I had recently begun collecting toy video cameras designed specifically for children. These plastic-lens toys produce beautiful pixelated images, similar in some ways to the ancient beauty of super 8 film. The cameras usually have no zoom lens capability and are difficult to use in low light situations, but there is something so harmless, so forgiving, so wonderfully surprising about the format.

From November 2006 to November 2007 I made 365 short movies, each lasting under a minute. These amuse bouche videos were posted on my website for 2008. (I had begun an earlier online version of these videos back in May 2006, but had to discontinue the project because 180 titles were purchased by Ouat Media for distribution.)

Looking back on the project now, I can see it’s solid proof of my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. But there’s no doubt it sharpened my image-making skills and brought me to another level of processing the world around me. At first, I approached each movie as if it were a longer form project. For the first few titles I had a huge shooting ratio. But then I quickly discovered that the time constraints did not permit the luxury of thoughtful, lingering post production. Instead I had to edit in camera. In fact, I had to edit the world before I even took out my camera. By limiting what I chose to shoot I managed to create a movie a day.

In October 2005, Apple introduced their 5th generation ipod with video playback capability. Although at the time it seemed absurd to think that anyone would want to watch a video on such a tiny screen, it paved the way for video-on-the-go. At first and as is the case today, mainstream titles proved a minor hit: Disney pap, reformatted sitcoms and animated Pixar shorts dominated the new distribution network. There were very few independent works and those were largely YouTube-inspired comedy sketches and butchered versions of in-flight entertainment. Was there was a place for artist-driven work? Yes and no.

The following year, online short video festivals began to spring up. Anyone with a high-speed internet connection, a camcorder and a half-baked idea could become a filmmaker. Overnight, we all became content producers searching for a way to cash in and become the next big online sensation.

Other than that first distribution purchase – and mind you, it was a big one – I have not actively pursued any sales opportunities. I thought about a subscription/membership arrangement, but I quickly abandoned the idea because keeping up with all the titles, writing the synopsis, making the film stills and posting them was already too much work. This was supposed to be fun, not a business. But having said that, I do believe there are many untapped distribution opportunities out there: if what you love to do is make stuff, then do it, give it away and see what happens.

Watch more films online at www.midionodera.com

Then I finally saw them play a show. That night, due to various communication problems, the performance consisted of Chris and Jeff on guitars and a drum machine. It was at that time, and still is, one of the most exciting live performances I’ve been a part of. And I say ‘a part of’ because I got the feeling that they were creating and experimenting right there, seeing where they could take things in front of a live audience, and get away with it.

Now, finally, after six years, they have their debut, I Blame the Scenery, on Better Looking Records. The record label’s site describes this band as "playing indie rock with an emo sensibility." Now, before you cast them out as ‘just another emo band,’ I would choose to add to that description: an indie band who tips its hat at 60′s pop. There’s a simple purity to Reubens Accomplice, something organic, but without being stagnant. I wouldn’t go throwing them into the Elephant 6 stable, but they do beg comparison to fellow Southwesterners, The Shins. I’ve found that just the term ‘emo’ wards many rock enthusiasts away like Kryptonite, myself included. Yet, I really enjoy I Blame the Scenery. The album avoids the pitfalls of many of today’s emo bands. Too many of those albums bleed together, being overproduced and forgetting to just let go of their tortured hearts and sometimes just fucking rock.

Like fellow Phoenicians, The Meat Puppets, Reubens Accomplice manages to capture the paradox of the desert in their songs — the sense of echoing loneliness and at the same time the overwhelming beauty of it. The smooth voices of Chris Corak and Jeff Knapp seem to harmonize easily over Saguaro cacti and Gila Monsters. Though the track "Down Again," with Andy Eames’ thicker voice, mixes things up, sounding vaguely Modest Mouse. Throw that together with Flaming Lips-esque rising guitars, tongue-in-cheek humor that balances the overtly emotional, and flourishes of the pedal steel paragon and you have one of the more interesting albums to come out of the independent scene in the last year.

Ryan: Who is Reubens Accomplice right now?

Chris Corak, guitar/vocals, age 25. Jim Knapp, guitar/vocals, 26. Jeff Bufano, drums, age 24.

Ryan: How many incarnations of Reubens Accomplice have there been?

Jeff: Up until recently it had always been the same four that appear on the record, but Andy Eames recently moved to the Oregon coast to be closer to his family. We are not mad at him, we only wish we could have kept the original line up. As for now Aaron Wendt (Seven Storey Mountain) has been filling in for local shows.

Ryan: This album seems to touch a number of areas in independent music, so I assume you have a number of influences, who are your main ones? Are you influenced by any other art forms besides music: literature, art, photography, poetry, film?

Jeff: Fugazi, Boys Life, Giant Sand. I don’t know, there is a lot of really great bands like the Flaming Lips, Pavement. I could go on and on and I would consider them all as influential as the next. I think lyrically I have drawn from film and books. Sometimes singing about your own life is just too boring, so why not sing about how you wish your life was a little more like one of your favorite characters.

Chris: Here are my top 6 albums. I know I’m leaving something out and I couldn’t live with only picking 5. Each has been influential, but hard to say if that’s what we sound like.

