Respect Authority

Mike Stilkey’s work is some of the most striking and creative “traditional” art I’ve seen in a while. That said, his paintings are far from traditional. The Los Angeles based artist uses unlikely canvases in the form of vintage paper, record covers, pages torn out of books, and books themselves, the latter being the most stunningly unique variety of his creations. The old wisdom is to never judge a book by its cover, but with one of Stilkey’s paintings on it, why would you even want to look at anything else anyway?

He calls these works “book sculptures” — a clusterfuck of media that comes together beautifully and really, defies any kind of categorization. Stilkey uses ink, colored pencil, paint and lacquer to capture the melancholy characters within his gorgeously gloomy illustrations. The moody pieces have an overwhelming sense of longing within them, prompting feelings of anxiety in the viewer — something feels very visceral about his work to me, but maybe I’m just a depressing bitch. Read More ›

Oh the woes of William Wu.

Wu, who recently moved his herbal medicine shop off of Canal Street and onto a smaller side street in Chinatown, is struggling to make rent, according to the New York Daily News. He’s now open six days a week instead of seven, has let go two part-time workers, and manages the whole shop himself. But with wholesale herb prices on the rise, and the recession taking its toll on consumers’ willingness to spend, Wu is in trouble. Big trouble.

This is one of those news stories with a solution so painfully obvious I want to call Wu up right now. “Hey Willy,” I would say, “I saw your story in the newspaper today and well … you should really sell weed.” Read More ›

You know shit’s bad when people are worshiping metal bovines.

[Praise Wonkette]

Hate Mongrel Jr: God may hate fags, but bumboclot, he sure loves reggae!

It’s incredibly rare, if you’re sane that is, to see a Westboro Baptist Church protest and smile. The man above is my hero of the day, injecting humor into a humorless vacuum of hate, showing just how pathetic and disgusting the WBC is (as if cajoling toddlers to hold up hideous signs, ensuring that future generations will be just as abysmally and offensively stupid as this one, wasn’t doing that already). Now, if I were to hold a counter protest to their picketing, I probably wouldn’t use a funny sign, but a baseball bat pumped full of nails… but to each their own. Read More ›

Gasoline behemoth Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, shattered its own profit records this quarter, and consequently also the record for biggest profit from operations by a U.S. corporation. The company broke the bank with $14.83 billion in third-quarter earnings, a 58% increase from third-quarter 2007. 

Coupled with a 35% increase in revenues, this makes executives at Exxon Mobil pretty fucking filthy rich. 

Meanwhile, in Connecticut this week, a man is being charged with three felonies for reportedly firing gunshots into a gasoline pump. Luckily, no one was injured — including the moronic customers standing around watching — and the pump didn’t explode. However, Joe TriggerHappy was so hopped up on gas-rage that he drove off, struck two cars and got in an accident. He faces jail time after his release from the hospital. 

I’m sorry, Exxon is allowed to post Earth-shattering profits by insisting the price of crude oil is so high we need to pay $4 a gallon, but I can’t exercise my frustration by popping a few off into the nearest gas pump?

What kind of country is this anyway.

Revenge of the nerds indeed. Two sophomore J.V. football players at Stuyvesant High School became violently sick this week after drinking Gatorade spiked not with vodka, rum or any typical punch-bowl spirit, but copper sulfate, a chemical fungicide their peers had stolen from the school lab. One of the kids started coughing up blood, and both became violently ill. 

Police have since arrested one sophomore and charged him with reckless endangerment, though everyone breathe easy — both football players recovered in time for the big homecoming game! The 13-year-old was given two weeks suspension, and six other team players who knew about the prank but failed to report it were suspended from the team. 

I’m sorry, isn’t Stuyvesant High School notorious for its population of intelligent students? This harkens back to a June incident where two seniors at the Brooklyn School for Global Studies served their teachers cake laced with laxatives, resulting in a big class trip to the emergency room. 

We’re all so busy looking for the trenchcoat-wearing Goth kids with swastika tattoos and obvious vendettas that no one seems to care about the high school warfare taking place underneath the radar. Seriously kids, keep your belongings at your side at all times and don’t accept candy from strangers, or fellow classmates.

But go ahead and keep eating the cafeteria food — if it hasn’t killed you already, nothing will. 

[New York magazine]

"Wait, this moves?"

Whenever I begin to regain faith in America’s legal system, it vomits up something like this.

A Queens woman (of course) is suing Johnny Utah’s restaurant in Rockefeller Center for “assault and battery” after she was tossed off the Western-themed establishment’s mechanical bull. …I couldn’t even make this stuff up.

Rachel Love’s lawsuit claims the restaurant allowed “an inebriated individual” to ride the bull, and that the bull’s operator sped up the ride when she was on it, effectively making it more violent in an effort to throw her off. Her lawsuit doesn’t detail her injuries (which must be devastating considering this happened in January), but it does seek unspecified damages.

Heads up Rachel: I’m fairly certain the entire premise of the mechanical bull ride is being thrown off, otherwise you’d be making a public spectacle of yourself simply to mount a slowly-gyrating ottoman, which sounds an awful lot like stripping. Whichever employee sped the ride up to eject you deserves a raise — for doing his fucking job. Objecting to being thrown off a mechanical bull is like suing a swimming pool because you got wet.
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Rachel Maddow, of the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, contextualized the election’s final stretch yesterday with, unsurprisingly, a football metaphor. We get it Rachel, you were the first openly gay Rhodes scholar. Stop shoving our tongues in it.

