April 2 , 2004
Crotchicus

Due to yesterday's tremendous response, management is currently investigating the possibility of showcasing daily crotch shots. Your input on this subject is unimportant, but encouraged.

Furthermore, management is investigating the possibilities of forming a strategic partnership with certain local pornographic institutions to bring you perverts the best in daily mudwrestling photos. It is advised, however, that expectations be kept low, as failure to succeed in any sort of business venture, even crotch shots and mudwrestling photos, is likely beyond management's capacity.

Management regrets to inform you that it is possible to showcase one fantastic mudwrestling photo today. Please click here and have your credit card ready.

In other news, I walked through MacDicks the other day with my own credit card in hand and bought two more cheeseburgers. Rae-Anne was serving and there was no one else around except for the cleaning retard, cause it was really fucking late, and we started chatting after my card cleared. She asked what I did, and I told her I was a writer, which was confusing to her, but she said that was interesting, and that she always wanted to write a book. She's a liar, but those perky nipples keep me interested. Question is: does some young McJob counterclerk really dig on the writing tip, or is she just looking for a squirt of special sauce between the patties?

Ah fuck, who am I kidding. Gonna drill her either way.

April 1 , 2004
Happy April Fool's Day

Oh ho ho.

Now that was funny.

I mean, it's not like I rubbed em in yr face when you were passed out.

Rock!

March 31, 2004
Short n Sweet n Sour

Due to yesterday's pathetic response to a thoughtful essay which covered corporate sponsorship, compromised artistic values, branding and the Economist, management has decided to ethershift operations. In the future, Mingus will stick to writing about cocks and bitches, and will do so in short, succinct sentences. Obviously, when the page gets too long, people can't get to the bottom, whether or not the essays address serious issues.

So instead of discussing the situation in Uzbekistan and whether or not the bombers are terrorists or suppressed rebels, along with Bush's disturbing endorsement of a dictator who may boil people alive in prison, Mingus will instead write in short, punchy lines, about a short, sexy Chinese girl he met the other day.

You see, after the whole thing with Colette imploded after one glorious evening of ashramming, Mingus has been walking the streets late at night to keep from thinking about whether or not Chloe's been punching the accountant's clock between loads. Sometimes, in the late hours, he walks through shitty fast food restaurants like McDonalds and orders cheeseburgers to go. And the last few times he's been there, there's been this cute little Chinese girl, a little plump, maybe twenty, always a bit flustered, obviously wishing she was somewhere else. And she smiles and makes more conversation than she needs to and tries to talk about her life, and how she was out too late the night before and how she always has boy problems and she pouts a bit with her lips and rubs her name tag that says Rae-Anne and she waits for Mingus to say something about taking her out for a drink or a roll in the mop room.

Yup. She's a short stack of nicely browned pancakes just waiting to have syrup poured all over her under a handdryer and licked clean and washed down with an extra-large cup of fountain pop. So I think that's just what Mingus is gonna do, cause nothing beats the cock hangover blues like a nice bouncy piece of pork, double fried, with cheese on top. Short n sweet n sour. Yum.

March 30, 2004
The Corporate Sponsorship of Mingus Tourette

I was reading the Economist the other day, and I ran across an article about the branding of David Beckham. The article revealed that of the $10 Billion spent in sponsorship fees every year in North America, almost $7 billion is related to sports. David Beckham promotes Pepsi, Adidas and Vodafone, among many other things, and is paid tens of millions of dollars a year to do so.

This struck a couple of chords with me. At first, I wondered why all the money went to sporting figures, and why I had never heard of a writer being sponsored by a major corporation. I understand that Michael Jordan is fast and powerful so he's the one you want eating your energy bar, or cereal, or driving your mighty truck. But even more, he's a brand unto himself, and when a product is tied to him, it borrows on his brand and takes some his personality and lifestyle and adds it to the product. Jordan could sell anything - clothes, ice cubes, beer, even dildos, because people love Jordan. Jordan is cool. Beckham, to a certain audience, is even cooler. And sexier. But it has to be said that to many people, writers are cool. Especially the sexy ones, or the lunatics, the drunkards and the sexual perverts. Rimbaud is cool, Kerouac is cool, Updike is cool. They're eccentric and creative and full of balderdash, and by God, people want that in their lives!

This led to my second revelation. A brand name author endorsing a particular line of typewriters, pens or what-have you seems like such a natural. Authors endorsing anything seems like a natural since writers, particularly poets, are chronically poor. It also seems natural that writers endorse certain products that speak to their lifestyle, to their brands, things they use. Why doesn't some gun manufacturer pay Elmore Leonard an obscene amount of money for three days of photoshoots with their new handgun? The fit is there; and so it is with Anais Nin and massage oil, Anne Rice and caskets, Mordecai Richler and fine scotch, and even with Mingus Tourette and beer, rum, vodka, absinth, condoms, old cars, cigarettes, bongs, and anything that has to do with the seduction of women.

