Beck is a man unlike any other, and that makes him like all of us... He's as close to a messiah figure as I can imagine, or a song buddha and an icon of individuality... I don't aim to start a holy war or anything, but the guy just doesn't ever seem to drop the ball when it comes to being unique and original... He doesn't even manufacture it, meaning his image... He doesn't need to... He's Beck... Ah, wax on... Wax off... There I go again...

I find that he inspires me to be more myself, which I feel has ever been his endeavor... Early on in his career he told an interviewer that everybody should make their own songs... This was before the days of mice-pace and eye-toons and you-tuber... Before any country joe and his fish could throw a looped beat on a computer and spit some mediocre journal entries and call it art... Still, he encouraged people to become all they could be, so I listened and wrote a hundred or more songs that year...

Today, I actually just wanted to blog about the fun things I do with Beck stickers... But that's what opening my Beck door does for me... To step in the ring is to allow my brain to perform loop-de-loops, and I always come up with some strange fruit... I even had a nearly finished blog very like this but different, which sadly bit the dust this afternoon, due to an overheated CPU and an absent-minded author who forgot to save prior to the freeze... But that's life!!! That's Beck as well... He's often writing about broken equipment and even included in his songs the noises these machines make in their death throes...

Even his name conjures creativity from me... If I venture into unBexpected territory, I call it a Bexperiment... If it sounds really superb I deem it Bexquisite... When I was living in China I rediscovered Beck through his album Sea Change... I instantly became a Bexpatriate... He sets a fine Bexample for all of us, and when I sound a little like him or draw from the same source, I am a Beck echo, or a Becko... Gosh, I am sure sounding like a Bextremist... And I could go on and on, but I don't want to Bexhaust you...

It's enough for me to know that you know that he knows that none of us know anything... heh heh... So I'll get back to the sticker topic... His last album, 'The Information...' was released with a blank white graph paper cover... Not even trying to be a legend, like the White album or the Graph album, it was simply a canvass for creativity to happen... There were dozens of amazing stickers in each album, and a person would have to buy several copies to find repeats... I still remember buying the regular album first, then the deluxe edition shortly thereafter... I got it more for the extra stickers than the two bonus songs... But I really like stickers...

There were portraits of Beck... Thought bubbles bursting, cloud horses making love, shadow puppets barking, alien tribal band members, surreal holes left unfilled, a man with a pinball face... And much more... After I covered my beach guitar with them, and designed my graph paper cover, I still had an ample surplus... I have given them randomly to children, stuck them at odd bus stops, and even slapped them on Malaysian currency and sent them right back to Beck himself... What fun they offer me in a gluesome guerrilla way!!!

The peak of my Beckstravaganza stickerfest was a blank book I began about when 'The Information' came out... I stuck them on several pages throughout the book, though leaving lots of room for my words... Little did I know that in the following 3 months I would completely fill the entire book with my wackless poetry, writing around or about the engaging little stickers... I also used many other magazine images or found 2-D objects, taking the spirit of the Beck stickers to a new level...

So in the past two years I have randomly collaged with the stickers, which I would like to share with you...









The Malay money I picked up in Kuala Lampur amid a layover from China to India... I ought to do this with  some U.S. dollars and then recirculate them... Just imagining that makes me giggle, heh heh...

Then I got an insurance advertisement in the mail that just asked one question... "Why is this woman smiling?" I laughed at the bizarre irony even before I defaced or refaced it... Does this woman NEED a reason to smile? Philosophically, the advertising world shattered all moral mores with this one... If our society has come to a juncture where we need to ask why someone smiles, then we need to learn from the blissfully enlightened two-year-olds at a daycare...






Last but not leased is a 1950's football card that just made me laugh so hard I turned it into a fridge magnet... The cards came from my deceased father, who pasted them all into a book when he was a child... I received them in my teenage years and could only see them then as worthless nostalgia... Until I went through them all this last winter and realized they have super funny images in a posing-too-hard way...


Here's the one I gave away as a fridge magnet for Christmas... My friend recently scanned it and sent it over so I could share it with you... Thanks Naomi... And what a NAME this guy has, eh?!? John Kreamcheck!!! I did NOT black out his tooth! It came to me that way... This is from when sports heroes were normal people who didn't need to have perfect celebriteeth...



When all is said undone, it's all about the fun... Beck has a blast usually, which in turn teaches others to be free and have their own fun as well... I hope the next several years are kind to him...