...home is where the art is...

...the ballad of footeastman [part five]...

CansaFis Foote

Sep 14, 2023

…the ballad of footeastman is a series of stories I am sharing to commemorate a union I recently celebrated in the hallowed plateaus of western nebraska…If you are just getting caught up there are only a handful of things you have missed at this point. In part one we learned that I like bad jokes. In part two we learned that I make bad drinks. In part three we learned that I have bad taste and in part four we learned that I like Color Me Badd. In this part five I expect you to learn absolutely nothing…

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“Home is where one starts from.”

-T. S. Eliot-

It was the year 2009 when Magic Pony [Champagne] and I moved into our first house. The house had been a brothel in the 1800’s and had tiny circle windows in the corners so you felt like you were inside some wooden treehouse version of a flying submarine. There were two staircases to enter, one a straight two story haul up alley-thin-tight steps with white walls we were instructed by our racist opioid-addicted landlord not to scuff lest we wanted to be murdered.

It was an ominous sort of warning, given we were also instructed we could not store our bikes anywhere but up that staircase. Needless to say I scuffed the shit out of those walls and am currently in hiding, lest that lord of lands hunts me down and fulfills her promise for wall wrecking vengeance. I bet she is too tired and high to do so.

The second staircase was circular, dark and ribbed in stained oak. I had never had a winding staircase before and there was something magical about rounding from the street level abyss and into the orbed windows of a kitchen that brought me home with every entrance via this route. The ripe lemon yellow sun would kiss through the slightly stained glass and rub our feet on arrival.

A house is not a home.

A house is shelter, a generic covering that one dwells in for generic periods of time while performing generic things like spreading mayo on white bread in a white walled kitchen while listening to Vanna White sing nights in white satin. A home on the other hand holds you, carries you, shares you, and marries you. A house just houses you. Despite the threat of vague violence from the owner of our house, we had every intention of making it our home.

Our home holds our life. It is the spirit we carry, the stories we make, and the objects we bring along on the journey. To make a house a home I can bring into it any of these aspects. Our home for instance is littered with walls and shelves and corners and cubbies of things and stuff and stuff and things.

If you are ever around I’d love to have you over and share it all with you. But since we are here and talking, I figured why don’t I just let you in for a little while anyhow. Please take your shoes off and get comfortable…come step inside our home…

“A girl phoned me the other day and said... 'Come on over, there's nobody home.' I went over. Nobody was home.”

-Rodney Dangerfield-

AN EXCURSION INTO AN UNDERSTANDING OF AN HOME

[case study :: Art & Objects from the home of CansaFis Foote & Sarina “Champagne” Eastman]

THE ENTRANCE
1. The entrance is where your journey into a home begins. It is the once upon a time of how to get into somewhere you might stay. No home is complete without a way to get in. An entryless home is a space pod prison. If someone invites you to a space pod prison you should return their invitation using 44th century echo technologies or the black hole sun bike messaging service. Don’t let yourself be quadranted.

…at the entrance to our home you will find a feathered metal knocker with a braided friendship bracelet…knock once to say hello, twice to say howdy and three times to get barked at by a hungry blue heeler…

…to the right of the door a lamp lies covered in cut colored plastics…this is a great way to hide the spider's web filled with flies within it…the spiders have made their home inside the outside of our home, which I find to be a quite agreeable cohabitation given my aversion to being bit and stared at awkwardly…given this cohabitation you might also say that me and these spiders are homies…

**…a teenie tiny mirror to reflect upon your entrance and exit into the home…it is sized this extra extra little to assist in helping you check on your eyelid hair…which looks great by the way…**

…celebrate great successes upon entrance…these young youth used x-ray glasses to conquer the alien’s outer space…comment below with an address to get mailed a magazine and a record download all about the santa clauses and their moons…

**…no nurses, no nuns, no neighbors, no exit, no pants…**

THE LIVING ROOM
1. This is a space for entertaining. Say for instance your home had a stage, some rafters, balcony seating, stadium speakers, a lazer light show, concessions, t-shirt sales, overpriced beer, week old hot dogs, century old carpets and a rotating cast of up and coming and/or already came musicians (and one old man that no one knows but everyone is afraid to meet). You should put all of that in your living room (and invite me over).

