A Wild Change

So...with the new year ringing in, I decided that I am going to switch this blog up, and possibly give it a little face-lift. I haven't posted anything in a really long time. I honestly just didn't really have the time. I think each day I am going to post a couple of graffiti pictures a skate video and a song. That's it. Unless there is a day that I really want to share something else with you all. I might be able to start this today/tonight, but if not, I'll do a post tomorrow.

Also, with year-end lists coming in like crazy, I thought I might do a little one.
So here's my top albums of 2008 (in no particular order)

The Gaslight Anthem "The '59 sound"
The Effort "Iconoclasm"
Have Heart "Songs to scream at the sun"
Verse "Aggression"
She & Him "Volume One"
Frightened Rabbit "The midnight or..."
Defeater "Travels"
Carpathian "Isolation"
New Found Glory "Tip of the iceberg EP"
Flobots "Fight with tools"
Dillinger Four "Civil war"
Cruel Hand "Prying eyes"
Common Market "Tobacco roads"
Adele "19"
Paint It Black "New Lexicon"

This is a great article that a friend sent to me!

2008-07-16T07:21:00.001-07:00

This is from the new issue of E magazine...

COVER STORY
The Meat of the Matter

Our Livestock Industry Creates More Greenhouse Gas than Transportation Does

By Jim Motavalli

Ask most Americans about what causes global warming, and they’ll point to a coal plant smokestack or a car’s tailpipe. They’re right, of course, but perhaps two other images should be granted similarly iconic status: the front and rear ends of a cow. According to a little-known 2006 United Nations report entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” livestock is a major player in climate change, accounting for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions (measured in carbon dioxide equivalents).That’s more than the entire transportation system! Unfortunately, this incredibly important revelation has received only limited attention inthe media.How could methane from cows, goats, sheep and other livestock have such a huge impact? As Chris Goodall points out in his book How to Live a Low-Carbon Life(Earthscan Publications), “Ruminant animals [chewing a cud], such as cows and sheep, produce methane as a result of the digestive process…Dairy cows are particularly important sources of methane because of the volume of food, both grass and processed material, that they eat.”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the American meat industry produced more than 1.4 billion tons of waste in 1997—five tons for every U.S. citizen and 130 times the volume of human waste. Michael Jacobson, the longtime executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, adds the fact that just one midsized feedlot churns out half a million pounds of manure each day. “The methane that cattle and their manure produce has a global warming effect equal to that of 33 million automobiles,” the Center reports in its book Six Arguments for a Greener Diet.
That’s just one side effect of raising animals for food. It turns outthat nearly every aspect of the huge international meat trade has anenvironmental or health consequence, with global warming at the top ofthe list. If you never thought that eating meat was an environmental(and by extension, political) issue, now is the time to rethink thatposition.
A Really Big Enterprise

To understand livestock’s impact on the planet, you have to considerthe size of the industry. It is the single largest human-related use ofland. Grazing occupies an incredible 26 percent of the ice- andwater-free surface of the planet Earth. The area devoted to growingcrops to feed those animals amounts to 33 percent of arable land. Meatproduction is a major factor in deforestation as well, and grazing nowoccupies 70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon region.In Brazil, 60 to 70 percent of rainforest destruction is caused byclearing for animal pasture, one reason why livestock accounts for ninepercent of human-caused carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Other sourcesof CO2 include the burning of diesel fuel to operate farm machinery andthe fossil fuels used to keep barns warm during the winter. And food grown for animals could be feeding people. Raising livestockconsumes 90 percent of the soy crop in the U.S., 80 percent of its cornand 70 percent of its grain. David Pimentel, professor of entomology atCornell, points out that “if all the grain currently fed to livestockin the U.S. was consumed directly by people, the number who could befed is nearly 800 million.”
Grazing is itself environmentally destructive. The UN reports that 20 percent of the world’s pastures and rangelands have been at leastsomewhat degraded through overgrazing, soil compaction and erosion.
Methane (a global warming gas 23 times more potent than CO2) comes frommany human sources, but livestock account for an incredible 37 percentof that total. Nitrous oxide is also a very powerful global warming gas(296 times more potent than CO2) and by far the biggest source, 64percent, originates (as does animal-based methane) from manure“off-gassing.” This process of nitrous creation is aggravated byintensive factory farming methods, because manure is a more dangerousemitter when it is concentrated and stored in compacted form.Nitrogen-based fertilizers also emit nitrous oxide. Another byproductof raising livestock is copious amounts of ammonia, which contributesto acid rain and the acidification of ecosystems.
Unacceptable Risks

Theenvironmental consequences of meat-based diets extend far beyond theirimpact on climate change. According to the UN report, producing theworldwide meat supply also consumes a large share of natural resourcesand contributes to a variety of pressing problems. Livestock productionconsumes eight percent of the world’s water (mainly to irrigate animalfeed); causes 55 percent of land erosion and sediment; uses 37 percentof all pesticides; directly or indirectly results in 50 percent of allantibiotic use; and dumps a third of all nitrogen and phosphorous intoour fresh water supplies.Astudy by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production(IFAP), released last April, called the human health and environmentalrisks associated with the meat industry “unacceptable.” One of theirmajor recommendations was to “implement a new system to deal with farmwaste to replace the inflexible and broken system that exists today, toprotect Americans from the adverse environmental and human healthhazards of improperly handled IFAP waste.”
And livestock are forcing other animals out. With species loss accelerating in a virtual “sixth extinction,” livestock currently account for 20 percent of all the animal biomass on the planet. As they occupy 30 percent of the planet, they also displace that much wildlife habitat. The grazing of livestock is considered a serious threat to 306 of the 825 “eco-regions” identified by the Worldwide Fund for Nature,and to 23 of Conservation International’s 35 global hotspots for biodiversity.
Upping the Volume
Meatproduction has become a major problem because of its very success as ahuman food. In 1950, world meat production was 44 million poundsannually; today, it has risen fivefold to 253 million tons per year.Pork production, for instance, was less than five million tons annuallyin 1950, but it’s more than 90 million tons today. The average personon the planet ate 90.3 pounds of meat in 2003, double the figure of 50years ago.
These sharp increases are partly the result of dramatically higher meatconsumption in the Third World. China alone now consumes half theworld’s pork, a fivefold increase since 1978.

Dairy cows are particularly important sources of methane because of the volume of food they eat.

Brazilmakes an excellent case history. With 160 million head of cattle, ithas the second-largest herd in the world after India. In Brazil, cattleprovide 29 percent of the country’s methane production, and an amazing10 percent of the world total. If that were the only issue, Brazil’slarge cattle herd would be a major problem. But it would be an enormousglobal warming aggravator even if its cattle produced no methane,because Brazilian farmers burn rainforest land to create pastures. This process releases carbon into the atmosphere from the heavy fires,and also destroys the rainforests’ ability to act as a carbon sink andcapture CO2. These fires are Brazil’s largest contribution to globalwarming, which worries Brazilian environmentalists such as Rubens Bornof the group Vitae Civilis. He says he’s waiting for Brazil’s nationalinventory of greenhouse gas emissions, which will allow him to see moreprecisely the scope of the problem.
Selective Solutions
Thefew commentators who have taken on the connection between meatconsumption and global warming ignore the most obvious solution: noteating meat.
The UN report offers a lengthy section entitled “mitigation options”with a range of other choices. To avoid cutting down rainforests thatsequester carbon, the report suggests “intensification of agriculturalproduction on some of the better lands, for example by increasedfertilizer benefits.” The logical conclusion to this suggestion is thetotal confinement factory farming methods used in the U.S.—which, bytwisted logic, could be said to have environmental benefits becausethey are not land intensive (and don’t cut down trees). But theenvironmental problems associated with factory farming are legion, andinclude polluted air and waterways.
OtherUN suggestions include conservation tillage (leaving agriculturalresidue on the soil surface to enrich its health) and organic farmingfor better soil health; improved grassland management; better nutritionfor livestock to reduce methane gas production; and capturing methanein anaerobic digesters to produce “biogas.”

Displaced Wildlife

The latter method has been adopted by several Vermont dairy farms andworks well. Cow manure is stored in the digesters (huge tanks) at 100degrees Fahrenheit and deprived of oxygen. That encourages the bacteriato break the manure down, releasing biogas that is 90 percent methane.This fuel is captured and burned in an engine to generate electricity.Unfortunately, the equipment is expensive—$200,000 to $1 million,depending on the size of the farm. Only 32 farms in the U.S. were usingdigesters at press time, so only a tiny amount of methane productionhas been mitigated in this way.ACanadian study by Karin Wittinberg and Dinah Boadi of the University ofManitoba lists 20 separate ways to reduce greenhouse gas productionfrom livestock. These include grinding and pelletizing food forconfined animals to make it more fully digestible (a 20 to 40 percentreduction); grazing steers on high-quality alfalfa grass pastures (50percent reduction); adding canola oil to feedlot rations (30 percentreduction); and separating animals by age group and phasing in foodrelated to their growth stages (50 percent reduction). These arelaudable solutions and should be implemented, but, absent legislation,they’re unlikely to be put in place.
It takes seven pounds of corn to add a pound of weight to a cow, and that’s why 200 million acres of land in the U.S. are devoted to raising grains, oilseeds, pasture and hay for livestock. That land requires 181 billion pounds of pesticides, 22 billion pounds of fertilizer and 17 trillion gallons of irrigation water (not to mention billions of gallons of global warming-aggravating fossil fuel for farm equipment).
Another way of looking at this, supplied by M.E. Ensminger, the former chair of the animal sciences department at Washington State University, is that“2,000 pounds of grain must be supplied to livestock in order to produce enough meat and other livestock products to support a person for a year, whereas 400 pounds of grain eaten directly will support a person for a year.”

Meatproduction is a major factor in deforestation, and grazing now occupies70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon region.

Because vegetarians enjoy lower levels of blood cholesterol and sufferless frequently from obesity and hypertension, their life expectanciesare several years greater. But the benefits of the vegetarian optionare rarely on the agenda, even when the environmental effects of themeat industry are under discussion.A Very Big Change
Mostpeople grow up eating meat and seeing others doing the same. Themessage that “meat is good and necessary for health” is routinelyreinforced through advertising and the cultural signals we’re sent atschool, work and church. Vegetarianism is regularly depicted as afringe choice for “health faddists.” The government reinforces thismessage with meat featured prominently in its food pyramids.
Jim Mason, coauthor of the book The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter(Rodale Books), offers another possible reason we’ve kept vegetarianismoff the mainstream agenda. “People who eat meat and animal products arein denial about anything and everything having to do with animalfarming,” he says. “They know that it must be bad, but they don’t wantto look at any part of it. So all of it stays hidden and abusesflourish—whether of animals, workers or the environment.”
Even such an enlightened source as the 2005 Worldwatch report “HappierMeals: Rethinking the Global Meat Industry” is careful not to advocatefor a vegetarian diet, including it in a range of options that alsoincludes eating less meat, switching to pasture-raised “humane” meat,and opting for a few non-meat entrees per week. Vegetarianism is the“elephant in the room,” but even in a very food-conscious age it is noteasily made the centerpiece of an activist agenda.
DanielleNierenberg, author of the Worldwatch study, works for both thatorganization and for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).She’s a vegan, and very aware of the climate impacts of meat-baseddiets. But, she says, “Food choices are a very personal decision formost people, and we are only now convincing them that this is a tool attheir disposal if they care about the environment.”
Nierenberg says that some of the Worldwatch report was published in Environmental Health Perspectives,and there was concern that it wouldn’t see print if it overemphasizedvegetarian diets. “People have a very visceral reaction when told theyshouldn’t be eating the core meats they grew up with,” she says. “Theyget upset.”

TheAmerican meat industry produces more than 60 million tons of wasteannually—five tons for every U.S. citizen and 130 times the volume ofhuman waste.

David Pimentel agrees that Americans are acculturated to eating meat.“The nutritionists say we’re eating way too much meat for our health,”he says. “The public knows this but it doesn’t change their dietaryhabits. What will alter their behavior is higher prices for meat andmilk, which are inevitable because of higher fuel prices and the risingcost of corn [caused in part by the diversion of corn crops to makingethanol].” Although he admits it’s an unpopular position, Pimentel says he’d liketo see gas reach $10 a gallon, because it will encourage energy conservation and increase prices for environmentally destructive meat,milk and eggs. “Right now, we have some of the lowest food prices in the world,” he says. “In the U.S. we pay 15 percent of our budgets for food, compared to 30 percent in Europe and 60 percent in Indonesia.”
Jacobson agrees. “People are pretty wedded to what they eat,” he says. “The government should be sponsoring major mass media campaigns to convince people to eat more fruit, vegetables and whole grains.”
He argues that cutting down meat consumption should be a public healthpriority. “From an environmental point of view, the less beef peopleeat the better,” he says, citing not only the release of methane fromlivestock but also increased risk of colon cancer and heart disease.Jacobson adds that grass-fed, free-range beef (which has less overallfat) is a healthier alternative, but grazing takes longer to bring theanimals to market weight “and they’re emitting methane all that time.”
He posits that the Centers for Disease Control or the Environmental Protection Agency should be convincing Americans to eat lower on the food chain. “There are the environmental and animal welfare problems caused by ‘modern’ agriculture,” he says. “The animals’ retribution is that we die of heart disease and cancer.” Is there an environmental argument to be made for livestock? Gidon Eshel, co-author of the report“Diet, Energy and Global Warming” and a professor at Bard College, says that livestock “has an important role to play in nutrient recycling.Minerals are taken up by growing plants, and when those plants are eaten by grazers, some of it ends up in their tissues and some is returned to the soil in their waste products. But what’s good in small quantities becomes toxic and devastating in large amounts. So it is only beneficial if we were raising livestock in much smaller numbers than we are today.”
Eshel calls for enforcement of the frequently ignored federal Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, which contain provisions to protect against harmful discharges of both animal wastes and the fertilizers used to grow animal feed.
Eating More Meat

Although anaerobic digesters show promise, they are prohibitively expensive.

A record 284 million tons of meat were produced worldwide in 2007. Inmost developing countries, meat consumption per capita is expected to double from the 1980s to 2020. Meat is an economically important product in most parts of the world in 2008, and it has powerful lobbies and enormous vested interests. There’s just one problem: It’s hurting the planet, and wasting huge resources that could easily feed a hungry world. Offer these facts to many meat eaters, and they’ll respond that they can’t be healthy without meat. “Where would I get my protein?” is answer. But the latest medical research shows that the does not need meat to be healthy. Indeed, meat is high in cholesterol and saturated fat, and a balanced vegetarian diet provides all the protein needed for glowing health. Were humans “meant” to eat meat, just because our ancestors did? Nonsense, says Dr. Milton Mills,a leading vegetarian voice. “The human gastrointestinal tract features the anatomical modifications consistent with an herbivorous diet,” he asserts.
With the recognition of meat’s impact on the planet (and the realization that we don’t need it to stay healthy), is it possible that the human diet will undergo a fundamental change? The fact that the cornerstone of the American diet aids and abets climate change is an“inconvenient truth” that many of us don’t want to face, says Joseph Connelly, publisher the San Francisco-based VegNews Magazine. He takes a dig at Al Gore for not mentioning meat-based dietsin his film and only dealing with them glancingly in his book, An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale Books).
A 2003 Harris Poll said that between four and 10 percent of the American people identify themselves as vegetarians. So far, Connelly says that number seems to be holding steady. “From a sustainability point of view, what’s really needed is for people to understand the connections between factory farming, meat eating and environmental impacts,” he says. “That’s the first step.”
Lisa Mickleborough, an editor at VegNews, is probably right when she says that animal concerns are a powerful force for turning meat eating intoa moral issue. To be an animal rights leader is almost by definition tobe a vegan. But few environmental leaders have gone that far. “As an environmental issue, it’s pretty compelling,” she says. “The figures on methane production speak for themselves. But when it comes to doing what’s right for the environment, most people don’t take big steps—they just do the best they can.”
JIM MOTAVALLI is the former editor of E.

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I've been way into Freight Monikers as of late, and came across this great little interview with one of the greats, Colossus Of Roads!

2008-07-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

Colossus of Roads

Interview by Gabe the Saint
50mm Staff Writer

Years ago on my way to school, I would cross the railroad tracks as a short
cut into the eastside of town. It was here in this small train lay over where I
first encountered aerosol style graffiti on freight cars. I was intrigued with the
idea that a piece could actually travel around the country on a rolling canvas.
Because of my new discovery, I made sure that I took the shortcut across
the tracks everyday. As time progressed, I began paying attention to other
details of the trains... bolts and hinges... coupling systems, the cryptic
numbers and other details of the rolling stock. That's when I first noticed the
simple but iconic one-color grease pen drawings. They seemed to be
present on every car... Many of the drawings included dates that at times
approached 3 or 4 decades in age. Some were barely discern-able drawings
of skulls or hand written names. Others seemed carefully branded and
particularly stylish... Most note-able to me was a white line drawing of a
bearded man with a large brimmed cowboy hat. The friendly looking
character was streamlined as though still in motion, yearning to get
back on the rails to parts unknown. I wasn't sure of its origin or the author. A
hobo? Rail worker? Freight hopper? Years later "Who is Bozo Texino" a
recent documentary has cleared up a lot of the mythology about what are
largely known as "boxcar monikers." I was able to track down one of the
most prolific boxcar artists and talked with him about the culture and history
of this phenomenon. His handle is Colossus of Roads. He is a third
generation rail worker in his 60's and he has worked the railways for more
than 30 years...

GTS: Many people are in the dark about boxcar artists. What motivates
them? Is this a form of art?

Colossus of Roads: Hard to explain man's basic need to mark his territory,
but the expansion from cavemen walls to the billboards of rolling boxcars
offered an opportunity for expression in the industrial revolution too delicious
to resist for those prone to pursue it. The practice of chalking the cars was
required of the various trades of the railroads. Be it the mechanical forces
communicating a specific problem on bad ordered cars to the repair
employees at the rip track, or the switch foreman chalking the abbreviated
destinations of cars to communicate with the other crewmembers, and to aid
in their recall. The marking materials were provided by the railroads. Others
eventually recognized the distinctive styling of a person's markings. The
availability of chalk afforded a means of expression beyond the mundane
tasks of railroad trades. The tramps and hobos utilized it to communicate
monikers or aliases, and devised a code of symbols to denote the hostility or
hospitality of any given community along the route. Jack London wrote a
story about his futile pursuit of another hobo with the moniker "Skysail Jack",
simply because of the similarity with his own, "Sailor Jack", by hopping
freights chalked and dated by the pursued.

