganey shutters and doors and I sat around drinking more beer because it was holiday time bitches, and I was in a different state. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: I never even seened the label, and I don't honestly remember what the beer tap at the bar looked like that night. But being it is Key West Ale and I was drunking myself up at a gulfside bar in deep south Florida and it was during a cold spell of like 65 degrees at the end of November, I can give them the benefit of the doubt on their label, because it's cold as fuck here. My chicken water keeps freezing every day. Now I've got to try and save up for a stupid heated chicken waterer by next winter. Everyday it's something. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: The Key West Ale, upon some intense momentary internet consultations, is brewed up "under something or other" by the Florida Brewing Company, somewhere further up in Florida. In fact, the internet said that all the allegedly local south Florida beers are actually brewed up in the greater (oxymoron, am I right?) Orlando area. Having visited there and roded my first ever airplane and you could see the diaspora of wealth esploding through the over top of the swamplands. Man, my favorite time of cable television was when The Spike channel was still TNN but it didn't stand for The National Network but The Nashville Network, and though they played shitfuck crap country music videos a lot of the time, on a Friday night you could see demolition derbies, and on Saturday and Sunday mornings it was weird motor sports like the Swamp Buggy races and shit. That was some good television. I know the UFC reality program is all sorts of the populars now with closeted homosexual muscular young men with tribal tattoos on their upper backs, but man, having weird long truck things driving through two feet of water in circles is way better. And less gay. 2 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I enjoyed my trip to Florida because I had like $37 yet ate and lived like a King in a concrete castle with palm trees for six five days, and I associate the Key West Ale with such a high and unwarranted living, thus I enjoy it and hopefully have edutained you about the Key West Ale, even if the real type of info you'd maybe want from some beer dork review nerd website is not here. I am a spiritual person, and go by the feeling. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 3 & 3/5 STARS!

(7s) Artists Wanted #7 - Kehinde Wiley

I had been thinking about dropping Kehinde Wiley on this list, and then half the people I was thinking about were Juxtapoz-featured "street" artists, so I kinda figured I should have Wiley on the list for some fine art balance. And then we trade in some books for store credit at Barnes & Noble today and I get a new Juxtapoz and it's fucking Kehinde Wiley on the cover. But Wiley is far beyond that normal upwardly mobile graffiti artist realm of artist. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond actually bought a Wiley painting (seen above) and had it displayed while they've been undergoing this constant renovation for the past few years, and I went to see it in person, because all I'd seen were these little magazine reprints of his stuff, small and funny looking since it's traditional portraiture style but with some modern black dudes in modern clothes in the pic instead of Napoleon or St. John or whoever. The thing is, Kehinde Wiley works on a huge scale, like the painting I saw was a good 6 foot by 6 foot. And the backgrounds, mocking or paying homage or just sampling old school portrait styles, are perfect, looking like they got done in Photoshop, without a blemish untouched by a stamp and clone atonement. Yet he paints the whole fucking thing. It is amazing, but I would assume if he's in fine art museums, he's probably far out of my price range, even if I end up rich like I plan on being. But if we do end up getting a Kehinde Wiley, I'm gonna need a bigger house. Or a pole barn.

100 VINYLZ: #56 - I Still Live With My Moms 12-inch by Thirstin Howl III

(2000, Landspeed Records)
Man, I can't remember how, if it was on a mixtape of what, but I knew who Thirstin Howl III was back when I worked at this shitty painting company in Farmville, but we were finishing up a job in Richmond, and it was only me and my boy Rob aka Va. Canibus aka the Black Clever Star, riding back and forth to way above Richmond up near Hanover County, and we'd stop at Willie's Records in Southside because I knew the spot to stock up and he knew it as the black folks record store, and we were in there and I was picking out 12-inch singles and came across this with the big basic block letters, and I had to buy it. Rob always bought a couple tapes that we'd pump in the work van on the way back home, but my records would just be sitting there, waiting to make it to the trailer and get played. This song was the fucking greatest on multiple levels. First off, Thirstin Howl III is the greatest freestyle style rapper to ever have records, and this, along with "Brooklyn Hard Rocks", is his finest moments. But what makes this song even better, as if it needed that, was the whole Rob factor, because at the time, he lived with his moms, and actually shared a bedroom with his brother who was in like 6th grade, in bunk beds. Rob was like 22 and we'd drink beer together and he'd go play dice behind the Elk's Lodge and end up cracking some dude in the head with a baseball bat, but go home and sleep in the bunk beds with his little bro. And it wasn't ugly. His mom was nice as shit, a real cool lady. In fact, I rode through there like two years ago trying to get up with Rob, and this older black dude kept looking at me, he always seemed to be hanging out whenever I came through, and he probably thought I was there to buy weed or coke or something, as it's like three blocks from the projects and we used to buy mad weed there from a dude named Sheephead. I circled around and asked the old dude if Rob still lived there, and he was like, "Why? Who asking?" and I told him we used to be tight but I ain't seen him in years and he was like, "Yeah, I'm his daddy. I'll tell his mom." Next day, his mom called the number I left and gave me Rob's home number, he had a kid now and all that. I called like 19 times, but my caller ID says my wife's name because like any good piece of shit, none of the bills are in my name, except for shit we ain't gonna pay for so it can fuck up my credit and not her's, so nobody ever answered unless they answered and said, "HELLO!!!!" and then hung up. I would imagine Rob was probably fucking around and his ol' lady would see the caller ID and start tripping. I never got up wit Rob until finding him inside the facebooks, but I think his facebook account might be run by a robot judging from some of his strange posts. Who knew that invasion of the body snatchers would be through a social networking site and wouldn't end up actually killing us but just annoying us with broken Russian programming and Nigerian english?

