keith birthday

docutube:

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010) 1h 30min

A documentary film directed by Dmitry Vasyukov and produced by Werner Herzog. The film depicts the life of the people in the village of Bakhtin along the Yenisei River in Siberian Taiga.

norwegianarms:

It’s been a long process, but totally worth it, and today, we get to share a bit of the results with you. Check out Tired of Being Cold, which is one of the new tracks to expect from our LP. Click the picture to listen!

take being ridiculous seriously

A great little comic with the late great Maurice Sendak and Art Spiegelman. From the New Yorker

Found wood sculpture (Taken with instagram)

05.09.2012
KUNG FU NECKTIE

Warm Weather
Norwegian Arms 
Ecce Shnak 

flyer by keith birthday

‘I don’t want to feel like my life is some sort of endless spiral into predetermined productivity’ he said. ‘I would like to be productive on my own terms.’

He discovered that having any control over your own scheduling was empowering.

‘Being hired by someone is being paid to be a brain attached to an arm, an extension of some other person. The brain is secondary, the arm is the primary element of being under someone’s employ. Being an arm sucks.’

He had slowly been making steps towards attaching his arm back to his own body, but there were a few snags involved. It’s difficult to wave your free arm about when your other arm is leased out by somebody else. There’s also the issue of drawing attention with all the waving.

Open gmail. compose message. to: myself. subject: all of those resumes he’d been sending out to no avail. attach 15-18 documents in .doc and .pdf format, all with taglines for all of the jobs he didn’t get _editor, _social media coordinator, _studio assistant, _blog. The ‘general’ ones with the timed taglines that have no actual consistency: _new, _new2011, _new92011. He’ll sort through them later. Thinks it’s rare/funny when failure can be quantified. 

When he rode his bike to work that morning he thought about how he hadn’t had a flat tire in a while. He thought about the taxis that sit along Dock street everyday, thought about the homeless who slept in the vietnam memorial, saw their bags all over the benches. saw a robin in a giant puddle and thought about it.

He thought ‘Hey robin, you don’t have to fly away I’m just riding by your makeshift birdbath. Preferably, I would like to see you bathe, I would like to feel as non-influential upon your existence as possible.’ 

The robin flew away anyway but none of the homeless stirred. 

He thought ‘In Helsinki they have those timed sprinklers to keep homeless out of the parks at night.’ Then he wondered if that was ethically sound. ‘At least here in Philadelphia they don’t have sprinklers to chase the homeless away.’

He thought these things in spite of the fact that he knew his data was incomplete. He had spent the weekend trying to convince a very tall asshole that using human systems to measure anything ‘unknown’ was pointless. The tall asshole just kept talking in what he thought were long, impressive words. If he had measure the asshole’s average number of syllables per word it still would have fallen below 1.5

‘I hate that tall asshole’ he said out loud. He meant it. Tall people are given the unfair advantage of being taken more seriously than shorter people. 

He wasn’t short, he was average. 5’ 9” being average. He was kinda fat, though.

He arrived at work and was an arm again and on this day he felt like a particularly awful arm. overextended, used for things that he thought lesser arms should use. He often thought ‘a person does not need to go to college in order to be able to complete this mindless task’. He wondered if he would have been in the same place without a college education. He certainly would have been in less debt. Then all of those people who he had saved as ‘do not answer’ would stop calling and he wouldn’t have bad dreams about interest being added to his ‘principal’.

He had been having more bad dreams lately. Usually they involved his boss who he hated. One involved them looking for an apartment together, but on a platonic level. Although the dream was pleasant overall, after waking up he realized that would be a very awful roommate situation. He also would have dreams where his girlfriend would say that she didn’t love him anymore. The lack of absurdity to those dreams made them that much worse.

He was depressed because he felt like a failure, so he went to his room to hide and sulk and pretend to read a comic book. The comic book was about people who were experiencing something much worse than he had ever experienced. Still he couldn’t identify and decided that’s okay, considering he doesn’t know any better. He at least tried to understand and that’s probably more than those abused/oppressed people ever tried. His depression had been triggered by dirty dishes. He was tired of doing them, specifically those plus the ones that he knows he wasn’t responsible for.

—————————————————-

There was a protest in New York that week, about taking over the government and giving money back to the weakening middle class. He watched some videos on the internet of the protestors, of them being abused by cops for trying to march. He wished he could have participated, but he couldn’t help but believe that participating in that sort of thing was cheapening or something. ‘My actions are indicative of the problem’ he thought out loud. How many other people his age who felt like failures and sent out 18 different versions of their resume were there? How many of them felt the same way about these protests, that they were ‘probably diluted by neo-hippies/crust punks/other various assholes who don’t know enough about the cause to actually justify their participation.’ He and all of those other people would go If they could get over their egos and take a few days to go and do something at least somewhat externally meaningful/visible to a camera. Ultimately, he felt as though the protests were dangerous to his personal brand, even though if he were actually there he would obviously disappear into the masses just like everyone else. 

Instead he took some older tumblr posts that addressed themes that were relevant to the protest, added a little tag line so that they identified with the protest and were obviously expressing the aligning of his ideals/sympathies and posted them to his blog. He was hoping that maybe they’d achieve minor meme status and he would wake up tomorrow morning to thousands of likes/reblogs and a slew of new followers. Then people would look and pay attention to any of his work and offer him modest sums of money for their purchase and he could quit the job with the shitty boss who he dreamed about and his self-esteem would improve.

The next day he woke up and only some spambot blogs had liked it and he thought about how he would always be an arm and that’s just how the world worked. He logged onto his email and had received twelve new useless emails.