I like to call the marking of the cars by railroad workers and hobos a folk art
tradition.

I'll not argue if it's art or not.

GTS: Why do you write on Boxcars?

Colossus of Roads: To me the crux of the biscuit, the message of the
medium, is to have a huge number of images out riding in the network, to
have a vast presence, yet remain anonymous and thus mysterious. It was
also a means of _expression, to sing the blues for someone with the inability
to play the flattop box, or moan the mean mistreatment by singing, but could
mark the boxcars. Captioning the icon with language which questioned my
practice, such as "Resignation or Resistance?" where Zen koans to ponder.
Was I resigned to the adherence to a complete career, or a screaming
resistance by dispatching errant ersatzs? Recent research has revealed a
named malady I felt explained the appeal of the repetitious acts and my
penchant for inappropriateness, in Asperger's Disorder, named after the
Viennese psychologist who delineated the symptoms of this form of autism.
Although it seemed to negate the artist excuse, it was a relief to know I could
blame mental illness for my shameful and infantile vandalism.

GTS: Who are the first boxcar artists that you remember seeing up? Who is/
was the most prolific of all time?

Colossus of Roads: ...Herby was the most prevalent practitioner through
most of my career. Bozo Texino, Tuscan Red (the raised left ankle nude
saying "Hi", so named by Larry Penn), Don A, Charlie Brown, Stinky, Ol' Bob,
Kid Idaho, and The Rambler were up a lot when I was attracted to the
practice. I would say the most prolific of all time would be the complete loop
signature of J.B.KingEsq. which has spanned more than a century, although
by numerous authors.

GTS: Tell me about your particular moniker.... the style and motion... How did
this image evolve? Have you ever drawn anything else?

Colossus of Roads: .It is supposed to be a rider motif variation to the pipe
smoking cowboy icon of the original Bozo Texino. My initial icon of a deadpan
character had reached its definitive moniker in "gypsysphinx", so I was
searching around for another image to replace it, absent minded stoned
doodling in my sketchbook revealed a visitation from a ghost of the net, Bozo
Texino. The icon gradually evolved to signify, hopefully, a cowboy hat-ed, big
billowy bearded, pipe smoking escapee, on the lam.

"My intended purpose of
dispatching the maximum number of icons with the least amount of effort, has
turned into a real chore..."
-Colossus of Roads

GTS: You seem to always accompany the image with a message.
Often it appears personally encrypted and other times poetic. Does the
process of drawing inspire the message or does the message come to you
beforehand and inspire you to draw... As though something is on your mind
and you need to express it....

Colossus of Roads: ...The redundancy of the icon applied as quickly and
automatically as possible requires some form of variation, and the use of
language, in the form of anecdote titles, alter egos, fantasies, lamentations,
and brief histories, or concrete poems, if you will, is surely the purpose.

GTS: Do you care about the so-called "gallery art" world? You've said that
you have drawn more self -portraits than Picasso, Rembrandt, and Van
Gogh. Are they artists that inspire you?

Colossus of Roads: I've had the "gallery art" experience and it left a dour
impression. Perhaps more acceptance of my work would have seduced me
to the form. That referencing of the biggies who made self-portraits was
delusional posturing.

GTS: Freights have become a popular medium for aerosol graffiti artists in
the last two decades. How do you feel about them? Do you mind sharing
your space with them?

Colossus of Roads: My intended purpose of dispatching the maximum
number of icons with the least amount of effort, has turned into a real chore
since it is so hard to get any kind of network accumulation account of the
hazards of weathering in the elements of nature combined with the more
destructive covering of my work by spray-painting hordes now that it is so
trendy. The acceptance of impermanence as a fact of life is the main
statement in this Vita Brevis ballet, but it is hard not to despair when you see
so much of your work covered. I wouldn't mind them covering the image,
which is a given constant, but the language memory nudge is usually what is
obscured. Historical erasure of the sloganeer. It has become an open
medium, so as long as I indulge in the practice I cannot limit others.

GTS: Have you caught any aerosol graffiti artist "red handed?"

Colossus of Roads: I live in such an out of the way place I haven't
encountered any spray-paint people. If I did I certainly wouldn't be
confrontational.

GTS: When will you hang up the paint sticks? It seems like freight monikers
are sometimes handed down... Do you mind another artist carrying on your
name?

Colossus of Roads: Certainly would be easy to embrace the rocking chair
and stay on the porch, but I'm still urged on by the instincts to continue my
Main Sledge / Major Opus even as futile as it seems.I would be honored if
someone continued the tradition of marking the American loner outsider riding
the rails out in the network, but I would hope the image would mimic the
author's own identity and individuality, should that transpire.

GTS: Are you religious?

Colossus of Roads: There a caption to my icon out there somewhere, which
addresses this question. "Schooled: Church of The Level Track", a
reference to my own family dedication to the supremacy of the railroad as
provider of livelihood, given that both my father and grandfather were
railroad men in track maintenance, and in the case of my father, required to
move all over the system to the degree, we were never integrated into any
community, especially church, where we seemed to be decidedly poorer
than the other parishioners, thus kicking in our shame-based aversion. For
that reason I tried determining the human condition explained more by
philosophy than religion. Although I never attend church much, I've certainly
been subjected to many sermons of condemnation by Bible scholars and
deacons, awaiting trains in sidings, in switchman shanties, and depot
evangelists' warnings of Hell. In the face of this berating I viewed Nietzsche's
Will to Power about right as explaining human motives, but the absence of
God and the aspiration to Heaven can cause greater harm to the collective
psyche of mankind than the continuing atrocities of delusional righteous
divine inspiration. Yin/Yang measure of all the world's dualities has me on the
sidelines contemplating my navel as a Zen Existentialist.

GTS: How do you feel about America? Do you pay much mind to politics?

Colossus of Roads: I love America. I am an American.

Of course I mind the path of America at the moment, now that the fascists
subverted the 2000 election, and started a war that was the dumbest foreign
policy move in the history of the nation, especially as a tactic for fighting
global terrorism, the new paradigm of east/west world split Holy Wars. The
arrogance of power caused our Oedipal Prez Rich Boy to be provoked by
pleb Osama Rich Boy into attacking the usurper to Babylon, thus giving a
rallying point for radicalism in Islam. It may seem absurd to think America's
moral compass will ever be back to true, but that is my wish. But what do I
know, I'm a liberal democrat.

GTS: Any last words?

Presumptuous Colossus of Roads: Yes, Peace Please!

GTS: Thank you for your time...

Thank you Learn & Lack

2008-07-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

So in honor of last Saturday's events, I decided to do a post dedicated to some genuinely nice chill dudes.

Vegan Sichuan Kung Pao "Chicken"

2008-06-28T10:35:00.000-07:00

INGREDIENTS:

12-14 oz / 340-390 g firm tofu, cut into strips
1 T light soy sauce
2 t cornstarch
1/8 t white pepper
1 T oil
4 green onions, cut diagonally into 3/4 inch / 2 cm pieces
2 t minced garlic
1 T chili garlic paste
1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into 3/4 inch / 2 cm squares
1 T brown bean paste
1/2 cup cold vegetarian broth
1 T cornstarch
1 t light unbleached sugar
1 cup unsalted roasted peanuts or cashews, chopped

METHOD:
Mix the tofu with the soy sauce, 2 teaspoon cornstarch and white pepper. Heat a wok or heavy skillet over high heat. when hot, add the oil. When the oil is hot, add the tofu and stir-fry until lightly browned. Add the green onions, garlic and chili garlic paste. Stir fry for 1 minute.

Add the bell pepper and brown bean paste. Stir fry for 2 minutes.

Stir the broth, 1 tablespoon cornstarch and sugar together, and add to the pan. Stir until thickened. Sprinkle the peanuts on top and serve immediately with rice.

I really hate Fox News! How are these people allowed to be news anchors!!!???

2008-06-28T09:42:00.000-07:00

Click here to tell FOX:

"FOX must stop injecting racism, prejudice, and fear into our political dialogue. We intend to hold FOX, its advertisers, and its personalities accountable for FOX's attempts to smear the Obamas."

Sign the petition

Dear MoveOn member,

Right now, FOX is trying to paint Barack Obama as foreign, un-American, suspicious, and scary. They're trying to send Americans the message that our country's first viable black candidate for President is not "one of us."

We've seen this before from FOX. They won't stop until it becomes too painful to continue—until the public calls them out and advertisers start getting worried.

Now is the time to draw a line in the sand by putting FOX on notice that their behavior won't be tolerated. Over 100,000 Americans have already expressed their outrage. Can you make that number even bigger by adding your name to this message?

"FOX must stop injecting racism, prejudice, and fear into our political dialogue. We intend to hold FOX, its advertisers, and its personalities accountable for FOX's attempts to smear the Obamas."

Clicking here will sign the petition:

http://pol.moveon.org/stopthesmears/o.pl?id=13021-9012341-6zch1px&t=5

FOX's longtime pattern of smearing Obama and the black community is well documented.¹ But the outrageous moments have increased in the last month.

First, a paid FOX commentator accidentally confused "Obama" with "Osama" and then joked on the air about killing Obama.² Next, a FOX anchor said a playful fist bump by Barack and Michelle Obama could be a "terrorist fist jab."³ And then, FOX called Michelle Obama "Obama's baby mama"—slang for an unmarried mother of a man's child, and a clear attempt to associate the Obamas with negative stereotypes about black people.⁴

If you know others who'd find FOX's recent actions despicable, please ask them to sign the petition too. The more people who sign, the bigger our impact will be.

Our friends at ColorOfChange.org—an online advocacy group focused on the issues of importance to the black community—are leading this charge. They will deliver thousands of petition signatures as a group to FOX's headquarters (in front of other media cameras, so FOX feels more heat). Here's how they describe the situation:

After each of the incidents mentioned [above], FOX issued some form of weak apology. But what does it mean when you slap someone in the face, apologize the next day, then slap them again? It means the apology is meaningless.

Now is the time to call out FOX for these attacks and their fake apologies. The first stop is FOX. Next will be their advertisers and the FCC. If we don't push back now, we will see more of the same from now until November. Please join us to demand that FOX answer for its behavior:

Add your name to this important cause by clicking here—then tell your friends:

http://pol.moveon.org/stopthesmears/o.pl?id=13021-9012341-6zch1px&t=6

Thanks for all you do.

–Adam G., Peter, Anna, Justin, and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. "Fox Attacks Obama." Brave New Films at FoxAttacks.com, February 2007
http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/573-fox-attacks-obama

"Fox Attacks: Black America," Brave New Films at FoxAttacks.com, June 2007
http://foxattacks.com/blog/572-fox-attacks-black-america

"Fox Attacks: Obama, Part 2," Brave New Films at FoxAttacks.com, March 2008
http://foxattacks.com/blog/32376-fox-attacks-obama-part-2

2. "Fox News Jokes About Killing Obama," YouTube video posted May 25, 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjYpkvcmog0

3. "Fox News' E.D. Hill teased discussion of Obama dap: "A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?" Media Matters, June 6, 2008
http://mediamatters.org/items/200806060007?f=h_clips

4. "Fox News in trouble again over Obama smear: 'baby mama'" Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3855&id=13021-9012341-6zch1px&t=7

Want to support our work? We're entirely funded by our 3.2 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chip in here.

Anti-Vivisection Post

2008-06-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

So my friend Ray of What Would Ray Do? made a post to his blog about Rock for Life saying that March of Dimes is evil, but not for their extensive animal testing and vivisection, but for their pro-choice stance on abortion. Ray was touching on the fact that Rock for life, a hugely absurd Christian Fundamentalist group, is pushing their religious views on the right of science and pro-choice. I am pro-choice, and very anti Rock For Life, but however I do feel that March Of Dimes is very evil indeed. Not for their research and pro-choice stance on abortion, but their horrible animal testing.

So therefor, I figured I should do a little post on Vivisection/Animal Testing, and the fact that it is totally unnecessary, unreliable, ineffective, and inhumane.

A short little overview of animal testing

If you think Animal Experiments are Necessary Consider The Following:

* Less than 2% of human illnesses (1.16%) are ever seen in animals. Over 98% never are.

* At least 50 drugs on the market cause cancer in lab animals. They are allowed because it is admitted that animal tests are not relevant.

* When asked if they agreed that animal experimentation can be misleading because of anatomical and physiological differences between animals and humans, 88% of doctors agreed.

* Rats are 37% effective in identifying what causes cancer in humans. Flipping a coin would be more accurate.

* According to animal tests lemon juice is deadly poison, but arsenic, hemlock and botulin are safe.

* 40% of patients suffer side effects as a result of prescription treatment.

* Over 200,000 medicines have been released most of which are now withdrawn. According to the World Health Organisation, 240 medicines are essential.

* Thousands of drugs passed safe in animals have been withdrawn or banned due to their effect on human health.

* Aspirin fails animal tests, as do digitalis (heart drug), cancer treatments, insulin (causes animal birth defects), penicillin and other safe medicines. They would be banned if results from animal experimentation were accurate.

* When the producers of thalidomide were taken to court, they were aquitted after numerous experts agreed animal tests could not be relied on for human medicine.

* At least 450 methods exist with which we can replace animal experiments.

* Morphine puts humans asleep but excites cats.

* 95% of drugs passed by animal tests are immediately disgarded as useless or dangerous to humans.

* One is six patients in hospital are there because the drug they have taken had been passed safe for us on humans after animal tests.

* Worldwide, at least 22 animals die every second in labs. In the UK one animal dies every five seconds.

* The contraceptive pill causes blood clots in humans but it had the opposite effect in dogs.

* We use aspirin for aches and pains. It causes birth defects mice, rabbits and rats.

* Researchers refused to believe that benzene could cause cancer in humans because it failed to in animal tests.

* Dogs failed to predict heart problems caused by the cardiovascular drugs encainide and flecainide, which led to an estimated 3,000 deaths in the USA.

* Heart by pass surgery was put on hold for years because it didnt work on dogs.

* If we had relied on animal tests we would still believe that humans dont need vitamin C, that smoking doesnt cause cause cancer and alcohol doesnt cause liver damage.

* It was denied for decades that asbestos caused disease in humans because it didnt in animals.

* Polio researchers were mislead for years about how we catch the disease because they had experimented on monkeys.

* As one researcher points out, the ultimate dilemma with any animal model of human disease is that it can never reflect the human situation with complete accuracy."

* Only 2% of animal tests has found or lead to a discovery of a disease.

* A little over 2% of animal tests have lead to a cure for a disease.

2008-06-28T08:43:00.000-07:00

When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much. - Fen Yang

Talent is pretty talented!

2008-06-27T15:05:00.000-07:00

2008-06-27T14:58:00.001-07:00

Having found no self that is not other, The seeker must find that there is no other that is not self, So that in the absence of both other and self, There may be known the perfect peace, Of the presence of absolute absence. "The Tenth Man" by Wei Wu Wei

2 skate videos and a cool music video

2008-06-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

This little kid is a bastard!

I hate skate competition announcers!

You ain't artsier than me!

One of the many emails I get from savedarfur.org I can't believe this shit is still going on!

2008-06-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Jesse,

Arbitrary shootings.
Merciless beatings.

Our common humanity demands an urgent response.

Only 5 days left to reach $200,000.

Please make your gift today.

A college student shot by Sudanese security forces because the color of his hair and skin resembled that of Darfuri rebels.

Paramilitary and security forces going from house to house, arresting men and boys, throwing them in trucks and speeding them off to unknown destinations.

These are fragments of daily life in Sudan. This is more than a crime scene. This is genocide.

We cannot stand idly by as genocide continues. Nearly a year has passed since the U.N. resolved to send peacekeepers to Darfur—we need your support to make sure they don't forget their promise.

We have only 5 days left to raise $200,000. Please make a secure online donation today.

There are hopeful signs, and your activism has made a profound difference. The recent joint statement on Darfur from Senators Clinton, McCain, and Obama was historic—the first time since World War II that presidential rivals have come together on a foreign policy issue.

But the people of Darfur shouldn't have to weather seven more months of unspeakable atrocities until a new U.S. president takes office. We will continue to demand accountability from the current president, from those who want to be president, and from everyone with the power to address this humanitarian crisis.

But we can't do any of that without your support.

We are still $165,000 away from our $200,000 goal for this critical campaign. Send a gift before the end of the month and help chart the path to peace for Darfur.

Our common humanity demands action. There isn't a moment to lose.

Best regards,

Colleen Connors
Save Darfur Coalition

Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this urgent campaign.

Tell-a-friend!

If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for Save Darfur Coalition.

The Save Darfur Coalition is an alliance of over 180 faith-based, advocacy and human rights organizations whose mission is to raise public awareness about the ongoing genocide in Darfur and to mobilize a unified response to the atrocities that threaten the lives of more than two million people in the Darfur region. To learn more, please visit http://www.SaveDarfur.org.

Good luck Hope!

2008-06-25T06:52:00.000-07:00

This is so sad to read, why her family of 10 years would do this to her is beyond me. I guess it just further proves that the average person still thinks that an animal is less than them with no feelings. I just don't get it, if I lived in that area and had the money to do so, I would adopt her. Good luck Hope!

Unleash the Future video series....Barack Obama!

2008-06-25T06:06:00.000-07:00

So in light of the insurmountable amount of evidence of global warming and the decline of the entire eco-system on this planet the Enviromental Defense Fund came up with this little video series called Unleash the Future.

It focuses on alternatives to the energy crisis, and the people that are innovative in creating "green" energy alternatives.

