Stop Stabbing the Sponge....

Just a quick update to let everyone know that I'm alive (barely) and that I have been promised that it's not as infected as it looks or feels. A quick update due to the fact that I'm writing this right now from a coffee house here in the wonderful world of Denver, because I don't have internet access in the new temporary place. The good news is that, unlike Brooklyn which charged me near $12 an hour for internet and then laughed at me and punched me til I wet my pants, internet access is free here!!! There are coffee houses and bars and restaraunts and what nots that all offer free wifi! Praise the dead baby god in the barrel in the sky, with a mouthful of noodles! I'll stop that now.....sorry.

So, here comes the update:

Wait for it.......wait for it.......

First, the move from the pit of Westminster to Denver is finally over.....at least somewhat. I am sharing a spot with my drunk brother for a few months, taking my time and looking for a place of my own, where I can strip naked and make as many muffins as I see fit. I look forward to those days, as I'm sure you don't care. I say 'somewhat' above because of the fact that my brother still has items to move into the new place, and I still have a mass moving of my soggy and ruined stuff from Pennsylvania to look forward to.
But I am OUT of Westminster! And finally in Denver, which I have to say is my new favorite place. More on that later.........wait for it.......

Second, I think that I really dig my new job, all but the fact that it doesn't pay as much as I would like. Everyone that I work with is cool and refrain from throwing stuff at me when I'm not looking which is always a plus. One of the best things about working at an art supply store is that you work with other artists and creative types.....and you get to deal with artists as customers.....you also have to deal with 70 year old craft experts who come in to show you the hundreds of watercolor paintings they've done of thier cats, but I can live with that.

Third.....there is no third.

Fourth, I was lucky enough to be a part of my first group show here in Denver last night. A few of the people that I work with put on an art/music/poetry slam at a bar called Three Kings, in the basement gallery space. They have been organizing this event for a while, but I didn't hear about it until the beginning of the week. They were really cool to let me be a part of it, and tolerant enough to still put my piece up at the very last second (it took me all week to finish the drawing, matt and frame it).
The show was monkey themed....that is, monkey themed. Do I really need to go into more explaination?
I wish that I could share some images with you all here, but I haven't had the chance to get any of them onto this here computing machine.....so I'll have to share later.
The show was a blast and I seemed to get a really good response from everyone for the drawing. There were some amazing work on the walls. The whole experience has finally inspired me to start building a new body of work again after losing all of it to the storage disaster, so hopefully I'll have some drawing updates to share in the near future.

Fifth, please send me all your money. I is the poor right now.

Sixth, yes, I realize that my profile is looking pretty fucked lately. It seems that my web host has a problem with proper billing. I have been offline for a few days, and it seems that my bill for the next two years became due. Unlike most companies who will inform you weeks in advance that a bill is coming up, my host works like this: "Dear Fisher, you hosting fee is due....riiiiiight......NOW! Oooo late."
Fuckers.
So, I paid the fees today and await the suspension to be lifted in the next few days.
Fuckers.

Seventh, I haven't had the chance to work on the new zombiespoon ideas that many of you have given me. The moving has made that difficult.

.....and that's about it in a nut pouch. I leave you all now to talk amongst yourselves, as I need to update all kinds of accounts with my new address and phone number and what not.

While Dawning a Circumstance-Skin Coat.....

Recently I learned the "Pull my Finger" gambit that everyone has been talking about. For those of you who have yet to experience this exciting flavor of Pop Culture, allow me to ruin the surprise for you....it makes the "pullee", or the initiator, fart. Hot damn! That is funny! "Pull my finger!" - "Uh, ok? Oh! That's great.....you farted. Wow. You farted right when I pulled. Good for you. You're like a machine. Just like a white trash robot with a switch that makes you seem to shit in your pants. I'm going to walk away now and never speak to you again."
I realize that many of you probably already know this trick, and are wondering how it might be that I didn't. Well, in truth, I have heard of it before, it just meant something completely different in my family. It's not that I didn't grow up with the one family member who got drunk at family gatherings and asked all the kids to pull his finger....it's just that when the finger in question was actually tugged upon, the free hand was used to put a shiv in the belly of the unfortunate puller. Needless to say, we all fell for this trick only once, either because we were clever enough to associate "Pull my Finger" with terrible pain and emergency room visits, or because we died. That uncle was the most feared person in my family.

