Surreally, can you paradigm?

PORAB

2010-01-30T16:32:00.002-05:00

Location:E Grand Blvd,Detroit,United States

Merry Christmas, Sir.

2009-01-28T21:24:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas, Sir.
Originally uploaded by ExcuseMySarcasm

On this past Christmas, 2008, I made a visit to the Michigan Central Station Depot in Detroit.

Sarcasm does the Dequindre Cut

2009-01-27T00:03:00.001-05:00

Sarcasm does the Dequindre Cut
Originally uploaded by ExcuseMySarcasm

slideshow

single color stencil tutorial

2009-01-02T01:45:00.014-05:00

"A wall has always been the best place to publish your work."

Banksy

MATERIALS: picture, cutting mat, exacto, glue, paint, file folder

This tutorial will show you how to create a single-color stencil. The first step is to get a hold of a photograph with a high level of contrast.
If your photo doesn't have a high level of contrast you might want to tinker with the lightness/contrast. I use GIMP. It's a free, open-source, photo manipulation program. After adjusting the contrast use the Desaturate option under Colors. Experiment with the different versions until you achieve your desired result. Create a new layer and use the sobel line detection filter. The resulting image is reversed so use Invert to make the lines black and the background white. Set the screen for this layer to multiplicity.
Print out your image and use glue or spray adhesive to affix it to your file folder. Save yourself a world of frustration and purchase a non-slip mat to cut on. Also, make sure your cutting blade is sharp. You may have to refresh the blade several times during cutting. Try to avoid cutting off digits as they may be needed for future steps.
In this picture I focused on cutting out the light areas. Your image may have you focusing on the dark. Once all the light (or dark) is cut out your stencil is complete.
For installation plan on carrying a wet stencil. I use a normal art portfolio folder lined with chicken wire. Make sure you are protected from the health damaging chemicals associated with aerosol spray paint by wearing a paint filter and gloves, the white doctor mask is not enough to stop the chemicals. Or use a roller with chalk to stay safe.
You should scout the location. Once you've found one use your chosen color to apply sparse thin coats from a distance of eight to ten inches. Use less paint than you think you should.

Spending time with Jesus and his pet dinosaur...

2007-06-18T17:54:00.000-05:00

"Should I wear it or not?"

We were sitting in the parking lot of the newest weapon in the fundamentalists attack on main stream science: The Creation Museum.The place had kinda snuck up on us, as we had misread the map. Jahi, my navigator, had told me we had an hour to get there when we really were there in less than ten minutes. She had confused the map to my cousins with the map to the museum.

"No, I don't think you should."

Our current debate was over my t-shirt. It was bright blue with "NUKE A GODLESS COMMUNIST GAY BABY SEAL FOR CHRIST" printed across the chest. I pointed out that no one really reads it, and even if they do, 99% don't even get it. She was adamant that I attract enough weirdos as it is and that shirt would just draw them in.

"Nah, I'll go hardcore. You know, I'll refuse to make eye contact and only respond in low monosyllable barks. Works with the homeless!"

We gathered our courage, for some unexplainable reason we were both frightened to join the throngs lining up in front. There were tour groups, singing hymns, families, and just a mass of humanity moving towards the museum entrance. The security had the most sheriff looking uniforms I had ever seen, even equipped with side arms. I can't say for sure if it was a police officer with a Creation Museum badge on his shoulder or just a really official looking rent-a-cop.

We had both filled out our forms that saved us five dollars. I gladly gave my name and address, as I was hoping to get some kick ass propaganda from them. Once we got into the building, we had to wait in a line for about twenty minutes before we got the ticket counter. The lobby was very tall, and pretty narrow. There were various movie poster style picture frames hanging about and a couple assembled skeletons, one was a dinosaur and another was a rhino. The whole inside wall was made to look like stone. Jahi was bitching that I was taking the whole don't talk to me vibe to a "whole 'nother level." Frankly, lines and me don't mix, nor do I find crowds that pleasing to stand among, less so when I know that this crowd, for the most part, would have disapproved of me and my opinions...

Honestly I had expected more evidence. Shit like those Paluxy fossil footprints of man being criss crossed with a dinosaurs. But no, and I am not shitting you, I can sum up the museum just like this...

This is what science says about *insert topic of contention*
But, what if science is wrong?
This is what the bible says.

For all intents and purposes the museum capitalizes on the religious-minded's mistrust of science and its theories on time. The Bible says the earth is around 6,000 to 10,000 years old. That the fossils that man has found were actually buried during the great flood that God swept down upon his creation. Those bones are not, as science wrongly teaches, millions of years old, but just a few thousand. The language, as well, was very crafty. Everything that was talked about was designed. The eye was designed, this planet was designed, etc...

