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write NOW NOW 4/23/01 >> Lewman's Wild Years :  We've all considered this. Tossed the idea around. Wondered. 1% of us act on it. Meet the 1%. Mark Lewman, writer, idea-machine, cool hunter and musician, has dropped out. For real. Sold a home in the suburbs, given away the dog, the cat, the car, the job and fled. With his entire immediate family, wife Nadine and daughters Hannah and Tuesday. Location : South America. Timespan of drop : Undetermined. This was his latest email : "Less than a month ago I called you from my cell phone with a strange shrill tone in my voice, explaining that we had just put our house on the market. "Monday we move out. "The cell phone is disconnected. I can see the mirage on the tarmac from the window of our plane bound for Costa Rica glistening, in the distance, just a few days away. Time moves slow but can feel like the arc of a rollercoaster about to pitch downhill and through a fuckin' double corkscrew." Anyone wanting to reach Mark will have to do so through his Powerbook via this email address : cognosumer@hotmail.com. If you need to mail him anything physical, send it here, Bend Press, 22500 S. Vermont Ave., Torrance, CA 90502 USA. We'll hold it 'til he returns. Watch Bend Now for the Lewman Family Updates. All the best to you, Lew, we're proud. But get Black Mayonnaise finished while you're down there, okay? THEN 4/22/01 >> FOB, Matthew Marteinsson wrote this email and we became curious. Who was the band? ...was visiting your site and found my e-mail printed there got very excited every once and awhile I surprise myself by just how excited I get about the little things there was this time I was talking to a friend about his band which was really small at the time now they're a little bigger but they play ambient noise music stuff so even if you're big your still really small so he was telling me about this re-mix album he was going to put out of there stuff and how he got these guys from Seattle to do one for him so I was really impressed and getting excited for him and we started talking how we were probably the only two people in the city who would be impressed by this The band? we asked. Who's the band? Vote Robot. Nice MP3 snippets available on the site. >> Only 1 Hessenmob/Bend board left. THEN 4/19/01 >> Racecar song added to the Bend Ear. Spike Jonze sings the lyric, "Eli's opening up for Eric's band." Eli is Eli Bonerz, drummer for Racecar, and Eric is Eric Bonerz, drummer for Free Kitten. It's all true. >> Only 2 of those Hessenmob/Bend boards left. >> There was a suggestion made that we make a Bend t-shirt using the Wellbutrin tablet shown below. Good idea? >> Couple more publishers listed on the GPT. No bites. One bit of advice was "Dig in your heels." >> Adam Voith publisher of TNI Book's Little Machines magazine is soliciting contributions for issue no.2. Any aspiring writers, journalists, comic artists, etc., should contact Adam. Little Machines is a gem. Have we been plugging it too much? Oops. THEN 4/18/01 >> There are 4 (four) Hessenmob/Bend skateboards available on the Consumption Machine. Hessenmob is a German skate company run by master-of-many-trades, Christian Roth -- yes, the man responsible for all the photography for Valley, cover included. Over the past year Hessenmob has issued commissioned graphics from the likes of Evan Hecox, Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Michael Leon and Don Pendleton. These aren't available in the US. If you want to check out Michael Leon's edition, he's got it posted for sale on his website, Commonwealth Stacks. >> New section, peoples. Download obscure audio at the Bend Ear. First featured artist is One-Cylinder. If you've got any music, sound-bites, speeches, noise, etc., that you would like to contribute to Bend Ear, write us to make suggestions, or just send the file... either way, we're open. >> Enter the maze drawing contest at Ohio Girl, designer/photographer Andy Mueller's newly upgraded site. THEN 4/16/01 >> An email from Greg Barbera : AJ, What's it take to get a link at Crailtap or Bend? G Boy, www.saltforslugs.com >> Submitted by Kevin Wilkins : WAR THEN 4/13/01 >> Anti-depression medication. Really.  THEN 4/09/01 >> It may be that the very last Glimpse has been written. At least, by me. Feel free to write your own now. And if you're interested, use the Glimpse Publication Tracker (GPT) to follow the lives of mailed Glimpse manuscripts. Suggestions for recipients are encouraged. Write me. >> Look, Bend isn't any kind of portal for cool sites. But gadamm if we aren't living in the ice age compared to this site. >> Click here for an impromptu psychological evaluation of MTV's Jackass by a licensed psychotherapist.  