The fanzine Ben Is Dead was, and still is, a fucking LEGEND as far as ‘zines go so, interviewing founder Darby Romeo about her life and times was other-level-cool for me. Growing up in Los Angeles, certain things remain indelibly printed in my memory: driving by the enticing Anti-Club sign just before my mom got onto the 101 South, the sexy smell of leather jackets from rock shops on Hollywood Blvd, and this principle: comic book stores and coffee shops could be judged on quality based on whether you could find a copy of Ben Is Dead in their publications area. So therefore the mighty Bourgeois Pig, on Franklin Ave., rocked.

Ben Is Dead had collaborators from all walks of life, featured punk bands, performance artists and gender activists and didn’t believe that there was anything that couldn’t be talked about. It was an honest read and they had fun. Mostly run by women—and men who respected women—that, in itself, was something that my friends and I noticed. Ben Is Dead was a glowing engine that couldn’t be stopped—celebratory and wise-beyond-its-years, that ‘zine was a reflection of people, places and movements that were forces in and of themselves and could (and would) never be repeated again. It served as an unintentional documentary of life, art, culture and human existence in El Lay. And it was fucking cool, man.
 

Lorraine Mahru, left, one of Darby Romeo’s many Girl Fridays from Ben Is Dead, and Darby Romeo, right.
 
Ben is Dead’s founder, Darby Romeo briefly went to Pierce College, studying to be a graphic designer but quit school to get a job. She was temping and developing computer skills with the MacSE40 that she got from her father when she ended up temping as a secretary at Grey Advertising. She told the art director at Grey that she had graphic design training, and they ended up hiring her as an art director. I asked her about the beginnings of Ben Is Dead.

Darby Romeo: In the late 80s, I was already making $25/hr at Grey Advertising, and my only good friend there was this comic and the guy in the mailroom who sent out all the Ben Is Deads for free. But that’s basically what paid for Ben Is Dead. So I got the computer from my dad, I got this job at Grey, and that was it because you didn’t really make money on it [Ben Is Dead and ‘zines in general] you just spent money on it. So Grey Advertising kinda started Ben Is Dead. And the LA Times doesn’t really know this but they kinda helped us do our first issue for us! My dad would’ve hated that we did this but I kinda considered it to be like pro-bono and that they should be supporting zines, y’know? But I remember that this was right before the first issue came out and I was talking to someone at Flipside [another well-known and beloved LA punk-rock fanzine]  and I was like, “We’re gonna make 1000 issues!” or something like that and they [seemed unimpressed]. Cuz I didn’t know what I was doing! So someone from the LA Times snuck us in there at two in the morning and we printed another 1000 on the LA Times’ huge copy machines. So, thank you, LA Times! I don’t know what the statute of limitations on that is but, there’s a little known story!

How do you feel now that there is now a dedicated space at the UCLA Library Special Collections Punk Archive for the preservation and archiving of the entire Ben Is Dead collection?

Darby Romeo: I’m really thankful that this nerdy librarian lady came—what year did she come?—I think her name was Julie Graham, I can’t remember, but she would come over to the Ben Is Dead offices, I can’t remember the hook-up, but we would go through all the issues and I was looking at the archive and there were 78 boxes of ‘zines. We went through each one so that she could archive it. Like who would be that patient? We even archived the [letters to the editor] and included those, just knowing that there are people who are willing to do stuff like that—especially for ‘zines since they’re not online mostly, like 95% of the ‘zines are not online, and these libraries and people like her are vital! Having UCLA treasure these and keep them safe is amazing. So many of them are fading or falling apart or getting thrown away and in a few more decades those are going to be the only places besides your grandpa’s collection in the attic where you’re going to find them.

And we’re working on putting ours online but you can’t trust online as much as you can trust an archive that isn’t going to get tossed. Libraries are so important. And it’s so funny because in creating Ben Is Dead, we created it before there was an Internet. There was no Internet to find a photo, there would be a whole long process to print a photo! So it was a whole different thing creating ‘zines back then and having them in a place where we don’t have to worry if the Internet goes down, they’ll always be there, y’know?
 

A “Retro Hell Party” complete with Hostess HoHos. Party people include: Darby (blue dress), Reverend Al Cacophony (in black), Noel Tolentino of Bunnyhop (wearing a McDonald’s Grimace party hat)
 
What’s the difference between analog and digital research and how important were libraries to the creation of Ben Is Dead?

