I would love to hear what you think, so please get in touch : R.John Xerxes Piche'. Or check out this crazy thing.

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06.21.2008 Science can not be based on crime, can it?

New zine for all of you! Mashanda, an artist I met a while back after commissioning a bunny ear drawing from her, has created a comix called GUYS I WOULD TOTALLY DATE. Everyone who has seen it has been really impressed, but also a bit scared since they find a few of the guys creepily familiar. Boyz R DUM.

Next on the agenda is this cool fact - Kent Smith, who could nurse an Arabica coffee like no one else, and Derek Hess, who used to man a mean door during the heyday of the Euclid Tavern, have come together to produce a book. Its called Please God Save Us and it looks amazing. If you pre-order, you can get a limited edition Hess print too. I would suggest buying it.

Mindy Fisher has 27 paintings up at the Green Eye Lounge in Chicago. She reports - "I'm not sure when they will be taken down, but I am pretty sure they will be up through June. On the 28th (next Wed) I'll be there from 7pm-9pm if any of you would like to come by and say hi or buy art. I'm going to be giving out buttons, there might be food too."

Here are some photos of her show: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Awesome, huh?

06.09.2008 You, too, can feel the joy and happiness of hating.

I have been listening to a lot of CITIZEN'S ARREST again. Man. You should too.

But then I am almost always also listening to THE FALL. If you go to the Punk Planet Message Boards, you can watch almost the entire 19 July 1985 W.O.M.A.D. Festival set. Its like being there if you had really crappy tv eyes.

LBP helped pay for the publication of Elizabeth J.M.W.'s awesome 398 # 10. Sample Press had THIS to say about it on their blog! I have loved Elizabeth's writing for a very long time. Man. You should too.

04.30.2008 Marijuana is the flame, Heroin is the fuse, and LSD the bomb!

Is it true that the janitor at YOUR grade school was a supposed Acid Victim, like the one who trundled around mine? Wearing his drab green army surplus-looking school-district issued onesie, while pushing those big gray plastic garbage cans through the halls, occasionally muttering about kids or drool?

"He did too many drugs after viet nam and now he is sorta stupid, leave him alone," some know-it-all girl would scold with an empathy and compassion lost on the crowd of gossipy boys.

Then some bully kid would hear from an older brother or neighbor relation that Acid Victims can flashback at any time. A rumor stated as fact, probably based on the fact that they had to sit through that Go Ask Alice movie with Matlock or saw the Dragnet episode with Blue Boy. Since the intellectual nourishment that sustained these gossip mongers, the most, came from the clickity clack of a classroom film projector, they actually learned something about hard drugs, or something.

So that same bully kid would try and incite a grand mal acid flashback in the creepy janitor dude, even though we would not have recognized a drug-induced coughing fit, let alone an acid trip. But it didn't matter because this other kid's older brother knew a kid who saw the janitor totally have a flashback and, shut up he did!, whatever, don't believe me! But I was going tell you what that kid said it looked like when he saw the janitor freaking out.

Fuck, grade school sucked.


04.13.2008 Harvey Pekar: [looking at himself in the mirror] Well, there's a reliable disappointment.

american splendor: another day Someone told me, recently, that they thought I was featured in an American Splendor story. I guess they mean “Morning Route” which is in the collection Another Day. I am not sure, beyond the fact that the librarian Harvey speaks to is named John, it is supposed to be me. The library where I work does not look anything like the one in the comic, nor am I that svelte and well-kept.

But, there is also a good chance. Seeing as there have been many deadlines met because I was able to photocopy Harvey’s tiny comic scripts into readable 11" x 14" sheets. I sometimes claim that without me American Splendor : Season 2 would never have reached comic shops everywhere. Though, we all know that is bunko. Still...

I will never forget the afternoon when Harvey was convinced that I had misplaced two sheets of scripts. As he folded and stuffed and shuffled the piles of pages in front of him, I suggested that he probably just sealed them up in with the photocopies he was shipping to Vertigo. At first, he simply dismissed my suggestion with a brutish wave of his paw and disapproving squawk. But as the photocopies and originals fell to the floor for the third time, he entertained my suggestion as a possibility.