Dundee Honey Brown

AFFORDABILITY: The Dundee Honey Brown 12-pack was on markdown at the Kroger grocery store place, and it came out to a quite affordable 12-pack of the pop top bottles (although it was probably actually twist top... used to be that was the true test of whether a beer was high brow or not, but now a bunch of pseudo-high brow beers come in twist top bottles; my theory is that they have moved to this when owned by larger breweries to keep people from homebrewing because pop tops are the only ones you can successfully use in homebrewing, and I also have a paranoia that everything is out to stop any D.I.Y. mentality whatsoever from existing in us till we're all a bunch of veal calves in cubicles, waiting for our R&D government to feed, fund, and direct us, for their profit and probably fake prophets too). 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Dundee Honey Brown apparently used to be my wife's beer of choice when she lived in Athens, Georgia, but something is different about it now according to her. I remember us drinking it sometimes in our early dating days when we wanted something mellow instead of a 30-pack of Budweiser (which seemed to be rarely), and I didn't like it back then, but I didn't like much of anything back then. This here Dundee Honey Brown that we've been buying lately, I can enjoy it, and it's in that cheap good 12-pack range like Yuengling and Killian's Red, if either of those are considered good (which they aren't to beer dorks, because nothing is ever good enough), and I can see this becoming a steady staple in my diet, which I might've mentioned, but I drink a lot so it's hard to remember every goddamn stupid talking point I make in these stupid endless nothing posts. 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The remodulated Dundee Honey Brown bottle labels are pretty nifty, in a nice honey color, with some marching band looking bumblebee getting his caricature on. It's nothing that would make a good poster or anything, but if ever there was a beer bottle label that would look great on an old t-shirt found in a thrift store that benefits retarded Christian veterans of domestic wars, this would be the one. And that is high praise. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: They portend being owned by theyselves but you can tell something is up. I don't trust nobody no more, fuckin' Obama accepting peace prizes talking about going to war. Nothing even cares to be full of shit anymore. At least they used to pretend, in wrestling and political debates and commercials and everything. Now they're just like, "Our shit gives you cancer, we're going to war Nobel Peace Prize, and let's talk about blah blah blah ratings merchandise bottom line advertising search optimization." Here's an embedded search optimization hook-up for your ass - stupid bitches die world blow up let's go end times fuck you all . 2 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I enjoy this here Dundee Honey Brown beer thing. It reminds me of what the dad from the Berenstein Bears would drink. Hopefully he drinks too much over at the big dog, little dog house, and the little dog also drinks too much, but big dog doesn't drink at all, and little dog wants to drive Pa Berenstein home to his tree but little dog doesn't want any of them to drive because those two have been drinking Dundee Honey Browns since 1 pm and big dog is too tired from his night shift at the Wal-Mart Distribution Center to drive, but little dog does it anyways, in that big long ass car, and they don't wreck, because drinking and driving doesn't always end in tragedy. Don't let late night TV PSAs fool you. I know with a big long car driven by a drunk little dog ready made for extended crumple zone jokes, or the Berensteins living in an oak tree and that whole "whiskey bottle, brand new car, oak tree you're in my way" thing, you thought I was gonna make them wreck. But I didn't. You shouldn't be so tragic. 5 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 & 1/5 STARS!

(7s) Artists Wanted #6 - Chaz Bojorquez

Chaz Bojorquez is another figurehead legend in the ever-expanding and hardly distinguishable world of street artists/legit graffiti guys. The thing that sets Chaz apart, for me, is his style goes beyond normal graffiti into wild tangents, yet somehow stays truer to actual graffiti than the space age wannabe manga bullshit a lot of graff artists end up doing on canvas. Chaz was an L.A. kid and idolized the lettering styles of cholo gangsters, which is probably the best fucking style of writing letters ever created. Graffiti taggers got all speed dippy and wild with their letters, but the cholo style has always stayed straight Olde English gangsta in the hands of the barely educated. Chaz's shit has that same mentality, but updates it, not to where it's all cybertronic like most things are nowadays, but to where it's showing how the cybertronics suck and have taken our soul and make us of weak morals and soft minds and hard dicks and stuck in a bright glossy digitized nothing. Chaz's shit doesn't fuck with that noise. And if we're gonna pretend I'm rich and had shit to buy shit, I'd just put a giant billboard up in my field, offer it for free to a slew of companies, have them present their proposed billboards, show it all to Chaz, let him decide which one for me to allow to be put up, and then let him get loose on it. Fuck it man, I dig the whole idea of temporary art anyways, that no one might ever see other than four people who actually know what it is, so I'd, in my fake rich art collecting world, just contract him to do a new one every four months. Keep it in cycles. My pasture would look good as fuck with some pigs trained to stay inside electrified horse tape and root around, a Vollis Simpson whirligig, a Chaz-altered billboard, and my big red maple sitting garden that the red-tailed hawk is always chilling above.

Friday Love/Hate

I love working a new job, although after years and years of construction capped off by about five years of self-employment, it's a little hard adjusting to a state job. My mentality is GO GO GO and, thinking from the mind of a guy who hired people at times, moving slow or taking your time or having down time is a black strike of death. Yet here I am, packing five hours of work into an eight hour day. Really, this is what has killed America more than anything else, because most jobs are like this, and people have come to expect goofing off on the internet or playing solitaire on their computer as part of the cost of doing business. That is not cool. Why can't we just bust ass, be done by 1:30, and go the fuck home, all of us? Oh yeah, that wouldn't look professional, because nobody would be there in case something comes up. I guess a bunch of people pretending to do things is better than getting it done and starting up something else extra. That's America right there, to a tee. But back to the love, I love the new job, as it's some wacky challenging nonsense that will fill my years well yet only adds to the strange writer's resume that I like to cultivate even if I'm not a for-real well-published writer yet. Although I long ago deleted all games and distractions from my laptop, so in my spare time at this new job, I'm just gonna be writing like a madman, and hopefuly wrap up a couple of these projects that have been percolating for a long ass while.

I hate the cold. We got two feet of snow like ten days before Christmas, so I'm done with snow for the year. Plus, it's stayed below 40 for the past month, and been below 30 for three or four day chunks a couple times now. Fuck that. I already want it to be spring, and for women to wear tank tops and those wrap-around skirts that you can just imagine pulling loose like a string on a sweater. Oh man. I am ready as fuck for spring, already, very early.

