Pack Rat needs to hug it out.

Most people would find a pitch black tunnel leading off into God-knows-where terrifying. I know I would. But to some people—people braver, more determined, and better equipped to handle themselves than I—have for many years been disappearing into what has come to be know as the Freedom Tunnel. Located under Riverside Park, in New York City, this old Amtrak train tunnel was featured in the 2000 documentary, Dark Days for the community of homeless people who lived inside, in a shanty town beneath the city streets (which, P.S., is a terrific movie). What the documentary didn’t capture was what an amazing gallery of graffiti art that the tunnel has become. I stumbled across some photos that urban enthusiast and blogger, Peter, posted on City Noise (an interesting website, worth a post in and of itself). Peter plunges into the deep to capture some of the ever changing artwork decorating the dark concrete walls. Especially cool are the mural works by Chris “Freedom” Pape (who wikipedia claims is the tunnel’s namesake), one of the foremost graffiti artists. It’s amazing and awe inspiring that this great artwork is made hidden from most eyes: definitely not for mass consumption, but instead for the love of creation.

Pack Rat Magazine drove its Chevy to the levee and guess what? The levee–she was filled with whipped cream and booze, man.

I first fell in love with the work of Chris Van Allsburg when I was a wee Meghan. Like millions of other children, I was transported away on the Polar Express and caught up in the game of Jumanji. And my favorite adventure was walking through the wild topiaries in The Garden of Abdul Gaszasi where the shrubs can walk, jump, and run, or so they seem.

Usually, childhood pleasures lose their allure as we grow into adults, but for me, Van Allsburg’s illustrations, with looming, shadowy figures baring down on his children protagonists, are as startling and exhilarating as ever. And one of his books in particular, The Mystery of Harris Burdick, will always captivate me.

The Mystery is a fairy tale told as fact. Van Allsburg writes, in an introduction to the first edition in 1984, the “true story” of Harris Burdick. Many years ago, he claims, a man called on editor Peter Wenders. This mystery caller identified himself as Harris Burdick and said that he had written and illustrated fourteen stories. He presented Wenders with a portfolio of fourteen drawings, captions, and story titles– one for each story–and promised to return the next day with the remaining tales. He never came back.

Wenders, as Van Allsburg writes, hung the intriguing pictures in his home and for some time his children, and then grandchildren would look at the illustrations with their captions and story titles and they would make up their own tales, filling in the blanks as they went. Until one day he showed the drawings to Van Allsburg, who subsequently decided that more children needed to admire them. Hence the book.

I have to admit, it has taken me about twenty years to realize that this is all a ruse. Not until I began to write this blog and I went back and revisited The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, did I see with adult eyes that “Burdick’s” style of illustration was remarkable similar to all of Van Allsburgs other books. Oh well. A little of the magic has died, but the intrigue is still there all the same. Thousands upon thousands of children have written stories to accompany “Burdick’s” illustrations over the last two decades (you can read some of them online). And adults are equally captivated. Stephen King wrote a story called “The House on Maple Street,” inspired by one of the Burdick drawings, an animation company has created short films based on some of the images, and a songs have been written in tribute to the mystery.

Van Allsburg may have children in mind when he sets pen to paper, but his stories have captured my imagination for a life time. Enjoy some of the Harris Burdick images below and let me know if they stir you into writing a tale of your own.

Title: A Strange Day in July

Caption: He threw with all his might, but the third stone came skipping back.

Title: The Seven Chairs

Caption: The fifth one ended up in France.

Beware. Pack Rat Magazine has learned the 5-point Palm Exploding-Heart Technique

Let’s get right to the meat of the matter. Today’s artistic discovery comes in the form of pet portraiture. Unflagging, unfailing, relentless love of a pet is a strange thing. People seem to either get it or they don’t, there’s no middle ground. Well, even if you aren’t an animal person, you’ll probably enjoy Ron Krajewski’s Dog Art Studio. His paintings of dogs and cats are to be enjoyed; not just for the subject matter but also for the way in which he presents it. Krajewski’s unorthodox use of color brings the spirit of the animal subject to life. Just look at this print of a Boston Terrior, that’s going for only $12.50. Adogable, as my friend Sarah would say. Or, commission a painting of your own pet.

Pack Rat Magazine wonders, what ever happened to Little Cesar’s Pizza?

