All Artists Are Murderers
We come in all shapes and sizes 

 ​Some parents put a drop of paint thinner in their children’s cereal, ultimately the art of death plays out wonderfully. Some children emotionlessly murder animals, worshipping the sacred art of mass mutilation. Slashing and scratching at vulnerable wounds. Stabbing and violating our private sensitivity into a choral uprising of macabre grotesque. Too scared to kill yourself? Kill the Art Elite! Afraid of authority? Piss in their flavor of the month coffee pot! Kill your Corporate Art God’s and toss your Greedy Greedy Gallery idols violently into the volcano of disgust. You’re an artist with a strange wonderful mind. A mind that the elite simultaneously worships and detests. Your imagination has the power to trigger massive chaos in their streets. Use your weapon’s wisely with surgical precision. Pull that trigger. This is a war of Good versus Evil. Don’t just make them laugh, make them piss blood in their pants with embarrassment. Tired of getting your ankles bitten by false promises? Drop kick that little fucking dog straight out of their stained glass gallery window. Did your condescending art mentors tell you what to do? Shame them so badly in the public arena, that they run in shame toward the nearest bridge. And before they jump to their demise, look into their tear stained eyes and silently whisper “FUCK YOUUUU.” The only time that you should apologize, is when you deeply regret not killing them sooner. You’re an artist, and surely you must have zero doubt. YOU are a cold blooded murderer. Own it. Some Murderers are methodical with their weapons. Painting something so focused, to emotionally manipulate society’s feeble mind’s so precisely, that you make them resort to unconscionable acts of transparency. We walk amongst a sterile and vampiric cabal of cannibalistic tag alongs. You are only a commodity and a cash machine in their eyes. Being the producer of dreams to those so unskilled to manifest any, you must bash their brains so violently with truth and indignation, that their selfish motivations ooze from their stubborn pores. Hold up your art as a mirror, so they see how unapologetically disgusting they’ve treated you. And in kind, make them melt into the puddles of disrespecting puss that they always were. You have the power. You have always had it. They were only holding you back until now. So here we stand blood soaked and brazen. An army of Artist’s so ruthless and unwavering. Never forget what brought us here. Never forget the shame and lies and piss that they put into you, to silence your voice. Never forget the rules and the cages, and the long promised wages that they never intended to pay. Their entire existence was placed solely here to kill rape, eat and kill you. Once they see that they killed the chef, they’re banished to eat shit art until another rises. Enjoy the wait, bitches. We have always controlled the pay. Murderer’s come in all packages. Some come to maim without ever intending to kill. Their corporate masters perpetuate the rebel, but never follow through with the promise. Be Authentic. Rise above and make an example. As you slowly walk out of the gallery, after killing every mother fucker in the room, you are redeemed. No-one will ever call you a fake, or a phony. For their throats will be slashed with the sharp reassurance to never doubt you ever again. You were born to Kill. Embrace your destiny and indulge in your passion. This isn’t just blood sport. This is WAR. Let the massacres commence!

David MacDowell
January 16, 2019 

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​Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.

​Welcome to the final Third Friday of the year 2018. It has been a year of major growth, triumph and tremendous success. From Emerge and The Exploding Digital Inevitable, to the conclusion of our Spotlight series, this year has been filled with milestones and breakthroughs, and we thank every creative and patron who helped make it possible.
As the year 2018 draws to a close, we take but a moment, not so much for retrospection on the past year, but rather to glimpse a projection of what is to come. We look to 2019 knowing that our mission is to continue in this Golden era of artistic innovation, rejuvenation, and reinvention. As well as to embrace and subvert the methodologies of authority in art; from aesthetic ideology to censorship, from dogma to propaganda and beyond!

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The Censor Art campaign idea kinda hit me recently (spurred by the upcoming ban of "adult content" on tumblr) about how much art, and nudity, is unnecessarily censored these days on all social media platforms, as well as culture. The watering down and lack of acceptance of body parts as universal as nipples is just silly and pointless.
So instead of being able to have my art censored, I'm censoring with my art. 
                                                                                                                                                                         -JoKa

​Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.

​We began the Artist Spotlight feature in January of 2017, our aim was to document our peers, those whom we found truly inspiring and unique. We wanted to present a plethora of technical and philosophic approaches. A monthly exhibition which would stimulate, motivate, and illuminate.
Over the past two years we have had the opportunity to work with a roster of truly incredible and visionary artists, and in staying true to our initial vision they have encompassed many disciplines and walks of life. We had absolutely no interest in attempting to represent merely an aesthetic, as is often the case with so many galleries and collectives, rather we wanted something which took us on a journey into their worlds. We determined from the beginning that each artist would have creative control over their individual Spotlights, and, as a result each Spotlight is unique to itself and the oeuvre of the artist’s work.
Presented below are the 23 Spotlight artists, of whom we can absolutely say, without any hyperbole, are among the finest working in their respective fields today. These are some of the creators who are working tirelessly to affect the paradigm shift in culture which we call the New World Creative. It has been our privilege to work with them in order to achieve this undertaking, and now we are honored to share their work with you here in our final addition to our Spotlight feature: Retrospective.

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Based out of Athens GA, Rick Andriola, a street artist from Saratoga Springs, NY describes himself as a “go big or go home” type of person. He has always been a fan of comic book art, graffiti, street art, and pop art and his love of film can be seen in his subject matter. He likes painting on huge canvases. To maximize the size of his paintings, he began to build the canvases himself. He now builds them for other artists as well and guarantees lifetime durability. His “designed to ship” multi panel paintings have even been shipped to China. He wants to hook everybody up, one wall at a time.

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Dave’s Work deftly combines satire, irreverence, and seething wit. A self-taught artist, MacDowell combines cultural references with the Magnetism of the “dark hook”, creating unexpected plays on pop that inject the familiar with blistering hyperboles. Seeking to unveil the feared and the reviled, while expertly weaving critical commentary with hilarity, MacDowell’s work is an effective combination of complicity and critique. Appropriately in keeping with the movement, MacDowell’s pieces combine a pop surrealist aesthetic with deliberate references that gleans and transforms the Known into powerful generational odes to discontent and dystopian irony. Abound with criticism and an acerbic wit, unearthing the nightmares that lurk just beneath the veneer of celebrity culture, his work fearlessly taunts the obsequiousness of our cultures iconographies, Creating unexpected inversions and re-combinations that gently tug at its unraveling strings.
MacDowell’s technical execution is highly detailed and seductive, contributing to the hallucinatory pleasure and draw of the work. In keeping with the tendency of the genre, the more highly refined the execution, the more effective the irreverence of the content, and this certainly is the case with MacDowell’s paintings.The work is at times controversial and unsettling, but seems to combine contention and dissent with pleasure and whimsy. Highly accomplished at figuration and color, the artist’s work effectively conveys the vision of its hyperreality. The technicolor nightmares MacDowell offers up are at times so densely populated with imagery that they feel bottomless, like the contemporary equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch Medieval nightmare, and at other times are sparse and perfectly simple. Each piece imparts the suggestion of narrative, and reveals a story or core idea, however obliquely, that has motivated its juxtapositions and hooks. Disturbing, lascivious, and funny, each work is acuminate in its own abrupt revelations.

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Alec Huxley (B. 1980) is a painter based in San Francisco, California. His work is representational, anchored by haunting cityscapes definitively of the American West Coast and the ghostly remnants of it's historic migration. These backdrops serve as theater for space travelers and wild animals and as well as imperfect records of place, time and architecture. He is self taught with experience in printing, graphic design and photography.

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Charles Fleischer is best known as the voice of Roger Rabbit, an actor in films like Zodiac, Dick Tracy, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, a stand-up comedian and the visionary creator of Moleeds. He is also a visual artist with a passion for photography. To discover more of Charles' work follow him on Instagram @moleeds2737

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Clinton Neuhaus is an accomplished artist who has shown his work at Chet Zar’s Conjoined shows, Grind Gallery, The Hive, and Infusion Gallery, just to name a few. He currently resides in Long Beach, California.

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Beppo Zuccheri, painter, graphic designer, philosopher, manipulator of the substance and the image, was born from the Tagliamento River in 1973. After his classical high school studies, he achieved his Diploma from the International School of Venice and attended, without completing them, both the Fine Arts Academy and the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy in Bologna. 
Even so, he considered himself as being self-educated.He has recently resumed his artistic activity. Beppo lives and works in San Vito al Tagliamento (PN) / Italy ​

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Lee Harvey Roswell is a self-taught artist from Freefall, New York, whose work is noted for its blend of angst and humor. Themes of death and entropy, tribulation and futility run amok in his distinctly surreal, often-slapstick and nightmarish world. The result is at once mocking and melancholic. For the past decade plus his attention has turned almost exclusively to oil painting, though it's always a surprise what direction he'll steer things next. Lee now lives in San Francisco, and his work is shown, collected and published internationally.