———————————————————

It was autumn again, and with autumn came the inevitable ‘seasonal products’. He hated seasonal products. Pumpkin spice was his least favorite. He would curse at his computer whenever the slew of internet/social networking related updates from his friends contained the words ‘pumpkin spice’. He didn’t understand how people could 1. actually think that it tasted good or 2. bought into any of this ‘seasonal consumerism’ anyway.

He logged onto Facebook and saw that the tall asshole was bragging about his ‘pumpkin spice latte’ from some corporate coffee chain. ‘I hate that tall asshole’ he thought out loud while channeling as much negative energy as he could in the general direction of the tall asshole’s house. 

He had started purposefully directing negative energy ever since his girlfriend had introduced him to the ‘law of attraction’. He still had a hard time believing that it actually existed, but it felt good to wish ill upon people. He thought that voodooism was created by other cynical assholes just to scare the assholes they hated into thinking that it was actually possible to cause physical harm through metaphysical means. It all boils down to controlling or being controlled, or something. Witch Doctors are just smart assholes, is why they always seem small/scary. It’d be nice to live in a society where being smart was still the deciding factor in being powerful/rich, where birthright/lack of ethics didn’t factor. Where the strongest man in town could be spooked into submission.

Sometimes he thought he could see the energy leaving his eyes and shooting of into the distance, it looked like a rippling beam shaped like a lemniscate. This happened mostly on airplanes when he was scared to death and thinking morbid thoughts. He would see the energy shooting into the distance in its wavy lines into infinity and would try to focus on keeping the airplanes aloft. Sometimes his focus would stray and he would start thinking about how the plane was inevitably going to crash because that was the type of luck he had/the law of attraction would come into effect and fulfill the goal of his thoughts. Then he would shake his head and grip the armrests tighter and direct his lemniscate energy back to the task of keeping the airplane aloft. 

He wrote in his notebook ‘google voodoo’. He liked the way that sounded, it had good cadence. He wrote down ‘tell google to create product with above name’. Under that he wrote ‘also a good name for middle-aged ‘dad-rock’ band.’ 

Every airplane experience was the same, always checking to see the make/model of the plane to see if he had flown on one before, bravado until take-off, trying to look cool and collected, pretending to read, trying to convince himself that it was wonderful to experience human flight, something that had fascinated him so much as a child. Secretly calculating the probability, praying to statistical likelihood. ‘How long has it been since the last major airline crash?’ He knew how airplanes worked and had worked intimately with the physics that kept them aloft. He would work formulas in his head and guess the percentage of the throttle/flap extensions. Then the plane would shake with minor turbulence and his heart would yell and he would begin thinking about the way he would act/what he would say as the plane would begin to plummet. Would he be the one who survived the crash and tell the tale, or would he be the statistical likelihood and turn into a charred fleshy pancake? If he flew with friends he wouldn’t be able to focus on the card game they were trying to play because he would be constantly thinking about the state of the aircraft, its angle of attack, the condition of its engines, the fact that pilots were more overworked and underpaid than ever before. ‘Has this pilot worked more than the maximum number of hours per week?’ etc.

Often before take off he would write ‘one last poem’ in order to ensure his legacy. This latest final poem was typed out on an iPod, so it probably would just be reduced to dust and scattered along the Atlantic coast. He would have posted his new ‘final poem’ to his blog but there wasn’t internet on the plane. Actually there was, but it cost $20 a flight and he didn’t think his legacy was worth that. 

————————————————

‘I would like to see a time-lapse video of a zit forming. 

‘There probably is one on youtube.

‘Yeah but from start to finish. Like the whole process.

‘That would take weeks.

‘No, it wouldn’t, remember that zit on your chin this morning? It wasn’t there last night. I would like to see a video of it forming, of it filling up with pus and stuff.

——————————————

Yesterday he had two more followers on twitter, today he had two fewer. He wondered what he had done to lose those followers, wondered what he could be doing to ‘tweet better’.

cutting out teddy bear skins

Just now you rolled over in your sleep and asked “Can I have some ice cream please?”

I said “We don’t have any ice cream.”

You said, “But can I have some ice cream please?”

Then I said “What kind of ice cream do you want?”

You said, “Yes.”

‘Why won’t it load’ he says to a tiny screen.

He is trying to find a picture of Russian cigarettes on google.

‘Oh no, the internet on my tiny chinese box made by tiny chinese hands is incapable of delivering this digital content within half an instant’ she says.

He looks at her and kind of smiles; opens twitter: @ikvakikva sez that our inpatience is perhaps our greatest weakness

More about me… I’m wacky silly and I love to look on the bright of of things. Sometimes I get down, but I get right back up again and I start living my life and having fun again. I AM A BORN CREATOR, AN ARTIST, AND A FULL TIME MOTHER.

I have four beautiful children who I love with all of my heart. Their names are Johnathan 8 years old, Chassetty 6 years old, Natin 2 years old and my youngest is Niki 10 months old. Only Niki lives with me. My other three are autisic and live with their dad because he has a better support system and they grew up in that house and autistic children are very sensitive to change.

all things music/norwegian arms related will now be appearing on norwegianarms.tumblr.com. please follow. 

everything else/writing/art/whatever related will continue to be posted here.

I dreamed that I was Barack Obama’s intern and worked with him in a shared office with one other person. He would sit quietly in his suit at his desk and work on things while I sat across the room from him facing him. My assignment was to write reports about things that obviously didn’t matter, now forgetting all of the subject matter. There was an assistant who was supposed to manage my internship but I would always not do the work and get away with it anyways because she knew my brother from high school. I never talked to Barack, only secretly made paper airplanes that I wanted to throw at him from across the room but could never bring myself to.