Intro

Solar

Biofuels

Wave

Geothermal

For the first time in my life I can really believe in a presidential candidate. If we as the people actually electBarack Obama the above things could actually happen. As well as taking our troops out of war, working on rebuilding our economy, improving our schools, and protecting our environment and the living creatures who inhabit this earth, not just the humans. These and many others things are needed, and Obama is the first candidate that I have seen with such a revolutionary spirit and drive to try and actually fix this fucked up earth. Obama is also the first candidate to have a huge grassroots movement that is actually working, and if you were for Clinton before, now that she is not a candidate anymore she is fully backing Obama.
In order for Obama to win, we need to get everyone we know to vote. Especially the young vote, as this society right now is full with old rich white christian republicans.

YAY!

2008-06-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

So, after some frustrastion, anger and dissappointment, I am able to sign back in to this account, and you know what that means don't you?!
More posts.
Awhile back I video taped a running train, and decided to make a little video using the footage, here is the final project. Let me know what you think!

Also, I am looking for jobs for my artwork and/or selling some of my artwork. I can also do requests. Please visit my art page at www.myspace.com/zomb_one

Finally I got to put together a real post! I hope you all like!

2008-04-03T07:27:00.000-07:00

So, the other day I got to see the indie flick In Bruges, about two hit men hiding up in a small town in Belgium. This film was great and I would strongly recommend it to everyone! I was surprised at Collin Farrel's performance, I'm not usually a fan of his, as a person and an actor, but he did a phenomenal job!

In Bruges Trailer

In Bruges was filmed on location; Bruges (pronounced “broozh”), the most well-preserved medieval city in the whole of Belgium, is a welcoming destination for travellers from all over the world. But for hit men Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson), it could be their final destination; a difficult job has resulted in the pair being ordered right before Christmas by their London boss Harry (two-time Academy Award nominee Ralph Fiennes) to go and cool their heels in the storybook Flemish city for a couple of weeks. Very much out of place amidst the gothic architecture, canals, and cobbled streets, the two hit men fill their days living the lives of tourists. Ray, still haunted by the bloodshed in London, hates the place, while Ken, even as he keeps a fatherly eye on Ray’s often profanely funny exploits, finds his mind and soul being expanded by the beauty and serenity of the city. But the longer they stay waiting for Harry’s call, the more surreal their experience becomes, as they find themselves in weird encounters with locals, tourists, violent medieval art, a dwarf American actor (Jordan Prentice) shooting a European art film, Dutch prostitutes, and a potential romance for Ray in the form of Chloë (Clémence Poésy), who may have some dark secrets of her own. And when the call from Harry does finally come, Ken and Ray’s vacation becomes a life-and-death struggle of darkly comic proportions and surprisingly emotional consequences.

H2O is back!!!!

H2O needs no introduction.

After four albums and over 300,000 copies sold on Blackout, Epitaph, and MCA Records and almost a decade of constant touring with the likes of the Misfits, Sick Of It All, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Warped Tour, H2O is joining Bridge Nine Records for their fifth and long-awaited full-length album

The band was given time to pursue other interests that they didn't have the chance to pursue in that breakneck schedule. H2O still played shows and still wrote songs, but in the meantime, Toby became the proud father of Maximus Morse, expanded his musical range with Hazen Street and founded the SXEOG clothing line. Todd hit the road as lead guitar player in Juliette Lewis and the Licks. Rusty focused on his company, Pnut Jewelry, which became a busy enterprise in its own right. TF played drums for various NYC punk bands, and Adam played with rockers Alston. With five members split between LA and NYC, it was never a matter of IF H2O was going to get back to full-steam, but a matter of when.

In 2005, H20 went back to what made them a household name in the first place: touring, and while getting ready for their next record, they went out with The Used and Pennywise and they headlined the Peta2 tour with future members of B9's own Ambitions (then known as With Honor). In 2006, the new record was still in the works when the band headlined South America and the USA again, as well as supporting Rancid and headlining the inaugural "This Is Hardcore" Fest in Philadelphia. 2007 came around and after returning to Japan and doing some small stints in the US, that unnamed new record was still in progress all along. As the story goes according to Chris Wrenn, "[Label Manager] Karl [Hensel] and I were in the office listening to H2O and talking about the first time we both saw the band play, and then the conversation became 'They’re still an awesome band. We should do the next H2O record' not thinking that it would actually happen. But here we are." said Chris Wrenn. And the rest is history.

Anyone who knows will tell you: H2O is best experienced live-and the band is ready to do that with a new album of songs to play. Bassist Adam Blake said, "You won't get the full picture of who H2O are from reading an interview or even from listening to a record. To really get it, you need to come to a live show and hang with us. We want our fans to feel like we're all part of one family,that we're all in this together. We appreciate every kid who has come out, and who still comes out- this album will not disappoint anyone."

Look for H20's highly anticipated Bridge Nine debut to hit stores in May 2008 and get ready to see H20 to support the album with full world touring throughout the new year!

H2O was formed in the summer of 1994 in NYC by childhood friends, vocalist Toby Morse and guitar player Rusty Pistachio. Almost immediately the band began making waves with their blend of searing hardcore riffs and catchy melodic punk. Recruiting bass player Eric Rice, drummer Todd (TF) Friend and Tobys brother Todd on guiter the band entered the studio to record their now classic, self titled, debut record. Soon after the release Eric left the band to be replaced by English born bass player Adam Blake. The band were quickly signed to legendary punk rock label Epitaph records and immediately set to work on their second release Thicker Than Water and followed it up with a whirlwind of touring with such legendary names as the Misfits, Pennywise and The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones. Fresh from the road the 5 piece once again went back to the studio, this time under the guidance of Epitaph head honcho Brett Guerwitz of Bad religion fame, and cranked out the FTTW record. Once again it was time to hit the road and hit the road they did, this time taking out then up and comers Saves the Day for their first tour. After all this touring (almost 6 years of straight touring and recording) you would think the band needed a break, not these workaholic, hardcore guys! Signing with MCA records the band once again entered the studio, this time with producer Matt Wallace (Faith No More/ Maroon 5). the result was GO which added more melody to the bands already signature sound. Once again the band hit the road again for almost 18 months including snagging the coveted main support slot on the Boxcar Racer tour. The band followed up Go with the All We Want EP, which also featured 3 live tracks from the bands hometown show at CBGB’s. Taking a well needed break the band went on and explored other areas of their lives. Toby became the pround father of Maximus Morse and expanded his musical range with Hazen Street, Todd hit the road as lead guitar player in Julliete Lewis and the Licks, Rusty took up guitar duties in NYC staples 9 Lives, TF played drums for various NYC punk bands and Adam played with rockers Alston. After a little over a year of inactivity the band once again hit the road and began writing songs for their as yet yet untitled 5th record, a record Alternative Press magazine slated as one of the most anticipated releases of 2005. The band expect the record to be released in mid 2006 and have been playing selections from it live.

So that is the story so far but that is far from the whole story. After 4 full length records, all the ups and downs of being in a band and literally thousands of live shows the bands core beliefs haven’t shifted since day 1. Explains bass player Adam Blake "Coming from hardcore, we have always had the belief that the band is only half the story, maybe even less. What is really important is the connection with our audience. We want them to feel like we all part of one family, that we’re all in this together". Says Toby Morse "Hardcore is not about what you eat, drink or wear. Its a way of life, the music and the message". The band are planning on hitting the road hard hard and its a good bet that they will be coming to your town soon. As Blake says "You won’t get the full picture of who H2O are from reading an interview or even from listening to a record. To really get it, you need to come to a live show and hang with us". Thats is where H2O lives....on stage and coming to your town soon.
--Taken from their myspace page.

"Role Model" from the album "Go!"

"Thicker than water" from the album "Thicker than water"

"Family tree" from the album "H2O"

"Everready" Music video

"Here today, gone tomorrow" Live at Pound SF

H2O live @ The Skinny - F.T.T.W. Tour 5.2.00 - Portland, ME (kind of shitty footage, but I was at this show, so I had to put this up!)

For more info please visit their sites at:
http://www.myspace.com/h2ofamily
http://www.h2ogo.com

State Bird

"State Bird is a duo featuring the songs of Coby Hartzler and Jared Riblet. With help from a cast of other musicians, the two create loud, eccentric folk-rock. Originally from Dover, OH, State Bird have matured with an experimental cohesiveness on their new record, Mostly Ghostly. The sophomore album on The Record Machine label is catchy with unconventional "country and tribal Indian" themes.

Mostly Ghostly has a folksy foreground with simple rhythm guitars and narratives. Melodic vocals form the base of each song, while the background shimmers with more eccentric, orchestral embellishments.

In "I Saw The Light," a simple guitar riff leads off while another guitar riff, more colorful and more psychedelic, thunders in the background against fleeting drums and sparkling cymbals and tambourines. The duo relies on the tribal rhythms and choral chants to make the songs infectious, unexpected and exciting.

In addition to a short tour in February, State Bird will release Mostly Ghostly on February 26, 2008."
-NPR.org, January 25, 2008

"Son of dust"

"Where the water met the land"

A performance at Corner stone music festival 2007

For more info please visit their sites at:
http://www.myspace.com/statebirdmusic
http://www.statebirdmusic.com

Have Heart

"Boston's Have Heart is a band that has caught the hardcore world by surprise. After releasing a demo and an EP, Have Heart caught the attention of Bridge Nine records and they recorded their debut LP The Things We Carry in 2006. Since then, Have Heart has been causing a fury with an intelligent, heart-felt, dynamic debut full-length and their passionate & energetic live shows around the globe.

Taking the positivity of fellow Massachusetts bands like Bane and In My Eyes, Have Heart also takes influence from bands like Outspoken & Unbroken for a sound that is captivating everyone who hears or sees them."
-Taken from Bridge 9 records

"Lionheart" taken from the 2003 demo

"Reinforced" taken from the EP "What counts"

"Armed with a mind" taken from the album "The things we carry"

"Something more than ink" taken from the album "The things we carry"

"The Machinist" taken from the album "The things we carry" (My Favorite!)

Have Heart "Armed with a mind"

Please visit their sites for more info at:
http://www.myspace.com/haveheart
http://www.bridge9.com

Very exciting releases coming from Bridge 9 Records soon!

Have Heart have also just finished recording their follow-up to "The things we carry" and their new album with be out sometime in July! and yes, there are rumors of it being a double album, 41 tracks long, I really hope that is the case!

Providence, RI's political hardcore band Verse finishes recording, and is just putting the finishing touches on their 3rd full length album titled "Aggression" due out June 10th.

New Found Glory's Tip Of The Iceberg comes out in about two months, but Altpress.com blew the cover on the CD version of the new EP. With our blessing of course...but The CD version of Tip Of The Iceberg will now include the first offical release of International Superheroes of Hardcore Takin It Ova!. What happens when Jordan & Chad swap vocal & guitar duties, the band's sense of humor, and a combination of New York Hardcore influences with Crucial Youth? The result is a 12-song album that takes on the hardcore scene ills of talking shit, genres they find offensive, eBay, save driving & their open appreciation for Madball. Takin It Ova shows a side of the band people might not have known and after a self-released 7-song, limited edition CD of only 1000 copies, this is the first official North American release of the ISHC full-length album.

Sorry for the delay....Please read!!!

2008-04-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

So, it's been awhile since my last post, and I wanted to write a quick note, letting you all know that there will be a new post on here sometime later today or tomorrow. I have been really busy as of late, due to job searching, working part-time at the cinemas, and working at my new internship at Congressman Mike Michaud's Bangor office. I was also really sick last week, and my future sister in-law just flew in from Cali a couple of weeks ago. She's going to be helping me with zine as well, so get ready for some interesting posts from her in the near future. Until then you can go over to Ebay and check out a bunch of stuff I am trying to sell! Just follow the link below!

http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZthezombieapocolypseQQfrppZ50QQfsopZ32QQfsooZ2QQrdZ0

Also, I suggest checking out the bands She & Him, Smart Birds, Every Smith Ever, and Immortal Technique, and if you ever get a chance go check out the movies In Bruges, and Be Kind Rewind!

Sorry...

2008-03-17T05:54:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry it's been a couple of days since I posted on this. I will either make a quick post today before I go to work, and I'll make one tomorrow.

Either way, I wanted to let you all know that coming up soon here I am going to be making a huge post highlighting local musicians, and bands.

Herbert West: Reanimator story written by H.P. Lovecraft

2008-03-13T07:11:00.000-07:00

Herbert West: Reanimator

I. From The Dark

"Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were in the medical school where West had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and by his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions, he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs but he soon saw that the perfection of his process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that, since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human subjects for further and more specialised progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with the college authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the medical school himself -- the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every old resident of Arkham.

I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West’s pursuits, and we frequently discussed his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite. Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called "soul" is a myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of death would be apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to find a reagent which would restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on animals had shewn him that the natural and artificial life-motions were incompatible. He then sought extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solutions into the blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death had not occurred in any case. They did not stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly.

It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. To hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two local negroes attended to this matter, and they were seldom questioned. West was then a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery and the potter’s field. We finally decided on the potter’s field, because practically every body in Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West’s researches.

I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all his decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the ground floor an operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet precautions were none the less necessary; since rumours of strange lights, started by chance nocturnal roamers, would soon bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college -- materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes -- and provided spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus was too costly for our unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance -- even the small guinea-pig bodies from the slight clandestine experiments in West’s room at the boarding-house.

We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial preservation; preferably free from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present. Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of anything suitable; though we talked with morgue and hospital authorities, ostensibly in the college’s interest, as often as we could without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice in every case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer, when only the limited summer-school classes were held. In the end, though, luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter’s field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Summer’s Pond, and buried at the town’s expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after midnight.

It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns, for although electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid -- it might have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists -- and we were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully uncovered, West scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and propping up the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance. The affair made us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of our first trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had patted down the last shovelful of earth, we put the specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old Chapman place beyond Meadow Hill.

On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a powerful acetylene lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian type -- large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired -- a sound animal without psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes of the simplest and healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead; though the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on that score. We had at last what West had always longed for -- a real dead man of the ideal kind, ready for the solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and theories for human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew that there was scarcely a chance for anything like complete success, and could not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation. Especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the creature, since in the space following death some of the more delicate cerebral cells might well have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious notions about the traditional "soul" of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what sights this placid youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate if fully restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large quantity of his fluid into a vein of the body’s arm, immediately binding the incision securely.

The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he applied his stethoscope to the specimen, and bore the negative results philosophically. After about three-quarters of an hour without the least sign of life he disappointedly pronounced the solution inadequate, but determined to make the most of his opportunity and try one change in the formula before disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar, and would have to fill it by dawn -- for although we had fixed a lock on the house, we wished to shun even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery. Besides, the body would not be even approximately fresh the next night. So taking the solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left our silent guest on the slab in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of a new solution; the weighing and measuring supervised by West with an almost fanatical care.

The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol blast-lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when from the pitch-black room we had left there burst the most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature. Human it could not have been -- it is not in man to make such sounds -- and without a thought of our late employment or its possible discovery, both West and I leaped to the nearest window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and retorts, and vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think we screamed ourselves as we stumbled frantically toward the town, though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance of restraint -- just enough to seem like belated revellers staggering home from a debauch.

We did not separate, but managed to get to West’s room, where we whispered with the gas up until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a little with rational theories and plans for investigation, so that we could sleep through the day -- classes being disregarded. But that evening two items in the paper, wholly unrelated, made it again impossible for us to sleep. The old deserted Chapman house had inexplicably burned to an amorphous heap of ashes; that we could understand because of the upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been made to disturb a new grave in the potter’s field, as if by futile and spadeless clawing at the earth. That we could not understand, for we had patted down the mould very carefully.

And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder, and complain of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared.

II. The Plague-Daemon

I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by that satanic scourge that most recall the year, for truly terror brooded with bat-wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me there is a greater horror in that time -- a horror known to me alone now that Herbert West has disappeared.

West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety because of his experiments leading toward the revivification of the dead. After the scientific slaughter of uncounted small animals the freakish work had ostensibly stopped by order of our sceptical dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West had continued to perform certain secret tests in his dingy boarding-house room, and had on one terrible and unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its grave in the potter’s field to a deserted farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.

I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins the elixir which he thought would to some extent restore life’s chemical and physical processes. It had ended horribly -- in a delirium of fear which we gradually came to attribute to our own overwrought nerves -- and West had never afterward been able to shake off a maddening sensation of being haunted and hunted. The body had not been quite fresh enough; it is obvious that to restore normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh indeed; and the burning of the old house had prevented us from burying the thing. It would have been better if we could have known it was underground.

After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the zeal of the born scientist slowly returned, he again became importunate with the college faculty, pleading for the use of the dissecting-room and of fresh human specimens for the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly important. His pleas, however, were wholly in vain; for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and the other professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the radical theory of reanimation they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal -- almost diabolical -- power of the cold brain within. I can see him now as he was then -- and I shiver. He grew sterner of face, but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and West has vanished.

West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate term in a wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the kindiy dean in point of courtesy. He felt that he was needlessly and irrationally retarded in a supremely great work; a work which he could of course conduct to suit himself in later years, but which he wished to begin while still possessed of the exceptional facilities of the university. That the tradition-bound elders should ignore his singular results on animals, and persist in their denial of the possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly disgusting and almost incomprehensible to a youth of West’s logical temperament. Only greater maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the "professor-doctor" type -- the product of generations of pathetic Puritanism; kindly, conscientious, and sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow, intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in perspective. Age has more charity for these incomplete yet high-souled characters, whose worst real vice is timidity, and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins -- sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West, young despite his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate daydreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.

And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of Tartarus. West and I had graduated about the time of its beginning, but had remained for additional work at the summer school, so that we were in Arkham when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet licenced physicians, we now had our degrees, and were pressed frantically into public service as the numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost past management, and deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers fully to handle. Burials without embalming were made in rapid succession, and even the Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed with coffins of the unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not without effect on West, who thought often of the irony of the situation -- so many fresh specimens, yet none for his persecuted researches! We were frightfully overworked, and the terrific mental and nervous strain made my friend brood morbidly.

