A friend invited me to one of the members of an industrial band called Gridlock's Birthday. He told me on his 21st birthday his friends thought it'd be fun to take him to a 25cent peep show parlor. All he had was a 5 so when he got change he had this almost uncontrollable pile of quarters cupped in his hand. So he's putting the quarters in and watching the show when some slip out and fall to the ground. The stripper stops and waves her arms in a "No! Don't do it!" fashion. When he looks down he sees the floor is caked in men's "leavings", so much so one of the quarters stood upright.
bARTer Sauce would like to add: That's a horrible story Nik. Not in the normal way that your stories are horrible -- this one is horrible in a totally new way. Congratulations!
I have a corpse named Lucky that I make everyone pose with when they come over. He was traded to be by Kevin Klemm of Girls and Corpses magazine. He's named Lucky because he was the leprechaun corpse from the March issue. I dream of one day luring Rosalie out to California so I can add to my collection of photos called "Victims of Lucky Harms".
"Two-faced Jane" is the newest offer on bARTer Sauce. I think I'm in love with her giant, mutant button eye. There's just something about it. Maybe deep down I wish that I, myself, had a giant, mutant button eye instead of a regular eye. Perhaps that would make my cat cease and decist on the waking me up by sniffing my eyeball routine that has become so popular in the mornings these days. Rachel submitted "Two-faced Jane" as an offer for the "Brain Scan."
I'm pretty sure I'd be crazy not to take her up on it which is why I immediately accepted her trade offer. You will be able to submit your own trade offer for "Two-faced Jane" shortly. Check the website in mid-February and she'll be prominently displayed for all to bid on. Are you wondering what the hell I'm talking about?
Nik and I have done at least one billion trades at this point.
It becomes kind of difficult to think of a new thing to write about ever time -- especially since we do our trades through the mail so LITERALLY -- nothing happens (unless the mean post office lady is there and then I can at least complain about how she yelled at me once and I'm now holding a grudge about it a year later).
We all know that. She's been a huge supporter of bARTer Sauce from the beginning. And because of that, I decided to consider this trade offer - a cat shaped lawn ornament for the awesomest lamp ever made out of popsicle sticks and rhinestones.
Kelly's story that came with the Shameful Cat Shaped Lawn Art:
It's after midnight, I stop being funny at 12. I can either get online tomorrow night at 11 pm to trade, or just go with the facts tonight.
Ariane is a facilities and program manager at a small (very small) visual art center in Gillette Wyoming.
She mainly works with clay, but as the art center programs gal, she can't stand the embarrasment artists have to go through when thier classes don't fill-up, so she takes a lot of random classes. Like the Taxidermy Fish Form Alteration Workshop. She knows, She scheduled it. It sounded good at the time?
This cat painting wasn't awful enough for the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) to put in their permanent collection so they passed it on to me.
What's funny to me is that this painting of a kitty looks more realistic than our friends cat: Curly Burnt Whiskers who got his name because he liked to sleep on a radiator and it burned the whiskers on half of his face. He also likes to chew on curtains and look around with a blank look on his face. He's special.
I mailed them the blue faced, clown thing when I finally worked up the energy to walk all the way to the post office.
It's difficult to take pictures documenting my trades with MOBA because they're located near Boston and I am definitely not located near Boston. So I just took a picture of their packing job. It says: This package contains Wicked Good Aht!
Kelly Lyles was kind enough to trade me a ton of her prints in exchange for the Microwave Love Tester Diorama.
All the prints are from her rodent series. Here's what she says about them:
"These paintings came about in response to the constant questions about my art-car, Leopard Bernstein. "Are you a Leo?" "You must really identify with leopards." None of the above.