• Meat Puppets Up On the Sun
• Flaming Lips Soft Bulletin
• Pavement Wowee Zowee
• Dinosaur Jr. Where You Been?
• Boy’s Life Departures and Landfalls
• Fugazi In on the Kill Taker

Ryan: You worked with a number of well-respected artists on this album (DJ Radar, Jim Adkins [Jimmy Eat World], and John Rauhouse [Calexico, Giant Sand, and Niko Case touring fame]. Could you give me a few sentences on how you hooked up with some of these people?

Jeff: Most of them we knew before hand and had discussed the idea of the record and our desire to have our favorite local musicians perform on it regardless of there musical style. Others were introduced to us by Jamal Ruhe, our friend who recorded the record. It was my favorite part of the whole experience, they all did it for their own reasons. There was no money involved.

Ryan: In the past, the Phoenix indie music scene hasn’t gotten much attention. Jimmy Eat World’s new album, however, is now everywhere you look. Do you think Reubens Accomplice could follow in J.E.W.’s footsteps? Are there other bands in Arizona that you feel could soon be recognized on a national level?

Jeff: I really believe that Phoenix is a city with a large talent base, including Tucson as well. There are some great singer/song writers here as well as DJs, MCs, and pretty much you name it. I think for every genre there is at least one act in town capable of mass appeal. As for us, I’m not sure. It’s hard to look at your own music that way. I really believe in what we do, I just don’t know if radio would. Although after System of the Down, maybe anything’s possible.

Ryan: With Jim Adkins playing on the album, and coming from the same area, there are bound to be comparisons of Reubens Accomplice to Jimmy Eat World. Do you have an opinion of their new album, Bleed American? Some feel they have gone too mainstream.

Jeff: We have the insider point of view. Most people that love a record, go to the band’s show when they tour and then forget about them until the next record hits. We’ve seen Jimmy Eat World’s progression over the last six or more years first hand and this is definitely a natural step in their progression. There is nothing forced about Bleed American and as a fan I don’t think you can ask for anything more.

Ryan: You mention Arizona, both directly and indirectly, more than once on the album. How important is ‘place’ in your song writing process? Do you feel that your band will always be associated with Phoenix?

Jeff: In the past two years I started to really appreciate the desert. Most people
don’t know what it’s like to drive only a half an hour and find yourself in the middle of the desert with no obtrusive city lights. I think it definitely plays a more major role within our music. We have lived here our whole lives.

Ryan: Sorry if this question seems jumbled, but because of Arizona’s pleasant year around weather, the state attracts a lot of ‘beautiful people’ bringing with them many mainstream ideals. Do you feel that makes it harder to form a subculture or makes the ‘rest of us’ feel that much more ostracized?

Chris: I think I know what you’re saying and I agree that mainstream culture dominates Arizona. In fact, it’s the one thing I absolutely despise about this town. We don’t get any art films, there are few good places to eat, and the people involved in the art community are all struggling because no one will look, listen, or buy anything. It’s really odd, after all, we are the sixth largest city in America. But often it feels like a small sheltered town. Yeah, there is a smaller community for us, but that’s not the point, the point is to all hang out and share ideas.

Ryan: Exactly how many 7 inches did you put out?

Chris: A single (2 songs) and a double 7 a long time ago (8 songs)

Ryan: You’re on a number of compilations, can you name them all?

Chris: Yes we have been on quite a few.

• Free Sampler sponsored by Better Looking Records, Slowdance Records, and Five One Inc. – w/ Jealous Sound, Boilermaker, Black Heart Procession, Album Leaf, Poor Rich Ones, and others
• "Not One Light Red" (a Modified Comp) song title "leave the city" – w/ Seven Storey, Go Big Casino, and others
• "I Guess this is Goodbye" (EmoDiaries 5) song title "you do it awfully" – w/ the White Octive and others
• "Libations Unlimited" w/ Jimmy Eat World, Less Pain Forever, EmoCamaro, and others

Ryan: What have been some of the major obstacles in the band’s career?

Chris: When you have been a band as long as we have, you are bound to run into obstacles – it’s inevitable. In fact the last two years have been filled with extreme examples. You wouldn’t believe some if I told you. Here is one of the believable examples.

Creating "I Blame the Scenery" and getting it released was tremendously difficult. One day reality hit us like a ton of bricks. We decided we would record our first full length with our own funds and then find a label. "What came first the demo or the album?" Before we recorded our full length, respectable indie labels weren’t exactly knocking down our doors. While recording, we brought 3 adat machines to destruction. While mixing the record, Jamal Ruhe was forced to open up a machine with a screwdriver to extract the master tapes manually. Our record was nearly destroyed and we didn’t have any more money. We lucked out. We sent our full-length record to a number of indie labels and aroused some interest. We finally found a label that we had 100% confidence in, Better Looking Records.

Ryan: If you could tour with any contemporary band, who would it be? What about any band of all time, living or dead?

Chris: Contemporary dream tour: Less Pain Forever, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, Flaming Lips, Bjork, Jimmy Eat World. All time: Beatles, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., Jimmy Hendrix.

