One Nation...I Fear no Beer

I’ll BUY you a crackpipe…just don’t break my spark plugs please.

You know the recession has hit when the crack smokers of San Francisco are unable to purchased low cost pipes and must resort to the vandalism of my motorcycle. The scenario goes like this: coming back to the bike after a night out at the club or some other function and trying to start up. It is a little slow to turn over and seems to be running funny when it does fire up. First course of action in this diagnosis is to look down and find a plug wire dangling unattached. Further investigation reveals the porcelain broken off of the spark plug, still threaded in with the exposed copper wire protruding at a bizarre angle. Break off the porcelain part anyway, and you have a little jagged edge tube that you can smoke crack with and cut your lips while you blister them.
The engine design of the 86’ Yamaha Radian leaves the spark plugs in a vulnerable position to predatory rock smokers. Many bikes have the plugs set in a deeper, small space to where you need a deep socket to install and remove them. If they aren't just covered by the fairings all together. This makes a crack pipe/plug jacking a more work intensive affair and adds no small measure of difficulty to the procedure.
The first time it happened, I wanted to strangle the perp. I started to carry extras after the third time that some fool knocked me down from 4 cylinders to 3. It has became a recurrence that I have managed to get somewhat used to, strangely enough. Due in part to the realization that getting angry didn’t seem to help the situation. All the same though, if you need to something to blaze your white pebble with, hit me up here on the blog and I will BUY you a crackpipe. I’ve seen them for sale in a store downtown for .99 cents, and that is half the cost of a replacement spark plug. Take this offer into consideration before you baptize my bike in the aftermath of your singular need.

Street Gallery...the Versioned map goes on display

I took a picture of this guy (I'm the shadow in the bottom right corner) and hung a few copies of my California map retool in his street gallery. He was actually quite friendly in spite of looking pretty apprehensive here.

California; Retooled

I took a topographic map of California and versioned it.

Who is Left Hand Up?

View the image and tell me if you are any closer to figuring that out.

Makin' space, cutting thru the dust

There was a time when the mission was to beef up the record collection to add some bulk and heft. Amoeba records worked quite nicely for that, and it weren’t long before the whole load got massive and damn near unmanageable. All my good cuts were getting lost in the stacks and any attempt at organization was quickly reversed as soon as I moved again. Trying to organize and make use of limited space got a touch stressful at times, apartment living and all. The source of this vinyl avalanche was of course the fifty cent records at Amoeba. Coming home with a BOX of records every day for four days in a row during one particular week was staggering. And I did it all the time. There are no vinyl listening stations at Amoeba so I am limited to the names of producers and labels that I recognize and things I don’t recognize, but take a chance on anyway. Working like this, I bought a fair amount of truly horrible electronic music that I dispensed with immediately and refused to allow into my collection. Then there were a lot of records that were not sterling selections, but with the desire to make my collection larger, I found something about the tracks worth keeping around. This is how I got into trouble. Along with all of these dodgy sounds tho’, I found some right fuckin’ amazing records that made ALL of that dust inhalation worthwhile.
Over the last couple of months I have been pulling all questionable selections and giving them another listen to determine whether they are worth keeping around. Taking notes and putting on stickers to mark tracks. Taking paint to some records where there is only one serviceable track and blotting out the rest with colors. Thereby saving me the effort of going thru tracks that are not playable next time.
I am getting closer to finishing task and it has taken a lot longer than I counted on, but the extra space in our apartment and my head is nyce. Except when I spilled paint on that one really choice dark house track. I’m still twisted up inside when I think about that. I have uncovered many choice pieces from their hiding places and discovered a lot of great ones that I was unaware that I even owned, there was too much. Amoeba seems to have raised the prices on most of these records to a dollar however, and the quality has dropped, but no matter. I can just be selective now that the collection is leaner and has lost all of that dead weight.

Roll Call

The toilet roll situation at my last residence got out of hand at one point.