This wouldn't be so sad to see, if it wasn't for the throngs of little ones being dazzled by the smoke and mirrors. Everyone had that slick wholesome preppie look, and we were clearly marked other. I got a couple o' thumbs up and "cool" whispered at me about my faux-hawk, mostly by bored looking tweens, but the place was full of church groups. The kind of people that seem to easily glance at you disapprovingly.

The museum was a mix of video clips playing, odd art (like Graffiti Alley) and full size replicas, sometimes moving, of animals/dinosaurs/humans. The humans were always in biblical dioramas. Like Adam and Eve frolicking with lambs, prehistoric zebra horse, uh, things, dinosaurs and that obligatory snake. I got to see how God-oh, since I am here, on God, I'll mention how the speakers always loudly played and when you walked between exhibits you were nailed by this cacophony of God, God, god, GOD this and that coming from both rooms...where the fuck was I...oh, yeah, um, there was the garden, Caine murder, that big boat, that was badass with Noah loading dinosaurs onboard, and I think that was most of the big ones.

Well, the Noah one was a miniature. The truly large Ark, some queer life sized walk through object with all types of workers hammering and, well, working, the women were locked in a cage and some shady model was standing behind this pillar, all dark and serious looking, and not working. This is where Jahi said this funniest quip of the trip...I was all like what the fuck is shady up to there and she quipped back, "He's the lookout for the roaming maneating dinosaurs." God, she is badass.

By this point, about 2 1/2 hours into our tour, we were starting to get hungry, and we didn't want to support this fiasco with anymore of our cash, so we were fairly happy to get to the end. The end of the tour dumped us out into the "Dragon's Den" or lair, or, something, "Bookstore." There seemed to be this unpromoted thread that dragons were dinosaurs, and they even had a few DVDs in the bookstore selling that point. We bought a magnet with the seven Cs, a strong theme, let me see if I can google'em:

CREATION: God created galaxies, solar systems, and planets in six days.
CORRUPTION: The entrance of sin into the world brought about sickness and death in our once perfect world.
CATASTROPHE: Sin was the natural progression of man in his fallen state and the global flood destroyed all, except for Noah, his family, and the animals on the ark.
CONFUSION: Following the flood, man again disobeyed God, and people began to spread across the earth, speaking their own languages.
CHRIST & THE CROSS: Because sin brings about death, God sent his son Jesus to die in our place and rise again to defeat death. Jesus' crucifixion was his act of paying the sin debt for all.
CONSUMMATION: God promises in Scripture to do away with the corruption of man by creating a new heaven and a new earth where death and suffering no longer exist for those who have followed Jesus Christ.

We also purchased a small pin with Noah's ark having a couple of triceratops being loaded up. That was it so we wandered out to get a last shot of some Neandertal feeding a carrot to a bunny, while his pet dinosaur kept watch out.

Truly about me.

2007-06-10T22:24:00.000-05:00

I was born in Detroit. My parents were two hippies that managed a home for retarded adults. As a child my friends were all in their thirties and forties. That was fine, we were operating on the same playing field mentally, if not physically. As I grew in maturity I realized that I had a small army of man-children willing to take me as their leader. I was crowned King Fucktard. My reign was short lived as the troops were implicated in a failed assassination of Detroit Mayor Coleman Young.

Excuse my sarcasm, but ruling the retards was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Since then I've meandered from dead end job to dead end job. My father quickly shed his hippie hair and adopted a hard pro-working stance for me. I was eleven, my empire in ruins, when I was forced into slavery for a local pay if you want news rag. This was beyond easy to scheme. This led to a full Detroit News route, and I had the distinct pleasure of witnessing JOA firsthand as the Free Press and Detroit News combined forces. This heavenly moment granted me the divine pleasure of carrying several tons of combination Sunday papers across the neighborhood. Luckily for me I had retained the services of a huge mongoloid. This beast of burden easily pulled my rickshaw.

Next, I lost my manservant and began pushing carts for a local grocery store. There’s something extremely calming about pushing seventy carts through six-inches of snow while being pelted with freezing rain and dodging the old people that stole the fucking carts in the first place. Just because you fought Hitler doesn’t mean you can take your groceries to your respite home in the store’s cart. Fucking old people. This excellent resume booster led me to my next high-paying job pushing carts for a bulk grocery store. This job went from vaguely entertaining to outright religious when Sam Walton strolled in and bought the place. Something about praying and then chanting our store number, #6666, struck me as being oddly hypocritical.