Ryan: Finally, where did you get the name, Reubens Accomplice? I heard it was a character from Peewee’s Playhouse, is that true?

Chris: That’s classified information. As far as Peewee, that sounds like a rumor to me.

Links

• www.reubensaccomplice.com
• www.betterlookingrecords.com
• www.holidaymatinee.com

We had been in Saigon for a good five days before I finally talked myself into going through with it. I had asked around about it. My first night there, I had met a nice fellow, an American, who had moved to Vietnam. He had been over there for the war (he was a sniper with 42 confirmed kills) and was now security for a madam. I asked him how much a girl would charge for a hand job. He wasn’t sure, but was pretty sure that I’d have to explain to the prostitute what a hand job consisted of. Most girls were just used to giving blow jobs. “Why don’t you just get a blow job?” he asked me. “They’re only like ten bucks, maybe less.”

No, I had decided on a hand job.

Later that night, I found out that I was dry-humping in the wrong direction. A guy from my ship told me that he went to get a massage, just a regular massage, and at the end, the woman, (who of which, he mentioned, was very attractive) pointed to his crotch and said, “Massage?”

After he told me this, he took a long swig of his Tiger beer. “So,” I said. “Did you do it?”

“You crazy?” he said. “Do I look like a guy who has to pay for it?”

I wanted to say that he did, but I didn’t. Throughout the next few days, I heard many of the same stories. Some guys admitted to it, some guys didn’t. The consensus was that it was about five dollars extra on top of an original ten for the massage.

Finally, on the fifth day, our last full day in port, I decided it was do or die. I was going to go through with the hand job. My friend, Eric, was with me. We had both seen Full Metal Jacket too many times to come home from Vietnam without paying for some kind of sexual favor.

So, we hailed rickshaws (the Vietnamese version of taxis) and told them, massage. However, we didn’t say ‘massage’ like one says, ‘take me to the grocery store.’ When we said it, we raised our voices like we were telling them an inside joke. And we raised our eyebrows. Then we let out little laughs like we were laughing at the inside joke. We were about two seconds away from socking each other in the shoulder like a couple of high-school jocks in the locker room, when the rickshaw drivers both raised their eyebrows and went “Ahhhh,” in a voice that could only mean that they got the inside joke.

They took us to a rundown part of the city (the whole city is rundown, but this was even more so). We stopped in front of a hair saloon. Eric and I must of looked confused because both of our rickshaw drivers looked back at us and said, “Massage. Yes. Massage, massage,” while pointing to the shop.

We went inside what was indeed a hair saloon. A little man with huge smile approached us and said, “Hello, hello. Hair cut, shave, manicure?”

“Massage,” Eric and I said.

“Yes, yes, massage,” he said and pulled out two tickets and wrote down our orders like one would write down an order for a cheesesteak sandwich.

“Ten dollar each,” he said.

We both paid him. Then he led us through the salon and into another room. Ten to twelve women sat on a concrete floor, using various pieces of carpet for cushioning, and watching a small black and white television. All of them wear wearing traditional silk Vietnamese dresses and all of them were beautiful.

The small man barked some orders in Vietnamese and two of the girls jumped up and led us up some wooden stairs. We went into a long room with six massage tables. There was already one masseuse in there with a large white guy who had no hair. He was getting a regular massage at the time.

I had kind of figured that something like this would be done in private, but I was open to new things. The women told us to undress and get under the white sheet on a massage table. Then they turned around while we did this.

After we were both on our tables, they proceeded with the massages. Don’t get me wrong, the massages were excellent. We first got the full rubdown with oil. Then they stood on us with their bare feet and cracked everything that needed to be cracked. Finally, we got the more mellow hand massage. Very relaxing.

The bald guy who was already in the room finished with his massage before us. I avoided looking over at him, but I had not heard any sounds that would suggest that he gotten a hand job. He dressed and his masseuse led him out of the room. Now, I was thinking one of two things: he either didn’t want the hand job or the sexual stuff happened in another room. I shared my thoughts with Eric and we agreed it must be the latter.

Our massages were completed after 45 minutes. We got dressed and were lead happily out of the room, thinking we were going to private rooms for hand jobs.

This didn’t happen. Right outside the massage room, the ladies started really pouring on the charm. They were hanging all over us and giggling. They didn’t speak English very well, but I did hear one of them say five dollars. That seemed the going rate from what we heard, so we each pulled out five dollars. They both seemed very happy, kissed us on the cheeks, and then said good bye. Apparently, they were just asking for a five dollar tip, because they went back to watching the black and white television and forgot about us.

The little man with the big smile popped out of nowhere. “Yes, yes, good, good,” he said. “Would you like a shave, a haircut? Look good for the girls.”

How does one argue that he thought he was paying five dollars extra for a hand job? Especially with people who barely speak the same language as you.

We said no to his offers for haircuts and shaves.

Once outside, Eric reasoned that $15 for massages was, after all, a great price compared to what they run in the States. I agreed with him and felt better. Besides, I could always tell people back home that I paid for a hand job in Vietnam. How would they know any better?

