Based in California’s Central Valley, medical marijuana patient and grower “Valleyrec420” celebrated getting 100K Instagram followers with this giant squid blunt crafted out of cigar wraps and a bunch of weed.
He then went on to light all six of the cannabis-cephalopod’s arms simultaneously and smoke it (only six, not sure where the other two are).
Oh, Northeast Ohio, I love you. Akron police are seeking a man now dubbed, probably by some rubbish local news program, the “Bowel Movement Bandit,” suspected of having shat on as many as nineteen cars parked in residential driveways. But police have an excellent lead—the gentleman caller has been clearly photographed red-assed in the act of Cleveland-steamering an innocent sedan:
Officers are searching for someone they said has defecated on 19 parked cars in driveways.
The bowel movement bandit strikes between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m. On Wednesday morning, a resident caught the suspect on film.
I have nothing to add except that it sure would be wonderful if his name turned out to be “Browning.”
In its December 1949 issue Harper’s published a short story by John Cheever—the story was called “Vega,” and it was illustrated by a young artist named Andy Warhol, who was all of 21 years old at the time.
The editor of Harper’s at the time was Russell Lynes, and at some point he wrote Warhol asking him for some biographical information. Warhol responded with an unmistakably Warholian document, featuring a cute drawing, an upbeat greeting, and a bare minimum of upper-case letters (there are five in all). Perhaps fittingly, Warhol plays the humble card, insisting that his “life couldn’t fill a penny post card” and that he has spent the previous few months “moving from one roach infested apartment to another.” (Warhol lived in at least two such apartments with his old school chum Philip Pearlstein.)
The short letter dates from an interesting time in Warhol’s life. He was fresh out of college, and the alacrity with which he secured some high-profile illustrating gigs may have been a sign of future successes to come. He illustrated two album covers, A Program of Mexican Music by Carlos Chávez and a recording of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky by the Philadelphia Orchestra. He worked as a commercial artist for Glamour, Vogue, and Seventeen and also, we get this tidbit from the Tate Modern in London: “Infatuated with the writer Truman Capote, Andy inundates him with fan letters and telephone calls until Capote’s mother asks him to stop.”
Here’s a transcript of Warhol’s letter:
Hello mr. lynes
thank you very much
biographical information
my life couldn’t fill a penny post card i was born in pittsburgh in 1928 (like everybody else — in a steel mill)
i graduated from carnegie tech now i’m in NY city moving from one roach infested apartment to another.
Andy Warhol.
The letter comes from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. It appears in the dazzling new book More Than Words by Liza Kirwin, published by Princeton Architectural Press (for more information about the archives, visit aaa.si.edu). It’s highly recommended, as it’s jammed with visual treasures just like this one.
On the outside, this t-shirt by L.A. skateboarding apparel brand Ripndip looks rather innocuous, but pull down its breast pocket to reveal its secret double-pawed message. Not so innocent now, are we?
That’s Lord Nermal, Ripndip’s feline mascot, and he’s all right with us.
I should have known better. I rationalized my choice to see Gang of Four (pick your epithet: Gang of Gill, One of Four, Gang of One…) thinking sure, this is in no way actually Gang of Four, but still, I’ll get to see Andy Gill playing guitar, and that can’t be bad. Ooooooh, brother, YES IT CAN.
I’ll backtrack—when the current Go4 tour was announced, I was pretty excited. I’ve seen Andy Gill and Jon King with a no-name rhythm section before, and it was always still a worthy show, despite how dreary most of their new music post-Songs Of The Free has been (how myopically Dunning-Krugerish does a band have to be to name its mediocre comeback single “Don’t Fix What Ain’t Broke?”), because Jon King is a fucking living sparkplug, and even as he aged he remained one of the most kinetic and magnetic frontmen in rock music. So I was amped about the new tour because I somehow missed the news that King exited Gang of Four a few years ago and the band is now effectively Andy Gill and the Pips. But even still, if I was going to see an expensive Go4 cover band, it was a Go4 cover band with Andy by God GILL in it, and it’s been a fair few years since I’ve seen him brilliantly torture a Stratocaster into emitting jagged shards of perfect, poisonous hate-noise, so why not just go anyway? “How bad could it be?,” I thought.