Olde Richmond Brown Ale

AFFORDABILITY: Hey, the Olde Richmond is a big thick double deuce bottle that the fancy beers call as a pint plus six ounces I got at the Country Blessings store, which means one beer was like between $4 and $5, which is a deep dig down into the empty wine gallon bottle turned into change jar. And scooping up all those pennies and nickels, if you're early in the dumping/refilling change jar cycle, ain't all that easy, looking around to make sure you don't leave a stray so the baby don't try to eat it. Hard to trust a fancy lad bottle with painted label instead of printed one, especially if they're not militant about having you bring their bottles back. By painting them, they're marking them for useless. 1 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I drank this beer but only one of them because the price is not accomodating to my type of desensitivity to alcohol. As far as brown ales go, this was one of those beers that puts itself in a big fancy bottle and portends it's something special, but really, whatever man. I have often times since drinking this a few months ago gone into grocery stores with good beer selections with the sole idea of buying a big bottle of some fancy ass fauntleroy beer, and this would be one of the only non-Corona, Red Stripe, Beck's choices available, and I always am like, "Man, fuck that Olde Richmond Brown Ale bullshit," and I end up buying a 6-pack of Yuengling instead. 0 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Olde Richmond Brown Ale bottle is really fucking annoying. First off, it's not even a label but that screenprinted paint bottle type shit that annoys homebrewers the world over, because you can't remove the label to put your own dumb shit on it instead. Secondly, to be a printed bottle, it's pretty fucking boring at that, with a big giant "4" and the name wrapped around in an oval. I know maybe this is Olde Richmond Beer People's fourth style of beer, but why do they have to force the 4 so prominently? This beer annoyed me on so many levels. 1 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Olde Richmond brand beers, according to random internet information, seems to be inter-connected to the stupid St. Georges Brewery bullshit in Hampton, Virginia. How is Hampton, Virginia, some sort of "olde" Richmond? Man, the actual Richmond, Virginia, is the first place they ever made a beer can, so fuck this fake Richmond bullshit, with their stupid numbered bottles and hefty price for a painted bottle of ass crack. Minus 3 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Terrible terrible terrible. 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 1 STAR!

S14: The Ultimate Fighter Season Three

It's been a long while since I watched the end of this season three of The Ultimate Fighter, and I went about halfway through season four, and then bailed on the project, knocking it all way down my Netflix queue. It ruined MMA for me. First off, this season three was a motley collection of the most stereotypical weak-brained tribal tattooed bar bouncing fake bad asses that you could ever ask for. It perpetuated everything I hate about MMA. Secondly, Dana White never did anything different, but I think I hit the Dana White overload mode, to where he wasn't this genuine blue jeans and t-shirt corporate head, like Mark Cuban with attitude, and he just ended up seeming like a fucking douchebag who can get away with sayin whatever because he controls the purse strings on a bunch of dudes who could kick your ass. Frankly, it became apparent that Dana White fucking sucked, to be honest. They should've cycled him out and had somebody else host the show, even though it's Dana White who makes the decisions. He just seems like a guy trying too hard for you to notice what a straight shooter he is, how cool he is with the boys. It comes across as fake and postured and I'm sure he's making bazillions off these guys and screwing their wives when they're training in Iowa or Minnesota or Brazil or wherever the latest flavor of the month fighting style is headquartered at. Nonetheless, I did actually trudge all the way through Season Three, so here are my top 14 from that one, being the most notable 14 people for me personally, ranked from straight up chillest bro type to biggest douchebag type. No Dana White either. I just didn't even bother including him in the list, because that'd probably be what he wants, even if I talked about what a slimy snake he is.
#1: Ross Pointon - This was the little goofy limey fucker who just liked to fight and ended up taking the heavier weight class open spot just because why not? That dude was awesome, and should I become famous, my security personnel will be three dudes EXACTLY like Ross Pointon - usually drunken, always ready for trouble, with a goofy smile on their face at all times, and enthusiastic as fuck about anything I could tell them to do, no matter how impossible.
#2: Michael Bisping - The other limey fucker, and it is obvious I am part of the viewer reaction process that caused them to have a stupid America vs. England year of this show. Michael Bisping not only seemed like a chill ass dude, but his Rocky going to Russia to fight Drago training techniques were quite inspiring too. Bisping is one of those rare MMA bitches that actually seems like he might be able to hang out all evening, playing some cards, watching the game on TV, and not be a jack ass about mixed martial artistry every twelve minutes, like most of those dudes are, whether famous or shitty little local cokehead guy taking Gracie jiujitsu at a garage two blocks off Broad Street.
#3: Ed Herman - In lieu of dudes who actually seem chill, I will always pull for the relentless retarded brained drunken and overly-emotional redheaded dude. That was Ed Herman this season of the show, and very much like the Chris Leben dude from the first season, just, if at all possible, filled with even more hollowpoint bullet-like intensity. I hope Ed Herman has made many children with many women from his time on the television screens.
#4: Saul Soliz - He was just one of the coaches on the show, but honestly, that's how shitty this Season Three cast was. Saul seemed like a solid dude who told you the truth, even if it sucked, and he gave the show a bit of even-keeled coaching, as opposed to the odd style of bighead Tito Ortiz and the no style of stupid Ken Shamrock.
#5: Mike Nickels - Honestly, a few months later, I don't remember why I wrote Mike Nickels down as number five. I know he was one of those tattooed rock star bodyguard tribal MMA homos on this season, but I think he was the one with the wacky neck tattoos who seemed like an old friend of mine I used to get fucked up with all the time. Nickels maybe did something toward the end of his run that I was like, "Oh yeah, that dude's a lounger." Something had to have happened, but in a sign of a truly great reality television show, I have no memory of what that could've been.
#6: Tito Ortiz - Really, amazingly enough, before watching this season of TUF, I couldn't stand Tito Ortiz. His giant knoggin combined with marrying nasty ass Jenna Jameson, who looks like a female skeletor with big tittie bags now, kinda creeped me out. But by the end of this season's DVDs, I didn't really hate him anymore. I didn't love him, but I could tolerate him, because he seemed sincere, and not like he was just a balloonhead of indeterminate racial make-up trying too hard to seem cool, like a Dana White Jr.
#7: Kendall Grove - Nothing really bad about the wiry Kendall, other than he was just kinda there. He and that black dude had that stupid "DAGGER!" thing they did, but that seemed more like the stupid black dude's thing that Kendall Grove went along with. I don't know, he was just so quiet, and he wore that Hannibal Lechler mask when he came out for fights in the training center in front of like 13 people, which seemed odd to me as well.
#8: Kalib Starnes - I used to frame houses with a dude just like this. JUST LIKE THIS. It was so weird because I knew he was gonna complain about the coaching, and I knew back home he had a Japanese motorcycle with an airbrushed gas tank and matching helmet. I knew it. I knew he wasn't gonna win because something always goes wrong for dudes like that. They might hit a wild turkey on their motorcycle or they'll fall in love with a crazy chick who already has four kids by some Mexican guys or they'll get some sort of infection from a tattoo they got in a dilapidated industrial city about two hours from where they actually live. Doomed from the start.
#9: Tait Fletcher - This was the shaved head sculpted facial hair ginormous tool guy that was a wannabe rock star bodyguard. It was too easy to imagine him telling Tommy Lee that a rap album was a good idea to enjoy anything he did. I actually bet dudes like Tait Fletcher think Mickey Avalon is a good thing. Ugh.
#10: Matt Hamil - The big burly deaf guy is Matt Hamil. Deaf people are boring when they are really good at something, like grappling. Deaf people tend to be more enjoyable when they are full of frustration and unsatisfied lifelong desires and an inability to interact with others very well, partially out of their handicap but partially out of a deep psychological cocoon they've built for themselves as a defense mechanism against the evil taunts of other children. Successful deaf people are really creepy, and lack personality.
#11: Jesse Forbes - He reminded me of somebody who was friends with an old roommate of mine. I actually thought it might be the same guy, but they never said if Jesse Forbes washed dishes in Atlanta or not. An idiotic teenager's mind in a grown dude's body, skilled in the art of fightboxing - all of that is a terribly annoying formula, and that's exactly what stupid Jesse Forbes was.
#12: Josh Haynes - I didn't like him not because he was chubby but because he was stupid, carrying around a picture of his stupid son for motivation, and looking like the type of chump ass dude who has never drank a beer or done a drug in their life but is still naturally stupid so follows all the rules in life, not out of fear like most normal people do after getting busted one or two times too many, but out of stupid, meaning all he can do with his life is be a cop or a firefighter. I mean, I guess I'm glad the rest of us get the public service, but damn, it's always ignorant ass white guys doing it.
#13: Ken Shamrock - Shamrock came across as such a raging dumbass in this season of The Ultimate Fighter. And the strange thing was, just as he seemed completely clueless, he could somehow key into an aspect of the ongoing saga, you'd think maybe he had a slight clue, and then he'd blow it up and seem even stupider than before. Ken Shamrock is a pretty good argument for eugenics actually.
#14: Rory Singer - Up to this point in my The Ultimate Fighter watching, I would have to put Rory Singer as the least likeable piece of shit ever on this show. I was amazed when in retrospect wikipedia knowledge, I found out he trained with and was homeboys with Forrest Griffin, who has been the coolest dude on this show up to this point (through three seasons). How could that be? How could a goofy oddball be best pals with a whiny jewish guy who perpetuates all the annoying aspects of being a jewish guy? It confused me to no end.

