Jack Boy Big Get Present

Open publication - Free publishing - More birthday

These Things Are Hip: 2011, a book of drawings I made for Jack Ramunni's 22nd birthday, is above.

Other News:

* Columbus Street Style's Tatyana Kagamas frees a season's greetings viral video from the confines of Secular Village.
* Black Cloud posted soon-to-be iconic Slave Labia photos from their recent 15th House show.
* Alex Ross has an artist's site now; it includes photo documentation of Max Caldwell's recent Blitz Minded/Blitzed Mind show at CCAD.
* Aaron Lake Smith published an essay in the Utne Reader; it's illustrated with an Edward Gorey envelope.
* Some site, "The Hot 17," wrote about Carabar, the black hole at the center of my social universe. 

Top 5 of 2000s: Bitter Homes & Gardens

"Perhaps human beings weren't made to be happy and free all the time, we're always trying to enslave ourselves one way or another, if it's not through a career it's through a relationship or it's through kids. It just doesn't seem to be the natural human state. We go through a good phase then we regress. I'm really glad you're happy just be prepared because tomorrow you might be thrown on the scrapheap." - Richard Linklater's Slacker.

Bitter Homes and Gardens' single album is dark gray. A dark gray manifesto in favor of admitting reality during the mid 2000s reign of unreal happy punks. It's music for those that refused to drink the Kool-Aid of folk-punk and bike rides and holding hands. The sound is bass heavy and shitty. The lyrics are saturated in self-loathing; personal excoriation permeates each and every song - a total rejection of the affirmative utopia that Bloomington signified on message boards across America. The first song on the album is actually called "Bloomington," an appropriate opener as the rest of the album can be thought of as the answer to one of its first lines:

"Do you think a person could just disappear on the walk from Seventh Street down to Town Square?"