New joint. Moving. At the decomP.

Quite excited about this we are and big thanks to the Jason Jordan and the decomP crew for that. We are also excited to let you know that this joint is part of a series of pieces from our contribution to a new collection titled WHERE YOU SHOULD BE: Four (Aging, Uncertain, Often Confused, Frequently Terrified) Contemporary Writers on Fatherhood that we collaborated on with stellar dad writers dudes and friends Dave Housley, Tom Williams, and BL Pawelek, and will be released by the Andrew Keating and Cobalt. So there's that as well. Excerpt? Word.

"He’s just walking down the street in front of you. It’s what they do of course, walk and breathe, and all those things people engage in when they’re alive and they grow.

He’s in front of you though, and he’s not holding your hand, or looking at you, and that’s different, new.

You’re not even on his radar.

Did you see when she kicked him at recess? your older son says to his friend all mock serious.

Yeah, she replies, he got treated.

Treated, your son says laughing, that’s not how you use the word treated.

No, she says, what’s treated?

It’s like when you say, your mom is so fat, that when she stands in front of the sun it’s like a total eclipse. That’s getting treated, he says.

And they both laugh."

We are Broken. Drinking. And chew.

Quite thrilled we are to play any role in hyping the Patrick Wensink's new joint Broken Piano for President, including, but not limited to today's reprint of our joint You Want Some Chew? which previously ran in the decomP. Big thanks bro and long live the Piano.  

This American Life is happening now.

Like totally happening. And we are most geeked to be joining the stellar line-up of Achilles Chapbook Press releases. This American Life is a collection of humor essays published over the last five years in a variety of publications including decomP, THE2NDHAND, Opium.net, Curbside Splendor and Knee-Jerk. Please do take a look, please spread the word and if you have a moment please consider adding it to Goodreads and letting us know what you think. Cool? Nice.    

"Tanzer’s books have haiku moments at their core." My Father's House gets decomP magazinE'd. And likes it. A lot.

Really honored and appreciative for the incredibly thoughtful and kind words about My Father's House, not to mention, okay we are mentioning, the ongoing support and championing of our work by the stellar decomP magazinE and the inestimable Spencer Dew. Drinks on us for sure when next we meet.

"The goal of Tanzer as a novelist, the gem at the center of his work—is not solving the problems or untangling the knots but coming to some still points of transcendence, moving beyond all the 'unresolved shit' and assorted questions and bad behaviors and normal behaviors and façade of day-to-day bullshit 'mellowness.'”

Michael Tanzer. A shout-out.

We want to take a moment to recognize that June 3rd would have been TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer's father Michael Tanzer's sixty-ninth birthday. He was a great artist and mostly unrecognized during his lifetime. With that in mind, we draw your attention to not only a piece we wrote about him titled PaintWriteDeathLifeArt (Sketches from a life in art), that ran in decomP back in 2007, and is briefly excerpted below, but an academic article about his life and work as well, which is titled Michael Tanzer: An Artist Searching for His Routes by the late UCLA art historian and long-time family friend Albert Boime.

"My father Michael Tanzer was a lot of things. Painter. Teacher. Activist. Raconteur. Filmmaker. New Yorker. High-school dropout. Tough guy. He was also a man who had regrets, someone who died much too young from a twisted form of cancer, an artist who never quite achieved what he hoped to, and a guy who never cried, not until the end anyway."

Have you decomP'd?

There is new decomP. It is tasty. Please feel free to consume it now. Nice.

This Self-Portrait Will Change Your Life, Week Thirty-Four - "PaintWriteDeathLifeArt."

It is Week Thirty-Four of This Self-Portrait Will Change Your Life, our endlessly self-absorbed effort to post self-portrait per week for one year, and this week we have titled our self-portrait "PaintWriteDeathLifeArt," because one, we were thrilled to attend a retrospective of TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer's father Michael Tanzer's work as an artist, and two, we were honored to have been invited to read something at the preview show for the retrospective and decided to read an excerpt from PaintWriteDeathLifeArt (Sketches from a life in art) a piece originally published in decomP. To say it was quite cool all-around is an understatement, but there you go, it was cool, and overwhelming, and all of that. Meanwhile, while we want to invite you to follow this project in its entirety at the Flickr, we also want to invite you to send us a self-portrait of you very own which we will post right here at This Blog Will Change Your Life. But then you knew that, right?

