CalebNeelon
Articles by CalebNeelon:
Walt Frazier
When we came up,” NBA Hall-of-Famer Walt “Clyde” Frazier remembers, “the Temptations and Four Tops, they were our idols, and they all dressed up, so we dressed like them. Today, it’s Jay-Z and all the rappers, and the players dress like them off the court. You’d never know that they have money now
Steven Pinker
Face it: if you’re reading this magazine, being cool is a dominant facet of your life. Experimental psychologist, linguist, and author Steven Pinker understands. “When I was in my teens in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s I wanted to look cool, so I wore my hair long.
SABER
Graffiti doesn’t have a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records, but if it did, SABER would surely be found ruling the “Biggest” category. By the age of 21, SABER was already a living legend of Los Angeles graffiti when, in 1997, he executed the largest graffiti painting ever created
Hilly Kristal
Before punk rock even had a name, Hilly Kristal gave it a home. In 1973, Kristal opened a club on the Skid Row of America, New York City’s Bowery, and named it CBGB & OMFUG, one acronym for the types of the music he hoped to attract—country, bluegrass, and blues
Chuck D
Public Enemy scared the living shit out of America in the late 1980s, thanks in large part to its leader, Chuck D. The asides of court jester Flavor Flav only made Chuck’s barked orders and admonitions more fearsome.
Alan Dershowitz
I do a lot of things in revenge,” says lawyer, professor, and public intellectual Alan Dershowitz. “I’m a vengeful person. I want to get even with my high school teachers and all the people who thought badly of me.”
AJ FOSIK
A.J. Fosik has been haunted by his last name for 12 years now. “The etymology of that word is sort of interesting and a little cheesy, but it’s a metaphor that I like and one that has served well enough. The word is Australian, originally spelled f-o-s-s-i-c-k
STOP
A gigantic metropolis with up to 20 million citizens (depending on when you stop counting), Mumbai, India, with its fine harbor, is one of the five largest cities on Earth, as well as one of the most densely populated.
FRIENDS WITH YOU
Friends With You isn’t kidding; they’re really friendly. Get these Floridian friends-individually known as 25-year-old Sam Borkson and 29-year-old Tury Sandoval-on the phone and it’s a sea of goofball giggling.
MONSTER PROJECT
Street art will forever be the rollerblading to graffiti’s skateboarding. Like rollerblading, street art is safer, more readily understood by yuppies, and takes about an afternoon to learn. Like skateboarding, graffiti is a risky, closed system.
JUDY BLUME
Whenever author Judy Blume visits a group of kids, she says, “someone-and it’s always been a boy-will ask me, ‘So how much do you make?’” With an astonishing 75 million-plus books in print, it does beg the question, though you might have to be a nine-year-old boy to have the gumption to ask it.
STEP RIGHT UP
Carousel animals are a confusing species. They are alternately beautiful and creepy, the kind of image that can populate both a fantasy of bucolic childhood days at the park and a macabre bad dream full of clowns gone evil. At their best, in their original wood-carved forms, they are certainly some kind of art
THE ROYAL ART LODGE
Message to young artists: rent some big space with your friends, and give it and your new crew a name. It’s an important lesson, especially for young people living outside the big cities, and it’s a lesson best acted upon sooner rather than later.
CAROLINE HWANG
Plenty of young artists on the come-up will move to New York and immediately proclaim themselves NYC lifers. Caroline Hwang isn’t falling into that trap. Born, raised, and schooled in Los Angeles, the 25-year-old Hwang moved to Brooklyn just under a year ago, treating it as an experiment.
High Sobriety
“Teaching people to drink responsibly is like trying to teach a pig to eat with a spoon. It’s a good idea, but it’s very difficult.” Gene Amondson is a modern-day prohibitionist. The 62-year-old Vashon Island, Washington, minister would like to see beverage alcohol made illegal again.
Ed Hardy
“I don’t know why people like tattoos, I honestly don’t ,” says Don Ed Hardy. After inking hundreds of thousands of them, he’s still happily mystified. “But some people like them and want to get them, and they should have the opportunity to get the best tattoo they can get.”
Alan Lomax
Eighteen-year-old Alan Lomax would not return to Harvard in 1933, and instead headed out on a car trip wit h his father, John, to record song sin Southern prisons. Huddie Ledbetter, 44, had already been in for murder in Texas, released, and was serving at Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana for assault
Jung-Il Hong
The creative capital of New England over the past decade ha been Providence, Rhode Island, regardless of whether anyone out side the city has noticed or not. Ten years ago, the city’s center was a crater. Cheap warehouse spaces abounded, and, since nobody seemed to be watching, it was a relatively consequence free environment.
Bones Brigade
What cheesy lines are you talking about? We were serious about our acting roles!” barks Bones Brigade skateboarder Steve Caballero. “I never thought that anyone saw it as anything short of fantastic acting,” muses former teammate Lance Mountain. Neither is serious. The Search for Animal Chin. The name itself sounds like a porno. The fact [...]
Wrappers Delight
Growing up in the California desert 30 years ago, Darlene Waddington decided that she wanted to start a roadside attraction for a time, as she calls it, “when I inevitably turned into a mentally questionable old lady.” Cement dinosaur was taken, so was fiberglass gorilla, baby doll collection and rocks from famous places.