Reid’s First Novel Now Available Free Online

66 Years in the Making!
95% Fiction!
3 Plays for a Quarter!
Yes, it’s true!

Download the Jukebox for free:

play-the-jukebox  PDF version

play-the-jukebox-reid-Dickie  ZIP file epub for tablets and ereaders

Just This – New Video In a Contemplative Mode

Click any picture to play my 3:55 video.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tesla As a Boy – New Video by Reid

“It will soon be possible to transmit wireless messages around the world so simply that any individual can carry and operate his own apparatus.” – Nikola Tesla October 1909

Another piece from Free Wild Samples, a series of short videos employing found sound and images I made in early 2014. Tesla As a Boy is 3:11. Click pic to watch.

Guitar Concerto – New Video by Reid

Created entirely from found images and found sound, click any pic to play 4:27 video

 

 

Sorry Notes to the Future #3

Awaiting :36

Sorry Notes to the Future #2

Street Life :27

Sorry Notes to the Future #1

Caffeine Patch :46

12-11-10 to 12-11-12 It’s RRR Second Birthday

Reid Dickie

It was two years ago today that I first proffered my blogishness online, a rather clueless beginner with massive curiosity and a tad of talent with words. My intent had been to find my audience which I accomplished in the first year. In my second year, I managed to retain and build my audience. The blog has attracted an average of 240 hits a day for the past year. Amazing! Thank you for coming back to review my latest meanderings time and again.

In my second year 185 new posts appeared on my blog, significantly fewer than my first year. I have found a nice pace for posting that doesn’t create stress, only enjoyment and a sense of accomplishment.

 

If there is a fly in my blog life, it is WordPress, which hosts both my blogs (www.shoallakehistory.com is the other blog) and millions of others. When I started with WordPress two years ago it was a simple and straight-forward blog builder where most everything worked every time I needed it. Today I have come to dislike WordPress greatly. Every week there is some new wrinkle they introduce that makes something more complicated, more time-consuming and much less enjoyable. The tall foreheads who  administer WordPress can’t seem to leave anything alone.

The latest annoying feature is a spell check WP introduced when you compose posts right on the blog. I am certain Monty Python designed this spell check. It gives the most outrageously complicated and/or irrelevant suggestions to simple errors making it useful less than half the time. I can’t figure out how to stop the damn thing.

Regular readers will have noticed how sometimes pictures and text don’t format well together, leaving large white spaces in the middle of paragraphs. This is a recent thing due to some mysterious change to WordPress and again I am at a loss on how to fix it. Bottom line is, if you want to start a blog, don’t use WordPress. Shop for a simpler and easier blog maker.

That said, I still enjoy having a blog or two. I need the outlet and I am enormously grateful to everyone who has visited RRR in the past year. Thank you.

Buzz Buzz Buzz

What’s ahead for RRR, you ask?

The tradition of the Twelve Days of Christmas that Linda and I started back in 2005 continues, beginning this Friday, December 14. This year, alternating daily, there will be six heritage churches and six heritage houses featured, all in Manitoba, of course. Something new this year: nine of the heritage buildings will have short videos along with pictures and descriptive write-ups!

On the last day of the year, I’ll post my year-end review, another tradition and one I particularly enjoy writing because I get to reflect on my life using the blog as a filter. What a year it has been! So much to report.

Starting January 1st, watch for a new feature called Sorry Notes to the Future. It’s a series of original videos which I created over the past few months combining collage, sound and story. All are very short (under a minute) and quite absurd. I’ll be posting one a day, every day during the month of January.

The past and the future are both experiences in the present moment. Thanks for being here now.

 

 

DickTool Co YouTube Channel Second Anniversary Today!

Reid Dickie

Two years have passed since that pivotal moment when the first Dick Tool Co video was uploaded onto YouTube. It was Be An Artist Now, the excellent and disturbing long form coming in at 29 seconds. Sit down and watch it now by clicking the pic.

I have shot, edited and uploaded 49 new videos in the past year bringing the total number on my channel to 167. The number of views has shot up this year by 40,000 bringing the total to around 53,000. This is still remarkable and humbling for me so thank you for tuning in.

 Top Ten Most Viewed Videos on Dick Tool Co Channel 

LY   TY

—    1. Canadian National Railroad Fast Freight  9597 hits

—    2. The Doll House by Heather Benning  6956

1.     3. Giant Manitoba Sinkhole June 16/11  5562

2.    4. Lake Manitoba Flood at The Narrows  1441

8.    5. Caligari’s Mirror – Pere Ubu  1422

—   6. Tim Horton’s Car Crash  1406

7.    7. Go – Pere Ubu 1164

—  8. Manitoba Boogeyman Percy Moggey  946

—  9. Giant Manitoba Sinkhole 2012 Update  858

4. 10. Kangaroo Birth Cycle Coat 841

I Scare Myself

Reid Dickie

Now a tradition, my one concession to Halloween. Five minute Super 8 film that I shot in the 1970s in Winnipeg’s Osborne Village. Inspired by its music, a great tune by Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. Click the pic and booga booga.