Semester at Sea:

1. Beating The Hell Out Of A Japanese Penguin
2. Losing The Yak Race
3. An American Dancing Fool In China
4. The Time I Couldn’t Even Pay For a Handjob

Semester at Sea official website

I expected factories. I expected the straight faces of working stiffs. I expected huge pictures of Mao. But what I got was the Asian version of Manhattan, a relatively small island with more skyscrapers than Arizona and New Mexico have combined. It was a bustling metropolis with a mixing pot of every race and creed in the book.

One of my friends, an economics major, told me that technically Hong Kong isn’t communist. He said that there’s way too much money in Hong Kong and even the Chinese, with their strong principles, wouldn’t dare give up that money and make it communist. So one would think once I got there, that I would just forget about communism and revel in the epitome of free enterprise. That was not the case. I was there when they were celebrating fifty years of communism in China.

There were banners up all over promoting the celebration. I can’t read Cantonese but people told me that’s what the banners said. So, there they were. Banners hanging from skyscrapers. Banners next to the Coca-Cola signs that wallpaper the city. Banners over the McDonalds’. Banners over the street markets. Banners over the ATMs. All things that are not in the Communist Manifesto. That is, I imagine they’re not in there, I’m waiting for it to come out on the books-on-tape series. There were even banners over their dance clubs. Their dance clubs that stayed open all night and peddled cheap booze like a drunken Irish vendor.

And it was in these dance clubs that I learned to love communism. We partied all night, dancing and drinking and celebrating 50 years of communism. Right in the heart of free enterprise, right next to billion dollar companies that own sweat shops all across Southeast Asia, we danced the electric slide with giggling Chinese girls.

Communism or no communism, Beijing or Hong Kong, it seems that most Chinese people come from the same conservative stock. My American friends and I would walk into these dance clubs that looked the same as any dance club in the United States. There was a bar complete with bottles of booze, bartenders, and cocktail waitresses. There were speakers with loud techno music blaring and a DJ was in his booth, bobbing his head up and down with this headphones on. There was a dance floor with colored lights spinning around it. There were people. But there was no people out on the dance floor.

A few Long Island Ice Teas in us, my friend Russ and me, shrugged at each other and just went out and started dancing. Neither of us are good dancers. We were those kids in high school still trying to learn the running man five years too late. I really don’t have the slightest idea how to dance. I was just moving whatever body part I felt like moving at that time and hoping that it would somehow coordinate to the music.

Despite out poor dancing skills, people from the bar started to gather around and watch. And not watch like people watch the town drunk, not pointing and laughing, but watching with genuine interest.

So we pulled a couple girls out on the floor with us. There was some resistance at first, but before you knew it, they were dancing too. And, wow, were they bad. They just flailed body parts around like they were in the middle of a mosh pit. But we didn’t care, we just gave them some room and kept dancing.

Pretty soon more women joined in. Then the guys joined came out. At first I thought they might be pissed at us for stealing their dates, but no, they just wanted to dance. Chinese businessmen brought out extra Heinekens and gave them to us and we toasted. I had bought a velvet leopard-print hat earlier that day from a street vendor. I had been using it as a prop most the night, rubbing it around on my head and spinning it on my finger. The guys who brought us the drinks pointed to it and I let them borrow it. You would have thought I had given them a foreign artifact the way they looked at it and smiled. Little did they realize that they could buy one down the street for about two dollars.

Now the dance floor was full and Russ and I were the center. We did the running man, they did the running man. Russ shuffled to the left, they shuffled to the left. I did the ‘lawn mower’ and the ‘windmill’, they did the ‘lawn mower’ and the ‘windmill’. I freaked like Jay-Z, they freaked back. One time I looked over at Russ and he had a girl on each side of him. He was the fortune in the fortune cookie.

This went on all night. They couldn’t speak English and we couldn’t speak Cantonese, but that was all right because we spoke the international language of bad dancing. So you can say what you want to about communism and you can talk all about how much fun you had at Mardi Gras or at a Fourth of July party. But you haven’t experience anything like celebrating 50 years of Chinese Communism in Hong Kong. I’ll be about seventy when they celebrate 100 years. I just hope at seventy, I can still do the electric slide.

Semester at Sea:

1. Beating The Hell Out Of A Japanese Penguin
2. Losing The Yak Race
3. An American Dancing Fool In China
4. The Time I Couldn’t Even Pay For a Handjob

Semester at Sea official website

It’s that paranoid confluence of having an eighties flashback and catching the Chicks on Speed in concert which leaves the audience practicing cutesy weirdo dance moves all the way home, hoping around to anything with a beat. The Chicks on Speed who bring their stylish mix of music, video art and tarty venom (and cleverly unsubtle sales pitches everywhere they go.)

Originally conceived as an art installation project, COS have hair-sprayed themselves beyond academia into a seemingly unlimited statement of fashion and social criticism. But how serious are they taking this movement?

According to Melissa Logan, Euro Trash Girl is a complex narrative with a comedic storyline. “David Leurie more precisely Camper Van Bethoven’s track is about a Euro bumming around guy and is totally self pitying. This wasn’t written for girls to find each other, but then we had to turn the poor me ness into toughness so we would want to listen to it, so we could have a cool anthem.”

The band actually started out as a ‘fake-band’ and a merchandising project in 1997. They sell paper dresses on their Web site for $86.”

