I. Love. Mike. Stilkey. *swoon* His work combines my two favorite things – art and books.
Mr. Mike Stilkey makes very cool art. I went to the Culver City Artwalk a few years ago and saw his stacked-book painting-sculpture creations and was immediately hooked. He also had some tiny little pieces on matchbooks that were in my price range and, sadly but understandably, all sold out (boo.).
Take a look at his website for more pictures of his work
I first saw this amazing book by Peter Beard about 10 years ago, it’s a printed reproduction of his journals and collages of photos and inspirations collected by this man who made his whole life into an artform. The 2-volume set is now on sale at Amazon for about $63. WANT!
I really enjoy this excerpt from Charles Bukowski’s “South of No North” collection of short works, in the piece entitled “Bop Bop Against That Curtain.” The depression theme runs throughout, but you can still feel the carefree, irreverent, darkly humorous cast. Even in the middle of such a dark time, these kids were still able to entertain themselves, have fun and get in trouble. Bukowski’s beautifully dirty writing style gets me every time… Please enjoy.
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“…There were three of us, me, Baldy, and Jimmy. Our big day was Sunday. On Sunday we met at Baldy’s house and took the streetcar down to Main Street. Carfare was seven cents.
There were two burlesque houses in those days, the Follies and the Burbank. We were in love with the strippers at the Burbank and the jokes were a little better so we went to the Burbank.
“You boys going to a burlesque today?” Baldy’s grampa would ask.
“Hell no, sir, we’ve got things to do.”
We went. We went each Sunday. We went early in the morning, long before the show and we walked up and down Main Street looking into the empty bars… After our walk along Main Street we’d go into the hotdog place and get our eight cent hotdog and our big nickel mug of rootbeer. We were lifting weights and our muscles bulged and we wore our sleeves rolled high and we each had a pack of cigarettes in our breast pocket. We even had tried a Charles Atlas course, Dynamic Tension, but lifting weights seemed the more rugged and obvious way.
While we ate our hotdog and drank our huge mug of rootbeer we played the pinball machine, a penny a game. We got to know that pinball machine very well. When you made a perfect score you got a free game. We had to make perfect scores, we didn’t have that kind of money.
Franky Roosevelt was in, things were getting better but it was still the depression and none of our fathers were working. Where we got our small amount of pocket money was a mystery except that we did have a sharp eye for anything that was not cemented to the ground. We didn’t steal, we shared. And we invented. Having little or no money we invented little games to pass the time — one of them being to walk to the beach and back.
This was usually done on a summer day and our parents never complained when we arrived home too late for dinner. Nor did they care about the high glistening blisters on the bottoms of our feet. It was when they saw how we had worn out our heels and the soles of our shoes that we began to hear it. We were sent to the five and dime store where heels and soles and glue were at the ready and at a reasonable price.
The situation was the same when we played tackle football in the streets. There weren’t any public funds for playgrounds. We were so tough we played tackle football in the streets all through football season, through basketball and baseball seasons and on through the next football season. When you get tackled on asphalt, things happen. Skin rips, bones bruise, there’s blood, but you get up like nothing was wrong.
Our parents never minded the scabs and the blood and the bruises; the terrible and unforgivable sin was to rip a hole in one of the knees of your pants. Because there were only two pairs of pants ot each boy: his everyday pants and his Sunday pants, and you could never rip a hole in the knee of one of your two pairs of pants because that showed that you were poor and an asshole and that your parents were poor and assholes too. So you learned to tackle a guy without falling on either knee. And the guy being tackled learned how to be tackled without falling on either knee.
When we had fights we’d fight for hours and our parents wouldn’t save us. I guess it was because we pretended to be so tough and never asked for mercy, they were waiting for us to ask for mercy. But we hated our parents so we couldn’t and because we hated them they hated us, and they’d walk out on their porches and glance casually over at us in the midst of a terrible endless fight. They’d just yawn and pick up a throw-away advertisement and walk back inside.
I fought a guy who later ended up very high in the United States Navy. I fought him one day from 8:30 in the morning until after sundown. Nobody stopped us although we were in plain sight of his front lawn, under two huge pepper trees with the sparrows shitting on us all day.
It was a grim fight, it was to the finish. He was bigger, a little older and heavier, but I was crazier. We quit by common consent — I don’t know how this works, you have to experience it to understand it, but after two people beat on each other eight or nine hours a strange kind of brotherhood emerges.
The next day my body was entirely blue. I couldn’t speak out of my lips or move any part of myself without pain. I was on the bed getting ready to die and my mother came in with the shirt I’d worn during the fight. She held it in front of my face over the bed and she said, “Look, you got bloodspots on this shirt! Bloodspots!”
“Sorry!”
“I’ll never get them out! NEVER!!”
“They’re his bloodspots.”
“It doesn’t matter! It’s blood! It doesn’t come out!”
Sundays were our day, our quiet, easy day. We went to the Burbank. There was always a bad movie first… If you had enough money there was even a bag of popcorn; if you didn’t to hell with it.
…
Not long after that I began to lose interest in those Sundays on Main Street. I suppose the Follies and the Burbank are still there… And when I’m in my neighborhood, I drive past the house I used to live in and there are strangers living there. Those Sundays were good, though, most of those Sundays were good, a tiny light in the dark depression days when our fathers walked the front porches, jobless and impotent and glanced at us beating the shit out of each other, then went inside and stared at the walls, afraid to play the radio because of the electric bill. “
Happy International Women’s Day!
Viva la mujer!
‘Female politicians are outperforming their male counterparts at both shaping policy and securing funds [by] an average of $49 million more per year than men from 1984 to 2004.’
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“When girls and women earn income, they reinvest 90% of it in their families. They buy books, medicine, bed nets. For men, that figure is more like 30% to 40%.”
Proof Beyond A Reasonable Doubt That Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else.
OMGBTW 