surreal visions of hell: collect ’em all!

who doesn’t like hieronymus bosch? the painter who dragged the dark age demons of europe’s subconscious onto canvas and into the light of the rennaissance has been dead for far too long to sue for royalties due on this collection of bosch action figures. thanks boing boing.

le punque rocque

in the latest issue of the voluminous print mag the big takeover, tbt’s jack rabid gets an interview with john kezdy of the effigies. this original chicago punk-era institution reunited a couple of times in 2004 and is working on their first new record in a decade and a half.

embodying the resolutely intellectual approach to rock music and its subject matter that characterized lots of chicago punk from the original era, singer kezdy name-checked albert camus and uttered his quote: “of modern man, they will say: he fornicated and read the papers.”

at least the fornication continues.

new ways for software to ruin your day

point and click your way to a hit song with HSS – software designed to make record company a & r people even lazier and more cowardly than they already are.

rivered again!

seems no matter what i do, every jackass on the planet ends up doing it years later. my pal greg dunlap and i have been playing poker for fourteen years and, true to form, america was late to the party. now that the general public is in love with texas hold ’em, the game is on tv, in homes and online for millions of amateurs lining up to donate their sheckels to the older hands.

but it’s still poker. which means that even amateurs can get cards. the bad beat is a regrettable part of the game, where almost winning hurts a lot more than plainly losing. enjoy riveredagain.com, the poker equivalent of gaping at horrible accidents on the freeway.

brand new nostalgia

a seven-hour documentary film called bbs: the documentary has been completed by jason scott. this film chronicles the golden age of what we know now as the “online” world.

the early days of disembodied typing took place on small systems called bulletin board systems, running on early microcomputers such as the apple 2, the commodore 64 or texas instruments ti/99s.

i spent a lot of the early reagan era as an online teen dork. i was a vandal and a bully and sometimes i wrote some neat stuff. jason scott’s texfiles.com is a vast repository of some of the pieces of online culture that inhabited these systems and were passed around the english speaking world as a form of slow digital agitprop. browsing jason’s site is like traveling to a vast mental hospital and trying to unravel the complicated secret societies that run the place.

lights out!

i get pretty wistful when i think about my high school days so long ago when my friend and i would go driving around the north side / north shore with the cassette player blasting the angry samoans. it was 1982, it was the hardcore punk. with the fast playing and the loud guitars and the stick clicks. oh, you and your goddamn internet. stop reading this.