The shaking aerobics is part of the fun, although second hand smoke does deter from an actual healthy exercise, the event itself is pure visual and oral stimulus, video projections, re-enforced infomercial video art, promoting some of the wares of the COS Empire. An empire that consists of a record label, t-shirts, vinyls, bumper stickers and of course, cotton undies. “The fashion we make derives from the stage outfits, but if we find a good pattern we are likely to screenprint a batch of t-shirts for the producers, then some scarves for the web shop & the shops we sell to. We don’t do seasons, we do out-fits: Birmingham, white leather, Bic Camra, Le bon marche. As for what we wear, we each have a airplane outfit, & it’s not from H&M.”

It seems at worst the Chicks on Speed emulate an 80′s fashion frivolity minced with the occasionally predictable early 1990′s C+C music factory monotony. However, their live presence distorts all the possible musical criticism, they are so rabid with colours, movement and eclectically distorted energy you can’t help but enjoy every minute of it. Wardrobe is a big part of the Chicks on Speed live shows. “I bought a washing machine last week, I made my friends come & try to bargain down the price from $220 to $200 with delivery not bad huh? And yes, when we come back from tour first thing is to get it all washed so hopefully it’s dry by the time we have to pack again.”

The Chicks on Speed are as much entrepreneurs as kareoke media darlings. They have a record company, and recently put out Feminist Sweepstakes, the new album by the New York based band LE TIGRE.

Logan says the recording process doesn’t change their improvised approach to making noise. “Its still spontaneous in the studio, one is just projecting in a different way, one is not reaching to the back of the concert hall, one is reaching the listener on the other side.”

Articulating their idiosyncratic language by merging performance, graphic design and feminist/consumerist politics with the seemingly disparate sounds of early 80′s New Wave/NYC, electronica, DIY punk, disco, pop and Digital Hardcore.

In 1999 the NME voted their first release single of the week, but does their fashion speak louder than their sound?

“We write a lot about marketing strategies, about commercialism, sometimes we want it to sound commercial like in Sell-Out. At the same time its a political song (it’s about systems of ripping off & being ripped off).At the deep down basis of politics is freedom, & we are very conscious of freedom & sometimes the lack of it, & the respect for those who put out there necks, & revulsion to puppets & sheep, the sneechers & leachers, we know who you are.”

Will Save Us All!, released in April 2000, brings us all up to speed, and at nearly 72 minutes in length via 33 tracks, The Re-releases of the Un-releases claims the throne as the definitive Chicks on Speed document. The single"FASHION RULES" on Chicks On Speed Records was just released and a new album on the horizon. in the next few months.

For more on shows, new releases and merchandising check out the Chicks on Speed website on-line empire.

I met the guys at the bar at the Pink Cadillac around 10:00. Gabe had just puked on it. Luckily the bartender didn’t notice at the time because it was Labor Day weekend and everybody and their mother was in Puerto Penasco, Mexico. The bar was packed with people and the bartender had shuffled down the bar to help the irate mob that was demanding stronger drink, no ice, no water, no chaser. Gabe had been sucking down tequila like a recovering smack addict sucking down methadone. Shawn had suggested changing it up a bit and getting a shot called a cherry bomb. I have no idea what’s in a cherry bomb. But it seems appropriately named since it blew the insides of Gabe’s stomach up and out his mouth.

When I got there, they were more ducking-out, rather than waiting for me. They didn’t want to be linked to the puddle of vomit on the bar.

“C’mon, Gabe puked on the bar, we need to go somewhere else,” Jimmy told me. And that is how we ended up at Margaritavilla, a more mellow, Jimmy-Buffet-themed bar.

There we loaded up on cheap beers and tequila, transforming each of us into easy prey for Mexican business sharks that were circling the bar, just waiting for the weak ones to show themselves. And show ourselves we did. Pretty soon there stood a beautiful Mexican woman in front of us. She smiled. We did our best to work our numb faces into smiles for her.

“Hey guys,” she said in impeccable English. “You look like you’re having a good time. May I sit down?”

We all clamored at once to get a chair for her, but she already had one and was sitting down. She had a clipboard with a pencil tied to it by a piece of string. She had four fliers that she handed out to each of us. The fliers had a picture of a ship on them and at the top read in bold black letters, KAYAK RACE: WINNER WILL RECEIVE A FREE SUNSET CRUISE. FREE FOOD. FREE DRINKS.

She began talking. I followed her for a couple sentences: she was selling tickets to be in the kayak race, which was the next day at 10 am. Then I noticed how full her lips were and how they were painted red. And I noticed how tight her shirt was, and she was showing a lot of cleavage, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t wearing a bra because I could she her nipples poking out.

In the middle of thinking all of this, Gabe nudged me. I looked up and noticed they all had their wallets out. She had sold them, they were entering, it was twenty dollars a piece. Before I fully realized what was happening, I too had my wallet out and was handing her a twenty. She wrote our names down and told us that we were lucky to get on the list because it was filling up fast. Then she asked if she could have the fliers back, they were the only copies she had.

