News You Can Bruise

In 2006, Jacob rented a storefront in his native Worcester, MA and started a junk shop/art installation called Happy Birthday Mike Leslie. I worked the store shortly after it opened to get a feel for this joining of art and commerce.

Other artists have started stores as art projects, but most of them sold lame crap or nothing at all. Happy Birthday Mike Leslie sold awesome clothes, records, and other secondhand goods, along with works by local artists and grade school kids, and Jacob's own homemade stuffed animals and chimeric action figures.

HBML's other advantage over other stores-as-art-statements is longetivity. Inferior art stores close once they've made their "point", but Jacob ran HBML for almost three years, longer than the lifespans of many businesses not intended as works of art. But on March 31st, Jake announced that HBML would be closing the following day. I was able to acquire an exclusive post-mortem interview with Jake, which I present here with capital letters restored. We talked about his plans for the future and about the business side of HBML. This is the first of a two-part interview that will be concluded whenever he emails me back with his answers to my nosy questions.

LDR: What are you going to do now that the junk shop is done?

JPB: Roughly, summer I'll be living in Providence, fall I'll be traveling around, winter I hope to be "somewhere warm". The traveling around will be in the guise of a slow snake oil tour, landing in a town with some handmade product and relevant artworks, and having a show at some sort of art space- a gallery or a weird store or something. I've been constructing a small network of these places, or at least keeping tabs on them. This is gearing up to a big one-man (or group) show i'm trying (fingers crossed) to put together in Philadelphia a year from now.

My project for the rest of the week is to clean out the store as much as I can, and try and sell the squid to raise money for a round trip ticket to Miami, where i'll hang out and do an art show with my friend Mike T.

Summer is setting up the tour and working on some new websites to try and make ad money so I don't have to all the way worry most of the time.

LDR: OK, it looks like you went on vacation and then shut the store down.

JPB: Yes, that is also true.

LDR: Did you plan this from the beginning or did you discover that you were having a really good time on vacation?

JPB: No, I was actually pretty bummed out on vacation, but for once I wasn't in crisis mode, so I could sort of step back and look at what I was doing and what I wanted to be doing.

LDR: From here it looks like you became something of a local institution in Worcester. How true is that and did it make you feel constrained or any other leading question?

JPB: "Local institution" has a bit of truth to it, but I didn't feel constrained at all, except that I had to put more time and energy into it over other projects.

LDR: I'm curious about the future of your storefront, and maybe the best way to find out is to see what happened to the other space in the building. I remember it was an abandoned hair salon or something. Did anyone else rent it? Did you scare anyone away?

JPB: That other side was rented out even when you were there, but the guy that rents it only uses it as an office space-- he comes in a few times a week and just makes phone calls, almost never when I'm there. pretty weird. He's still there.

LDR: How likely is it he's up to some kind of con or scam?

JPB: No, he's a coffee roaster and he has another space that he roasts at but it's too chaotic, and he can't work out of his house or he'll never get anything done.

LDR: How much was your rent?

JPB: Rent was $300 for a while, then in the past year it went to 350 and then 400.

LDR: Did you get people coming in from out of town who'd heard about HBML?

JPB: Yeah, all the time. Lots of folks from Providence, because I'd cross-post to the big Providence weirdos email list. but also Boston, western Mass. People came from farther (further?) away but not just for the store.

LDR: It's not unheard of for artists to open stores. A long time ago I mentioned to you that Marinetti opened and ran a Futurist restaurant. Damien Hirst also started a restaurant I believe. Actually I'm seeing a lot of restaurants in this list. Banksy put up an exhibit in a New York storefront but it wasn't a real store, you couldn't buy stuff. Do you know of any others?

JPB: The big "artist store project" was Claes Oldenberg's store, which I think was just called "The Store". It was a big inspiration, although he only ran with it two months I think. Sun Ra and his Arkestra ran a convenience store in Philadelphia in the 70s (I think). [According to Wikipedia, one of the band just happened to run a convenience store. -LR] There are a few musicians who opened up curated record stores, but that's different.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Totally gross! You know what we're talking about. You've skinned your elbow while crashing your bicycle getting extreme over a gnarly jump in your neighborhood.

I never meant to get extreme! It was all a big misunderstanding!

Dear Life in These United States
I sew plush squids and sharks and skates
And as these photos indicate
They're really great
Honest injun

I almost said Jake's program worked in a Dissociated Press fashion. It doesn't, but I bet that would sound really neat. You could turn a music library into an insane never-ending medley by analyzing the waveforms, finding smooth transitions, and pasting together one-second chunks.

I was going to do a minor NewsBruiser release tonight, but it misbehaves really badly when you install it on Python 2.3, so I'll do it tomorrow.

re: breaching sharks
go to your library and have them order a documentary video entitled "air jaws". it totally delivers.

re: garlic cracking
i always keep a hammer in the kitchen for this purpose. well, i don't
keep it there just for this purpose, but it suits this purpose fine.
just give em a little tap. don't mess with garlic presses, even the
purportedly self-cleaning ones- these things are for yuppies only.

I hope you're keeping caught up on Brendan's Jake Berendes West Covina graphic novel. Embarrassing factoid: that blotch on Jake's nose on the bill is a slip of the Gimp pencil that I didn't notice for about a year. Then I was too lazy to do anything about it, and now it's being reprinted elsewhere. Let this be a lesson to you: never undertake any action!

PS: here's Air Jaws, which definitely looks better than Air Bud. Quote from Amazon review: "For the first time, you can watch a huge 15-foot white shark flies [sic] in the air with a seal in its jaws!!" No seals were harmed in the making of Air Jaws.

    Hey all you impressionable kids, don't forget to read our special holiday message! Heh heh heh...

    Bleeg! I'm splitting a (ph/f)at 90-minute tape with underground pop sensation Jake "I've lost all underground pop sensation in my fingers" Berendes, he's the man, if he can't do it, eat raisin bran. I want my side to be called First Church of Deranged Sock Puppet, Sock Puppet because, well, it's a funny title. Look for the tape to have its own IRS page, or whatever we're going to replace IRS with, soon.