"Tell my wife I ...glug, glug, glug..."

This video of you is surreal. It is straight out of a deep R.E.M stage. Not to mention it appears to be taking place in an art gallery. I'm riding a wave of wonderment at the utterly perfect and ridiculous vision of it (nice shirt, by the way).
But what if you slip? Surely, you would perish in the murky swag. Perhaps you should be wearing a brighter cap that would stay afloat above your foamy grave to alert a passing sommelier.
When I worked on a vineyard in Italy in the Fall of 1989 I saved a man who was hanging by one hand above a giant vat of grapes (true story). Aldo, the vineyard's owner, was on a cat walk above some monstrous, automated grape crusher and lost his balance. When I heard the screaming I found him losing his grip on a railing 6 feet directly above the giant, diabolocal grinding mechanism. Talk about crushed grapes.
Who knew alcohol was so dangerous!?..and that's without drinking it.

So now I have to get some sort of video recording device to keep up with these posts of yours. What would I film? ......I could have filmed three guys trying to force a 30 ft. chimney liner down a chimney it didn't fit, in the rain and on a slope that would make a mountain goat think twice. It might have looked like some bizarre take on the "Rape of the Sabines"

My mother bought me a pair of skateboarder shoes for my birthday and it's probably why I'm still alive.
Until the next stupid shit, yours truly,
c.

undercover instructional videos

yo bro,
I love that french Pup Puh Ho.  I guess I love all Pup Puh Hos.  There is not much to dislike.  I had managed to transform the image in my demented memory of it.  I really thought he had a retired linebacker type body with a very youthful bound, unteathered by the anchors that hold everyone else down.  Love that guy.  He gives credence to my unfounded optimism.
check me out in the grapes.

Here is another Pup Puh Ho drawn in France, as a matter of fact. He's the only one I can recall who is pointing.  I was attempting to introduce him to Beth at the time. She had heard the phrase but had never met him in person.

Parlez Pup Puh Ho

First of all, the pup puh ho I drew in NYC  was leaner then this one. Where did you get the memory that the pup puh ho was ever ....chubby!?
That one I drew on the granite wall under the bridge in pencil stayed for like three years. Very sad to find it gone, on one of my return visits (they finally pressure washed the wall). The one above, as I may have mentioned along the way, was done in France in 2003, drawn into a slather of ink on a plate of glass and then pressed onto a sheet of rag paper. Yes, he is running in perspective, away into the stars. He looks like a constellation. It just came out that way, that time (one can never be sure). I like the feeling of him having turned towards his mission, balls to the petal. There is something bitter sweet in it. The unholy glee has become earnest, committed. Leaving. The Pup Puh Ho of a 33 yr old.
My favorite is the one I sent to you in a letter sometime in 1998 or 9. He was leaping off of a cliff above a rising flame, suspended by a butterfly tied to his cock. His inner twinkle was blinding, glorious. If you have it (which I half expect you to), please post it.
 Then there is the triple breasted  hermunculous demon Greg signed a few letters with, which I feel was some how the predecessor. Maybe that's what the french Pup Puh Ho was running away from.
Well, my friend, the chimney harvest has begun in earnest and I have just learned that
I need to begin running stairs with a weighted back pack to prepare for the Fire Dept physical...ugh...

Ithaca brings not riches but the journey itself, right?  

puh puh ho

You realize that the guy running up there is not the puh puh ho I remember.  This guy is much leaner.  Even muscular in a Greco Roman wrestler type of way.  He is also running away pretty fast.  The guy you drew on the wall back in Morningside Heights had a much different attitude. Maybe instead of a skull, you should get a chubby, happy-go-lucky, carefree Puh Puh Ho in a twinkle toed leap.

they will eat your brains out.

psss

Maybe 'Armageddon' IS a scrum of frisky spankings under a giant stalk of broccoli..
...that's not so bad, really.

pss

For our legion of future readers: I am not responsible for Monk's tattoo....whew....just to make that clear.