**…wear this and you can have (googly) eyes on the back of your head…**

**…no dirty hippy hobbit hole is complete without a crystal rock altar that includes two jade pigs locking snouts…**

**…according to the garage sailor who sold us this, the frequency of love is 528hz…**

…if you aren’t familiar with pakistani bus art I highly recommend a quick investigation… what looks like painting here is actually cut neon stickers stuck onto a bent piece of metal…the local buses were covered in far more complex pieces and some really wild designs when we traveled to Rawalpindi…

…one of Champagne’s perks of working at a fancy restaurant in SF is that she got to DJ Too Short to Too Short and get his record signed in return complete with his trademark biiiiitch…life is never too short…

…during the 12th annual meeting of the small council it was decided that Chuck Cherry, the turtle offscreen of this picture, needed to seek out even smaller smalls to council with…do you think tiny turtles walk faster or slower than the big ones?...relatively speaking…

**…this awesome octopus was created by an excellent tomato connoisseur and gong lending empresario poet and artist known in some circles as “THE IZ” as in hiz art iz the shizz…**

…we met one of the sons of this painting family in mexico city and were blown away by the creativity and color of their work…La Familia Lorenzo’s art scatters throughout our home…seen here are myself and champagne in our after dinner dance pajamas performing the dance of the pizza kitty…

…this painting greeted us outside of a restroom at a movie theater in downtown Oakland and we both simultaneously knew we had to hang it on our living room’s side wall mantle…the rainbows captured on its glass spire through the crystals hanging next to a plant named Glenda who is growing and multiplying throughout the house and might eat me some day…

…**a mysterious artist know only by her western swiss-italian moniker “****The Hand of Mahan**” made a series of these geometric works to celebrate her local village’s Criss-Crossed Line week during the village’s shadiest summer on record in 2018…we had to barter away two sleeveless hooded sweatshirts with jimmy buffet parrots on them to retrieve this important work…

THE DINING ROOM
1. The difference between eating and dining is how involved your pinky becomes. When eating you have several options from shnarfing to chowing to slurping or just chewing tenderly while counting to twenty. Dining on the other hand is eating, but with a little more pomp, pageantry and purpose. I have never been to a home with an eating room. But I have been to many with a dining room, and most of those we never ate in because people see me as an slurping room type of guy. They just hand me a paper sack of potatoes covered in chopped beef and say “can you please step outside with this while we all go and dine together in our chomping den.”

**…a napkin keeps the sides of the wall’s mouth clean and tidy…**

…Chuck Lorre should create a sitcom with Charlie Sheen as Jesus and David Spade as Judas poking holes into his “miracles”...they could have a talking pet neighbor donkey played by Rob Schneider named Moses…”**He walks on water and will make you wine. This spring on CBS everyone is getting a rise out of Jesus. Watch OH JESUS Thursdays after the show where we watch people fall down a bunch**”…

**…gifted from a Yerevan coffee house hosting the works of a Russian studio that helps adults with developmental disabilities create art…i can’t read what it says, but i believe the caption is “****math is more fun when you draw it inside of happy looking cow people”...**

**…this is a dog named Dennis who watches you break into the fridge and steal my orange juice…**

…we put this magnet on our fridge to encourage existential moments whenever we search for anything within it…what are we searching for and what do we expect to find?...if the fridge is never opened does it contain anything?...and if it contains nothing is it even a fridge in the first place?...and if it is not a fridge but only representing one, then why did you steal my orange juice?...

**…an ink drawing entitled “The Pineapple Mermaid Fails to Hail a Taxi on Cactus Island”...**

**…the proper holding space for a walrus is clearly a wall, just as you should house an alligator only in your alley…**

THE HALL
1. An odd room in any house or home in that objectively it is a space you aren’t supposed to spend time in, and rather just pass time through. Its utility is to share and show art. Museums are just glorified hall houses, and castles are just a series of halls that lead to a tall bed where some old diapered man in a wig powders his ass. Halls smell like emptiness, like a hobo’s old wine jar tucked tight at the bottom of his bindle, holding the hope of some divine miracle bringing the sleep juice back to him. I am certain there are many halls that lead only to other halls from which I can’t enter. Those halls are called dining halls.

**…it has been awhile since we had a terrible pun…owl who enters our hall shall see this painting…that was two puns by the way…you’re welcome…**

**…artwork created by a solar engineer named** **Sir Captain ChxMyx** **who specializes in Scottish dog training, youth baseball ergonomics and running parody fantasy football fraternities…**

**…a cosmic loveletter given from a yeti to a ladybird to celebrate the first rain of 2010…**

…in 2006 i decided to draw all the candidates running for president at the time in sharpie outline with pulled quotes from the campaign trail…i showed them at a local art gallery downtown and was a little bummed to see that almost everyone under 64 thought these were terrible…as much as we want the over 80 crowd to quit running for office it might be true that politics is an old folk’s game…i always thought it was cribbage or solitaire…

**…a hand painted self portrait of the woman who hand rolls beach cigars in Aruba…**

**…rock painting of a New Mexican Navajo protector god…highly recommend looking up the history there…**

…this picture is not in our home but the author wanted to show you an artist’s rendering of what he will look like on his 55th birthday……this is a picture of a house god…that other god we have was a home god…and the god of gods is also named god (pronounced “Todd”)...

