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Hi ya'll, Chad here (wonting's hubby), I'm introducing this weeks Five Whats. I have known Mike Davis for quite a while now, oddly enough, never in our shared hometown of Nashville. Under his moniker, Mike 2600, he is a super talented dj and graphic designer/artist with his crew Burlesque in Minneapolis. He is also a major record head (one of our continuing friendship builders), a great photographer, and one of the best amateur comedians I know.
Please to enjoy...
What items do you always carry in your bag?
It changes on a regular basis, so let me check for the five most interesting things in there right now...
Laptop computer + cables + emergency startup disk which I've had to use too many times
Digital camera
Map / brochure from the Milwaukee Art Museum
Spa menu from the Standard Hotel in Miami
Terrible rap lyrics I found written on a sheet of paper at a club where I was DJing last weekend
What is your favorite thing that you have ever designed?
Either the "Got to Get it Right" 12" for DJ Day or the Alphabet poster I designed for my niece Hailey.
What are your inspirations?
Toys, cartoons, album and magazine artwork, posters, food and product packaging and other commercial graphics from the 1960s-1970s, travel, weird stuff from Japan, good music, art museums.
What were your favorite TV shows growing up?
Thundarr the Barbarian, Spiderman (the 1967 cartoon version (I actually left my own 5 year old birthday party to walk downstairs and watch it)), Saturday Night's Main Event (WWF special that would come on every now and then), Yo! MTV Raps, Rap City, and Out of Control.
I know that you DJ quite a lot at clubs across the country, what kind of music do you spin? What are you listening to these days?
I started off spinning hip hop and then got really interested in the music where hip hop came from - funk, disco, funky rock, soul, etc. Since then I've been expanding off of that idea as well as getting into some of more action-packed electronic and club music coming out lately. Here are some recent things and artists I've listened to...
SebastiAn "Motor" EP, Lil' Wayne & Juelz Santana, DJ Blaqstarr, DJ Guilty Pleasures, Top Billin', White Girl Lust, James Brown, Eddie Kendricks, P.O.S
bonus What: What are you working on right now?
Just finished the label design for a new EP on Melting Pot Music for a group called Circle Research and I'll be doing the 12" jacket artwork probably tomorrow. Today I'm gonna finish wrapping up the cover of issue 51 of Mass Appeal magazine and then continuing to work to promote the giant dance party our crew (Burlesque of North America) is promoting called Do it To it!
images: Mike Davis, thanks!
Ok I swear this is the last one. It's a gorgeous pic from The Sartorialist. Think I should go to the flea market this weekend.
Gotta get back to work now, have a great weekend!
Tonight is also the re-opening of Kidrobot store on Prince Street. They even have a countdown clock on its homepage and at 5:30pm there will be a live broadcast of the store, crazy, right??? I can't wait to see the madness tonight!
I get really excited whenever I see something cool from my hometown. A guerilla store called Made in HK will be opened on May 2 for only a month, it features Hong Kong's independent fashion labels, plus G.O.D.!!! I'm going to stop by the opening reception tonight, here's the info:
Made in HK
181 Lafayette Street,
May 2-31 12:30pm-7:pm
opening reception: may 1 6pm-8pm
cash only
I'm so lucky to have lfop for this week's Five Whats. Melissa and James are a husband and wife team that has a lot of fun making their super cool and witty screen prints together, and they are just as cool and witty as their work! I really enjoyed reading their answers and I hope you will too:
What did you have for breakfast?
James had a hot turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, and I had a ham & cheese omelette with wheat toast. We went to the Harmacy, which is our affectionate name for the pharmacy down the street from us. It is maybe the only pharmacy that we've been to where you are allowed to smoke, hence "Harmacy." We only eat there once a week because we can't stand the smoke.
What is an average day like in the house of Little Friends'?
We usually wake up in the late morning, take some calls and at least try to respond to all of our emails. After breakfast we sit down to work and pretty much continue that way until evening. If we're doing any screen printing, we do it at night. I don't know why. It just seems to work better that way. Otherwise, we watch rubbish TV while we eat candy from a bowl. We usually have music playing almost all the time. We like to listen to WFMU, which is our favorite radio station. We bought a professional-quality FM transmitter so that we could listen from anywhere in the house. It's a bit of overkill because it transmits in one hundred yards in all directions, so if you want to hear what we're listening to just park your car one hundred yards or less from our house and tune into 105.5 FM. We have two cats that require a fair amount of cuddling. We almost never leave the house, except for our late-night candy runs. We usually end the day in bed, like everyone else, around 3 or 4 in the morning. 
What are your inspirations?
We get a lot of inspiration from watching too much TV. Candy wrappers. Our cats and other cute animals that we see. Living in a dilapidated weird old city like Milwaukee. Traveling. Things you half-remember from childhood - those are good because the more you don't get it right, the more better it are.
What are the advantages of working with your spouse?
