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Filed under: paris, pigeons, Ruby Gold, songs

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This is what I used to tell my kids when they were young, teaching them to cross the street: Stop! . . . look (both ways) . . . and listen. Three important words every child needs to learn very early in life.

STOP! . . . Is that a word anymore? Are parents allowed to yell that in public? When your two year old is trying to poke the dog's eye out with a twig . . . can you quickly shout "NO"?! Or are you now advised to ask your child if you can have the twig . . . PLEEEZZ??
I remember years ago when my youngest son was two and we'd gone to the playground one cloudy day. I was pushing him on a toddler swing next to three other Moms and their little ones. All the tots were giggling and squealing, when all of a sudden it began to lightly rain. As the drops became bigger and wetter, the two Mom's to my left and myself began declaring . . . "Okay, it's time to go!" . . . "Two more pushes" I said to my pouting child and then took him out of the swing as the other two ladies did the same . . . just before the downpour started. But not so for the Mom to the right of us. She was standing and pleading in front of her two year old daughter in the swing . . . as they both were getting drenched . . . "PLEEEZZ, Sweetheart,can't we stop now?" The little tyrant just shook her head "NO!!!" and screamed bloody murder as her Mother attempted to come near the swing. So the woman stood there crying and repeating her need for permission from a two year old.
I wouldn't be surprised if she's still standing there pushing that swing!

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Glenn Beck appropriates ACT UP's Silence = Death.

I went to some ACT UP meetings and protests in the mid-1990s in New York. One of them was a protest against the Pope. People who were braver and more committed than I dropped a banner out of Saks 5th Avenue that read "CONDOMS SAVE LIVES". I was with a group of about 20 folks who were allowed into a special police-created protest area in amidst what felt like a million Catholics waiting for the Pope outside St. Patrick's Cathedral. I remember a woman coming up with her young daughter to the waist-high metal barricades that enclosed us. She threw holy water at us and told her daughter we were vampires.

Perhaps in this new alternate reality, Beck will have Larry Kramer on his show to talk about Ronald Reagan. That would be fun...

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The winner for the "Insanity" challenge is:

happy chinchilla!

Congratulations to happy chinchilla. I chose happy chinchilla's "Sane/Insane Bunnies" as the winner for the Insanity challenge. A really professional illustration, fantastic style and color, and great illustrative story-telling. I really enjoyed happy chinchilla's blog.

Also of note, two beautifully drawn, awesome but similar takes: Justelle and Clifford.

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Happy Zany Monday to all!

This would be my first contribution to the topic "insanity" in which I posted a while back on me original blog @ beautifique. Mixed Media. Oil on canvas and I literally punctured a huge hole in the middle of it and took photo refs of my head sticking out of the canvas to get this sketch done. In doing so, I totally felt like I was insane. Can't wait for the next topic!

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Second version of insanity. Ho!. Lot's of great work for this one I see. Artist: Andrew Finnie Please click for big.

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No one could understand how Edward could not see he was cuckoo...


one-line pen & ink drawing w/watercolor pencils

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A group of tigers danced with me
A poem of insanity
One time I ate the letter “G”
A poem of insanity
I fought alone in World War III
A poem of insanity
My arms are where my knees should be
A poem of insanity
I live next door to Brenda Lee
A poem of insanity

They’re watching me with ears that see
A poem of insanity
I built the Bridge at Tappan Zee
A poem of insanity
Above the purple manatee
A poem of insanity
I think about a killing spree
A poem of insanity
And eating crackers with baked brie
A poem of insanity

Once I wrestled big John Wayne
And then I flushed him down the drain
A school of fish I’d entertain
While serving them hot beef chow mein
I thought about a town in Spain
Until I was declared insane

The floor is covered with debris
I see my name on the marquee
I’m introduced by the emcee
But no one hears my constant plea
No one’s here, no one but me
And my poem of insanity

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Hi, I'm astroquack, a self-taught artist from Portugal. This is my first post,
hope you like! If so, please visit my blog:
http://esferonaifa.blogspot.com

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His way of eating and driving are driving his Guardian Angel INSANE!

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The new challenge is:

Insanity!

Illustrate your idea of insanity. Is it light like The Marx Brothers or dark like Hannibal Lecter?

The "Family" challenge, the "Horse" challenge, and the "Mystic" challenge are over. The new challenge is "Insanity" and ends on February 1, 2010. The "Invisible" challenge continues for another week and ends on January 25, 2010.

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I was there at the beginning.