But West’s gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College had all but closed, and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished himself in sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to cases which many others shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before a month was over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking advantage of the disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations, he managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university dissecting-room one night, and in my presence injected a new modification of his solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling with a look of soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which nothing could rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough -- the hot summer air does not favour corpses. That time we were almost caught before we incinerated the thing, and West doubted the advisability of repeating his daring misuse of the college laboratory.

The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead, and Dr. Halsey did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral on the 15th, and bought an impressive wreath, though the latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the municipality itself. It was almost a public affair, for the dean had surely been a public benefactor. After the entombment we were all somewhat depressed, and spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House; where West, though shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us with references to his notorious theories. Most of the students went home, or to various duties, as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in "making a night of it." West’s landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the morning, with a third man between us; and told her husband that we had all evidently dined and wined rather well.

Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house was aroused by cries coming from West’s room, where when they broke down the door, they found the two of us unconscious on the blood-stained carpet, beaten, scratched, and mauled, and with the broken remnants of West’s bottles and instruments around us. Only an open window told what had become of our assailant, and many wondered how he himself had fared after the terrific leap from the second story to the lawn which he must have made. There were some strange garments in the room, but West upon regaining consciousness said they did not belong to the stranger, but were specimens collected for bacteriological analysis in the course of investigations on the transmission of germ diseases. He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious fireplace. To the police we both declared ignorance of our late companion’s identity. He was, West nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish to have our pugnacious companion hunted down.

That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror -- the horror that to me eclipsed the plague itself. Christchurch Cemetery was the scene of a terrible killing; a watchman having been clawed to death in a manner not only too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the deed. The victim had been seen alive considerably after midnight -- the dawn revealed the unutterable thing. The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped from its cage. Those who found the body noted a trail of blood leading to the receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just outside the gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave out.

The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing which strewed red death in its wake -- in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark, and said it was white and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and had not been alive.

On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in a house on Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest with care, keeping in touch by means of volunteer telephone stations, and when someone in the college district had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered window, the net was quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and precautions, there were only two more victims, and the capture was effected without major casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not a fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital amidst universal excitement and loathing.

For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism, and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head against the walls of a padded cell for sixteen years -- until the recent mishap, when it escaped under circumstances that few like to mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster’s face was cleaned -- the mocking, unbelievable resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been entombed but three days before -- the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic University.

To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered through his bandages, "Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!"

III. Six Shots by Moonlight

It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It is, for instance, not often that a young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal the principles which guide his selection of a home and office, yet that was the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and sought to relieve our poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we took great care not to say that we chose our house because it was fairly well isolated, and as near as possible to the potter’s field.

Reticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours; for our requirements were those resulting from a life-work distinctly unpopular. Outwardly we were doctors only, but beneath the surface were aims of far greater and more terrible moment -- for the essence of Herbert West’s existence was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown, in which he hoped to uncover the secret of life and restore to perpetual animation the graveyard’s cold clay. Such a quest demands strange materials, among them fresh human bodies; and in order to keep supplied with these indispensable things one must live quietly and not far from a place of informal interment.

West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathise with his hideous experiments. Gradually I had come to be his inseparable assistant, and now that we were out of college we had to keep together. It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors in company, but finally the influence of the university secured us a practice in Bolton -- a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local physicians. We chose our house with the greatest care, seizing at last on a rather run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers from the closest neighbour, and separated from the local potter’s field by only a stretch of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies to the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no nearer house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the factory district. We were not much displeased, however, since there were no people between us and our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle long, but we could haul our silent specimens undisturbed.

Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first -- large enough to please most young doctors, and large enough to prove a bore and a burden to students whose real interest lay elsewhere. The mill-hands were of somewhat turbulent inclinations; and besides their many natural needs, their frequent clashes and stabbing affrays gave us plenty to do. But what actually absorbed our minds was the secret laboratory we had fitted up in the cellar -- the laboratory with the long table under the electric lights, where in the small hours of the morning we often injected West’s various solutions into the veins of the things we dragged from the potter’s field. West was experimenting madly to find something which would start man’s vital motions anew after they had been stopped by the thing we call death, but had encountered the most ghastly obstacles. The solution had to be differently compounded for different types -- what would serve for guinea-pigs would not serve for human beings, and different human specimens required large modifications.

The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain tissue would render perfect reanimation impossible. Indeed, the greatest problem was to get them fresh enough -- West had had horrible experiences during his secret college researches with corpses of doubtful vintage. The results of partial or imperfect animation were much more hideous than were the total failures, and we both held fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our first daemoniac session in the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we had felt a brooding menace; and West, though a calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific automaton in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering sensation of stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he was followed -- a psychological delusion of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact that at least one of our reanimated specimens was still alive -- a frightful carnivorous thing in a padded cell at Sefton. Then there was another -- our first -- whose exact fate we had never learned.

We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton -- much better than in Arkham. We had not been settled a week before we got an accident victim on the very night of burial, and made it open its eyes with an amazingly rational expression before the solution failed. It had lost an arm -- if it had been a perfect body we might have succeeded better. Between then and the next January we secured three more; one total failure, one case of marked muscular motion, and one rather shivery thing -- it rose of itself and uttered a sound. Then came a period when luck was poor; interments fell off, and those that did occur were of specimens either too diseased or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and their circumstances with systematic care.

One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not come from the potter’s field. In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing -- with the usual result. Surreptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were common, and occasionally professional talent of low grade was imported. This late winter night there had been such a match; evidently with disastrous results, since two timorous Poles had come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties to attend to a very secret and desperate case. We followed them to an abandoned barn, where the remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching a silent black form on the floor.

The match had been between Kid O’Brien -- a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose -- and Buck Robinson, "The Harlem Smoke." The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life -- but the world holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful crowd, for they did not know what the law would exact of them if the affair were not hushed up; and they were grateful when West, in spite of my involuntary shudders, offered to get rid of the thing quietly -- for a purpose I knew too well.

There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the thing and carried it home between us through the deserted streets and meadows, as we had carried a similar thing one horrible night in Arkham. We approached the house from the field in the rear, took the specimen in the back door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it for the usual experiment. Our fear of the police was absurdly great, though we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary patrolman of that section.

The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it was wholly unresponsive to every solution we injected in its black arm; solutions prepared from experience with white specimens only. So as the hour grew dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the others -- dragged the thing across the meadows to the neck of the woods near the potter’s field, and buried it there in the best sort of grave the frozen ground would furnish. The grave was not very deep, but fully as good as that of the previous specimen -- the thing which had risen of itself and uttered a sound. In the light of our dark lanterns we carefully covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly certain that the police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense.

The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient brought rumours of a suspected fight and death. West had still another source of worry, for he had been called in the afternoon to a case which ended very threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical over her missing child -- a lad of five who had strayed off early in the morning and failed to appear for dinner -- and had developed symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the boy had often run away before; but Italian peasants are exceedingly superstitious, and this woman seemed as much harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o’clock in the evening she had died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held him when he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses and oaths of vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child, who was still missing as the night advanced. There was some talk of searching the woods, but most of the family’s friends were busy with the dead woman and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must have been tremendous. Thoughts of the police and of the mad Italian both weighed heavily.

We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for so small a town, and I could not help fearing the mess which would ensue if the affair of the night before were ever tracked down. It might mean the end of all our local work -- and perhaps prison for both West and me. I did not like those rumours of a fight which were floating about. After the clock had struck three the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without rising to pull down the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the back door.

I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West’s rap on my door. He was clad in dressing-gown and slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an electric flashlight. From the revolver I knew that he was thinking more of the crazed Italian than of the police.

"We’d better both go," he whispered. "It wouldn’t do not to answer it anyway, and it may be a patient -- it would be like one of those fools to try the back door."

So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and partly that which comes only from the soul of the weird small hours. The rattling continued, growing somewhat louder. When we reached the door I cautiously unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon streamed revealingly down on the form silhouetted there, West did a peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger of attracting notice and bringing down on our heads the dreaded police investigation -- a thing which after all was mercifully averted by the relative isolation of our cottage -- my friend suddenly, excitedly, and unnecessarily emptied all six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal visitor.

For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against the spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares -- a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.

IV. The Scream of the Dead

The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert West which harassed the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man’s scream should give horror, for it is obviously, not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And, as I have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid.

Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far beyond the usual routine of a village physician. That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated house near the potter’s field. Briefly and brutally stated, West’s sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead through injections of an excitant solution. For this ghastly experimenting it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh human bodies; very fresh because even the least decay hopelessly damaged the brain structure, and human because we found that the solution had to be compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and guinea-pigs had been killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which vitality had only just departed; bodies with every cell intact and capable of receiving again the impulse toward that mode of motion called life. There was hope that this second and artificial life might be made perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an ordinary natural life would not respond to the action. To establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct -- the specimens must be very fresh, but genuinely dead.

The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West looked scarcely a day older now -- he was small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme; the results of defective reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had been galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution.

One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars; still another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and done a deed -- West had had to shoot that object. We could not get bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when reanimated, so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that one, perhaps two, of our monsters still lived -- that thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.

It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle -- that of artificial preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming compound, and was not surprised that it had turned out well; but until he explained the details I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound could help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely due to delay occurring before we secured them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised; creating his embalming compound for future rather than immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again some very recent and unburied corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the negro killed in the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this occasion there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay could not by any possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation, and whether we could hope for a revival of mind and reason, West did not venture to predict. The experiment would be a landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body for my return, so that both might share the spectacle in accustomed fashion.

West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man; a well-dressed stranger just off the train on his way to transact some business with the Bolton Worsted Mills. The walk through the town had been long, and by the time the traveller paused at our cottage to ask the way to the factories, his heart had become greatly overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to West a heaven-sent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear that he was unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis, apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this man could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our materials in a dense strip of woods between the house and the potter’s field. If, on the other hand, he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually established. So without delay West had injected into the body’s wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for use after my arrival. The matter of the presumably weak heart, which to my mind imperilled the success of our experiment, did not appear to trouble West extensively. He hoped at last to obtain what he had never obtained before -- a rekindled spark of reason and perhaps a normal, living creature.

So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar laboratory and gazed at a white, silent figure beneath the dazzling arc-light. The embalming compound had worked uncannily well, for as I stared fascinatedly at the sturdy frame which had lain two weeks without stiffening, I was moved to seek West’s assurance that the thing was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough; reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used without careful tests as to life, since it could have no effect if any of the original vitality were present. As West proceeded to take preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment; an intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own. Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug in the wrist just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralise the compound and release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a change and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs; West stuffed a pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied, and finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the vital elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a greater care than we had used since college days, when our feats were new and groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for results on this first really fresh specimen -- the first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.

West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of consciousness to bodily phenomena; consequently he looked for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond death’s barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides -- I could not extract from my memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried our first experiment in the deserted farmhouse at Arkham.

Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure. A touch of colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white, and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror inclined above the body’s mouth. There followed a few spasmodic muscular motions, and then an audible breathing and visible motion of the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I detected a quivering. Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which were grey, calm, and alive, but still unintelligent and not even curious.

In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening ears; questions of other worlds of which the memory might still be present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind, but I think the last one, which I repeated, was: "Where have you been?" I do not yet know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the well-shaped mouth; but I do know that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables which I would have vocalised as "only now" if that phrase had possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was elated with the conviction that the one great goal had been attained; and that for the first time a reanimated corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next moment there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the solution had truly accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and articulate life to the dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest of all horrors -- not horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed that I had witnessed and of the man with whom my professional fortunes were joined.

For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness with eyes dilated at the memory of its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life and death struggle with the air, and suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution from which there could be no return, screamed out the cry that will ring eternally in my aching brain:

"Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend -- keep that damned needle away from me!"

V. The Horror From the Shadows

Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on the battlefields of the Great War. Some of these things have made me faint, others have convulsed me with devastating nausea, while still others have made me tremble and look behind me in the dark; yet despite the worst of them I believe I can myself relate the most hideous thing of all -- the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from the shadows.

In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian regiment in Flanders, one of many Americans to precede the government itself into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the army on my own initiative, but rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man whose indispensable assistant I was -- the celebrated Boston surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West. Dr. West had been avid for a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and when the chance had come, he carried me with him almost against my will. There were reasons why I could have been glad to let the war separate us; reasons why I found the practice of medicine and the companionship of West more and more irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague’s influence secured a medical commission as Major, I could not resist the imperious persuasion of one determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.

When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was either naturally warlike or anxious for the safety of civilisation. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine; slight, blond, blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There was, however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders; and in order to secure it had had to assume a military exterior. What he wanted was not a thing which many persons want, but something connected with the peculiar branch of medical science which he had chosen quite clandestinely to follow, and in which he had achieved amazing and occasionally hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than an abundant supply of freshly killed men in every stage of dismemberment.

Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work was the reanimation of the dead. This work was not known to the fashionable clientele who had so swiftly built up his fame after his arrival in Boston; but was only too well known to me, who had been his closest friend and sole assistant since the old days in Miskatonic University Medical School at Arkham. It was in those college days that he had begun his terrible experiments, first on small animals and then on human bodies shockingly obtained. There was a solution which he injected into the veins of dead things, and if they were fresh enough they responded in strange ways. He had had much trouble in discovering the proper formula, for each type of organism was found to need a stimulus especially adapted to it. Terror stalked him when he reflected on his partial failures; nameless things resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain number of these failures had remained alive -- one was in an asylum while others had vanished -- and as he thought of conceivable yet virtually impossible eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual stolidity.

West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful specimens, and had accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedients in body-snatching. In college, and during our early practice together in the factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been largely one of fascinated admiration; but as his boldness in methods grew, I began to develop a gnawing fear. I did not like the way he looked at healthy living bodies; and then there came a nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory when I learned that a certain specimen had been a living body when he secured it. That was the first time he had ever been able to revive the quality of rational thought in a corpse; and his success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had completely hardened him.

Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was held to him by sheer force of fear, and witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did -- that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment -- a languid Elagabalus of the tombs.

Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came when he had proved his point that rational life can be restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting on the reanimation of detached parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas on the independent vital properties of organic cells and nerve-tissue separated from natural physiological systems; and achieved some hideous preliminary results in the form of never-dying, artificially nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable tropical reptile. Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle -- first, whether any amount of consciousness and rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and various nerve-centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation distinct from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what has previously been a single living organism. All this research work required a prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh -- and that was why Herbert West had entered the Great War.

The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915, in a field hospital behind the lines of St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could have been other than a daemoniac dream of delirium. West had a private laboratory in an east room of the barn-like temporary edifice, assigned him on his plea that he was devising new and radical methods for the treatment of hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There he worked like a butcher in the midst of his gory wares -- I could never get used to the levity with which he handled and classified certain things. At times he actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver-shots -- surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital. Dr. West’s reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience. Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was better than human material for maintaining life in organless fragments, and that was now my friend’s chief activity. In a dark corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.

On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen -- a man at once physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the officer who had helped West to his commission, and who was now to have been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our division, and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by the intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his destination. The fall had been spectacular and awful; Hill was unrecognisable afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great surgeon in a nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the lifeless thing which had once been his friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered when he finished severing the head, placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue to preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated body on the operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and nerves at the headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture with engrafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an officer’s uniform. I knew what he wanted -- to see if this highly organised body could exhibit, without its head, any of the signs of mental life which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Once a student of reanimation, this silent trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.

I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe -- I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows.

The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system. Much was expected of it; and as a few twitching motions began to appear, I could see the feverish interest on West’s face. He was ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong opinion that consciousness, reason, and personality can exist independently of the brain -- that man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was about to relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched more vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which was unmistakably one of desperation -- an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient to prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were recalling the man’s last act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling aeroplane.

What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an hallucination from the shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German shell-fire -- who can gainsay it, since West and I were the only proved survivors? West liked to think that before his recent disappearance, but there were times when he could not; for it was queer that we both had the same hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself was very simple, notable only for what it implied.

The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a sound. I should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was not the most awful thing about it. Neither was its message -- it had merely screamed, "Jump, Ronald, for God’s sake, jump!" The awful thing was its source.

For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black shadows.

VI. The Tomb-Legions

When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me closely. They suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps suspected graver things; but I could not tell them the truth because they would not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with activities beyond the credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in the reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect secrecy; but the final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac phantasy which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw.

I was West’s closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years before, in medical school, and from the first I had shared his terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking were the products of some of the experiments -- grisly masses of flesh that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous ammation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.

This need for very fresh corpses had been West’s moral undoing. They were hard to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded for a brief and memorable moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they noticed my fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions.

West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a life of furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the police he feared; but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things into which he had injected a morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough. There was that first specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also that Arkham professor’s body which had done cannibal things before it had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving results were things less easy to speak of -- for in later years West’s scientific zeal had degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief skill in vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or parts joined to organic matter other than human. It had become fiendishly disgusting by the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could not even be hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us served as surgeons, had intensified this side of West.

In saying that West’s fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind particularly its complex nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the existence of such nameless monsters, while another part arose from apprehension of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do him. Their disappearance added horror to the situation -- of them all, West knew the whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a more subtle fear -- a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who knew about his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been removed, so that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had been a success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate, we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful, in a way -- but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we two were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.

West’s last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one of the oldest burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-cellar secretly constructed by imported workmen, and contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal of such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might remain from the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the excavation of this cellar the workmen had struck some exceedingly ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old burying-ground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After a number of calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb of the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with him when he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend the uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West’s new timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating fibre by ordering the masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus it remained till that final hellish night; part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak of West’s decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental and intangible thing. Outwardly he was the same to the last -- calm, cold, slight, and yellow-haired, with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed grave and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.

The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent men had entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it -- for it was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like men than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time help could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their mad charge had vanished.

From the hour of reading this item until midmght, West sat almost paralysed. At midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there was no wagon in the street, but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing a large square box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly unnatural voice, "Express -- prepaid." They filed out of the house with a jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house abutted. When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs and looked at the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West’s correct name and present address. It also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi, Flanders." Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached head which -- perhaps -- had uttered articulate sounds.

