A hero, Seymour Cassell, holding a piece of paper that says Justin Stone.
Image courtesy of Seymour and my girlfriend, Valerie:

Valerie & Seymour
Image courtesy of all things Strange & Wonderful
(Valerie would be upset if I didn't point out that she has some kind of contraption in her mouth. She enjoys fake teeth in her mouth very much!)

And on that note, I wish to announce my retirement. These two images, taken together, are more than any one man can be expected to fathom in the course of one life. I am spent. I wish all of you Poise, Decency, Grace and Dignity. May you find your own Seymour Cassell one day and may he hold up a piece of notebook paper upon which your very name has been scrawled in ink. Travel light. And fast. And know all the while that I sit somewhere with feet raised high above my head, resting comfortably, and know that a tear cuts a solitary path down my cheek. Good night. God bless. Eat right.

Listen to a couple rough demo tracks, flicker and turkey, by Justin Stone and the Sea of Tuscumbia.

and if you listen real close you might just hear the distant gackle of turkey in the field at dawn. theirs is a hectic song, their world autumnal brown and spring green, and the sun is always coming up. all the turkey say.

I have a little something going over at Justin Stone.

Son of a Son of a Killer's first and only full-length release, A Hangover in the Life was released in 1993 on the tiny southern label Bait & Tackle. The album recently sold its one-hundredth copy worldwide. Doug Schism, founder and director of the gooseknit band from Suzy, Arkansas, greeted the news with equanimity and more than a little indifference as I sat with him on the front porch of his deep hills bungalow and watched as he slow-rocked himself to sleep. "Pretty good band," he said softly, his eyelids fluttering, "but folks can only listen to so much howling of dog. So much white noise." Any possibility of a reunion in the near future? "Well now sure. Me and Ranch (drums) and James Lean (bass) reunited just last week for the taco buffet over to WingDing's there in town." You guys played a show? "No, no. We ate tacos. They were good though." Moments later Schism was sound asleep. What does that mean exactly, sound asleep? I sat on the porch another 15 minutes or so and I listened to the beat of the whippoorwhil, cricket symphony and accompanying rhythm of frog. Dusk reeled by in slow motion, the treeline gathered darkness. I rose, moved across the yard, got into my car, drove the seemingly endless dirt road back into town, back into Suzy, and searched out the aforementioned WingDing's. I located the restaurant easily enough, but the place was closed. In fact, every business and every residence I saw that evening in Suzy was markedly closed, every door closed tight, every light in every window off. I stood on the sidewalk in front of the darkened WingDing's and I looked up and down the street. I saw not a soul in Suzy. Sudden and swift, a shade passed through my mind, a revenance. My breath stuck. I thought for a long moment I had gone mad. It felt mad. Nothing existed and I knew it. But just then the whippoorwhil called me back, broke my revery. A frame had seemed to catch, time skipped, an almost imperceptible stopping and starting, but then... something. I was alone. I took the deepest breath and I got into my car and I drove and I drove and I drove.


A Hangover in the Life
(Bait & Tackle, 1993)
track listing:
1. The Courtship of Eddie Vedder's Father
2. You're the Shit, the Shinola
3. Metalandwood It Destroy the Missouri Sky
4. Denim Wedding Dress
5. Old Tom Paine
6. Calamitous Jane
7. Governor, Make Yourself Home
8. Sigh Factory Outlet
9. Pall Bearer
10. Buck Rodgers in Bed
11. Grinemascope
12. Clutter & Charlie Horse

The Ancient Salt Trade 7"
(Bait & Tackle, 1990)
track listing:
1. Dudded Out and Benign
2. Randy's Asleep
3. Yay Big
4. The Missouri Compromise

stroll fire
Matt Shebesta

Dear God,

Today I felt a most severe pang of sorrow for the Neandertal--more or less extinct a good 20,000 to 15,000 years before they had the opportunity to know Jesus and to know You in all your well-dressed glory. I was wondering if perhaps you might take a moment and ask one of our Mormon friends to bless these poor, prehistorical souls en masse in deceased absentia. I know I would sleep a whole heckuva of alot better. And I hear the Mormons can do this. If not, I mean, if you are too busy or something, or if, in fact, I heard wrong or misread some fact about the Mormons, that's cool, don't worry about it. Or if you wanted to kill the Neandertal, that's cool too. Maybe they sucked. In this case, please forget that I asked.

Also, please give me a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Thanks.


p.s. Sorry about that "thing" last week, if you know what I mean. I'm glad you got my back. You're totally awesome.

lucentio

...rambling really, joyous, innocent and self-obsessed, self-centric, the universe of association and reference revolve most certainly round my head. the game is afoot. let chance fall where it may, but with heady endeavor may i find myself with no small degree of control within chance's flight. be now clear-headed and bold, though not blunt or obvious, for such will not win this day of subtle gamesmanship...

it is a vanity,
it is a tweaked drive south and west
and then souther and wester.
i long to have some chat with you.
may the fates set us down in a quonset hut
or a tent, or in a cabin or palatial manse,
on a plain or hill,
for i have some pictures to show you,
i have a few stories to tell,
and if you have got the time
i would loke to walk about in your clothes.
consider it done, my friend,
consider it a global summit,
and in the very late of night
we will paint our bodies blue,
as the kids climb the walls
we will make eyes, me and you.
consider it sacred, consider it profane,
consider it a wide wide world of goonball shit.
you will not see anything the same way twice.
in fact you will not see anything you have seen again.
in our dreams we are hectic,
the action is special,
we will chaos into thought
and thought into doing.
the system is endless,
emotions and friendships fill the sails.
consider us fluid atop fluid,
the great problem of the solid state.
you got your boats, you got your whales,
you got your oceans and your tidal waves,
you got unknown reaches above and below,
you got madness and ecstasy,
you got the roll, the cabin floor.
lay us down lay us down
lay us down tonight.
may we round the corners fair
and up the stairs and out the window
into wild night.
consider it stupid, consider it sublime,
consider it brown, a trick of the eye,
consider it the the best it is going to be:
a simple thing within a simple thing
within a simple and a simple thing.
we stand fluid on fluid feet atop a thing
which never stops moving,
though the orbit is proving itself
susceptible to everything.
i will take a bowl of primordial soup
and a salad tossed in darkness.

I am very much in the liking Doob LeVey.

sea dwellers
travelling rocky point
people i love

The sky is a vulture trophy,
And on this morning the stomach gathers
around a vulture platter.
But of course you'd go digging
and you'd find something:

"I recognize that lazy Romanov walk,"
Arlyn called to me
as she jogged the short distance between
us on Prospect Park West.
West Hollywood may as well be Prospect Park today,
and I may as well be working the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
I may was well be a statue housed in the basement,
not a flower in the botanical garden,
or a Shel Silverstein poem.
She sent me an e-mail that read,
"Whatever happened to Justin Stone?"
And I never properly responded,
In part, because I do not know the answer.

The not-so-curious case of the dude who suddenly
had great difficulty putting the contact
into his left eye,
and who may have eaten a critical mass
of peanut butter, finally:

What I need is the equivalent
of a toothbrush and cleaning paste
for the interior of my body cavity,
we'll call it cavity paste,
a good lungbrush,
a most thorough cleansing.