Darby Romeo:: We used the libraries much more back then than people do now… I just remember how much time I would spend in the microfiche section. I loved microfiche! I loved just sitting there and looking for old stuff and just going into the basement of the downtown LA Library and that smell and the old bookstores. But the libraries were important and the photos from Ben Is Dead—a lot of them were because my friend ran the photo department of AP. He was the archivist, basically of AP, so he’d slip us a bunch—so thank you AP for supporting Ben Is Dead!
 

 
While BID had many striking qualities, one unique aspect was the way it platformed the symbiotic connection that LA punk rock has with local queer icons and performance artists like Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis. Tell me about the Sean deLear video tribute that will be playing at the 30th anniversary Ben Is Dead Festival.

Darby Romeo: Stuart [Swezey, from Amok Books] was going to show Desolation Center [but then it was unable to be shown] and he came up with this bright idea and it’s so awesome and so touching because everyone loved Seande [Sean deLear] and Seande was such an influence in the scene and was such a big part of Ben Is Dead and played one of my favorite shows at Al’s Bar during our “Gross” issue. I love chickens now so I feel awful but everything was gross—we had chicken feet in bowls at the bar, and I remember people were throwing them at Seande and he was throwing them back during his set with Glue. Yeah, he was really vital. And we were all really shocked when he passed last year and we are really honored that Stuart is going to put together a documentary about his life because he did some interviews with him just before he passed for Desolation Center and stuff, so that will be playing early on in the day at the Zine Fest on Saturday.
 

 
Tell me some of your wildest Ben Is Dead stories…

Darby Romeo: A crazy story? Probably when Kerin wanted to interview Anton LaVey. I mean, you grow up goth dancing at Phases and Odyssey [local LA dance clubs] and all but I’m not into the REAL darkside or whatever. So [Kerin] was planning with Anton and his wife at the time a Ben Is Dead interview and he really liked the magazine. It was supposed to be me and her going [up to San Francisco] for the interview but at the last minute I’m like: Um, I don’t wanna meet Satan, nope, uh uh, I’m not going up there, nope nope nope! So I call up [Germs drummer] Don Bolles and I tell him that he has to go up there and do the interview instead and I’m just like freaking the fuck out. I just tell him “Go with Kerin and do this interview. She wants to do this interview.” And he said, “Okay, cool.” And then Anton said, “Nope.” It was like he knew I was petrified! He could just sense it! He was like we’re not doing the interview without Darby. And I was like “Nooooo!”

So we get to his house and they sleep by day and are up all night so we get there at night and he has this old house and it just smelled like Europe. We go in and we’re in the waiting area and his wife—Blanche was her name—she has her new baby with her and she leaves the baby alone in the room with us! So we go and check the baby to see if there’s a 666 on top of its head. We really did! They were so sweet and nice but Anton would not allow me to record the interview and that was like the worst nightmare because now you have to take notes and remember everything!  The Anton LaVey interview was the only interview we ever did that we gave someone permission to approve. And the thing was, he didn’t ask for any changes, he just approved it!
  

 
So we go to his favorite restaurant—Olive Garden—and I’m still distraught, I remember begging them to let me use my tape recorder, I remember hiding it for a little bit at one point, I remember having it in the bathroom at one point talking into it, saying some of the stuff he’d already said, documenting it out of my mouth. Then we go back to the house and his other favorite thing was animal cookies—the frosted ones [Mother’s brand, pink and white with little sprinkles]. So we’re sitting there, he’s playing the organ, we’re eating animal cookies, and I’m trying to write notes and it’s going on all night because that’s their daytime because they sleep all day and I’m wishing that we still did drugs! But the piece came out great and he was happy and he was a really nice guy but I never ended up joining the Church of Satan or whatever. 

You’ll probably never think of Olive Garden in the same way again.