THE BATH ROOM
1. A whole room for baths that we have as a world inexplicably converted to places we take shits in. We live in a competitive dichotomy seeking to out run ourselves to a finish line we set up several races behind us. Maybe we should start dining here as well.

**…this is an illustration of instructions i was left at a vrbo i rented once in the snowy sierra mountains…we shit in the sink all weekend as instructed…**

…i did a group hypnosis once to figure out who i might have been in a past life and found out i was a sad mute french harlequin squatting alone in an abandoned castle…this is a drawing commemorating the time my neighbor who was a spellcaster came by for dinner and entertained me by turning me into a hat for an hour…he kept fake sneezing and saying “hat you!” to me…

…Santa is plugged in to what is going on…he sees you when you’re sleeping…he knows when you’re awake…he knows if you’ve been bad or good so please just light a match when you are done in here…

**…sidestreet surf art from highway 1 in northern California…the artist makes endless varieties of this face filled with beach relics…i think it is called “****The Dream Of A Monkey Who Went To Lens Crafters When He Found A Coupon At The Mall**”…

THE BEDROOM
1. You are not supposed to show guests your bedroom so this is off limits. Just know that super boring stuff goes on in here like sleeping. But inside of that sleeping super interesting stuff goes on like dreaming. And inside of those dreams you are returning to some home you have yet to go to. And you are getting very sleepy. And you should probably go home now.

THE GUEST ROOM
1. You can guess where the guests of any home might end up after a night being entertained by bands in your living room, the dinners in your eating hall, the cold stinky beers in your bathroom, and the man-eating chicken-wolf in the cage in the basement. That is the guest room. The guest’s name is Huey. He loves clucking showtunes, and you need to whistle him to sleep with songs from Phantom or he will peck at his remote and watch Beverly Hillbilly reruns all night long.

…this is a painting of a CLXOPAXS…when we released the last NO DOCTORS record we created a painting for every song on the record…we also hired a PR firm to help us promote the record and all they did was post free links to it online…we went from selling 2-3 records a day down to zero and broke up a few weeks later…one of the guitar players is now lost in Cambodia, one has 18 kids in the middle of Illinois, and one teaches manatee swim lessons in South Florida…be careful if you ever join a band…weird stuff can happen…

…at a certain point any art we pass with dogs on it is fair consideration for one of the many walls that our home contains…on that note, what is the right amount of walls in a room?...four is the generally accepted norm, though i have been in triangular and octagonal spaces before…i even made it into a dome once which was a one wall space…so if the room is just one wall, but on the other side is the outside, then is that entire house also just a wall?...and if a wall is a house and a house is a home and that home is made of fourteen walls then why did you steal my orange juice?..

**…the small council continues their debating with a ceremonial dance and sandwich intermission…**

THE BONUS ROOM
1. At work the bonus is typically a representation of work well done, or over done, or done above and beyond the scope of said work. We don’t have a bonus room in our home, but as you made it this far I thought I should give you one. And I’d say at this point I have quite overdone this tour of our home. So thanks again for joining me.

…so Tastyville was the world’s greatest entertainer and i interned for them once and they never came to any of the shows they were supposed to play and then they fired me when the internship was over…but during the internship i learned to play a song called Bram Stoker’s Acura…that was a good song (title)…

…it is weird and hyperspecific that ghosts want to communicate mainly through ouija boards…what a different world we would be in if they communicated through say Candyland or Battleship…i’m just saying, if i was a ghost i would do my damndest to communicate through a good game of LIFE…

“A man in the house is worth two in the street.”

-Mae West-

Whether you have a house or a home, be thankful that you have anything at all because the reality is that many don’t. If we take into consideration all the wild animals and insects of the world the throngs of the homeless far outweigh the throngs of us housed or homed [note to self :: create and then link to something called the throng song].

What we call homelessness is really houselessness because everyone carries the ability to make a home, that place of spirit, and stories, and stuff and things and things and stuff. You can take your home wherever you go. And thanks to the internet you can also take pictures of your home, put captions on them, and write an entire article where you pretend to show someone around that home while making a few jokes about man eating chickens.

So whether it is the empty jug of wine in our bindles, or the horse head asking WHY? on our fridge, savor the things that make your house a home. And know also it is more than the things and stuffs and stuffs and things that make your house a home. It is the life within it. The more life that enters your house, the more home you have.

So I appreciate you coming over dear friend and sharing that life…and if you have time please tell me a bit about your home below…and next week I’ll tell you a little bit more about the other lives that live in our home…

“Home is the nicest word there is.”

-Laura Ingalls Wilder-

Rick Lewis

What do you mean you don't have a bonus room? I thought that's exactly what this project is, an open room to the bonus room of your over-delivering mind.

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