Reid’s Roadside Junkorama Is Going Around!

Reid Dickie

Reviews of my latest video to hit cyberspace are starting to roll in. Yes, Reid’s Roadside Junkorama is going bacterial!! Here’s what some online poobahs are saying about my little video…

“There are equivalent things to watching this 5:30 video that you might consider like being deep-fried in GMO canola oil, getting waterboarded while skydiving, eating Alberta beef. Beyond a waste of time, it’s a waste of body heat,” tempts Toonsis Crimped on the YouTube critic’s site http://www.clickscratchchewclickscratchchew.com

“Now that masturbation has gone out of style, this is an adequate alternative,” crows Daniel Palmdamp on his blog How Salmon Do It.

“Its awfful an ugly an vera long so youll probaby artch it hatever I say,” pouts Marky ‘Take a deep breath’ Highlighter having a bad day on his flashblog I Spelt It Rong On Perposse. The W fell off his keyboard. Nothing’s right for poor Marky.

Those are just critics. Now the real test begins, when You, the real people of the world come face to face with the latest spawn of my imagination. Get ready, world, here comes

Reid’s Roadside Junkorama!

Our motto is “Something free by the side of the road.”

It’s a simple idea: I describe stuff I’m going to leave somewhere along the road then I leave it somewhere along the road then show it to you this how. Don’t be swayed by what you hear, watch the video yourself. You decide what percentage of your time you wasted watching it.

Be warned: It IS a time waster, tried and true, through and through, in the dreaming up, in the capturing, in the denouement, from its moment of mental conception to you clicking away from it in disgust, futility and lost precious moments…gone, all gone. Can you handle that? Find out! Click on any red lettering to start the video.

World Collage Week – Day Seven

Reid Dickie

After the Sunday service at the Squishy Church for Everybody and communal Sacrificing of Common Sense, it’s the Pulp and Pancake Breakfast in the Bally Crawlspaces presented by the International Forestry Industry (their motto is “Do we look oriented?”) who are introducing a new line of edible tree products, basically poorly-disguised sawdust – oak oats, elm nuts, cedar wheat, aspen aspic (yuck, first; and second, who needs or craves or can even be sold fucking aspic in the 21st century? They’ve been smoking their bibles at the Big Tree Club!), pine sugar, willow eggs, teak Tylenol, unknown nanotree additives for cereals, potato chips and anything that fizzes at any time during its processing and/or consumption and yew yogurt. The pancakes are actually irradiated plumped birch bark, plumped ground pulp, and acidophilus infused with the genes of a panther and a ring-tailed chubhyct. What will those wacky biogeneticists think of next?! The syrup is maple, of course. Collage festival week concludes, as usual, with regression: smiting, keening, ulullating, bisoning, quailing, shaling, stoning, and sexual frolic. Hope you can come at least once. These are the last two collages (I could be swayed by public opinion…) of the week.

THEREA’S BLIND TASTE TEST

Her men gathered in the kitchen, each eager to be blindfolded, spun around and fed pot roast with extra pot.

SQUARE ONE

“And this is how you were conceived, son. Do you understand?”

World Collage Week – Day Three

Reid Dickie

Today’s big event is the International Shred-a-thon which began at 2:00 this morning worldwide and runs for 24 hours. It’s Cloud Nine for paper fetishists. Due to the Miracle of Technology, the whirring and chewing of millions of paper shredders of all sizes will be heard echoing without stint through the ancient octagonal drums of Our Lady of Ouch Ouch Grotto, one of the area’s major tourist attractions. Here are today’s celebratory collages. Yummy!

TOP TEN CHARTS

She watched the fuzzy dice sway gently back and forth from the rearview as the Chiffons sang “He’s So Fine.” He was large and hot, increased his pace inside her, did a few dick tricks and groaned. She told him to bark like a dog and he always did which made her even hotter and hornier. His face and shoulders were getting red. He was just about to come when…

CAFFEINE PATCH

No time for coffee? Need the caffeine anyway? Try the new Caffeine Patch from Maulco. Slap one on first thing every morning and you are caffeinated for the day. Convenient, non-allergenic, contains no peanuts. Side effects include jitters, shitters and quitters. Extreme but rare side effects include machete-wielding serial killing, exploding penis, taserable panic attacks and/or death.

World Collage Week – Day Two

Reid Dickie

Collage week celebrations continue! At noon today, join me and the gang down at the Fussy Eaters Clubroom at Sunshine and Suchness. We’ll be chowing down on lymph burgers and yamato juice. Later is the hike through the Recanted PVC Forest, a rebuilt plastic imitation of a forest that once stood there, tree for tree, tick for tick. It’s a remarkable accomplishment in simulacra. Experience it before it’s against the law! Meanwhile, enjoy today’s collages.