There were a lot of stories around the “Sex” issue too [Most issues of Ben Is Dead had themes: the “Gross” issue, the “Broke” issue, the “Black” aka “Death” issue.] That’s when we actually started selling it and when we realized that we had a lot of fans. Like Jon Spencer was like, “Your “Sex” issue really inspired the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion,” um, what? Okay. Then we interviewed Malcolm McLaren and gave him the “Sex” issue and the same technological issues that just devastated us every single day—our voicemail system would sometimes just eat our voicemails—our voicemail being our Ben Is Dead Hotline which was how you found out about shows every week. So he calls and in his British accent he says, “Darby, this is Malcolm McLaren, y’know that ‘Sex’ issue I just want to tell you…” and it gets cut off! Fuck! What about the “Sex” issue? I go into the voicemail place and tell them that I need this voicemail back, where is this voicemail, and I think I got three months free and that was it! 
 

 
Is it true that you promised Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran that you would find him a massage therapist?

Darby Romeo: I told him I would get him a masseuse and the one lady that I thought I hooked up cancelled! I had a couple Girl Fridays over the years, and Jessy, Jessica Jones, was one of them—so I was like “Jessy! I have to go over to Simon LeBon’s! Help me get dressed!” And I put that red velvet dress on and the Elvis Penis [a wig Darby nicknamed the Elvis Penis—it was huge and bouffant-style], she stuck flowers from the vase that we had that we had gotten from Mrs. Gooch’s [a local LA health food store] in my hair and I go and I get in the car and the wig is hitting the top of the car and I go and I drive over to the Beverly something—they always stayed there.

So I get there and I’m valeting the car and I didn’t even know at the time that you’re supposed to have a massage table, right? That would make sense? So I have sunglasses on, and the car guys are like what the fuck is this? And I think I had my Fluevogs on—yeah, my Fluevogs, it was tragic—with (of course) this bright red lipstick, and I go to Simon’s door, and I knock and he opens the door and he looks and I’m like [in fake European accent] “Hello, I’m your massage therapist,” and he looks at me and he’s like what the fuck is this? And he didn’t know what to do so he opened the door and he’s like, what the fuck? And he sees that I don’t have a massage table but I don’t know that that’s a thing.

I later go on to become a massage therapist—I’m now a licensed massage therapist, by the way—so I’m sitting there on the couch and he knows me but I’m all dressed up with the glasses and everything and we’re having this full on conversation and he’s just trying to figure out what to do with me. Like “Who sent you? Darby knows you? What are you…?” And after about ten minutes I just busted out laughing and told him, “I couldn’t get you a massage therapist, I’m sorry!” and the fucker made me massage him anyway! I’m in this velvet dress with this Elvis Penis wig, he takes off all of his clothes, puts a towel on the floor, lays there, and I’m like: I have no idea what to do so I’m just kinda mushing him and stuff? And I don’t even think I had massage oil? Anyway, he had a cute little butt and he was a very sweet guy but…he didn’t even tip me!
 

 
And of course I have to ask about I Hate Brenda…

Darby Romeo: The thing about I Hate Brenda—and people never got it right then and the only reason we did it—was that we were on the side of the victims. The victims were like security guards at clubs who were like, “God, we’re getting abused because she [actress Shannen Doherty who played “Brenda” on TV’s Beverly Hills 90210]  was at the door, yelling at us because she’s not on the list and she’d be like, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’” and we just kept getting these stories and different stories [of Doherty terrorizing people] from labels and people in the scene and they just kept coming to us and we had no plans on doing a newsletter… at the time the fax machine was like social media so we made our version of a flyer or our version of a meme and it had Brenda on it and it said “I wash my hair in Evian” which was her thing and we pretended it was the “I Hate Brenda Newsletter” and we sent it out to everyone and they were like, “Oh my God! When is the I Hate Brenda Newsletter coming out? Oh you gotta include this and you have to interview Eddie Vedder! Oh you have to do this and dadadada and this story and this happened to me and all this stuff!” and that’s how that ended up happening. It’s not like we were really going to do anything but yeah. And what’s kind of weird in the scheme of things is that we would all go to bars or knock on the neighbor’s fucking door just to watch 90210. We’d be working in the offices and there was some model next door and we’d bang on her door and say, “No, you have to let us in! 90210 is on!”
 
Continues after the jump…

 
If it’s ever been your dream to produce a feature film, the good news is it’s easier and cheaper than ever. In fact, I just did exactly that and I’d like to share some thoughts and experiences on the process with any first-time would-be filmmakers out there looking to get started. I’m talking about doing it on the cheap.