I left that place to join the ranks of the mallrats. The gap offered me the chance to waste my paycheck on slave labor created hipness while trolling for teenage ass. I was let go for refusing to shave. I next tried my hand at working for an alternative food store. The best part was knowing that the lesbian stocker’s code for hot chicks was price check in aisle whatever one the hottie was in. It was also worth it to take the trash out at 7:20 A.M. and catch all the lesbians and other employees in the know watching this teenage girl shower, with her window wide open. Every single morning there were a ton of workers scrambling to find trash for that dumpster! I was fired from there for refusing to change the way I dress and/or remove my piercing. The vegetarian’s supermarket was feeling a squeeze from the local normal grocery stores and my image didn’t mesh with what they were looking for.

I slid into a video store next, and to make my life as close to Clerks as possible, I quit to work the night shift at 7-11. My quitting the video store had nothing to do with the female owner pulling her sliver handgun out and plopping it on the counter every time the rickshaws waiting for their food to be prepared next door came in to browse. Well, maybe a little, but it had more to do with me working a six hour shift and seeing only one customer. I spent the whole time watching porn on the in-store telly. Not to say 7-11 was better, but at the time it fit what I wanted. I was skating fourteen hours a day and had moved into the skylofts, otherwise known as 1217. This was the headquarters for techno parties in the city of Detroit. The djs, promoters, e dealers, doormen, bouncers, and groupies all had lofts in that building. My roommates were ½ stripper that I had met at the gap and ½ flip that I had met skating.

I could care less about the parties, but there is something to be said about returning home from a night clubbing at St. Andrews Hall and finding 6,000 people partying in your building. I moved down there to have ready access to a concrete jungle, I was six blocks from Hart Plaza. The lit underground areas of Hart Plaza offered a 24-7 skate arena, no matter if it was raining or snowing. The only problem was bums pulling guns because you were interrupting their beauty sleep and the police station by the river. If the police caught you they would toss your board into the Detroit River. One of the many perks to living at 1217 was that we were on every guest list in the city of Detroit. All you had to do was say 1217, and bingo, you were in.

By this point I had left 7-11 and started on the night shift at UPS. At the time the horse track next door made this excruciatingly hard labor job very malodorous. I left to manage a Pier One, wandered out of there to do inventory for a major autopart supplier. That job made my brain hurt. Chinese labor was so cheap that the corporation could buy parts in Detroit, ship them by boat to China (with a little coke, and smuggled Mercedes thrown in) to be assembled and then shipped back to Detroit to sell to the big three. That job found me being tailed by private eyes and videotaped. That had less to do with me and more to do with the thugs at the warehouse over that spent the night smoking weed, drinking forties and shooting their handguns. Those guys were my friends compared to the psycho I was working through the night with. Psycho, as I called him to his face, thought it was supremely funny to drive his forklift at me, with the forks at chest level, and swerve at the fucking very last second. The night was spent counting millions of parts and hoping that Psycho wouldn’t include me in his tantrums.

I moved to a new loft, one above a strip club in Greektown, and started bouncing at St. Andrews. This job was barely worth the money to mingle into fights and break them up. On one hand I got to meet a lot of kickass people, Henry Rollins, Eminiem, Kid Rock, Kid Rock’s midget, not to mention a plethora of local hip hop artists. On the other hand I had underage kids threatening to shoot me. St. Andrews has always been a stronghold for Detroit Hip Hop, with breakdancers, circles of freestylers, and mad djs spinning. I have currently left all that behind me to teach small children with the Montessori Method. I am living in a small bland suburb just north of Detroit.

I eat books.

2005-09-11T13:33:00.000-05:00

I’ve been trying to start this blog up but I’ve had trouble coming up with what I want this to be about…since I don’t really have a clue, nor the money to rent one, I’ve decided to stick with what I know.

Not much.

Now that we covered that I’ll delve into what I enjoy. I love to read. I could sit in a room with a book(s) for weeks at a time. Seriously, I might pause here and there to stop my stomach from devouring itself, and maybe to find out whom the United States Government (USG) has decided to bomb. There’s little else that I find as enjoyable as diving into and swimming through as books. Actually, that’s all I like to swim in as water gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I can ravish a work of fiction in three hours or less. Nonfiction on the other hand takes me days, a week, maybe even months depending on what I call the density of the text. Some books I read, Noam Chomsky comes to mind, are like running into a brick wall of text. It’s hard to decipher and process such a large amount of brain data. I work through this by reading books in chunks and assigning books to different rooms. I got my car books, my lunch break books, my bathroom books, my bedroom books—I just cleaned out under my bed and found forty books down there!

