Last updated Jun 30, 2007 6:53 pm Universal
what is slinkP?
warning, vanity page follows
I am Paul Winkler. This is my blahblah / links page.
I was born in 1970. Sometime after that, but before my memory begins, I started drawing. When I started taking those long bus rides to school, in the town of Setauket, NY , I couldn't draw on the bus to amuse myself - but I discovered that I could listen to music in my head, and remember every detail if I'd heard the record enough. Sgt. Pepper was an early favorite of my inner audience. I continued to draw obsessively for many years, but I didn't know that eventually music would take over completely.
Sometime around age 10, I remember my dad rehearsing with an ad-hoc band for somebody's wedding reception. I heard a deep, delicious vibration through the wall. I snuck into the room and watched the player of this strange instrument - a bass guitar. By the time the group packed up and left, I'd decided that bass was what I wanted to play. I started lessons soon after.
In 1988, having endured some truly atrocious cover bands (I would play "Mr. Roboto" or Wham! if it meant I got to play bass LOUD), I finally was allowed to escape from Ward Melville High School. I ended up at Bard College, because it was small, because it was "progressive", because it had a pretty campus, but mostly because they let me in and it had an excellent rock-bands-per-student ratio (maybe about 0.015).
Originally I was an art major, but I found that I had no interest in painting, and none of the faculty knew a damn thing about REAL art (i.e. alternative comics). I also found the music department was inhabited by the most interesting people I'd ever met. I changed my major to music just before the department split in two (politics) and my crew was christened Music Program Zero. When people ask me what I majored in, I usually say "experimental music".
The hardcore community of MPZ changed my life. They were smart, they were funny, they took everything seriously, they were very suspicious of dogma and anything that looked like an assumption or habit. I consider them some of my best friends, even the ones I haven't kept in touch with. Some of them are: Tildy Bayar, Ben Boretz (no home page but this'll do, Sol Pittenger, Penny Hyde, Chuck Stein, Catherine Schieve.
Something of the spirit and flavor of MPZ is still present in the music and writings at the-open-space.org.
The MPZ crew were interested in rock music, but they didn't actually play it. I couldn't kick the habit. My first attempt at a real rock band at Bard never got off the endless-funk-jam larval stage, but it was worth it to play with Bradford Reed. Later, in a couple of moldy basement practice rooms, I found myself part of a shifting constellation: ten people who in various combinations formed ten different bands over the course of the five years i was there. I was in Snack Chunk with Abby Grush and Ruth Keating for about two years. Someday I'll make a decent compilation of our best stuff and post it so you can hear it. For a little while, when Ruth was away, our drummer was Alan Heifetz, best known for his writing/drumming/guitaring/singing in the late, much-lamented Soothing Sounds for Baby who exploded for almost ten years continuosly. Ruth returned; she now plays with the Malarkies alongside Matt Sutton. My last band at Bard was Bookman, with Matt and with Dave Demallie, another former Malarky.
Matt Sutton, Dave D., Abby, Bill Dechand, and Matt Schickele, and myself had another project called Whoopskie, which was an attempt to improvise songs that sounded like they weren't improvised. I highly recommend concentrated experiments like this; the experience of working very quickly, with a bizarre combination of total freedom and intense pressure, can reveal all kinds of things about your bad habits and unknown talents. A vaguely-related concept is the 24-hour Comic of which I've done several.
Some of this old music, and lots of new stuff by many of the same people, is available from MussMyHair Records.
After graduating, I had a couple years of cozy squalor in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I lived in a pseudo-commune of nine people in one house. Four of us were comic-book artists and we frequently bothered, er, enjoyed the company of local cartoonist/inventor Scott McCloud. We did some really interesting stuff, including many of those aforementioned 24-hour comics - one of Scott's inventions. Too bad most of that work is not available. I don't even have copies of everything myself. If I ever get a scanner, I'll put some of mine online. But fortunately, Barry Deutsch has some of his comics online now. I especially like Pre-Structuralist Funnies.
. Hey, waitaminute! Jennifer Lee has started putting her comics online too. Cool!The Ennead was the name we sometimes used for the "intentional community" which we all lived in, which now persists somewhat in Portland, Oregon. A couple others of the old ennead are still in Amherst, including my once-again-roomie Scott DiBerardino.
I left Amherst in 1995. Most of the local musicians were too busy being college students, and music was bugging my brain again. I was starting a new band, first called Canary, later becoming ARMS with another ex-Bard multi-instrumentalist and prolific songwriter, Benson Sebastian. ARMS is now about six years old, and while we're not very active anymore we did put two albums out. Sometimes with ARMS I played a crabby instrument that I cobbled together myself.
For almost three years, starting in 1997, Arms lived in Brooklyn, NY, in a former peanut-product factory on the edge of Bushwick. Our train was the L. There were 15-foot long empty peanut-oil tanks in the basement that made great musical instruments. They were also fun to sing into.
Also in 1997 I finally got sweetified with Abby Fleischer. Here's some really goopy pictures of us.
If you want her email address, you'll have to ask me... I don't want to subject her to spam and random weirdos...
We both really like the Cyclone at Coney Island. Ride it before it falls apart!
Then we lived in the Woodstock area for two years. Then I moved back to Brooklyn... great place in Flatbush... then I got an unexpected offer in Knoxville, TN, of all places. I've never lived farther south than Brooklyn before! This was an interesting change...For ten years, I was by trade a proofreader. I read bad books very carefully. Now I fiddle around with programming and I once again occasionally read for enjoyment (what a concept). Dave Spencer got me out of proofing by getting me into the now-defunct CalendarGalaxy project, which led to me being officially pronounced a Zope Guru and getting the gig in Tennessee, at CTI who I still work for.
Drawing has fallen by the wayside. I'll surely come back to it someday, but it's just not on my mind much. I still make strange music. I spend most of my time working and playing with computers, having becomoe obsessed with Linux, Python and the whole world of open source / free software. I blame Dave Phillips for getting me into this mess. Inevitably, I have wandered into writing small bits of software which could only be of interest to computer-music geeks. I also very occasionally play with digital art.
I was pretty strictly vegan from about 1996 until 2000-ish. For several years I ate no animal products whatsoever. Lately I've loosened up a lot, I started eating fish and sometimes cheese, and living in TN led me to eat pretty much whatever I could find that wasn't an ex-mammal or bird.
Oh yeah... what's slinkP... It was after an Arms show that occasional Arms guitarist Jeremy Bernstein referred to me as a "slinky funky fuckin' freak". I think it was Benson who contracted that to "Slink P", or "slinkp", which stuck.
Send me some mail slinkP home page 