First, a bit of background: I’ve always wanted to make movies. When it came time to go to college I couldn’t afford to go to a fancy film school, so I studied Media Arts at the local university. The degree I received was, in practicality, fairly worthless, and my college experience, if anything, dissuaded my interest in film. The curriculum pushed students toward industrial videos and commercial work—and that held no interest for me at all. I got out of college and, instead of going to Hollywood to gofer coffee for actors and execs on movie sets, I opened a record store.  Records are my other great love. And so I have worked in record stores ever since, for twenty years, with the idea still always in the back of my mind “one day I’m gonna make movies.” Until, finally, one day I realized that I wasn’t getting any younger and it was time to either shit or get off the pot.

There were two catalysts that ultimately resulted in me producing and directing my first feature (which I just completed this month). The first was the inspiration of a filmmaker in my hometown named Tommy Faircloth who had made a horror feature called Dollface in 2014 for under $10,000. Citizen Kane, Dollface was not, but it looked and felt enough like a “real movie”  to get me really excited about what one could be capable of on an extreme micro-budget. The second catalyst was my friend David Axe, a war journalist and would-be screenwriter expressing some frustration over breaking through in Hollywood. My thought at the time was “if I’ve always wanted to make a movie, and you’re trying to get your words on the screen, and if our friend Tommy can make a movie for less than $10K, then what are we waiting for? Why don’t we just get our act together and make a movie?”

We entered into “our first feature” looking at it as a “learning exercise” and I think this is an important attitude to have. Your first movie is bound to have a lot of mistakes, but you can look at the overall project as a success if you learn from any mistakes made. It doesn’t necessarily have to be good... it just has to be.

Ultimately, we decided that we were going to make a movie to learn how to make a movie and the only unbreakable rule we set for ourselves was “no matter what, no matter how disappointed we might possibly be with the end result, we have to FINISH THE PROJECT.” In hindsight, that was the perfect gameplan. If you know that finishing is a foregone conclusion, then that frees you up to concentrate more on the details of getting to that finish line. Ultimately, I ended up with very few disappointments in our completed product outside of some intermittently imperfect framing, lighting, and audio. If you go into the project with this attitude then the only way to fail is to do nothing.

And so David and I moved forward, brainstorming the things we could afford to put into a movie as far as locations, actors, and effects go. You have to use locations you can access for free. You have to have a small cast—ours was probably too big.

We made an “Exploitation 101” laundry list, informed by the entire history of low-budget cinema, of items to include in our feature to make up for the fact that our film would have no name actors and would likely suffer from dodgy production value.

If you are looking to make your first no-budget feature, I highly recommend going the genre route… particularly horror. Horror fans are extremely forgiving of production quality and non-professional acting as long as the story is interesting. For us, it helped that my favorite movies are essentially horror and exploitation films ANYWAY, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to find an audience for a cheapo slasher flick than it is for a cheapo rom-com.  Without going into great detail about our list, essentially we were looking at some form of sex, violence, or general strangeness at least every five script pages. If you don’t titillate your audience every five minutes, they are going to start to notice, say, how shitty your lighting is. I mean, they’re going to notice that anyway, but they are much more forgiving if they are constantly distracted from it.

From that list, David wrote the script for our first feature, The Theta Girl, a psychedelic horror revenge story.
 

 
Our story contained all of the “Exploitation 101” elements we had laid out, but it also attempted to subvert some of those tropes. We also made sure it passed the Bechdel Test— because movies should do that anyway (though, to be fair, the horror genre as a whole tends to be better about this than most other genres).

One thing that was important to us, and I will offer this as a bit of advice to new filmmakers: make a film that can be categorized as a genre film, but DO NOT remake shit people have already seen. A $10,000 version of Friday the 13th is not only unnecessary, but it’s likely to be boring, and it certainly won’t win you any word-of-mouth unless you are able to go way-the-fuck-over-the-top with the kills. The best thing you can do as a new filmmaker, working under the duress of a microscopic budget, is to make a film that’s sort of like other things that people already enjoy, but also totally fucking different from everything else. Granted, this isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but no matter what your budget is, imagination is free (unless you’re paying a screenwriter—but if you can afford to do that, then why are you reading this?)

