Pour The Coffee In My Eyes

• Hearing about my exile on Elba, S. Higginbotham came to visit this week. Ping-pong was played. Attendant injuries were suffered. Pork chop sandwiches were consumed, and attendant food comas were endured. It was like a morale-boosting care package that you'd get on a rainy day at summer camp except, like, in human form.

• "You's a seven-time felon. What you doin' with that?"

• I want someone that I know, likesay the aforementioned Higginblatt, to make their own font, and then to tell me how that went, so I can decide if I would like to do so as well.

• So what if I don't have a functioning automobile or any discernible source of income? Fuck it. I'm going to see Spoon. Because I can't think of a good reason as to why I wouldn't do that. I mean. It only costs money and is happening hundreds of miles away. (Happy birthday, FP.)

• I'm having one of those days where I'm not dying; I just can't think of anything good to do.

• From the "More Evidence That This Blog Has Become Less About the Strange Activities of One 'The Devil Himself' And His Far-Flung Associates and More About the Goings-On Within the World of Rap Music That Nobody Who Reads Said Blog Cares About Other Than Its Author, 'The Devil Himself'" file: Lil Wayne is going to be on the new Jay-Z record. We here at CFY,K consider this a win. (Also: Here's hoping that there's some little kid sitting in front of his computer with a notebook full of scribbled sixteens thinking, 'Oh. That's how you do that.')

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• The above artwork comes from a Love & Rockets collection by Jaime Hernandez called The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S. I highly recommend it. (You should really probably buy it from Fantagraphics, just to keep it real, but I could only find a direct Amazon link.)

• So now that new Hova joint "Blue Magic" has its own video, in addition to the aforementioned trailer. Hype Williams directed the new one, and it looks gorgeous. (Hype Williams should offer to do his best work for Jay-Z for free, in an unceasing effort to make up for "Sunshine.") See also: "Roc Boys," which is also classic Jay. (I am getting my hopes up for American Gangster. I can't help it.)

• You know who I like? Graphic designer Charley Harper (RIP). I think old FP has a poster of his somewhere in her house. And Habitiat Skateboards pretty much unabashedly got their whole stee from him.

• If you were thinking of making the best music video of all time, you'd probably want to combine the following ingredients: a freestyle intro from Big Daddy Kane with human beatbox provided by Biz Markie, sing-along shots of authentic eighties-style hip street kids on a basketball court, where Spud Webb (!) is playing some ball. Then you'd think, "fuck it, go nuts" and throw in a John Madden cameo in there for giggles and grins. What if I told you that that video already exists, for Paul Simon's perfect pop song "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard." You'd have to like that, because you love that song, and it would save you a ton of impossible work.

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Corndog Victory in the Final Seconds

• What I think is funny is the idea that having a degree in English makes a person somehow less able to communicate with the people around them in the world. Like. I wrote this little thing for my friend the other day, just a little write-up to appear in a local publication, about 150 words, and I honestly had no idea how to do it. Perhaps I'm only capable of long-winded and convoluted academic critiques. And half-assed blog posts. (I mean. I did it, and did it happily, as my friend is the hardest-working person I have ever met in terms of charity. She really, actually, thinks globally and acts locally, which is a rare thing, despite the proliferation of bumper stickers intended to convey that same philosophical message. What I'm trying to say is that writing that 150-word thing was way more difficult than a longish paper, but it took a while for me to say that, because I have an English degree and therefore have a hard time saying anything.)

• So, um. Lil Wayne got arrested. But I guess it's cool now. Or something.

• Speaking of Lil Wayne, and other rap-related news, what the hell happened with Still Listen To Gangsta Music? That shit was my favorite. I'm beginning to think that whoever made that blog is secretly, actually Cam'ron, and has, as such, disappeared from the face of the earth. Luckily, my dude over at Jesus Piece still holds it down.

• Rave-on sends me links to good stuff like small-time producers send Kanye soul records to sample. This one's good, about an art collective that moved into the mall. Although I must say that living in the mall sounds like the place I would like to live least. But whatever. Art kids and their damn statements.

• I have not finished Marisha Pessl's book. Nor have I fully explored that book's website. But even a cursory perusal of these things suggests that Pessl is pretty, pretentious, and approximately half as talented as she thinks that she is. I think we ought to get married. (My book, for the record, seems to be selling for upwards of one hundred dollars. Take that, suckas!)

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The Kid With the Most Knowledge

• I think I have gotten more "post titles" from "Ghost Deini" than from any other source. HST had The Book of Revelations. I have Supreme Clientele. This is reflected in our respective prose, I think.

• So, yeah. I drew this picture of Buddha for some reason the other day. Figured I'd, you know, share it with you fine folks.