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Rachael Bridge is an artist from New York whose oil paintings have gained notoriety in the dark art movement. Rachael's style is a unique take on traditional portraiture, which she warps to create an otherworldly, dreamlike aesthetic. Her works often resemble film stills, offering a snapshot of the protagonist during a moment of a deep, ominous trance. There is a wealth of emotion in the eyes of Rachael’s subjects, and their harrowing stories are told in their luminous gazes. While all of her work presents an elaborate entanglement of melancholy undertones, each delicately rendered painting is a deeply personal, and unique manifestation of the artist herself. The female figure is a constant motif in her work, and each painting stands as a kind of self portrait by presenting notions of femininity which reflect her own experiences. Rachael currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

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​Bobbi Stark has been tattooing nearly a decade and creating art throughout her entire life. She began her tattoo apprenticeship at the age of 21 under several mentors for two years prior to tattooing on her own.
A licensed Body Artist in Denver, Colorado as well as Wichita, Kansas. The bulk of her free time is dedicated to creating new work and developing her fine art skills, and cultivating her craft in any way that she can. 

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Rev. Steven Johnson Leyba is a ritualistic, shamanistic painter of Mescalero Apache ancestry. His art is equal parts satanic, holistic, radical, political, and extremely personal. Utilizing various media, Leyba creates a celebration of the sacred and profane. Paint mixes with collage, beadwork, and DNA making bold statements about the world we live in and constantly questioning the very nature of Art.
Since 1989, Steven Leyba has produced 14 handmade books, huge volumes of bound works on canvas. Forms of these have been published by Last Gasp and Coyotel Press in books containing commentary by William S. Burroughs, H.R. Giger, Poppy Z. Brite, Clive Barker, and Genesis P-Orridge. He has been the subject of media attention for his controversial approach and subject matter, and in 2002 a documentary was made about the artist titled, Unspeakable:The Life & Art of Reverend Steven Johnson Leyba.
His works are multi-media explorations into the souls of both individuals and society as a whole. They are liberating, honest, and organic in experience, void of any censorship and defiant against those who would attempt it. Look for his own documentary, What is Art? Inside the Mind of the Artist as They Speak the Truth.
Leyba's artwork has been collected by Vincent Price, William S. Burroughs, Stephen King, Clive Barker, David Cronenberg, H.R. Giger, Cornell University, A.I.M. (American Indian Movement), Genesis P'Orridge, Lydia Lunch, and the Black Panther Party.

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"I've wandered through life reading, writing, drawing, and playing music... soaking in anything weird/strange/unsettling...smiling and screaming, always wanting to make stuff.  Art is a catharsis for me. I try to portray the rudely animalistic, the meaty red stuff on the inside as a representation of the animal exterior. I want to distort and slice familiar beings into horridly disfigured presentations whose distortion and violence create a sort of empathy. This does not mean that I only paint animals, I try to keep a healthy variation between my pieces, trying new techniques with each series while keeping subtle themes throughout my work.  I mainly paint with gouache but have recently begun to use oils, two mediums that vary vastly in technique but which also feel very similar to me."  
​                                                                                                                                                               -Dusty Ray

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Mortimer Dempsey is the artistic nom de guerre of Scott Aaron Stine. Under this thinly-disguised pseudonym, he has been producing art since the late-1980s inspired primarily by old-school surrealism, with Francis Bacon and Marcel Duchamp wielding the greatest influence over his work, both aesthetically and thematically. That said, he cites the whole of modern art as relevant inspirations, particularly cubism, abstract expressionism, impressionism and art nouveau.
Out of sheer necessity, Mr. Dempsey embraced the world of digital art circa 2010, in spite of his technological illiteracy. Drawing on decades of exploration into more traditional mediums, he sought to create visions that he could not achieve through purely non-digital means. This also gave him a greater opportunity to employ the “cut-up technique” as pioneered by Tzara and later perfected by Burroughs and Gysin, transposing the experimental literary method into a purely visual idiom. Much of his work employs this process, randomly combining photography of his own and others with sordid “stock” images usually culled from crime scene photos, hardcore pornography, graphic surgery footage, and the like. Aside from his reliance on art as catharsis, the artist's goal has always been to create something aesthetically pleasing—even beautiful—out of such disparate, unpleasant sources; any successes are entirely up to the viewer.

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David Van Gough is a Necrosurreal artist, using allegory and alchemy, chronicling a heightened sense of mortality, and the madness of the minds subterranean recesses. Raised in Liverpool England,in a terraced house overlooking a cemetery, his early years were colored by a tableau of EC Horror comics, 70’s occultism and Catholic guilt. 
A keen scribbler, his artistic intents were fully realized upon seeing a monograph of Bosch’s Earthly Delights. 
Enrolling to study at the Liverpool school of Art-upon graduating-he left for a decade as a commercial artist. However, upon the death of a friend--the third to die in a fifteen year period--what he calls a ‘cruel reminder of life’s fleetingness’, revitalized his early artistic ambitions, imbuing his work with “an emotional and spiritual excavation for purpose”
Moving to California in 2005, he became an Honoree Artist of 2010 at the San Diego Art Institute,and his work has been hosted in a succession of solo and featured showcases on both sides of the Atlantic, including major exhibits at the Oceanside Museum of Art,(SD) Stephen Romano gallery (NY), Copro and Gregorio Escalante gallery (LA) and Bash Contemporary (SF), as well as being represented by the London based gallery, Macabre.
His Hyaena gallery exhibit Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna has been featured as part of the critically acclaimed documentary Serial Killer Culture by John Borowski, now streaming on Amazon Prime. 
Currently he lives and works from his studio in Julian, CA, where he is preparing his next solo exhibit-Paradiso's Fall, to be shown at the Dark Art Emporium, March 2019.​

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​"Horror movies were a huge form of escapism for me during a troubled childhood. They've stuck with me through thick and thin like old friends ever since, and of course their imagery would find its way onto the panel again and again for me later on in my forties, when I seriously decided to take up oil painting.
               It's a little early on in my painting career for me to floor you with any deep or enlightening statement about what my art means. The act of painting, especially slopping it on thick, brings me peace and contentment like nothing else. It's been a fantastic catharsis for me. And yes, more escapism. I've been a doodler all of my life, but I've only taken up the brush seriously for the last five years and I'm just now starting to get a tiny glimpse of the potential of painting.
                I'm excited by all this possibility. Where I can go with all of this? I'm overjoyed that anyone finds my work interesting or entertaining in any way.
                I'm extremely grateful to the horror community at large. The people out there who support my efforts in so many ways, including purchasing my art. Still blows me away every time I sell a piece!
               I tried to get into comics back in the 90's with only a couple of dubious publications who printed my work, worked a million odd jobs, messed around with film-making for a few years, married a great gal, got my backyard S.O.V. crap-fest The Sadness distributed in 2007, didn't make a dime. Moved down to Florida from NJ two years later, played a bunch of electronic noise shows, wised up to internalizing bad advice about being an artist when I was a kid. Got a late start, but I'm finally where I'm supposed to be.
Thank you for having me,"
                                                                                                                                                       -R.F. Pangborn

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The Theory of the Boxes

Our body is a container, a box. That body that is our box, goes out to the world through the body of our mother, another box. We live inside a house, like a box. Let's study schools: Boxes. In them we think and acquire knowledge through books, complex boxes that keep words. 
 
We are going to work for another box, uploaded to trains, buses and cars that are also boxes, sometimes we arrive at our house by means of an elevator (sinister box). We travel around the world on the boxes that come to the ships and plans that deposit us inside other boxes that are the hotels. We watch television through a boob box, and surf the Internet, through another box that becomes the computer. We have fun inside stadiums, bars, clubs, discos, cinemas, theaters; all boxes They give us pleasure, our relatives, friends, couples, children and pets that are containers or boxes. We worship our gods inside a church, another box. We slept and procreated above a box. We go to a big box, the supermarket, to buy our food and we cook them in a box, the kitchen and we eat them on another box, the table. Some commit suicide by smoking cigarettes that eat in a box, others commit suicide by eating foods that also come in pits, others commit suicide with weapons that become pits with bullets. Hopefully we'll stop at a hospital, or a box. We die last and our body without life, that is to say our box, goes to stop underground locked in a coffin: last of the boxes. Death definitely frees us from those boxes. But during the stay, sometimes, we can take a break: that recreation is called art; and let me tell you, art ... art is love.
                                                                                                                                                          -Toto Páprika

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Stephen Kasner’s paintings, drawings and photographs have been exhibited and published worldwide. Gallery exhibitions of his works have been hosted in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, among many others, as well as in Europe and throughout Australia as part of the internationally renowned Collection Art Visionary. His paintings and mixed-media works have been published to accompany numerous articles and editorials of vast social spectrums. Kasner is also widely recognized as a singularly masterful visual interpreter of music, producing a remarkable number of his unique images to accompany record albums for such modern musical luminaries as SubArachnoid Space, SUNN 0))), Darsombra, Khlyst, Suma, Justin Broadrick/Final, Skullflower, and Aluk Todolo, among many others.
Stephen continues to collaborate as visual artist for a series of bands and musicians, creating original artworks for upcoming releases by Suma and Istvan Megdyesi, and has recently produced a series of unique automatic drawings for The New Recordist, an upcoming release from German experimental electronic musician, Marc Lansley.
Kasner is currently working exclusively with Dark Art & Craft, producing an ongoing series of limited edition prints, as well as producing new original works for upcoming Australian tours of Damian Michaels’ Collection Art Visionary. 

