Dpmhi Sale

From an e-mail that I received last weekend. Pretty self-explanatory. Sorry I didn't inform y'all sooner. Get there before the sale ends on Sunday.

Also, I got my shoes today, I will post pics later. They look much better in person than the preview on Nike iD.

Bring The Toys!

Check it out, yeah y’all c’mon, here we go again. Turn it up! Bring the toys!

Paraphrased from Bring the Noise by Public Enemy

Check it out, the new Limited Ed. "Twilight" Mad*l from My Plastic Heart, here we go again. I thought I was over the whole toy thing, but this is such a nice little artistic piece, it could be in a gallery or painted on Asian pottery. Instead, it is painted on a little vinyl figure. The Asian landscape painting with Kanji characters gives the figure some well-deserved artistic cred. Limited to only 300 pieces, I appreciate the fact that you can get it with a Limited Ed., signed & numbered, archival quality Giclee print and double-sided metallic postcard. The full set is limited to only 50 pieces and both the set and single figure are only available from My Plastic Heart. I really like this design and find it very aesthetically pleasing, maybe because of my fascination with Asian art, maybe because of my love of the outdoors and the landscape in art. Either way, it is a very attractive Limited Ed. toy as well as a work of art. My birthday is coming up in March, maybe they will last until then.

Mmmm... Chocolate... D'oh!

Who doesn't like starting the New Year off right with some yummy-delicious chocolate? If you are anything like my dad, you are constantly yelling, "Where's my damn chocolate?!" I ate a lot of chocolate over the holidays, but none of it was as cool as these Limited Ed. Yoyamart x Chocolate Bar Artist series Chocolate Bars.

10 artists and designers created the labels for these new chocolate bars. The set features dark chocolate with almonds (Gary Baseman), ChocoMinty (David Horvath), Crispy Rice (Sun Min Kim), Dark Chocolate (Rolito), Dark Caffetto (Nathan Jurevicius), Chocolate Milk (Toy2R), Milk Toffee Crunch (Dalek), Milk Hazelnut (Tim Biskup), Dark Salty Pretzel (Friends with You) andMilk Salty Pretzel (JD Boujnah).

A portion of the proceeds benefit the Third Street Music School.

[via Cool Hunting]

Where Am I?

Yeah, I have been gone for a while. Up in the Rotten Apple enjoying the company of my family during the Festival of Lights. It is a very exciting, entertaining time of year, so I am once again completely broke. Of course, I did get a flat tire last night and had to pay almost ninety bucks to get a new one. And I still need to get the matching tire so that I won't have a blow-out on the interstate and go careening off of a cliff into oblivion, which actually sounds kind of nice right about now. If I lived in New York I wouldn't have to worry about flat tires, just transit strikes, yippee! Anyway, I had a great time in the city with my family staying at my brother's amazing apartment on the Upper West Side. It's not really his apartment, it's his friend Judd's mom's apartment, but she is in England for a while, so he is caring for it while she is gone. The place is ridiculous. The largest apartment I have ever been in in New York. Twice the size of my place in Carrboro, and only twice the rent because Judd's mom has been living there for so long and the place is rent-controlled or whatever. Anyway, I'm jealous. But that has always been the case when it came to my brother. But this is neither the time nor the place to go into that. Instead, I'll just post some pictures from the trip and from the Annual Oyster Roast at Drew and Misty's place on December 10^th that I hadn't gotten around to posting yet. I hope you enjoy them. I sure enjoyed taking them. I also enjoyed the oysters, beer, cheese pie, etc. Oh yeah, the night pictures of buildings are looking out Seth's living room window. The living room that is twice the size of mine and does not include the dining room and kitchen like mine does. No, his dining room is almost as big as the living room and his kitchen is twice the size of mine. And he has three bathrooms. And two bedrooms. And a study. And Zabar's is right across the street. Bastard.

Proper

Well, I've been on a bit of a sneaker kick recently and I got an e-mail this morning from Proper letting me know that they have some new kicks in stock, so I thought I would share. Unfortunately, I don't live in Long Beach and Proper only does in-store sales. So if you happen to live in Cali and can make it out to Long Beach check out the new stock and let me know what you think. I'm personally diggin' these Nike Laser 1-Piece Dunk low sneakers. It doesn't get much classier than that.

Fair Trade Kicks

I got an e-mail this afternoon from Aurélie at the new, first brand of fair trade sneakers, Veja, about their new kicks. Here's the info:

We launched in March 2005 in Paris and Tokyo, Veja, the first brand of fair trade sneakers. The concept is to make sneakers that do respect men and nature. Materials used are organic cotton produced by a cooperative of small Brazilian producers and rubber from wild Amazon Hevea trees. The cooperative of latex producers is fighting against deforestation. Manufacturing is done in a cooperative that respects the dignity of workers. The fair trade premium paid to the producers aims at financing concrete development projects in heath, education or environment fields. All along the production chain, from small Brazilian producers to European, Japanese or American consumers, the new brand tries to have a positive social impact and opens new ways of doing business.