I suppose that today is the official moving day into Denver....Part 1, that is. The actual apartment that my brother is willing to share with me for a few months (until Corinne, his wife to be, is out of her lease and switches places with me) won't actually be available until this Tuesday the 13th. But, due to circumstances beyond our control --which, if one were to think about it, is the very nature of circumstances...for those who actually do have control over them refer to them as 'events' or sometimes 'occurrences', though occurrences are rare to see in the wild these days, having been hunted to near extinction for their valuable pelts and medicinal horns-- we feel it best to leave this condo a few days early.
So, today is the official moving day into Denver....Part 1; into the living room of Corinne and her roommate, Allie's, apartment in Capital Hill. Part 2 will be moving everything again into the new apartment come Tuesday. Part 3, which is mine and mine alone, will come a month or two later into my own studio, hopefully staying within Capital Hill. I'm tired already....if only I had some Occurrence Horn Powder to add to my coffee.

In other newses: I started working full time at a place called Meiningers in Denver, pushing all sorts of art supplies and art supply related materials....hoping to eventually be promoted to the "upstairs" in the admin portion of the company....still trying to figure out who to sleep with for that.
I enjoy the job, though it's retail, mainly due to the people I work with, and the people who come in. Plus, I'll be getting a great discount on items that I'll be slowly replacing from the storage disaster.

Speaking of which....still fighting the insurance company over the amount of what my lost art and supplies are/were worth. Example: they offered an amount of $15 an hour towards the hours worked on the very large drawings that I had lost. Fine, I thought. Then I explained that one drawing in particular took near 90 hours (this was a 24" x 36" pen and ink drawing), they responded that there was no way it could have taken more than 2 hours.....to which I said "Pull my finger."

I should be finally getting the remaining possessions from Pennsylvania by the end of August....I suppose that that would count as moving Part 3a....moving Part 3b being the move into my own studio in a few months....in case any of you need to make a note of it, which, in all honesty, would frighten me if you did.

And finally, there's a good chance that I'll be minus internet access for a while due to the combinations of moving.....I'm already getting the shakes.....but that could also be due to the loss of blood from my sucking chest wound.......fucking uncle!

The Story of Soggy Toast....in Ten Parts...Part Ten

Part Ten: the Mummified Sex Toy in the Coffee Grounds

Taxidermy has always been a strange and guilty fascination of mine. I have always found myself drawn to those beasts that I've encountered in stores and homes, mesmerized by their perfectly preserved and posed existence. I have even, on many occasions, given serious thought to taking the practice up and learning the art; and while I don't condone or even understand hunting, especially as a 'sport' or more so as using the kill for nothing more than a trophy for bragging rights, I have to admit being in awe and captivated by the said trophies.
The closest I've really ever come to this work or art form is digitally, with Photoshop. For years I've had a love of finding as many usable animal pics as I can and then digitally altering them, usually combining two or more animals together to create something new.

I've called this process my Taxidermy mainly due to the fact that it would be exactly what I'd be doing with real preserved animals, had I ever learned the technique. This is also my favorite practice in Photoshop, which is, combining images together and trying to make it appear seamless and plausible. I use it almost daily for a variety of reasons, not just for my Taxidermy projects: I've done it for my recent book cover designs like the cover of Tonic (the winged bottle) in my last post; I've used it professionally in some of the commercial work that I've done in the past; and it's even the technique behind my online avatar.

This has been a post that I have been intending to do for a long time. Actually, this is a post that I should have done a while back, that is, the story behind my thumbnail picture. I can't even count the number of times I've been asked what it is, if it's real and why it got the name 'zombiespoon'. I have seriously lost track. Will this post stop the influx of those queries? No, probably not at all. But, after posting this I'll add the link to my collection of quick-links in order to quickly point the askers here, seeing as my responses to the questions have gone from detailed answers in the beginning to one word responses as of late.

