scott penkava's blog

the photocopy

the photocopy

[Scott's Mom:]
Scott Penkava was born December 31st
Weighing in at 9 pounds 9 1/2 ounces
He was the first of my 3 children
The one who caused me the most pain when i gave birth to him
And that's how i knew that he was a special child

[Scott Verse 1]
They say "they never really miss you til you dead or you gone"
So on that note i'm leaving after the song
So you ain't gotta feel no way about Scott so long
At least let me tell you why i'm this way, Hold on
I was conceived by Sue Wilkie and John Penkava
Who lost their love before i was three
Which makes me
A love sick kiddee,  my momma would claim
At nine and a half pounds when i was born 38 hours of pain
Throughout the years i gave her her fair share
I gave her her first real scare
I made it from birth and i got here
She knows my purpose wasn't purpose
I ain't perfect i care
But i feel worthless cause my shirts wasn't matchin my gear
Now i'm just scratchin the surface cause what's burried under there
Was a kid torn apart once his pop disappeared
I went to school got good grades could behave when i wanted
But i had demons deep inside that would raise when confronted
Hold on

[Scott's Mom:]
Scott was a very shy child growing up
He was into science
And a funny story is
At 4 he ran away from home
For two weeks at that
Isn't that special?
But, i noticed a change in him when me and my husband broke up

[Scott Verse 2]
Now all the preachers couldn't reach me
And my momma couldn't teach me
Enough to match the pain of my god not seeing me, SO
With that disdain in my membrane
Got on my goth game
God is dead my defense came
Then comic store introduced me to the game
Nerd kids and the role playing games
I'm a punk kid now
My gear is black and i'm livin' outside crowd
And all the black lipstick white skin girls is lovin me now
My self esteem went through the roof man i found my bag
Got to an arts high when public got bad
Talking philosophy and marxism at school
No more pariah girls think i'm cool
I'm getting ahead of myself, by the way i made art
That came second to me taking this crap
Gimme a second i swear
I will say about my art career
Til 96 came austin i'm here
Good-bye

[Scott's Mom:]
Scott use to be in the kitchen
Playing with legos and talking
And um, until the wee hours of the morning
And then i bought him some construx
And his sisters said that he would drive them nuts
But that was my way to keep him close to me and out of trouble


[Scott Verse 3]
Good-bye to the game all the sports, the adreneline rush
Your blood boils you in a spot knowing jocks could rush
And you in a drop your so easy to touch
No two days are alike
Except the first and last pretty much
And "trust" is a word you seldom hear from us
Punk kids we don't sleep we rest one eye up
All alone can define a man, when the friends dry up
You learn to work yourself without workin, out of trust you'll die YUP
And kids tore themselves up looking for acceptance
And little brothers emulating and lookin'  up
To show others their accepatnce
And this was the stress i live with til i decided
To try this art shit for a livin
I can't pray i'm forgiven
For every bad decision i made
Every game i played
Cause i'm still paranoid to this day
And it's nobody fault i made the decisions i made
This is the life i chose or rather the life that chose me

If you can't respect that your whole perspective is wack
Maybe you'll love me when i fade to black

If you can't respect that your whole perspective is wack
Maybe you'll love me when i fade to black
[repeat 2 more times to fade]

my mom can read this one...she already knows this story...

Feminist icon

so one morning i was riding the train with my friend emmy, and we were talking about our respective devorces, and she asked how things with my ex-wife and i actually ended, and i told her that we got in a fist fight. which was the greatly abbreviated version of things. in actually, we had been having a lot of communication problems and we were both drinking too much and i was severely depressed etc. and things escalated to the breaking point one night while we were fighting. i threw a drink in her face, in which action i also dinged her forehead with the glass, then everything went all wrong. befvore i knew it we had escalated from a common domestic dispute to a full on trailer-park style brawl. anyway, that was miserable.
so anyway emmy asked about how the fight went, and i told her that it was pretty fair i was 20 about 6'4" and 126 pounds, scrawny to a fault at the time. and she was 22, 5'10" and about the same weight, not to mention pretty nicely gunned for a lady given all of the yoga and baby lifting. regardless i felt weird, i still do, about fighting back. you know that whole never his a girl thing. so i asked emmy what she would do if a girl hit her. and she paused and thought about it, and then said, "i'd hit her back, i'm a feminist." i about laughed my ass off of my seat on the train.
and thus after a few iterations and adjustments of the language, the shirt was born.

