O-bama! O, Bushwick.

Terror Alert Taupe: Last week’s deluge of Obama-tamism has melted and reconstituted as sludgy gray Reality on the streets of New York. The foreign scent of legit change (and judging from Obama’s first acts in office, his rhetoric packs heat) and The First Black(ish) President are both brilliantly righteous returns for eight years of Canadian flag patch purchases and “God Bless America” interruptions of otherwise-innocuous sporting events. But when New Yorkers leave their apartments every morning, there’s still frozen trash on the ground, the train still leaves 10 seconds too soon, the layoff plague is still claiming friends, and it’s still cold as shit. In other words, it’s back to being January in a massive, under-serviced metropolis. In what I can only hope was light hyperbole, Reuters even ran a piece suggesting that the city might be headed toward another 1970s. Judging from separate interactions I had with two neighbors on my block over the last few days -- captured henceforth in always-classy haiku form -- Bushwick/Los Sures de Williamsburg is already well on its way:

A man’s soul destroyed
as father learns he was touched
by ball coach while small.

Sitting helpless on
Steps. Cane fallen to the ground
She stuck long? Unknown.

A bit of a downer post, you say? Here -- grab a popsicle, watch this, feel better. 

H.S. Thompson, Businessman

From time to time, among the peyote-driven snake-femme battles and botched Rolling Stone assignments, Hunter Thompson managed to Take Care of Bidniss when he decided his associates' missteps had reached catastrophic levels. A source sends us proof positive of one such episode, in which Thompson takes the meat grinder to attorney George Tobia for apparently bungling negotiations with New York publishing house Simon & Schuster over the 1998 publication of The Rum Diary:

In another declassified communique written two days earlier, the Master of the Cannonball Sendoff informed Tobia of his fate while simultaneously filling him in on leisure plans for the day and demanding an estimate of his "exact profit expectations" from the soon-to-be-released Fear and Loathing film adaptation. The last graph alone speaks volumes about a man who knew he had the juice to disregard formality and spent the bulk of his career doing just that: 

For his part, Tobia seemingly made good with Thompson after the dustup: At present, the Boston lawyer continues to represent HST's estate -- 19 years after the two met while Tobia was handling the estate of another writer who rejected conformity in savage fashion: Jack Kerouac. 

Good Girl in a Stuy Gone Bad

The homegirl JS took one for gentrification the other week, sacrificing a non-shining eye and a purse full of goodies in exchange for 18 months of cheap rent in Bedstuy. Moving time. Pics coming, but five days later and her face is still a horrid mess. Fucking teenagers. 

With that said, methinks this blog needeth an explanation: IDM's been preparing to come at ya for more than two years now, an idea that developed into a concept and has remained such since summer '06. We're into the latter stages of dropping our first print issue, with a website also forthcoming. Once we're fully operational, you'll be looking at an online zine with periodic print releases distributed in our three hubs: NYC, SFC and LA/OC. We're onto music, politics, art, multiculturalism and sports, with a focus on the places we live (see previous sentence) and visit, and creating under one overriding rule: We don't print pieces on anything that we don't find entirely enthralling or hilarious (and sometimes both). 

So there it is. Time to get get on with the damn thing already. Enjoy. 

Here We Are.

This past Tuesday, an African-American finally got the chance to play president. 

This coming Tuesday, suburban white kids will finally get the chance to play an African-American samurai with the bombast of Samuel L. Jackson. 

Both unthinkable even 15 years ago. Both reality now.

If ever there were a day for Dubya to fall face-first off that wagon, this is it.

Welcome to It Doesn't Matter.