But for all you Joe Six Packs, Plumbers and G.I.s out there, the football metaphor should help you understand why your pal is losing and help you come to grips with the looming onslaught of socialism.

Understanding the general election as a competition for territory, Maddow deftly plots the contest on a football field. Using D.C. and Utah, the widest margins of victory in the 2004 election, as the ten-yard lines and the swing states as the fifty, Maddow illustrates that most of the game is being played over in McCain territory — which means Obama is winning.

She continues that even if Obama doesn’t win all the red states in play or makes a “touchdown”, he’s still in field goal range. Point is, if this was a real football game, with real money on it, your bookie would be paying out already.

While the comparison is brilliant, I can’t help but wonder how this analysis is substantially independent from the polls she claims aren’t entirely reliable. Even if Obama’s playing on the 30 and flirting with 15 (I have no idea if that’s really football speak, help me lesbians), isn’t he pursuing a strategy built on the assumption that he’s totally safe in the states that are on the “50 yard line”? Where do those assumptions come from? Polls, right? Video after the jump. Read More ›

If you live in a city, there’s no doubt you’ve noticed the invasion of fixed gear bikes over the past couple years. It’s like Pogs, they’re everywhere right now and everyone’s trying to get the best slammer. The trouble is, the insane trendiness of the activity has diluted the fact that when taken more seriously and not treated simply as a fashion accessory for your perfect hipster uniform, fixed gear biking can be just as thrilling and aggressive a “sport” as skateboarding.

The die-hards will still be there in five years when all the kids in Brooklyn have moved on to vintage rollerskates or, hopefully, arsenic sandwiches, and this trailer for Ride/Relax Production’s NYC-centric fixed gear documentary, Empire, helps to highlight the true potential for this activity when you treat it like a lifestyle and not just as a means of looking chic while riding to the bar and back.

Personally, I think most of the tricks should probably be left for those of us rolling on four wheels, as “grinding” with a track bike seems like a really easy way to look like a fucking huge geek, just like “grinding” with Soap shoes is retarded and “grinding” in the club isn’t nearly as fun as getting slowly plastered in the corner.

Rather, it’s the furious street riding that really illustrates the intensity and urgency of this remarkably dangerous (when done right) emerging subset of the biking community. There’s no denying the fixed gear culture is here; now the question is what parts of it are legitimate and what’s trendwhoring. We must be vigilant in our skimming of the fat, but in maintaining a critical eye we can be left with a fantastically exciting new adrenaline rush which is… actually… much more expensive a hobby than simply buying some good drugs.

I guess all those scathing commercials finally hit home. 

Microsoft on Tuesday announced what it claims will be a slimmer and better operating system, Windows 7, and unceremoniously dropped the “Vista” brand name. A smart move considering Apple has been relentlessly slamming the company for Vista’s ongoing issues, sometimes at the expense of including any real advertisement for Apple itself. Seriously, I don’t know the last time I saw Justin Long doing something other than making fun of PC. Does Apple even sell products?

“We’ve done a lot of work around how you manage the windows, how you launch programs and how you manage the windows of the programs that you’ve launched,” Microsoft technologist Steven Sinofsky told investors and developers at a conference. “It’s all about personalization and putting you in control of the PC, and that’s a big initiative that we’ve had.” 

Thanks Steven. After all, why shouldn’t a company that’s been releasing operating systems for 20+ years (and by the way, more or less pioneered the concept) develop something capable of “launching programs” and “managing windows.” This will certainly solve a lot of issues, and may revolutionize computers altogether. 

The real question though, what if it works? What if a few hard-hitting ads and a lot of public backlash actually pushed Microsoft to develop a comprehensive Windows solution? What would happen to Justin Long? 

Exactly what happened to the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” kid. Total and utter oblivion.

Good news, pedophiles! Looks like you’re going to be able to molest children in that Hello Kitty costume you bought for Halloween after all!

According to The New York Times, on Monday, a federal judge in Missouri blocked parts of a new state law that required sex offenders to avoid all “Halloween-related” contact with children and stay in their homes on October 31st. Judge Carol E. Jackson said the law was too vague after a story of a child molester in a Nintendo Wii costume standing outside a school and asking passing children to “push his buttons” came out over the weekend. (Note: If it wasn’t already immediately obvious, I completely made this part up.)

The diddler defended himself to local authorities, saying that he “wasn’t aware of this so-called ‘Halloween’,” and that he bought the costume for All Saint’s Day, November 2nd.

He said he was “hoping to bestow the gift of the Holy Spirit upon lucky children with [his] Wiimote.” Police allowed the man to continue, and as of Monday, six children in Missouri are missing. Read More ›

I love Newsday. The Federal Reserve is poised to cut interest rates again, to a shameful 1%, one day after the Dow surged 900 points and New York Gov. David Paterson bought knee pads in preparation for begging some cash off the federal government. We’re about to have one of the most important presidential elections in our lifetime, and we’re still at war in Iraq. But why bother with all that when you can document the history of neckbeards?!