(7s) Artists Wanted #5 - Wayne White

A lot of successful artists end up creating some sort of gimmick for themselves then sticking with it whether they like it anymore or not. Wayne White would definitely be one such artist. His schtick was he took old paintings he bought on the cheap at Goodwills, and then he'd paint three-dimensional words into the painting. There was one that was originally hunting dogs that he splashed a giant skinny block letter "LSD" into the scene which I dug, but plenty of options. I am a word guy so big giant words painted into shitty thrift store art speaks to me pretty strongly. I think in words, process everything in words, and often times I have dreams where I'm reading books and notebooks full of shit I've written. So of course I'd love a gimmick like Wayne White's, although having perused him inside the internets, some of his later stuff is getting busier and not as simply striking as the earliest shit he did under this idea. But I can understand, it's gotta be painful as fuck to think up something retarded like that, have it take off, and be stuck with it like a creative albatross for as long as you're willing to want to pay bills successfully and on time.
Also, I forgot to mention Wayne White was co-creator, set design freak for Pee Wee's Playhouse. That's kinda prominent, that one of the best kids shows ever was run by a couple of grade A degenerates.

Samuel Smith's Winter Welcome Ale

AFFORDABILITY: Samuel Smith's Winter Welcome brew is a New Year's time classic, and though it's a whopping four bones for the big bottles and almost ten bucks for a four-pack of the regular sized bottles, New Year's only comes once upon a calendar. And 2010 is gonna be big, putting shit ass 2009 in the rear view mirror, and those stupid glasses with the year on it with it hopefully, at least for my lifetime. I will tolerate, in hopes for a better tomorrow. But if at the end of this year, I'm as fucking broke, broken and depleted, and lacking in faith (to the point I'm almost turning to the blind faith of religion to calm my skitter scatter fluttered brain waves), then fuck paying for this expensive ass beer. But again, I tolerate, in hopes for a change, because that's what the fuck a New Year is supposed to be, even though it's just an arbitrary replacing of one calendar on the nail in the wall with another one. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: Sammy Smith be a tasty winter turn of the Greco-Roman calendar treat, ready to grapple with the demons of everyday life, or just at night under the blue moon, fighting my pigs, but not today because they haven't had any dumpster goodies in like a week and they might eat me because my wife keeps joking on how they'll eat me, but I think that's some manifest destiny shit, joking or not. A lady 20 miles from here got mauled by pigs last year in an ugly affair, and I try to keep my pigs happy so they don't eat me. The irony of it all is, ultimately, I'm gonna eat the fuck out of them. So yeah, Samuel Smith's Winter Welcoming brew dog makes me want to go out in the full moon in the 20 degrees night refracting the light back up from the snow still covering all the grounds of the compound, wake my pigs up out their nest (pigs build a nest out of straw very much similar to a bird's nest) and do some grappling, getting all Dan Gable on their punk pig pork ass. What pig has won a gold medal in wrestling, ever, even in the Special Olympics? None, that's who. Fucking pigs. 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The Samuel Smith Winter Welcome label is a bright and festive one, purple with a bunch of colorful banner thangs going on all over, very much unlike the rest of Sammy Smith's label army, mostly boring limey style labels. The info blurb on the back label has a picture of horses belonging to Samuel Smith himself apparently, and how they use fuggle and golding hops to make the beer, which sounds like some Harry Potter bullshit to me. And inside the actual label is some strange barely drawn bloke on some 1950s era footstomping red motorcycle like a comedy movie child molester would drive, sitting outside a Tadcaster pub with a barely drawn wench all up in the doorway. I mean, labels are what they are, nothing special really because they just wrap around a beer bottle, but I guess I could look at this one at least a third of the way through the bottle, maybe longer if it was a 4-pack of smaller bottles. My weird sister actually split a 4-pack up of those, gave one to my mom, gave one to me and my wife, and gave one to her boyfriend, and the fourth one was gone already. She's a strange one that girl. 3 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Label says Samuel Smith in a diamond banner thing, also reading "The Old Brewery, Tadcaster" and claims to be the oldest brewery in Yorkshire. When I was in high school, there was a kid named Sammy Smith and one time I had snuck some Everclear and grape Kool-Aid into school in this snazzy bottle I had, like some old 1970s Thunderbird bottle looking shit with the strange prints and federal warnings that old school bottles always had. Sammy got invited into the bathroom by a mutual friend to slam the Everclear and grape Kool-Aid in a stall, huddled around the toilet like budding hobos, and Sammy took the last gulp and then slammed the bottle into the toilet. That kinda sucked, but I let it slide, because as a kid trying to get by in public high school, you have to pick your fights. And picking one in the bathroom while skipping class and drinking Everclear with other delinquents is not the best time to pick one. I would assume the Samuel Smith of Yorkshire, England, is probably not related to the Sammy Smith of Farmville, Virginia, so I will not hold my lost old bottle against them. 3 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Sammy Smith Winter Welcome Warming Ale is a wonderful blast of holiday spirit, and my woodstove is doing nothing to cut the cold but the cinnamon sticks in the cast iron kettle on top make a nice smell, but it's a New Year and I can start a new job later this week and get my work on and hopefully my food stamp off (though I may lie for a couple months to ease the transition back into having to pay for my own bullshit all the time... all they do is ban you from having food stamps for a year and I don't see needing them again for at least a year) and move into a better future motherfuckers. 6 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 & 1/5 STARS!

