barriomulas.com

This week was Public Servant Week. The City Government sponsored a barbecue along with a series of fun competitions and games. Dunk tanks, inflatables, and mechanical bulls were the rule of the day.

It was the first time I ever saw someone start a fire with plastic cups (pictured above).

Fun stuff.

I few days ago I posted a rendering of some improvements I'd like to make to my guest room:



After two days of work I finally finished the dresser. Here we go:



Before. Horrible horrible. I don't know who's idea it was to spray paint the designs. Looks like someone wiped their ass on it.


I pull out the drawers and paint the rest of the piece matte black.


Finishing with the top. The edges were the hardest because I would have to carefully cut them prior to placing them down.


Starting on the individual drawers. The corners were the hardest, cause it would just look too obvious that I folded paper over the corners. I had to cut each corner about half a dozen times for it to fall into place.


The only thing that's left is to place the handles back. I'm not sure if I should keep them their metallic gray or paint them black.

My next home improvement project is to rehabilitate my guestroom. The most recent picture I could find of it was taken a few months ago. Excuse the mess - I had guests who had a habbit of stackign their close up aroudn the room. (I didn't provide any dressers or closets, so they are not to blame.) Please ignore the bootleg phoneline that was strung up across the room (don't worry - I'm taking it down).




I would like to do the following to this room:




I wanted to paint the wall to the right black and add 2x2 panels of artwork with about an inch buffer between each piece. This would create a neat texture and would add a lot of color to the room. I would add a dresser (a rehabilitated version of one that my great grandfather built ages ago - nicly built but ugly as hell), and a lamp (which I have to make).

I'll keep you guys updated.

I'm all about home improvement. You guys know that. If I can build it myself, save a buck, and make it look good, than I'm down. Everything in my house has either been rehabilitated, remixed, or built by yours truly. From the stools at my bar to my bookshelves to my platform bed.

I have some company towards the end of the month so I decided to carry out a thorough clean-up of my house. In the process I've decided to revamp (again) room by room.

I started with my beat lab. The first thing that I acknowledged was my need for another desk. The recently remixed desk that I already had (plastered with a collage of cool clippings from magazines) was not enough to hold all of my beat making equipment. So I decided to take another. I found an old table that my grandmother had built many years ago and decided to work on it.

Here we go:



Starting at the corners. It's easier to get the corners out the way (you have to cut them specially and fold them around the sides once the top-side is dry.


Painted the legs a thick, dark black. Used two coats just to keep it sleek.


Liquid plastic. It actually seems to work better the older it is.

You can see the final result alongside the rest of the room's improvements:


My beloved inner-wall shelves.


The new table to the left; new home to my miniature mix board and my MIDI controller. Next pieces of equipment to invade its top: an MPC drumpad and a turntable (for sampling).


I found those two chairs like a year and a half ago on the side of the road in the rain. I sanded down the rusty metal legs, painted them black, cut wood to replace the rotten back and ass rests and added collage. The larger PC table was actually made afterwards to match them. You can also see a recent clock that I remixed, by making a collage face. The numbers say cool things like "IV", "7:00pm", and December. Also pictured are some of my beloved heroes: Rafael Cortijo, Ismael Rivera, and Hugo Chavez.


An old recliner that used to belong to one of my great grandparents. I picked up two yards to cheap clearance cloth at my local hobby shop and simply tossed and tucked. It used to be covered by that neat blanket that I had bought in Mexico two years ago. Pictured on the column is another hero, Simon Bolivar and Salvador Allende (added soon after). The photo/drawing on the top was made by my good friend Dino years ago.

I wanted to make the protruding sections of the wall carry a darker gray to stress its shape. I also added dark gray lines every few feet on the lighter gray walls to give it some dimension. Sort of make it looks like it's made of panels.

Just stumbled upon the work of Daniel Dociu from a friend's blog. Fascinating artwork, I must say. It reminds me of  the shanties, slums, and barriadas of the future.

Found this while cleaning out my master bed room.

Ok, so Marcia Gay Harden is the hottest 48 year old actor ever. I just finished watching The Mist and couldn't stop thinning about how hot she is for a grandma'.

Ok, ok, so I had this crazy dream. It was actually a commercial.

The setting is on the streets of New York, or some other gray city setting. A young street hustler played by Mos Def is slanging CDs from a roofed bus stop. He holds a stack of CDs in one hand and a poster for the album in another. The poster features a number of reggae-like symbols, including a lion, drawings of people with dreds, and the Ethiopian flag. He stands next to a boom box which is playing the album. The music is a thick reggae with a sharp soul beat over it. (I memorized some of the melodies with the intention to try to model beats after them, but I must have forgotten them when I went back to sleep). The music was great. A thick ragga bass line, a hip drum beat, and the "wakka wakka" characteristic of reggae music. The music sounded like it was from the 1970s.