dude how did i miss it...

i finally figured out why comedy is better than art... and it's pretty dumb and obvious. comedy is all about content. that's it. it's completely intellectual. you're weird looking so what (actually, amy sedaris is pretty fucking gorgeous, not that she ever takes advantage of that, which works even more to my point), you have a weird voice, fuck it, you're a repellent human being use it.  formalism doesn't exist in comedy. you don't even have to talk as long as you can communicate in some basic way,  (there's no escaping semiotics) you're golden. if you can use it well. the one rule for comedy is to be funny. that's the entire game. just a bit of cleverness that hasn't been seen before. you cant get on stage, fine, you can write produce whatever. its all one game for these cats.
all you need to do is watch the commentary for anchoman to relalize that the director is easily as funny as will, and the reason why the film works is because they are playing that game together.
but that's the thing.
like what does art have?
the closest thing that you can get to laughter is the formalist's ohhh and ahhh. and that's total crap and bound up in some weird social myth about the artist as socally inspiring genius anyway; not due to some hocus pocus aethestectic experience.

I really hope my mom doesn't read this one...

Feminist icon

i guess this thing is all about the back stories for this crap so here's the second half first for this one.

last spring, a couple weeks after i made it i was wearing this shirt at a party in baltimore. and these two girls roll up on me and start reading me the riot act. so i'm reasonably shit-canned at this point and the short version of the story is that i start lecturing them on the history of feminism and i inform them in no uncertain terms that just because they are girls who went to college that does not give them the right to run around invoking feminism as the default reason to back-up whatever they want. because of course they were gonna meet up with someone someday who knew the rhetoric better than they did, and in fact today was that day. so while i'm talking circles around them, (really don't know the history of feminism all that well but the johnny walker wisdom was runnin' high) one of them keeps interrupting me. so being the nice guy that i am, i say, "shut up, bitch, i'm tryin' to talk." needless to say that upped the ante a bit in the whole interaction, she demanded an apology, which i in no uncertain terms informed her was not going to be forthcoming. and she continued to demand said apology regularly from me for the rest of the night, up to and including the point where she was blowing me i a stairwell.

and i think that's where i will end that part of the story.

http://scottpenkava.com/feministicon.html

i'm gonna join the circus

Lifetime Impulse

so one night i was quietly google image seaching, probably for vomit, or poop or some such, and i came across some form of note, i don't remember what it was but anyway then i started searching for notes, a note came up from a girl named michelle to what was most likely a boyfriend. i had a girlfriend named michelle in high school and that was enough to get me thinking that i should search for scott and note. it wasn't far in that i found this note, well not exactly this note, the guys name was scott teplin, and he was six in 1978 instead of 1987. convenient for me that with a little photoshop i had what i needed to reassign this note to me.

the thing that i didn't realize when i grabbed it was that scott teplin, if he is this scott teplin, is an artist in new york too, in fact according to his site, his studio is a few blocks from mine. i think now i'm gonna have to talk to him about what i did, and make sure that it's cool with him, i hope it is. okay that's all for now, i'll gush about how fantastic this note is later.

i have since varified that the scott teplin who penned this note is the artist scott teplin, now i just need to figure out how to talk to him about it.

i got this email the other day

weak move   Inbox

	Rivet Tip	<rivettip@yahoo.com> to me	More options	Sep 2

Dear Scott,
Pretty weak, I have to say, stealing an image from
http://www.teplin.com/bonus/scott_note.jpg and
altering the note to appear like something YOU posted.
LAME.
-rivettip

but whatever, to someone who is emailing me from an alias, and doesn't email me back, talk to me about it dude, or piss off.