• I, also, would like to apologize to all the people whose phone calls I have only been sporadically answering as of late. It's like this, see: my car's broken down. In order to do anything, therefore, I have to get a ride, usually with Thee Famous Person, who has been graciously carting my stank ass around town every day. I have this thing, though, where I refuse to talk on the phone for any substantial amount of time when I am in the, like, physical company of people. Especially in the car. I can't stand it when the person you're in the car with is all on the phone for a long time. You can't talk to that person, listen to music, or have your own phone call. You can't do shit but listen to, like, half of a conversation you don't care about anyway. So I don't do it on principle.

• The other thing that's been suffering lately is this blog. Having a blog is something that you do when you have some time by yourself, which is rare these days as well, and for much the same reason. (It's also the same deal for, like, dicking around on the intrabutts finding out about stuff, which also makes the blog suffer. Like. When have I ever gone this long without a link to something?)

• Wait. You know what's awesome? Taking, like, dialog from Frank Miller's Batman and visually remixing it with Adam West-style Batman. It's the shit. (Via Drawn. (Are we still, like, crediting link-sources? I do it intermittently, 'cause fuck it.))

• More soon? Let's hope so.

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That's Okay With Me

• So. You'd have to know, by now, that I'd be all stoked to see the thirteen minute prequel to The Darjeeling Limited. (Trailer here.) It's called Hotel Chevalier, and it's free on iTunes. (Get iTunes, already. Sheesh.)

• And speaking of movies, old Raver sent this next thing my way. (I have to give credit where credit is due, lest I be accused of "ravenizing" anybody's shit.) Right in the middle of Robert Redford trying to re-legitimize his career, Tom Cruise seems intent on letting you know that he is still, in fact, doing his thing.

• You remember when that Shyne joint "Bad Boys" came out with that ill-as-fuck Barrington Levy cameo? Foxy Brown has made that song again, and it's still a pretty good song.

• My favorite Simpsons episode of all time is called "The Mansion Family," and it's on Season 12. I consulted Video ETA, but they don't know when the shit's coming out.

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We Now Return

• "... to your irregularly scheduled programming."

• That picture is supposed to be like an early rough draft of this weird little comic project I'm supposed to be working on with my sister, thee Famous Person. Because when we are around each other, that's what we do: begin little comic projects and then never finish them.

• I finally - on a related note - got that book that Paul Pope released. It, like the rest of his work that I've seen, is kind of uneven, but when that dude hits, he kills it.

• More art crap: Have I talked about Nicholas Roerich on CFY,K before? I might have, in some incarnation of this blog. But then I forgot his name for a long time, until, like, two days ago when it occurred to me again. Roerich is the shit. I'm putting this up here as much for your benefit as my own. You know. In case I forget.

• I think you guys know how I feel about TDB's - that's Traditional Dutch Bicycles, by the way. So. I found this blog, right? And I'm not saying it's, you know, "rule 34" status, but it might as well be.

• I don't even wear glasses, but I would wear these. I do, however, wear sunglasses, so if anybody wants to come up off some Persol 649's on the cheap, holler at the kid.

• Making an album, after, let's face it, a pretty lackluster coming-out-of-retirement joint, based on your reaction to a movie was, when I first read about it, either the best or the worst idea that I had ever heard of. But then Hov dropped what I guess is a trailer for his upcoming single - which, I know, is weird - and the shit is ill. (But, I mean. I'm biased.)



• The Orange Park Kennel Club is neither decadent nor depraved. It is, however, for suckers. You spend all your time trying to figure out the difference between, like, a quiniela key and a box superfecta. The odds listed on the racing program mean nothing. A 13-1 shot, from what I could gather, has exactly as good a chance as winning a race as a 3-2. (Meanwhile, of course, I am naturally allergic to numbers and, therefore, bet entirely on instinct and the humor-quality of a given dog's name. This, I have come to learn, is an ineffective method.)

• Ok. More. Soon.

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The CFY,K Travelogue Phase Three: Colorado

• As has been made, I think, pretty clear by the first two "phases" of the CFY,K Travelogue, I spent a great deal of time on this trip not actually doing much of anything. I found this to be refreshing, coming off, as I was, a hard summer of the final throes of college classes, and all the attendant nonsense therewith. By the time I got to Denver, though, it seemed like it was time to get on with the business of some hard-core tourism. Luckily for me, old Lo-Ha, my lovely hostess, was as bored and as unemployed as I was (and, by the way, am), and therefore ready to seek out whatever action there was to be found in the Centennial State.

• If you laugh "a special kind of" laugh when you're hanging out with Nebraska, then it's sort of a constant thing with Lo-Ha. At least with me. Everything that happens when you're hanging out with her is hilarious, due in no small part to the fact that she's there. It's one of those things like if Lo-Ha was reading out of the dictionary, it would be really, really funny that she was, in the first place, reading out of the dictionary.