West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, "It’s the finish -- but let’s incinerate -- this." We carried the thing down to the laboratory -- listening. I do not remember many particulars -- you can imagine my state of mind -- but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West’s body which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any sound come from the box, after all.

It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity -- or worse -- could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all -- the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West’s head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officer’s uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of frantic, visible emotion.

Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say? The Sefton tragedy they will not connect with West; not that, nor the men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and they pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They imply that I am either a madman or a murderer -- probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent."

-By H.P. Lovecraft

A song by Casiotone for the painfully alone, vegan fajitas recipie, Graffiti video trailers, A short story by Leo Tolstoy, and a picture.

2008-03-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

"Young shields" by Casiotone for the painfully alone

Best Vegan Fajitas:

prep time: 40 min (including peeling the | cooking time: 25 min | makes 4

Equipment:
Just one choping knife and a wok (or a 11" pan)

Ingredients
Two large sliced onions
Three peeled and sliced Poblano Pepers (or Green peppers and tomatos)
Any kind and amount of mushrooms
1 cup of corn (if it's fresh, better cook it first)
1 ts. of oil or vegan margerine.
8 oz. Firm Tofu, cubed
Soy sauce (as desired)
Vegan cheese, if desired.
Soft tortillas, any kind.
Mexican Green sauce, lime, fres onion and a chopped handfull of Cilantro to serve

Directions
The easiest way to peal a poblano peper is grilling it directly in a gas grill. If not a litle bit of oil and toasting in a pan will do the work. After toasting dark the poblano pepers, put them in a plastic bag for about 15 minutes, so they can sweat and everything will come off easier. If you don't want to peel them is fine, but will be a little bit harder to digest. Also, if you don't like hot food, better remove the seeds. That is a major diference.

Heat the oil in a wok untill very hot. Add the onions and let them cook for about 3 min. Add the rest of the ingredients. Cook in medium heat untill everything is well cook and then turn the heat high to dry the ingredients. I preffer to overcook it a little, so everything get a stronger flavor.

Heat the tortillas in their plastic bag in the microwave. Add the cheese and fajitas when they are hot so it will melt the cheese.

Real mexicans will serve this with lime and fresh chopped onion and cilantro. A hot sauce is desirable. Enjoy.

GRAFFITI VIDEO TRAILERS!

Inside outside trailer

Refeer madness trailer

Affiti gray trailer

Still free trailer

Piece by piece trailer (documentary all about San Francisco graffiti)

THREE QUESTIONS BY LEO TOLSTOY:

"Three Questions - by Leo Tolstoy

One day it occurred to a certain emperor that if he only knew the answers to three questions, he would never stray in any matter.

What is the best time to do each thing? Who are the most important people to work with? What is the most important thing to do at all times?

The emperor issued a decree throughout his kingdom announcing that whoever could answer the questions would receive a great reward. Many who read the decree made their way to the palace at once, each person with a different answer.

In reply to the first question, one person advised that the emperor make up a thorough time schedule, consecrating every hour, day, month, and year for certain tasks and then follow the schedule to the letter. Only then could he hope to do every task at the right time.

Another person replied that it was impossible to plan in advance and that the emperor should put all vain amusements aside and remain attentive to everything in order to know what to do at what time.

Someone else insisted that, by himself, the emperor could never hope to have all the foresight and competence necessary to decide when to do each and every task and what he really needed was to set up a Council of the Wise and then to act according to their advice.

Someone else said that certain matters required immediate decision and could not wait for consultation, but if he wanted to know in advance what was going to happen he should consult magicians and soothsayers.

The responses to the second question also lacked accord.

One person said that the emperor needed to place all his trust in administrators, another urged reliance on priests and monks, while others recommended physicians. Still others put their faith in warriors.

The third question drew a similar variety of answers. Some said science was the most important pursuit. Others insisted on religion. Yet others claimed the most important thing was military skill.

-------------------------------

The emperor was not pleased with any of the answers, and no reward was given.

After several nights of reflection, the emperor resolved to visit a hermit who lived up on the mountain and was said to be an enlightened man. The emperor wished to find the hermit to ask him the three questions, though he knew the hermit never left the mountains and was known to receive only the poor, refusing to have anything to do with persons of wealth or power. So the emperor disguised himself as a simple peasant and ordered his attendants to wait for him at the foot of the mountain while he climbed the slope alone to seek the hermit.

Reaching the holy man's dwelling place, the emperor found the hermit digging a garden in front of his hut. When the hermit saw the stranger, he nodded his head in greeting and continued to dig. The labor was obviously hard on him. He was an old man, and each time he thrust his spade into the ground to turn the earth, he heaved heavily.

The emperor approached him and said, "I have come here to ask your help with three questions: When is the best time to do each thing? Who are the most important people to work with? What is the most important thing to do at all times?"

The hermit listened attentively but only patted the emperor on the shoulder and continued digging. The emperor said, "You must be tired. Here, let me give you a hand with that." The hermit thanked him, handed the emperor the spade, and then sat down on the ground to rest.

After he had dug two rows, the emperor stopped and turned to the hermit and repeated his three questions. The hermit still did not answer, but instead stood up and pointed to the spade and said, "Why don't you rest now? I can take over again." But the emperor continued to dig. One hour passed, then two. Finally the sun began to set behind the mountain. The emperor put down the spade and said to the hermit, "I came here to ask if you could answer my three questions. But if you can't give me any answer, please let me know so that I can get on may way home."

The hermit lifted his head and asked the emperor, "Do you hear someone running over there?" The emperor turned his head. They both saw a man with a long white beard emerge from the woods. He ran wildly, pressing his hands against a bloody wound in his stomach. The man ran toward the emperor before falling unconscious to the ground, where he lay groaning. Opening the man's clothing, the emperor and hermit saw that the man had received a deep gash. The emperor cleaned the wound thoroughly and then used his own shirt to bandage it, but the blood completely soaked it within minutes. He rinsed the shirt out and bandaged the wound a second time and continued to do so until the flow of blood had stopped.

At last the wounded man regained consciousness and asked for a drink of water. The emperor ran down to the stream and brought back a jug of fresh water. Meanwhile, the sun had disappeared and the night air had begun to turn cold. The hermit gave the emperor a hand in carrying the man into the hut where they laid him down on the hermit's bed. The man closed his eyes and lay quietly. The emperor was worn out from the long day of climbing the mountain and digging the garden. Leaning against the doorway, he fell asleep. When he rose, the sun had already risen over the mountain. For a moment he forgot where he was and what he had come here for. He looked over to the bed and saw the wounded man also looking around him in confusion. When he saw the emperor, he stared at him intently and then said in a faint whisper, "Please forgive me."

"But what have you done that I should forgive you?" the emperor asked.

"You do not know me, your majesty, but I know you. I was your sworn enemy, and I had vowed to take vengeance on you, for during the last war you killed my brother and seized my property. When I learned that you were coming alone to the mountain to meet the hermit, I resolved to surprise you on your way back to kill you. But after waiting a long time there was still no sign of you, and so I left my ambush in order to seek you out. But instead of finding you, I came across your attendants, who recognized me, giving me this wound. Luckily, I escaped and ran here. If I hadn't met you I would surely be dead by now. I had intended to kill you, but instead you saved my life! I am ashamed and grateful beyond words. If I live, I vow to be your servant for the rest of my life, and I will bid my children and grandchildren to do the same. Please grant me your forgiveness."

The emperor was overjoyed to see that he was so easily reconciled with a former enemy. He not only forgave the man but promised to return all the man's property and to send his own physician and servants to wait on the man until he was completely healed. After ordering his attendants to take the man home, the emperor returned to see the hermit. Before returning to the palace the emperor wanted to repeat his three questions one last time. He found the hermit sowing seeds in the earth they had dug the day before.

The hermit stood up and looked at the emperor. "But your questions have already been answered."

"How's that?" the emperor asked, puzzled.

"Yesterday, if you had not taken pity on my age and given me a hand with digging these beds, you would have been attacked by that man on your way home. Then you would have deeply regretted not staying with me. Therefore the most important time was the time you were digging in the beds, the most important person was myself, and the most important pursuit was to help me. Later, when the wounded man ran up here, the most important time was the time you spent dressing his wound, for if you had not cared for him he would have died and you would have lost the chance to be reconciled with him. Likewise, he was the most important person, and the most important pursuit was taking care of his wound. Remember that there is only one important time and is Now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person with whom you are, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future. The most important pursuit is making that person, the one standing at you side, happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life."

Leo Tolstoy

A picture by The Miasma Experiment:

No post for yesterday, but big giant music post today/tonight!

2008-03-09T18:08:00.000-07:00

WHAT MADE MILWAUKEE FAMOUS:

First up we have up and comers in the indie/power pop realm, What Made Milwaukee Famous. Extremely catchy at most times (listen to the song "sultan" I immediately got hooked) and other times, very hush and soft, singing sweet lullabies of the indie persuassion. Seriously get on board, these guys will be making big noise soon here.

This is what the press has to say about WMMF:

"”What Doesn’t Kill Us” exemplifies the rococo ideal that no pop filigree will go unused. Is this a bad thing? I think not. New wavisms turn up alongside the kind of ’70s power ballads that shamed many, but serve as a suitably ironic backdrop for Michael Kingcaid’s easy lead vocals (although when he pulls out the stops… watch out! He’s one of rock’s overlooked vocal commandos)." - Los Angeles Times

""Middle of the Night," an instantly memorable anthem that places its "What you need is love, sweet love" refrain atop a bed of layered acoustic guitars and ornamental piano arpeggios. What doesn't kill us clearly makes for a strong sense of melodic arrangement." - Slant Magazine.com

"Surrounded by shifting, muted post-punk guitar chords and minor-key keyboard twinkling, vocalist/guitarist Michael Kingcaid croons through lo-fi sheen, "Hey, weren't you told / How brutal life can be?" before the rest of the band rips into a soaring, guitar-and-saxophone-laden build up." - SPIN.com

"Guitar muscle, ferocious drumming, commanding vocals, and hook-laden tunes: no sophomore slump here. Austin’s What Made Milwaukee Famous took its time with the follow-up to its 2004 debut, and it was a wise move." - Texas Monthly

"I Decide"

"Prevailing wind"

"Selling yourself short" 1st video for this band

"Sultan" Most recent video for this band

For more info on What made milwaukee famous please visit their sites
www.myspace.com/whatmademilwaukeefamous
www.whatmademilwaukeefamous.com

THE LONG WINTERS:

Next up we have label mates of What made milwaukee famous, The Long Winters. Less on the poppy side, these guys focus more on intimate song writing, and softer narratives. Some very talented musicians that have been around for awhile now, and with little recognition. If you are into great indie bands like The Shins, Death Cab For Cutie's earlier stuff, and Kind of Like Spitting, then this band will win you over.

"Fire island, AK"

"Pushover"

"Blue diamonds"

If you would like more info on The long winters please visit their sites
www.thelongwinters.com
www.myspace.com/thelongwinters

DAWN LANDES:

Now we have indie/folk singer/songwriter Dawn Landes. This girl has just the right mix of young raw-ism coupled with a deep soulful feel that can usually only be found with someone more aged. This girl really wears her emotions on her sleeve, and can certainly belt out her aggression on stage, but she also has the ability to warm your soul over, and make you feel happy and loved. Seriouslt give her a chance if you are into, Jenny Lewis, Rilo Kiley, Lucinda Williams, Cat Power, and the likes.

Taken from her myspace page-
"Dawn's music comes from the mouth, mind and hands of New York-based singer-songwriter Dawn Landes. Reminiscent of the raw traditionalism of Woody Guthrie and the experimental alt-folk lyricism of artists like Joanna Newsome, the Louisville KY native plays a variety of instruments (8-dollar guitars! pink accordions! glockenspiels! optigons!).

Whether she's performing by herself or with accomplices (members of the bands Hem and The Earlies), her live show brings moving silence to the crowd and has caught the attention of a number of popular touring artists who've taken her on the road. In addition to her gig performing with Rounder recording artists Hem (backing vocals and Glockenspiel), Dawn has supported the likes of Midlake, Jose Gonzalez, Suzanne Vega, Le Tigre, Andrew Bird, Feist, M83, Josh Ritter, Jane Siberry and Shannon Wright.

Dawn recently finished her second full-length album "Fireproof" which will be released Jan 2008 in Europe by Fargo Records, and Feb 2008 in the US by Cooking Vinyl Records. Dawn's first self-recorded and self-produced album "Dawn's Music" is now available in Europe through UK label Boyscout Records, and can be purchased in America if you go to a show (or online iTunes or cdbaby.com). Boy Scout also released an EP called "Two Three Four" in Europe summer 2006. Dawn will be touring Europe for the remainder of 2007 so be sure to check back for tour dates.

Oh, we almost forgot! Dawn's day job is as a recording engineer, working with such renowned artists as Hem, Philip Glass, Joseph Arthur and Ryan Adams."

"Young folks (bluegrass version)"

"Suspicion"

"Twilight"

"Bodyguard"

For more info on Dawn Landes, please visit her sites
www.dawnlandes.com
www.myspace.com/dawnlandes

BAT FOR LASHES:

So, Bat For Lashes, an amazing UK trip-hop group, with something more to offer than most groups of the trip-hop genre. This group is what would happen if Lady Sovereign, Cat Power, Feist, and Portishead got together at a RJD2 concert. Amazingly dreamy in sound, with the feel of a late 18th century ghost story. If you are a fan of the above mentioned artist in this write-up, I suggest giving Bat for lashes a listen!

"natasha khan of bat for lashes ain't scared. i love the harpsichord and the sexual ghost voices and bowed saws. this song seems to come from the world of grimm's fairytales, and i feel like a wolf."-Thom Yorke on the song "What's a girl to do"

"Trophy"

"Horse and I"

"Whats a girl to do" (This is probably one of thee coolest videos!)

For more info on Bat For Lashes, please visit her sites
www.myspace.com/batforlashes
www.batforlashes.com

VERSE:

Do you remember the gamout of political hardcore bands that surfaced around the early to mid 90's, that would leave you stunned when you heard or saw them, but also made you realize that there is something more, and that you needed to be better informed of the world's current situation? I sure do, and I miss the days of bands that had truely something positive and meaningful to say. Finally I am able to have that feeling again, and I owe a great deal of thanks to one of the most hard working bands of today, Verse. Verse plays a style of hardcore very remineciant of early bands like Gorilla Biscuits, Trial, Unbroken, fused with newer bands like Have Heart, The Effort, and Champion. If you are a fan of energetic, meaningful, fast hardcore and/or the above mentioned bands, please give Verse a chance. They have just recently been signed to Bridge 9 Records, so if you don't know, get into them now, before the mass of mall-core kids discovers them.

"Waiting on a revolution"

Verse at the Rivalry Records showcase 2005

For more info on Verse, please visit their sites
www.myspace.com/verse
www.verseprovidence.com

RUINER:

Up now, we have the hardcore band, Ruiner. One of the few honest, hardworking hardcore bands out there these days. With more poetic lyrics than the cliche crap of lyrics hardcore bands are using today (Rob Sullivan's lyrics tend to remind me of Wes Eisold in the days of Amercian Nightmare). These dudes tend to play music akin to Modern life is war, Panic, and American Nightmare, and if you are a fan of these bands, you must check out Ruiner.

Taken from the Bridge 9 Records site-
"Baltimore, Maryland has never been known for its beauty or charm. With a strong D.I.Y work ethic, an honest and sincere outlook, and not to mention a machine-like touring regiment, Ruiner has been breaking barriers since their first show in October 2004.

Before releasing their first LP Prepare to Be Let Down in June of 2007 on Bridge Nine, Ruiner already toured the full United States four times, parts of Canada twice and three times to Mexico. They played a little over 200 shows in their first year and a half of existence, all of which were booked with out the help of any booking agent. Topping off the bands second year, 2006 saw them head to Europe for 31 shows in 10 different countries.

Itï¿½s fast, melodic, angry, and as heartfelt as the bands of yesteryear. Yet never expect this band to begin a set by preaching about their role in hardcore. The fire that feeds them is their own. It is pure raw human emotion. You can not fabricate this type of intensity, nor can you stop it. The road traveled by these five has been and always will be by their own design."

"Paint peels"

In daytona beach, FL.

Ruiner interview conducted by Carter for Monument webzine (PLease check them out for radical interviews with artists and bands! http://monumentzine.blogspot.com)
Ruiner Interview

Carter: What does the title of the new record mean?

Rob: Well at first we weren’t going to use Prepare to be Let Down as the title. We just didn’t like the original title as much. As the artwork was getting finished we just went with that, which also happens to be the title of the first track. Just goes along with the entire feel of this band. Never expect life to just hand you things, always count on the worst case scenario. The Ruiner camp is a negative bunch of dudes…

Carter: What was touring Europe like? Do you have any interesting stories from the trip?

Rob: It was pretty mind blowing to say the least. You realize how much you can hate your closest friends. Ok that’s not totally true. But it gets kind of difficult to only be able to really communicate with the same 4-5 dudes all the time. A lot of this new record came to be because of that trip. Most of the music was written but lyrically I spent a lot of time changing things and finishing songs over there. I have tons of stories but nothing that would really interest anyone, in my opinion. I will say the treatment in Europe is incredible. You get fed almost all 3 meals for each show. Being a big fan of food I was pretty excited about this.

Carter: What thing do you think the band ruins the most?

Rob: Each others lives…

Carter: Are there any places that you would like to play next that you haven’t been before?

Rob: We are hoping to play Japan and Brazil next year, as well as Australia hopefully. I mean our main focus as a band is to tour everywhere we possibly can.

Carter: Were there any changes in songwriting between ‘What Could Possibly Go Right’ and ‘Prepare to Be Let Down’?

Rob: We have a new drummer so the drumming is a little bit more straight forward. For the most part it’s roughly the same. It’s heavier in parts and much faster in others. It’s a good progression I think.

Carter: Does the band have any direct influences for your sound or does it just play off of ideas you get from each other?