And older man walks by. He wore a black cap with a red star on it. It was obvious by his attire that he was a Black nationalist in his days. Quite possibly even a Black Panther. "Hook me up with one of your CDs, little man" he says. "What year is this from?" "2008" says Mos Def. The old man's face was surprised as the scene faded out.

Man. That music was so sweet. I wish that album really existed so I could buy it, or something. Damn mind games.

I have bad days all the time. It doesn't really make me feel any different than when I have good days. I guess you can say that though I acknowledge that everything seems to be going wrong, nothing gets done, or I have more work than what my allotted time permits me to accomplishing, none of this really makes me *feel* any different. I think I do a good job at separating myself from the "bad". "I'm" fine, even though the day can be shitty. I mean; you can feel totally dandy even though everything else around you is shot to hell, right? Why not?

Today was one of those days. A pretty bad day. But my mind and spirit is intact. And boy, is this Chet Baker CD pretty good.

Work was nothing but dilemma after dilemma. "We have a problem!" an employee would tell me as they barge into my office every 10 minutes. "So and so doesn't want to sign a document." "We have no more funds in that account." "So and so said this and that behind my back." "The world is ending." Bla bla bla. ("Crisis management" is something that I slap onto my resume, cause I'm just so used to disarming bomb after bomb.) I can stare an employee with an emotionless blank face as they tell me that shit's going to hit the fan. It's alright. Problems are there to resolve, right? ("Trouble shooting" is something else that I include on my resume's "skills" section.) I mean, that's what I'm good at. Sometimes I'm even looking for problems to fix. I won't - on the other hand - let my superiors know that there is a crisis until I have a solution planned out for it. It's worked out so far. I mean; I hate when people come to me with crisis but no solution.

Well, today was nothing but all of the above. Those gram crackers that I found laying on an employee's desk were pretty good, though.

Anyways; after a long day of saving the world, I notice that it's pouring rain as I'm leaving my office building. "Whatever," I thought. "It's been so long since I've really wet myself in the rain that it probably feels good. Anyways, I'm going to shower as soon as I get home, so no loss."

So I make my way to my car, soaking wet and notice a flat tire. I weigh my options: drive a quarter mile to the nearest gas station or change the tire in the rain. I opt for the first option.

While homeboy was changing my tire, I munched on a few mangoes that an uncle of mine gave to me when we passed each other on the street. I would peal them with my teeth and bite into them as if I was some sort of spider monkey. I didn't have anywhere to wipe my hand so I would just clean them off in my pockets. I ate maybe five of those little bastards as I pondered what my real life super powers would be. I identified the following:

• Immunity to bug bites; they never bite me, really
• The ability to change the tire with the snap of a finger; when I feel like it
• An enhanced memory address; a computer term I stole, referring to my super human ability to remember things like instrument solo placements in a song I heard five years ago or the location of a specific CD stuffed into the middle of a large binder.
• A sexual super power that I will not mention for the sake of web ethics.

I think one has no option but to think about stuff like this after 10 hours of office politics (and real politics, in my case). Looking around my environment I noticed the following:



It's a banana stalk hanging from a shelf of tires. I tried to take it without anybody noticing it but I had the flash on. Nobody seemed to care, though. I suppose that they were hung out to "ripen up" and are casually picked by the workers whenever they are yellow enough. Who needs health care and over time laws when you have free bananas!?

Little Negroes says:
vas a celebrar tu cumple?

Little Negroes says:
happy birthday!

Tomorrow's my birthday says:
I dont know how to "celebrate"

Tomorrow is my birthday, by the way.

Nobody call me. I don't like talking on the phone.

(Instead just pick me out something from my amazon.com wishlist. You can buy it used.)

Jaja. I almost wrote mamazon. (Which means something funny in Spanish)

Recently the electricity has been going out at work during the mornings and afternoons. This is pretty much the only time where a blackout seizes to become an inconvenience and becomes outright annoying. Office attire doesn't necessarily go well with stuffy offices. I hate when my workday mornings are air conditioned free, for I will spend the read of the day treading in my own dried up sweat.

I can tell when we have no power for all of my employees are standing outside of the building door. With no air conditioning, no ventilation, and an overcrowded office, one can quickly feel stuffy. "Can we get the rest of the day off?" employees will ask as they drip sweat. "Let's just wait a little bit longer," I respond. "How about now?" they ask half an hour later. After a few hours of blackout I finally I agreed to send everybody home. Ironically as the last employee pealed away from the building the light comes back on.

The electricity and water go out every once and a while here in Puerto Rico. Maybe not as much as say, Santo Domingo, but in comparison to my Georgian upbringing, one could classify utility outages as occurring "often". I have no qualms, though; having your utilities cut with no advance obligates you to be prepared at all times. Families often keep sealed gallons of water under the kitchen sink. Some have electricity generators in their carports, water tanks on top of the house, or even a solar panel to assure hot water during a power outage. If Y2K were to have ever really happened, Puerto Ricans would have lived through it.

