Hello there. My heart is racing. I have sworn to never-again defend late-era Metallica to anybody ever forever and recent events are trying the steel of my resolve. I must resist—I will resist—and move on. As always, Crook finds a way to get the water boiling with his fantastic Choice is Yours. For the record: I have made the same promise to myself regarding Trent Reznor and Primus. You either like them or you don’t, and I am fine with either.

Let me tell you what I’m not fine with. I am not fine with you not thinking that the currently hanging ‘This Fear You May Know‘ show by Sacramento’s very own Skinner Davis is anything but an epic and brutal odyssey through the pulsing bowels of all that is awesome and unholy in all this wretched land. Forever.

I had chance to check this show out a week ago, and my mind is still blown. I am reading this through a brainstain on my monitor. That is how blown my mind is. My business partner and I were so shocked and fucking awed, that we—for some reason—decided to send Skinner this text from the gallery floor. He has it. Probably pinned to his bedroom wall. With all the others:

Skinner is no newcomer to the Mishkaverse…as a matter of fact, a fantastic painting of his hangs in the Echo Park store, last I checked. He is awesome. And we all know that. But this…this is something….else.

The colors. The lines. The scope. The fucking IDEAS that are present in this man’s work are just. fucking. incredible. I feel so lucky to have gotten my nose as close as possible to these paintings without touching them, and if you’re anywhere near San Francisco, I would highly recommend that you go check this amazing show out. It is at Whitewalls. (here are more tight-crop detail shots from me)

What else does this week bring us? As if that’s not enough. Oh nothing…just the hugely colossally epic release of Gargamel’s standard-size Deathra. Gargamel often takes it on the nose for being too ‘cute’; their idea of kaiju does just happen to be more streamlined and polished than many other companies out there. That said, this thing is terrifying. Never mind the all-seeing eye of Zolnak. Never mind the leathery bat wings of the night. This thing has two thumbs on each hand.

Two Thumbs. Just like the little one. And the teeth. OMG the teeth.

I am so excited about this toy…so excited that I’m doing my best to look at it as little as possible. I want it to terrify me. I want to walk by it and be completely grossed out. I want it to give me goosebumps. And it is. It is.

Last but not least, I spent this weekend huffing dog farts and putting together this little video for you. Well, I actaully made it for Skinner and laid it’s bloody carcass at his swollen feet in hopes that he would be pleased. A token of my thanks for making such hideously righteous scarescapes. But! I figured I’d share it with you too…he’s sucked all the magic out of it…the soul is gone, sorry…but you are of course free to sit here for a few minutes and chew on the fat that’s left over.

Until.

I wanted to share some images with you of Justine Joli and Ryan Keely together to encourage you to join us this Friday, August 27th from 7-10pm at the Acclaim Magazine signing.

These images make me want to squeeze the both of them real, real hard whenever I see them because they are such beautiful, fun and lovely ladies.  Head after the break for two more sexy shots. See ya Friday.

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Behind-The-Scenes on the Fall 2010 Video

So hopefully you remember this video from this past weekend? Well Fame Giant’s Chris Gualano also snapped a few really great behind-the-scenes shots during the filming of our lovely model, Chloe Wise. We’ve now uploaded them into their own little gallery that you can ogle at your convenience.

It’s a nice 20 images which include Chloe decked in a lot of our graphic tees that are currently online and in-store now or will be available in our second delivery for Fall. Enjoy!

I have to alpologize for not posting on here for quiet a while but the Summer of 2010 has been a rough one for me.  If you visit my site, Stagg Street then you know some of the intimate details behind my cruel, cruel Summer. Broken equipment, getting sick, a big job and of course the stress that comes along with it all.  Wah wah wah! But anyway, I’m back now.

I’m back now though and with everything seeming under control, so who wants to hear me cry about it? Not I!  So I’m here to share with you, one of the better parts to my Summer…  I got to take and shoot three of my favorite models Justine, Darenzia and Marlo to Better Farms in upstate New York. Lots of sexy naked ladies outdoors, how could that be bad?  It was one of the best work trips I ever had because I got to combine my two favorite things: naked ladies and nature!!

