Logo #141: Black Flag

Created for Black Flag by Raymond Pettibon (born Raymond Ginn on June 16, 1957) in 1978. It's free and it's completely its own being at this point - and, like the man said, black is beautiful, baby. Not to confused with "Hoisting the Black Flag," but the spirit is essentially the same. Which is to say: livid and vivid.

That this year in music was singularly beige and whelming is like saying that a transvestite has "a little bit extra." The round-up for ought-7: the government in the former Soviet satellite of Georgia assaults the leftists with sonic weaponry, the Japanese build roads that make music as you drive on them and what does the inscrutable West offer? The circus-act-on-a-runaway-train that is Amy Winehouse, the marching band stylings of Arcade Fire, and the Mayberry Machiavellis of a music industry who make clueless housewives from Getmethefuckouttahere IA pay $9000 per stolen and contaminated song. That buys a lot of Juice Newton records. High points: the endlessly beautiful talent of Mr. James Franks and his German disco hit "Screwing You on the Beach at Night"; getting an e-mail from Karlheinz Stockhausen; being hailed by VICE Magazine as "the world's most foremost expert on experimental, conceptual, and all-around-obscure weirdo-art- noise music"; Norman Mailer smiled at me; continued exposure to random cats that always turn out to be greebles / tufted twice-mice / saintly bonks (circle one or more); apples continue to fear me; fresh milk in glass bottles with cream at the opening. Low points: being cast out of Paradise after my previously perfect girlfriend fell off a cliff and died on impact. Sort of.

And so we raise a similar flag in hopes of a better year in 2008 - because 2007 was so deeply and satanically wretched in many aspects that, well, it can always be worse.