Saturday, November 29, 2008

Thursday, November 27, 2008

earning some money

`It only takes me a minute to put the wheel on! THe whole bike should take no longer than six minutes. this is just a bad way to lose money.

backyard man

the man in the van is thankful for a backyard where the police can't get him.

building a disney "fairy" bicycle

that's some chinese engineering and disney fuckall marketing put together in one plastic package that will last all eternity, longer than the image of Micky Mouse is recognized. An indestructible, yet utterly useless bicycle.



``

electronic "fairy soundeffect" box. Earnings =$3.56
the fairy box made sound effects like a fairy flying or dropping fairy dust. When I played it I could hear the tears of chinese slaves dropping on concrete floors. It sounded like an unfinished Hiaku.

a hard way to earn a buck
building bikes for dead children
plastic never brakes
it merely melts into our lungs

monkey rant



no worries

Monday, November 24, 2008

billingsleys

Billingsleys is a prime rib joint in West LA. I took my crew out to dinner to celebrate my new situation livingin the backyard of the house owned by the older dude, George. If you stick around you'll learn quite a bit about mr. Hernandez.

Friday, November 21, 2008

mixo part 3


Rock Bottom

It's not often you get to video tape yourself hitting rock bottom. But here it is.
Stoned on some yerba mate enhanced medicinal tea (doctor's orders) I was out on the town, having a good time, laughing it up, on top of the world, feeling good. Bulletproof. Then the shit storm hit and the cops came in numbers too large to count. It's a war for territory and they had all the guns. So they stormed in to take back the land. But just imagine the scene of terror when the helicopters and alarms and megaphones "All Jews are hereby ordered onto the streets. Bring your belongings!" Knowing that the belongings would end up in piles. That is what happened on the night of November 19th 2008. Crystalnacht II. Except everyone was stoned or drunk or stumbling schizophrenics. A circus of insanity. The cackling homeless could be heard in the shadows. The crazed veterans fled like roaches.
We were all pushed into our broken down vans. Some abandoned their belongings for the street. Some vans were towed away. I thought I should just give up and accept my fate since driving in my condition was insane. But the police of Santa monica brought it on themselves. So I tried to move two vans in a few minutes while fumbling with my keys and my bicycle and jump starting another van and dropping change all in the spotlight of the police helicopter. Probably funny to watch but believe me my heart was racing and I was certain the club would come down at any minute.
It was awful. This is the video of a man on the ledge.


Tuesday, November 18, 2008

street jam

Here's some of the musicians on third street playing. The man in the van was in there and actually cut some pretty good licks but he didn't get it on tape, so this is what you get.

amused to death

If there is anything like smoking a pipe of chronic and listening to a Roger Waters solo album then PLEASE TELL ME WHAT THAT IS!
Because, for the money, there ain't nothing as cool as that.

"The album title came from a short book by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is about the history of the media, particularly as it relates to political communication—i.e., how things have changed since such works as Lincoln's speeches were made available for the general public to read."
"And I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien creature seeing the death of this planet and coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around and finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why it was that our end came before its time, and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death."
"Things coalesced slowly as I became more and more interested or obsessed, pick your word, with the inordinately powerful and all-encompassing effect that television seems to have on the human race. My general view is that television when it becomes commercialized and profit-based tends to trivialize and dehumanize our lives."
"So I became interested in this idea of television as a two-edged sword, that it can be a great medium for spreading information and understanding between peoples, but when it's a tool of our slavish adherence to the incumbent philosophy that the free market is the god that we should all bow down to, it's a very dangerous medium. Because it's so powerful."
"I think the motivation is at the root of its current evil, i.e. it's because they have to compete in an open marketplace that their standards get reduced so the programming tends to end up as the cheapest possible saleable item. I don't believe that wanting to beat the opposition makes for good programming, but it's an ideology that is still rigidly adhered to."



We were watching TV
In Tiananmen Square
Lost my baby there
My yellow rose
In her bloodstained clothes
She was a short order pastry chef
In a Dim Sum dive on the Yangtze tideway
She had shiny hair
She was the daughter of an engineer
Won't you shed a tear
For my yellow rose
My yellow rose
In her bloodstained clothes
She had perfect breasts
She had high hopes
She had almond eyes
She had yellow thighs
She was a student of philosophy
Won't you grieve with me
Fo rmy yellow rose
Shed a tear
For her bloodstained clothes
She had shiny hair
She had perfect breasts
She had high hopes
She had almond eyes
She had yellow thighs
She was the daughter of an engineer
So get out your pistols
Get out your stones
Get out your knives
Cut them to the bone
They are the lackeys of the grocer's machine
The built the dark satanic mills
That manufacture hell on earth
They bought the front row seats on Calvary
They are irrelevant to me
And I grieve for my sister
People of China
Do not forget do not forget
The children who died for you
Long live the Republic
Did we do anything after this
I've a feeling we did
We were watching TV
Watching TV
We were watching TV
Watching TV
She wore a white bandanna that said
Freedom now
She thought the Great Wall of China
Would come tumbling down
She was a student
Her father was an engineer
Won't you shed a tear
For my yellow rose
My yellow rose
In her bloodstained clothes
Her grandpa fought old Chiang Kai-shek
That no-good low-down dirty rat
Who used to order his troops
To fire on women and children
Imagine that Imagine that
And in the spring of '48
Mao Tse-tung got irate
And he kicked that old dictator Chiang
Out of the state of China
Chiang Kai-shek came down in Formosa
And they armed the island of Quemoy
And the shells were flying across the China Sea
And they turned Formosa into a shoe factory
Called Taiwan
And she is different from Cro-Magnon man
She's different from Anne Boleyn
She is different from the Rosenbergs
And from the unknown Jew
She is different from the unknown Nicaraguan
Half superstar half victim
She's a victor star conceptually new
And she is different from the Dodo
And from the Kankabono
She is different from the Aztec
And from the Cherokee
She's everybody's sister
She's symbolic of our failure
She's the one in fifty million
Who can help us to be free
Because she died on TV
And I grieve for my sister

white inferiority

It's a crazy time. the sky if filled with ash from 500 mobile homes. But the people are dancing in the street. We are strong because we are too fucked up to care. Obama liked to smoke weed back in his Chicago days. He'd smoke weed and play basketball. Ain't nothing wrong with that. A man has to find out who he is and sometimes the wacky weed helps.

obama takes the prize

Barak Hussein Obama won the presidency election. That's some major shit.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Wheel's on Fire

What better way to capture the black and white difference between economic classes?


Wheels are, or should be, the man in the van's motif. He loves wheels. And he especially loves wheels that have become so worn out as to be sort of useful, only to homeless people. Nothing exemplifies the homeless, beat, down and out life as a tire with no air, or a wheel with no rubber.
And when the wheel is on a baby carriage, and is pushed by a guy with no teeth ragged clothes, staggering, yelling, tripping over shadows, pushing his baby carriage full of junk and half empty boxes of cereal and old books and bike chains and things he believes may bring him a dollar for some wine...then that wheel is golden. That wheel is a holy thing. It carries on despite the problems. It is not only junk, it kind of helps a homeless guy but only a little. Every step is an effort he must overcome the resistance of the plastic on the cement. But he takes his time in the rain. What does he care if the cars stop in the road? He is pushing a baby carriage full of junk that has three wheels.
More holy wheels later!
Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.