First there is the name 'zombiespoon'. Basically, this came from a day of frustration, many years ago, when trying to come up with an online moniker that hadn't already been chosen by a few hundred, if not few thousand, people before. I'm sure most of you remember originally typing in your name somewhere online only to have it returned to you followed by a large number indicating how many of you already exist out there. It's a frustrating process.
So, rather than settle with being the 389^th of anything, I started plugging in whatever different ideas came to mind. This took more time than I could have possibly expected (are you aware that at that time there were already over a hundred "eggfuckers" out there?). Finally after much frustration, I typed in zombiespoon....and it came back clean.
Exciting so far, isn't it? Just wait, it only gets better.....well, no....actually it doesn't.

Next, the doll.
The doll itself is real, and was a gift to me by a friend. I have a great fondness for strange, old and weathered dolls and collect them.

As you can see, the actual doll is completely faceless. This picture is a still from a short movie I did when testing out my new webcam.
I had been using the name zombiespoon for a good while before the thumbnail that you see today was ever actually conceived. Mostly on another social networking website known as LouisvilleMojo, which was much like myspace, only for people residing in Louisville, and where the lonely, large and socially inept could meet online and anonymously hate on one another. Great fun!
I changed my thumbnail picture regularly, until the day I was goofing off and quickly added a cat's mouth to that still.

Almost at once, the people that I conversed with, or made fun of, started referring to the doll image itself as zombiespoon. The image and the name became one on their own, which was fine to me.
That image remained unchanged until around the time that I discovered myspace. I just felt that the zombiespoon doll needed a bit of refining, an upgrade. The zombiespoon that you see today is the combination of the same doll pic merged with the distorted mouth of a piranha that I found online.

From here, I went a little insane. Starting slowly, by making holiday versions of the zombiespoon to post on their respectful days, to a period of mass creation of different zombiespoon personas....most of which haven't even been showed until now:

One would think that with this group I might have finally gotten it all out of my system, but no. I'm still looking for any excuse to alter the image into something else.....any suggestions for which will be appreciated and considered, altering this little guy has become one of my new favorite things to do....alongside drinking coffee and talking to inanimate objects.

Coming back to the art of taxidermy (true taxidermy, not my digital version of it), I have wanted to add the toothy mouth to the real doll for some time. I feel fairly confident in the fact that I could most likely sculpt one myself, using polymer clays and enamels with air brushes, but I have no idea what the best way to attach it to the doll would be, which is why I've been so hesitant. The last thing I'd want to do is to destroy the little guy (this is, of course, assuming that the doll survived the storage disaster....I'm still waiting to see and keeping my fingers crossed).
Several months ago I watched a program about the history and art of taxidermy. The show followed the timeline from the early techniques of the practice to the styles and skills of today. The part that intrigued me the most was near the end of the program, when they covered one of the newest techniques. There are taxidermists now out there that can create animals for you from a photograph, or even just from description. Using any of their hundreds of models and sheer artistry they can create almost any animal in any wanted pose using no part of a real critter. I watched in awe as one of these artists finished the detail work on the mouth of a carnivore in mid growl....no teeth, no bone....just pure sculpture.
Of course I thought of my zombiespoon guy.
At the time I was still in Pennsylvania, which seems like it would be a prime area for taxidermists, seeing as deer season seems to be a weekly occurrence and hunters will actually walk, armed, through neighborhoods and take down game in full view of nearby swing sets. But this was right before leaving to come to Denver, so I never got the opportunity to search.
I still plan to at least follow up on this idea, once I get settled here. I actually look forward to explaining what I want done to the unsuspecting taxidermist and studying his expression....and if he says no, I plan to follow up with asking him if he would instead be willing to create a monkey reading a Bible while a family of snakes escape from it's butt. Hell, this could be a new past time, asking taxidermists to create the most ridiculous of items.
"I was writing to inquire whether it would be possible for your company to recreate a three headed mouse fucking a door knob. Time is critical as this is to be an anniversary gift to my wife."


Finally, this was the last of my ten part directionless series, which was supposed to land on my 100^th MySpace blog post (LiveJournal readers....I have NO idea what post we're at), and it would have too, had I not witness the motorcycle accident that just recently stopped haunting me while I slept. So now, please join me in celebrating my 101^st post!
(blows into a party horn and throws dry ramen noodles in the air, not having confetti)