After she left, we sat quietly for a minute, forcing our booze-soaked minds to compute what had just transpired. Finally, we looked at each other and started congratulating ourselves. We were going to be in a kayak race. Us. Four average twenty-year old white males, who came down to Mexico only with the purpose of getting drunk. Just to escape our usual, mundane lives back in the States. There was nothing special about us. We weren’t exciting people, we never picked up on girls at parties. We never tried. We brought nothing to the table. We would stay in our own group and drink and tell each other the same stories. We were never the life of the party. People remembered us as ‘the guys in the corner.’ We were wallpaper. We were accessories.

But now we were something else, we were kayak racers. And we let the other people in the bar know about it. We started talking to girls. They seemed impressed. We told guys sitting at the bar and they gave us high-fives. They bought us a round of drinks. We bought them a round of drinks. We bought drinks for girls. They smiled at us and we smiled back. We tried to flirt and to the best of our knowledge, they flirted back.

We were kayak racers, however, somewhere in the night, our drunken slurs transformed it into yak racers. We laughed, the girls laughed. Yes, we were yak racers and we began talking about racing Mexican Yaks, a rare species, down the beach. Jimmy saddled a imaginary yak and began riding it around the bar, yelling ‘gidde-up yak, gidde-up’. I jumped on Gabe’s back and began riding him around the bar. Other people in the bar noticed and laughed, and few people yelled, ‘woo!’ More drinks were bought and drank and the night becomes hazy and eventually fades out.

I awoke to Shawn’s blurred outline. The responsible one of the group, he was getting us up at 9:30 so that we could get to the race. Jimmy and Gabe were throwing up. I felt like elves had crawled inside my head and were pounding on my brain with miniature hammers. But Shawn, also the frugal one in the group, insisted, we had already paid twenty dollars each.

We arrived at the beach, pale and sick and wanting nothing to do with any of this. Nobody from the night before was there. Not the lady who had sold us on the idea, not the girls who had promised to cheer us on, not the guys who had bought us drinks. There were just two men, one Mexican, one white. The Mexican guy was tending to four kayaks. The white guy told us that we were the only ones that had shown, so we would be the only ones racing. Which was cool, because at least one of us would win. The race was to paddle out to this orange buoy about a 100 yards out and then paddle back.

The race was ugly. Shawn was the only one who completed it. He had already reached the buoy and was on his way back when I gave up, about 50 yards out. Gabe was, for all intensive purposes, merely paddling in circles. Jimmy was dry heaving while his paddle floated away from him.

When Shawn reached the shore, the white guy said, “Well, since you’re the only ones that showed this morning, how ’bout I give you all a free sunset cruise this evening.”

We had all won. I hadn’t felt like that since I was in little league and they told us that we were all winners no matter who scored the most runs and I believed them.

That evening we rode our sunset cruise, the four of us, sipping our free Coronas and looking our on the orange Mexican sunset. We were no longer four average white guys, but kayak racers. Winning kayak racers.

It really didn’t matter later when we found out that anyone can take that sunset cruise for fifteen dollars.

Semester at Sea:

1. Beating The Hell Out Of A Japanese Penguin
2. Losing The Yak Race
3. An American Dancing Fool In China
4. The Time I Couldn’t Even Pay For a Handjob

Semester at Sea official website

From there, it was a slippery slope. My father also supplied me with the food-for-thought that a person of but one eye was a “cyclops” (which concept rivaled that of Merrick on my top ten list of horrific imagery), and his Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Human Oddities paperback (not to mention the subsequent visit to the San Antonio Believe It Or Not Museum!) of course fed my cautious interest like mad, MAD, MAD I TELL YOU! At 5 or 6, every time I tried to draw a cyclopic face, I ended up spooking myself so mightily that I had to employ someone else to even destroy the picture for me. By the time I was 10, though I was somewhat more resilient to my own one-eyes, I found myself drawing up a page of melting, wrinkled faces with beady, misplaced eyes, which I labeled “DEFORMOMANIA” and promptly folded up and hid from my own vision. The vagaries of grade school, what?

Things came to a head at the start of 1992. The January issue of Discover Magazine somehow made its way into our home and the first thing I noticed about it was a little piece called “The Mütter of All Museums.” Seems the T. D. Mütter collection at the Philadelphia College of Physicians was right up my alley. Giant skeletons, conjoined livers, wax models of horrible malformations and … glory be! Real little malformations; the bodies of mortally abnormal infants born in the last century and preserved for posterity in massy jars. The pilgrimage instinct hooked itself to my heart and would not be assuaged until what day I could actually stand in the midst of that shrine to medical anomalies, &c.

Certes, there were other fascinating teratalogic tidbits in my life after that life-altering article. A plethora of books about deformity from both the view of medicine as well as the carnival, a handful of high school discussions and one very chilling video (footage of a harlequin fetus). I learnt of the mythical “Monster of Ravenna” and — though strictly speaking this is no more related to my present topic of deformity than, say, the monsters in Revelation — I fell for it as well. And then, of course, the cornucopia that the World Wide Internet (inevitably a boon for all pursuits) brought straight to my own home. But Mütter, Morbid Mecca, loomed yet.

