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.