Thursday, January 13

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Brew received an invitation to attend a folk art show at the house of a Point and Shoot folk artist, Big Chief Visions. Homegrown Pow Wow.

Brew loved a former-hippie pow wow.

Did you hear the one about the woman with a W tattooed on each cheek of her ass? She wasn't much to look at, but when she leaned over--wow.

Brew was invited as a hospitality industry report writer and folk art critic. And, of course, senior fellow at the prestigious Point and Shoot Institute (PSI).

Brew heard an ad on his noncommercial college radio station for a concert at a churh with an "accompanying visual artist."

It reminded him of when Balder got him a backstage pass to MagnoliaFest, at which Dread Clampitt were appearing.

There was an accompanying visual artist painting an abstract painting with his back to the audience while Peter Rowan and Tony Rice played bluegrass music on stage. The audience could see the painting, not the artist. But Brew could see the artist, not the painting.

Brew was able to stand backstage and get a shot of the visual artist, around the edge of the canvas, like Hans Namuth shooting Jackson Pollock up through glass.

I'm not the phony, you're the phony.

It really made Jackson Pollock feel like a phony to paint on glass with Hans Namuth underneath him shooting up through the glass.

He'd been on the wagon. He fell off of the wagon, and created a scene, at the house. In the movie he turned a table over.

Brew had a point-and-shoot digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix 3100 Dread Clampitt bought him out of their tip jar, to thank him for setting up their web site, Dread Clampitt (www.dreadclampitt.com), where you could hear them play their eponymous theme song, "Dread Clampitt," on their self-titled debut CD, Dread Clampitt, as well as see a lot of pictures of the band Brew took as band paparazzo.

What's the difference between a groupie and a roadie? They both give blow jobs, but a roadie carries an amp.

When Brew told that to Suzette and Pretty Michelle, one of them said, "I don't give blow jobs," and the other one said, "I don't carry an amp."

Brew accepted the invitation, and told Big Chief Visions he could advertise an "accompanying literary artist" on the posters he had made to publicize the show.

Brew would write poems and YU News Service press releases in a Big Chief tablet while people looked at the paintings and the really interesting pretty girls looked at Brew and wondered who that old man was, scribbling anecdotes and ravings in a Big Chief tablet with slobber running down his chin.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Brew was the Miami Bureau Chief of YU News Service, a parody news and disinformation syndicate. He had a cloisonné ten-year pin stuck in one corner of his Press badge. He'd been with the old YU since 1984.
On the front of Brew's Press badge, it said,

This card identifies the holder as a representative of the Press. Yossarian Universal News Service verifies the holder's credentials.

and on the back, it said,

Dedicated to the stoogist ideal that all news is created equal in an age of disinformation, YU News Service, in issuing this press credential, verifies that anyone and everyone, including the holder, is fully capable of reporting the news.

Brew remembered a Three Stooges Countdown to 2005 on New Year's Eve Day, marathon Three Stooges shorts, the stooges looking like President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

It was hard to parody stooges.

These are the men who convinced the American people that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they were the masterminds behind the 9-11 attacks, Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat to the security of the United States, and that the people of Iraq would welcome us with open arms after we did a slam-dunk cake-walk over their Army.

Brew said at the time--he had been saying since September 12, 2001--that he didn't believe them, he thought they had something up their sleeves, and that Captain Yossarian was the only man in WWII capable of telling the truth, in a book like Catch-22, because, yes, reality was that surreal.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--One time Franz Boas sent a student to British Columbia, to study the language of the Indians of the Northwest Coast, and when the student returned, Boas asked him, "Well, did you get the whole language?"

It was important to get everything one could before the speakers disappeared, died off, the younger Indians not learning the old tribal ways.

Sometimes Brew called himself the salvage archeologist--or linguist--of the Mall Builder culture. Sometimes he called himself a forensic philologist. He wanted to get the whole language, the formal dialect and the vernacular. He knew a lot of words, and could play them, musically. He liked to switch back and forth between one dialect and another, and to use the wrong dialect to discuss something in, talking about high art in vulgar language and low art in refined speech. Surprise was an element of humor. And who wanted to read something pedantic and dry?

One obligation a satirist had was to be funny.

Would you hit a woman with a baby? No, I'd hit her with a brick.

Enema vérité is what you see on the end of the fork when you really look.

Sometimes to see what's on the fork, you have to eat with chopsticks.