Enjoy all these sexy pics after the jump!! I’ll be posting more in the weeks to come.

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Мишка Fall 2010 Lookbook “Take On the World” by Marley Kate

One part downtown kid and one part reform school, our fall collection provides the only reason to be glad that the weather is getting colder. Beach parties turn into house parties, and although it sucks that it gets frosty, we always find a way to make sure staying warm becomes a new favorite pastime. Our new sweaters, jeans, and jackets will help you with that, too.

When the temperature drops, we turn up the heat with sweaters that make you stand out, be it our ode to the U S of A or Henry Spencer. Illustrations by Lamour Supreme, Sara Martin and James Callahan put a mystical edge on the t-shirts, and the our Bear Mop is back with a vengeance. Filling out the season are crisp trousers and wool jackets which give a nod to the preppy in all of us, and classic letter jackets let you experience the jock side (without losing any neurons).

This collection is about going from daytime into the late, late hours of the night – when anything can happen, and probably will. It will keep you prepared for those unexpected moments between twilight and starlight, and straight until sunrise. We’re for doing what feels good and looking good while doing it, focusing on hot style for cold nights, big style for little effort, and good friends for wild times.

Button-down plaid, dark denim, and patterned sweaters will make sure that you stay looking fresh throughout the year and with tons of jackets in tons of styles, this collection sends a big message. It’s about getting the most style for the least amount of effort. Our 2010 Fall lookbook was shot once again by the incomparable Marley Kate, and the collection is currently shipping to accounts worldwide and will be available for purchase at our stores and vendors worldwide very shortly.

And don’t forget that we will be hosting an official 2010 Fall launch party at The Echoplex in Los Angeles tomorrow, Friday August 20th. RSVP now for entry!

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The Bloglin doesn’t have a budget to just send someone down to The Gathering to document it for us… Believe me I tried! Thankfully there’s Igor from Driven by Boredom who’s basically family and was already down there for the Village Voice.

Igor just uploaded a ton of photos from his stay at this year’s Gathering, which will hopefully not be it’s last! Woop! Woop!

Head over to his site for his full 2010 Gathering of the Juggalos gallery!

Before my camera got stole up I was taking a lot of photos of girls.  I even have a little Tumblr site called Nicholas Gazin’s Photos of Girls.  Recently mu obsession with photographic girls lead me to directing and editing a little commercial (shot by Chris Person) for a used clothing store in Manhattan called Metropolis (43 3rd Avenue).  That’s the commercial up above.  The song in it is “S & M Party” by Red Cross who later became better known as Redd Kross. But now I digress…

I’ve been taking photos for a while now. But I especially like to take to photos of girls. Being a man of nerdy interests I’ve hung out with a lot of people who claimed to not understand women,  or who wanted to tell me the differences between men and women as they understood them.

The straight men and gay women I’ve known who tend to claim they don’t understand women, I’ve come to find just really don’t understand people in general. They only notice their social failings with women because they want to fuck them and dominate their time/mind/lives in some way that they don’t want to with dudes.

It’s hard to say how capable people are of understanding what others feel.  Infants have no ability to feel empathy. At some point their brains develop enough that they can.  Do people gain the ability to feel empathy or are we just trained into not hitting other people because we’re afraid of getting punished?

I’ll only ever see things from behind my eyes and no one else will ever see exactly what I see. No one can eject the little Luke Skywalker action figure that is my consciousness from the X-Wing toy that is my body, and put another in it.  Sometimes it seems like all that exists is Me and Everything Else.

For me, taking photos of girls is a way of examining the things in the world that aren’t me in a way that’s entertaining and palatable to viewers. I’m not a girl and I’ll never be a girl so they represent other people for me. People like to look at pictures of girls. Girls like looking at girls, men like looking at girls and  like photographing girls.

Hayao Miyazaki had a tendency towards using little girls as protaganists in his movies. Girls can be strong and proactive but they can also cry and be vulnerable without the audience thinking that they’re wimps.

Taking photos is a fun way to interact with people and their reaction to the presence of a camera can be bery revealing.  I used to know a girl who would almost always open her mouth and put her hand on her neck whenever she saw a camera… like before it even got into photo taking range. Some girls get really upest and hate having their photos taken…I don’t really understand how that works in their minds? Maybe if I keep doing this I will someday.