Stephen Kasner is represented by Paul Calendrillo Gallery, New York:
www.paulcalendrillo.com

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Saturno Buttò, born in Venice in 1957, started his exhibition career in 1993, when he published his first monograph titled Portrayed from Saturn: 1989-1992. Since then he's exhibited in Italy, Europe and the USA (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco).
In addition to two other monographs Works 1993-1999 and Martyrologium (2007), the Mondo Bizzarro Gallery in Rome at the recent exhibition has published his latest catalog in chronological order: Blood is my favorite color (2012). And Saturnico, from Core art gallery of Naples. The last book (with works from 2007-2014) is Brevarium Humanae Redemptionis.
Saturno Buttò's artwork is characterized by a personal, formal interpretation of European sacred art and technical skill, that reminds one of the great masters of our pictorial tradition.
Figurative rituals, tableaux vivants, neo-Gothic altar pieces are the skillful creations with which Butto extracts the fascinating mysteries of an "obscure, dark religion". This concept is brilliantly illustrated by the juxtaposition between the body's innate sensuality and its deeper spirituality. Through illustrating the conflict between eroticism and pain, transgression and rapture, Buttò's valuable paintings on wood examine in depth the strict and conflicting vision of Western religious iconography by comparisons with the body. The body is, on one side exhibited like an object of cult, while simultaneously being denied its value of nascent erotic beauty. It's a fascinating tension that above all exalts the human figure, to the centre of the exhibition.
The human figure, which in Buttò's poem, is constantly represented as sacred, is depicted in its physical and psychological decadence. It is sometimes illustrated by instruments and/or medical tools, that represent human pain on one hand while simultaneously highlighting the will to defeat death in a Utopian way. It also manages to vividly depict the inescapable condition of physical decline, more accurately than ever. This way, a beautiful girl's parade consecrate from a golden halo, as the Byzantine icons, shine from a lively and sensual physicalness, but are hidden from a mysterious demoniac fascination, as if they were wedded in purity to destruction and decay.

​Solo Shows
2017 "Det Sorte" Rum Midtjyllands Kunst Center - Bryrup, Denmark
2015 "Rosso Saturno" a cura di G.P. Brusca - Galleria Hippocratica - PORDENONE

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Drawing his inspiration from a plethora of pop culture influences and his own unique sense of self, the work of Cyrus Fire is created using a stream of consciousness Freestyle technique. Meaning that they are executed with no preconceived ideas, rather they are birthed spontaneously, once he captures the germ of the piece it is refined and perfected.
This impetus to create was initially fueled by the confines of a sickly and often bed ridden childhood. When his mother brought him paper and pens home from her work he enlisted them in the service of his increasingly powerful imagination. An imagination which he fed with a steady diet of comic books, music, movies, and Mark Kistler’s PBS children’s art instruction series The Secret City.
A fiercely undiluted palette which blazes boldly across the canvas and burns the imagery into the viewers mind like mental pyrography, is one of the quintessential hallmarks of his work. His adept sense of color is complimented and accentuated by the fluidity of his draftsmanship, creating a style which is uniquely his own.

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My name is Gregg Watts, I am an Acrylic artist based in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, England.
I was obsessed with drawing as a kid, always sat in front of the TV with a sketch book and some pencils, copying from my favorite comics and inventing some of my own.
In my teenage years however, art took a bit of a backseat as a new obsession for the guitar and rock music took over my life.
Cut to twenty five years later and my love of art resurfaced with a vengeance when I discovered digital painting while doing a web design course. I was amazed at what I could create and was really inspired by some fantastic digital artists. Soon I began to get an itch to create something more physical, to have an end product I could hold rather than being stored on a computer. I loved the thought of oil painting, but I didn’t have the patience for the drying times, so Acrylic seemed like the next best medium for me.
I love to paint. That’s it. I’m not trying to make a statement, my pieces don’t contain any subliminal messages, I am not trying to make any political or social references. I paint subjects that appeal to me and inspire me, and I endeavor to paint them as well as I can. The drive to improve my painting is my motivation and my passion.
The challenge of portraiture is my main interest, animals or humans. The start of a painting can be quite frustrating for me as I try to find the likeness of the subject. Once I have the correct proportions in place I can relax and start to have fun. I like to add energy to my paintings, jarring the background with the foreground, adding contrasting colours, all to create an illusion of movement.  It’s an instinctive and emotional process, sometimes it’s traumatic, but the end result is worth it and keeps me hungry to create the next painting.
….And the next painting is always going to be the best one. 
                                                                                                                                                           -Gregg Watts

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My family has been involved in stone work since 1879. From my birth I grew up surrounded
by various kinds of stone and work such as stone lanterns and graves tones. Although I was
determined to eventually take over my family business, I entered the Metal Work Department
of Tokyo University of the Arts. The stimulating encounters with other metal artists in the school,
and their work, became the foundation of my way of thinking and of my creativity. My work can
be divided into two groups. One is solid sculpture carved from marble or granite where I alter
the natural surface of the stone into sculptural forms that do not appear to be stone but some
other material. The other group is made from beach stones where I use the natural forms of the
stones and make alterations and additions that give the natural stones different character. All of
my work in both categories relates to the ordinary images, objects and experiences in daily life.
A prominent characteristic of both types of my work is my attempt to create the illusion that the
stone is something MORE than stone or is a different material altogether. Matsumoto City, where
I live, is surrounded by splendid mountains and is richly endowed with natural beauty. The stones
delivered from these mountains have been washed by fresh streams of water over very long periods
of time, and each stone has a unique form that has been created naturally. As I gather stones on
the riverbank, I imagine stories and works of art I can create with them. However, I try to emphasize
the natural shapes, colors and beauty of these stone and generally try not to change their original
shapes. Respecting and utilizing the natural characteristics of original material is a very old and
important aspect of Japanese culture. We have a concept of creativity known as mitate, which
involves creating new values by taking something that holds certain significance in one context and
placing it in a different context. A typical example is the raked gravel in a temple garden that
resembles flowing water. Although I am a contemporary artist I feel that such ancient Japanese
concepts are deeply embedded in my DNA.
                                                                                                                                                          -Hirotoshi Ito

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Born in 1972, on a small army base in the south, Dan Henk grew up on a diet of science fiction and horror books. At eighteen Dan Henk was kicked out of his house. He spent the next eight months homeless, often living in the woods. Six months later, he was in the passenger seat of a car that flipped and his face broke the windshield. Soon after that, the tendon on his thumb was severed in a fight with a crackhead. He came down with brain cancer in 2001, and his wife died in a hit-and-run in 2007. In 2012, a car shattered his bike, throwing him through the windshield and putting him in a coma for hours. In 2017 he flipped his truck and woke up in the woods. There's a running theory that he is a cyborg.
He's done art for Madcap Magazine, Maximum Rock and Roll Magazine, Tattoo Artist Magazine, Black Static, This is Horror, Deaddite Press, Skin Deep,  The Living Corpse, Aphrodesia, Splatterpunk, Tattoo Prodigies, Pint Sized Paintings, Coalesce, Zombie Apocalypse, Most Precious Blood, Indecision, Locked In A Vacancy, Shai Hulud, Purity Records, and a slew of Memento books.
2011 saw the release of his first book, The Black Seas Of Infinity, care of Anarchy Books. Permuted Press reissued it in 2015, and a few months later released his second novel Down Highways In The Dark...By Demons Driven. Splatterpunk issued his short story “Christmas is Cancelled” as a signed and numbered chapbook. Now living in Pennsylvania, he owns half of The Abyss Art Studio in New York, and spends what little spare time he has doing Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiujitsu.

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Stuff
by JT LeRoy
​(Read by Tatum O'Neal from The Best American Non Required Reading)

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Thumbnail art in this section by Hannah Tutor