Hola mis amigos. Como estas? I don’t know the keyboard commands for accent marks, I apologize. I have another camera technique for all y’all to try out. Much in the same vein as Mark McKinney’s famous head-crushing character from Kids in the Hall, SKYplay plays around with the depth perception of the viewer. Artist hb19 says on his (her?) Flickr page that SKYplay “depicts a composition dominated by use of the sky and real clouds at that moment, with another object.” Very powerful imagery.

Pack Rat Magazine gets crunked up. We think. We’re not really sure what that means.

Hi girls and boys. I must apologize. I wrote out this whole blog entry yesterday, but apparently didn’t bother to save and post it. Which means that it wasn’t much good to anyone, including myself. But why dwell in the past. What I had meant to show you was these colorful, playful pendants from Victoria Usova’s shop, Chest of Fairytales. They are bright and light-hearted, like a children’s book crossed with a stained glass window. They are each $15 and I want to collect them all. Check out a smattering of examples below.

Pack Rat Magazine just called to say we love you

Some people hate graffiti. I’ll admit that the random expletive or the “Tori loves Jo-Jo” type of written diarrhea certainly detracts from the general ambiance of any given surrounding. Real art, though; people using the faceless, emotionless concrete of our cityscapes as a canvas for creativity and expression? I say bring it on. In the last decade or so, I’d guess that there has been an increase in stencil graffiti in particular (that’s just a guess, I can’t provide any kind of hard data to back that up, so don’t even bother asking for it.) It surprises me how much I enjoy this stencil art. I can get pretty nose-in-the-air about some things for no apparent reason, and normally the fact that stencil artists create their images beforehand as oppose to other artists (taggers and the like) who do everything freehand, I am surprised that I’m not more uppity about the purity of it, blah, blah, blah. But, lucky for me my head isn’t firmly wedged up my ass on this one. I can appreciate stencil art for all its worth. I’m especially impressed when I think of how hard it would be to create some of the complex images out there, and then to think about having to cut out the NEGATIVE space of some of those complex images when making a stencil. It boggles my poor spatially addled brain.

Anywho, if you want to become an aficionado on you own, take a gander at Street Art compiled by Splitbrain.org. A personal favorite is below.

Pack Rat Magazine is the dandy highwayman you’re too scared to mention

A big fat congratulations are in order for Marek Bennett, comic strip author/artist, and friend to Pack Rat Magazine. Those of you who have been visiting our site from the beginning will remember the interview we did with Marek about his Comics Workshop for kids. And now Marek’s work has received the recognition it deserves. He recently won the Xeric Grant for comic book self publishing. Read the press release below for more info. Well done, Mr. Bennett, kudos to you from your friends at Pack Rat.

“Mimi’s Doughnuts” Wins Xeric Award

Prestigious Self-Publishing Grant Goes to New Hampshire Comic Strip

Henniker, New Hampshire — The weekly comic strip “Mimi’s Doughnuts” has won a coveted Xeric Grant for comic book self publishing. With this award, creator Marek Bennett will self-publish a trade paperback anthology of the past four years of his comics.

The Xeric-funded anthology, entitled Breakfast at Mimi’s Doughnuts, will collect the best of the strip’s first two hundred episodes, plus several pages of original artwork and special features. Bennett plans to release the collection in the spring of 2009.

“Mimi’s Doughnuts” follows the lives of an extended family that runs a small neighborhood doughnut shop in fictional Claymont, New Hampshire. Bennett bases the strip loosely on his wife’s childhood growing up at family doughnut shops and diners in Claremont, New Hampshire.

“The characters and stories are mixtures of people and places we’ve known, people and issues I encounter in my teaching, and new ideas that come up every day,” says Bennett. “It’s the perfect setting to address so many of the issues facing small towns all over our country today.”

Past storylines use humor to deal with serious topics like diet, politics, littering, real estate development, lung cancer, domestic abuse, and global warming. Often, real-life stories and adventures find their way into Bennett’s comics. In 2007, while Bennett’s family rescued over thirty stray kittens from an abandoned house in Henniker, his comic strip characters found themselves also rescuing feral cats.