NFL WEEK 18: Wild Card Weekend

The NFL capped off an interesting year of their professional variety of the American football egg game with a lackluster week 17 that was uneventful as fuck. Like seriously, it was the one week of the year where both CBS and Fox had a doubleheader, but even in the few games that mattered, it still seemed lethargic and boring. Too much was already decided. And they want to boost it to 18 games, to make a few more weeks of uneventful football to push up home game revenues? Fuck that noise. But the playoffs are set, and next weekend means two great things for football fans - the start of one and done pro football, and the last weekend of the year we have to fucking listen to that godawful booth team of Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth. They, more than anybody, make me wish satellite radio didn't have the ten second delay behind the television rays. Anyways, here are the eight teams playing this weekend in wild card games...

#1: DALLAS COWBOYS (11-5, 4th overall) - Coach Wiggum finally whooped them boys into December shape. Now he can get r dun in January. Except Tony Romo, forever the employee of the month runner-up, already has an achey breaky back to use an excuse for flubbing up this coming week like he did the last playoff games Dallas had, the last few times. Tony Romo has still never won a playoff game, and the fact the Cowboys didn't fuck themselves up in December was like they cleared a new hurdle in life and don't have to try real hard to feel successful at the end of this season.

#2: PHILADELPHIA EAGLES (11-5, 5th overall) - The Eagles seem to enjoy being the underdog, on the road, expected to lose. It's like Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb don't like to be the favorites for fear of fucking it up. Or maybe they don't want to play in front of their own Philly asshole fans, because it sure seemed like they didn't give a fuck last weekend at Dallas. Maybe they wanted an extra week away in a five-star hotel, to chill in the (relatively) warmer climate, even though the Arctic blast is on nationwide right now. Whatever it is, don't let last weekend fool you... I would be shocked if the Cowboys beat the Eagles again this week. As bad as the Eagle defense has gotten, their offense is like an Arena League team in the vein of the '99 Rams Greatest Show on Turf. They could backdoor their way into another Super Bowl if bitches ain't careful.

#3: NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS (10-6, 7th overall) - Wes Welker's double ligament blowout is a devastating loss to the Patriots, and might affect next year heavily having happened so late in the season, and ruins any hopes of playoff successes they might have entertained. Lucky for them all they have to do this week is play the New York Jets. Oh wait, they play the Ravens. Hahahaha. Brady's window shuts another inch.

#4: GREEN BAY PACKERS (11-5, 8th overall) - Last weekend's Packers/Cardinals game was a joke, but you know, the Packers defense has developed into a well-rounded monster, with strong pass rushing, solid veteran secondary, monster linebackers that look like vikings, and they will disrupt some shit. On offense, they lack the line and an abundance of offensive threats, but with a solid ass young defense and Aaron Rodgers, who has looked seasoned as well as solid, this could be a team for the next few years to worry about, considering the Bears are swinging low and the Lions are the Lions and Brett Favre might have this year and that's it in the tank for the Vikings, and that's all their division rivals. As much as it would be a media shitstorm frenzy, I'd love to see the Pack and Eagles both win this weekend and set up a Favre/Packers showdown in the stupid NFL playoffs.

#5: BALTIMORE RAVENS (9-7, 9th overall) - We live around and know a bunch of oversensitive hippie new age types, so the only dude around my regular life that actually likes a football team senselessly is a friend who likes the Ravens, actually the dude I bought my pigs off of, so I like to root for the Ravens just to see him happy. Plus, who doesn't hate the Patriots? Both Ed Reed and Randy Moss look like not-very-well-raised black dudes who have far too much money for their own good. Yet Ed Reed looks like a happy assed motherfucker who knows how to cook a whole pig inside a trash can (or more likely crabs up there in Charm City), while Randy Moss looks like a moody motherfucker for whom the allure of white pussy has long since faded, leaving nothing but an angry and unhappy man for whom nothing is good enough. Not the millions, not the touchdowns, not the screams of adoring children. Nothing. It would be nice to see Reed just lay Moss's cornrowed ass out one time, in the snow, a rumpshaker of a hit, just to see Randy Moss grow alligator arms for the rest of the game and be all pouty and moody during the final minutes on the sideline.

#6: CINCINNATI BENGALS (10-6, 11th overall) - The Bengals will unleash their full fur this coming week, against the most undeserving playoff team of recent memory in the Jets, meaning the Bengals will actually win a playoff game. The Cincinnati Bengals will win a playoff game. Unless of course Carson Palmer gets kneecapitated in the first series like a few years back against the Steelers. I think they could still win without him, at least against the Jets.

#7: ARIZONA CARDINALS (10-6, 12th overall) - Last year the Cardinals snuck through because no one really expected them to do shit. This year, again no one expects them to do shit, but nobody's gonna give them the benefit of a slack approach. Kurt Warner's god will fail him, I am sure of this. But if somehow the Cards and the Eagles make it to the NFC Championship game again, and it is a rematch of last year, and they win to go to the Super Bowl again, I will accept Jesus as my whatever the fuck he's supposed to be. So Kurt Warner, my soul is in your hands, if your wacky mythology is correct. You can save me like an African AIDS baby.