the kitten drama

sleepy kitty making biscuits

okay so then there's this thing, this wee-little video that i made that was the first thing i ever posted on youtube, and of course there was drama. i stole it, yep, that was me, i re-edited it, guilty again, and yeah i put it back right next to hers, guilty. so then she complained and it was removed.
you see of course she was upset, because i placed the narration of a foul mouthed comedian over her kitten. which i understand to a point, but only slightly. then i look into her and her boyfriend's accounts, her boyfriend brought the original complaint, and i discover that he has a bunch of crap that is totally ripped off and raunchy parody as well. so i point this out to him. i talk him down.
here's his email:
Scott. First off, I want to back up a little and apologize for the tone in my comments. It was a gut reaction to the way that the kitten video had been used. Some backstory is useful. She's my girlfriend and that particular kitten is now all grown up and living with us in our apartment. It was just a shock to hear the audio you used with the video. I support parody, being a "Weird Al" fan (and Richard Pryor, for what it's worth) for as long as I can remember. Had she known how the video would have been used, I don't believe she would have given permission since she was more than a little upset with your interpretation. I think that if I had not been personally attached to this particular video I wouldn't have had a problem with it but, perhaps unfortunately, I am and we do. Sorry.

Without trying to get into an argument about them, just a clarification about the videos I have "favorited" on YT. I've explained about the kitten one. Totally original. In fact, it's really my fault this happened at all. I convinced her to post the video. She's had a lot of fun watching the views go up and seeing the reaction and comments. That's part of the problem with the modification you made. It's always been this cute and adorable video and, without trying to dance around the situation, she felt you had sort of defaced it.

The video with the guys dancing to some song... An original video as well. I personally know the guy in the black shirt. I work with him. The song? It's an original composition by a friend of his.

And the Jimmy Kimmel clip? Well, I don't know what to say about that. Perhaps it wasn't uploaded by someone associated with the show but it is their original video. It hasn't been re-edited in any way. It's a Kimmel thing if you haven't watched the show before. It's an unfortunately funny sidenote to think about the title of that Kimmel clip on YT. "Unnecessary Censorship" ... I have thought about what you said and I agree that my assigning this video as a favorite is hypocritical. I have removed it from my favorites. I still think it's funny though. Don't you? And thinking a little more about it. I'd support Kimmel if they decided to ask YT to remove those clips due to some kind of ownership rights. And I'd support the people IN those clips used by Kimmel if they were up-in-arms about his use of their videos. I admint it's a difficult line to walk.

I _DO_ know how easy it is to grab the videos from YT and I appreciate your feelings about the kitten but I guess I'm asking that you respect my girlfriend's wishes to keep this a cute and adorable video.

So, sorry about the long message. I'm not speaking for my girlfriend in any way but I wanted to clearly explain things from _MY_ side. I understand that the Jimmy Kimmel video paints my comments here, and on YT, as a bit hypocritical and for that I apologize. That said, I believe it's because of my personal attachment to the kitten video that changes thngs for me. I have a lot invested in both the cat and the girl and don't want to see either of them demeaned" in any way. This is me riding up on my white horse in a suit of shining armor.

I look forward to hearing your feelings about this, if you feel inclined to reply, and I hope we can put this behind us

so yeah anyway then i write back to him:

