We have recently upgraded from dropping the zine on bathroom floors to actually putting the zine into cardboard bins. But instead of putting a bare ass white bin on counter tops around Texas, we asked local artists to design our magazine bins and the few that didn’t hang up on us, were gracious to decorate them with their own dope design.

So to give thanks to those artists, we will feature their bins and reveal a new design each week. We will also inform you where you can peep the bin and pick up the latest issue.

First up to bat, is local great – Article.

Hater: When Hater asked you to create an original design for their bin were you honored or did you think “fuck; now these ninjas want something for free’? Why the design?

Article: No, not honored really. I think it’s an honor for Hater to have had local talent support the magazine and do the art bins for free. Without artists there wouldn’t be a mag. As for the design, it only made sense to do tattoo style images for this bin that would house the new issue.

Hater: Favorite line from Pimp C?

Article: I walk around this motherfucker, trippin on these weak niggaz /pullin all this hoe shit, callin themselves street niggaz. (I Don’t Fuck Wit U – Pimp C)

Hater: What do you hate most about the Houston Art Community?

Article: I don’t hate the so called ”art scene” here. I’m to busy painting and creating to worry about what it’s doing much less hate on it, but it’s kind of commercial, it’s like most of the new peeps involved now that are trend followers….looking at Jux (Juxtapoz) biting other peeps styles and trying to pawn it off as their own. A majority of Houston has always been a trend city though. Hell, just look around the next time you’re out!

Hater: What projects are you working on for 2010?

Article: More canvas work…that I know for sure!

Hater: What inspires you to create?

Article: Pussy, weed and alcohol.

Hater: Favorite medium to work with at the moment?

Article: Wood stains. Let’s see how many peeps start working with this medium now!

Peep Article’s bin @ Premium Goods, 2416 Times blvd, Houston Tx 77005 713 523 8825

Feel free to contact Article at articlegfx@hotmail.com for any artistic needs and Pimp C quotables.

Houston native and San Antonio transplant OG Bobby Trill graced us with a lover’s mix sweetly titled, “Chons 2 Da Side”. My favorite part of the mix is how he melds Brown and Black love with a Selena track into AL Green. Play it now and get your mind ready for knocking da boots with your significant other on Sunday.

“Chons 2 Da Side” - click to listen

“Pumzi” is Kenya’s very first science fiction film, written and directed by Wanuri Kahiu:

“Pumzi imagines a dystopian future 35 years after water wars have torn the world apart. East African survivors of the ecological devastation remain locked away in contained communities, but a young woman in possession of a germinating seed struggles against the governing council to bring the plant to Earth’s ruined surface…”

The film is now playing at Sundance five times between Friday and Jan. 30. Director Kahiu’s future plans include expanding Pumzi to feature length film as well as cultivating her local film community.
nerd with swag via wired

Soul singer Erykah Badu debuts her first single, “Window Seat” from her upcoming fifth studio album, New Amerykah, Part II: Return of the Ankh.

From Peace Uv Mine:

Welcome to Space City.

Questlove’s “group to watch” H.I.S.D. returns with the first single “Lando” from their forthcoming LP/Book project The Weakend. Click the image up above for your FREE DOWNLOAD or copy and paste the following link into your browser:

http://hisd.peaceuvmine.com

Get Ur Space Up!

If you were Black in Houston before 1970 and wanted a tattoo, you had to either let your homeboy down the street play etch-a-sketch on your skin, do a bid in prison or enlist in the military.

As I thought over the restrictive and not very hygienic ways of how to attain a tattoo back in the day, I wondered where in the hell my uncle got his tattoos. I called my uncle, a man over the age of 50 from Trinity Gardens in Houston, Texas, and who still refers to himself as the “playa from the Himalayas,” and asked him where he and his friends used to go to get their tattoos. He paused a moment to remember and responded, “It’s a shop off 45, right after Tidwell, past the Skyline apartments. Go there and they’ll hook you up.”
My uncle couldn’t remember the name of the tattoo shop but the shop he was referring to, the shop where he and his partners were able to go and for the first time receive a professional tattoo, was Dago’s Tattoo Parlor. [..]