To feed my habit I spend a lot of time wandering through used books stores, flea markets, garage sales, and estate sales. I also hit up and take any text books I can con off of college students. As most of those text books are not purchased back by the school. I’m also fascinated by dictionaries and reference books as a whole. Something about finding out anything I want in alphabetical order makes me get erect. I’ve found NPR and the internet to be an invaluable tool in pointing towards books and authors I may want to read. If there’s anything that I’ve missed in my massive reading journey it’s the classics of literature. I find them toilsome to read. That’s something coming from someone that does read dictionaries. I am trying to read more classics as I get older but I find myself enjoying nonfiction too much. Here’s some of the books I’ve picked up lately, some read, some not…

Abercrombie, Nicholas; Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner. The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. London: Macmillan, 1915.
Baldwick, Chris. Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford, 2001.
Barnes, J. A. Who Should Know What? Social Science, Privacy and Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Barth, John. The End of the Road. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971.
Binder, Frederick M. The Way We Lived; Essays and Documents in American Social History, Volume I: 1607 – 1877. New York: D.C. Heath and Company, 1996.
Bruce, Robert V. 1877: The Year of Violence. Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1989.
Bunker, M. N. Handwriting Analysis. Chicago: Nelson-Hall Co., 1959
Burnam, Tom. The Dictionary of Misinformation. New York: Crowell, 1975.
Burrough, Bryan and John Helyar. Barbarians at the Gate. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.
Cornell, James. The Great International Disaster Book. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. New York: Vintage Books, 1946.
Dawson, Jim. Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart. Berkley: Ten Speed Press, 1999.
Delany, Sheila. Counter-Tradition: The Literature of Dissent and Alternatives. New York: Basic books, Inc., 1971.
Dobson, Christopher and Ronald Payne. The Terrorists; Their Weapons, Leaders and Tactics. New York: Facts on File, 1982.
Douglas, John and Mark Olshaker. Obsession. New York: Scribner, 1998.
Drosnin, Michael. The Bible Code. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Dye, Thomas R. Politics in America. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003.
Friedman, Thomas. The World Is Flat. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005.
Grater, Michael. Paper Play. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1972.
Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt; a History. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952.
Hoff, Benjamin. The Te of Piglet. New York: Dutton Book, 1992.
Inbau and Reid. Criminal Interrogation and Confessions. Baltimore/London: Williams & Wilkins, 1983.
Jensen, Carl. 20 Years of CENSORED News. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997.
Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control; The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994.
Lapham, Lewis. Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executions. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1973.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Lesberg, Sandy. Assassination In Our Time. New York: Peebles Press International, 1976.
Lung, Dr. Haha and Christopher Prowant. Mind Manipulation: Ancient and Modern Ninja Techniques. New York: Citadel Press, 2002.
Maggio, Rosalie. How to Say It; Choice Words, Phrases, Sentences & Paragraphs for Every Situation. Paramus: Prentice Hall, 1990.
Malvern, Marjorie M. Venus in a Sackcloth; The Magdalen’s Origins and Metamorphoses. London: Feffer & Simons, Inc, 1975.
Margolies, Edward. Native Sons. New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1968.
Maurois, André. Disraeli. New York: Time Inc., 1965.
McLeish, Kenneth. Guide to Human Thought. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.
McKeon, Richard. The Basics Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House, 1941.
Moliére as translated by Richard Wilbur. The Misanthrope & Tartuffe. New York: Harvest, 1965.
Montessori, Maria. The Absorbent Mind. Oxford: Clio Press, 2004.
Nasty, Mack. Take No Prisoners: Destroying Enemies with Dirty and Malicious Tricks. Port Townsend: Loompanics Unlimited, 1990.
Pentagram. Puzzlegrams. London: élan press, 1989.
Petronius. The Satyricon and Seneca The Apocolocyntosis. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
Pringle, David. The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction; The Definitive Illustrated Guide. Carlton, 1997.
Rosefsky, Robert. The World 1929 Almanac and Book of Facts. America: Workman Publishing Co., Inc, 1971.
Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1998.
Sterba, James P. Morality in Practice. United States: Wadsworth, 2004.
Simmons, J. L. Deviants. San Francisco: Michigan State University Press, 1985.
Simon, David R. Elite Deviance. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002.
The New American Desk Encyclopedia. New York: New American Library, 1989
Tillman, Norma Mott. How to Find Almost Anyone, Anywhere. Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1998.