Then I heard What Happens Next, the first Go4 album with new singer John “Gaoler” Sterry. The AV Club‘s Annie Zaleski compared it to Stabbing Westward and God Lives Underwater, and if that’s not enough of an indictment, I don’t know what the hell to tell you. Sterry is a fine singer, and in a band in which he wasn’t a replacement for JON FUCKING KING, he would not offend, but Sterry isn’t actually the vocalist on about half of the record, nor does he even sing on its best material. Guest vocalists are handed a lot of the throat duties, and the best song features German actor/singer Herbert Grönemeyer. But the album’s great crime isn’t that the “band” continued without a crucial member—they lost a lot when they lost founding bassist Dave Allen to Shriekback, but they still managed at least some enduring material—its crime is that it’s tepid and unoriginal, two things nobody ever needed from Gang of Four, but if we’re to be honest, apart from some promising moments on 2011’s Content, tepid and unoriginal are mostly what their studio recordings have delivered for the last 30 years. Go4 have been on cruise control for decades, perpetually trading on the brilliance of Entertainment! and Solid Gold.
Apologies for the crappiness of my phone camera. I blame Apple.
And yet I went to the show. Because I’m a dumbass. Despite the merits of Sterry’s singing voice, as a frontman he’s all posturing and no charisma. I spent the first half of the band’s set right up front and directly in the line of fire of Andy Gill’s amps, waiting to be fucking perforated by the glorious missiles of angular clamor they’d hurl, but even HE sounded blah. Much credit is due to the rhythm section, especially the drummer, and if he and the bassist should ever decide to move on from the tribute band scene, they could probably do something amazing. But tempos were sluggish overall, robbing the band of all the fiery urgency that was its calling card. Songs that should have brought the house down like “Damaged Goods” and “At Home He’s a Tourist” sounded like early ‘90s shit bands covering those songs in slow-motion. The new material they did could have been discarded—NOTHING about those songs is worthy of the band’s name or legacy, both of which Andy Gill seems bent on narcissistically shitting all over. Had that music been the product of a band by any other name (or any other guitarist), nary a soul present would have cared. This is no new beginning for Gang of Four. This is the violation of Gang of Four’s corpse.
Words I never thought I’d find myself writing: Gang of Four is a fucking awful band. Here’s a reminder of why they once mattered.
One thing about Miles Davis, he’s difficult to mistake for anyone else on the planet. With his high forehead, pinched features, and ultra-raspy voice, he’s so incredibly distinctive a person that it rather impedes any endeavors he might make into vanish into a role in an actorly way—he’s always unmistakably “Miles Davis.” For whatever reason (probably $$$), in 1985 the most restless and innovative jazz musician of the 20th century decided that he wanted to take part in an episode of Miami Vice, at that time one of the hottest shows on TV. Watching the episode, it’s easy to see the appeal the show must have had at the time, the plot is threadbare and the acting attitudinal, but you get the trappings of an R-rated crime thriller without having to think too hard about it.
Davis appeared on season 2, episode 6, “Junk Love.” The idea is that Crockett and Tubbs arrest the owner of a whorehouse, a dude named “Ivory Jones”—played by Miles. They realize that a local druglord (of course) is obsessed with one of his prostitutes…. do you really want me to go on? The key here is that Ivory is a scumbag but collaborating with the local constabulary, which means we get plenty of scenes of him hanging out with Crockett and Tubbs. It’s a challenge to watch Don Johnson and not perceive him as doing a Kevin Costner imitation, but Costner wasn’t very well known yet. Most of Davis’ dialogue is semi-incomprehensible, but you haven’t lived until you’ve seen the genius behind Bitches Brew croak, “Watch that big cabin cruiser, he has a thing about them.”