Johnny Knoxville as Greg Poogainus. THEN 4/08/01 >> Bend Press Quote of the Month : "You tried getting into one of my ports... NOT GOOD... keep it up and you will be shut down permanently. That is a Canadian promise." --Darlene From Response episode #9 , now up. >> ModArt has posted the breast mold gallery on their web site. The molds were created from volunteers, then given to a set of artists to "paint." Artists include Ed Templeton, Futura, Joe Sorren, Andy and Kelley Jenkins, Randy Janson, Lance Mountain, Shepard Fairey, Lori D. and many more. The molds were shown at shows in New York and San Francisco (in conjunction with Boarding For Breast Cancer) and are now up for auction on the ModArt site. All moneys will be given to breast cancer research. A good chance to own an original work and help a good cause at the same time. A word of caution, the site loads slow, but is worth the browsing. >> Little Engines, issue no.1 is now available from TNI Books for a reasonable price. "No Good For Your Heart," a short by Jenkins, is in there as well as Suzannah Felts (who wrote an excellent piece entitled "Strategically Concealed Light"), Jim Munroe and more. >> Artist, Edith Abeyta, has been piecing together a quilt made by 4" x 4" contributions. Materials vary. See the one's sent in so far, here. Enter "edith@suprememundane.com" where it says "visit albums & enter a friend's email." Click "go." A list of albums will appear with descriptions, click on the one, or all, you want to view. Also check out more of Edith's work on Supreme Mundane. She has supplied a template you can download in order for YOU to contribute to her quilt project. >> Justin Goetz has nice work up here. Please go see it. THEN 4/06/01 >> Mr. Mark Lewman writes about the job... THE COOLHUNTER I prepare trend reports for fortune 1000 companies. I am paid to play the disenfranchised against the disrespected make the F1000 feel connected to the cognosumers who reject them, stuck in the cultural crosshairs. I package the questions and organize the answers, emailing the butcher, blackmailing the baker, sharing the bone marrow with clandestine video game maker. I tell them about funky black barbers in Memphis using fire to cut hair. Swedish teens bored to tears soaking their tampons in vodka to get juiced in school. Crispin Glover joins the Wu Tang Clan and nobody bothers to understand but everybody says dude that's cool. The revolution is a bunch of white kids addicted to database pollution yelling slogans, brandishing upside down crosses bearing inverted icons; Pillsbury wants to update the dough boy and make butter 'younger', stick that fucker with fork and call your mother, scrape the lard from the fat of the land and leave it smoking in the pan. And some guy in a conference room in Ohio says into his speakerphone: "Tell me more about the Krautrock movement and the abstract bands." I spit out details to counteract, and wipe my face with my cuff, generating more fluff, without concentrating on the end result, just the next step which is an orchestrated effort to tap into tech step to sidestep the fact that all packaged goods are the same, only the name changes. and the game rearranges and the world Wayne lives in can be divided into stages, phases, trends, fads, and crazes. Declare a war on a demographic, paying top dollar for a guerilla campaign of street posters placed in prime places where kids congregate and pedophiles masturbate to juvenile faces, services provided by an eco-terrorist graffiti artist specializing in revitalizing heavy metal. His brandalism spreads the viruses we peddle: Kids in custom vans should crave candy and chemicals, rejecting morals and resting on their laurels, making fun of Pauly Shore as they get addicted to death and keep whoring for more. And some guy in a conference room in Ohio will smile. "This is teen cool AND mom cool." What's hot, what's right, what's not in the spotlight? Hold a focus group and retool, train the pilots to tame the planes and get ready for a midair refuel. Do kids really think black is the new brown? or is platinum the new black? Who do we assassinate, and what era is ripe for a comeback? Do you trust me to keep the world on track? Bend Press 22500 S. Vermont Avenue Torrance, CA 90502 USA fax 310/783/1920 ©2001, Bend Press / Andy Jenkins All Rights Reserved All other works copywritten by the individual artists / writers |