So what did we do next? What should you do next once you have an entertaining story ready to go? We brought in people to work and made the decision to pay everyone on our production. Not much, mind you… but enough to make it worthwhile for actors and crew to show up on set. Now you could (and a lot of people do) make a film with an all-volunteer cast and crew, but I am going to tell you from my first-timer experience that unpaid people will quit the first day that everything sucks… and you will have plenty of days where everything sucks. I’ll get more into this later, but making movies is really, really, really, really fucking hard.

I suggest paying a day rate to your cast and crew and have them sign a contract stating that they will be paid at the end of production for all days worked, but the contract becomes void if they quit before the end of production. This contract is assurance that the crew members will be paid, but also your insurance that the actors won’t bail on the project after you have 3/4 of the thing shot. Make meticulous records of days worked. Treat everyone fairly. Pay them as soon as you wrap shooting. We paid a flat $50 a day for every actor and crew person. This is admittedly jack-shit, but it was what we could afford and just enough to keep everyone motivated.

Having made that decision to pay or not to pay (PAY THEM!), you can then do a casting call and find some crew. Working on a mega-low budget means you will probably be hiring inexperienced crew who are looking to learn. Give them the opportunity to learn with you and allow them some room to fuck up with you.

Paying everyone meant that we were going to be spending a bit more than we had originally thought when the script was written. In hindsight, our script was rather (as one filmmaker friend delicately put it) “ambitious,” and probably a bite bigger than we had any right chewing.

Full disclosure here, it actually cost us $14,000 to make The Theta Girl, but had I known then what I know now, with better planning, we could have easily brought it in at $10K. Unfortunately, without ever having made a movie, there’s no real way to know how to plan your shooting days until you’ve actually done it. We ended up spending much of our budget paying multiple actors and crew members for multiple days that could have been more efficiently scheduled. My advice to new filmmakers on this front is: read as much as you can about pre-production. Plan for EVERYTHING. Think of every possible contingency. Storyboard everything. Create shotlists that you will stick to during production. Assume low-paid actors are going to be late a lot and have someone on your team whose job it is to pleasantly harass and wrangle them into being where they are supposed to be when you need them.

Knowing that money was likely to be extremely tight, we decided to do a crowd-funding campaign for our project. Now, in general, I’m not a huge fan of crowd-funding campaigns, but there is a way to do them “right” and, in retrospect, I think the crowd-funding campaign is a really smart idea beyond money generation. First of all, don’t be an entitled asshole with your campaign. No one owes you anything for “being cool” or making something that only you think is “awesome.” The best way to manage your campaign is to “pre-sell” your film or items related to your film. You can also “sell” roles and production credits. If people believe in your project, they will be more than happy to contribute. How will they believe in it? You must demonstrate that you are serious and capable, and that can take a bit of convincing. For us, having never made a movie before, the big looming question was “how do we demonstrate that we are capable of doing this?” It’s not like I had a showreel. I’d never made a movie before. Ever.

So what we did was this: We made a trailer for a fake movie in order to demonstrate that we could operate our gear and edit something together into a cohesive and entertaining form. This fake movie trailer also served the immeasurably benefitting purpose of allowing us to work with the actors we had just cast and the crew members we brought on board. It was also a good dry-run at learning how to direct and edit on a smaller scale before jumping totally into the deep end of a 90-minute feature head-first. It allowed us to make sure none of our hires were flakes or divas (they weren’t!). We decided to make a trailer for an imaginary movie INSTEAD of a direct trailer to The Theta Girl because we wanted to keep some element of mystery as to what our feature was going to be.

Continues after the jump…

 
As I am more gourmand than gourmet, and more human garbage disposal than either of those things, I refuse to turn up my nose at any dish I’ve never eaten. Texture doesn’t throw me off (I love escargot and gelatinous Chinese mushrooms) nor does appearance (paneer saag—looks unholy, tastes of the heavens). But I have a mental block over the traditional Scottish dish, haggis. It’s not the idea of a sheep’s heart, liver and lungs boiled with fat and oatmeal inside its own stomach—I’ve no aversion to organ meat. For me, it’s the trypophobia—fear of a dense collection of holes, or rather the revulsion I feel upon seeing the honeycomb pattern of something like tripe, which is the casing of haggis. (Trypophobia is not however, named for tripe—they’re false cognates.)

