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.

Burritos have a reputation for being a classless food. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because there is a time and a place for classless foods. My issue with the matter is that when you get down to the brass tacks of the issue, burritos aren’t so different from Greek wraps, which you tend to find in a lot more aristocratic environments. If you were to make a meal right now using a pita, refried beans, feta cheese, cheddar cheese, grilled vegetables and tzatziki sauce, what would you call it? I’m not sure. You’re combining some of the finer elements from both the Mexicans and the Greeks. The thing though is that Greeks are universally renowned as being one of the sexier cultures in existence. I don’t think I know anyone that would make the same argument for Mexicans. When I was around 12, I had a massive crush on a Greek girl named Caterina Papadakis who was a few grades above me. She must of hit her growth spurt way early because she was always at least a foot taller than everyone. I always imagined her as a supermodel although she was clumsy and sluggish since she grew so fast. She also had these two beauty marks perfectly symmetrical above each side of her upper lip. I always thought that beauty marks like that were super sexy, and she had two of them. What a babe. She was the perfect girl.

One night, I had this amazing dream about her and I and the local public pool. It was probably one of the best dreams I have ever/will ever have for the rest of my life, so it has been stitched into my memory fabric for eternity. I was playing baseball with my friends in the park that neighbors the pool. I was in center field and had to chase down a foul ball that was hit into the pool. As I am swimming around, fully clothed in my baseball gear, Caterina Papadakis comes out of nowhere looking super hot, and asks me if I want to go down the slide with her. We start climbing the stairs to the top of this giant red slide. The stairs just kept going up into the heavens forever and I am getting increasingly terrified by the second, but her soothing grasp of my right hand keeps me calm and motivated to get to the top. Eventually we reach the stair’s crest, and I refuse to go back down. She convinces me that if we go down together, then we won’t die, so we lay in the slide together. Suddenly, mid-slide, she is completely naked, and we are making out for the rest of the descent down the giant red waterslide that reaches into the heavens. Even though it was just a dream, it went down as one of the most awesome, and arguably most important experiences I have ever had.

The next day, I got to school and immediately started looking for Caterina Papadakis. I remembered the dream so vividly that I knew that when I saw her again, I would be able to picture her naked exactly how she was in real life, which was more than enough reason for me to be late to homeroom. Yet, she wasn’t in her usual location, which was gym class. After asking around, I found out that earlier that morning, some boy had hit her in the face with a dodge ball and called her a fat giant. Evidently, she beat him so mercilessly that it took both the gym teacher and the vice principal to pull her off of his face. I rushed over to the principal’s office as fast as I could to try and catch a final glimpse of my lover before she was taken to the county juvenile delinquency center. I saw her for the last time just as she was leaving the building, wrapped in the arms of the law. She looked back at me like I could save her somehow; like I could break her captive-holder’s wrists like she did with John Gillilan’s face, even though she didn’t even know my name. I stared at her with jilted lover’s eyes, and watched her leave my life. Apparently she is a born-again Christian somewhere in Wyoming now and has three illegitimate children. I don’t have a crush on her anymore.

-Ben Majoy