#8: NEW YORK JETS (9-7, 17th overall) - The Jets suck and shouldn't be in the playoffs. Mike Greenberg is fucking stupid and Rex Ryan is a fat ass. Mark Sanchez is one of those white Mexicans that gets all the pussy in the world and I hate him.

(7s) Artists Wanted #4 - Estevan Oriol

Really, once I had bought my wife the painting by our friend for our birthday, I ultimately had hoped for a print of one of Estevan Oriol's pictures the following year for my own. Oriol used to be manager for Cypress Hill and is kind of the hip hop Annie Leibovitz. But I don't really care for his hip hop portraitures so much as his photos of gang life in L.A. Being from that area, he has access to the super-stylish cholos more so than some chump ass photographer would get, so it's interesting photo essay stuff, as the "gangstas" let their guard down enough to look somewhat normal within their very bizarre sub-culture. But Oriol has one picture in particular that I saw in Source magazine years ago and clipped and have kept, of some red flannel shirts on clotheshangers hanging on a wire to dry out in a random back yard with an alley present behind with rust-colored sheet metal walls and roofing, and not to get all artsy nerd or anything, but the red shirts and rusty background, not to mention the geometric patterns of the industrial backdrop with the factory fresh square and rectangular designs on the hanging flannel, it's a tight fucking picture. Like rarely have I had photography go to that unexplainable high art plane where it spoke to me in ways I couldn't even consciously justify to anybody (which I just tried to do anyways however), but that pic did it. Others, usually B&W rural photographers like Sally Mann or Shelby Lynn Adams (or whoever that guy is who took pics of the family of retards in West Virginia) or guys taking pics of hobos or freight trains, have spoken to me, but never so strongly through a single image. My wife and me actually looked up his site, but all he had was info on contracting him for photo shoots, nothing about purchasing prints.

(7s) Artists Wanted #3 - Ghana Movie Club Posters

It was Raw Visions magazine that first hipped me to this entire phenomenon, which I then had Noelle at the local library get the book that article culled from inter-library loaned to me so I could scope it out fully for two months, the book being called Extreme Canvas, and being a collection hodgepodged together by one obsessive compulsive dude back in the day. The story is in Ghana, there weren't movie theater, but when VCRs spread the world, movie clubs popped up that had bench seats at best, and you could pay to go watch a VCR movie play on a TV in the front of the room, kind of like every American school kid did at that time in school, except it was a big entertainment treat in Ghana. And for advertising movies, the clubs would have people use old flour or food sacks and paint images from the movie with the title on the sacks to hang outside the movie clubs so people knew what was playing. The many aspects of this that made it wacky was, many of the movies were not just Hollywood releases, but coming from next-door Nigeria's burgeoning movie industry, now infamously known as Nollywood. The movies from there are way out, with tribal demons and all sorts of monstrosities of interpersonal dealings as well as paranormal beings. This makes for pretty graphic potato sack painting posters, when you have a man's baldhead with fangs and the body of a snake wrapped around a crying baby. On top of this already wild subject matter is the fact that the people who painted the posters oftentimes knew nothing about the movie, other than the title, and the explanation on the box the movie came in. These posters no longer exist in Ghana really, as DVD players are cheap and abundant and made movie clubs obsolete. (Remember how VHS movies were like $60 each? That's crazy to think about now.) So most of these posters in existence are already in the collections of oddball freaks like myself, so I'm sure ever being able to buy one wouldn't be the easiest process. But they are some amazing looking things, and the perfect example of how the entire process makes something art as much as the artist does. Ghana is this strange west African country where tribal religions still blend together with major international ones, and movies became social gatherings, but in a poor Third World country, food sacks and leftover house paints were used to make these movie club ads, which ended up being bizarrely colorful and graphic and a one-of-a-kind cultural phenomenon on the earth ball. And now fucking dork ass whiteboys like myself are like, "Oooooh! I wish I could have one!"

(7s) Artists Wanted #2 - James Castle

James Castle is a guy who was in mental institutions who did drawings with charcoal and soot on scraps of paper without any artistic training whatsoever. His shit is small, and it's ill. Somehow, in recent years, he's became fairly well-known as a major American outsider artist, so I doubt even with wealth I could afford some of his pieces. James Castle isn't around to see it all, and I don't think he would've recognized his successes if was still around. I wonder if it's his family who benefits from that, or who? From what I remember reading, he had no offspring, so it would be extended family off side branches of the tree making their money off his mental institution meanderings.
I've always had an infatuation with the art of the mentally ill. In college, I had a friend who was paranoid schizophrenic who drew the most amazing drawings, and would do Jackson Pollock effect splatter paintings that somehow made sense to me, mostly because of the color combos he'd put together. It didn't seem as random as I would expect when looking at it. That type of art, based on mental instability, it scratches at something below our surface. At times, I wish I was more fucked up myself, to chop down all the bullshit, the email accounts and watching DVDs and riding around to get back and forth from a work, so I could concentrate on that instability below the surface, that sweet lovely soul-satisfying hidden instability.

