Srsly, how does that guy stand up and keep fighting after that punch (actually 2 punches) at the 2:08 mark on that clip? Yeah, I know it’s a movie and all. But still.

Found this clip when I was downloading a punk compilation from Hardcore Punk Reviews, I remember Jim Kelly from watching the Bruce Lee flick, Enter the Dragon. That was the big production that was set to make Bruce Lee a huge international movie star. Unfortunately, we know, or sort of know, what happened to Bruce Lee.

You may also know Jim Kelly from one of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s verses on 36 Chambers.

So the above clip is the title sequence from Black Belt Jones. It’s pure 70’s golden funk silver screen sun-kissed California goodness. I kinda like to think if Grand Royal Magazine still existed, and had a blog they’d post stuff like this.

It’s crazy how the police in NYC were so worthless back in the day….6:57  NYC looked like a warzone….looked kind of fun.

We have been working with Ricky Powell over the last few weeks on a story for our Soapbox Section.  I finally got to meet him and he gave me a copy of the newest issue of Frank 151.  Exceptionally great mix of people.  I was really feeling the Joe Conzo interview.  Ricky was a cool ass dude and we hope to be working with him more in the future.

If after I die I wake up in 1976 as a black guy,  this shit is going to be my anthem.  Got caught out there this morning at a red light blasting this song and I looked over to see some dude clowning me.  I did an office space move and slowly lowered the volume until the light turned green.  This shit is so pimp.  One of my top 10 favorite songs of all time.

Found this one today…Richmond VA.  Kemos, Bigfoot, Eulogy for The Art of Storytelling

It’s kind of funny that I got La Laupe and this song playing back to back but these two people are keeping me focused to get this book done.  Tim Barry Avoiding Catatonic Surrender…the East Brunswick NJ refrence is the shit..  Mr Barry will be joining us in Book #1.

If you don’t know about this lady do some research.  She is on heavy rotation in our offices.

Check out the Dave Chapelle cameo at the end of the video.

Photo by: Joe Dantone

Interview by: Justin Rossi

___________________________________________________________

What is DJ Nappy up to these days? Coming back hard I assume.

I’m just catching up with what’s been brewing during the past 3+ years in dubstep and sorting out which tracks I’m going to refix. Working some rough mixes and seeing what sounds appealing. Also linking with producers, emcees, singers, and dj’s for collaborations. I need others to properly operate, and the input is way more important than the output. Movement is slow but precise. Been watching old episodes of ‘The Wire’ and Jersey Shore. That Snooki…. she’s so crazy!

Haha the Wire is pretty dope. I actually just started watching it a couple of weeks back. I still have a bunch of seasons to view. I could see you kicking it with snooki… that would be a hilarious tv show! Speaking of jersey, where did you grow up?

A little town called West Windsor, but I spent most of my time in Princeton as a teenager and young adult. It’s the next town over and there was a lot more trouble to get into in Princeton.

” Thugstep works best in clubs in my opinion. I have some r&b and underground hiphop cats on Dubstep beats, and it doesn’t feel right to me. I’d prefer to hear Snoop than Murs with this type of production. The ignorant rap over complex bass and drums and synths seems like the perfect blend, and you can take a shitty Soulja Boy song and make it fun with a dubstep track behind it.”

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Little Sammy has been holding it down on the video tip.  This video was done by  the same dude responsible for the Rime / Trailer Park fiasco.  I was just with Sammy this weekend at the Chiller Show and we were throwing around ideas for some new video content for the Art of Storytelling.  At any rate, check out this new Young Zee and Mr. Green video.  You may remember Young Zee from the Eight Mile Soundtrack as well as the Fugges album ”The Score”  Zee is also a member of the legendary ”Outsidaz.”

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1

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So where did your interest in Bigfoot come from and why did you decide to startpainting Bigfoot characters?

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It’s been about 14 years now since I decided to start writing Bigfoot. I realized the symbolism of Bigfoot was the culmination of all things I was into portraying, nature, magic and an opposition to the modern human world.

“If I stayed in Jersey I would definitely be making art but wouldn’t have started writing Bigfoot and would’ve ended up doing hard time for like 2 grams of weed.”

Graffiti artists have the luxury of hiding behind their artwork. I have met tons of graffiti artists and there are a lot of dorks, social idiots and loners in the graffiti game myself included. But they have a unique talent, graffiti is illegal, above the law, the act of graffiti has street credibility, so for a lot of people it serves as an alter ego. Is this the case for you as well?

. Read more »

At New York Comic Con, I got a chance to check out a number of scenes from the upcoming documentary on writer Grant Morrison. Morrison’s best known for his creation, The Invisibles, but also for his reinvention of various comic characters for both DC and Marvel.