ps

Nice friggin' fish, man! or  'Squish'..get it?

from one grunt to another

Goddammit!
Twice I have deleted  an almost completed posting and could not retrieve it!!
It was incredibly witty and pertinent and took me 3 hrs to write.  
I talked about straddling a slate roof with a 50lb bucket of morter for the entire day (talk about frank and beans!) and Monk's (a young sweep) "Armageddon" tattoo that turned out as a scrum of frisky homos spanking eachother silly in the shadow of a giant stalk of broccoli. Then there is the 'forgive me ' sign the other owner (not Cullin) has decided to put up permanently (for god only knows what)  for his girlfriend, not to mention he lives up in his bird coop above the company compound doing God only knows what, like some kind of Nosferatu (See pictures below). Rumor has it he occasionaly descends to verbally abuse Monk (I never actually witness this or actually ever see the owner... ever) although Monk always relays the previous day's  abuse on our hair raising morning rides to work as Bob, my crew mate, who rides us both downtown to the compound, races to the crack 'O' dawn methadone clinic. 
So, are you angling to move up the food chain at the vineyard? Your tattoo suggestion to your boss (and friend , thank god), as hilarious as it is, will not help.  Also, I am not available for that particular gig because I have made a pledge to never tattoo on a  penis or tattoo an image of a penis (as icon), grapes or no grapes.
I must go, before this evil machine deletes this whole e-mail again.
By evil machine , I mean me.

aloha

Ahh, finally, a day off.  This winemaking is hard work.  I have been all over the winery this year.  They have let me do things that I can hardly believe.  From driving the forklifts to running presses to digging out tanks, it is all fun as hell.  I talked a guy from the office into mounting a camera on a good vantage point and setting it to take a picture every minute, all day.  I am looking forward to showing you a stop animation
of a day.  I really want to shoot the clean up at the end of the day.  We are essentially a food service and it is very important to clean the fuck out of everything, every day.  I have not experienced as much indulgent gushing of hot water since I took a shower at the Yale Club locker room.  There are grapes everywhere.  seriously, by the end of the day I am picking them out of my underwear.  I freaked out in the shower when I was washing the hot dog and beans and I came across a gnarly purple scab!  It turned out to be a grape skin that had managed to slither right into my crotch.
I was asking my pal Sam, the guy you sent a shirt to, about winemaking.  I think he might be a little bit of a cowboy, trying odd things to achieve the wines that best represent the personalities of the terroir and the vintage.  He has a tattoo of a little grape cluster on his arm.  I suggested that he get a new one.  I think your tattoo career has really inspired me.  I told him to get a tat that goes under his arm across his armpit and down his ribs a bit.  It would be a big hard cock with a whole cluster of Pinot Noir grapes as his nuts.  I told him you were the guy to do it.  He seemed open to the idea.

Congrats on your firefighting exam score.  That sounds promising.  What a great job that would be.  Even better than carcass cleaning.  If it doesn't work, there is always taxidermy.

careful what you work towards

So I got a notice from the city that my 'converted graded score for the eligibility list' is a 91.
I think this is good. My mother has a colleague who's husband is a career firefighter and she thinks that score will put me in the first tier of applicants. For the next year I'm on a list that they will call in on a rolling basis. I know I can pass a physical. We'll see about the arrest record.
 As a chimney sweep you see every corner of the city and from just about  every angle. There is  constant driving from job to job because most 'sweeps' take about an hour. Sometimes there are longer projects like a chimney liner or rebuild but usually we will go from horse country to the ghetto and back again in a day. Because we work from the basement to the roof at any given house cleaning the flu(s) etc.. we get a really intimate view of the way people live. So, whether we're riding thru a rough part of town or pinching our cheeks on %70 graded slate roof to install copper gutters, or crawling over boxes of memorabilia to reach a furnace, I'm now in constant EMT-Fireman fantasy mode. I'm involuntarily taking the scenery around me and visualizing all hell breaking lose. The fat lady in the moo-moo watching me vacuum the chimney damper becomes an inert epileptic with a blazing floor joist about to crush her or the junkie dipping around the corner (one of hundreds we drive by every day) is going to be the guy I scrape off of the street and into an ambulance because his jaw was blown off with a 357 magnum. I wonder if I'll throw up? Probably.
Hey, how is the 'Design sponge' thing working out? If well, then I know your psychotically busy and writing an e-mail is the last thing on your list.  And I looked up earwigs....nasty.
ps Let me design the earwig 'tattoo' that goes on your arm for the wine label.