Mingus will be a brand. It will stand for whatever I stand for. It will conjure an image, a thought, a feeling; just like Bukowski, Dostoevski, or Sidney Sheldon. Let's face it - Mingus Tourette will never get a grant from any self-respecting government counsel, he will never be a respected writer-in-residence and he will never be a tenured prof at a fine institution of higher learning. The brand denies that to him. Which is distressing, because more than anything, Mingus would like to write ten pages every day and call that a career. And because he loves writing so much, he will do anything he can to get to that point, and like a bitch and her pimp, he is ready to whore for his art, ready to whore for the thing he loves. Cause what options are open to him, besides the hope of selling a hundred thousand copies of Nunt? Can Mingus be sponsored? Can he cash in on his brand as it grows?

The central question is: who would want to sponsor a drunken poet constantly waddling down the centre line to self destruction? Furthermore, who wants to sponsor a self-confessed atheist, womanizer, and sodomite? The answer is, possibly: beer makers, wine growers, Appleton's Rum, Molson's... whoever sells liquor, whoever packs domes, whoever builds real dolls. You want a poster boy for good hard times and lots of drinks, and Mingus is yer man. Hell, he's probably drunk as he writes this.

So I'm throwing this out there for all my readers who might happen to be corporate sponsorship representatives. We're looking for a sponsor to underwrite the Nunt Cream tour in September. It's cheap compared to Beckham's rate. I'd offer up my valuable beer endorsement to Pilsner right now, in exchange for them buying me the Ice Cream truck and three hundred cases of beers and the gas money for the tour. Hell, I'd be your official poet laureate if you cover the meals, cause the government of Canada sure as hell ain't going to hand me one of those posts. I'd even write you a poem or two, once a year. Yup. Like this. Pay attention, corporate Molson executives. You could be running this on a billboard soon.

My Night On The Pil

I been counting white rabbits
on the side of this fucking Pilsner can
all night

and every time I get it down
to fourteen or fifteen bunnies
i take another drink
and I got to start over

and now
twelve beers in
I can't count at all
and I'm seeing rabbits hopping around the room
in the television
smoking cigarettes

and mostly
sticking out from between women's legs
soft and furry
and I just want to pet that rabbit
kiss it on the forehead

might seem a little forward
but don't worry ladies
everything is just fine
cause Mingus is on the Pil

fuck I love this beer

--- --- ---

There's still space on the side of the van. Give me your logos, your wretched corporate colours, your mascots and your slogans, but most of all, give me your fucking sponsorship money so I can write like a motherfucker till I melt down some day in my expensive Estee Lauder™ water, put on my Nike™ bathrobe, wander out into the lobby of the super-8 motel™ and open fire with my bluesteel Remington™ on everything that moves until they shoot me down in the parking lot like some rabid dog™.

Ye Gods. Give me corporate sponsorship or give me death.

March 29, 2004
Tourette's Tournament
of Evil

As was mentioned way back in January, the fine people at Zygote are very interested in running contests to generate some excitement about the book, and they were kind enough to ask me for input on what kind of contest I would like to run.

Being the net denizen that I am, I thought it would be the fucking raddest thing ever to run a wallpaper contest and give away a gasmask to the winner (pictured above). Wallpaper, for those who are completely computer illiterate, is a large graphic that you can download to your computer and set as the background screen. Quite often, people have shots of their kids. Nerds have photos of Carrie-Anne Moss in tight latex. I have a tight shot of a woman's breast, lactating. It's quite a Rorschach test.

The official announcement will come later on this week, I believe on April 1 (suitably) or the beginning of next week, but a reminder of the general idea and contest rules are as follows:


Tourette's Tournament of Evil - Round One

1] Contestants read a selected Nunto from Mingus Tourette's upcoming book of prose-styled poems, Nunt.

2] Contestants will create a piece of interpretive digital artwork based on the Nunto. The artwork will fit in a standard wall-paper format, ie. 1024 * 768 pixels. Anything goes - typographic interpretations, photos, illustrations, 3d, finger painting, whatever, but it must be yr own work.

<editor's question>: Is this a standard wall-paper size? Should we use a different size? If you have strong opinions about this, let me know.</editor's question>

3] Contestants submit the artwork for judgement. Judgement will occur with extreme prejudice. The first contest will last a month. Selected entries will be displayed as the contest progresses. When the contest closes, the jury will select an undetermined number of wallpapers for the public contest. The finalists will be displayed and readers will be asked to vote on their favourite. Whoever has the most votes wins.

4] The winner will be announced. The winner will be awarded ... THE TOURETTE TOURNAMENT OF EVIL GAS MASK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That's right, we mail a real gas mask to you, the winner.

5] [Optional] Drunk on their own street credit, their own fleeting glory, and a shot of absinthe from Mingus' bellybutton, the winner will be carried through the streets of Balthazar on the back of a thousand slaves to a waiting room filled with virgins to be annointed with oil and set alight on Viking funeral barges.

So there it is. Get yr creative juices flowing. And if you have any bright ideas about how this could work, let me know. There will be other contests, cause we have lots of nuntos and at least two gasmasks and nun habits and other crap to give away, but why wait? This is the soon-to-be legendary first Tourette Tournament of Evil. A gasmask could be yours in the near future.





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