If you aren’t familiar with Glue, you should be. I’ve had the pleasure of bowling with Adeem (vocals) on a couple of occassions — a super nice guy — and caught the rest of the group at various venues around Chicago. If the chance arises, please go and check out one of their shows and pick up Seconds Away or Sunset Lodge. You won’t be disappointed, and if you are, you must be in a coma. Also, keep an eye out for their new album Catch As Catch Can later this year. Until said record drops, check out one of the cuts - A lot to say. One last bit of media goodness, here is a video from Scribble Jam 2004. A little taste of what Glue’s live set is really like.  Awesome!

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So I have been slacking with the posts as of late. Maybe I don’t have anything to say, maybe living surrounded by boxes in a new place has squashed my creativity, or is it the new GameCube? Could be a combination of all of the above. Whatever…

To celebrate this On Paper Wednesday, here is a small ray of light that escaped Oprah’s event horizon: Harper Lee Tells Oprah She’s No Fan of E-books. Thank you, Miss Lee.

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Today I would like to highlight a very unique site.  In keeping with the tradition of “on Paper Wednesday,” I present this to you: World War I Photographs in Color.  Let the images speak hundreds of thousands of words.  Our minds have been conditioned to think that life — prior to the advent and mass availability of color photography — had only occurred in Black and White.  While this is often times metaphorically true, in reality life has and always will be in vibrant color.

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I love Chicago. I love Chicago punk rock. The Lawrence Arms are Chicago punk rock. Do I love them? Not personally, but I shore do like their music. The past is gone, and so are the many bands Brendan, Chris, and Neil preformed with in the days of yore. Slapstick, Tricky Dick, Baxter, the Broadways…the list goes on. It would be unfair to attempt to compare the Arms to these bands. They are long gone. Their influence on the Chicago punk scene continues to live on through the music they left behind. So in the now the Arms spin their tales of late night drinking, growing older without growing up, and living beneath a perpetual grey sky without ever giving up hope. Check out the new issue of Punk Planet for an interview with Brendan.

I always thought band tattoos were kind of tacky. But I will eat my words and get this done someday…

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So, many moons ago I attended a little school in Missouri. While at this school, I studied Art. As I (and many of my new friends) was new to university, we had to take the required core Art courses. These consisted of your basic drawing, painting, color theory, and history classes. They were a breeze, you ask? No, not really. As any new college student can attest, it was not easy to adjust to the new course loads whilst balancing a newly active social life. So, my work might not have been stellar - to say the least. I was lucky enough, however, to have professors who may have experienced some of the drinkin’ and druggin’ earlier in their lives and careers (if it didn’t follow them into the present), that we undergrads now partook. With that said, they knew where we were coming from, and we knew where they were coming from. Everyone around was just kind of phoning it in.

SEMO was a suitcase university - students were there during the week and left for home on the weekends. School was something to do between drinking on the weekends, which started on Wednesday and ended on Monday. Even the Southern Baptists got in on the fun. As serious as SEMO students may have been, it was still a third rate State school in Missouri Meth country (not to knock those that may have gotten a useful degree from there - Big J).

Then there was Ron (names have not been changed to protect identity). Ron taunght drawing and painting. He reminded us of his illustrious Undergrad (or was it Grad) years at the Cranbrook Academy, where they made REAL artists. Ron was (and probably still is) an A-Hole. As such, he and I had a bit of a falling out. See, Ron was under the impression that by insulting his students he would toughen them up to make them work that much harder. Wrong. That may have worked at RISD, SAIC, SVA, or in the Cheese Monkeys, but at SEMO, shit didn’t fly. Once, after a particularly frustrating day in life drawing, I scribbled some kind of asinine sarcastic note on a charcoal study and turned it in. The next day in class, I received a note back from Ron, on school letterhead to boot, reminding me that it was not his job to coddle those who were too lazy and to suck it up. I will say it once and only once, he was probably right. However, that doesn’t change the fact that he was a D-Bag and hack artist. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. Come on, Ron. Having one gallery in Chicago represent your sloppy, ill painted, moderately abstract, take on the industrial complex’s juxtaposition against and interaction with nature does not an Artiste make.

Here is why I am writing this. I was right, for all of you who didn’t believe me. Read this first, and then this. Beautiful, simply beautiful.

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