I have to offer a bit of full-disclosure here. I’m not an Aerosmith fan. I think they produced a handful of good to great songs in their first four years between 1973 and 1976, but they’re certainly a band who overstayed their welcome and the atrocities of their 1977-2012 catalog piss over any legacy they may have ever had as a decent hard rock band. I once made a list of my top ten “most hated songs of all time,” and Aerosmith appeared a whopping three times on that list (“Ragdoll,” “Dude [Looks Like a Lady],” and “Love in an Elevator,” in descending order for anyone keeping score.)
I have to admit, however, a soft spot for “Dream On.” It’s one of their few tracks that I view as truly transcendent. One day in a classic rock YouTube k-hole, I stumbled upon what I thought would have been a killer live performance of the song from 1977. Seconds after hitting “play,” I began scanning the comments to see if what I was watching was indeed a true Aerosmith performance and not one of those internet “shreds” videos. If you’ve been living under a rock, “shreds” videos were all the rage a few years ago - clever YouTubers would record out-of-tune audio tracks over the top of performance footage of popular bands, resulting in a few yuks at the bands’ expense.
This is not a “shreds” video.
What we have here are Steven Tyler and Joe Perry at the height of their “Toxic Twins” indulgence, zonked completely out of their minds, barely able to stumble through their signature tune. Perry delivers so many clams he could open a seafood shack, sounding like a fumbling teenager’s first visit to a Guitar Center President’s Day sale. Tyler fades in and out, struggling to keep it together. At times the other band members look on with some confusion. The band starts to gel by the crescendo, and then allows the fizzle-fart ending to put a cap on how much of a shit they don’t give about being onstage.
This has since become a YouTube favorite, and one I like to pull out anytime someone mentions the “greatness” of ‘70s Aerosmith.
In a just world, copies of this performance would have been distributed as parting-gifts to American Idol contestants dismissed by Tyler. Certainly, many bruised egos could have been salved.
You can’t say much in defense of this, but at least, once-upon-a-time, Steven Tyler looked cool.
Designer Sybille Paulsen uses unconventional materials for all of her work, but her series “Tangible Truths” is created with one of the rarest and most unique mediums—the hair of women undergoing chemotherapy. These beautiful, elaborate pieces allow women to keep their hair and wear it in a meaningful way. Paulsen customizes each necklace to the personality of the client, taking special care to get to know each woman over the course of the construction process. Her work is produced catharsis for both patients and families.
In the words of one of her clients:
What Sybille created touched me really deeply. The free flow design of the project meant that my hair had not been transformed simply into a piece of art that was separate from me, the flow of the necklace she created somehow seemed to still hold pieces of me within it. The waves of the hair ... still looked so alive and so full of life. ... Her work touched not only me, but also those close to me here in Berlin who have seen it or seen the pictures. One person close to me even teared up because the necklace still looked like my hair and was a reminder of what it had been. ... I was impressed by what she had produced and very proud to have been a part of her project. ... I love the idea of helping create beauty out of what for many of us is a ugly process: chemotherapy.
It’s often been said that the most successful business owners really know their audience. Not sure of his back story, but Tennessee-based Jason Brown seems to know a lot about prison culture. His company, Cards for Convicts, makes a line of black-and-white greeting cards geared to inmates.
Serving time is a serious matter, of course, but Brown is trying to take some of the sting out of being in the Big House:
Our allegiance lies with those sentenced to suffer and we make it our mission to ease their suffering. With words we tear down walls and reach through the glass. We keep hope alive everyday come mail-call. We understand the feeling an inmate gets when their name is called in front of everyone making it clear that they are not forgotten and that someone, somewhere still cares a great deal for them.
Working as a construction site security guard, 26-year-old Fumiya doesn’t make enough money to afford a real apartment. So he’s turned his temporary living space, an Internet cyber-cafe, into a more ongoing one.
His story, along with fellow ‘net cafe “refugee” Tadayuki Sakai’s, are shared in Net Cafe Refugees, the second in a three-part documentary series by Shiho Fukada titled Japan’s Disposal Workers:
Internet cafes have existed in Japan for over a decade, but in the mid 2000’s, customers began using these spaces as living quarters. Internet cafe refugees are mostly temporary employees; their salary too low to rent their own apartments.