St. Peter's Cream Stout

AFFORDABILITY: The St. Peters Cream Stout was not cheap, but it came in a stubby limey beer bottle, in a limey color even, and looked like the type of thing that would make for a good homemade vinegar jar, so my wife was all convincing me to get it up inside the fancy assed Wegman's in northern Virginia. I drank that bitch that night, once we finally got home from Hell. 2 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I don't know, with such a great shaped bottle and odd limey color, I guess I expected more. Gennessee Cream Ale also sets a high and cheap bar for Cream beers, and I don't think I fully wrapped my head around the word combination of "cream" and "stoudt". It didn't work well, and I felt like I was drinking out of a balsamic vinegar bottle to boot. 1 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: The bottle with label looks a lot like some sort of nice vinaigrette. I don’t like vinaigrettes really. My favorite thing lately is taking the frying pan, a big old black Wagner one, not some pussy aluminum teflon cancer zone bullshit Wal-Mart thing, and cooking down a ton of garlic in olive oil, and then throwing in two bags of fresh spinach, stirring it all up, cutting the heat off and throwing a lid on top of the pan. Except it’s an old ass frying pan so there are no fitted lids, so I take a big metal lid from some sort of thrift store pot or dutch oven from some point in my ramshackle life, and put it on upside down, with the handle poking into the pan, because it’s too big and won’t seal the food up right side up. Let that sit there for a five minutes, make yourself some basmati or jasmine rice well beforehand, man that’s my shit right now. Hook up some boneless chicken thighs with a little hot sauce, hell yeah bitch. But the St. Peter’s Cream Stout doesn’t jibe with all that. 2 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I can't find the vinegar bottle so I looked inside the interwebs about St. Peters Brewery, and they were just built at some point in the 1990s, in some rural English bullshit, using well water for their beer, and talked up some good-sounding jive about brewing in the old ways, making fruit beers in the summer and spice beers in the winter, to keep it real. Near us is a place called The Frontier Culture Museum, a living history joint with old world houses bought, torn down, and put back up at this place, plus a couple of different American era houses, and their building up an African mudhouse spot as we speak. Often times we go there as we have a family membership... in fact, we went a couple Christmas Eves in a row but had to avoid it this year because of weather, the girls all wearing old fashioned clothes, and last year I wore some white shirt that looked like a pirate colonist shirt of some sort that I'm not sure where came from into my house, with some overalls. Often times when at this Frontier Culture Museum, I wish me and my wife could sneak in, build a fire in the old English house, drink homemade beer and have crazy sex, traditional style. The fact someone involved with St. Peters probably is a perv like that too makes me feel better, I guess because if you are a degenerate and a stain upon society's fine upstanding front facade, it's nice to have some strength in numbers. But honestly, if we went to Staunton to sneak into the Frontier Culture Museum after hours, more likely we'd go up the hill beside it to the giant abandoned hospital that looks and feels like it was probably some sort of mental institution since it has metal grates over the outside of the balconies and all. I have wanted to break into that place at night for years, and get really high, and wait for ghosts to freak me out, but none come, so you just get freaked out anyways because it's an old ass building and all dark and unelectrified and your already tweaked out by environment so drugs just compound your personal interest. 5 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: For such an impressive looking bottle that said "Cream Stout" this turned out to be a letdown. Hell, hanging out in Wegman's trying to decide which of their 7000 beers I've never had was the highest point for this St. Peters beer. I guess for me the entire cream genre is angled by Gennessee Cream Ale, abundantly packed in batches of 30 inside of crude heavy handled boxes that can be toted around to put behind the passenger seat of the truck to go somewhere else and take it out to go inside their house and drink some more of it and then have plenty of left for the drive home and the end of the night wind-down and the next afternoon as well. This stupid goofy bottle of St. Peters Cream Stout is no match for such a memorable experience, and is doomed as nothing better than second fiddle, but probably second violin, with its pretentious ass bullshit. 0 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 2 STARS!

(7s) Artists Wanted #1 - Vollis Simpson

Mr. Vollis Simpson of rural North Cackalackey is a respected heavyweight in the field of whirligigs - gigantic metal contraptions usually made of scrap things that spin or turn or wobble with the wind. He has a farm with a ton of them on display somewhere in the eastern half of Carolina, and I've been meaning to road trip down there to catch up with the assorted friends from different segments of my personal time line who all seem to be in the central part of NC nowadays, and make a Saturday afternoon sidetrack through Mr. Simpson's way to check out his allegedly oddball compound, probably the wackiest self-taught artist spot in Carolina now that James Harold Jennings is dead. Of all the ones on this list, I'd say if we had a sizeable chunk of discretionary income, Vollis Simpson would be the most likely recipient of our scrilla because a giant whirligig could kick it in our field where we're gonna build my wife's herbal studio and where by next summer I hope to have pigs trained with electrified horse tape to wander pseudo-wildly, and a big, moving, metallic contraption would be perfect. In fact, if we're gonna imagine imaginary shit, might as well work something out with Vollis Simpson where he come up and incorporate my old Datsun which is still sitting in my side field road frontage, rusting into the ground. Never did make the giant forsythia planter out of it by cutting the top off, and the Christmas lights don't work on it anymore (which, apparently, saddened a lot of locals who knew that on Kidds Dairy Road there was always the junk car outlined in pink Christmas lights every December), but I did find a fake yellow siren in the woods walking around one day and set that on top, to pretend it still does something important, other than hold my dad's old shitty shotgun and some homebrewing supplies in the trunk.

(7s) Artists Wanted Intro

Everyone has dreams, and me and the ol' lady dream of our big ol' farmhouse being fixed up nice and filling it with all types of fucked up art to surround ourselves with. I am lucky enough to have an ol' lady who thinks a lot like me, that regular art is cool art, but so is shit like dudes in North Carolina who staple gun magazine scraps into Biblical scripture stories. And ultimately, we both thrive personally, on a creative level, by surrounding ourselves with all sorts of crazy visual stimuli. It seems our lives have become cluttered by more normal material waste though, and we can feel it in our lack of creative passion lately. We are drained by our environment. For her birthday, not last year but the year before last, I bought her a painting done by my man D-Mo aka Dave Moore - (The Lowland King) - hoping to set up the pattern of us buying each other art for our birthdays. Who knew the economy would crumble and my self-employment would become more self-unemployment than anything, we'd be on food stamps, and waiting for something to magically save us from the creditor calls that go straight to the answering machine because no matter how many times you answer the phone and explain to them you haven't been working and have no money, no not even a partial payment, they will keep calling. They say they note your account, but they don't seem to note shit because the calls keep coming constantly. Anyways, let us pretend we have recovered from this Good Depression as my oldest daughter called it - "If that was the Great Depression, then this must be the Good Depression," - and we be blowing mad money on art to surround ourselves with like we're some sort of media magnates or financial elite instead of the broke ass pieces of shit we seem to be most of the time. These are the artists I'd most want to have tacked up to the wall somewhere in this house, preferably with a giant assed three-story addition coming off the back corner.

