I thought you might enjoy this week’s R3515T shirt design.
Sissy Bounce, a taste of the real underground
Last week my old friend Scott Beibin IM’d me asking my thoughts on Sissy Bounce. My reply was pretty immediate:
“What the hell is Sissy Bounce?”
After he got over the shock of realizing he knew about something before I did he went on to tell me one of the most interesting stories about an actual underground music scene. I say actual because I’ve known Scott for close to 20 years since we met through the early 90’s hardcore and straight edge scenes across the US. We both booked bands, ran labels, and generally tried to foster the scene. At that point underground meant something. It was actual sub-mainstream. Today it’s largely a marketing term and the notion of having to hunt to dig up information about a band or a style of music is completely gone. Information that used to require hours of driving and good words put in by the right people to get ahold of can now be googled in seconds. That’s not good or bad, it just is. So when Scott started telling me about a completely unknown sub-fork of the already crazily obscure New Orleans Bounce scene I dropped everything I was doing and started hitting him up for info.
Vice Presidents Can Say “Fuck”
A few years ago when he was Vice President, Dick Cheney told some dude “Go fuck youself.” I thought it was funny and I made a t-shirt about it. Following in his honored footsteps, the other day current Vice President Joe Biden told some dude “This is a big fucking deal.” I thought that was funny and made a t-shirt about that too.
Vote with your dollars, buy my shirts and send the message it’s totally OK to say the “fuck” word if you are Vice President.
Update: I made another: Progress
Oatmeal with Die Antwoord
This morning Xeni and I had breakfast with Ninja from Die Antwoord and talked about what a crazy month it’s been for them since being catapulted from relative obscurity to international super stardom basically because of one blog post. I took some photos and will be posting more soon too.
Toy Cameras & The Photographic Image
“Despite all signs to the contrary, it was not the original goal of Mr. Lee… [inventor of the Holga] to make toys, but rather to ensure that people were fascinated and interested in creative film photography.”
My recent photography obsession isn’t limited to just taking pictures – I’ve been talking to photographers and looking at tons of photos as well. Two things that have sparked my interest a bit recently are the extremely high end stuff like Leicas, and the extremely low end stuff like Holgas. I actually think the two play really well together and at the same time create images unlike anything else. Recently, the folks over at Magnesium (the worlds most respected photo agency) asked me to curate a piece they were doing on toy cameras. I happily accepted got to work sorting through mountains of photos taken by a few very talented photographers using some exceptionally cheap gear. The images in the piece were taken with Holgas, Dianas, Fujipets, Lomos and even a Hipstamaic or two. Really fun stuff. Here are a few of the shots, but I encourage you to check out the full piece as well.
©Manny Santiago
©Stavro Papadopoulos
©Nathalie Farigu
©Ken Lee
Read the full article by Manny Santiago and see the complete photo set on Magnesium.
750 words again and again
It’s the beginning of March and so far this year I’ve written more than I’ve written in most years combined. OK that might be a little bit of an exaggeration but it’s probably not far from the truth, and I’ve certainly been on a much more productive kick. If you’ve been paying attention you know I’ve been crediting 750words.com for a lot of that. It’s a simple premise – assume 250 words fills a page, and write 3 pages every day. It doesn’t matter what, just write, every day.
I started doing this at the end of January and immediately fell in love. I liked that it was private so I didn’t feel like I was writing for anyone else, just writing to write. As someone who has always had dreams of being a writer the writing “just to write” part has always been the hardest. I’ve tormented myself with thoughts of what people would like to read or what they would care about and talking myself out of putting pen to paper, or more realistically finger to keyboard on so many occasions – 750words allowed me to jump right over that hurdle and totally kill it.