Rob: We just play off of each other for the most part. The writing process in this band is a difficult thing. We tend to trash a lot of stuff and start from scratch a lot.

Carter: Are there any bands in which you would really like to play a tour with?

Rob: Not really any specific bands. We just want to tour with our friends and have a good time.

Carter: How has being signed to Bridge Nine been so far for you?

Rob: It’s been great; Chris and Karl are great dudes. We couldn’t be happier to be where we are right now.

Carter: In ten years could you imagine there being a band that would cite Ruiner as a major influence?

Rob: Umm I guess so. I mean we cite bands as influences that existed in the last 5 years. Shit I could cite local bands we came up with as influences. You don’t have to be the staple bands to influence someone’s musical interest and taste.

Carter: What was the most memorable show that you’ve ever played?

Rob: The release show for our first 7” was pretty crazy. It was also Never Enough from Baltimore’s last show. So a lot of memories went into that one. We did this acoustic set playing Black Sabbath and Black Flag covers once here in Baltimore. I don’t think I will ever forget that show.

Carter: Who did the artwork for the new album and 7”? Did the band have input on the imagery that is portrayed?

Rob: A guy named Greg Houston, an amazingly gifted and odd individual. We didn’t really have that much import. We checked out his work and liked a piece he did so pretty much he took that idea and went with it.

Carter: Are there any songs from the new record that stand out to you personally?

Rob: The last 2 tracks are my favorite songs off of it. I think Sleepless is one of my favorite songs. Every song stands out to me at some point in my day to day life.

Carter: If you had to describe Ruiner in one word what would it be?

Rob: EATSHIT

Carter: Does the band have any rituals or hobbies that they do in the van between shows?

Rob: We sometimes play the movie game. That’s where you try to connect people from different movies. For the most part we sleep a lot. We just got this shuttle bus thing so that will probably change the way things go for us I’m sure.

Carter: Are there any bands that you think are underrated right now that are worth checking out?

Rob: I don’t know about underrated but Pulling Teeth are great. Sick Fix from the DC area also. I think Another Breath from Syracuse deserve a bit more respect. Also the same can be said for How We Are from Rochester, sadly they are breaking up this summer. I’m sure I could think of more but whatever.

Carter: What do you think about interviews?

Rob: I hate them. Just because most people ask me the same fucking questions that can be found on our website/myspace. I like this one though. Honestly I just take forever getting to them and if the questions aren’t interesting I’m never compelled to start cause I don’t want to respond with lame answers. Someone is probably reading this right now and saying “well these answers don’t exactly rule” well I’m sorry its late and I’ve been listening to Danzig II for about the 40th time now.

Carter: If somehow the band was all trapped on an island with no food, which one of you do you think would be the first to offer that the other guys eat his body to survive?

Rob: I will have to say none. We would probably decide on a fight to the death. Which would make the whole band turn on me first then fight amongst them selves. In the end I would imagine Steve or Joey winning.

Carter: Finally I just wanted to know what could possibly go right?

Rob: In the end... Nothing

For more info please visit the their sites
www.myspace.com/ruiner
www.youruiner.com

SOLE:

Now we have one of my favorite poet/hip-hop lyricist, Sole. Maine native, who has gone on to form avant-garde hip-hop/art label Anticon Records, home to great acts such as Alias, Thee More Shallows, Jel, and Sage Francis (before he went on to epitaph). This dude writes politically charged, emotional (not Emo) indie hip-hop. If you are a fan of Sage Francis, and haven't heard Sole yet, do yourself a favor, and learn how Sage Francis got his whole style and aestetic.

Taken from myspace page-
"With some fairness, Sole's musical arc to this point might be described as a series of battle raps whose range of targets has gradually widened. His early work, beginning with his demo of 1992 (which included such hits as "Cops Ain't Shit") was deeply beholden to the New York rap of that era, Lord Finesse most especially. After all, his first album, self-released in 1994 when he was but sixteen, was entitled, Mad Skillz and Unpaid Billz. Though the plural "z's" were dropped from future releases, the forceful language and aura of overconfidence vital to classic battle rap remained. His proper, post-adolescent albums, Bottle of Humans (2000), Selling Live Water (2003), and Live From Rome (2005) each mixed traditional rap aesthetics with a more original and highly poetic approach with growing sophistication.

Live From Rome, the recording of which spanned a near nervous breakdown, a providential marriage, and a move to Barcelona, was a transitional record, personally searching and politically embittered. That period was epochal for Sole, particularly his alternately disturbing and exhilarating experiences touring Eastern Europe and Israel with his wife, Yasamin. They stumbled across a cache of anticon bootlegs in a tiny outdoor market in Moscow, were caught in the middle of the 2005 church and mosque-burning riots in Belgrade (while they watched the chaos on CNN, tear gas filled their hotel room), bribed crooked Serbian police for their freedom, and hosted a radio show on the Israeli Army’s Radio Station, on which Sole pumped Gregory Corso's reading of his long poem, "Bomb," and Public Enemy's "Louder than a Bomb." His return to American soil after nearly two years was occasioned by his participation in Sage Francis's Knowmore.org tour of 2006. He was surprised to find that his homeland had not yet fallen to Brownshirts, and he and Yasamin decided to stay and make a home in rocky Flagstaff, Arizona.

Though Sole had spent most of his career working with celebrated producers—primarily Alias, Odd Nosdam (of cLOUDDEAD), and JEL (of subtle)—by 2005 he had for some time been looking for a working relationship with a more exclusively focused yet also uniquely talented group of musicians. His solo instrumental work, released in 2005 on Morr Music and in 2007 on anticon as mansbestfriend, and his yearlong collaboration with half of Barcelona's Tortoise-like improvational outfit Twelve were aspects of this search. On tour with Dosh, Pedestrian, and Telephone Jim Jesus in 2005, fate landed the caravan at the tropical home of Bud Berning, an electronic musician and dub drummer then recording solo work as SkyRider. Intrigued by SkyRider's sound, Sole later returned to Orlando on a short tour of the Southeast and collaborated with Berning and two musicians who had recently joined the Skyrider fold. Not naturally attracted to music born of machines, Bud had only begun tinkering with computers while immobilized after a coma resulting from a traumatic collision in Mexico City in 2002. The two instrumentalists Berning recruited, Tennessee native John Wagner and omni-instrumentalist William Ryan Fritch, not only fleshed out Berning's sample-based ideas, but also added their own distinct musical voices. As Sole and SkyRider played, sparks struck, and Sole had the quickness of mind to immediately invite SkyRider to move to Flagstaff and record an album.

Against all odds, the band accepted the offer and before long found themselves sharing a house in Flagstaff. Nearly the moment they arrived, SkyRider began playing and recording intensely at Sole's studio, set at an eight thousand foot elevation at the foot of a mountain amid a garden of collard greens, melons, and green beans. Sole promptly scrapped the ten or so songs he'd already recorded towards an album—with a formidable line-up of producers, no less—and devoted himself fully to realizing the distinct sound he'd long heard only in his own head and further sharpening his art of battle rapping the biggest of enemies: empire, ennui, the industries of distraction, and, not least of all, himself.

Released October 23, 2007 on anticon records."

"Dumb this down"

Interview/video about Sole and the Skyrider Band

Very early video for "Bottle of humans"

"Stupid things implode on themselves" New video of the newly formed Sole and the skyrider band

"Ghosts assassinating other ghosts" Sole and the skyrider band live in Zagreb, Croatia

www.myspace.com/soleandtheskyriderband
www.soleone.org
www.myspace.com/timholland

RJD2:

Rjd2, one of the best dj/producer/samplist ever. Do you remember that feeling you got when you first heard DJ Shadow? My first time hearing Rjd2, was exactly like that. His infectious trip-hop influenced instrumental music, struck a chord with me, I could clearly hear what he was trying to say, and he didn't even need lyrics to convay his point. His music is sometimes fun, sometimes, scary, sometimes soothing, and sometimes motivating. Are you looking for that perfect cross over music that would appeal to skateboarders, graffiti writers and indie kids? Well, now you have it. I highley suggest listening to Rjd2 if you are into DJ Shadow, DJ Spooky, UNKLE, DangerMouse and the likes.

"Sweet piece"

"Final frontier (remix)"

"Work it out" Music video

"Exotic talk" Music video

For more info on Rjd2, please visit his sites.
www.myspace.com/rjd2
www.rjd2site.com

Couldn't come up with a better post, being lazy!

2008-03-07T14:46:00.000-08:00

So every so often me and a couple of my friends from work like to send each other random videos that we find online. Here are a few of the funniest ones from the recent email I got.

Everyday normal guy rap 2!
(I swear this is better than the first)

Germs and you

2 girls, 1 cup song

Rapist glasses advert

One weird parent teacher conference

Hey jude sung by 3 year old Asian kid

Kids rock advert

Price hill girlz (Is this real or not?)

An excerpt from Animal Liberation by Peter Singer

2008-03-06T06:15:00.000-08:00

Peter Singer writes in Animal Liberation:

Among the factors that make it difficult to arouse public concern about animals, perhaps the hardest to overcome is the assumption that "human beings come first" and that any problem about animals cannot be comparable, as a serious moral or political issue, to the problems about humans. A number of things can be said about this assumption. First, it is in itself an indication of speciesism. How can anyone who has not made a thorough study of the topic possibly know that the problem is less serious than problems of human suffering? One can claim to know this only if on assumes that animals really do not matter, and that however much they suffer, their suffering is less important than the suffering of humans. But pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being that suffers is not a member of our species. What would we think of someone who said that "whites come first" and that therefore poverty in Africa does not pose as serious a problem as poverty in Europe?

It is true that many problems in the world deserve our time and energy. Famine and poverty ...all are major issues, and who can say which is the most important? yet once we put aside speciesist biases, we can see that the oppression of nonhumans by humans ranks somewhere along with these issues. The suffering that we inflict on nonhuman beings can be extreme, and the numbers involved are gigantic ... [and] should cause at least as much concern, especially since this suffering is so unnecessary and could easily be stopped if we wanted to stop it. Most reasonable people want to prevent war, racial inequality, poverty, and unemployment; the problem is that we have been trying to prevent these things for years, and now we have to admit that, for the most part, we don't really know how to do it. By comparison, the reduction of the suffering of nonhuman animals at the hands of humans will be relatively easy, once human beings set themselves to do it.

In any case, the idea that "humans come first" is more often used as an excuse for not doing anything about either human or nonhuman animals than as a genuine choice between incompatible alternatives. For the truth is that there is no incompatibility here ... there is nothing to stop those who devote their time an energy to human problems from joining the boycott of the products of agribusiness cruelty. It takes no more time to be a vegetarian than to eat animal flesh. In fact ... those who claim to care about the well-being of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people everywhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests; moreover, since a vegetarian diet is cheaper than one based on meat dishes, they would have more money available to devote to famine relief, population control, or whatever social or political cause they thought most urgent. ... [W]hen nonvegetarians say that "human problems come first," I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals."

Vegan Pumpkin Waffles

2008-03-06T06:11:00.000-08:00

prep time: 10 minutes | cooking time: 20-40 minutes | makes 16 waffles

"I used to serve these at Sunday Brunch at the doghouse, a loft in Brooklyn I used to live in. It was so great to smell these cooking on those freezing cold winter mornings. Yeah, we had no heat, but we compensated with the best vegan waffles you'll ever have. Serve with maple syrup and tempeh bacon."-Isa from www.postpunkkitchen.com

Equipment:
A Waffle iron, mixing bowls, a wisk or a strong fork

Ingredients
2 1/2 cups all purp flour
1/3 cup demerrara or brown sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
2 Tablespoons soy yogurt
2 cups soymilk
15 oz pureed pumpkin, fresh or canned
1/3 cup oil
2 teaspoons vanilla

Directions
Sift together dry ingredients. In a seperate bowl, vigorously wisk together wet ingredients until well emulsified. Pour wet into dry and combine. Prepare waffles according to manufacturers instructions. I use a normal 4 waffle iron, but I've made belgian ones, too.

Super skate post!

2008-03-06T05:39:00.000-08:00

Some flicks I stole from the Skate All Cities forum (www.skateallcities.com)

The following are flicks taken by magical Jimmy Collins

And here are some photos of the Lewiston Park!

Brent Atchley videos (He's not super tech or anything like that, his style is just simply amazing!)

Big 'ol music post!

2008-03-05T08:40:00.000-08:00

BISC 1:

First up we have mc, producer, graphic artist, dj, and graffiti writer Bisc 1. An amazing talented real hip-hop artist who does it all, and is not afraid to push the boundaries that are plaguing current hip-hop these days. He takes from the old school style, and adds some new almost trip-hop flare to his music. Which serves to create an atmospheric soundtrack to city life, and just life in general.

He doesn't rap about having lots of money, or big rims and lots of stripper looking girls, but he tends to lean towards rapping with a conscious message about the ills of society, and the fact that we losing our touch with our roots.

I would definitely suggest his music if you are into other great hip-hop acts such as, Sage Francis, El-p, Aesop Rock, Sole (Anticon) and the likes. It's just straight up old-school hip-hop mixed with new electronic influence, with socially conscious lyrics. I highly suggest if you are looking to expand your musical taste.

Here is his "Parallels" Music video

"Parallels" music video

Some video magazine interviews.....

Bisc1 - Walls To Words from Carl Weston on Vimeo.
From massappeal

For more info on Bisc 1, check out his sites!
www.myspace.com/bisc1
www.embeddedmusic.net
www.bisc1.com

Cassettes Won't Listen

Next up we have Cassettes Won't Listen, with ties to Bisc 1, but surprisingly not hip-hop at all, but more of a Indie rock mixed with electronic music. Very catchy and melodic, it serves to make you happy and enter you into an almost dreamlike state. Almost futuristic in it's sound, with just the right amount of live instruments, it creates that perfect mix. Think of groups like The Postal Service, Thee More Shallows, Fisherspooner (minus the techno), The Russian Futurists, Teddy Bears, and Stars. If you are a fan of any of these groups, I highly suggest listening to Cassettes Won't Listen, you won't be disappointed. Also check out the teaser music videos for the song "Paper floats" It looks fantastic, and I can't wait to watch the whole thing!

30 Second clip of the new single "Paper float"

"Cutting balloons" Music video

where did you go? music video

Check out their sites for more info
www.cassetteswontlisten.com
www.myspace.com/cassetteswontlisten

Cinephile

Now we have a Scotland based trip-hop act. Their sound is the perfect movie score sound, electronic, atmospheric, and dreamy. They have recently gotten the recognition they deserve, having been asked to do some tracks for CSI, and some British tv shows and movies as well. You will definitely be hearing about them more in the coming years, so keep your ears and eyes pealed for this amazing trip-hop group. You will certainly dig on this still fairly unknown group if you like Portishead, Morcheeba, LAMB, 8mm, Dot Allison, and the likes.

My favorite song "Into nothing"

For more info check out thier sites.
www.myspace.com/cinephileonline
www.cinephileonline.com

Soul Control

Now, I could do a huge long write-up on Rhode Islands seminal Hardcore group Soul Control, but there really isn't a need to. These dudes are simply amazing, and all come from some very influential bands in the past, which don't really need to be name dropped, because their music, message, and dedication deserve more than to simply be called a super-group of sorts. They play early to mid 90's style hardcore in the vain of Into Another, 108, Trial, and Unbroken. With their lyrics heavy on the spiritual side, this music serves as a true hardcore band, with their ideals leading towards a more cathartic ending towards aggression with todays world. They are truly about bettering ones self, and finding a positive output for the hostility you feel from time to time.

"I struggle"

Lyrics to "I struggle"

"I will separate this conditioned solitude. Past failure overruled. revitalize the will to empower and overcome. Unconscious movement of the mind breeds the war of man and man. thoughts destroy feeling. true affection for life cannot be pushed aside. and for the soul that struggles to know his greatest enemy. step outside yourself and look within yourself."

Live footage.

An interview with Soul Control done by Frankie for Monument Zine

Frankie: So who am I talking to and what's your role in Soul Control?

Jim: This is Jim, I play guitar in SC.

Frankie: Who are the other members and what do they do?

Jim: Mattdude sings, Eric plays bass and Ant is on drums.

Frankie: How and when did Soul Control form and how did you come up with the name "Soul Control"?

Jim: We formed in November as an offshoot of Matt, Eric and Ant trying to rekindle a band they were in in the late 90's. "Soul Control" is the name of
an unreleased Into Another record and Mattdude had been trying for about 2 years to get people to start a band called Soul Control with him.

Frankie: Where are you all from?

Jim: Providence, RI.

Frankie: You guys have a unique sound compared to most bands these days. Where do you get your biggest influences from?

Jim: Life in general. Hardcore wise...Burn, Quicksand, Later Bad Brains. Non-Hardcore...The Beatles, Ride...

Frankie: You Recently got signed to Rivalry Records and now have a new 7" out. How is Rivalry treating you?

Jim: Awesome. Kyle is a great dude and he has a lot of faith in us, can't ask for more than that.

Frankie: Was the 7" actually recorded before you got signed to Rivalry Rec.?

Jim: The Soul Control Ep is our demo. We got contacted by Kyle so soon after recording that we only actually made about 200 demos and he felt the recording was good enough to be released so there it is.

Frankie: How has the response to Soul Control been?

Jim: Better than we ever could have hoped for and we are extremely grateful for everything that has happened so far.

Frankie: Lyrically what do you stand for, what's the message Soul Control trys to get out there?

Jim: Well we don't really "stand" for anything but our basic message thus far has been based on thought and introspection. Lyrically we are influenced by
a lot of eastern/western literature and a universal spirituality.

Frankie: As you guys have started playing more shows, what ones have been your favorite so far and which band's been the most fun to play with?

Jim: We try to make every show the best show we've ever played. Its kind of hard to figure out "what to do" to our music and we understand that so we just get lost in it and have fun and hope some others come along with us. You might not be able to mosh but you can def enter the vibe-zone with us haha. We went to richmond last weekend and the scene there is awesome. Fav bands we've played with are I Rise, Swamp Thing, Bracewar, Saint Jude, Have Heart, Verse and Bane.