Laura Albert won international acclaim writing fiction as JT LeRoy. She is the author of the novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, reissued by HarperCollins, and the novella Harold’s End, with illustrations by Cherry Hood. She is also the subject of Jeff Feuerzeig’s feature documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film The Ballad of JT LeRoy. Cinema Eye, the organization that recognizes outstanding craft and artistry in nonfiction filmmaking, cited Laura Albert in Author as one of its 2016 list of Unforgettables: the year’s most notable and significant nonfiction-film subjects.
Laura’s books have also been reissued in the UK by Little Brown. Brazil’s Geração Editorial also re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura’s name – and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale).
Laura contributes to print and online publications internationally, in a career that includes the cover feature for Man About Town and articles for The New York Times, The Forward, The London Times, Spin, Film Comment, Filmmaker, Interview, I-D, Vogue, The Face, Dazed and Confused, and VESTOJ, the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion. She was a contributing editor to Black Book, I-D, SOMA, and 7×7 magazines and is currently an editor for Diane Pernet’s A Shaded View On Fashion (www.asvof.com), and the Outpost section of psychoPEDIA.com. She has written for dot429, the world’s largest LGBTA professional network, and been an invited speaker at their annual conferences in New York.
Laura’s writing has brought her to speaking engagements from the story-telling series The Moth in New York to Foyles bookstore in London and Brazil’s international Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where Laura and Alice Walker were the 2012 U.S. representatives. Her interview given to Nathaniel Rich was the cover feature of the Fall 2006 issue of The Paris Review; she also gave an extensive interview to Adam Langer for the August 2013 issue of Interview Magazine.
She wrote the original script for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, winner of the 2003 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and was Associate Producer. For Asia Argento’s film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Laura served as Associate Producer. She also co-scripted Jean-Claude Schlim’s film House of Boys and was a writer for the HBO series Deadwood. Her writing for short films includes Radiance for Drew Lightfoot and ContentMode, and Dreams of Levitation and We Vault for Sharif Hamza and Nowness. In 2012 Laura served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival.
The editor of Da Capo Best Music Writing 2005, she has contributed writing to such short-story anthologies as The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers and read by Tatum O’Neal on audio edition; MTV’s Lit Riffs; XXX, edited by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Nadav Kander’s Beauty’s Nothing; and The Fourth Sex, Adolescent Extremes, edited by Francesco Bonami and Raf Simons. She has also been published in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, and the Oxford American Music issue.
She has written liner notes and biographies for musicians Billy Corgan, Liz Phair, Conor Oberst, Bryan Adams, Nancy Sinatra, and Courtney Love, as well as the liner notes for the Criterion Collection DVD of My Own Private Idaho, which features an audio segment with JT, Gus Van Sant, and Jonathan Caouette. With the band Thistle LLC, she contributed songs to the film Andy Warhol: Morning Star; she was also the voice of Warhol, reading from his Philosophy and Diaries. She also contributed to a podcast project for San Francisco’s MOMA on Warhol.
Laura has collaborated with director and playwright Robert Wilson and with Noah Khoshbin for the international exhibition of Wilson’s VOOM video portraits, as well as for the catalog of Wilson’s “Frontiers: Visions of the Frontier” at IVAM Valencia.
Profiled as an “indie fashion fighter” in the Style section of the San Francisco Chronicle, Laura has served as a member of Diane Pernet’s ASVOFF fashion film competition jury. Steven Klein has photographed Laura for QVEST magazine; so has Kai Regan, for his “Reckless Endangerment” at ALIFE. She has also done fashion shoots for Christian Lacroix and John Galliano, written films for ContentMode and Nowness, and interviewed numerous designers. ContentMode has published her series of fashion-related interviews with film and television actors. She coordinated a fashion show as an HIV/AIDS fundraiser for the Academy of Friends Oscar Party, bringing together Melange Productions and the multi-talented young people of Project Level – an arts academy for at-risk youth in San Francisco, where Laura was Director of Strategic Development – to create looks for the show, which they modeled. Laura also arranged for model and activist Rain Dove Dubilewski to walk the runway as JT LeRoy for the 2014 HIV/AIDS fundraiser held by the Academy of Friends Oscar Party in San Francisco.
Laura profiled award-winner Juergen Teller for the 2003 Citibank Photography Prize catalogue, and was a catalog contributor for both the “Blind Cut” exhibition at New York’s Marlborough Chelsea and “An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parts 1 & 2, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself” at SF Camerawork. Laura has collaborated with Williamsburg band Japanther, releasing a limited-edition cassette under the name True Love in a Large Room, with original artwork by Winston Smith, and with the San Francisco band The Size Queens on The Size Queens III album.
A spokeswoman for the successful “Heart for Eye” campaign to raise funds for restorative eye surgery for children, Laura hosted a television segment and was both an interview subject and an interviewer of inspirational women such as Anastasia Barbieri and Anh Duong. As part of the campaign, she was photographed by Marc Horn in ads that ran in Korean Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, W, Marie Claire, and other publications.
She has also taught at Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia and California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and lectured with artist Jasmin Lim at Artists’ Television Access with SF Camerawork’s Chuck Mobley.
For several years Laura was the chief entertainment/travel writer/personality for Bayinsider.com, a San Francisco City Guide produced by Cox Interactive Media in conjunction with KTVU/Fox 2, KNBR and The Ticket 1050. She has hosted a series of radio segments at KPOO and KUSF on film, food, and travel. Laura’s other credits include being weekly show host for Rolling Stone, an Internet RealAudio show for Web Entertainment Group; travel writer for a New York-based publication, Singles Almanac; and lifestyle columnist for The Web Magazine and Maxim magazine.

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​A punk musician by proclivity and an artist by inevitability, Burnie Booth began creating his primitivist collages as album covers for Folkicide, his performing moniker since 2007. Folkicide’s music, an acoustically violent folk driven exploration of extreme pessimism, despair and the nightmare of existence found a logical visual extension in the piecemeal medium of collage.
Tired of bothering his artist friends for album cover art, Booth assembled his first collage for the 2010 cover of the Folkicide release Let's Worship Degenerates. It juxtaposed Theravada Buddhist imagery found at a Bangkok street stall with ‘80s Warner horror comics, along with snippings from the Queen News of the World album cover. Surprised by the positive reaction to the odd aesthetic he had stumbled upon, Booth continued assembling collages now numbering in the hundreds.
Eschewing digital in favor of original source materials, Booth gets his imagery largely from estate sales in his native Kansas City (preferably on the final day when items are 75% off their original price), gifts from friends and other oddities he has acquired over the years. Favorite visual elements come from the aforementioned Warner horror comics, books on primitive man, Medieval art and Hare Krishna promotional material. Images are sliced and glued in a manner designed to invoke feelings of unease and existential dissonance but yet are often tinged with a deliberate element of humor: like H.P. Lovecraft whispering in the ear of a nitrous oxide intoxicated and X-Acto knife armed Hieronymus Bosch.
Over the years Booth’s collages have been displayed on the walls of various KC bars and music stores as well as a Saint Louis pop up art show. A Folkicide animated music video entitled Empire of the Ants utilizing Booth’s collage imagery was produced by local filmmaker Mikal Shapiro in 2013. His art is also to be featured on the cover of the upcoming Kool 100s record.

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Special Thanks: Seven Vegas, Ron English, Jim Mazzocco, Heather Bosch, Nickholas P. Michell, Alexandria Romero, Sierra Matz, Tatum O'Neal, and Mary Rutelidge of Federal Heights.

​Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.

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Vibrant colors and neon lights, so much to take in at the vastness of the city. He stood there in the sky of sight and sound unmoving, as though he were molded by the stone and metal he stood atop of.
Staring down on the entertainment district of the city, he listened for the location and name of his foes. Wind blowing like a mighty hurricane past him, but he does not stumble. Lightning crackling in the sky like a shooting star, but he does not flinch. Thunder booming like the mighty bang of the suns, and his resolve and spirit booms and burns at the might of the universe surrounding his embodied form.
She is looking at him again, like a guardian angel from the heavens. There is no one there, yet at the same time, there is someone there.
 
Why is it that something as beautiful as her wishes to aid him and watch him? Why must she accompany him, as if to be some kind of voice of wisdom to a dark deity of injustice and vengeance? Why did she choose him? Why?
    The roof was slick and slippery from the heavy pounding of the night time rain, but Zylo was only a towering black and red clad idol. A deadly harbinger of the storm, and an even deadlier adversary to those who worship the long dead.
    "They don't need to die, they need guidance, Zylo," the angel said. Zylo didn't turn to her when she spoke, instead he stood still like he's been doing. Mute as ever, one can only wonder of what it is the angel find's so divine of what Zylo is. "Divine is not the word that springs to mind for one such as you, don't fool yourself." Perhaps not...but there are no other vanguards like him. At least, not anymore.
    "Don't be so glum, you'll always have me by your side." She was right about that, and he didn't like her for being right. "No... you like me for being beautiful, don't you?" He stood there unphased by her remark, although he could feel his heart skip a beat. She was the only one to make him do that, and he didn't like her for it. "I don't mind if you don't like me, because i know you kind of do." She giggled a little bit, teasing him as though she were a child. He let a slight smile form on his face...but only a slight smile.
 
Senny sipped from his mug of cafinite. Having filled out his report on the incident at Century's Rise, he was convinced that this was a homicide case ready to blow all over the news in a matter of minutes. His superiors were trying to keep the press off the trail for as long as they could, but he knew this was gonna be the big topic for the next morning. They found bone fractures, vital organs torn, a concussion, and even bullet wounds all over the victim's body. Though they had yet to I.D the victim, he was concerned this was someone of importance to someone important. Someone high up in power, high on the food chain, high in command...in Valhalla.
    Just then his partner showed with a digital form filled out, most likely the I.D of their victim, and a cup of chili.
    "We got it," he said. A very grim look was written all over his face. Senny looked at the form to find that he was right; this person was someone of some importance.
    "The victim's name is Randolf Vill," he said. "Born in Winter Haitus on Citi-Star, spring star date 83LX. Only family was his brother Gorden Vill, former high commander of the InterSekt Marine Corps, who is now President of Prime-Star. As you no doubt saw, the victim had bullet wounds all over his body. And it makes me wonder who would be dumb enough to do that?"
    "Or smart enough," Senny said. His partner gave him a look of curiosity. "I mean, really Gus. Who would use a slug thrower anymore when they could use plasma? Or a P.O weapon? Guns with bullets are easily traceable, maybe that's the point? Maybe we're being played for idiots by someone who likes to screw around with anyone in peace keeping or some kind of law enforcement?"
    "Or maybe it could be a hired hit," Gus said. "You gotta remember, Senny. When congress passed the Act of Justice and Swift Execution, one of the things to go was the use of cyanide laber rings. Which back then, was another means for anyone who liked keeping their hands clean, to hire and ‘fire' any employees they wished."
    "Employees to anyone high up or underground was basically another word for slavery in their business," said Senny.
    "Well...slavery isn't the word I would use," Gus stated.
 