The first Veja model is inspired by Brazilian volley shoes from the 70’s.

Pretty cool, huh? And the shoes ain't half bad, either. Check out all the flavors on their website. I like the black and yellow ones the best. The website is all in French, so this is all of the information I have. I have no idea if they are available yet, but they do have a list of retailers on their website. If it weren't all Flash, I would link to it, but you are just going to have to find it yourselves. The only US retailer listed is SCOUT at 7920 West Third Street in Los Angeles.

I Am Invincible!

So last months I mentioned a little something at the bottom of one of my posts about the fact that I was one of the five winners of the Nike Invincible contest over at Freshness Mag. Well, last week I finally received my prize, a gift certificate for a pair of custom-designed sneakers over at Nike iD. First of all, I would like to thank Freshness Mag and Nike for naming me one of the winners of this contest. I never win anything, other than swim meets and lacrosse games in high school, so this is big for me. I think this is the first real, physical thing that I have ever won. Secondly, I would like to quote the winning paragraph that I wrote on what the word "invincible" means to me:

"Invincible" is a state of mind. If you think you could fall, get hurt, suffer injury, or sustain damage than you will. If you want to be invincible, you have to think of yourself as invincible. Invincible is running through the wall at the end of the race. Invincible is carrying tacklers through the end zone, down the tunnel and into the locker room. Invincible is destroying all of your enemies without sustaining a scratch.

That's what I won with. There must not have been a whole lot of entries for me to win with this one, but that's the way things go. And lastly, here's a picture of the sneakers I designed. I did eight designs before I finally settled on these Air Bruin Max iD's. I like the gold swoosh, but was hard pressed to find colors that I thought went well with it. I think the blue and red work well. Of course, half the fun of Nike iD is coming up with new designs. Check out my other designs, The Strip Club and Country Fried Vengeance.

Some People...

Still haven't figured it out yet. Pottery, not toys! Sheesh, what do I have to do around here to convince people. Anyway, I got an e-mail this weekend from My Plastic Heart letting me know that they have some new toys in stock and that if you place your order by 8:00pm EST today, you will receive it by Christmas. If you live in the United States, that is. Christmas, shmistmas! Who cares if it is a few days late. Do you think Santa minds? Less crap for him to carry. Anyway, the first toy on Satan's list is this Limited Ed. 2005 Taiwan Toy Festival version TADO Sissyfists' Puchoo 3" vinyl toy. This figure represents the mascot/percussionist of the Tokyo die-hard punk band The Sissyfists. Apparently they are the worst Crass tribute band you could ever imagine, with a touch of Melt Banana and a little Sick of It All. Sounds wonderful. I'll have to download some of their music to check it out. The figure is also only available from My Plastic Heart.

Next up we got the cute little Cactus Friends from Italian artist Simone Legno and his art brand tokidoki. The cute, prickly little bastards are apparently taking the world by storm. The only one currently available is the little pooch Bastadino, but the rest should be available soon. The Cactus Friends are tokidoki's first entry into the world of designer toys, but based on their cuteness, they won't be the last.

Any Relation To Jerry?

Like I said yesterday, toys are out and pottery is in for collectors this holiday season. So I was searching Google for some fine Limited Ed. pottery and I stumbled upon the Luna Garcia gallery. I don't know if they share any relation to Jerry Garcia, or even Andy Garcia for that matter, but they do have some rather interesting Limited Ed. art prints based on pottery. These prints are more interesting to me than the actual handcrafted, signed and dated pottery featured at the gallery. According to the website:

These signed and numbered, limited edition giclée prints by Luna García Editions are printed on 100% rag paper using colorfast inks and protected with a UV coating. The editions are limited to 200. The image size for each print is 15" x 10.8". The paper size is 19" x 13"

I especially like the use of comic strip imagery in the prints. It reminds me of a painting that was in my grandparents' bathroom when I was a child. It was a painting of three nude figures over an old Pogo comic strip. The juxtaposition of imagery always fascinated me. And I like naked ladies (you know who you are).

I Hate Christmas

I think I'm repeating myself here, but I really can't stand this ridiculous consumer holiday and all of the crap associated with it. Selena, a woman(?) I share my office with, has her radio tuned to the Christian rock station and it is driving me fuckin' bananas! This is the kind of thing that makes people bring semi-automatic weapons into work and kill! Kill!! KILL!!! She's lucky I'm not very fond of gun-ownership. I mean, it's fairly obvious that I'm Jewish. Is she just trying to torture me? Anyway, for those out there who feel the way I do this time of year, check out Fuck Christmas. He pretty much says it all. Brilliant!

[via It is OK]