Frankie: What's the story behind the s/t 7" cover art(with the head turned against the crowd of other heads)?

Jim: Anthony stole the dust jacket off of a psychology text book when he was in middle school and knew that one day he'd be in a band and THAT would be the cover.
10-12 years later his vision came true. Turns out a band called The Faux already used it, guess they had the same vision haha.

Frankie: Any plans on putting out a full length anytime soon, or is Soul Control touring out the summer?

Jim: We're currently recording for a new Ep on Rivalry that'll be out in July. It'll be a 4-5 song 7" and the CD version will also contain the first Ep and the 2 songs from our split with I Rise. We'll tour on that for the rest of the year and around this time next year we'll record and release a full length.

Frankie: So what do the guys of Soul Control like to do when they're not playing in the band?

Jim: Elimination frisbee.

Frankie: thanks for answering my questions hopefully you'll make it to Maine sometime!...

Final Words/Shout Outs?

Jim: Thanks for wanting to do the interview, good luck with the zine. Shout outs to everybody in the world.

Frankie: prepare to be Randomized!!

1. Big dogs or little dogs?

Jim: Dogs in general!

Frankie: 2. Bad Brains or Black Flag?

Jim: Dude, Bad Brains. Not even close.

Frankie: 3. Anyone in the band play the harmonica?

Jim: Yes, I grew up in the Mississippi Delta and played harp for Clams Casino, a local blues legend.

Frankie: 4. Allergies to peanuts?

Jim: No, but mattdude hates Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches. Total commie.

Frankie: 5.Worst job ever had?

Jim: Professional Body Builder.

Frankie: 6.Dumbest craze to ever sweep through the "scene"?

Jim: "Rock and Roll"...it'll never last.

Frankie: 7.Who would you rather hang out with?
A. a homeless man, with many stories of old.
B. Donald Trump.
D. or A proffesional burgler.

Jim: A homeless man that has stories about robbing donald trump.

Frankie: 8.Love tv or hate tv?

Jim: Love.

Frankie: 9.Where do you buy new music?

Jim: Usually at gigs. I only buy vinyl.

Frankie: 10.Favorite shirt?

Jim: This Electric Wizard shirt that I'm wearing right now.

Frankie: 11.Favorite snack for the road?

Jim: Veggies.

For more info on Soul Control please visit their sites.
www.soulcontrolhc.com
www.myspace.com/soulcontrolhc

Some graffiti pictures.

2008-03-04T09:40:00.000-08:00

VEGAN

ANK

London graffiti

CEMEK WUT (Portland, ME)

BANKSY

CAVS

NACE (R.I.P.)

SET UP and BLIS BA

Some poetry....

2008-03-04T09:17:00.000-08:00

"If you have time to chatter
read books
If you have time to read
walk into mountain, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
sing songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly, you happy lucky idiot"
-Nanao Sakaki

HEIGHTS OF FOLLY

"O crows circling over my head and cawing!
I admit to being, at times,
Suddenly, and without the slightest warning.
Exceedingly happy.

On a morning otherwise sunless,
Strolling arm in arm
Past some gallows-shaped trees
With my dear Helen,
Who is also a strange bird.

A feeling of being summoned
Urgently, but by a most gracious invitation
To breakfast on slices of watermelon
In the company of naked gods and goddesses
On a patch of last night's snow."
-Charles Simic

THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS

"I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen it's muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers."
-Langston Hughes

The world according to Garp

2008-03-04T08:36:00.000-08:00

"When Robin Williams played T.S. Garp in this movie, two totally original american icons met: A leading comic actor of that time, and the character whose loopy adventures made John Irving's novel a literary milestone and runaway bestseller. Fans of Williams dramatic work in Dead Poets Society and his oscar winner performance in Good Will Hunting will also savor his role as Garp, a sweet-natured writer whose life is a weird minefield of violence, adultry, fatherhood, rampant feminism and eerie coincidence. Glenn Close (This was her film debut) as Garp's formidable mother and John Lithgow as a transsexual ex-NFL reciever give impressive support, earning oscar nominations and critics laurels galore."-Taken from back of dvd case.

I had borrowed this movie from a friend and co-worker from the cinemas I work with. One day we had eventually got on the subject of "comedic" actors taking on more serious roles in their quest to be more well-rounded actors. Of course, like always, I brought up my love for Bill Murray and his more indie/serious/quirky movies. Somehow in this conversation my friend had brought up this movie "The world according to Garp" with Robin Williams, John lithgow, and Glenn Close. Quite honestly I had never heard of it, and my friend nearly fell to floor in astonishment. So, his reaction, and our ability to share similar movie taste's I borrowed it, and gave it a shot last night.
I could not be more happy with my decision to do so. This movie is beautifully made, the cast was phenomenal, the score was perfect, and unlike most movies made today, I felt a fondness for the characters. This is one of those movies that had to inspire Noah Baumbach in making Margot at the wedding, and The squid and the whale, while both of these movies are amazing, and have the ability for me to identify with the characters, The world according to Garp has something more. Maybe it's the fact that while most of the movie has some wholly depressing parts, it adds just the right amount of comedy to make it stay out of the darkness some movies of this same subject matter tend to stay in without adding something more to help the audience enjoy it more. While watching this movie, I couldn't help but to ask myself "Why did Robin Williams stop making movies like this?" Anyways, I highly suggest this for people that are actually interested in good cinema. If you get excited for huge Hollywood movies, this probably won't appeal to you.
However, if you like movies, like Margot at the wedding, The squid and the whale, The savages, and the likes, this one will win you over as well.

This is a scene from Garp's childhood, I just love the end where she's telling the dean how she got pregnant.

A myspace page for A Wild Change

2008-03-03T07:55:00.000-08:00

Yup, I made one of those thingy's for this webzine. If you support this thing in anyway, please add us on myspace at:

www.myspace.com/awildchange

And again, please tell all your friends about this nifty little thing!
Also, if you have anything to contribute, just drop me a message a comment. Either on here, or over on myspace!

Some local skate footage. All shot by the wonderful fella Jimmy Collins.

2008-03-02T05:43:00.000-08:00

Filmed by Jimmy Collins.
A quick edit for the Maine skaters forum.

Bath skatepark.

Skowhegan skatepark

Old Town skatepark

Please read and get informed! Taken from www.savedarfur.org

2008-03-02T05:27:00.000-08:00

You can watch the whole video for free online at www.googledarfur.com
Also check out the documentary "The devil came on horseback"

For those who are unaware of the atrocities going on in the Darfur region of Sudan. Please read!

Darfur Update - October 2007

Background

Sudan is the largest country in Africa, located just south of Egypt on the eastern edge of the Sahara desert. The country’s major economic resource is oil. But, as in other developing countries with oil, this resource is not being developed for the benefit of the Sudanese people. As much as 70 percent of Sudan’s oil export revenues are used to finance the country’s military.1

Darfur, an area about the size of Texas, lies in western Sudan and borders Libya, Chad and the Central African Republic. It has only the most basic infrastructure and development. The approximately 6 million inhabitants of Darfur are among the poorest in Africa. They exist largely on either subsistence farming or nomadic herding. Even in good times, the Darfuri people face a very harsh and difficult life; these are not good times in Darfur.

The current crisis in Darfur began in 2003. After decades of neglect, drought, oppression and small-scale conflicts in Darfur, two rebel groups – the Sudanese Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) – mounted an insurgency against the central government. These groups represent agrarian farmers who are mostly “non-Arab black African” Muslims from a number of different tribes. President al-Bashir’s response was brutal. In seeking to defeat the rebel movements, the Government of Sudan increased arms and support to local tribal and other militias, which have come to be known as the Janjaweed.2 Their members are composed mostly of “Arab black African” Muslims3 who herd cattle, camels, and other livestock. They have wiped out entire villages, destroyed food and water supplies, and systematically murdered, tortured, and raped hundreds of thousands of Darfuris. In previous internal conflicts (in the south, center, and east of the country), the Sudanese government also employed the tactic of using proxy militias to attack the civilian populations that have been thought to support insurgencies. These attacks often occur with the direct support of the Government of Sudan’s armed forces or at the very least, with their tacit approval.

Few have been spared violence, murder, rape and torture. As one illustration of how Khartoum has waged its war, the Sudanese military paints many of its attack aircraft white – the same color as U.N. humanitarian aircraft – a violation of international humanitarian law. When a plane approaches, villagers do not know whether it is on a mission to help them or to bomb them. Often, it has been the latter.

This scorched-earth campaign by the Sudanese government against Darfuri civilians has, through direct violence, disease, and starvation, already claimed as many as 400,000 lives. It has spilled over into neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic. In all, about 2.3 million Darfuris have fled their homes and communities and now reside in a network of internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Darfur, with over 200,000 more living in refugee camps in Chad. These refugees and IDPs are almost entirely dependent on the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations for their basic needs – food, water, shelter, and health care.

Approximately 1 million more Darfuris still live in their villages, under the constant threat of bombings, raids, murder, rape and torture. Until the arrival of the long-awaited United Nations peacekeeping force, authorized by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1769, actually takes place, the safety of these civilians depends on the presence of the underfunded and undermanned African Union peacekeeping force. Known as AMIS, the force, in Darfur since October 2004, numbers just 7,400 troops and personnel. AMIS lacks a civilian protection mandate as well as adequate means to stop the violence. Its sole mandate is to monitor and report ceasefire violations and it has done little more, due to its limited mandate but also because of its anemic capacity.

In the summer of 2007, outbreaks of violence between some of the Arab tribes that worked together as part of the Janjaweed began to occur more frequently. This latest mutation of the conflict, is indicative of the ever-changing dynamic of this crisis. The United Nations recently reported that tribal and factional fighting is now killing more people than the clashes between the government or government-backed militias and rebel forces.

Another new dynamic, reported by various news sources, is the tens of thousands of non-Darfuris arriving in Darfur in recent months, with many ending up on lands belonging to displaced Darfuris. Different news outlets have reported slightly varied information about Arab groups from neighboring countries, like Niger and Chad, resettling in Darfur. Many news reports cite the same rumors and unconfirmed reports of third-party nationals being given Sudanese identity documents, as well as other evidence of a planned scheme to permanently settle Arabs from outside the Sudan on the lands of displaced Darfuris. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that as many as 30,000 people have left Chad for Darfur in a steady flow since early 2007.

Current Humanitarian Situation

The government continues its military operations directly and through its proxy militias. Those who have visited the camps in Darfur and Chad, including some from the Save Darfur Coalition, have reported on the dire conditions their inhabitants endure. It is remarkable they have survived for this long, in the face of such overwhelming hardship, and with so little progress toward resolving the underlying cause of their dislocation and insecurity. Only the herculean efforts of the U.N. and nongovernmental humanitarian relief agencies have made this possible. About 13,000 aid workers in approximately 100 refugee camps in Darfur and Chad work under very difficult security and logistical conditions and are constantly harassed by Sudanese government obstruction and red tape.

Humanitarian workers and operations are increasingly being targeted by both government and fragmenting rebel movement elements. Vehicles are being hijacked and robbed, aid workers are assaulted and intimidated while carrying out their work and offices are broken into and looted.

In 2007 alone, according to the U.N., over 240,000 additional people have been displaced as they continue to flee the ongoing violence. Both the U.N. and non-governmental humanitarian agencies have warned that their ability to sustain operations is at risk in the face of government harassment and worsening security problems. Any interruption in the flow of humanitarian aid could spark deaths on a scale even worse than that seen to date: U.N. officials say that the death rate in Darfur could rise as high as 100,000 people per month if the fragile humanitarian life-support system collapses.4

U.S. and International Diplomatic Efforts

U.S. Actions

The human suffering in Darfur continues despite the fact that the United States Congress, President Bush, and two U.S. Secretaries of State, have all labeled the conflict in Darfur genocide – the first time in U.S. history that a conflict has been labeled as such while it was ongoing.

On April 18, 2007, President Bush stated that he was tired of Sudan’s obfuscation and evasion as it pursued its genocide; he demanded prompt action by President al-Bashir to end the genocide and cooperate with international demands that he admit U.N. peacekeepers to Darfur and cease obstructing humanitarian aid. President Bush warned that the U.S. would impose unilateral, targeted economic sanctions on the Sudanese regime5 and work for the same globally in the U.N. Security Council. On May 29, 2007, President Bush announced the implementation of said sanctions against Sudan.6

While the U.S. is a major funder for both A.U. peacekeeping and humanitarian aid efforts in Darfur, the actual costs related to Darfur have often outpaced U.S. budget projections due to the changing nature and scope of the crisis, creating dangerous gaps in funding and the need for frequent emergency measures to address the shortfalls. Within the President’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2008 (FY08), there is a projected $186 million shortfall for Darfur peacekeeping, and a $6 billion shortfall for America’s core humanitarian assistance. If these gaps are not addressed, the impact on international peacekeeping and aid efforts could negatively affect millions of Darfuris. Congress took initial steps to fill these gaps, but it is certain that more money will be required in the upcoming FY08 supplemental funding bill to fully rectify this shortfall.

Over the last few years, a number of states and universities divested their financial holdings from companies doing harmful business with the Sudanese regime. Unfortunately, there is an effort underway to overturn some of these state divestment laws. Congress is considering a resolution, H.R. 180, that would safeguard states’ rights to divest. H.R. 180 would also bar U.S. contracts with these same companies, ensuring that federal tax dollars do not end up in Khartoum. H.R. 180 passed the House by an overwhelming vote of 418 to 1 on July 31, 2007, and now awaits action in the Senate.

Multilateral Actions

International diplomacy has also failed the people of Darfur. For four years, an endless parade of envoys and officials from the United States, many other countries and the U.N. have visited Khartoum with messages to President al-Bashir. The diplomacy has been sporadic, uncoordinated, and incoherent. Promises and threats have gone unfulfilled. Khartoum has become adept at playing one envoy and peace initiative off against another – all in keeping with its overarching strategy to deny, delay, and defy a weak-willed and disunited international community as it pursues its genocide relentlessly in Darfur. To limit world awareness of that genocide, al-Bashir severely restricts access to Darfur by diplomats, humanitarian workers, and journalists – anyone who might tell the world community what is going on there. However, information from those who do visit and from aid workers and U.N. and A.U. personnel on the ground has provided broad evidence of ongoing government attacks.

Among the key multilateral diplomatic initiatives that have sought to end to the conflict:

Darfur Peace Agreement: On May 5, 2006, under strong pressure from the A.U., the U.S. and others in the international community, the Sudanese government and one rebel faction (SLA/M-MM) signed the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) in Abuja, Nigeria. However, other rebel groups found the DPA inadequate in addressing Darfuri grievances and refused to sign. The violence in Darfur has not subsided since the signing of the DPA. In August 2006, Sudanese government forces launched a major offensive in northern Darfur. That attack was quickly bogged down in the face of successful rebel counterattacks, achieving little other than renewed hostilities. While it quickly became clear that a military victory for Khartoum is impossible, the attempt to achieve victory made progress towards a peaceful solution nearly impossible. The U.N. and A.U. are currently working together to try to revitalize a political process to bring all parties back to the table to work on a revised and improved DPA. This effort is being hampered by rebel disunity and by government obstruction. The Sudanese air force repeatedly bombed locations where rebels were to meet under U.N./A.U. auspices to unify their positions in order to negotiate properly.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1706: The United Nations has passed 16 resolutions on Darfur. One of the most important was Resolution 1706 of August 31, 2006, that authorized a robust U.N. peacekeeping force of 22,500 troops for Darfur with a mandate to protect its civilian population. Due to Sudanese stonewalling and a failure of U.N. member states to enforce their will, less than 200 U.N. advisors actually deployed.

U.N. Human Rights Council: A high-level mission of the United Nations Human Rights Council, led by Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams, issued a report on March 7, 2007, which stated: “The situation [in Darfur] is characterized by gross and systemic violations of human rights and grave breaches of international humanitarian law. The principal pattern is one of a violent counterinsurgency campaign waged by the Government of Sudan in concert with Janjaweed militia, targeting mostly civilians.” Sudan sought to have the report rejected by the Council because the mission had not visited Darfur – which was true, but only because Sudan refused to issue visas to the mission members. That effort to quash the report failed. A new high-level delegation was appointed to follow up with a visit to Sudan and report back to the Council’s next session this summer.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1769: The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1769 unanimously on July 31, 2007. It determined that the situation in Darfur constitutes a threat to peace, and authorized the deployment of a United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) under Chapter VIIof the U.N. Charter. UNAMID will be the largest United Nations multilateral peacekeeping force ever deployed, with a total presence of more than 26,000 troops, police, and civilian personnel. When deployed, UNAMID will have the authority to “take the necessary action” to: (1) support early and effective implementation of the DPA, prevent disruption of its implementation and armed attacks, and most importantly to protect civilians, without prejudice to the responsibility of the government of Sudan, and (2) protect its personnel, facilities, installations and equipment, and to ensure security and freedom of movement of its own personnel and humanitarian workers. Full deployment of the force is not expected until mid-2008. It is estimated that UNAMID will cost roughly $2.5 billion a year, in addition to start-up costs. U.N. member states will fund the mission through the U.N. assessment scale. The United States will contribute 27.1% of the total costs. If the U.N. fails to successfully deploy a peacekeeping force in Darfur, it will be the second time in that institution’s history that U.N. troops have not deployed after being authorized to do so by the Security Council. The first such instance was the failure to deploy troops in Darfur as mandated by Resolution 1706.

What Needs to Be Done to End This Genocide

The Save Darfur Coalition calls for emphasis of the following objectives toward which the United States, the U.N., and the international community must focus their efforts in order to end this crisis. They must apply strong pressure to accompany more intensive and coherent diplomacy with Khartoum:

Ceasefire: There needs to be a ceasefire respected by all parties to the conflict. There have been cease-fires agreed to in the past, notably in the 2006 DPA and again when New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson visited Khartoum in January 2007, but all parties violated them. The international community must back the U.N. and A.U. envoys as they work for an internal political negotiating process, including a viable ceasefire respected by all actors.