Allah be praised. In the Summer of 1999, my family acquiesced to my suggestion that PA would be a dandy vacation spot (mainly because, coincidentally, there were actually points of interest there for them too) and we miraculously ended up in The City of Brotherly Love Among Other Things. The wait was over six years long, and I had to endure a day of interminable windings through Amish country in search of a single ancestral tombstone (sheesh) but it was a bargain nonetheless. I was free to pay homage to the Soap Lady (you may have seen her on the TLC television special on mummies “Unwrapped!“), the shelves full of ugly babies (beauteous all the same), and all the other awesome medical specimens.

As you might have guessed, such a downright … religious … experience was bound to stir up my artistic urges, and I managed to squiggle out a couple of verse compositions on the subject of ‘wrong’ foeti I have known and loved. But by far, the greatest part of my autistic, er, artistic output was far more practical. As photography at the TDM was prohibited to the masses (for whatever the hell reason), I had to make do. Fortunately I had the foresight to tote along a sketchbook and pencil, with which I captured (albeit hurriedly) a few of the more interesting misshapen lumps; et voilà mes trophées!

Drawings:

• TB Spine
• Cornu cutaneum
• Elephantiasis arabum
• Eye polypus
• Hernia cerebri
• Exencephaly
• Cyclopia
• Otocephaly
• Lithopædion
• Acephalus acardius
• Sirenomelus
• Buttbaby

Reprinted from Les paGes fainéants

Wanting a break from the heat and ‘beautiful people’ of Arizona State University, I took my financial aid money and some money donated to me by a well-to-do aunt and grandmother, and went on the University of Pittsburgh’s Semester at Sea program in the Fall of 1999. It’s a program that puts 500 college kids from all over the country on an old cruise ship, adds to the mix some professors, who teach classes while at sea, and then sets sail around the world, stopping in ten different countries. Five hundred college kids, both sexes, in very close proximity, hormones pumping, booze swirling, with only the globe to stop you, no wonder this program has been slanged Semester at Sex, Mattress at Sea, The Booze Cruise, Slackers at Sea (you get the idea). I heard them all and went anyway.

And before you ask . . .no, I did not get to meet the Road Rules Semester at Sea people. I went a semester late for MTV. CNN was on my boat and did 10 shows that aired so late at night that only my mother, a pot of coffee in her shaking hand, would stay up to watch. The first part of the trip was a two week sail across the Pacific, from Vancouver BC to Kobe, Japan. Two weeks cooped with people we barely knew, weather not so great, learning about the beautiful, foreign culture of Japan. We hit the streets of Japan half-crazed. And did we flock to the beautiful Buddhist monasteries or the Kobe Tower or the museums?

No, the most popular thing in the first couple hours of dock time was the beer-vending machines. Japan, a beautiful, respectful culture, that trusts its youth to not buy the beer if they are not eighteen and its general populace to not get drunk in public. They, of course, hadn’t taken into account American college students. The majority of us huddled around these ‘wonder machines’ and plunged our foreign coinage into its guts. In return it gave us large cans of Asahi beer.

Drunk on beer, the foreign culture, and the fact that we were on dry land, we wandered around, in our individual small groups, looking for something that caught our eye. Something did. Down the street, we saw these Japanese teenagers beating the hell out of this inflatable penguin outside a donut shop. It looked like one of those blowup punching toys that kids own. The things with sand in the bottom, so when you hit them over, they pop right back up, and then you hit them down again, and so on and so forth. The entire two-week cruise across the Pacific, our professors preached to us that if you wanted to blend in, we should just watch the locals and do exactly as they do. When in Rome . . . .

So we ran over to them and started to punch the penguin. It bent backward, sideways, popped back up, plastic smile still plastered on its face, wanting more, not afraid of us Westerners. And the Japanese teens, two boys, four girls, loved it. They cheered us on and the boys joined right in, pummeling the inflatable penguin harder each time, trying to impress us or the girls that were with them.

After minutes of kicking the ass out of this inflatable penguin one of the boys stopped us and summoned up all the English he knew. He told us his name, his friend’s name, and that the cute girl next to him was his girlfriend and her name (all of the names I cannot pronounce, let alone spell). The girl put her head down and smiled.

During his broken speech, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that some of the donut shop employees were grouped up and looking in our direction, pointing and shrugging. I began to get the sneaking suspicion that something was wrong.

When choosing which locals to emulate, it might have been a better idea to not pick teenagers, who of which I was now starting to realize were drunk. All we had learned about Japanese culture being traditional and conservative, that youths have total respect for elders and the laws they produce, was starting to blur into bullshit.

If these teenagers had spoke English, they would be no different than any other kid you seeing kicking around outside of a American corner store. They were teenage boys, drunk on probably a beer or two, and were trying to impress teenage girls. I had traveled two weeks across the largest ocean to see this. Really, the big difference between this situation and one in the United States was that the donut store employees took a few minutes to summon up enough courage to tell us to beat it. One finally came out and spoke sternly to the Japanese teenagers, pointing at the happy, inflatable penguin multiple times. The penguin was not something to be beat on, but an advertising symbol.