NEW WORLD ORDER

“Of course we can convince them that one plus one equals three. They are sheep. They believe what their television tells them to believe. They sit or stand at the touch of a button. They think they are who they are told they are. Of course we can convince them…”

MEDUSA 

While Jack and his drinking buddies watched the game in the living room, Michelle, in the guise of painting the bathroom, was actually communing with Medusa.

Celebrating World Collage Week – Day One

Reid Dickie

Come join me for a week of collage festivities on readreidread! June 18 to 24, 2012 has been deemed World Collage Week by the International Collagists Enclave (ICE), meeting in Brussels. The designating motion, seconded by the secretive Dry and Darkists, proclaimed that, during this week, the entire planet be recognized as a collage in its own right. The proclamation is lengthy, detailed, merciless tho housebroken and available for consumption on the ICE website at www.thisisajoke.com

Inspired and required by the ICE, I will post two collages daily this week, one colour, one black and white. These are selected from paper collages Linda and I created back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Each will be accompanied by a brief story suggesting possibilities for the image. Do not be limited by the stories. They are merely suggestions. Enjoy!

TRIPLISTS ABOUND

We who divide everything by three, who must divide everything by three, we are the triplists of the world – our vision is pure, our ways quaint and our power unfathomable.

UNFORGOTTEN ECHO

I am smiling down on you from Great Heaven helping you remember something you have forgotten. Have you remembered it yet? Keep trying. Be still. Look inside. It’s there.

New Video – Frozen Warnings Taxi Mix

Reid Dickie

A blast from the past! Alternate take of “Frozen Warnings,” a Nico classic covered by beautiful Linda and myself somewhere in the early 1980s. (Find our original version here.) This time, join us on a taxi ride from near River and Osborne to Winnipeg’s North End via the Arlington Street Bridge. Alfred Avenue between Battery and Artillery is where Linda grew up.  The Winnipeg taxi dispatcher works hard to keep the customer satisfied while we Dick Tool around, intoning a freakish duet. Local landmarks arise, Homer’s Restaurant on Ellice, the Windmill Restaurant on Selkirk and who remembers the Rickshaw Restaurant at 875 Portage? Rancid Randy, a feisty obese raccoon who frequented area backyards, can be heard pounding on a toy baby grand piano we set up near our trash can and tricked him into playing. That coon plays a nasty yano!

Despite the full moon and the deep background the places contain, things aren’t quite right. Aren’t they? Click the pic to find out.

Sordid Amok (because we’re all just kids in a closet)

Reid Dickie

After an exhaustive, year-long dig working under harsh and inhospitable conditions, a crew of experienced archies has unearthed something rare. Resurrected and dusted for carbon dating, this video relic from the distant past resonates even today in our post-communicative world. 

Decades ago, in the pre-digital Dark Age, Linda and I created a strange but topical promo video for a new fashion trend called Sordid Amok. With the help of several brave friends, we demonstrated the absolute relevance of Sordid Amok, which involves some skin, many forms of plastic, giant crocheted ice cream treats and plenty of office supplies.

As Linda tells you in the script, Sordid Amok shows you “new ways to create envy, infiltrate envy, thwart envy, develop rage, soothe rage” and just in time. Sordid Amok will help you get through life’s “wilderness of mirrors.”  

Since there still are people walking around committing crimes of fashion with no dash in last year’s brown, Sordid Amok’s time has come. “I want a hat with cherries!” Click on any picture to play the short video.

I Scare Myself

My one concession to Hallowe’en

Go Somewhere Else for Free

Reid Dickie

In the late 1970s, when Linda and I began our life together, we created dozens of collages on paper using cut-out techniques, reproducing them by photo copier and stapling them to lamp posts, billboards, hoardings and so on. I have uploaded several dozen of our collages with newly written captions onto DickToolCo Flickr. The captions are an outlet for my often-dark sense of humour.

To potentially encourage you to visit my Flickr site – a world somewhere else, free and the antidote to your usual clutter – I offer two of the collages with their captions for your possible amusement.

Caffeine Patch 

No time for coffee? Need the caffeine anyway? Try the new Caffeine Patch from Maulco. Slap one on first thing every morning and you are caffeinated for the day. Convenient, non-allergenic, contains no peanuts. Side effects include jitters, shitters and quitters. Extreme but rare side effects include serial killing, machete-wielding, panic attacks and/or death. 

Destiny 

Umber Aja swims next to his dolphin brother, Climie, through the Gulf of Boredom as they try for the world title in tandem flexing at 8:30 every time it comes around which for the boys is just about often enough as they catch their combined breaths gulping the sewage-spoiled water. Climie almost swallowed an eyeball about an hour ago but spit it out at the last second.

Amused? See more DickToolCo collages here.

I Am Curious Wind Farm

Reid Dickie

I Am Curious Wind Farm is my latest video which combines original DickTool Co audio with recent images of the St. Leon wind farm high atop the Manitoba Escarpment.