Okay look, i'm sorry that i came off as pissed, but i kinda am, i emailed and asked cath for the video a few weeks ago, no reply. but i wanted to make this video, why you ask, why would you want to deface this cute video?
well first off i love this video, my girlfriend is bff with meg at cute overload she was out here visiting a few weeks ago, and my girlfriend showed me her site, which i immediately procalimed to be the curefor prozac. anyway around that time was when i first saw the kitten video, and then watched it about a million times. we check cuteO everyday and talk and whatever, so one night i brought up the richard pryor thing and we joked about it and i talked to friends and stuff and at this point making biscuits has became an inside joke about being too drunk to fuck, and has since become a sweet thing that substitutes for 'hey honey you wanna go to bed' with a suggestive eyebrow raising. why am i telling you all of this? because i'm trying to illustrate the the type of person that i am and the people around me, so you can understand the type of motivation that this comes from.
a lot of people have kind of a 1:1 relationship to things like cuteness or affection or whatever, my mother is one of these people, and that's fine, cath's video is perfect for that, it's a cute ice cream sunday, and i love it that way. and then there's the other end of things like my best friend's mother who walks around calling cute things "lil' pooper" or saying in a babytalk voice to her granddaughter things like "who's the ugliest baby in the whole world, that's right you are, my sweet ugly little baby." i assure you that the baby is beautiful and that she thinks as much, she just likes to play with things like that. this behavior initially motified my mother, now she loves it, and is still slightly mortified by it, but she loves it.
so yeah, i respect both ends, and i don't want to see either of them go. so yeah

(oddly enough as i type this the tv special pee-wee did after he got out of the joint is on tv which is an odd mix of the precious and the indecent, you know childhood memories mixed with the scandal, and then the glory of having him back)

anyway i back the jimmy kimmel thing, ane i can almost positively assure you that it was not posted by anyone at the network, and the people at jimmy kimmel are totally protected to use those clips in the way that they did. (i'm an art student, and i do a lot of things that kinda wander into these things, so i've checked into u.s. copyright laws [which YT pays lipservice to, but knowingly violates constantly] i've also done a lot of research on the history and ethics of satire and parody, and i firmly believe that satire and parody are only good when when the author has an involved and intricate relationship to the material that they are working with) anyway i could go on further but suffice it to say i love cath's video and richard pryor, and also mr. rogers, and i support all of them being played with.
any way let me leave you with this, my favorite story about mr. rogers.
--When a celebrity dies, all too often the media digs up sordid stories and scandals about him. Mr. Rogers had no such scandals. He was universally respected and loved. Think I'm exaggerating? When his car was stolen a few years ago and the media reported it, the car was returned by the thieves the next day with a note: "Sorry - we didn't know it was YOUR car."

http://www.intrepidmedia.com/column.asp?id=1132

so then she writes back:

Hi Scott,

My boyfriend just shared with me your email conversation with him. I didn't know he was trying to smooth things over, but I now feel this is all a huge misunderstanding and I'd like to correct it. I regret that I did not respond to your original request to use the video of Daphne. Had I known how much you truly enjoyed the cuteness, and knew of your "making biscuits" private joke you have, we could have avoided this whole mess. I apologize for going to YouTube rather than writing to you to start a discussion. I reacted impulsively and rather than seeing your parody as funny, or clever, I only saw it as "hey, he took my cute kitten video and made it raunchy!"

Now that I've had time to cool off and stop spazzing out, I'm ok with you reposting your video. If I can just ask one thing though...in the description of your video, I would love it if you could maybe link back to the original, because we may not always be listed as 'related videos' on each other's pages. If you report, I'll change my description as well, linking to your interpretation of the cutest video ever (IMNSHO). Also, now that we've smoked the peace pipe, I'm going to remove the original comments you left, reacting to my overreaction. Cool?

That's so awesome that your girlfriend is best friends with Meg from Cute Overload. I *love* that site. And not just because it's responsible for getting Daphne like a bajillion hits.

So, I hope we can walk away from this feeling good about the end result. Good luck with your art studies, and that's a kick-ass Mr. Rogers story. Mr. Rogers always taught me that it's good to share :-)

Catheroo

so yea, we did it, four points for satire.

but then i found this:
http://nanofishie.vox.com/

biscuit kitty!

• Aug 9, 2006 at 9:02 PM
• 4 comments

sleepy kitty making biscuits

This is a shorter version of the "sleepy kitty making biscuits" video, but the older version had curse words, so I put in the quiet biscuit kitty.

Hello to all my friends that love kitties!

