scam is one of our favorite zines of all time and recently we had the honor of hanging out with author erick lyle aka iggy scam for a few days here in croWtown. this issue is all about a donut shop in san francisco (”hunt’s”), which is open “25 hours a day” and comes across like a true-life late-nite “interzone”, replete with gray-area crime and dusty eyeballs. erick, i forgot to tell you that one time i was waiting for the commuter rail here in worcester and i saw your wasted caricature on the side of a grainer and it made me really happy.
scam 5 1/2 - i forget, it’s like 2 or 3 dollars
onion flavored rings website with mp3s and everything!
dan wars is our good pal, a real goon with great dumb tattoos, an excellent eye for curious detail, quick to laugh when something goes hilariously wrong, and always there when you need him. he’s still in shock that we actually have a store, and every time he comes to visit he shakes his head and says “you guys have a store…”, the same way one might say “i can’t believe you gave the spray paint to the monkey”. you know- an expression of the pride one has as a tax-paying citizen of a totally bonkers world. in addition to being our brother and biggest fan, he always brings us really really great stuff, then runs around the store hiding it from us. this framed set of “winkies” we found pretty easy- as you move around it you catch the nice lady and her nice desk phasing between two similar realities. dan wrote on the back “nice lady, nice desk”, and something else that i don’t know what it means. i know there’s another name for this kind of picture but i don’t know what it is.
nice lady $4
full disclosure- i put this tape out. this tall grey dude with rose-colored glasses and black fingernails started coming in the store and buying only halloween shit, and we started talking about only horror movies. one day he’s holding this cdr, and i’m like hey buddy what’s that? oh, i’m supposed to give this to you. two words on the disc- “SNOW GHOST”. cut to now and he comes to the store every wednesday first thing (even though i’m *always* late) and i give him a little envelope with money from all the tapes sold in the previous week. and just before halloween he put out a book of halloween jokes, which is downloadable here.
snow ghost “on top of a silver mountain” cassette $3
full mp3s of this tape, plus an extra cut!
artwork on the tape cover by penny leslie
also, snow ghost was our employee of the month for last october! you go ghoul!
eric yankus-franco is a really funny and great guy in that modern method that matches an amicable, attentive, and ready acceptance with the willingness to eat things for money and a general sure-why-not-ness (probably triggered by a hilariously phallic last name). eric left this shirt at mike’s house after a show and now we’re selling it. he says he’ll come buy it and maybe that’s true– one thing for sure is that if you buy this shirt and he sees you wearing it you are in for a great ride. today’s model is once again the lovely pam. take a bow, pam!
eric’s shirt- $6
pictures from eric’s “king for a day” project, in which he wore a child’s size elvis costume and ate everything elvis ate in one day in one day. warning- contains serious vomiting and extreme mooseknuckle!
do you like that movie “the fly”? i do- both the old vincent price one and the newer cronenberg one. i mean, they’re two totally different movies, but i like both of them. the old one has that marvelous suspense, the new one has that wonderful terrible psychological transformation, lest we forget the part where jeff goldblum throws up on the donut and then eats it. OK, i can’t lie- the idea for this dude i got from a stuffed animal in the collection of jim drain. he was off building a 12 foot kaleidoscope in the south of france, mike t said i could sleep in his room, and i woke up looking at his stuffed animal collection which for a brief period had me thinking i was on the moon, or my eyes were in my skull wrong.
monkey fly - SOLD to ska dave between the time i took this picture and now.
jim drain links and pics on google
“little matt” is our one-man street team- a handsome mile-a-minute talker, sharp as a damascus blade, with awesome full sleeve tattoos he gave himself with a homemade tattoo gun at age 14 (!) and an almost inextinguishable font of maniacal schemes. we give him huge stacks of flyers which grant him just the angle to hassle mercilessly all manner of folks he runs into- fresh punks, secret goons, clever animals, street poets, weird babes and so forth. he recently shaved his head and got a job as a salesman for a promotions company, wearing nautica shirts and running around the mall trying to sell salon packages and not get nabbed by mall security. i was worried at first that he was using his incredible people skills for evil, but then his second day on the job he got drunk with a co-worker and the usual madness re-ensued. he writes the zine “poor and forgotten” and can always be counted on for a solid high-five and a great story. lately he’s taken to pretending to be canadian. if you see him and he starts this shit, just roll with it.
matty johnson for mayor! D.I.Y.L.A.M.F.!!!!!
chris dooley is this great guy from western mass who sets up tons of shows at the flywheel, an all ages DIY show venue out thataways. i call him “the human rolodex” because he’s got all the facts and all the figures always lined up in his brain ready for instant recall. this is a shirt he made for, and wore to, several suicidal tendencies shows (the bottom says “SK8 + DESTROY”). check the shirt montage on your copy of the first suicidal record, and you’ll see it ranks with the best of them, or anyway, it’s the cutest. what? you don’t have the first suicidal record? are you for real?
this shirt is modeled by matt z, famous substitute teacher and member of bone zone. hi matt!
suicidal cycos shirt - $7
wikipedia entry on the aforementioned first suicidal tendencies album. you need this record!
this is our foray into the “urban vinyl” scene. eyes to the skies and always googlin’, this prancy/respectful little chap is always silently like “then what?” to everything. working on an overpriced web edition of this in the style of the time.
fujichia donkey - $3
urban vinyl on wikipedia