Regia Extra

AFFORDABILITY: This was a big quart or forty bottle from the fancy Wegman's up near Gainesville in soulless northern VA we stopped at on the way home from our friends' corn maze early November. Wegman's is the greatest grocery store ever, we realized when stopping at one in Scranton, Pennsylvania by chance, where they have wonderful varieties of magical sausages at the deli, and ridiculous beer choices (where beer is available, like not in Pennsylvania, stupid state liquor laws). Regia Extra is a Salvadoran beer, and after my family went to Costa Rica and all I got was a lousy Imperial t-shirt (plus an Imperial 40), I always try to get weird central American forties, which has been only once, at Wegman's, when I got this Regia Extra. I don't remember how much it cost, but if I've only spent $4 on central American forties in the past five years, that's pretty fucking cheap. Plus, in northern VA, I can pretend MS-13 members are carpooling to the fancy Wegman's out where the white folks live to buy up some authentic Regia Extras for their favorite tio on his birthday. That types of thing makes me happy to be American in 2009. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I drank this big bulky bottle of Central American beer and it made me feel hefty and awesome. It made me wish I had about four more big bulky bottles of Central American beer. Basically, I primed the bulb and was ready to get fired up, but the stupid Wegman's was long gone in the rear view mirror by this point. 4 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: Granted, I've only seen two of them in my real life, but Central American beers have a great sense of wall mural ready label aesthetics. Regia Extra kicks this flavor strongly, and I would gladly wear a black t-shirt with its insignia on the front, at least until a lot of people knew what it was all about, or after one too many stupid fucks were like, "Oh man, Regia Extra, I was backpacking through El Salvador doing volunteer work for the handicapped spider monkeys that were given traumatic brain injuries by Reagan's Death Squads for fun back in the '80s. I LOOOOOVEEEE Regia." 4 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I'm sure Regia Extra is owned and operated by fine and decent upstanding folks, mostly because I lost the bottle in the snow outside and I don't feel like looking inside the internets for the information because you can't really trust the internets anyways. It is somewhat disconcerting that we mostly use Google for our information seeking nowadays, but Google is a for profit corporation, like we are willingly stepping into the Braven New 1984 Fahrenheit or some bullshit. My cell phone has been disconnected for like two months now because I ain't got no money, and honestly, it's been quite refreshing to ride around and not have the stupid constant cybertron contraction device in hand, just waiting to bombard my privacy with shrill and worrisome alerts that someone wants to waste a couple minutes of my life. Life is precious, and short, and not to be cluttered with electronic carcinogens. I would bet the fine corporate leaders behind Regia Extra, probably with a waxed mustache mots of them, understand this completely. 4 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: The Regia Extra is "extra" because it comes in a big thick bottle and make me feel like travel time is in order. Big thick quart bottles are highly underrated by bullshit uber elite beers. Metal signs nailed into windows with roofing nails, because big thick bottles busted out the panes. Metal signs talking of beer in bright colors with slanted letters, and inside the establishment, slanted people talk in big stories, and if the crowd becomes too thick and too regular to where they know each other too well, then new stories are made, sometimes violently, more often comedically, because people would rather laugh than bleed, and if they do bleed, it's better to laugh about it than die about it. What I'm saying is the Regia should be a bigger, thicker part of my life, not some fucking random quart bottle I bought at the ginormous Wegman's with the choo choo train riding around the top of the store up in soulless megavoid Northern Virginia. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 STARS!

Samuel Adams Holiday Porter

AFFORDABILITY: The Samuel Adams Holiday Porter came as part of a super-saver flavor pack of seasonal varieties, which was quite the affordable 12-pack, relatively speaking. The thing I never understand is why they don't also make these beers available separately, so that the sampler pack might lead to more Sam Adams business, instead of it being a limited time only thing, and with four types of 3 bottles each, you're invariably gonna be stuck with some shitty ass beers. I would never buy another 12-pack assortment of this beer, because of some of the other flavors, but still, the price was agreeable enough. 4 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: I thunk this a great beer and drank all of them out the 12-pack before anybody else could get one. I would buy many more of these and drank them quickly as well, not sharing any. It has the warm to my gut taste that my inner hobo respects, and the chocolate tint that my inner coffee fag has begrudgingly come to adore as well. I would drank a bunch of these, right now, had I had some, had I had some money for some, and had I not been sick for yet another spell of late 2009 germery, drinking as much of the odd herbal voodoo concoctions as my wife puts in front of me. But my body just doesn't repress illness like it used to. I think it's because I don't drink as much as I once used to. 5 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: One time, I watched a movie and a dude was chewing on a toothpick a whole lot while he was talking his shit, and I thought that a good style, so I started doing the same. But cheap ass toothpicks chew up, and when you're not doing nothing but walking along back roads for five hours a day, to the country store on Rt. 6 for a bottle of wine, and then back towards home, unless a pick-up truck with a smiling face, an empty seat, and some sort of adventure detours me, I didn't like chewing them up. So I started chewing wild lettuce stalks instead. I read one time on Erowid about making resin out of wild lettuce, but it seemed way too convoluted and time consuming for very little high, like smoking banana peels. But chewing on their stalks leaves a nice, pleasant tingle to my jawbone, especially when it's cold and the metal plate inside my face underneath my left eyeball gets all cold inside my face. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: Samuel Adams is such a common ass name, it could mean the sons of Presidents or it could mean fat black dudes who played for the Baltimore Ravens when they won the Super Bowl. The company puts forth a patriotic fervor, a friendly dude who was probably homeboys with Paul Revere before the bad times of fighting them red coats, pushing forth an ale for me to partake of and share stories of lusty wenches and the opium dens the chinamen keep in underground tunnels in their corner of town. The chinamen are well known for their underground tunnel systems in cities they transplant themselves too worldwide, for shuffling around kidnappees and to stay sneaky. In Mexico, they actually flushed them back into America with a fire that smoked their tunnels from the south and forced them all back into southern California. And that's how they built Chinatown in Los Angeles. 2 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: I have, ever since high school, made it a life habit to hate upon the Samuel Adams families of beers, mostly because of a couple of dumbass dudes in high school who were about it. When you are 16, you should not be about good beers, unless that means Corona. Underage drinking is about quantity, and large scale murals of Milwaukee's Best cans or bottles of Boone's Farm, not good beers, even if it is a sort of fake good beer in Samuel Adams. But I have to say, this Holiday Porter was a wonderful life type of thing, and it filled my blackened little soul with a touch of chocolate and an infusion of smiley face, even in the midst of massive defaults on all my financial obligations. I am sure the original Samuel Adams patriot dude would feel the same happiness, and then he'd help overthrow the evil rulers and install a new government, kind of like we all declared bankruptcy at the same time except we didn't have to wait seven years to get loans from each other because we were all in it together. I wish we could have some of that again. 4 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 4 STARS!