Harvest Continued

Earwig Soup:
It will eat your brains
It will get you laid
Dissolves STD's on contact.

Are you really going to make some wine? Does this mean you will sneak around the vineyard after hours collecting the run-off or can you put in an  order for a barrel to be relabeled in your basement? I feel your suggestion for a label design (fist and forearm) was an invitation for me to doodle something up ... However, the label should probably be done by your own inimitable hand...not that you even asked...which is cool....
Besides you could also easily find some starving hippy wood cutter in that town of yours to do the real thing. Just promise them a bottle of wine when they finish it and then hit them over the head with an empty one when they're done.
It does seem like a really fun industry. Especially the harvest. That's a  great picture of Chef Mike about to enjoy a glass of slurry in his lobster-man gear..... I do not, however' see any 'shorts' in the picture of you about to step into the vat. I will assume you have institutionalized those red short shorts of yours ( as immortalized last year) but that they have shrunk over the winter ( due to the all squashed penny tannins) and now function as an actual thong.
Why not just shovel that shit out naked (besides the fact that it would get you fired)? That's how the real Bacchus would roll.
Below are some pictures from my own Autumn activities (besides chimneys,poptarts and tattoos.) which include making 'fire and spill' paintings with the boys next store from the group home. First we build a proper fire on each one, then strain and spill disgusting moldy house paints we've scavenged from the neighbors and then I will add a little gold leaf and mud slip possibly, before trying to get them into a gallery and then better yet, into someone's living room. That's Harrison and Tevon, by the way and I have become "Mr.Chris". It has a nice ring, don't you think?

 

winespeak

Dear Dude,
This guy who is working for about a three week stint at the winery sent me an email because he wanted me to send him a picture I took.  I didn't recognize the name on his email address and there was no message.  So I googled the name and look what I found.  He is a chef at a restaurant in Chicago and teaches at a culinary school.  He is a wine guy so he spends his vacation working the harvest.  He was here last year for a week or so and we hit it off.  Anyway, he teaches a wine class and has a profile on corked.com or something.  here is his description of a wine (2005 Cirrus).  How fun is this industry?

First off, a lush, inviting color, and waterbed viscosity were a welcome change from the rusty syrah I have been seeing of late from SA. The nose was plummy, peppery, and a bit like squashed pennies on the railroad tracks; lots of ferrous minerals. The tannins were velvet and smooth, a pretty muscular wine, really. It is only in the persistent iron and minerals that one gets a sense that this wine might not be from the US or Australia. A sense of place is hard to grab in this bottle, but who cares. The wine has richness, fluid, silky tannin, a warm mouth feel, and enough junk in its trunk to stand up to bold flavors in food, or loud mouth dudes that "only drink red wine." It is red. It is 14% alcohol. It might get you laid. How's that?

BTW: the above is a picture of Mike in a bin of must, or unpressed skins and seeds, left over after a tank has fermented and is drained into a more civilized vessel.  It is like the wine is out of the ICU.  He choses to wear a big rain suit to dig the must out of the tank.  I tend to go for the shorts and a t shirt for digouts.

 I was thinking of a wine label for the wine I am making (Oregon Earwig Soup) Maybe a strong workman's or farmer's arm with the sleeve rolled up revealing a tattoo of an earwig.  I was thinking like a socialist propaganda feel to it.  Kind of wood cut looking?  Or a print.  What think ye?