Effective and Credible Peacekeeping Force to Protect Civilians: The full U.N./A.U. hybrid peacekeeping force established by Resolution 1769 needs to be deployed urgently to protect the civilian population. The first benchmark of UNSCR 1769 has already been missed; U.N. member states were supposed to finalize their contributions to UNAMID and the U.N. Secretary-General and the Chairman of the A.U. commission were expected to agree on the final composition of the military component of UNAMID no later than August 30, 2007.

A renewed Darfur peace process: In order to achieve a permanent end to the genocide in Darfur, the effort to find a political solution must be renewed. A peace agreement must create the following four conditions: (1) a secure environment that allows displaced persons to return to their homes-if they chose to do so; (2) a sustainable political agreement embraced by all armed groups–as well as noncombatant groups representative of large portions of Darfuri society – which deals with the root causes of the conflict; (3) a cessation and reversal of resettlement efforts underway by the Government of Sudan; and (4) accountability for all those who committed or can be shown to have had command responsibility7 over violations of human rights or international humanitarian law. A renewed and inclusive peace process must begin immediately, must include all the necessary stakeholders, and must ensure a voice for the people of Darfur themselves. While said efforts should be led by the U.N. and A.U. envoys, the United States and other key international actors must reinforce their work by sustained engagement and pressure on the Government and rebel groups.

What Needs to Be Done to Achieve Those Key Goals

The Save Darfur Coalition insistently calls for various measures to pressure Khartoum to end the genocide, something it has made clear it will not do in response to diplomacy alone. Such steps should include:

World leaders must make peace in Darfur a top priority: It has been over two years since President Bush declared the situation in Darfur genocide, and yet it continues. The President and his administration have made little progress; the situation on the ground continues to deteriorate. The performance of nearly all other world leaders, with few exceptions, has been even worse. The situation in Darfur demands more than tough rhetoric. The President must take a leadership role in maintaining a coalition of key international actors to force Khartoum to end the killing. Arab and African leaders must also take on a proactive role in mediating an end to this crisis that has brewed in their midst for nearly half a decade now. In the immediate term, all U.N. member states must participate, whether financially, logistically, or through troop or equipment contributions to a swift and effective deployment of the hybrid force authorized by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1769.

China must use its leverage with Khartoum: China has a great deal of influence on Sudan given its status as Sudan’s top trading partner, its strong military ties to Sudan, and its protective role in the U.N. Security Council. Although China did not exercise its veto, as it had vowed to do early on, and voted for Resolution 1769, it did significantly weaken the final text of the resolution. China’s vote in favor of 1769 came only after it managed to remove language calling for sanctions if Sudan fails to cooperate. Additionally, the hybrid force’s mandate to “seize and dispose” of weapons found in Darfur in contravention of the arms embargo (UNSCR 1556/2004) was diluted in the final text, allowing the force to merely “monitor” them. China has displayed increased unease and engagement regarding Darfur, but more must be done. China is deeply image-conscious, especially with regard to the growing possibility that the 2008 Olympic Games will be marred by Darfur-related activities. Chinese oil investments in Sudan, which benefit the regime but not the people and help fund government military operations in Darfur, are also susceptible to pressure through the growing global divestment movement. All this leverage needs to be consistently applied to China, which is in a unique position to influence Khartoum’s calculations.

Humanitarian Aid: Humanitarian aid in Darfur must be sustained while efforts are made to protect civilians and broker an agreement for a lasting end to the conflict. This means continued funding of aid programs and an international push to end Sudan’s obstruction of aid efforts. The Government of Sudan is also guilty of innumerable violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, which have hampered the effective delivery of aid. Such actions must be brought to an end immediately. Given repeated U.N. and NGO warnings of the fragility of their efforts, the international community must prepare a contingency plan for a collapse of current aid programs.

1 Jeffrey Gettleman, “Far Away from Darfur’s Agony, Khartoum is Booming,” New York Times, 23 October 2006.

2 Janjaweed loosely translates to “devil on horseback.”

3 It is important to understand that all Darfuris are Muslim and black. The distinction between “African” and “Arab” is primarily descriptive of lifestyle, and is common local parlance in Darfur: the “Arabs,” who are roughly 35% of the population, are nomadic herders; the “Africans,” roughly 65% of the population, are sedentary farmers. Traditionally, the two groups coexisted and had arrangements for passage of nomads through farmland areas. These arrangements started failing under the pressure of desertification and population growth, but were managed through traditional dispute-resolution mechanisms. When the Sudanese government launched its genocide in 2003, it instrumentalized the underlying tensions over land use by arming certain “Arab” clans and inciting them to attack “African” villages, with the promise of control of the diminishing land and water resources.

4 UN Daily News, 14 September 2006. Issue DH/4732. United Nations News Service. Available online at http://www.un.org/news/dh/pdf/english/2006/14092006.pdf

5 The “Plan B” sanctions, as they are commonly referred to, target 31 companies owned, controlled, or affiliated with the Sudanese government. They also sanction Ahmad Muhammad Harun, Sudan’s state minister for humanitarian affairs, and Khalil Ibrahim of the Justice and Equality rebel movement.

6 The United States has had trade and investment sanctions in place against Sudan since 1997, when it was harboring Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders.

7 Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, Art. 87(3). This provision is applicable to domestic armed conflicts as well, such as the one in Darfur.

Also this photo is just plain amazing!

2008-03-01T07:45:00.000-08:00

Taken by Beady Eye Productions
http://www.flickr.com/photos/beadyeye/287563155/

They take some really great photographs, I highly suggest you check them out!

A delicious looking vegan cheesecake!

2008-03-01T07:27:00.000-08:00

A delicious looking recipe taken from www.vegweb.com

Ingredients (use vegan versions):

16 graham cinnamon graham crackers, crumbled
1/2 cup vegan margarine
1 tablespoon light Karo syrup
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
16 oz. Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese
1/3 cup sugar (or fructose)
4 EnerG egg substitute "eggs"
1 teaspoon vanilla
juice of one lemon
Ah!Laska vegan chocolate syrup
fresh raspberries

Directions:

Crust: Combine graham crackers, margarine (adjust amount as needed), Karo syrup, and flour in a bowl. Mix by hand and press firmly into a round pan.

Filling: Combine "cream cheese", sugar, "eggs", vanilla, and lemon juice in a blender and blend until creamy and smooth. Pour onto crust.

Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 25-30 minutes, until set (doesn't jiggle when you move the pan). Let cool. Place in refrigerator and chill for 12 hours.

Topping: You may use any kind of topping such as strawberries in syrup, chocolate, vegan whipped cream, etc. My personal favorite is drizzling the cheesecake in Ah!Laska vegan chocolate syrup and adding fresh raspberries. Mmm!

Serves: 8-10

Preparation time: 30 min.

Trailer for indie movie "Paranoid Park"

2008-03-01T07:18:00.000-08:00

Taken from the myspace movie page. This movie looks pretty good, most likely since it is such a small release we probably won't get it here in Bangor, Maine.

"An unsolved murder at Portland's infamous Paranoid Park (burnside) brings detectives to a local high school, propelling a young skater into a moral odyssey where he must not only deal with the pain and disconnect of adolescence but the consequences of his own actions.

As director of "My Own Private Idaho", "Good Will Hunting", "To Die For" and "Elephant", Gus Van Sant has created some of the most memorable films about youth ever committed to film. At the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, he was awarded the 60th Anniversary Prize for "Paranoid Park" which is largely considered one of his finest films. Based on the novel by Blake Nelson & photographed by the incomparable Christopher Doyle ("In the Mood for Love"; "2046"), the film has captivated audiences worldwide, becoming a unanimous standout at the Cannes, New York and Toronto Film Festivals."

A song/prose from Jayme Thomas (not the skater, my girlfriends sister)

2008-02-29T18:03:00.000-08:00

Governments and multinationals
Corrupt and twist women and men
Are going to bring this planet
To a premature end

With their selfishness and greed
They destroy anything of worth
Are you just going to sit and watch
Their rape of mother earth?

They just could't care less
About the ecological devastation
Inflicted by their insane striving
For profit maximisation

We've got to fight back
We've got to give resistance
Or they'll pollute and exploite
Our world out of existance

Industrial accidents and radiation leaks
So babies are born as freaks
Like the Re-Chen babies with one eye
Or those who Windscale called before their time

And the petrol is full of lead
So kids grow up wrong in the head
And aerosols destroy the ozone layer
No protection - no we're layed bare

And nuclear waste is dumped into the sea
A slow poison for you and me
And what was once fertile land
Has now turned to desert sand

And acid rain pours from the sky
So whole forests wither and die
And dirty cities grey and drab
Cover the land like concrete scabs

And toxic chemicals are pumped into streams
Death where once life would have been
The whole situation has got out of hand
So go green and make your stand

And it seems you couldn't care less
That our earth is in such a mess
It makes me wonder how long it will take
Before you finally awake

Please, please you got to open your eyes
because you've got to realise
Exactly what those in power got planned
This is the last chance to make your stand

Now that we see what's going on
We've got to stop them and we aint got long
This isn't something just to sing about
because our time is running out...

Zomb One of Bangor interview, and some random pictures.

2008-02-29T04:32:00.000-08:00

Zomb One Interview (conducted by Carter for Monument Webzine)

Please check out Monument at http://monumentzine.blogspot.com/
They are a cool webzine for art and hardcore, get into it!

Carter: thanks for doing this interview! For those who haven’t seen your work how would you describe it to them?

Zomb: No problem man, I'm always happy to help furthering independent media and entertainment. I guess you could call my stuff urban modern-art, street art, graffiti, art, crap, awesome, whatever you'd like, it all means the same really.

Carter: how long have you been at this? Is their any other art forms that you work with?

Zomb: I have been doing graffiti art/street art for a long time now. I first got interested when I was in high school, around '96-'97, drawing like crazy on my books, in my books, lockers, black boards, etc...it was an escape from the bullshit at school, that and my head phones, haha. I have stoped many times since then, some due to legal troubles, some because of life's situations, like kids, bands, skateboarding, you know, just life in general.

Carter: I really liked how you apply stencil work as well as freehand design into your work. Although these styles are common with graffiti artists you have a way of making it your own. I was wondering if their were any special touches that you incorporate in your work to make them unique.

Zomb: Well my basic background comes from graffiti, first and foremost, but over the years I have been jaded by the graffiti scene as a whole, the attitudes, outlooks, cliques, competitiveness, basically all the things that I hated about team sports, and school. I looked at graffiti as more of a backlash to society, and another chance for a faceless kid to tell a story. I try to further progress my work, and incorporate diffrent mediums and techniques constantly. I love making art period, and finding new ways and things to make it work. I have used scrapbooking techniques before, acrylic paint, wheat paste, spraypaint, stencils, stickers, clothing, skateboards. I just love to paint and make art period.

Carter: Do you like to work on canvas or walls better. What is your favorite piece you’ve done so far?

Zomb: Well, they both have diffrent feelings, and honestly I'm not sure which I like better. With canvas you have time, lots of it, to create what you want, and you can use other mediums and whatnot on them. Plus they always look nice on my walls of my house, haha. It's nice to have that freedom and time to work, Especially in comparrison to working on walls. With walls, you have the adrenalin rush of doing something illegal, and also for me I have the feeling that I am doing something right for society, I feel that I am putting up a huge middle finger to comercialism and advertising, and it feels good and refreshing. Also with walls you have less time to work on your piece, but that can in turn be a good thing, sometimes I can ruin a piece because I am working too long on it, and I am trying to fix every little wrong thing. So the limited time can be a good thing too. Both are really fun, and each one lets me recieve and diffrent feeling and emotion, it's great!

Carter: Do you believe that street art is a good medium for reaching and sharing messages with other people?

Zomb: Most definately, as long as people are willing to turn off the initial negative reactions, and really think for a moment. Some really great points are being made through street art, like for instance, BANKSY, the dude is extremely talented, and his work is that of social/political commentary, and he really strives to make people rethink and unlearn. That is something I eventually want to achieve, something outside of being pretty or dope, but something with a message.

Carter: do you feel that street/graffiti art is neglected because some people don’t see it as much as art as just a form of mindless vandalism?

Zomb: It is neglected to some point, but really since like '82, it has blown up. You have it in advertising billboards, commericals, designer clothing, cd covers. So really more and more people over the years have really grown to accept it. I mean it has even reached modern art galleries. It was an art movement, the only art movement that was created by kids, for kids, and now people are paying well into the thousands for pieces of work. It's crazy. Then on the other hand, you most definately have the people, who see it on the streets everyday and only get to see the midless vandalism part, which I can also identify with, as there are hundreds and hundreds of kids out there just doing it for the vandilism side. In smaller places it's kind of diffrent though, places where graffiti is just starting to surface, and there will actually be kids doing it for the artistic side and they actually have something to say, but it's negleted by the mass local public, because they just don't understand it. It's all relative though.

Carter: when you come up with a piece in your blackbook then recreate that image on a wall or canvas do you change much or do you like to keep it close to how it looked in the blackbook?

Zomb: When I create something in my blackbook, it's there as more of a blueprint, or a guideline of how I want that pice to go. And then I just let fate take over when I'm carrying out the image onto a canvas or wall, adn I just let it transform. A lot of my best works have been due to accidents, mess-ups and fuck-ups. Nothing has ever come out as planned, and I find that very soothing. It's very metaphoric to life in itself.

Carter: Do you believe that art always needs to have some deep message to be worthwhile or you think that art can still have a powerful impression without a definite message?

Zomb: Art doesn't necesarily need to have a deep message, because I feel every work of art has a story in itself. Especially graffiti/street art. Like it makes you ask questions like "who was this person?" "how did they get away with this?" "what did they use?" "why did they do this?" and so on. However I am very partial to art that has a deep message in it, but I have learned over the years to appreciate it all. It's all like a book, they all have something to say or teach us.

Carter: Besides the usual places you might expect to see street art such as a wall or in a notebook you have done something unique in doing your art on records. What influenced you to use vinyl as a canvas?

Zomb: Well, I have been involved and influenced throughout my whole life by music, all of it. Every single genre and subgenre, I can gain something and find beauty in it, and I like how that can tranfuse into art as well. I also was looking to do something more unique and cheaper than canvas. It helps me stay in touch with the working class and poor. Art supplies can be expensive, so I have a friend that moved in next to a record store and every week they were throwing away vinyl, basically contributing to the unnecesary pile of trash in this world, so I asked him to start taking them off the road, and thought it would be a really neat idea to infuse the art with the music, and at the same time recycling. I have find out now, that I am not the only one who does this, but thats ok. A lot of people play around with it, but it's my main medium right now.

Carter: what are some of the artists or people who you look up too and get inspiration from? Do you ever gain inspiration from a non-street artist?

Zomb: I get inspiration from everywhere, and everyone. It all comes from my life and the shit I have gone through. The loves, the heartaches, the fun, the bad times. i also draw influence from certain authors like Daniel Quinn, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Chuck Klosterman, Chuck Palanuick and many many others, reading is a huge influence for me. Also my outrage for alot of the injustices of the world, animal liberation, social oppression, political agendas, and the like. As far as artists go, it ranges. Local graffiti artists and crews like LEARN, ICH, SEPT, ALKE, JURNE, CEMEK, TURDL, KG, ZURK, BERN, RENT, PANIC, NAP 71, HBT, YME, WUT, SFL, and the like. For graffitit artist worldwide it has come from a lot of diffrent dudes. JA, COPE, SABER, RIME, REYES, and all of MSK, AWR, TKO, SKUF, NOXER, UNTOLD, NECKFACE, DONDI, BLADE, BANKSY, OBEY GIANT, GOLD 1, NOWAE and all of FNK, and the list could go on and on. I love it all. For non graffiti/street artists, it would have to be Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dali, Cezanne. I could really make this list go all day, but for the readers I'll cut it short.

Carter: Any last shout outs?

Zomb: Shout out to Nowae, and the rest of my FNK crew, my girl Jenni, you are seriously the best ever! My crazy cat Lakai, all the hobos under bridges, every animal, vitamin water, vegan and straightedge movements, and everyone who read this, keep your mind open and stay informed, you can make a diffrence.

www.myspace.com/zomb_one (my main art page)
www.myspace.com/heartshardcore (Add my new band!)

Also support these sites/organizations
www.savedarfur.org
www.antiracistaction.us
www.veganoutreach.org
www.hrw.org (Human Rights Watch)
www.answer.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ANS_homepage
(A.N.S.W.E.R.)
www.knowmore.org
www.adbusters.org/home
www.shac7.com
www.indymedia.org
www.freespeech.org
www.zcommunications.org
www.truthout.org
www.democracynow.org
www.zeitgeistmovie.com (Watch movie for free online)
www.directaction../index.htm
www.stencilrevolution.com

I just plain love graffiti, from the dirty to the clean, all of it!

Some local graffiti, now covered up with some bullshit by some toys, oh well.

Oh how I wish I had a luck dragon. If any of you remember valcor was from the awesome movie "The never ending story" one of my favorite movies of all time! The book is even better though, and I suggest everyone read it. I'm not a huge fantasy fan, but I identified with a lot of the metaphors from this movie and book, when I was a lot younger.

Who doesn't love bananas!?

I used to skate alot, and now I really miss it, hopefully once spring hits I'll get enough motivation to push that wheelie board thing around.

Yeah, you get that bearbrick from behind! I have no life.

The start

2008-02-28T07:27:00.000-08:00

So, I've always wanted to create some DIY zine, blog, or newsletter for quite some time now, but I have always had the problem of what type of zine I wanted to do. I could do a cliche "hardcore" zine, or just a plain music one. Or should I do a strictly graffiti art zine? Maybe one of those ones with some weird and wacky pictures and some written ramblings. I could do one with reviews of albums, movies, books, and the likes. I could even maybe do one of those activist zines.
Well, I have finally made up my mind, to put whatever I feel should go in this. Just let things flow, write some things, post some pictures, steal some interviews, and have anyone and all contribute to this. Who knows, maybe one day this will materialize in some form of written press you could hold your your actual hands, rather than some intangible inter-web-blah-blah.
Anyways, so here it is. If you have any suggestions, ideas, or just want to contribute in any way, feel free to message me. I'm a pretty chill open minded dude.