my friend mike bell smith used to be in this band that sounded (to me) like jumpy fugazi, then they all got keyboards and mike, the singer, got timbales and a school whistle. they played in nick’s basement, it was great. mike’s a weird dude because his day job is making animated gifs and selling them for thousands of dollars. true story (kind of). an insound reviewer descirbed the band as “happy hardcore”, but i think that’s only because they didn’t know about actual happy hardcore. as is the case with just about every good band i see that tours through worcester’s basements, i bought a few copies of the cd for the store.
professor murder homepage
mp3– professor murder “champion”
cd $6
in-store filesharing setup- a bunch of blank cassettes for sale, a double cassette deck (or tape duplicator, a library of mixtapes with xeroxable liner notes. mix tapes should be thematic, along a theme you are enthusastic and knowledgeable about. purpose of the tapes should be to educate and guide people by the hand along a musical path that maybe they wouldn’t tread unguided. a good example (just an example) would be the tape you give a kid who is just getting into punk and only knows about mall punk, so you make a broad general view of things, covering as many bases and including as many anthems as possible along the varying sub genres. tapes can also be just a good time, or songs linked by topic, or cross-genre examinations. now accepting tapes. tapes must be 90 minutes long and must include photocopiable liner notes on one or two sides of 8.5″ x 11″ paper, that include at least the band name, the song name and the album name (if applicable) for each song. no cds. mail tapes to the store or hand off in person. stop chumpin’. donation of a working high-speed tape duplicator totally welcome.
we got a lot of dice, in a variety of colors, and immediately following their acquisition, i just got really into it (”it” = the idea “dice”). craps is great if you’re a gambler and into clichés (which i am), hot dice is a real good “stuck somewhere” kind of game, and the weed-smoking variant, “zonk” also seems pretty good– though i’ve never played it (true), the zonk wikipedia entry is really good, a great intersection of “stoner” and “nerd” archetypes (not to say such crossovers don’t frequently occur). special big up to meredith “li’l dice” gaydosh, who isn’t a nerd or a stoner but likes stoop games and who i like and who wish i was hanging out with *right now*. dice- $.25
we got some of these things in the other day and like any other thing that i don’t really know what to do with it, i classified it as a “wearable”. these soft plastic geometric craps are the product of a brief fad from the 90s- you lay special plastic beads out on a studded grid, then iron them and they fuse together, leaving you with a gridded design that has absolutely no practical value. while it’s possible that these litter the “mom’s attic” landscape of north america, it’s also quite likely that these were immediately sussed out as total worthlessness, and discarded while still warm, guiltlessly. to me, these things are interesting because they play on the intersection between the deerpath of traditional crafts like cross-stitch and quilting (which are indicators of a certain type of care, pride, and as such, value) and the 4 lane highway of soft fast petrochemical shit. also there’s the idea of millions of 8-year-olds simultaneously plotting out these geometric designs and huffing hot plastic off the iron. whoever made these particular examples had either a crude hand or a artist’s eye, because one side is way more melted than the other, which is cool (this effect is most visible in the picture on the boxy number in the top left). in an effort to rectify this horrible misuse of resources with the new-psychedelia, arthur magazine, god’s eye crowd, let’s say that these are diamonds hand crafted by beautiful children of their own volition out of the souls of plants and animals that died in the forests and plains and oceans of thousands of years ago, and let’s not forget that they will be on this earth long long long after we’re gone. $1.50
ok, studded belts may have blown up, to the point that 80% of people who wear studded belts nowadays do not identify as punk, but that’s just a fad and studded shit still rules. some people will get a ton and pour them all onto one totally buck item of clothing (usually a jacket). me, i like to scatter them throughout my wardrobe, one here, a few there, like bedbugs. also like bedbugs, you probably do not want to put them on your pajamas. but far be it from me to tell you how to play bedtime couture. we carry both pyramid and conical studs, because if you have just pyramids, which have a square base, you’re locked into a grid pattern. with the conical studs you can do whatever the fuck kind of dithering pattern you prefer. ESSENTIAL. $.07 each, or 10 for $.50 .
i really like those little glazed clay animals that come with that one kind of tea, so much so that i almost (almost) started buying the tea myself. but instead i just started rolling my own out of some left-over sculpey. true, mine don’t have that rock-tumbled look that the tea animals do, nor did any of my animals ever grace noah’s ark, but they do, i think, have a similar sad quiet dignity that discrete commerce and ephemeral status can only amplify. $2
new blog part of the website for the junk store, come on in and do the mess around.
every day a new item from HBML on display with little story. still signing people up for the rent club, so get it in while you can- $40 and this time it’s jean “secret door” cozzens, cybele “blue shift” collins, and george w “breaking world” myers. bzzzzzz!
this is just a dumb post to upload the new banner
(more info…)
