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. 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 man holding the balloons. 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.

I’m in Romania, but I still made a weekly sexy. It’s about 5% about piñatas. Most of the things I write are, if you really look at them closely. Here’s a picture of grizzly bears.

Brent Mowery is an artist who specializes in clay stop motion animations about robots and domestic abuse. You can see his newest piece of work in our Art Section!

image from www.techgadgets.in

(this isn’t Brent and this isn’t his robot, but I think Brent and I alike want for you to think of him in this manner.)

We are going to continue our weekly sexy segment after a respectable hiatus. Expect a new weekly sexy at some point every Tuesday. Not only are we at Team Win going to pursue a concerted effort at shoving our opinions on some arbitrary facet of life down your throat each week, but we are going to change the way that you think about the weekly cycle by making TUESDAY the beginning of the week. That Sunday/Monday business is garbage.

With that being said, the Weekly Sexy this week is (and probably always should have been) burritos. You can find the article in the Words section or by clicking on these two sentences.

(by the way, we aren’t in any way affiliated with the book “The Burrito Diet”, but I found this book when I was searching for pictures of burritos to spice up the site. Team Win does not condone this diet, but we DO condone you looking at the book’s site. It’s pretty ridiculous. Go to http://burritodiet.com. On second thought, maybe Team Win should find a way to be affiliated with this book. )

Believe it or not, every once in a while I actually make useful things.

I actually came to Scotland to finish my degree, though for the first 4 1/3 weeks of the 6 week program, I worked on this website and neglected to learn anything. Around week 4 1/2 I realized that I may actually fail, so I did what I came to do and finished the project on “visualizing Edinburgh” I decided to do an advertising campaign for a nightclub that I like called the Cabaret Voltaire.

I think advertising is fascinating for a lot of reasons. The primary reason being that sometimes, a commercial or a billboard will make me say, “whuh? does Absolut Vodka actually condone that?” In which case. I will buy whatever product it is. It could be a gasoline beverage; I will buy it.

So, I made a portrait of the city of Edinburgh being completely ruined by some menacing characters to go with the theme of “visualizing Edinburgh”. Edinburgh is an incredibly beautiful city. Apparently, the reason is partly because the WWII European Tour 1939-1945 skipped over Edinburgh. SO, I visualized Edinburgh experiencing an apocalypse at the hands of Santa Clause and his cronies, and made it into an Ad Campaign.

CHECK IT OUT IN THE ART SECTION.

On another note of complete irrelevance. This is Hugh Bagley. He “ran” as a write-in president in 2008. He wants to Annex Mexico. It’s probably that easy. Problem solved. Good plan.

I only mentioned him because I needed a picture to pull this post together.