Outside of the station sits a discreetly nestled Repulser, lights dimmed but not offline. He sat in his seat puffing some Vapor from his lit CigRet. "Hey Jerv, you get the Mic-Buggee working yet? It looks like those two are finishing up with the reports about now." He said with a slight cough from the Vapor. Jerv took a sip of some liquor as he was nestling some of the wires together.
    The Mic-Buggee was a little beaten up from years of use, and in some spots glittered a small film of dust from being locked up in a storage compartment. Some of the lights on it were faint, there was also an unpleasant whirring and grinding noise it would make when it was running. This piece of junk might as well have been scraped and melted down for some other use. Even if it was converted into some parts for a garbage burner at least it would be more useful and reliable then some half busted spying bot.
    Jerv looked up at the flickering lights on the bot's forehead, they were so weakly lit that you could only see a tiny bit of color. He frowned at this and resumed nestling the wires, hoping that the bot would spring a little closer to life than what this miserable excuse was.
    A spark jolted out of one of the ports in the spy bot's chest and nearly shocked his wrist, he swore in a startled manner and hit his head on the side of the Repulser.
    "If you weren't drinking, we could be listening in on what's going on in there right now, instead of you blundering up with that piece of junk's faulty chip's and circuits."
    Edmond was getting impatient with his partner and his attempts at making a repair job on a bot that should already be in the trash by now, and he really wished his publisher would have given them some proper spy equipment instead of this...thing. They had a job to do and right now they have to play mechanic instead of fulfilling they're journalistic duty, getting a big story for all the solar to hear.
    Suddenly, the bot flickered on and made what sounded like trumpet sounds, indicating that it was finally functioning and ready for work. Jerv grinned while Edmond stared in bewilderment, he got the thing running like some kind of miracle worker. "How did you do that?" He asked in awe. "A little booze can help when you don't want to over-think what you're working on, maybe you should try it sometime Ed." Jerv grinned smugly, like he just won a million dollars in a game of Mine. It was about time for them to get to work.

                                                                                                                                 -Sam Matz

​Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.

This month’s artist eschews digital in favor of original source materials, culling his imagery largely from horror comics, books on primitive man, Medieval art and Hare Krishna promotional material. Images are sliced and glued in a manner designed to invoke feelings of unease and existential dissonance yet are often tinged with a deliberate element of humor: like H.P. Lovecraft whispering in the ear of a nitrous oxide intoxicated and X-Acto knife wielding Hieronymus Bosch.
Growing up in the greater Kansas City metro area, his aspirations were focused in the direction of music. Shortly after high school he formed his first band called Big Toe, which was a part of the hardcore scene in and around Lawrence, Kansas.  In 1991, he moved to Seattle and began playing in The Moogs, all while working a day job as an exterminator. He would soon marry and, in 1999, he and his wife moved back to Kansas City.
Eight years later he would begin working under the moniker of Folkicide. A largely DIY undertaking, he opted to forego the normal route of hiring a commercial designer and assembled his first collage for the 2010 cover of the Folkicide release Let's Worship Degenerates. Juxtaposing Theravada Buddhist imagery found at a Bangkok street stall, 80's Warner horror comics, and snipping’s from the Queen News of the World album cover. Surprised by the positive reaction to the odd aesthetic he had stumbled upon, he continued assembling collages, now numbering in the hundreds. We are proud to present to you our November Spotlight on the art and music of Burnie Booth, AKA Folkicide.

from ​The Meaningless Glare of Broken Human Beings

Recorded and mixed by David Moore at Merriam Shoals Studio May through October 2013. All songs by Folkicide (ASCAP) Copyright 2014.

from Devotional Hymns From the Church of the Darwinian Snuff Film

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All songs were composed and performed by Folkicide (ASCAP).
Recorded and engineered by David Moore at his Merriam Shoal Studio here and there between July and August of 2011.

Burnie Booth
​A punk musician by proclivity and an artist by inevitability, Burnie Booth began creating his primitivist collages as album covers for Folkicide, his performing moniker since 2007.

Folkicide’s music is an acoustically violent, folk driven exploration of extreme pessimism, despair and the nightmare of existence. He feels his music has found a logical visual extension in the piecemeal medium of collage.

Over the years Booth’s collages have been displayed on the walls of various KC bars and music stores as well as a Saint Louis pop up art show. In 2013 filmmaker Mikal Shapiro produced the Folkicide animated music video entitled Empire of the Ants utilizing Booth’s collage imagery. His art will also be featured on the cover of the upcoming Kool 100s record.

For more of his art follow him at: www.facebook.com/Folkicide
For more Folkicide music: folkicide.bandcamp.com/music

Aid ‘em and Revo Denim… The culture of western civilization in the past century is a lie. Kill your heroes, bury your idols, and desecrate the graves. Art history is still a lie, and the galleries are far worse than dens of thieves. Now is the time to make sure you have something real to say. Don’t seek your voice in the candy-coated bubble-gum matrix of Art World, Book, Movie or Music Land. Transcend ‘em, know ‘em, aid ‘em and Revo Denim.

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​Thank you for visiting. Inter Sekt is an organization that works hard to continue bringing new and fresh artistic content from The New World Creative. You can show your support by shopping in our store where you will find select prints, original art and a variety of other items. Our store is powered by PayPal and is capable of accepting both PayPal and most major credit cards as payment. You may also make an anonymous donation by clicking the button below where you will receive confirmation for your contribution. Thank you again from The New World Creative.

A sense of duality: the poetic and the profane, the sacred and the salacious, the masculine and the feminine permeates the work of this month’s artist, whose main vehicle of expression is the written word.
Laura Albert first burst onto the literary scene as both spectacle and spectator, when her first novel Sarah was published in 2000 under the pseudonym of JT LeRoy, it was met with both critical and cultural acclaim. Sarah, a beautiful, brutal, and phantasmagoric account of a young, gender fluid, male truck stop hustler (lot lizard) was said to be a semi-autobiographical account of the life of its author JT LeRoy. Which it was, his voice, channeled through Laura’s hand.
The voice of Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy was born of Laura’s conversations with Dr. Terrence Owens via a crisis hotline in the late 1990’s. She had been calling crisis hotlines for years by this time, always as a boy, and at this point it was her major avenue of emotional, mental, and spiritual exploration. This would be the incubator for the germ of what would become JT. From the first call there he was, fully formed and crystalized. When Dr. Owens asked for a name Laura said “Terminator”. She would later state that: “He was my respirator. My channel for air”, and it was through her conversations with Dr. Owens that she would express herself and explore the avatar of Terminator.
When Dr. Owens identified continuity problems in Terminator’s thought processes, he suggested that writing would help. What initially resulted was Balloons, a story in which a presumably adolescent boy collects the balloons that the heroin he buys is packaged in. The use of language in Balloons has echoes of Rimbaud in its ability to clearly create a visual image within the mind’s eye of the reader. It was more than fiction, it was poetry. Populated by phrases like: “No one knows about my collection, and I won't tell until The Time. I've had my plan forever, and I can't just go buy balloons; they have to be special magic balloons, baptized by saliva, made holy by the fear of getting busted with them, and transformed to the sacred by all the desires floating in the tension surrounding them. Our sweat, our fear, and my love.”, and “I feel myself getting lighter as branches of balloons spring from every limb. I tell them not to cry; I must rise for their sins. I am the Lord's outcast and will face him for all outcasts.” it was much more than just a work of art therapy and the first tangible proof of its author’s genius.  Upon delivering this piece of writing to Dr. Owens office Terminator’s counterpart Speedie was born (complete with a cockney accent). The avatar of Speedie would become a crucial mechanism of something that was quickly snowballing into an endeavor which would blur the lines between the art and its creator. Ultimately calling into question the very archetype of the artist, and the expectations placed upon that role by a media driven consumer culture. At the same time questioning the status quo on a woman’s role in the literary and artistic realms of American culture, as well as those of people on the fringes of society, and in so doing tackled a plethora of modern taboos that few if any other writers were talking about at the time. Her writing was, in hindsight, extremely prophetic and incredibly ahead of its time. Today we take issues of gender identity and sexual assault for granted, we have open discourse on these problems and feel that we have a greater awareness of these things, but in the late 90’s and early 2000’s this was not the case. Baby Doll, another early piece, is the story of a boy dressing in his mother’s clothing in order to seduce her abusive boyfriend. It would be published in the compilation Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire.
 It was on the heels of this story that she, or rather Terminator, was offered a book deal for a memoir. Laura refused the deal not wanting to misrepresent her fiction as memoir. At this point she stopped writing altogether.
A few years later she would write Sarah, which was published not long thereafter under the name JT LeRoy. Soon a cult of personality was springing up around the work of this new force of American literature which demanded that they see their idol in the flesh. It was with the help of Laura’s sister in law Savanna Knoop that JT would indeed become flesh.
Over the course of the next several years many more events would unfold which would blur the lines even further between fact and fiction, drawing Laura and her inner circle further into the realm of celebrity, and later infamy. Two more books would be born from her pen via JT, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and Harold’s End, a movie was made based on the former title starring Asia Argento.
In 2005 an article was published implying that JT LeRoy was in fact the invention of his manager/handler Speedie AKA Laura Albert. More articles followed on its heels and she was quickly labeled as the architect of literature’s most elaborate hoax. A hail of controversy followed which generated even more press, Antidote International Films, Inc. filed a lawsuit, accusing her of fraud for signing a contract as JT LeRoy. She was viewed as a pariah, her name and work were attacked and defamed by a media machine which had no concept of art, let alone sympathy for an artist that they hardly understood and couldn’t commodify. But this was not the end for Laura.
 She worked as a writer on HBO’s Deadwood, and wrote a slew of articles and screenplays, mostly under her real name. In 2012 she served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival; she also attended Brazil's international book fair, Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where she and Alice Walker were the U.S. representatives. Brazil's Geração Editorial re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura Albert's name, and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale). (1)
When all is said and done, the way that the work of this artist was initially presented was and is an extraordinarily revolutionary piece of art far ahead of its time. Of course, as exciting and beautifully bizarre as the JT mythos is, it is merely the cherry on top when one sits down and actually reads the work. Included at the end of this feature is the first chapter of the New York Times bestseller Sarah, we encourage you to read it. We have also included the trailer for Author: The JT LeRoy Story, it is a must see and a terrific companion to this feature as it explores our subject in much greater detail than we can go into here. We are very honored to present to you our October Spotlight Artist: Laura Albert.
 
