Faesthetic, an illustration and design journal that started as a hard-to-find, fold-over photocopied zine, started off real good and then took a little tumble down that slippery slope of perfect-bound commercial art. Nick Gazin wasn't so keen on the last issue...what did he say again? Oh yeah: "Maybe just rifle through a copy and tear out the drawings that you think are good then try to flush the rest down the Borders bathroom toilet." Ouch. But the rules change when someone's got the good taste to print your own amazing stuff. Not only that, he swears, this one's actually good and the whole thing's back on track. Read on for his picks.
This I know: the Next Big Thing in music will come from from the United States Gulf Coast. I know this because I watch The Uncharted Zone, featuring Phil Thomas Katt. The Uncharted Zone is a weekly television show that airs on public access channels in the shit-hot Northwest Florida markets of Pensacola, Novarre Beach, and Bagdad, as well as on YouTube. The operation is run by painfully earnest former radio DJ Phil Thomas Katt and some guy named Tommy Robinetti, the Anton LaVey of meth.
I recently discovered that my mother, a woman happily married to my father for 25 years, once had a faraway love. They were both ten years old at the time. His name was Hernan Lozano, a bullfighter from Monterey, Mexico. They met, they swooned (hugged for longer than three seconds behind a building), and they vowed to write each other constantly. And they did, though my grandparents hated it because they were totally racist. But my mom kept the letters all this time. She sent them to me with a note attached reading, "Enjoy learning more about my bullfighter and don't forget to buy pepper spray." Here are the letters, obviously written by family members with her name misspelled each time, but they are so fucking adorable it makes your heart hurt. So screw the jaded, hardass, swaggering ten-year-old bullfighters of today who want to kill six bulls in one fell swoop; this one was a true romantic.
Those countless 90s dance parties ironically blasting Matchbox 20 and Pearl Jam and Faith No More and Ned's Atomic Dustbin (OK, that band's still good) seem to pretty much have come and gone, so we wiped our brows with delicate hankies and emitted soft sighs of relief. No, we are not in the midst of another "decade" revival. But then an alarming bit of news flared up: Zombies and hackers are back. We all know zombies will never change, those curmudgeon bastards, but at least this time hackers seem to have a sense of humor, not just wearing goggles in the dark while cracking into back-end security system bank files and sticking it to The Man, aka their dads.
Right now our friend Brian Mier’s at the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil (you can find a bit of history about this enormous annual event by clicking onward), which this year is focusing on developing solidarity among all the different indigenous tribes in South and Central America so they can better fight off darklord mega-projects that are destroying their territories. Brian drank some tainted water and we presume he’s sweating and shitting it out as we type these very words, but he did have the wherewithal to forward on some images from a photographer he met there. The only comments Brian could give are: “That mime guy is wearing a paper visor that says, ‘Your Mouth is Fundamental to confront the Fundamentalists’,” “The women in purple are from the World March of Women,” and "I have no freaking idea about that giant cow.” Not entirely helpful, true, but when he stops squirting life-force from his body he'll be checking in again to let us know more about what's going on over there.
I have good sweet loving parents, I really do, but I spent Christmas with them in the suburbs and I haven’t been able to leave since. On the morning before flying back home to the city where I live many, many miles away from them, back to my friends and job and own apartment with books and beads and bright green lightbulbs, I go for a run. I slip on ice. I hear my right ankle crack—a tight fluid sound—and right away I know I’m really fucked. Now I'm stuck here, just waiting. Here is my long story about the painful ordeal.
I met Griffin at a punk show in Kansas City when he was 15 years old. He had the word FALAFEL tattooed across his knuckles and told me that his father was a drag queen who went by the name Rachel Slurr. I thought he was totally cute and then he disappeared into the ether. Unbeknownst to me, a friend spotted him wearing a mustache that looked like caked-on baking soda at the International Noise Conference in Miami, where he threw a bunch of trucker speed into the audience and irritated everyone.
I had to go to court yesterday. As it turns out, court is really boring, nothing like all the red-faced yelling and shady defensiveness and bulging-veined anger I'd imagined. All I had to do was wait in an insanely long line leading up to a row of six windows, only one of which was in use--I am now convinced this is a government ploy to completely frustrate and annoy us, installing a bunch of windows in a public service building with no intent of ever putting an actual human behind them, enjoying a good laugh over our bitching about our tax dollars and whatnot--and listen to a woman rap her acrylic tips on a stainless steel counter in between telling people they were dismissed. That's all that happened. I walked up, handed her my little pink piece of paper saying I was bad, and she told me everything was fine, now go away. The reason why I had to be there in the first place was pretty damn exciting, and totally worth it. Here, lemme take you on a little excursion.
A guy who works way deep somewhere in the lair of this office sent us photos from a party where there was a mini ramp or whatever the fuck it's called inside a loft and hardcore bands played while everyone got sweaty rolling around on these newfangled boards mounted with wheels. Accompanying captions were real technical, stuff like this: "Now, don’t let its modest four-foot transitions fool you; the ramp’s really steep and has a protruding coping, which meant the ramp-newbies in attendance spent their first couple runs just figuring the thing out." Uh yeah. Whatever that means. Still, it looked like a blast, if you're into that kind of thing.
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