New(d) Print

We wanted to let everybody know about a new service we’re offering this Spring. Nude (mostly) interns printing your posters.

Ask Ed about pricing and available internships.

All participants get this print free.
Limited edition of 20.

Illustration by Dust.

Hybrid-living people

Green living is beyond trendy at this point and is pretty much on its way to becoming a lifestyle choice. And soon you’ll be able to buy lots more stuff to prove you’re living that lifestyle.

There isn’t a single human on the planet that doesn’t like the Earth. I mean, what are your other options? Live on the moon? The Earth provides us with food, water, shelter, gravity, sunlight, McDonalds, and all the other human essentials. I suppose the problem is that there are a whole mess of people out there that don’t really care to preserve what little slice of untainted wilderness and wildlife is left unchanged by our modern sprawl.

Somehow we can train chimps and Jack Russell terriers to fly spaceships, but can’t convince Joe Six Pack down the street not to dump his used motor oil down a storm drain.

Fortunately for retailers, rich yuppies allow their collective guilt to drive them to snap up every product marketed with the words “environment,” “organic,” and “eco.” Of course, the retailers are hoping that while you’re driving around in your Prius, you won’t try to quantify how much of the world you actually saved by buying a car with two engines (oh yes, it still runs on gas, remember?) and a trunk full of batteries that will end up in a junkyard 10 years from now when no one but robots know how to service it.

Remember that for every Prius you buy, for every organic pear you “rescue” from Kroger, for every recycled magazine you buy, there are 20 whale-killing, arsenic-dumping, radiation-laden corporations sending us hurtling toward our oh-so-glorified dinosaur-style extinction. But until then you can feel good knowing that green retailers are lining their pockets with your quaint attempts to reduce your carbon footprint.

It’s An Inkjet Print

The word “Giclée”, pronounced Zhee-Clay, is derived from the French word “le gicleur” meaning “Nozzle” because that’s what you are if you buy or sell one as art.

Some dude invented the word in 1991 so he could charge more for his digital inkjet prints. They were originally used as press proofs for real printing. You know, the kind where somebody gets dirty? Giclée prints can run up to $10,000+ depending on size.
For an ink. jet. print.

He went with a French name for this travesty because the French are great artists, so naturally they would make great injket prints. It has to be legit art with a French name, right?

They’re usually printed on the most expensive acid-free, archival, rag paper the would be artist can find because they need some reason to justify the price and title as a fine art print. If that’s not enough to prove it’s real art, sometimes they’ll run canvas through their inkjet printer and sign it because that’s what a real artist would do, right?

Some of these crooks even have the gall to number their prints. Like what, you’re going to delete the Photoshop file when you’re done making your “edition”?

Nothing that’s made via File > Print is fine art.
No amount of latte drinking or Air/Radiohead listening while you replace your ink cartridges will change that.

Make clicky on the Epson above to see the couilles (thats French for balls) these people have.

Event Eating

In the 21st century, I shouldn’t have to deal with bones in my food.

Nowhere is this more unacceptable than at a restaurant. Let me get this straight: I’m paying for food, you cooked it for me, our civilization has been around for millenia, and you can’t be bothered to remove the bones?

If you’re destitute, homeless, a Skeksis, or worse, a Cantonese peasant farmer, then maybe it’s OK. Enjoy the scraps from the leftovers of the lower middle class with my blessing.

But chicken wings are delicious, you say. Oh? How do you feel about chicken feet? Now explain to me how those two things are different. I’m sure if you cover them with enough orange sauce and ranch dressing you can pretend you’re not just eating the garbage of someone more privileged than you.

Also, I think if you want to chew on a carcass at supper time you should be required to wear the bones as jewelry. Otherwise you’re just being wasteful.

You know who else loves bones? Dogs. When you’re done chewing on your turkey leg, maybe you can bury it in the backyard when I take you out to make poop.

Cannibals are also bone connoisseurs. If you have no reference for these guys, go see The Road for a true meat-on-bone experience.

Until some “Event” occurs where all you can do is truly live off the fat of the land, as it runs away from you in a post-holocaust nuclear winter, consider raising your living standards above the poverty line and order something from the deboned menu.

Lola Moves On Over

If you dig on white shirts, these guys probably have your number. If they don’t, then maybe it’s time to get a new one.

lolanewyork.com

Click the kitty to hear the song  >>

This Is Not Sparta

Putting fetishes aside for a moment, human feet are pretty disgusting.

