AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

July 17 2006

I'm walking up Joy street, sipping a lukewarm can of coconut juice through a plastic straw.
It's 5:30pm. My stomach is heavy with the wretched shrimp bisque that I bought at Whole Foods. It was a gloppy, salty, orange pudding mess that I discarded, not even half eaten, into the trash. I should have asked for a refund!
Now I'm sweating my way up this hill, trying to wash the taste away with the coconut juice, except the juice is almost warm and it tastes like the milk left on the bottom after you eat a bowl of Grape-nuts. My stomach protests and further weighs me down.

I like to take photos of decaying waste that I find on the street. I especially like to document roadkills and discarded food products.

My camera is low end, and my compositions are straightforeward. I'm not calling this stuff art, I just find it interesting. I will include it as a secondary stream of data along with my journal, as I think it makes a fitting backdrop for the evolution of a personal mythology.

10 July 2006, 11 am

This will be the place where I write all of the things I shouldn't have made public.

You know all those stories you always hear of "idiots" who start blogs where they bitch about their jobs and coworkers and then get fired when Boss finds out? It's gonna be like that.

This journal will burn bridges and hopefully facilitate building new ones. It's a way for you to get to know me, and a way for me to know myself.

You see, I don't really have a coherent identity like many people do. Or at least, not one that I'm sufficiently aware of to do anything with. I never developed a Persona - I am many different things to many different people - fuck!

7 July 2006 - 10 am

I am here at work, at the flute company. Shooting waxes into rubber molds.
I am a God in chains. A one winged angel. An octopus with one tentacle.

I know better than all of these people - don't I?

A voice: " Oh, they're just grumpy because their lives didn't turn out the way they wanted."

Another voice : " You'll never make any money with your own two hands."

A third voice : "Kissing each other all over."

It echoes in my head.

A fourth voice, my own, echoing from the past:
" I've got to get out of here."
"It's an Elephant's graveyard."
"I've gone from thinking 'Oh how the mighty have fallen' to 'Oh how the fallen have fallen'."

WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last episode, Wong begins to stir as everyone else turns savagely on the Vice. The crowd at Ddwwchllyff's surprisingly proximate manse continues to swell, as the cast of characters try to squeeze into the antepenultimate chapter...
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 71

Wonce Peppet was a miserable bastard just like his miserable brother had been. But his brother had been the lucky one – he’d died first. Wence Peppet wouldn’t have to live in a world where there was no one exactly as miserable as him. Wonce would. Wonce was staring at decades of unaccompanied miseration. His brother’s good fortune made him all the more miserable, so in the end, his and his brother’s miserableness were no longer on a par, Wonce’s being of longer duration. This would have gratified Wonce, but gratification, satisfaction, vindication – these would have lifted the veil of gloom swaddling him like sackcloth, could even (in a worst case scenario) put a spring in his step. Peppets weren’t built to be steppers, let alone springers. The Peppets were a breed of slinkers genetically predisposed toward creeping, skulking, scuttling, sidling and sloping. Nonetheless, they get where they’re going, unforeseeable death-dealing student bodies aside, and when they get there they hand over the suitcase, but not before they have a peek inside. Such are the Peppets – a miserable, trudging, predictable tribe. Easy pickings for an assassin, in other words. And yet, unlike all of their forebears, this was not to be the fate of the last two Peppets on earth. Wence Peppet had already died a natural death in a flukey accident and Wonce Peppet, slipping behind a handy Buddleia to have a peek inside, would fare no better. Damn it…

WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last episode, S. Panther and Lassie emerge in the George Walker home as a busload of returnees returns and the embarrassing secret of the black gold is buried. Now, the return of everyone else.
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 70

The shallow old Bangladeshi was profoundly unmoved by the doom of the gentleman who’d just been seen sliding into the drink outside the starboard porthole of the [haven’t thought of a name just yet]. And speaking of drink…he couldn’t see the sun, but surely it was over the yardarm, unless the yardarm were upside down. He would never know that the man drowning so ironically to death in a secret subterranean submarine tunnel was the famously scifictitious geology professor, Otto Lidenbrock, explorer of a secret passageway to a place once unreachable by public transportation but now apparently accessible to any old inmate at the George Walker Home for the insanely demented and luxuriously deceptive.

I blog weekly at my site at www.harriettstomato.com. My subject is food....and tomatoes right now. Please take a look there! I like visitors.
Best
Michele

WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last episode, Wolfcastle, Elvis impersonator impersonator Ddwwchllyff and the lady killers argue about the significance and likelihood. How are Samantha Panther and the rest coping with the changes under foot?
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 69

Disencumbered of the superflous Mr. E, abrupt absconder from the George Walker home for the Criminally Insane and Marginally Demented, the lifft crept upward carrying its precious cargo to the welcoming surface of Cymru. So eager was the Welsh terrain to greet the cargo, it was actually sallying down to meet it en route. In no time at all the doors creaked open on rusted hinges, revealing the top floor of Mr E’s erstwhile domicile. Through the high barred windows could be seen a lot of soil, yet a lactescent sheen shone along the uppermost third of the permanently sealed glazing, casting an eerie glow across Che’s logoic brow, glinting off the pushpins that held him in place.

Love and light hellos to the AMP family!

A medicine woman named Medusa led me to AMP months ago and now feels like the right time to work this resource.
My dear brothers and I have a band called Elevaters and we love to play about town. Check us out @ www.myspace.com/elevaters
This Friday, July the 14th is our first adventure to a true eastside venue and since AMP started in Silverlake I thought to send an invitation this way.
We would be honored with your presence.

Elevaters Live
The Derby
http://clubderby.com
4500 Los Feliz Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90027
Friday, July 14th
10:45 pm