oh, buddy…
the toys in the box are really awesome. they are so awesome i wanted to just buy all of them for myself right away, but instead i sat down and stared at each one individually for a minute each, taking in all the details. really really great toys. as of this post, there are still some left.
right now the worcester art museum has a great show of the art of tom lewis. tom was an artist, an activist, and a friend of ours, who passed away last april. the show includes paintings, prints, drawings, and newspaper clippings from the times he was arrested. the show is located in the education wing of the museum, and hence, free to go and look at (the rest of the museum has free admisssion saturdays before noon).
this saturday from 2 to 5 it’s another silk screening day at HBML junk shoppe. bring a garment and we will print on it a design of our choosing, and this week we choose a design based on the idea ‘DINOSAURS”. if you love dinosaurs, and you love to think about them stomping around, eating things, evolving into birds, and so forth, well the path is clear- make your time. right now it’s a toss-up exactly what the image will be, but what it will not be is goofy- it will be one or more dinosaurs rendered with as much precision as i’m available for. magestic and proud; fierce or possibly ambivalent; in black ink. the price is ssteady at $5 per. i will have a fabric marker, if you want me to write a swear word on the garment, that’s free. and we will have cold canned coffee for sale, a summer treat.
this versatile handkerchief now for sale is printed with a (probably)-larger-than-your-actual-skull skull print, designed so as to be worn in as menacing a way as possible. perfect for small-town bank robberies, bicycle gang activity, and child rearing. can be worn in desperado style, as shown above, or in full face view:
or even as a headband with the teeth chewing your brain (and your bangs as a mustache):
for a limited time only, this fine product is something you do not have to actually travel to worcester to get. a scant $10 gets you two of these fine items post paid, one in grey and one in pink, delivered immediately, or at least, we put it in the mail immediately, or pretty much anyway. again, you get two, one in grey and one in pink, and there’s no added postage (unless you live outside the US in which case email us) and it’s $10. also there is a limited number so act fast!!!!!!!!!!! YAWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!
if you have a big bag (or box)(or small bag) of GI JOEs, where the legs all fell off because the rubber band broke, please consider donating them to HBML so we can make cool “candy crust” tribal necklaces out of them. we have some (pictured), need more. come on, what are you doing with them? also will trade broken (yours) for non-broken (ours) (4 to 1) while supplies last.
this rules! and there’s a beach boys cover (”don’t worry baby”). blue shift is scraping violins and close-mic’ed vocals, RT is greymarket mysticism and arcane ramblings, with drums. this is noise with no rock. letter pressed covers, green vinyl, awesome zine insert with lots of drawings of smoke. whatever, this rules. on RARE YOUTH.
maybe this is crazy, but were the California Raisins invented to counteract a grape boycott?
over the years california grapes suffered 3 boycotts: The first ran from 1967 to 1970, and ended when growers signed their first contracts with the United Farm Workers. The second grape boycott began in 1973 and received more widespread support than the recent one (with a 1975 Harris poll indicating that 17 million Americans were boycotting grapes). This boycott ended two years later, after the Agricultural Labor Relations Act was passed, allowing farmworkers to organize and bargain for contracts. in 1984 UFW co-founder Cesar Chavez called for a third boycott, as a way of focusing on the spraying of dangerous pesticides, and although UFW called the boycott successful, it lasted for 16 years (!) until november 2000, far less wham bam than previous efforts.
So the California Raisins were unleashed on the world in 1987, 3 years after the start of the last boycott, and were, duh, super successful, spawning a cartoon show, toys, live shows, all kinds of bullshit. even as a kid i always wondered why they even existed– i never saw an ad for bananas, for example. so is this why they made the ads? are the California Raisins like, scabs? i mean, outside of the fact that they look like huge scabs? does anyone have the numbers on california table grapes sold from 1984 - 1987? this coul dbe a good term paper for someone (someone that would subsequently owe me something for the idea, possibly fair trade organic chocolate bars, possibly lots of them).
also, buddy miles was the voice of one of the raisins, you may know him as the annoying guy on that band of gypsy record. what’s up with that?
anyway, we have this historical statue, it’s, i don’t know, $4.
oh, and sorry about all the capitalization weirdness, i obviously copied the statistics from another webpage (here).
hey EAB, what time is it?
summer time!
also:
full text of walden on project gutenberg
free walden audiobook from librivox
john cage reads from “mureau”, an “i ching determined mix of letters, syllables, words, phrases and sentences from the journals of thoreau” concerning music.
every week or so i paint everything on this shelf a different color, trying to figure out which is the color that sells the best. so far it isn’t lavender, bright green, sky blue, or mint. the shoes look pretty sweet though– right after i painted these i painted my own:
that’s tite, rite?
i just got back from seeing erick “scam” lyle and cindy “doris” crabb read from their awesome new books, and i brought back a big stack of printed matter to totally change a bunch of people’s lives. scam and doris are two of the best zines ever, really inspiring personal / universal stuff about living in a city, living in the country, being a person, being young, being old, everything. highly recommended. i got a few copies of some of the more recent zines, plus a few copies of nicely printed book collections from both of them. so good!