No one ever tells us that we need to quit this and get a real job or go to bed at a reasonable hour. It's a motivating factor that we are a rock-solid team and we want to really make it work out for each other. It's like the Jackson 5 - you really have to go out there and rock it. You can't just blow it off and be like "oh, I'm going to quit this and go join the Osmonds" or something. We are a family, dammit!
Do you guys go to a lot of concerts that you made posters for? What are you listening to these days?
We don't get to do this much anymore because most of the posters we're hired to do are for events outside our area. When we have the opportunity, it's something we really like to do. Although, there's no big payoff - it's not like people are like "oh my god, it's those guys I don't know who made the poster, I might maybe buy, maybe!" And then the crazed groupies chase us down the hallway, tearing at our clothes while security is like "MOVE MOVE MOVE." These are things that will never happen.
Listening to WFMU helps us find weird new and old stuff to listen to. We listen to a lot of Italo 12"s, which are kind of awesome because they are so stupid but also amazing. We're digging back into shoegaze music right now - there is a sort of weird musical cross-over between Italo and shoegaze, although I don't think the people making either of those kinds of music would recognize it. It makes us want to start a shoegaze band that covers "Diamond in the Night" and things like that, even though that is the exact kind of band that we hate.
bonus What: What is your favorite print/project that you guys have ever done?
The next one is always our favorite - full of promise and unspoiled by work we've done to it & future mistakes.
images: lfop, thanks Melissa for the wonderful pictures of your home and studio!
My Gocco Arts - not so green
JoJo's Riso 265 - tres green!I love my Gocco Arts and I've made lots of prints with it but I admit that it is not the greenest printer out there, almost everything is meant to be disposable, especially the light bulbs, it takes 2 bulbs to expose a small screen and 4 bulbs to expose a large screen, ouch!!!
My Flickr pal JoJo has recently bought a RISO SP-265 that would flash a screen without the use of disposable bulbs! Instead it uses a xenon lamp (like you would find in a thermal imager). For about $70, you can produce over 200 screens with the use of a xenon lamp, compared to over $400 for 400 bulbs to produce the same amount of screens, that's a bargain and not to mention all those bulbs you'll save!!! It's extremely hard to find one of these printers and JoJo has gone through a LOT to get hers (months of researching and posting on Craig's List and eBay). I would love to be lucky enough to get one but it looks ginormous! Wonder if it is even bigger than my Gocco Arts???
Today's green idea comes from Teresa who is my friend Zach's mom:
GreenDimes.com (they have a great blog too!) is a site that also gets you off catalogs' mailing lists--it is fee-based ($34 per year), however, they also plant 10 trees, anywhere you choose around the world, with your "donation/fee"! so you're not only saving trees via saving paper, you're also planting replacements!
It has taken a full year, and, in some instances, i additionally had to call a few of the persistent companies and demand that they stop sending the catalogs, but....i am happy to say that i now receive ONLY the cataglogs that i WANT to receive (which is about 3 or 4). Yayy!!!! We used to get HUNDREDS a year.
Remember, when you place an order with a company online, you AUTOMATICALLY go back on their mailing list unless you tell them, in no uncertain terms, to NOT put you on the mailing list. If you go on their list, you go on others, for they share/sell/trade your info with others. The vigilance, however, is worth it.
Thank you, Teresa!
I posted about Good Shape Designs just the other day, and today I bought the 3 shirts I mentioned before plus this one (above). Better get them now before they're gone!!!
Thanks for the tip, Melissa!
image: good shape designs
My friend Strath sent me this simple green idea:
It sounds like such a basic thing—most good ideas are—but walking as much as possible is good for the environment and good for you. In New York we take the subway or bus, which is much better than driving, but sometimes just hoofing it doesn't take much longer. For example, it takes me 40 minutes to walk from Fort Greene to the Lower East Side (only 15 minutes longer than the subway) and I get to check out that relic of NYC grittiness, the Manhattan Bridge.
When my wife Emily and I bought a place in Seattle last fall, which we're currently renting out but will eventually move to, a major consideration was the neighborhood's walkability. There's a website called walkscore.com that can help you calculate just that: type in your address and it brings up a map with shops, libraries, bars, restaurants, and other services and businesses within walking distance. Best of all, it gives you a "walk score" (hence the name) so you can easily compare the walkability of different locations. Go here to try it out: http://www.walkscore.com/
Strath has a very cool blog called Pacific Standard, check it out!
image: walkscore.com
Hi ya'll, Chad here (wonting's hubby), I'm introducing this weeks Five Whats. I have known Mike Davis for quite a while now, oddly enough, never in our shared hometown of Nashville. Under his moniker, Mike 2600, he is a super talented dj and graphic designer/artist with his crew Burlesque in Minneapolis. He is also a major record head (one of our continuing friendship builders), a great photographer, and one of the best amateur comedians I know.
What items do you always carry in your bag?
What is your favorite thing that you have ever designed?
What are your inspirations?
images: Mike Davis, thanks!
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