MuMo on VaTu: Love songs for misanthropes.

Its Dio De Valentis or some shit. This is the day in America where we celebrate the snakes being driven out of Ireland by some catholic guy in a baby outfit, I'm fairly certain of that fact. And I think snakes is old catholic code for "weiners" which is why all the hot irish chicks are lesbians.

Yeah, wikipedia backs me up on that today. Cool.

I used to really hate this day, but mostly because I was lonely loser, and I always hated being a lonely loser on Valentines day. Also the fact that I had a good stretch of about 5 years where I got dumped on Valentines, and on year six I though I was going to break my steak but instead I got an STD. Good times, good times.

I don't really hate it so much anymore, though.  I guess setting aside a special day to celebrate love isn't such a bad thing. Its still a loaded commercial holiday, but it could be worse...it could be like Back Friday. Now that's a disgusting corporate orgy of a holiday. But you can get away with celebrating Valentisssssimo day without buying into the like, big corporate machine, man.

Just make your own paper cutouts, go buy some chocolates and melt them into new shapes so it looks like you hand made them, and play these songs. That FEEEEELTHY hipster you've been sleeping with will think you are an ironic Don Juan/Donnatta Jaunita, then you can go drink some locally hand crafted artisan PBR from wine glasses and fuck like bunnies. Enjoy.
-Carnival Carl

Sunday Art Dump

Note: Listen to my radio show, The Recovery with Baxter Riley and Carnival Carl every Sunday at 10 am. 

Hear it at www.kteq.org or listen with TuneIn app on your phone/ipad/miracle musical electronic duck fart/ whatever.

streaming- click the link on this page 

Listen on Tune-In

Make your duck face for me, baby. ooh yeah. just like that. 

You can actually buy these shoes. Word. 

Skullerflies are for Fucktober.

You saw all these guys earlier in the week.

and a quick pic of my progress of the green lantern first appearance... should be done this week.

What Not To Eat

Everywhere you look today you see articles saying "eat this, not that." Its easy to get confused with all that information flying around your head, so Carnival Carl is here to help. I've put together a handy guide based on the FDA's Food Pyramid Hat of Ultimate Power and Prosperity to help you identify the things you shouldn't put in your body. Lets get started, shall we?

  

Rice? Only if you want to up your arsenic levels.

Wheat? Shown to produce strange fatigue, digestive problems and irritable bowel syndrome. Did you hear me? I SAID IRRITABLE BOWELS.

Oats? If you have high blood pressure or you’re diabetic, eating Oatmeal can increase your blood sugar to extremely high and possibly dangerous levels.

Corn? Not if you like having enough Niacin in your body to keep your limbs from falling off on their own. Corn was killing people left and right less than 100 years ago. 

 

Apples: Apples may actually encourage decay because their sugar content is relatively high, and has been rising in recent years with the introduction of sweeter varieties.

Oranges: Haven't you all heard that vitamin c can cause kidney stones? Well, its a lie. But they can contribute to heartburn with all that acidity, plus, if you are drinking orange juice, its really nothing more than chemically re-flavored, orange dyed sugar water.

Grapes: Pretty much pure sugar. You need to ferment them to get any real benefit from them.

Bananas: THIS SHI* IS BANANAS, B-A-N-A-N-A-N-A-N......well they are even more sugary than apples, oranges OR grapes, plus they make shitty wine. "Potassium" you say? Go throw a chunk of potassium into a kiddie pool and then tell me you want more of that in your body... have a fun explosion, chump.

 

Whats the worst part about eating vegetables? Trying to hide the wheelchair when you're done!WHARRRGARBLE!!!

Potatoes: Well, if you didn't learn from the first famine, you daft northern twats, I guess you can gear up for another. Pfffft..... Irish. Only people dense enough to eat something that can double as a watch battery.

Tomatoes: Members of the nightshade family. If you're lucky they will just aggravate your arthritis. If you're not they will make your face melt off and fall into your soup. Or so I've been told.

Carrots: If you peel them you are losing all the nutrients. Why? That's where the dirt is, with all its vitamins and minerals...ergo, carrots are less healthy than plain old dirt.