Interview love, new friends and old, some are silver and the others are gold.

Quite excited we are, were, are, to have stumbled into interviews from friends old and new, first long-time friend Jason Jordan, editor of decomP and the author of the quite fine short story collection Powering the Devil's Circus, has a new interview up on Pank, and second, much, much newer friend Stephanie Johnson of the quite captivating and recently blurbed here short story and flash fiction collection One of These Things Is Not Like The Others has an interview up at HTMLGIANT. Good stuff all-around, so please take a look and let their words wash over you like literary surf. Yeah, we have no reason why we went all metaphor on you just then, but that said, did it work for you?

Yo, suck it AtlasBooks, all hail the Lucky Man re-boot. Now in red. Okay blue, but that's just a jpeg technical glitch kind of thing.

As you may recall, and if you don't the full story can be found here, AtlasBooks Distribution bought Lucky Man's distributor Biblio and then got into a pissing match with Lucky Man's beloved publisher Manx Media over some trumped-up fees and ridiculous contractual demands. Manx Media refused to sign a contract with them and AtlasBooks in turn not only refused to release the remaining copies Lucky Man to Manx Media or anyone else, but recalled copies of Lucky Man from Border's across the country. With our blessing, Manx Media decided that AtlasBooks could keep those copies of Lucky Man and go in a new direction. As it turned out, that new direction requires a new ISBN# which has allowed us to also clean-up the grammar, spelling and punctuation problems plaguing the first edition of the book, though the esteemed Jason Jordan should note that the paragraphs remain sans indentations, change the cover color to red, though the jpeg wants to be blue, and in general re-boot and re-launch the Lucky Man for fans old and new everywhere. Which we have done and which can now be found at Lulu for all you consumers seeking your first, or even second, edition, and at Books In Print starting on Monday for all of you bookstores and library types. While it would be accurate to say that we find all of this quite amusing in a random indy publishing kind of way, we also think that the best way you can help us tell AtlasBooks to suck it, is to buy multiple copies of the new edition of the book. So what do you think, are you in? Excellent.

You want some chew? Or one man's quasi-accurate history of drinking and debauchery. Drinking anyway, debauchery sounds much cooler than the reality.

It's true, decomP magazinE has most awesomely run with our semi-accurate account of TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer's history of drinking and debauchery, though again, we never accomplished much when it came to debauchery. Well, nothing we are truly proud of anyway. Still, we hope you will take a look at You want some chew? and many thanks to the fine staff at decomP for their ongoing interest and support.

What do you do when you really really like someone, and even maybe idolize them a little bit, and then you meet them, and they don't seem to like you?

Well apparently if you are TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer and that person is Ira Glass you write a piece called Ira Glass Wants to Hit Me for decomP magazinE and then record that piece plus an interview for Apostrophe Cast. After that you ask people if they want to listen to it, which is actually what we are doing now. So, do you want to listen to it? Cool, thanks.

The blogging, shout-outs and mass marketing has begun. And we are most humble and appreciative.

Many thanks to all of of our friends for their kind words about Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine going live and much appreciation to our boys Nick Ostdick, author of the quite wonderful Sunbeams and Cigarettes, Steve Lafler, of Bughouse comix fame and publisher of Lucky Man at Manx Media, Jim McKay, the most awesome Wabi-Sabi, and Jason Jordan overseer of all things decomP and the author of the very rocking Powering the Devil's Circus, for the "Go Your Way..." shout-outs on their most excellent blogs.

An embarrassment of publishing riches - Gone hits the 63 Channels.

Coming off of last week's publication of "Ira Glass Wants to Hit Me" in decomP and the release of the dirty humor issue of Monkeybicycle, we are almost embarrassed to let you know that TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer's story "Gone" has been published by 63 Channels and can be seen on their website at this very moment. What's important to note here though is that we said almost, so please feel free to check it out, who knows, it just might change your life.

Ira Glass Wants to Hit Me. No, really check it out at decomP magazinE.

It's so totally true, Ira Glass wants to hit TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer, or did anyway, maybe, and now you can find out why in the new issue of decomP magazinE who we want to totally thank for allowing us to mostly clear the air.