Morrison seems a fascinating character study, from consulting with John Lennon (yep, still deceased) to becoming the characters he creates, I’m sure editing the project down to documentary length will prove difficult.

Morrison explains a lot with his description of his formative years and lessons from his parents. His father was ex-military, but later become an anti-war activist. His mother looking into the night sky with young Grant pointed up to the stars and said, “We’re from there.”

Looking forward for to this final project titled, Talking With Gods, from filmmaker Patrick Meaney. Wired interviewed Meaney regarding the film back in July, around San Diego Comic Con. Here’s the link.

I’ve had my eye on the various projects that have come through Kickstarter, so it was great to attend their panel at New York Comic Con. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, perhaps you should check out their website, and then come back for the rest of this post. It’s okay, I’ve got a call on the other line anyway. We can catch up in a little bit.

Hey, you’re back. So you know by now that Kickstarter is a vehicle for funding creative projects: graphic novels, video games, books, movies,…even magazines. Once you have your wonderful idea, you create a video to host on Kickstarter, determine the premiums you’ll award at different contribution levels, and set a deadline for funding. Reach 100% and you get the funding minus Kickstarter’s fees and a fee for process the payment through Amazon Payments. (Overall, I think it might be slightly less than 10%.)

We seriously need to consider this as an option for getting out the next issue of The Art of Storytelling. I’m not joking. Not only would we be funding our publication, but in a sense we would already be preselling it.

I know a bunch of creative types have been checking out what we’ve doing, so I figured it be worth bringing Kickstarter to people’s attention.

Here’s a video of the Kickstarter panel.

Finally after months of hard work we are happy to release our online shop.  99% of our products have been uploaded to our inventory, however we still have a ton of Vinyl Toys to import so keep checking back for that.  Our shop can be accessed by clicking the “SHOP” tab in the header bar or by going directly to www.analogcartel.com Hit us back and let us know your thoughts, what products you would like to see in the future and any other comments you have.

I came across a really good interview that KAWS did for Interview magazine.  Toby Maguire conducted the interview and it is a nice read. Check it out.

The Williamsburg studio of the artist known as KAWS is neatly lined with racks of acrylic-paint bottles in primary colors and guarded by a cluster of standing toy collectibles—life-size 3-D comic book characters of his own design—like a platoon of robot children. By the window, there is a small-scale model of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Connecticut. KAWS, an unassuming, soft-spoken 35-year-old New Jersey native named Brian Donnelly, is plotting his first solo museum show at the Aldrich next month. It will serve as the unofficial grand induction to the institutionalized art world for the graffiti artist, painter, illustrator, sculptor, toymaker, and product designer. Yet KAWS has a long history outside of the white cube. His street-born cartoonish graphics—specifically spermatozoa-shaped figures with x-ed out eyes—have achieved a subcultural iconography. He has applied this KAWS signature to his street art, a clothing line, heroically outsize toys and sculptures, and countless cobranding ventures with labels like A Bathing Ape and Marc Jacobs.

KAWS was a teenager growing up in Jersey City in the late ’80s and early ’90s, where he spent his high school years graffiti-bombing trains, walls, and billboards. He honed his street-art act in New York City, hanging out with the spray can–wielding skate kids in downtown Manhattan. He graduated to a more covert form of interventionist street art in the mid-’90s, when he began unlocking the glass panels encasing bus stop and phone booth ads. He stole the posters, added his own graphics to them in acrylic paint, and then surreptitiously put them back. These hits were so skillfully executed—brushstrokes are never apparent in a KAWS painting—that often no one could distinguish the artist’s work from the original advertisement.

After graduating from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1996, KAWS traveled to Japan, pursuing his street-art projects with Tokyo subculture heavyweights Hectic and Jun Takahashi of Undercover. In 1999, KAWS made his first toy with Japanese company Bounty Hunter,a vinyl figure of Mickey Mouse with x-ed out eyes (as if Mickey just drank from a bottle marked POISON). Nigo, the tastemaker behind A Bathing Ape, asked KAWS to collaborate on a clothing line in 2001 and began collecting his pop paintings of cartoon characters like the Simpsons, the Smurfs, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Channeling the commercialist attitude of Claes Oldenburg and, more recently, Takashi Murakami, KAWS has produced everything from x-marked sneakers for Nike to an album cover for a special edition of Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak (2008). To sell all the KAWS-mobilia, the artist opened a dazzling Masamichi Katayama–designed store in Tokyo in 2006 called OriginalFake. Although KAWS does not separate product from art or art from product, it was only a matter of time before the art world caught up with him. He found Los Angeles–based dealer Honor Fraser, who took on not only the paintings but the whole breadth of his work.