Celery: It takes more energy to eat it than you get out of it.

Corn: Is not a vegetable.

Holy shit, do I even need to waste my breath explaining this one? I tell you what, you can just take my word for it that you should never ever ever ever ever put cow juice in your body,

OR

you can just wander into any health food store, co-op or head shop, look at the first dread lock pile you run into and say "OH MY GOD! I HEARD MILK WILL KILL ME!" and just kick back for an hour or two while you are enlightened. Be sure to take notes when they get to the part about John Wayne having 48 pounds of impacted cheese in his colon, is my favorite part of the story, and I'd love to hear it but I have to finish this gallon of ice cream before it melts.

Meat.

 I know you know I know we know that meat is the most controversial dietary topic of our generation. And for good reason, too. It is almost ALL UNIVERSALLY POISON.

POISON!!!!

Lets just skip past the argument on delicious dead critters... that's an argument you can have over on reddit, or some shit. I'm more interested in telling you to not eat nuts and beans. Why not?

Because they contain phytic acid, which humans can't digest AND (BONUS!) inhibits the absorption of proteins and minerals. So the nuts and beans themselves are cock-blocking you from their own nutrients. Ain't that some shit?

Well, who is to stop you from eating a diet of nothing but heavy cream, Little Debbie snack cakes and molasses covered funnel cakes? That kind of decision is exactly why I always vote Libertarian whenever I vote (which is never.) The good news about most of the "fats" and "sugars" in our diet today is that they aren't even real! Modern chemistry is so far advanced that we just munch down on dioxyhydroglicercongulated oxylcetine-43 and don't even care that six months ago it was getting scraped off of the bottom of an A-Rab's sandal. God blessed us with great tasting petroleum, don't make Jesus's death in vain. Eat plastic cleverly disguised as chocolate.


Well, there you go. Proof positive that eating is a zero-sum game. Everything you eat is killing you anyway, so get down with the whiskey, cigarettes and deep fried butter. I know I'm going to, and I'm going to love it.

Music Monday

I realized after last week that perhaps dropping an entire album worth of music on one page for Music Monday might be going a little overboard, so this week I've trimmed it down to just seven videos. I'm not sure how to explain my picks this week, so I'm not going to try. If you enjoy taking a long drop into that surrealist bucket, you'll probably appreciate all of this.  Cheers.
-Carnival Carl

Sunnday Art Dump

A Belated Music Monday: Americana Bonanza!

     It Tuesday, and that means that once again its Music Monday. We're operating on musician time here, show starts at seven or whenever the bassist shows up. Though, to be honest, I watched an interview with the president yesterday and came away with a migraine and Music Monday became less important than laying on the floor and digging my eyes out of my skull with my thumbs. I'll save all the gory details for a facebook status.

      This week I'm tackling Contemporary Americana. This isn't a simple genre to define, because at its heart its just "american music." This makes it very broad, and very open to interpretation. Perhaps with a broad enough stroke Lady Gaga become contemporary Americana. In fact, if you ask me the TRUE contemporary Americana is Hip-hop, but this isn't about defining how culture will be remembered in the future, its about what we want to listen to at work this week. Contemporary Americana is a blending of blues, folk, bluegrass, country, rock and roll, soul, jazz, swing.... its as much a melting pot of culture as you would expect of America. There seem to be a few essential ingredients, though. First, you need a little twang; not too much, though- this isn't country! Second, storytelling; the american storytelling tradition is a musical one, and this music is its medium. Third, hard times; tragedy, trials,tribulations, overcoming adversity. It just isn't the american dream without a little strife.

Lets kick this hootenany off with what is my opinion the single most overplayed contemporary americana song of our day. Little Lion Man, by Mumford and Sons. And only because someone is going to cry foul if its not mentioned. Its a good song, but as you'll see there is a ton of other great music we can be enjoying instead of wearing out the welcome of what really is a great song.

Next up, another well respected, talented and overplayed band. Once again, we simply can't talk about this genre without mentioning them: Old Crow Medicine Show. I firmly believe that if it wasn't for this band the popularity in Americana music would not have had the surge it has had in the last few years.