I was actually under the impression that there would be no way to make haggis seem more repellent to me, but then some culinary sadist went and produced them in hors d’oeuvre “pop” form. Yes, like a haggis lollipop. A tripe lollipop. A tripe fucking lollipop garnished with a little tartan bow. In an attempt to overcome my completely irrational phobia, I’ve been subjecting myself to the images from this tutorial for haggis pops over and over again, and if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to narrate my disgust.
 

 
Guts! No problem there! I can watch graphic surgeries or brutal Hollywood gore with no problem. I cook my own meat—guts mean nothing to me, man.
 

 
This is where I start to get uncomfortable. This is the stomach and while I can’t see the honeycomb holes, I spot a glimpse of the villi—tiny little wormy hairlike structures that aid in digestion by increasing surface area. I don’t like villi either.
 

 
That is a disgusting amount of villi and I am openly shuddering right now. The tiny residue of cavewoman survival instinct and my brain is screaming at me to find whoever this person is and save them from the poison they are about to eat.
 

 
Oh thank God, we’re back to guts.
 

 
Hey it’s starting to look like food!
 

 
Okay, it is food now.
 

 
What are you doing?!? What are you doing with that?!? Nothing should ever look like that!! You’re making something evil!!
 

 
There is no God. We live in a bleak amoral universe. When we die, we’re meat, just like these… pops.
 

 
[Vomits. Screams. Pours bleach in eyes. Self-immolates.]

I honestly hope that you don’t share my lizard-brained aversion to the tripe surface of haggis, and I hope you’ll check out the full tutorial below—Burns Night has come and gone, but it’s never to early to start planning your next haggis-based soirée! If you are a fellow trypophobic, I sincerely apologize, I and hope you understand that the people of Scotland are at least partially responsible for your current condition. Blame them!

Via Instructables

 
I’m staunchly defensive of violence in horror movies. Sure, sometimes it’s an exercise in exploiting a visceral audience reaction with some cheap splatter, but when it’s done right, it can exorcise our fears and neuroses, and even give some really subtle commentary. This is not to say I don’t have my critiques within the horror genre.

For example, we need more ladies perpetrating the gore!

While The Woman, Teeth, and American Mary all have some great female roles, I think it’s time for a couple of women on a man-murdering spree, don’t you?

‘M’ is for Misandry is a submission to The ABCs of Death, a competition where up and coming filmmakers can submit a letter-themed short horror movie or trailer. We follow our two murderers (anti-heroines?) as they target, trap, and torture unsuspecting men. While it’s clearly a shoe-string budget (and the editing could be a little cleaner), I’m totally into this concept. Can we get this greenlighted with a fat budget and maybe flip the damned “final girl” cliche?
 

 
Via The Wall Breakers

 
“Upcycling” refers to the fabrication of a new product from old materials. How this is different from “recycling,” I cannot exactly pinpoint, except that there appears to be an aesthetic milieu attached to “upcycling”- something of a millennial take on shabby chic. Call something “recycled,” it’s someone else’s old crap. Call something “upcycled,” you can sell it on Etsy.

Take, for example, this… shelf, available for the low, low price of $395, a price for which you could afford an actual antique shelf. The seller, however, appears confident that his creation is just as good as any old piece of legitimate furniture. From the Craigslist ad:

This rustic ladder shelving unit is made from a 12’ ladder with two upholstered burlap boards. The ladder comes apart and folds up and can easily be taken apart for transport. I also have another ladder shelving unit that was made from the same original ladder and is also available upon request.

As one of those working class young Brooklynites currently sitting on a dilapidated IKEA couch, in front of a 3,000 pound television set, which lives on planks of wood perched atop cinder blocks, I know how to be resourceful on a budget, and I know how to make due with cheap and free materials. I also know the difference between real furniture and an amalgam of building materials. And building materials, no matter how expertly stacked, do not cost $395.

Thinking, of course, that this must be a Craigslist prank, I was delighted to see that the seller also has an Etsy store, where he does appear to sell some actually cool stuff. Then I saw this:

“Retro Early 1980s Baby Bouncer”
 

 
“Retro Animals Print High Chair”
 

 
No, Brooklyn Upcycler! Old baby shit is not “retro!” Old baby shit has been recalled. Because baby furniture used to be comprised of nothing but sharp metal and a series of nooses! Baby technology advances because babies have lost their damn little baby limbs on unsafe high chairs and bouncy seats! Old baby shit is neither functional nor aesthetically pleasing! Damn, Brooklyn Upcycler, sometimes you just have to throw old shit away!
 
