Sometimes great finds and inspirations come from taking a shit.  Let me elaborate. I was taking a shit yesterday… and flipping through an old Playboy. It’s the ultimate taking a shit magazine. Cute naked girls and lots of obscure gadget reviews for the quick in and out. Short stories if you get, ugh, sucked in and the occasional worth while article for the days when you are going to be awhile.  Yesterday I was flipping pages and suddenly exposed to the art of Ghana Movie Posters.

This toilet bowl epiphany sent me to the computer for some research and the discovery of a whole artistic movement I wasn’t aware of. In the early 80′s, the new wondrous technology called a VCR was born. The VCR allowed people who didn’t have access to theaters to view movies. In Africa, this new technology birthed a whole bootleg industry. Entrepreneurs traveled from village to village, lugging a VCR, a television, a generator and a suitcase full of cassette tapes. These makeshift screenings were extremely lucrative and all the rage. The screeners would hire local painters to make movie posters to let the village know what was on the playbill.

The posters were almost always oil on canvas flour sacks. Alas, by the 90′s, electricity and television started becoming common in the country and the bootleg screenings and their associated posters fell to a trickle. Now the posters a highly sought after collectors pieces, and rightly so. I would hang the House Party oil painting bellow over anything you can find in Soho any day.

-R.E. Brown
Swellco & Swellco 64312b

Stop by and purchase a real piece of art

Photos Courtesy of http://www.ghanamovieposters.com

Reggie Watts ain’t no spring chicken. He’s been doing the music/comedy thing more than a minute. While I recall seeing his video ‘What about blowjobs’ a few years backs and being mildly amused, it wasn’t until after Louise LaTease, with her damned pony obsession, turned me onto this video of Fluttershy covering one of Watt’s songs, which then led me to the multitude of his performance videos on you tube, that I truly understood that Reggie Watts is a fucking genius. If you disagree with this fundamental truth, I’ll fight you.

You take some shit, put it up on the wall, and check it out for a while
You take that shit up off of the wall, put it down on the floor in a glass bowl
You take some fuck, put it up on the wall where the shit used to be
You take that fuck up off of the wall, put it down on the floor
With the shit in a glass bowl

Are you kidding me? Brilliance.

Seriously, check him out and share it.

-Marcus Abrey
Swellco & Swellco 24534b

Oh Stanely.

There cannot be many moments in a life when what is civilized ceases to be, when the structures of continuity-job, shelter, routine, responsibility, choice, right, wrong, the state of being a citizen-disappear. English, the great mapping language of imperialism, has no verb that is the antithesis of “to civilize,” no word to describe the act of unmaking the rules that citizens have made. Our lives do not admit the prospect, are organized to exclude it. Our day consists of patterns of conduct that hold us intact. My place in a civilized society, my place as a citizen derives from an arrangement of agreements and routines. My day is heavily patterned:
I wake, piss, eat, shit, shower, dress, travel to work, write my letters, make my phone calls, pay my bills, attend to my diary, drink coffee, piss, talk, lunch, run errands, drive home, eat dinner, drink, piss, am entertained, fuck, piss, clean teeth, sleep.
I have an apartment, a shelter. I leave it in the morning and return to it in the evening: it is there-a material fact, not simply reassuring but reinforcing in it’s familiarity.

I live there in an agreement between a landlord, a bank, and me. I am a collector, not in a refined sense but in a fundamental one-my photographs, my articles of clothing, my pieces of furniture (arranged so), my friends and loved ones (arranged so), my idea of life made smooth and comfortable by regular use, my papers, my work, my idea of me. I surround myself with things, prop myself up with property, fill up my space with stuff:

I personalize it. I make it intimate, I make it mine.
I have so many images for it-this state of being a citizen, of being civilized. I see it as a net that holds me in place, keeps me from falling. I see it as fabric, a network of individual threads, intertwined, pulled tight-that keeps me warm, that I can wrap around myself. I see it as property, a house, a structure, a made thing, walls to keep out the cold, a door to keep out the unwanted, a roof to protect me from the night and its terrible undifferentiated darkness.
But I see it to as a weight. I see it as a barrier, an obstacle between something and the me I don’t know or understand. I see it as a mediator, a filter that allows only certain kinds of experience through. And I am attracted to the moments when it disappears, even if briefly, especially if briefly: when the fabric tears, the net breaks, the house burns. The metaphors are shitless. This line, again; this boundary: I am compelled, exhilarated, by what I find on the other side. I am excited by it; I know no excitement greater. It is there on the edge of an experience which is by it’s nature antisocial, anti-civilized, anti-civilizing-high temperature visionary obsession: exalted experiences that by their intensity, their risk, their threat of self-immolation exclude the possibility of all other thought except the experience itself, incinerating self-consciousness, transcending our sense of the personal, of individuality, of being individual in any way. What are these experiences? There are so few; they are so intolerable. Religious ecstasy. Sexual excess (insistent, unforgiving). Pain (inflicting it, having it inflicted) – pain so great that it is impossible to experience anything except pain, pain as an absolute feeling. Arson. Certain drugs. Criminal violence. Being with a crowd. And – greater still – being in a crowd in an act of violence. Nothingness is what you find there. Nothingness in its beauty, it’s simplicity, its nihilistic purity.

Thank you Bufford, thank you so very goddamn much.

- El Chacal (Swellco & Swellco 33259c)

(Vere Dic Tibi Ipsi)

One of my long time mantras, or slogans has been Beauty in Vulgarity, Passion in Madness. Now this may sound like an juvenile slogan, and perhaps when I started toying with the phrase, it probably was. But then, around that time I was writing artist statements about punching viewers in the face. I have a always tried, (albeit some would question how successfully) to balance between two worlds. To gain the life experience of those totally outside of society, and those who embrace it. A painter needs to know how to render realistically before he can credibly create abstract, a printer needs to craft fine lined etchings before he can move to free flowing monotypes. My Palahniuk/Bukowski instincts to stay outside of the “squares” world have always been tempered with an education of the etiquette I chose to ignore. I know where the salad fork goes. So when I go to the dinner party and eat with my hands, it’s not ignorance, it’s choice. I’ve always made the statement that I can blend in at either a biker rally or a black tie affair and you would never be able to pick me out.
Over the last year or so, I’ve been making a conscious effort to cut out all vulgar “verbal crutches” effectively eradicating all standard four letter words in an attempt to improve my speaking skills and mastery over the English language. But recently I got around to watching Deadwood. After 10 straight hours with my jaw open and brain stuffed with ear candy, I realized I had started going down the wrong path. I realized (perhaps remembered) that vulgarity isn’t a crutch in language, it’s an emphasis, an exclamation. It serves it’s purpose. The use of vulgarity helps define the line between classes and status. Vulgarity separates those outside of society. (or defines separate ones) It helps the upper crust look down, and helps the dregs give the finger back up. I realized I forgot about my love affair with shit fuck.

I have an excellent knowledge of art, history and politics. I am educated and well read. I have a solid knowledge of food and wine. And it is absolutely against my nature and belief system to avoid peppering vulgarity throughout conversations in these or any other contexts. There IS Beauty in Vulgarity. When you constrain yourself with the strangle tie of propriety and etiquette, you squeeze out all the joy in life’s experiences. Temper your ego, then let the Id shine through.

-R.E. Brown
Swellco & Swellco 64312b