• I think our shared inability to take anything seriously came in clutch when we visited - for the purposes of continuing a sort of trip-long theme, as well as research - the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. I had read about this place, but I don't think either of us were prepared for the weird brand of, like, militant freak they have running around that place. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism majors engaged in poetry slams with students of transpersonal psychology. There were strictly enforced rules as to which color of meditation pillow was allowed where. All of it: too much. After a half-hour we commandeered the sole computer in the school's tiny library to purchase baseball tickets online.

• The real highlight of my time in Colorado, I think, was a trip we took from Denver to Aspen by way of Independence Pass. The route is closed during the winter, because the road is high and treacherous. We almost hit a deer to the tune of "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)." Along the way, one fact became clear: everything in Colorado is mind-bogglingly beautiful. Even the mechanics. I kind of couldn't really deal with it. Once you get to Independence Pass, you're over twelve thousand feet above sea level. So. Even in the middle of the summer, it's awfully cold.

• At "Aspen's hippest hotel," old people play Connect Four at a large table in the lobby at all hours. Aspen is weird. It's surrounded by gorgeous mountains and peopled with citizens that seem nice enough. Be warned, though: they can sense that you are not in possession of a Black Card before you enter into any restaurant, and the wait staff treats you accordingly. Although I felt like some kind of impostor when I was there, I don't want to come across like I had a bad time in Aspen. It's incredibly picturesque and relaxing. It makes sense that rich people spend so much time there. But, really, for me, it was getting there that was the most fun.

• The next day I woke up and embarked immediately to conclude the strange "literary portion" of my tour of America. Lo-Ha and I drove around Woody Creek, Colorado for hours until we finally came across the entranceway to a compound that may or may not have been part of Hunter S. Thompson's legendary Owl Farm. I'm satisfied that it is. But you never know. Lo-Ha was, after a fashion, bored. So, with a final stop at Buffalo Bill Cody's final resting place, and a protracted round of the "Famous People Name Game," we returned to Denver.

• I left Colorado and Lo-Ha and what was essentially the final leg of my amazing trip the next morning. I returned to Orlando to visit again with Higginbotham. (Note: never, ever, under any circumstances, expect any peace and quiet on a flight to Orlando. You will be surrounded be screaming children that are out of their goddamned minds with excitement at the prospect of spending any amount of time at all at Disney World, and you will curse plane travel and want, silently, to die.) I regretfully couldn't spend the night there, though, as there seemed to be pressing issues to attend to in my hometown, so I went to see my folks for a few days. Then my car broke down, and I am now stranded in their home as I type this.

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The CFY,K Travelogue Phase Two: Venice Beach

• Mere micromips after Higginbotham dropped me off at the airport I was throwing my bags in the back of Jenkin, Nebraska's own Heroic Warrior Honda. There is something, to me at least, completely fascinating about being on an entirely different coast of the United States than the one you woke up on, all before lunchtime. (Nobody else seems to think that this is all that remarkable, however. "Can you believe it," I'd ask. "Yes," they'd say, "you were on an airplane." They don't understand, though, that airplanes are powered by magic.)

• The first night I was in town, there was a Swillpro Records Revue at the Good Hurt, but it really could have been held either inside of Nebraska's own MySpace page, or during a particularly strange evening at Fluids Bar and Lounge. Face was there! Think of this! Maybe you don't think air travel is all that wondrous, but surely you could grasp the significance of randomly running into Face, right? What are you? A robot? Anyway, the kid Smithers' Jagger elbows could seriously maybe give Shamanzo's time-tested Kiedis joints a run for their money (Ns;js).

• After that night, though, Nebraska and I got down to the business of not doing a whole lot of anything. To paraphrase our own Anvil Rabbitt, 'you laugh a special kind of weird little laugh when you hang out with Shaved.' It's true. You do. We spent a good deal of time wandering around the Venice Beach Boardwalk, which, exactly as I remember it, is better than television. In the span of seriously, you might come across a fistfight between two mimes - they had dropped all pretense and were screaming at each other - and, equally random but thematically linked precisely, Jimmy Hart, the Mouth of the South. I did. I also bought Brown's Requiem at Small World Books and caught up on some reading while Shaved Wieners shrapled the gnar like it was '88. Then it was off to get our Animal Style on.