I’ve run out of things to say about girls, but here are more pictures I took of girls.

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I love shit like this. Some dude (Tony Stamolis, a pretty big deal) figured out how to:

a) take photos of ladies, most of the time naked.
b) eat a bunch of tacos.
c) put it all together and get it made as an ‘art book’: T&T&A.
d) have it not be porn. It’s either a super-racy food book, or a really tame nudie book.

Awesome. And the best part?

Far as I can tell, it’s completely devoid of any sort of high-minded manifesto, mission statement, or preface. Just some girls with they thangs out. And tacos. Period. I was at the doctor’s office the other day and there were a bunch of big framed photos of, like, leaves and snow and leaves in the snow, and I was fine with it. But then—THEN!—I saw another frame—as big as the actual images—that contained the artist’s mission statement. There was a line in there that more or less went like ‘I explore texture. I find texture in almost everything…’

No fucking Duh. What—in the world—would you NOT find texture in? Are you from inside of Asteroids? Maybe then. But only then.

Anyway. This is not about that. It’s about showing you photos of a book of photos of girls and food. Probably NSFW, which is why there are more photos after the jump. If you get caught, just say it’s art.

T&T&A is available now via Sump books. I ordered mine and it came signed, which I thought was a pretty neat bonus.

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Do you all remember this classic Recon tee? Well this is the “Old New York” they were referring to. Peter Feigenbaum, who some of you may recognize from modern-day kraut rockers Dinowalrus has been busy recreating that vibe in his Trainset Ghetto photography and installation project. He builds these very photo-realistic models of 1980s era NYC slums and photographs them in strange scenarios.

You can check out a gallery of images featuring these small instillations over at Like the Spice. Really incredible looking stuff that flood me back to memories of my youth… especially to what Williamsburg used to look like!

He’s going to be doing a solo exhibition at Open Source Gallery in Park Slope this september!  Its quite a ways off, but I thought I’d give you early warning, as it would be great to see you at the opening.  If not, the show runs thru the end of September.

Trainset Ghetto is voyeurism more than it is hobbyism. It is the physical byproduct of teenage suburban daydreams and attempts to live vicariously through an alien post-urban 1980s landscape that was in no way part of my quotidian existence–a landscape that I caught glimpses of through car rides down the Bruckner Expressway, Henry Chalfant’s graffiti photographs, and movies such as “The French Connection” and “Style Wars”. But this odd juxtaposition of lifestyles is a well-hidden text. I make few overt attempts to exploit this perverse juxtaposition of place and social circumstance in my photographs. Rather, the primary emphasis is always “setting the scene” in a hyper-real, trompe l’oeil manner. Unlike other “scene-setting” photographers like James Cassebere, who works with hazy spatial ambiance, or Gregory Crewdson, who creates uncanny cinematic narratives, Trainset Ghetto is concerned primarily with hyper-realism via an attention to small mundane details of the urban architectural vernacular.

Trainset Ghetto is a by-product of the virtual urban spatial realms that defined my teenage experience in the 1990s-virtual realms found in video games ranging from Sim City to Duke Nuke ‘Em to Grand Theft Auto. The motivation to create Trainset Ghetto was cultivated by experiences in these virtual realms. Additionally, there was a desire to objectify these spatial experiences-a desire that could only be fulfilled via miniaturization, a process in which inhabitable spaces become tangible objects. While artists such as Corey Arcangel have responded to the digital realm of the 1990s using similarly digital means, Trainset Ghetto uses anachronistic, analogue means–the age-old pseudo-craft of model railroading.

I’m totally blown away by some of these and am really looking forward to the show even if it’s about a month away. In the meantime why not read an interview we did with Peter about his band Dinowalrus.

the show opens Saturday, September 4th and will run until September 30th. There will be an opening reception on the 4th from 7-10pm and who knows maybe Dinowalrus will even play?

Saturday September 4th, 7-10pm
Open Source
255 17th St. (Btwn 5th & 6th Ave)
Brooklyn, NY