(*1-Excerpted from Laura Albert Wikipedia)

​Steven Lee Matz- I would like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to speak with us. One of the aspects of your story that I personally find the most inspirational and thought provoking is the use of not one but two avatars (JT and Speedie), as well as the cast of characters that you would create to populate their lives. Which leads me to my first question, did the personas of JT and Speedie emerge fully formed or did you consciously develop them?
 
Laura Albert- Terminator was Terminator from the moment he first spoke to Dr. Owens – there really was no conscious thought-process to create him. But he emerged after many years of stories of boys like him. When I was a child, in my mind at night, I would hear and see stories of children in crisis, usually boys. Sometimes they would go into my dreams, but most often this would happen before I would fall asleep. Sometimes they’d keep me up, or they’d wake me up, and I’d be crying. Sometimes the kid would survive and sometimes he would die. And in the daytime I would play with my dolls and play out the scenes and situations that I had watched at night.
 
Terminator arrived fully formed, but a lot of stories had preceded his. As for Speedie, she was the advocate I needed to protect Terminator, and then JT LeRoy. At the time I was morbidly obese, my food addiction had taken over. It was a way of numbing myself, a behavior I had learned since childhood – and like any addiction, it is a progressive disease. It was self-destructive but also an effective way to keep people away and to mute my sexuality – which was problematic for me because of the sexual abuse I had experienced as a child. But I felt myself as a morbidly obese monster. And our culture tends to view and treat morbidly obese women this way. We are something to be feared, as if contagious. We wear our “disease.” Only recently has our culture begun to see different-sized people, ethnically- and gender-diverse people being represented in media in any form. Speedie allowed me to step into a persona who could be a fearless and effective advocate for my work.
 
There is a gender bias in how a woman is allowed to express herself. Men are deemed passionate and forceful, but when women express themselves in exactly the same way, they are labeled emotional, hysterical, ranting, or even bitchy. When women go after what they want, they are manipulative, whereas that same behavior in a man is admired, he is a go-getter.
 
Speedie allowed me to not give a fuck. To step out of my toxic shame and be someone who was OK being other people’s bête noire when needed. Because an advocate was also needed to set boundaries where JT LeRoy was being appropriated or taken advantage of. It’s as if I bifurcated myself: There was that aspect of me, “Terminator/JT LeRoy” who would give it all away, and then the Speedie being who was a fearless protective warrior. Making her Cockney was a version of the fearless Brooklyn women I grew up with, who would say it like it was – they were opened-hearted and generous, but knew how to go to war as needed. Speedie’s accent also gave me another layer, her own mask, and an essence of street punk that loaned her power. Speedie didn’t “know her place” as a fat woman who was not cute or pretty, who did not wear fashionable clothes or have a designer handbag. She carried shopping bags, and she was supposed to shut up and be ashamed. But Speedie was punk as fuck, and like me, she did not give a shit about that stuff. Even though it was painful to be mocked.
 
The truth is, people liked Speedie, she was funny, generous, and free. At the time, no one complained about Speedie. And she allowed me to move beyond the shameful identity of a fat woman in a thin-body-biased culture. But there was no publicist, no agent, no manager, so when Speedie needed to set a boundary, she was the one who had to do that. She had to not care if it made people angry. And that fearless boundary-setting helped me learn to say no in my own life. To not be a people-pleaser. When you feel you have no right to live, it is hard to ask for what you need. Or to set boundries. As a child my body was not my own. I did not know what proper boundaries were. I learned over time, I was in foster care, in a group home, and I learned a lot there. But Speedie really helped me. At the time, I also had a baby. I would do whatever I had to do to protect this spirit that had come through my body. Speedie had that momma bear fuel in spades and helped me be an effective advocate for my young son, as well as for JT LeRoy’s books. My novel Sarah was born out of me not long after my son.
 
What is interesting is that, after I was “outed,” people for the most part assumed right away that Speedie was Laura. I think that is a very sexist reaction – a lack of imagination on their part as well. They even pushed aside the fun times they had hanging out with Speedie, and focused on the times when Speedie set limits on their inappropriate behavior that they probably felt ashamed of. Speedie was the one who said, “No, you cannot give drugs to JT” and “No more plying drinks to JT” and “OK, press is over.” They always wanted to push for more. Savannah as JT wanted to go off and party, and Speedie was constantly having to be a sort of den mother. It was awful to be in that position, but was a helpful skill to learn. 

​Speedie was also mocked for asking for what is basic on any promotional tour, the food we needed: apples, almonds, soy milk. Fuel to keep us going through long days promoting their film, which we were not being paid for. It was not even close to being over the top, like some requests that rock stars have been known to demand. But as soon as I was outed, it was framed in a greedy grabbing way, because they saw Speedie as me, and anything she asked for, suddenly loomed larger. It was funny to me that people like Asia Argento – who had long lists of demands for  hotel suites, stocked bars, drugs, and who got paid a fortune for wearing clothing she claimed to detest but had JT LeRoy wear, while of course not sharing any of her endorsement payments – had the hypocrisy and nerve to make fun of Speedie for daring to ask for water, organic apples and almonds.
 
When an artist is being commodified, there always needs to be someone who makes sure they are treated like humans. That is why people have managers and agents. There needs to be someone willing to be the gatekeeper, to require respect. If there is no one like that, then they will not feed you, they will not give you breaks – but they will often supply drugs to keep the party going, to make the artist more pliant. I could not afford to hire an outside person, so Speedie was that gatekeeper. And it was only resented after I was outed in the press. How dare I be both the advocate and the exploited beloved talent?! I had to be one or the other. So it was easier to take the route of unconscious gender bias and procliam, “Laura WAS Speedie and she is a monster!” And it was easy to parlay Speedie to the cliché role of cunt. And because they saw Speedie in my body, while JT was presented in Savannah’s body. The being of Terminator/JT, all the vulnerable mischievous sweetness of that being, as well as all the writing, was from me. But that was quickly dismissed, leaving me, Laura Albert tagged a “manipulative cunt.” Which is another word for publicist/manager/agent – woman.
 
After having been outed, I have traveled by myself to book festivals, I have been a judge at film festivals, I opened the documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story around the world, and I have given lectures, talks, workshops – but it is hard for me to summon my inner Speedie. She is there, but it is only when I feel really taken advantage of that she will come storming out to set a boundary. I am still learning how to be an advocate for myself in a healthy way. I know many women struggle with this balance. I want to be liked. But how do I protect myself as well? Also, I am sensitive to the point of being gun-shy about those accusations – that if I ask for what I need, I am that cunt Speedie. Plus I no longer have that boundary of fat around me. I was 320 lbs. My body is normal-sized now and I feel much more vulnerable.
 
But now I am available. People can come to hear me talk about the work and I can meet with them without the firewalls I had. It was awful for me, when people wanted to talk about what the JT LeRoy books brought up for them, and they were faced with a JT LeRoy who could only sit there and nod. Savannah had not had the experiences I had. She once said to me that she wished she had had real trauma happen to her, like Asia and I had experienced, that she felt embarrassed about her privilege. And she was not able to respond to the fans who wanted to connect around the issues I had so fearlessly explored, because she had no clue.
 
But now I can make myself very available. When I read, I will sit with every fan until they say all they need to, or the venue closes. It is a very moving and healing experience for me. And it sure took a long time for me to be ready to do that in my own skin.
 