Hurricane Jeane was the coolest. The Puerto Rican government had thought that it would be best to turn off the nation's electricity grid prior to the arrival of Jeanne only to turn it back on once the storm was clear. They though that this could minimize damages. Seemed like a great idea. That's until the grid didn't turn back on, that is. Puerto Ricans were left with no running water and electricity for anywhere between two weeks to an entire month as the island's heavily bureaucratic agencies worked hard at booting back up the system.

Families held barbecues as to not loose refrigerated meat, grandmothers ate ice cream so that it wouldn't go bad, folks gathered around the radio, politics took a back seat, work for everybody was canceled, roadways were down, and everybody co-existed in a sort of post-apocalyptic setting (minus the zombies or outbreaks). Sure, folks complained and hissed, but I was having the time of my life. I would sleep each day until my back hurt, read two books a day, and explore my backyard. I always say that at least once a year our electricity and water systems should be shut down without notice for a period of two weeks. This wold be our "break time" from civilization.

I found this drawing under a stack of papers in my kitchen bar cupboard. It must have been stashed there by Amaia during her last visit. The drawing is of a princess in brown and blue with green hearts on it. Her hair is green and a big heart dots the "I" of Amaia's name. The name of her mother and her mother's partner are written to the left.

I hope I keep finding these.

Ya' know; even though I don't live with Children I'd probably do something like that. That's if it wasn't for the fact that drilling into my ceiling would cause an electrical short circuit or something. Wouldn't it be cool to watch a movie while hanging from one of those things?

Hhmmm. (Brain juices moving).

Okay, so I'm watching "The Eye". It's about a blind woman who undergoes an eye transplant. As she copes with her newly found ability of vision she find herself seeing ghosts and other spooky stuff. She begins investigating her eye "donor" who turns out to be [a cute] Mexican woman who committed suicide. There's a scene where Mrs. Post-blind walks into a basement and sees the Mexican woman attempting to hang herself. "No!" she screams as she lunges out at Chiapas chica and frees her from the noose.

Anybody who grew up during the era of the Back to the Future era knows that this scene could have caused a rupture in the time-space continuum. "What are you doing!?" I screamed at the screen. "If you save her life then she will have never died to give you your eyes!" What would follow would be Blind Girl's disappearance as her lack of eyes would have prevented her from being there in the first place. Age of Apocalypse-style M'kraan crystals would freeze over the universe and we would seize to exist.

Sure, it might have been scary seeing people's death a few seconds before it happens, but after a while I'm sure you can get the hang of it. I'm sure you can learn to ignore hallucinations of explosions and flying glass shards. I mean; thousands of common folk from Middle Eastern countries do that on a daily basis. She could actually make a fortune by utilizing her super powers (cause to me, it was a super power) for the greater good of mankind.

Many many years ago my grandmother built a tiny little table for miscellaneous usage. Shortly after moving to Puerto Rico I quickly confistated the table (which was an escombro at the time) and quickly hogged it up with broken computer screens, books, lamps, and whatever my needs called for throughout the years. But there was one problem: grandma was a very tiny woman and she made the table to accommodate her tiny little legs. The table was so short that the top was at the same level as my knees while sitting. Quite uncomfortable. Thus, the table was only had short-term and temporary uses.

That was until I acquired a new computer to accompany my new home recording studio and thus needed a place to accommodate my "play" PC. (The "new" computer is actually my reincarnation of a computer my father just tossed out.) So what better place to put a computer than in my own bedroom? (Crystal would shoot me just as much as I'd shoot her for putting at television in the room). I've had that short grandma desk stuffed in the corner for quite some time now, and decided that the computer would fit nicely.

Facil. I just hammered out the old legs, cut some longer ones, and utilized my God-given male memes to "implant" them into the old table. Viola! But yet another problem: the color of the table (a terracotta brown) didn't really match the legs (a light brown). Going through the trouble of matching the colors would be a pain in the ass, not to mention the original color wasn't that magnificent to begin with. Thus I dished out some left-over supplies from my Primitive Man mural and coated the table with three layers of red paint I watched Jessica Alba's "The Eye" (which sucked pretty bad, actually).



Bam.

By the way, the books on my built-in shelf are actually in sections. Once upon a time they were actually in Dewey Decimal system (thanks mom, for obligating me to remember catalog numbers whenever you took me to the library as a child) but it was a pain in the ass to keep them organized. Your currently viewing the geography, reference, international politics, colonialism, and religion sections. Those books stacked on the right compose my "to read" list. Books include those referred to me by readers, books acquired on recent trips, and those given to me as gifts.

I saw the above image in an amusing article from The Atlantic magazine on the current state of higher education. The crying man with the "F" report is quite humorous. I would like a t-shirt of the same character holding up something like an iPod or something of the sort.

Painting a line such as this one will make your ceiling look lower.

Note to self: click here for more ways to change the perception of a room.