The Japanese teens shrugged it off. They were maybe a little embarrassed, but nothing like I thought they would be. Not that Hollywood is a good source for anything at all, but movies always make it seem that the Japanese youth are so worried about bringing shame on their family that they rarely act out. A society that has always seemed so different to me before, seemed oddly familiar. I felt like I had been there before, a hundred different times in high school. Soon one of the girls pointed at her watch. Our broken translator turned to us and gestured toward the subway, that they must get going, otherwise their parents would be angry. To display angry to us, he growled and leered like a bear. And they were off. High-schoolers with an after-school curfew, not so different than what I was used to.

Alone with the penguin, its plastic eyes staring at us, we felt awkward and left.

Semester at Sea:

1. Beating The Hell Out Of A Japanese Penguin
2. Losing The Yak Race
3. An American Dancing Fool In China
4. The Time I Couldn’t Even Pay For a Handjob

Semester at Sea official website

1. The First Nail In Bowling’s Filthy Stinky Second Hand Coffin

Wherein the birth of bowling as art in Toronto was born unto us via the gutter some time ago at the hands of a then 16-year old bright-eyed boy and worked its way like a tequila worm caterpillar this September 8th at the Lola Launch.

What kind of whore am I to do all this, to act like some go-bot Moses of the bowling world, musing the sycophantic ex-strippers who bowled with them, down there in the beastly underworld. I’ve retired to golf shirts and strong Martinis poolside in Hades.

Rarely it seems, bowling is an excepted past times. Now there are exceptions. I will run over a few in further columns, particularly when I finish my other assignment, and the next columns feature, (an extensive review of b-movie Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama Comedy, 1987).

If you dare venture to Avenue Road and buy this video, wherever you find it, and see how easily mislead the youth of the world is, in this the bowling uglies, these sexy sluts will definitely colour you dirty. Not a good flick for a first date, but what bowling movie is? What is it about bowling that is so impotent, sexless.

2. Why The Gimmick Must Die & Why I Don’t Give A Fuck

In a recent issue of Playboy they had the girls out bowling mostly naked, but this to mean is just so deliberate and unreal. Even that fucking video by Soul Decision "GRAVITY" with their fucking bowling sex glam I’m so fucking cute I can go bowling and get laid by mid-twenties hotties, ah fuck yourself. You little fucking assholes couldn’t get laid playing baseball in a dirty cheerleaders in heat theme rave, so give it up.

Fame, also known to some lucky Torontonians as Tabitha Kane, who decked herself up good and dirty for the Lola bowling show said in a recent park interview that bowling was ‘a lesbian sport’ whatever that means.

When she said this it reminding me of my summer a few years back trying to recruit a master race of Lesbians to re-invent and take over the sports entertainment world. Of course it also reminded me of Naked Lesbian Athletes Play XXX Bowling: The Lola Launch proved that under the right light, in the least amount of clothing, perfumed in a mockish reducible of mutual respect, without the vile scent of discount shoes re-sentenced to feet, the dirty cheese dispensing breath of refried beans and poor quality cola machines, second hand lung-gun smoke, the dire balding entering and re-entering washrooms and alleys with their toothless worry and philosophy, the whining train whistle pitched cries of malnourished preemies in thirty-second diapers filling over into the fault line – bowling is okay.

3. Play With Your Balls

# 17 in the charts at FREE ARCADE. Leave me alone. Conquer your own worn out life. What else can I tell you? Read real articles I’ve written?

4. Lost In The Eighties Where The Devil Ball Fucko Sport Belongs

So yeah, I don’t know what to say. Order my crappy bowling films. This will be the first year I don’t have one at Canzine, maybe this is a good thing. If I could have made a movie over again, like they made Planet of the Apes, Psycho, I would make this one, but with Sarah Polly, Heather Graham, that girl from Josie and the Pussy Cats and Christina Ricci. Maybe Parker Posey as well.

5. The Trial (or The Great Rock & Bowl Swindle)

THURSDAY APRIL 6, 2000 TORONTO, CANADA. It started at 10:00. At 10:15 I was asked to leave for I was a key witness for the defense.

I didn’t go on the stand until 3:00 pm. I hadn’t spoken to anyone and was not informed until after my testimony that Mr. X had told the court the whole incident revolved around him being so drunk he thought the guy he hit was his bowling nemesis Dragan.

Not a word of a lie. Well, he was lying, but he did say it in court. So I go up there, lucid and clear and not mentioning bowling and then sent away. As I’m driving home the phone wrings and so we find out that Mr. X is found guilty of assault. (3 months house arrest)

The judge says to Mr. X "I would have believed you and sided with you except for your dumb and stupid bowling story which I didn’t believe for a minute." Scooby Doo ending, yes. Trade mark infringement? And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for bowling…. Grounds Keeper Willy. Unreal.

6. Life After Bowling / Bowling After Life

Was it all a bad b-movie? Maybe. Maybe if you are in the Toronto area, and you have a decent lawyer or psychiatrist, you can start a support group and contact the Jesus of bowling, take him for coffee, he will sit you down ever so slowly and begin the story. Like in Young Guns II.

It Wouldn’t Kill You To Stop

1. Bending The Medium
2. It’s No Gimmick: Interview with Bowling For Soup
3. The Final Nightmare