Via Brokelyn

 
At this point, “hipster” has basically become a catch-all for anyone under the age of 35 whose mother doesn’t dress them, so any and all drug consumption habits have fallen under the Instagram glow of this amorphous label.

Take alcohol, for example. Hipsters drink craft beer because they’re into DIY and micro-brews. Or is it that hipsters drink wine because it’s “artistic”? Oh wait, hipsters drink shitty malt liquor and PBR because it’s “ironic!” Or bougie mixed drinks made by these so-called “mixologists”? Or more esoteric hooch, like sarsaparilla and moonshine (ooh, retro!)?

Well you’re all wrong, because everyone knows drinking is soooooo over. Nowadays, hipsters do meth! Not only that, they make twee little videos about cooking it themselves! Next stop, Etsy! Maybe they can’t sell the drug there directly, but I’m sure they could make an adorable little illustrated how-to guide, and there’s all sorts of “cooking” accouterments that could be sold as accessories? Hand-felted meth pipes from recycled cat hair, for example!

(By the way, growing up in meth country, I was into meth wayyyyyy before it became hip!)
 

 
I have a bevy of hats from my great grandmother, quilts from my mamaw, and scarves from my girlfriends who have embraced the textile arts. But a bong cozy? I could totally use that! As a gift… you know, for a friend.

Don’t you hate that harsh sound your glass piece makes when it hits the tabletop? And isn’t it annoying when you’re passed the bong but not a lighter? Well, I have the solution! My bong cozy and lighter holder set will protect your waterpipe and keep your lighter close. A necessity for any bong owner, especially if you have a glass table!

It is a harsh sound! And one does tend to misplace those lighters! And the best part? Machine-washable! Which is so convenient… for my friend.

 
Lousy Book Covers: “Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn’t mean you SHOULD.”

A tumblr site dedicated to bad book cover art. That said, I do admit I am intrigued by a couple of these covers.
 

 

 
With thanks to the wonderful Mr. Steve Duffy!
 
More ‘Lousy Book Covers’, after the jump…
 

The elusive The Weeknd…
 
This spring has seen 20-year-old Toronto-based R&B singer Abel Tesfaye—who does business as The Weeknd—zoom suddenly across the radar screen of the alt-music blogosphere and into the starry-eyed attention of pop star Drake and still-boring institution Rolling Stone.

And as if you need further proof of the irrelevance of the music industry, he’s done it as an unsigned artist on the strength of House of Balloons, a free downloadable mixtape of his tunes.

The hype surrounding Tesfaye springs from a couple of factors. One is the anxiously defiant swagitude in his smooth, loping, MDMA-tinged electro-soul sound. The other is the guy’s tantalizingly un-R&B low visual profile, which has resulted in the dissemination of a handful of mostly black-and-white photos of the handsome cat.

Tesfaye’s relative anonymity has also resulted in his fans producing some video interpretations of his tunes. Most of these have gone for a pretty literal black-&-white noir-city-apartment setting & narrative.

But Jamaican indie filmmaker Storm Saulter—director of the feature Better Mus’ Come and curator of the New Caribbean Cinema series—sets his disturbingly sunshine-soaked take on The Weeknd’s “Wicked Games” off the waters of his home island’s coastal parish of Portland.
 

 
After the jump: a more typical, though well-crafted, take on “What You Need”…

 
How to make an embossed metal box from a soda can.
 

 
Via Atomic Shrimp. With thanks to Maria Guimil.
 

 
I really like this recycled CD rack from Redimei Objetos. However, it’s a bit pricey at $60 a pop! I betcha you could make one of these at home on the cheap.

(via KMFW)

Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World is Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make and co-founder of Boing Boing’s ode to the DIY lifestyle and slowing life down enough to allow for purposeful—and life enhancing—activities. Mark discusses bee keeping, raising chickens and the four and a half months he and his family spent living on a tiny island in the South Pacific. He also talks about his recent appearance on The Colbert Report and about the burgeoning DIY Maker scene across America.