Yes, soon after Dr. Schaller (my favorite mad scientist) captured the bird, I blindly selected one of my favorite tommy guns and slaughtered the creature with panache.  I gutted it with my teeth.  I deconstructed it with a gulletful of Derrida.  I chugged a shot of ennui and belched sentences of purple bile into the airspace of downed jetliners.  I wouldn't call it a beautiful sight, but it was what I had.

Jeff VanderMeer called me a "smart ass", but I was used to that.  He'd called me worse ("cretinous wombat", "illiterate dirigible", "barbaric yawp", "Dick Cheney").

It all led to a chain reaction of words, words, words.

And now those words have been packaged and frozen with flash, waiting for you to take them out of the freezer and stick them in the microwave of your soul.

All for charity.

Go now, my minions.  Pre your order.  Feed the Wyrm and its whimsical Ministry.  Bring back souvenirs and relics and tchotchkes of the damned.  You're doing something good for the world.  Tell your friends.  They'll never believe you, but you're used to that, ever since the UFO and the sasquatch and the death panels.

The Bird Head took his last drink and I no longer have any tommy guns.  But why should that stop you?  There are mad scientists and realpolitiking consiglieri who claim sovereignty over the rest of us, but you -- you're free.  Suck in your gut.  Join the abjection.  Flay your dreams.

Remember: it's all for charity.  All the children who don't learn to read, I'm sending them to you.  It's time to ask yourself: Do you really want that weight to rend the fabric of the last vestiges of your conscience, punk?

Do it for the Bird Head.  One day, you, too, will take your last drink.  But that day is not today.  Go now, so you can say you did one good deed in your life.

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It is a sad thing to watch a writer go off the rails. But in these Twittered, My-Faced, Spacebooked, blog-rolled times, any meltdown is bound to be tragically public.

You may remember that at the tail end of last year author Jeff VanderMeer rashly took on the challenge of reading and reviewing Penguin's three series of Great Ideas one after the other. That's sixty books in sixty days. At the time, I questioned the wisdom of this idea. But Jeff was adamant that he, and he alone, could do it. His endeavour - his hubris? - got picked up in a few places. Suddenly the world was watching. The pressure was on.

If Jeff wasn't true to his word, he was going to find more than egg on his face.

It was going so well. The first twenty books were dispatched on schedule. In those early reviews, more like mini-essays really, Jeff filleted the classics and artfully arranged their innards so that we looked at them anew. He was producing a minimum of a thousand words every day on each review, in addition to his other projects and posts.

'Every time I see “[...]” in these texts I consider it a special communication, and that there is the possibility the Penguin editors been monitoring my reading patterns and have personalized my copy to cut the text in just the right places for my attention span.'

A few posts later, he wrote, in a review of Hume's On Suicide (and other essays):

'Creators are a bunch of half-mad louts drunk with words, who gain power and strength through constructive expression of their irrationalities.'

At this point I was not yet aware that the wheels were coming off the wagon.

Then in late January I began to get the emails. Jeff needed to take a break. Not because he'd recognised the signs of mental exhaustion himself. But because he had 'other commitments'. A 'teaching gig in Australia' was mentioned. He stopped at book 36 of 60, then went off line for a while. Some posts 'from Australia' duly appeared. He was due to resume but then 'deadlines' got in the way. Two books needed 'last-minute edits'. There would be further delays. February came and went. And March. He was posting again on his blog but avoiding the subject of 60 in 60.

Then on Tuesday, this post appeared on his blog (see the not-at-all-disturbing screen-grab above).

Who knows what possessed him when he wrote it? Guilt perhaps. Shame maybe. Alcohol certainly. But also there is a kind of insane defiance at work here. The 60 days have long passed. The war is over, the battle lost. Yet he's soldiering on nevertheless.

But rather than reading the remaining 24 titles, Jeff has instead read the BLURB and FIRST PAGE of each book. Instead of writing a thousand words on each book's contemporary relevance, he has written a three line poem.

Two examples serve to illustrate his feverish state of mind:

#37 - Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Lived and What I Lived For

Hippy words
Talks to trees
Dirty yellow toenails

#56 - Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Replicate me please
Replicate me please
Why all these eyes?

Jeff claims the full service will resume next week. I have my doubts, and I'm not sure where it will all end. If at all. I'm especially worried as later this year a fourth series of Great Ideas is scheduled to be published.

But let's not tell Jeff that.

Colin Brush
Senior Creative Copywriter

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For all you folks waiting on the edges of your seats at home, here is my last contribution to The Conversation: Part Five. (In which we continue to talk about zombie movies and bring in Shakespeare for a cameo appearance.)

If I had to find a pullquote, it would be: "Inevitably, I end up distrusting my own statements. And yet I continue to make them. Compulsion? Insanity? I'm not sure."

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