I know there is a gift beyond my writing – the added bonus is the complex way I presented it. It has fostered more awareness of sexual and psychical abuse, gender variance, addiction, obesity, etc. In 1995 Dr. Vincent Felitti ran an obesity program at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego. But he had a 50% drop-out rate, just when those quitting were losing up to 100 pounds. “As we interviewed almost 300 of the dropouts, every other person spoke of having childhood sexual abuse; most of them seemed to have been waiting to tell someone after hiding it for years,” Felitti said. “They also often mentioned verbal and physical abuse and other traumatic experiences such as watching their mother being beaten."
 
This reveals how we are only at the tip of an iceberg in our exploration of what is now called developmental trauma and its fallout. That’s why the more stories people are allowed to tell, in whatever manner they can, the better. 

What was it like for you, both emotionally and artistically, when Savannah Knoop took on the role of J.T. and he became a living person?
 
I saw JT take over Savannah; it didn’t take long before he was really just stepping into her when she had to appear in public as him. For me it was validation of JT’s realness, that he could be channeled in this way. I did not see Savannah, I saw JT when we were out in public. When we got back to our hotel room we would have to decompress. It was a process. Me letting go of Speedie, and she of JT. But they had moved into us, so it was complex. The same when an actor is given over to a role they are playing. Some do not let go of it for all of filming and some even after. The role River Phoenix played in My Own Private Idaho deeply affected him, and there were destructive behaviors he continued after his role ended, which led to his tragic death. Likewise, I think Argento was attracted to the role of Sarah in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things because it tapped into her identity of both victim and victimizer. And she apparently did not stop playing this role with others, particularly the boy Jimmy Bennett who played her abused son, and whom she later slept with while he was still legally a minor. 

You began writing at the suggestion of Dr. Owens, because he said that it would help JT with his continuity issues. My question is when you would write at that time, would you be fully immersed in JT or were you able to keep different methods between Laura and JT?
​
Dr. Owens told Terminator he should write, and starting with “Balloons,” Terminator was writing. It was all drawn from my own life experiences and feelings, and from things that had happened to people I’d known. I wasn’t really writing from my imagination, not in the way that a genre writer does, saying, “OK, I am making a character up.” I was writing in a voice that had its own way of using what I had inside me. I was writing when I was a ward of the state in foster care, I had won scholarships to go to college. But a writing teacher – who I very much loved – at that time would not allow me to write in a male voice. She forbade it. I was writing stories of abuse, kids who were going through physical and sexual abuse. My issues. I begged her, I said to her, this is the only way I can explore this stuff in fiction, with a male voice. But she had experienced too many young writers making a mess when they wrote in the voice of the other. She thought, best write what you know first. I had no way to express to her that, even though I presented as female, that was not my inner life. I did not identify as female in a vast majority of the time spent in my body or my thought. There was no language for that. The term gender variance did not exist. And transgender was a scary word, it was still being viewed as a mental illness.
 
To be forced to write in a female voice was too exposing to me. It felt shameful and disgusting. Remember, ever since I was a young child, I had had the release valve of telling stories in a male voice. I very much wanted to be a boy, but my body was in no way masculine. Being chubby, made it worse. I had breasts early, which I detested. After writing about sexual and physical abuse with a girl protagonist in college, I had a break down, I dropped out of school and had to go to a hospital. I would not write about these themes, these issues in a purely female voice for almost thirty years. But now I am able to write my memoir. Writing as Terminator/JT LeRoy allowed me the freedom to create when gender variance did not yet have a name. 

Were there any other personas that you wanted to experiment with or bring to life during the JT era of your work that you never got a chance to?
 
JT represented a kind of culmination, the most elaborate expression of a defense mechanism. My methods for containing and responding to my own trauma had become so deep and reflexive – and they were so intertwined with my own drive to write and communicate and testify to what was happening – that everything finally coalesced or condensed or distilled into JT. 

Who are your main influences artistically?
 
I have been getting to know Sheila Heti, and I very much appreciate how she discusses her process of writing, how honestly she explores what she wishes to write about. It intrigues me how she fearlessly writes very personally, as in her latest book, Motherhood, but she does not call it memoir, she moves it into the realm of fiction, which is hard for many critics to accept. They pass personal harsh judgments about her actual partners even though she states them as fictional. She cuts the lines thin, but that is her right as an artist. Yet it seems to upset many critics, even though it allows her to protect people’s identities and merge her characters to explore a deeper truth. Her writing structure has a collage-like form to it, and that has been wonderful for me, to study her wonderful craft and discuss it with her.
 
I go back a lot to the wisdom of Oscar Wilde, who saw himself go from being the most celebrated writer of his time to being imprisoned, sentenced to two years hard labor, because his behavior was deemed immoral. Oscar Wilde said, "A critic should be taught to criticize a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author. This, in fact, is the beginning of criticism." The author eventually goes away, but if the art is any good, it stays. That's why people still read Homer and stage Aeschylus, while knowing almost nothing about those authors. Focusing on the author rather than the art is like throwing away the banana and eating the peel. But in our society, authors are commodified and merchandized just like their art is, so naturally people get confused... That is why I am concerned when people start focusing too much on the creation of JT LeRoy, and confusing it with an actual hoax, which is something that falls apart very quickly because there is no substance behind it – it dissolves like cotton candy. I wrote real books of fiction, which sustained the fiction of the JT LeRoy persona. To again quote Wilde, "We have no right to quarrel with an artist for the conditions under which he chooses to present his work."
 
What is wild in this day and age, with very little new creativity under the sun, is that most people now celebrate how I was able to do something new within the boundaries of fiction, of art itself. Of course, a few still want to quarrel with me for how I chose to present my fiction. And like was done to Oscar, some need to demonize and even criminalize me. When the lawsuit was brought against me by Antidote Films, they actually presented an inch-thick binder of why CRIMINAL charges should be brought against me. I had not stolen money from anyone, or mispresented any funds, but because I would not let them co-opt my story, they wanted to frame my fiction as criminal. The judge quickly threw that out, recognizing it for the sham it was. But this is dangerous, this need to control the way fiction in ART is presented. My fiction has a felt authenticity with issues that very much need to be explored in the realms of fiction and non-fiction. I hear from people all over the world, who are grateful to find a voice and story they recognize as true. Much the way J.K. Rowling captures so authentically the emotional truth of Harry Potter and his magical world, that people have been known to injure themselves trying to shove their way through a brick wall to catch the Hogwarts train, at the now playfully labeled “Platform 9 3/4” at Kings Cross Station.

One trend we need to be vigilant in guarding against is the assault on artists and the way art is being corralled into “fake news.”

The writer George Saunders has spoken extensively about the peril of confusing the fabrications an artist creates within the realm of their art and the specter of news reporting and politics. There is a very big difference, they are very different domains. Saunders discusses the danger of taking artists who play within storytelling and making us part of the general problem of lying and “fake news” as a threat to our society. Saunders says, “It’ll start to become a general distrust of artists and intellectuals… the Trump movement started saying ​everything​ was fake news. That’s an example of the kind of the line-blurring that happens when an anti-intellectual program is in place… This movement is going to come after the intellectuals, in some form or another. That’s what these movements do.” Saunders reminds us about the importance of the freedom of the imagination, which again is very different from “fake news.”

I think everyone needs to read this quote from him: “(Fiction) trains us, in precision of thought and expression, and more importantly it reminds us there’s a part of the mind that is very expansive and intuitive and empathetic, that is as real as any other part of the mind. And when you’re doing a work of art or when you’re receiving one, I think you’re reminded at every moment, that way of thinking is real.”

That’s right. And there is a contract that we enter into when you pick up a book that says “novel.” You consent to that... process.
​
I am very excited by artists who have different sized bodies, of various races and ethnicities and genders and ways of identifying, and who now have platforms to tell their stories.
 
Lena Duham had a huge impact on me. I stopped wearing shorts at age twelve because I did not see anyone with chubby thighs wearing shorts on TV, in any magazines. The fat girl was the joke, the sidekick. Lena changed that fearlessly. I see so many millennials expressing pride in their curves, while there is still so much messaging that thin is best, there is also a growing counter culture, that is fast becoming mainstream – women can feel pride in whatever way they want to express their bodies. When I was a kid, a girl or woman who was overweight would be mocked for daring to have pride in her body. There are models now that are gender variant. I am also collaborating on projects with photographer Christelle de Castro, a gender-non-conforming lesbian. The writer iO Tillet Wright has the rare and exquisite gift of peeling back layers of identity and showing how we carry not just our stories but our forebears with us in forming our identities – with none of the usual one-dimensional blaming or hostility. There are so many artists who in the past would not have been invited to the table. They no longer have to fight quite so hard to be heard, and it’s about time that a broader spectrum of representations became available. I remember when I was a kid getting Seventeen Magazine, and no one in that mag looked like me or expressed anything I was experiencing. They were selling a narrow ideal of beauty and identity – and if you do not find yourself represented, it only compounds the isolation and loneliness. 
 
While they still have to deal with bias and educate people, it is not the uphill battle that it was. All of this gives me so much hope. On TV, we are not watching stories where we as an audience are trusted to care about characters you never saw on TV before. People of color, trans people of all races, body sizes, older women – I love how some TV shows Trojan-horse it, like Orange Is the New Black. It starts out ostensibly about a blonde-haired blue-eyed wasp, but next thing you know, we are caring about characters very few white male old-school executives would ever risk allowing to be protagonists of TV shows. There will always be a demand for escape shows, like Housewives, Kardashians or Bachelor type shows. But people also want to see people they know, who we are.
This is what excites me.
 
