Woodland Creatures

DSC01375Sam Brown at Explod­ing Dog offered to do an orig­i­nal draw­ing for every­one who sent in a SASE and title to him. I was a huge fan of ED back in its ear­ly days, but even­tu­al­ly stopped vis­it­ing every day for no real rea­son. I once made a huge jpg of my 16 favorites and print­ed it out on the archy plot­ter at Bond Hall dur­ing my sopho­more year. I still have it on my wall here. Then this offer comes along…

The title I sent in was “Wood­land Crea­tures.” The paper is slight­ly warped because it was fold­ed in my mail­box dur­ing the whole damp week­end. I’m pret­ty sure fram­ing will flat­ten it out nice­ly though.

Plus free stick­er! [Already on my lap­top]. You can see the rest of the sub­mis­sions here.


One thought on “Woodland Creatures”

  1. Saw this, and want­ed to share. Reminds me of what’s hap­pen­ing with the Church.

    ***

    No Shel­ter
    Why an all-ages club grew old so quick­ly.
    By Jason Bracelin
    Arti­cle Pub­lished Aug 13, 2003

    In a lit­tle more than a month of oper­a­tion, the all-ages club Shel­ter was already show­ing signs of progress.

    “We were kick­ing butt,” says own­er Doug Kirschn­er. “We had some pret­ty good shows, where the place was packed, and the kids were lov­ing it. Par­ents were lov­ing it. Par­ents were drop­ping their kids off and actu­al­ly stay­ing to see the shows.”

    But if par­ents and kids were lov­ing the Shel­ter, the City of Cleve­land was­n’t. While Kirschn­er was out of town on busi­ness in late July, the club was shut down by the city for oper­at­ing with­out an occu­pan­cy per­mit. Kirschn­er says he applied for the per­mit and was under the impres­sion that he could run his club in the mean­time.

    “I did talk with the City of Cleve­land before we did this, to see if they were about it, and a lot of peo­ple we talked to were right on with it,” Kirschn­er says. “Then, when push came to shove, they weren’t with us any­more.”

    The city has a dif­fer­ent take.

    “I talked to Doug, I told him what some of the con­cerns were from the com­mu­ni­ty,” says Mer­le Gor­don, coun­cil­woman for Cleve­land’s Ward 15, which includes the Mem­phis-Ful­ton Plaza where the Shel­ter was locat­ed. “I asked him if he had all the appro­pri­ate per­mits, and at that time, he was­n’t sure what per­mits they had; nor did he real­ly know what time the club closed. He told me every­body is out by 10 o’clock, and that’s not in fact true.

    “There was nev­er a desire to close the estab­lish­ment down — that was not the intent at all,” Gor­don adds. “It’s just that he needs to have the appro­pri­ate per­mits, and we need to make sure that they’re not both­er­ing the neigh­bors, that they’re not there past a cer­tain time, that loi­ter­ing issues are dealt with.”

    For his rush to open the Shel­ter, Kirschn­er is left clutch­ing a good idea that went bad — and strug­gling to climb out of a hefty finan­cial hole.

    “I lost over $10,000 with­in the last month,” he says with a sigh. “I lost my house. I lost my car. I lost every­thing I had.” He may con­sid­er get­ting back into club book­ing, once he gets his finances in order. For now, he’s look­ing for a new line of work.

    “I can’t real­ly book shows any­more, because all the book­ing agents are pissed off with me because I had to can­cel shows,” he says. “My career in this is pret­ty much dead.”

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