Its one thing when you make something that subverts the original, and then you put it out and you imagine what happens with it, it's kind of another when you see it in action in kind of a harmful way. i dunno what to do. for now i'll leave it, i'm sure i'll deal.

matthew barney can suck my budget...

What fuckin' ever dude

So this guy has got more hubris than i've got chutzpah. matt matt matt matt matt, you're a photographer, deal with it. the books are fucking beautiful, the objects are fantastic, well some of them; but the movies are boring and fucking pointless and i can't even begin to care. yeah i know all of that crap about how these are art movies, and shit, and you know what, i don't care. i've seen 'em all, and i don't know what the fuck is going on and moreover i don't give a shit, kurosawa weeps to see him abusing time the way that he does. the cinematography blows, the characters are uncompelling, and the art direction (which seems to be what he is banking on to carry this mess) is for shit when you compare it to the pacing of the films.

so yeah i stole the movie, no i won't say from where, and no i can't get you a copy because i destroyed my copy. the only way that anyone makes it through these things is if they are so brainwashed by artschool blather that they are convinced that boring=deep. the thing is boring=boring, that's it; or the othher way of surviving is to add your own running commentary to the person sitting next  to you (it helps if you know the person and if they are on the same page as you).

this kind of thing only encourages more bad fucking self indulgent video work that goes nowhere and does nothing and gives the rest of us a bad name. i know everyone links this crap back to philosophy or oil painting or some such drivel, but seriously any work that pulls soley from such traditions is at the very best totally trite and completely contrived. philosophy can't even grapple with it's own shit, all of the three hour art movies in the world aren't gonna help. hell fuck it, you know what the philosophy guys liked, groundhog day, you know why, it was a solid movie that kinda dealt with philosophical shit. barney uses philosophy and theory to attempt to justify what is essentially a massive vanity indulgence.

http://scottpenkava.com/mstcm.html

ps, thanks to ruslan trusewych and cory arcangel for helping me decide how to do this one.

cruisin'

then there's this...

http://movies.aol.com/news/articles/_a/paramount-cuts-ties-with-tom-cruise/20060823075409990001

pretty impressive since they have a good working relationship with Roman Polanski (i never knew that he did her in all three doors), Cheech and Chong and the guys from Jackass.

War of the Worlds: Scientology Edition

Wow

So yeah i'm a belligerent atheist and yeah i don't suffer fools unless they're funny, but god damn it, why'd they have to take tom cruise? growing up he was the number one role model, i was like six when i saw top gun and i wanted to be a fighter pilot until i saw the color of money when i was ten. i lost the next four years of my life playing pool, until i saw interview with the vampire when i was 13, and i started drinking blood. okay it's not quite that dramatic, but seriously tom cruise is kind of the gold standard for cool. now i can't see him in anything without cringing. i dunno, i guess i think fame necessitates a different standard of behavior. pro athletes should sign autographs for kids, period, no exceptions, that's your job, not starting fights during games. the whole mel gibson thing is really sad, but at least i divorced mad max from mel gibson a long time ago, and honestly who didn't see that whole thing coming after the whole, passion of the deicide thing.

http://scottpenkava.com/wotwse.html

Come on NBC, what would Lorne Michaels do?

Snl

everything has to start somewhere, and i guess for here this is that point. NBC can suck my left fuckin' earlobe, nut, toe, kneecap whatever. they have some asshole patrolling youtube to find illegal content. which this video triggered when they went through and it got pulled off. which i know happens everyday but seriously i fuckin love snl; and i think that's obvious in the video, shit i miss important social events to go home most saturday nights to sit in front of a show that most people have lost faith in. and as you can see in the video i took almost nothing from them so they can calm the hell down. i mean what i did here is basically on par with taking a photo of myself dressed up as slash in front of an oversized poster of axl (hey that's not a bad idea, watch out geffen here i come).

anyway i wasn't given permission to make this video, nor for you to download it.

http://scottpenkava.com/marrymetina.html

so get on with your bad selves