Prezi is more interesting than powerpoint. It’s not even a fair to put the two up against each other. It’s like comparing apples and oranges, or better yet, an apple that was picked in 1984, and an Orange that was genetically engineered to make whoever eats it immediately attractive, talented, and good at sports without even trying. It’s the cure all of presentational ills.

However, it was designed by geniuses. The problem with geniuses is that when they’re talking, they’re usually thinking of string theory instead of what they’re actually saying. SO, when they make a video explaining what Prezi is, they look ridiculous.

www.internwhisperer.com thinks that I made a few good points apparently and posted my opinions on their fancy-ass website. You can read it by clicking on this sentence or the picture below - speaking of geniuses. This is a picture of a man name James Curran. James Curran invented the ski-lift. I don’t think that this man is the same person, but according to google images, his name is ALSO James Curran so he gets partial credit.

I’m diggin’ this one out of the archives. I wrote a piece for the anti-tourist while I was in Finland in September. The article was about a rock bar in Tampere, Finland called “Ruma“, but had an elaborate subplot revolving around a series of words that I found written on my forearm the next morning. The phrase was “space shuttle to Venus”, and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant or where/why I would have written it on my arm in the first place, so I tried to deconstruct my night using the article as my memory canvas. It’s still an unsolved mystery.

During the last five or so months of 2009, I lived somewhere in Europe. Most of my time was spent in Edinburgh Scotland. Eventually, I was living in Berlin, then Romania, then Paris. It was the kind of opportunity that gives people masters status on the harmonica. I had no such instrument, so I spent all of my time writing about things that I liked. Some of these articles can be found on a website called The Anti-Tourist. Some may call them “reviews”, which is essentially the purpose of the site. I however did less “reviewing” and a lot more “describing my opinions of a broad topic all under the auspices of a small shop or European destination”. Let’s call it “anti-journalism”, or rather, “not paying attention in college courses”. Read my opinions about select places in Europe by clicking on this sentence, or the bizarre picture below, which I found when I typed “Europa” in google images.

If you’ve ever read anything else on this site, or have eyes, you’ve come to realize that I only like depressing things. My friend at the Chicago Art Magazine thought that my blackened heart needed an emotional makeover, so she asked me to do a review of photographer Eugene Richards’s new show at at Roosevelt University’s Cage Gallery. He only takes pictures of flowers in bloom and people in love. Just kidding. All of his pictures are actually super depressing. Somehow, he’s fooled the Gods and still makes work that is not only depressing but also really awesome and moving, a seemingly contradictory combination. His new show is called A Procession of Them: The Plight of the Mentally Disabled, or as I like to call it “People not Smiling when they’re in cages: A documentation of how life isn’t fair”. You can read my review here by clicking on this sentence and either the picture of the man in the cage, or the picture of the man in the cage. The third image will take you to something completely unrelated. I tried to make jokes in this paragraph, but, you know, it’s hard to joke about people being treated like animals in mental hospitals.

Sometime in early June when I started rewriting the Team Win site, I searched pretty painstakingly for a painting of a New England sea captain wearing a turtle neck and holding a glass of brandy. The closet thing I found was a painting by Stephen Warde Anderson, an outsider artist in Rockford Illinois. Ever since, he’s been one of my favorite artists. I interviewed him about reincarnation, naive classicism, and solving world problems. He has a show opening in Chicago in early February. If you bring the turtlenecks and the comb-over, I’ll bring the Hennessee.

Read my interview with SWA by clicking on this different colored text or the picture below.

(www.stephenwardeanderson.com)

I love metal. I love it so much that I have it tattooed on my bottom lip. Granted, I love a lot of things and certainly enough to tattoo on my bottom lip, but I can’t imagine it being as impressive telling someone that I have a tattoo on my bottom lip, then showing them “Lime Popsicles”, or “Nerd Rope”. Last weekend the Swedish Black Metal giants Marduk were in Chicago. Despite their massive success, it was the first time that they’ve been to Chicago. As much as I love metal, I’m wholly confused by the existence of black metal. Considering how incredibly evil the entire genre seems to be, you’d think that it would have come from a place like Moldova, Cleveland or somewhere else depressing, but it actually got its life start in Sweden, easily one of the best off countries in the entire world. I sat down with the guitarist and founder of Marduk to talk about exactly this, their new album Wormwood, and Satan. The Chicago Reader apparently liked it quite a bit, however apparently not quite as much as someone with the user name “baby jesus must die”, who posted a comment directly below a user who may or may not be my uncle saying “go ben!”. Thanks for the kind words “baby jesus must die”. Read it by clicking on anything that looks clickable.

There are two old men who live in my town and everyone assumes are completely crazy. No one really knows what their deal is, so I started to follow them around and ask them questions. One day, I met them outside of Tim Horton’s and proceeded to follow them around and ask them about how to be a decent drifter. They gave me some great tips on how/where to ride a rail car, and what city to avoid when I am drifting (Lima, Ohio). Vice likened this interview to another interview that they did with Harmony Korine about humping trash or something along those lines. Fortunately for my morale, the general public liked this piece more than my article on Romania. Then again, there’s not much that Romania can complain about in this one (apart from my blatant nationalist bigotry which I try to express in all of my articles).  You can read it by clicking on this link or the picture of the two old men below.

A while back, I went to Romania and spent a week wandering around aimlessly. At one point I went on a pilgrimage to find an old citadel in a gypsy village. There was a nice old woman guarding the entrance to the micro-castle. It was not unlike a Zelda level, so I wrote about my experience and Vice Magazine liked it enough to publish it on their website. However, the Romanian population disliked it enough to tell me that I was a nationalist asshat. You can read all of it at Viceland by clicking on these highlighted words or the picture of the gypsy child with the red hat.

I have a friend who is an English teacher in an inner-city school. Anyone who has ever heard about the United States of America probably knows by now that the public education system tends to be sub-par compared to the rest of the world. In fact, the last time I checked, the USA ranks close to the bottom in the UNICEF’s list of best public school systems in the industrialized world. Because Team Win is a group of proactive citizens, we interviewed aforementioned friend about teaching in the inner-city. You can read the transcript in our words section.