"Distortomatic" [mp3 removed]
The rhythms are "Shermanized" beat demos from the Sherman filterbank website. The melody is played using a Sidstation patch called "Distorted." This is pretty gnarly on the whole.
Day: February 5, 2009
four collages
or quilts, or mosaics, made with Xacto, scissors, tape, and computer-drawn home printer output. have been working on this series for years, am somewhat embarrassed to admit. these four gelled for me in a way others haven't.
nomenclature
... Tramp Art is also a wanderer's art form: so again, there are no written records of the carvers' work. The stories of this art form became the facts; the misconceptions became the truths. There were no rules for constructing the pieces; materials were whatever the carver had available; decorations were whatever he could produce or find. Within the context of his own imagination, experience, and abilities, the carver assimilated what he saw with what he had to work with. He then translated and created what he saw into works of art by using his pocketknife and the ever-present cigar box.
Like the hobo, the tramp was a wanderer, but unlike the hobo, he was not a worker. Most tramps lived by their wits, some by petty thievery and begging, some by robbery and murder. The hobo feared the tramp and was contemptuous of him as a loafer, while the tramp despised the hobo as a sucker for working.
The distinction between tramps and hoboes, however, was not always discernible. Many men, and women, lived in both worlds, hoboing to make a "stake," then living without working until the stake ran out. Some hoboes became tramps, especially when there was no work to be found, and some tramps became hoboes. But even though tramps and hoboes often lived in different worlds, as far as work and philosophy were concerned, they were forced to share the same space. Hoboes and tramps together flipped the same trains, ate and slept in the same jungles, and were locked up together in the same jail cells.
The tramp world, however, had its own society separate with its own rules and its own hierarchy. At the top of the list was the "profesh," or professional tramp. He was distinguishable because of his good clothes, his habits of neatness, and that he often slept on newspapers.
The typical tramp, as we think of him, was a "fakir." He was part conman and part repairman or apprentice of a trade, such as a tinsmith, carpenter, blacksmith, etc. Many fakirs were very skilled but preferred to wander from town to town, searching for work when they felt like it.
The common meeting ground of both hoboes and tramps was the "jungle." [cont'd]
advantages (to AQ)
From a 2001 Bookforum interview with Alan Moore (link long dead), writer of the graphic novels Watchmen, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell (all ruined or about to be ruined by Hollywood):
"Michael Moorcock, a living saint of English gutter fiction, once observed that Victorian middle-class morality had erected wrought-iron rails about the confines of what could be considered literature--essentially Jane Austen and the novel of manners. All other forms of writing, like genre fiction and the literature of the fantastic, were exiled to the wastelands out past the perimeters. Literature was a vanity mirror for the social strata that could afford to be literate, and only writing that reflected an absorption in the social intricacies of the book-buying classes would be allowed past the gate, past the critics, past the guard dogs. This still obtains. No admission for the too-flamboyantly attired, for the impassioned and overexcited, for the rowdy or intoxicated or possessed, who are relocated to where the surfaced roads peter out and the inbred web-toed monsters really start to kick in. With the gothic melodramas and pornographies and ranting pamphlets. This isn't a nice district. You're not likely to have a park named after you. On the other hand, there are advantages . . ."