Bennett has drawn “Mimi’s Doughnuts” since 2003. The strip currently appears weekly in New Hampshire and Vermont newspapers. Bennett also offers quarterly mail-order ‘zines of his comics, with subscriptions available at his website. Bennett’s popular Comics Workshop programs for elementary- and teenaged artists run all Summer long at several locations in New Hampshire. For more information, visit Bennett’s website at: www.marekbennett.com.

The Xeric Foundation of Northampton, Massachussetts, supports independent self-publishers in the comics industry through competitive grant programs. The Foundation was established by Peter Laird, co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. For more information, visit: http://xericfoundation.org.

Pack Rat Magazine enjoys a good chocolate covered banana at the big yellow joint.

Okay this…this is pretty cool. Try to imagine this. You’re eleven years old and your best friend is spending the night in your family’s new apartment. You’re just hanging out in your bedroom, when all of a sudden your friend jumps up and points to your radiator. “It’s your name!” he exlaims. You think he’s a wacko because while the cover to your radiator is decorated with random letters, none of them come close to spelling out your name in any kind of combination. But, your friend explains, it is a puzzle. And then before you know it, your whole home has come to life as one big riddle waiting to be solved.

Sounds exciting, right? Well check out the article “Mystery on Fifth Avenue,” from yesterday’s New York Times. The Sherry-Klinsky family got exactly this kind of surprise a year after architect Eric Clough had finished renovating their new Fifth Avenue apartment. Steven Klinsky had asked Clough to put a poem he had written about his family into a bottle and bury it in the wall during renovations. Clough thought about it and did him one better. He, with the help of a battlion of friends and like-minded enthusiasts, devised an elaborate mystery without the family’s knowledge. Furniture was built with secret compartments, walls were left with hidden doors. Clough even coerced author Jonathan Safran Foer to write a novel full of clues that he hid in the wall and Canadian recording artist Kate Fenner created a special soundtrack for the home which was hidden in a secret compartment in the kitchen. There’s more, oh so much more. It seems like an Alice and Wonderland dream, that the home you thought you new actually has hundreds of small secrets right below the surface. Read the full article to find out more. Visions of sugar plums are dancing in my head after hearing this one.

Here are a few photos, but you should really go to NY Times website and get the full effect. What you see below is the radiator that son Cavan’s friend found his name in (each grate contains a poem for each child); the leather-bound novel that held the clues; the custom-built sideboard’s secret compartment; the hidden panel and pieces of a cube which, when assembled, became a sort of magnet. When the family ran the magnet over a panelled wall in the master bedroom, the panels opened, revealing the hidden poem written by Mr. Klinsky.

Pack Rat Magazine separates the wheat from the chaff. And then we ditch it all for some fried dough.

Let me walk you through what a day of searching for a blog topic is like. So I start out with a list of websites that I have on file…stuff I haven’t written about yet for one reason or another. It’s a long list, compiled of many a Stumble Upon and Google search. I close my eyes and randomly select a site. Today I landed on Hello Indie, a shopping ‘zine for indie goods. I really enjoy the articles in this ‘zine and have almost mentioned it a few times in the past, but I hesitated because they look like they haven’t put out a new issue since 2006.

Today I read through their archives, looking for something I could highlight, and I came across their article from Issue #2 called “Out Of Control Photography” about a new trend (movement?) in digital photography. The artists take their cameras and toss them into the air so that the resulting photographs are a surreal blur of light and shapes. The article linked to photographer Ryan Gallagher, so I clicked on his link and went to his flickr page. But I didn’t poke around there very long before I saw that he had his own blog called Camera Toss (The Blog) where he showcases his own “kinetic photographs” and his general musings about photography and life. I found the how-to guide for camera tossing to be particularly interesting. But I wanted to get a better sense of what this technique could accomplish, so I headed back to the flickr pool and I found some photos to share with y’all. They are from left to right: Kinetic 1023 by mtnrockdhh; Cameratoss from the archives by Beer 30; and Toss 109 by AKA33

And that, my peeps, is a sneak peek into the web sluething I do to bring you blog postings every day.

Pack Rat Magazine likes to punch-dance out its aggression.

How much fun is this? Artist Dave Devrie has taken drawings done by children and brought them to life…well, artistic life. It’s a joy to see where the wild whimsy of kidhood overlaps with someone whose job is a professional imaginer. I’ve snapped up these images from a few different sources, but you can check out his experiments with kid art on his website themonsterengine.com