With a monograph from Skira/Rizzoli due out this fall and the Aldrich show at his doorstep, KAWS has gotten approval from an art-world establishment that he felt would never take his guerrilla act as its own. He bought a building not far from his Brooklyn studio, which his good friend, the interior designer Katayama, will convert into a massive studio that will become the creative hub of the KAWS universe. That’s all in the future, but it is one KAWS can see from the seventh-floor window of his current studio—which is where the actor Tobey Maguire, a fan, friend, and collector, interviewed the artist.

Click here to view the full interview

Some old friends just opened up a record shop in Brooklyn.  I missed the opening night but from what I heard the space, concept, and merchandise is on point.  Stop in and check it out the address is listed below and you can click here to view their facebook page.

BLACK GOLD RECORDS

461 Court Street

Brooklyn NY

11231

Open daily except Moday. 11am-9pm Sundays 11am-5pm.

F or G train to Carroll Street. WE BUY RECORDS!!!

I came across a great interview today on SLAMXHYPE, with Erik Brunetti of FUCT.  Over the years I haven’t kept up too much as to what was going on in the street wear world.  Recently I started to gain an interest again and obviously I went back to what I knew as a kid, FUCT, SSUR, FRESHJIVE, and X-LARGE.  Anyway, it seems like Erik doesn’t do a lot of interviews, so I was real stoked to find this one. You should also check out www.fuct.com it is a great blog and one that I enjoy reading from time to time.  It Looks like Erik is working on a film project now.  You can see a teaser on the site.

D-Nice has been putting out these videos for a while now, they are called True Hip-Hop Stories.  I might have posted one up in the past, but Chip actually brought them to my attention once again.  They are really well put together, both the video quality and content is on point.  It is refreshing to watch a hip-hop interview and not listen to some thugged out bull shit.  I posted the interview with YZ because it was one of my favorites but you should check them all out.  He did pieces with B-Real of Cypress Hill, Doitall, Masta Ace, Doug E Fresh and Slick Rick and a bunch of others.  His website is http://www.d-nice.com and you can watch all the videos on his VIMEO page.

Here is one of my new Gene Simmons sculpts for an upcoming custom figure I will be creating.  I just have to figure out which era I want to use it for.  I will make one with pupils and one without.  I will post the photos when it is finished.  Hit me up if there are any customs you would like to see in the future.

- The Farrow

Just came home to a batch of our first figure, Eyeball Kid by Chip 7.  The molds and paint job came great.  The mold maker did a good job preserving all the detail which was my biggest concern.  We are doing 30 figures in the black color way.  We will have them at the Zakka store for May 25th’s show.  I am going to stop by uncle Nooche’s house tonight an we are going to start the assembly process.  Really stoked to see the finished product.  I will post shots once they are fully assembled.

The 100 Helmets of THE VADER PROJECT

 Freeman’s Los Angeles Auction Preview Exhibition
Opening Reception: Friday, June 11, 2010  6-10pm
Los Angeles Exhibition On View: June 12 – 20, 2010  Noon-6pm
6812 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, California
www.thevaderproject.com

The Vader Project Catalog Signing – Los Angeles
Featuring 20 Participating Artists
 Saturday, June 12, 2010  2pm

Freeman’s Philadelphia Auction Showing
On View: July 5-9, 2010

Freeman’s Philadelphia Auction
July 10, 2010
Freeman’s Auction House
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
www.freemansauction.com

 This summer, The Vader Project launches the final chapter of its four-year art odyssey. The iconic collection features 100 Darth Vader Helmets re-imagined by today’s most notable artists. Completing its epic world tour, The Vader Project returns to Los Angeles in June for a special ten-day exhibition in Hollywood as a preview to the upcoming Freeman’s Auction in Philadelphia.
 

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For some reason last night I ended up on youtube watching clips from Vietnam movies, specifically Apocalypse Now.  I ended up coming across the trailer for a DVD  about soldiers who surfed during the Vietnam War.  The DVD is called Between The Lines. Looks like it could be real good.  It is narrated by John Milius who I believe was in Apocalypse Now

Synopsis:

BETWEEN THE LINES explores the Vietnam War through the prism of the surfing sub-culture. The film offers unique insight into the dramatic effect that the Vietnam War and draft had on young American men who rode waves.

Between the Lines explores the choice that most draft age surfers faced during the Vietnam War era: either go to war or evade the draft. It was one or the other. Between the Lines delves into the lives of two surfers who choose opposite paths. Pat Farley and Brant Page.

While following the lives of these two surfers the film chronicles the impact of the Vietnam War on the surfing lifestyle. From the peaceful shores of Hawaii to the canopy jungles of Vietnam, Between the Lines excavates the surfing cultures response to an extraordinary circumstance.