• Me: In your professional opinion, how long would I have to stand around on the boardwalk before I ran into Nyft?
Nebraska: I'd say about two, three months.
{Not true. I ran into that dude in like an hour. It was awesome.}

• Roughly half of my time in the Los Angeles area was marked by this hilarious tension. Shaved was visited, in addition to myself, by this beautiful young schoolteacher that he had met on - get this - an airplane. (I know. This type of shit doesn't happen to anybody, but Nebraska's a damn superhero now. At some point before I showed up, he saved a house from burning down.) For a while there, as a result, he could not decide whether or not he was going to be Johnny Cool Guy, 'cause this lady was around, or, like Ridiculous Onomatopoeic Party Favor Noisemaker Nebraska, 'cause, you know, that's how the Security Council rolls. So I would send over these little lob shots over his Cool Guy net just to watch him deal with it. More sample dialogue:

Me: Hey, you want to play a Man Cup?
Lovely Lady: What's a 'Man Cup?'
Nebraska: It's nothing. It's the first level of MarioK -
Me: It's when we put on those jock straps, you know, with the cup? And then we run towards each other at full speed, from across the room, and bang cups together. Whoever thinks it sucks first loses.

• All of this eventually boiled over (aided in no small part by this depressing little movie we were all huddled around watching) in a furious fit of recording in The Genius's amazing new apartment in downtown L.A. There is evidence of this madness, and it can be found here and here, if you have the patience. (E Lamar, click these shits!)

• Suddenly - at least as suddenly as I had arrived in California, I was back on an airplane, headed this time for the mountains.

• When you're leaving LAX by airplane, they make you fly out to the ocean and turn around if you're headed eastward. I remember looking down out of the window of the plane at the expanse of water below. Moments later, after we made the turn back east, I was above undeveloped green land, and it looked exactly the same to me as the ocean had. "It's like," I thought, "they're the same thing, it's just that the ocean is moving faster than the land." I surmise from this that it is quite possible that either Los Angeles itself makes you high, or that they're putting strange chemicals in the air inside of airplane cabins.

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The CFY,K Travelogue Phase One: Orlando

• The whole time I was on this trip I was thinking that if I had a laptop, I could update CFY,K from the road. But then I thought that that would result, eventually, in me spending the whole trip "blogging," which would have blown.

• The day I turned into an old man, I drove to Orlando, Florida, to visit one S. Higginbotham. It was 110 degrees outside the whole way, in the Volvo without air conditioning. I drank a gallon of water and never had to pee, you know what I'm saying? Making that drive was like playing soccer. By the time I stopped, I was wearing Okefenokee Pants.

• There, strangely, doesn't seem to be a whole lot going on in Orlando. We spent all day looking for where the cool kids were hanging out. What we came across, though, was people dressing up, like in suits and prom dresses and shit, to go to the mall. (We did go to a mall. This much is true. But, to be fair, old Higginblatt had like this gift certificate or something. So it was justified.)

• The campus of the University of Central Florida is like this gigantic sprawling utopia. Sort of. It's like if they shot The Prisoner in Orlando instead of Portmeirion.

• I don't, however, mean to suggest that everything in Orlando is bad. Because, first, that would be untrue. (Add to that the fact that S Dot had like just moved there when I visited, so it's not like she had shit like all mapped out.) The Higginhours have set up housekeeping in the nicest little house that any of my friends live in. They use a fun-house mirror instead of like a regular mirror. How do you not love that? And every building in Orlando is shaped like a food product! We saw a house that Kerouac lived in! I saw President Isenhour straight snipe a wasps' nest from a hundred yards! It was epic!

• The other thing was that me and Higginbotham were afforded ample time for some regular old shooting of the shit, which is what I came down there for in the first place. We are awesome talkers. In addition, our hanging out resulted in the creation of a new comic strip we made called "Split 7 Inch." I want to do more of these things, so we get really good at it. And then, like, set up Split 7 Inch's own little web presence, and then take over the whole nerdy world, like those other dudes who make that webcomic that you don't read but like a billion other people do. Split 7 Inch is awesome and can be found here and here.

• I had a lovely time in Orlando, but, too soon, I was waking up S. at like 3:30 in the morning or some shit to drive me to the airport. We drank Doubleshots on the way, and I had to take a Doubleshit on the plane the whole time, but refused to.

• Next time: Venice Beach is just as weird even when you know your way around.

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He Lives!

• Hey, how long has it been? A "while," you might say. And too long. During which time things have managed to spin wildly awry, the fact to which the dormancy of this here "blog" primarily owes. Forgive me, won't you?

• Previous to these developments - involving massive automotive trouble and financial wrangling - I had been having the best time of, maybe, my whole life. I'm planning to put up a long-overdue travelogue here on CFY,K. And I might as well. Because I am stranded in my hometown, with, seriously, nothing better to do. (This is a precarious position. If you're not doing anything, you can be made to do anything.)

• There is more to come. Sooner than you know.

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