Me Head

Wednesday, April 30, 2003
9:45 PM by Michael Mason link

Acoustic Article by Acoustic Ross

If ever Me Head could be put to music, it would sound like Acoustic Ross. A featured performer for the once-defunct-but-now-stuff-is-happening Show Us Your Shorts, Ross has generously lent us his song "83 Ribbons" to be used as a post.

Thanks Ross, you're swell. We hope you make it big or small, whichever is better.




Monday, April 28, 2003
12:48 AM by Brian McCloskey link

The reaction

My best friend at school was Paul McCool. A matter of initials: most teachers would have the boys sit in alphabetical order, so from 1980 until 1988 McCloskey and McCool sat next to each other in almost every class. When I say “best friend at school”, I mean just that. We didn’t see each other outside school: in eight years, we visited each other’s homes maybe half a dozen times.

Like Nick Carraway and his father, we were unusually communicative in a reserved way. After a couple of years, when we had said everything worth saying and when each of us knew what the other was thinking, we spoke only when absolutely necessary. Our friendship involved a lot of silence.

Once, during one of many otherwise wordless lunch breaks, Paul said: “A man walked into a pub. He got a black eye. It was a metal pub.”

I never knew if this was something he had heard somewhere else or something he had thought of earlier and had been waiting to share. I always preferred to think that it was spontaneous, that the thought had come to him then and there and that I had been witness to a moment of genius.

Clearly it was genius. Simply by substituting “pub” for “bar”, he had transformed a piece of silly schoolyard wordplay --- a joke that everybody knew but which, by that age, we had all grown out of --- into something abstract and absurd.

Not everybody was convinced of its brilliance. Every time I repeated the joke I got the same reaction: the look which said “What kind of idiot are you?” and the response, “That’s wrong: it’s ‘A man walks into a bar’. You can’t walk into a metal pub.”

I tried to defend the genius of the joke: if you know that it should be “bar”, then you should realise I’m not getting the old joke wrong. This is a new joke. But nobody ever got it.

Until one lazy evening in the summer of 1997. During one of many epic transatlantic telephone conversations with somebody I had never met, I told the joke. And, without question or explanation, the reaction came through on the line from Boston: the woman who would become Mrs. McCloskey laughed at my favourite joke.

Of course, she was stoned.



Thursday, April 24, 2003
9:33 PM by Michael Mason link

Upcoming Sequels in the Bulletproof Monk Franchise

-- Anti-Ballistic Bishop
-- Gildedgroin Guru
-- Biomedically Sterile Rabbi
-- Very Prepared Prophet
-- Bad Mofo Bodhisattva
-- Neoprene Non-Denominational Preacher




Sunday, April 20, 2003
8:36 PM by Syg Pound link

Insight

Nice people scare me.




Saturday, April 19, 2003
11:12 AM by Emma Nicholas link

Necessary

Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy, suggested that if you could drive a person into uneasiness during therapy, then the possibility for growth and development would become a probability. Likewise, when we catch a glimpse of art that turns our bones and twists our joints, the experience is transforming.

For those of you unfamiliar with Jeffrey Sharlett's writings, it's time to familiarize yourself. He recently received the honor of having his article posted at Harper's Magazine online. His forthcoming book is Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible.

Sharlett's article, Jesus Plus Nothing, bent me to a certain uneasiness, and for that I am grateful.

Wednesday, April 16, 2003
6:25 AM by Emma Nicholas link

A Word from Wilhelm Murg

My favorite memory of John was turning him onto ROBOT MONSTER in the Infinity Press office the day I met him. The film is a personal favorite of mine and is considered one of the worst movies of all-time; the creature is a 300 pound man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet on his head adorned by TV rabbit ears. We were talking about how film doesn't have to be perfect and I just happened to have received ROBOT MONSTER on DVD to review that day. I popped it in and we laughed at the same parts with about the same intensity. That's when I knew John got the jokes, not only in the film, but in life itself.




Sunday, April 13, 2003
7:23 PM by Michael Mason link

Fragments of John Galusha, A Tribute

The same mad nightstorm that rattled homes and shook apart fences last Saturday was the same storm that undid a universe of lives in Tulsa. Amid the hail and thunder, John Galusha’s breath slipped away, and I can’t remember feeling so weighted. John was an artist unbound by method and medium; his life and his art blurred together, making it impossible to distinguish between the two.

Over a February beer, John once explained to me that he didn’t so much paint a painting as breathe one. He’d let the brush rest in his fingers, fix his eyes past the white, and somehow let the canvas draw the colors from his hand. The important thing, he said, was to relent, to not interfere with the process, but to let it move through your breath. A close look at his recent Portland series reveals his very breath in motion. The abstractions of blue swirls and crests suggest a sensitivity and insight to which all artists aspire.

Pronounced softly, the Latin word for breath, spirare, feels like a rolling breeze. It finds its wings in words like inspiration, or in-breath, and expiration, the out-breath. Since I’ve known John, I’ve drawn inspiration from him. We made films together, we ranted about local injustices on Brady barstools, and more often than not, he’d encourage my own efforts with his trademark exclamation, “Outstanding!”

Once, after a satisfying dinner at Binh Le’s, John pulled a fortune from its casing, tearing it cleanly in half, claiming that the fragments were almost always more beautiful on their own. I remember mine read “…and go to the end of your thoughts.” John smiled. He knew intrinsically that the fragments were fine on their own feet, as though they didn’t need completeness in order to fly.

Now that John’s life has passed, all of us who knew him are left with similar fragments—parts of memories, paintings and sketches, notes and scribbles. The fragments are more than beautiful; they’re inspiring. And with the inspiration comes the in-breath, John’s breath, once gone, and not gone at all, but present as our own spirits.