I won’t really go into details about why, since you should be able to discern this for yourself, but let’s just say that hair, lint, dead skin, and the grime of the world are involved. And yet many of you seem to think you should be able to air your toes to the universe so that we can feast our eyes upon them. Please, please stop.

Have you ever been on the train and seen those fashionable young ladies in their slinky, low-cut dresses and their stiletto sandals with their perfectly manicured toenails? Take a look at their actual feet—black with the grime of urban decay. Do they spend so much time on their makeup hoping no one will notice their goblin feet?

It’s even less acceptable for men. Bulbous, calloused, hairy hobbit feet fetchingly adorned in those horrendous leather cage contraptions or, worse, flip-flops, which are not and never shall qualify as shoes. There are only three places you are allowed to wear flip-flops—a community shower, the pool, and the beach. That’s it.

Sandals do have their place. But unless you live in the desert or are rushing into battle as part of a phalanx, you should not be wearing them. I’m sorry that it’s hot outside, but your right to feel the breeze rushing through your toe hair does not supersede my right not to be nauseated on my way to work.

So the next time I see you on the street, if your toes are showing, you’d better be on your way to battle some Persians.

Hyperbole For You & Me

Hyperbole is literally the biggest problem in modern communication, and it’s destroying our culture.

Take, for example, book reviews on Amazon. Some of them are useful, accurate accounts of someone’s experience with a text. But many of them are wildly divergent from reality along the lines of “This book actually really changed my life” or “I hated it so much I sent it back for a full refund and then I murdered the author’s children.”

Unless you’re 6 and experiencing things for the first time in your life, everything isn’t “so amazing” or “the worst thing ever.” Once people turn 18, we should start charging them for every unnecessary adverb they use. Seriously, if your life were describable in such extremes, you wouldn’t be reading this because you’d either be too busy starring in sports drink commercials, dead, in prison, or ascended to a higher plane of existence.

I was reminded of this while cleaning up the shop a while ago when I ran across a crack baggie that had blown in from the street. This isn’t an unusual situation; because of the way we are situated to Metropolitan Parkway, all kinds of random crap blows into our space. If some dude eats a Big Mac a mile away and, in local custom, throws the wrapper on the ground, it will end up in our space.

What was notable about this piece of migrating ephemera was that it was plastered with the word BEST. Like the guy selling it had the best crack you could buy and the packaging to prove it. I’m a skeptic by nature, but I doubt he had the best crack available in Atlanta or even the West End.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting comment on the state of hype and commercialism in our society when even the local street slingers are using it to sell their goods, as if it’s necessary to persuasively market a product that scumbags will shoot you in the face to obtain.

The World Is Not Your Trash Can

Now before you get started, let me say that we all realize you need to keep the interior of your Kia Sephia pristine.

Granted, the exterior, which I presume used to be white, looks like the skies over Beijing in August. But you still can’t allow those empty juice boxes to sully your ride even for the time it takes to reach your destination, even if that destination is a McDonald’s.

Though the last time I checked, McDonald’s had a convenient waste receptacle ready and waiting for you. No, you need to teach the consumers of said juice boxes, your precious little offspring, how to keep a clean vehicle. Better to toss those things right out onto Candler Road while you’re driving.

Of course, I myself learned about environmental responsibility at approximately age five, when a book called Yogi Bear Teaches BooBoo Some Ecology taught me two things about our world: that clean, potable water is not an infinite resource, and that littering is wrong and makes your neighborhood look like a garbage dump.

Now calm down, I’m not asking you to demonstrate the sagacity of a five-year-old (or a cartoon bear, for that matter). I’m just asking you to have a smidgen of self-respect while toning down the sense of entitlement just a hair.

Because when you litter, you become the thing you just tossed out your window—a piece of trash.

Thanks China

This is why I can’t hate on China.

No matter how much their government spits on basic human rights, while keeping most of their population below the poverty line, forcing them to eat anything with 4 legs besides the dining room table, and executing an even higher proportion of them annually than Texas, the fact remains that those same downtrodden people, who have accepted being treated like that as their culture, hand-assembled this, and you can buy it for $2.49 off of I-85 in South Carolina.

Brilliant.

Happy 4th of July.

Gorilla Typography

I ran across this dude that takes down handwritten notes/flyers from public areas like bulletin boards or lamp posts and replaces them with his Photoshop interpretation of a better designed piece of work.

http://www.idsgn.org/posts/guerrilla-typography/

Sadly, the posters he comes up with are not only harder to read than the original handwritten signs, but also less noticeable because they look like every other badly designed flyer/poster.

Thanks, Asshole.
Now I’ll never see my cat again.