I have seen many ill-suited endeavors undertaken in inebriated states that resulted in messy catastrophe, but nothing has rivaled the sight of an agitated and sweating Harvey Pekar attempt to open an envelope. Discontent with just sliding a stubby finger under the flap and ripping upward, in fear of tearing those precious photocopies I just made for him, he tried to peel the edge of the glue seal back, as if trying to remove a price tag from a picture frame.

This ended in a tear across the front of envelope where the address was scrawled. Also, the sealing flap of the envelope had been transformed into a small pile of errant confetti and a ridge of dangling triangular shapes that looked like an aged monster’s broken fangs. The originals were in the envelope, after all. An envelope was able to reseal with the delicate use of glue stick and a lot of tape. For, you see, Mr. Pekar, could not afford to lose the two first class postage stamps adhered to the front of that decimated envelope. Not with postage rates always going higher and higer.

So maybe, he did put mention of me in his comic book.

Here are the pages under discussion.

04.03.2008 Tomorrow we will have a demonstration of the freezer cannon. To be precise about it, it freezes everything it hits.

magnesium sisters in wiggly teeth New Magnesium Sisters comix is done. I got a few others bumping around that I will get around to posting one of these days. If I were not such a blind dry drunk I would churn out a comic a week. But as things stand, I am un-medicated. Which means I fail at life.

Some nights, years ago now, I used to come home drunk and try to play To Bring You My Love. I’d sit on the arm of the orange love seat and pluck at metal string. That love seat simply disintegrated into fabric streamers and a puff of orange dust as we, finally, pushed it out of the apartment. I think some passing Russians snatched it up. Ex-KGB, probably. “We make many DNAs sample from dis,” I imagine them saying as the fatter one flung it upon the back of the skinnier one. Slowly making their way back toward Musician’s Towers, humming national anthems all the way.

03.27.2008 Some guy who used to threaten me is going to be played by Jamie Foxx

the conductor Back in the 1990s a man displaying schizophrenic behavior would come into the library where I worked. He would come in every day and stay for hours. He was usually homeless and off his meds. For even this suburban library, not a rare customer, but a few things set him apart from the rest of the lot.

For one, he was always dressed in a large military green flack jacket. On the back of the jacket, in black magic marker like a kid junks up a high school notebook, he had written Yo Yo Ma and Emmanuel Ax. He carried with him an assortment of trash and bags and tash bags with trash in them, all of which burdened him but did not slow him down as he paced up and down the street waiting for a particular bus.

Another was, once he was finished lumbering around the library -- sniffing here, spraying air freshener there -- he spent most of his time up on the second floor listening to classical music, at the quiet study listening station. He would stand with the old 70s style puffy ear phones on, with his plastic bag boots and hodge-podge of clothing, furiously conducting or pantomiming the violin. On account of this behavior, the library staff nicknamed him “The Conductor.”

For some reason, he really hated me and every time he saw me would threaten to "stab me." Not a unusual reaction to me, actually. Anyway, one day as I walked past the nest of books and cd cases he had built around himself, he muttered his usual threat, only this time another customer, standing at the dictionaries, heard these violent promises. Thinking that The Conductor had made this threat against him, the other customer asked me to call the police. Which I did.

When the police arrived the threatened customer made a statement, then the police approached The Conductor. To his credit, he explained, with great alacrity, to the police that the threat was not meant for the complainant, but for me. Regardless for whom the threat was meant, The Conductor was escorted from the library and was trespassed from the building. For a few years, we would still see him wandering up or down along the bus line, but he never did return to the library.

He somehow made his way to Skid Row in Los Angeles, where a writer for the LA Times wrote a series of articles about him.

NPR did a story on him.

The LA Times articles have been turned into a book, THE SOLOIST, to be published in a few weeks.

The book is being made into a movie. I highly doubt they will include much, if any, of those years of The Conductor's life spent at the library where I worked. But, it would be wonderful if they filmed the scene where he is booted from the library, and I am played as some fey hands-quivering-at-the-face screeching-bed-wetting guybarian who flings himself across the library in a trembling panic to dial for the police.

It would be just another life's goal accidentally ticked off the list.



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