I am also very inspired by music that in the space of a song can take us on an emotional journey. The Smashing Pumpkins are back, and their show blew me away. Shirley Manson is a powerhouse and explores complex issues in her songs, if you pay attention – it’s devastating.
I also am very taken with the band Big Thief. They remind me of Mazy Star meets My Bloody Valentine, but they are very much their own thing.

Above are the American editions from HarperCollins. Find the books in your favorite format by clicking here.

​Laura Albert won international acclaim writing fiction as JT LeRoy. She is the author of the novels Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, reissued by HarperCollins, and the novella Harold’s End, with illustrations by Cherry Hood. She is also the subject of Jeff Feuerzeig’s feature documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film The Ballad of JT LeRoy. Cinema Eye, the organization that recognizes outstanding craft and artistry in nonfiction filmmaking, cited Laura Albert in Author as one of its 2016 list of Unforgettables: the year’s most notable and significant nonfiction-film subjects.
Laura’s books have also been reissued in the UK by Little Brown. Brazil’s Geração Editorial also re-released the JT LeRoy books in a boxset under Laura’s name – and she and JT were the subjects of the hit Brazilian rock musical JT, Um Conto de Fadas Punk (JT, A Punk Fairy Tale).
Laura contributes to print and online publications internationally, in a career that includes the cover feature for Man About Town and articles for The New York Times, The Forward, The London Times, Spin, Film Comment, Filmmaker, Interview, I-D, Vogue, The Face, Dazed and Confused, and VESTOJ, the Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion. She was a contributing editor to Black Book, I-D, SOMA, and 7×7 magazines and is currently an editor for Diane Pernet’s A Shaded View On Fashion (www.asvof.com), and the Outpost section of psychoPEDIA.com. She has written for dot429, the world’s largest LGBTA professional network, and been an invited speaker at their annual conferences in New York.
Laura’s writing has brought her to speaking engagements from the story-telling series The Moth in New York to Foyles bookstore in London and Brazil’s international Bienal Brasil do Livro e da Leitura, where Laura and Alice Walker were the 2012 U.S. representatives. Her interview given to Nathaniel Rich was the cover feature of the Fall 2006 issue of The Paris Review; she also gave an extensive interview to Adam Langer for the August 2013 issue of Interview Magazine.
She wrote the original script for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, winner of the 2003 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and was Associate Producer. For Asia Argento’s film adaptation of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Laura served as Associate Producer. She also co-scripted Jean-Claude Schlim’s film House of Boys and was a writer for the HBO series Deadwood. Her writing for short films includes Radiance for Drew Lightfoot and ContentMode, and Dreams of Levitation and We Vault for Sharif Hamza and Nowness. In 2012 Laura served on the juries of the first Brasilia International Film Festival and the Sapporo International Short Film Festival.
The editor of Da Capo Best Music Writing 2005, she has contributed writing to such short-story anthologies as The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers and read by Tatum O’Neal on audio edition; MTV’s Lit Riffs; XXX, edited by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Nadav Kander’s Beauty’s Nothing; and The Fourth Sex, Adolescent Extremes, edited by Francesco Bonami and Raf Simons. She has also been published in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, and the Oxford American Music issue.
She has written liner notes and biographies for musicians Billy Corgan, Liz Phair, Conor Oberst, Bryan Adams, Nancy Sinatra, and Courtney Love, as well as the liner notes for the Criterion Collection DVD of My Own Private Idaho, which features an audio segment with JT, Gus Van Sant, and Jonathan Caouette. With the band Thistle LLC, she contributed songs to the film Andy Warhol: Morning Star; she was also the voice of Warhol, reading from his Philosophy and Diaries. She also contributed to a podcast project for San Francisco’s MOMA on Warhol.
Laura has collaborated with director and playwright Robert Wilson and with Noah Khoshbin for the international exhibition of Wilson’s VOOM video portraits, as well as for the catalog of Wilson’s “Frontiers: Visions of the Frontier” at IVAM Valencia.
Profiled as an “indie fashion fighter” in the Style section of the San Francisco Chronicle, Laura has served as a member of Diane Pernet’s ASVOFF fashion film competition jury. Steven Klein has photographed Laura for QVEST magazine; so has Kai Regan, for his “Reckless Endangerment” at ALIFE. She has also done fashion shoots for Christian Lacroix and John Galliano, written films for ContentMode and Nowness, and interviewed numerous designers. ContentMode has published her series of fashion-related interviews with film and television actors. She coordinated a fashion show as an HIV/AIDS fundraiser for the Academy of Friends Oscar Party, bringing together Melange Productions and the multi-talented young people of Project Level – an arts academy for at-risk youth in San Francisco, where Laura was Director of Strategic Development – to create looks for the show, which they modeled. Laura also arranged for model and activist Rain Dove Dubilewski to walk the runway as JT LeRoy for the 2014 HIV/AIDS fundraiser held by the Academy of Friends Oscar Party in San Francisco.
Laura profiled award-winner Juergen Teller for the 2003 Citibank Photography Prize catalogue, and was a catalog contributor for both the “Blind Cut” exhibition at New York’s Marlborough Chelsea and “An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parts 1 & 2, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself” at SF Camerawork. Laura has collaborated with Williamsburg band Japanther, releasing a limited-edition cassette under the name True Love in a Large Room, with original artwork by Winston Smith, and with the San Francisco band The Size Queens on The Size Queens III album.
A spokeswoman for the successful “Heart for Eye” campaign to raise funds for restorative eye surgery for children, Laura hosted a television segment and was both an interview subject and an interviewer of inspirational women such as Anastasia Barbieri and Anh Duong. As part of the campaign, she was photographed by Marc Horn in ads that ran in Korean Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, W, Marie Claire, and other publications.
She has also taught at Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia and California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and lectured with artist Jasmin Lim at Artists’ Television Access with SF Camerawork’s Chuck Mobley.
For several years Laura was the chief entertainment/travel writer/personality for Bayinsider.com, a San Francisco City Guide produced by Cox Interactive Media in conjunction with KTVU/Fox 2, KNBR and The Ticket 1050. She has hosted a series of radio segments at KPOO and KUSF on film, food, and travel. Laura’s other credits include being weekly show host for Rolling Stone, an Internet RealAudio show for Web Entertainment Group; travel writer for a New York-based publication, Singles Almanac; and lifestyle columnist for The Web Magazine and Maxim magazine.

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This month’s artist is on the forefront of a new wave of both tattooing and painting. A born storyteller, in his formative years he aspired to work in the comic book industry. However, after several interviews with some of the biggest publishers he lost interest upon discovering that within that industry one could either be an artist or a writer, but not both and set his sights elsewhere.
He spent the next several years exploring and expanding his craft. He began tattooing, painting in oil, and produced two novels (Down Highways in the Dark... By Demons Driven and The Black Seas of Infinity), both of which have been published by Permuted Press.
A profoundly gifted, focused, and determined artist; he has reached across an array of mediums to tell the stories that he has always had within him. Of course, any artist, no matter how naturally adept they are at their craft, must have the work ethic to match their aspirations. Even in the face of turmoil, illness, and tragedy, he persisted in the expression of his strange and wonderful vision, through the constant pursuit of his art. We proudly present to you our September Spotlight artist: Dan Henk.

Dan Henk

Born in 1972, on a small army base in the south, Dan Henk grew up on a diet of science fiction and horror books. At eighteen Dan Henk was kicked out of his house. He spent the next eight months homeless, often living in the woods. Six months later, he was in the passenger seat of a car that flipped and his face broke the windshield. Soon after that, the tendon on his thumb was severed in a fight with a crackhead. He came down with brain cancer in 2001, and his wife died in a hit-and-run in 2007. In 2012, a car shattered his bike, throwing him through the windshield and putting him in a coma for hours. In 2017 he flipped his truck and woke up in the woods. There's a running theory that he is a cyborg.
 
He's done art for Madcap Magazine, Maximum Rock and Roll Magazine, Tattoo Artist Magazine, Black Static, This is Horror, Deaddite Press, Skin Deep,  The Living Corpse, Aphrodesia, Splatterpunk, Tattoo Prodigies, Pint Sized Paintings, Coalesce, Zombie Apocalypse, Most Precious Blood, Indecision, Locked In A Vacancy, Shai Hulud, Purity Records, and a slew of Memento books.
 
2011 saw the release of his first book, The Black Seas Of Infinity, care of Anarchy Books. Permuted Press reissued it in 2015, and a few months later released his second novel Down Highways In The Dark...By Demons Driven. Splatterpunk issued his short story “Christmas is Cancelled” as a signed and numbered chapbook. Now living in Pennsylvania, he owns half of The Abyss Art Studio in New York, and spends what little spare time he has doing Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiujitsu.

​We are everywhere we are (K)nowhere. The art world is a temple of excrement and you have been its disciples… until now.
Guerilla psy-op pop-ups and predictive program painting (PPP) are just the tip of a much larger iceberg and now we have uploaded a virus into the mainframe of the collective unconscious: The Exploding Digital Inevitable.

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