And while we are talking responsibility, I'd like to give a mention to the Squirrel Nut Zippers. This is a band who was breaking ground with hot jazz and nostalgic sound back in the 90's before it was en vogue. "The Ghost of Stephen Foster" is, in my opinion, their magnum opus. No other song, including "Hell," really distills their twisted irreverence and honest homage down to such a searing  jam. 

Americana has some Rock and Roll to it as well, and we can find that in Eilen Jewell. If you don't fall in love with her voice I'll call you a liar. 

And speaking of voices you'll fall in love with, let me introduce you to Meschiya Lake. I have the wonderful fortune of having known her when we were younger and I can tell the spitfire of her youth has been forged and honed into the precision vocal passion you'll here in this track. If you ever find yourself in New Orleans, look up where she is playing and treat yourself. No... you know what... fuck that. Plan a trip to New Orleans to see her. You'll thank me. 

While I'm name dropping, you need to go get yourself some Haley Bonar.  I'll admit this probably has a more deserved spot on a blog of indie artists, but her music isn't so easily defined, and she is a hometown homie who still asks our mutual friends how I'm doing so this is my way of saying "Hi! I'm doing fine!"  She has a new album out, "Golder" go check it out. 

    Another critical new release from a hard to classify Americana artist is "Old Ideas " from Leonard Cohen. If you aren't familiar with Leonard Cohen, you can pay me now and thank me later.

Getting back on track, lets get down to that real roots sound. That undeniable americana comes distilled like smooth corl liquor from "The Devil Makes Three." If you can catch these guys live, don't pass it up, they are just as great live as they are on tape. 

The Puppini Sisters.

Now check out The Scarring Party. I guess I'd call this Americana Noir, a darker, grittier, almost experimental noise at times, branch of the genre.  

Southern Culture on the Skids gets a place in this weeks chart by combining groovy american fuzz guitars with one of my favorite topics: Zombies. You can download this song for free from their website, which is a testament to how much this band loves their fans. 

Few things are more american than big rigs, so lets squeeze in a trucking song from The Little Willies.

Is Texas america? Or is Texas just Texas and they let america think that Texas is part of america? I don't know, but there is some damn good american music coming from Texas. Fool's gold by the Damn Quails is a great example. 

So there you go, that should be enough new grooves to keep you chewing for the rest of the week.  Plug a few of these into pandora and remember some of the things we have to be proud of, as Americans. Just because our government has run off with the keys to the car doesn't mean we stop driving; We're Americans, we know how to hotwire this old beast. 

BONUS:

Art Dump Sunday.

This big bad map is what has sucked up a majority of my art time for the last couple weeks. Its a map for my pending Dungeons & Dragons / Pathfinder campaign. I had the players draw in the shapes of the continents on the whiteboard, take turns adding forests, mountains, cities etc. The goal is that the world is more personalized and thus the players, through their characters, feel more attached to it. Its a sort of toned down version of what the DM for the campaign I play in did as he started his game. 

 This isn't even its final draft. I've already made some major changes to it, most notably the font for the nation names- They looked nice up close, but once you zoom out they are unreadable. The ones I have now are better, but still lack something. I also need to name the oceans and seas, and add some more little details here ant there. A legend and compass rose will be needed too. And a scale. Damn... 

With this map I've taken a completely new approach to my cartography, and its been a learning experience, but certainly one that has produced some nice results. 

Now on to the rest of the art dump. The whole idea behind this series is to create a large volume of  low quality work, continuously throughout the year. Basically, its the American Dream- only nobody is going to see me owning a split level and a new oldsmobile as a result of this. At some point in the year I'll be having stickers made, and when I do I'll give them away to anyone who sends me a SASE. 

This is sort of the "flagship" design for the entire series. You'll be seeing the Diabolic Smile(tm) and the Scuuurvy Skull (tm) frequently throughout the series.

You may recognize that explosion-burst outline from "Surge!" soda. Boy, I miss that stuff. To anyone familiar with my catalog of art, you may recognize that this is a rework of an older design. 

I got DMCA'd for this baby, I shit you not. 

Thats it for this week.  Hopefully I'll have seven more of these for you next week, as well as some sort of new traditional media. Keep your cats on the ice.

-Carl