This past Sunday was a bittersweet coming together as our neighborhood celebrated ten years of Zebulon with one final night of music and friends. As I looked around the room at the early crowd – kids scampering about on the stage up front and their parents hanging back by the bar – I got to thinking: what would all of us have done without this place? Over the past decade it has served as a community hub for many of us: we watched World Cups and elections here: screaming and celebrating, we met our soul mates here (I met mine) and celebrated weddings (including my own), bid farewell to friends, welcomed new ones, chimed in new lives (including little Henri’s)…

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Jaime Hayon is on the fast track to completely winning over my heart. First there was his Green Chicken, with its childish, nonsensical spirit, and now, in collaboration with French glassworks legend, Baccarat, Hayon has created these spectacular crystal and porcelain vessels for a collection simply titled: Baccarat Zoo. Their tongue-in-cheek opulence is right on the money (a hefty wad of money).

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I rarely pine for a work of art. I must sheepishly confess that you’re more likely to find me daydreaming of a big leather bag than a painting. Not to say that I don’t ♥ art: Matisse, Brancusi, Ernst, Morris Louis, and so on… I just… I don’t need to own them the way I need to own a Reed Krakoff Boxer bag. You know. But Alma Allen? I’ve been jonesing for this Joshua Tree-based artist’s delicate little sculptures: thinking about which I would own if I could, the precious spot on my desk where it would live, how would it feel in the palm of my hand, how I probably wouldn’t be able to stop at just one…

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How does an artist move forward without forsaking his past? Take something he’s already made and give it new meaning? Over the course of one year, filmmaker Jim Helton documented New York-based artist Chris Rubino as he explored these paradigms and new direction in his work…

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While the Americans are still cranking out duct-tape wallets, the Slovenians have gone above and beyond. (Tape wallets? That’s sooo ’90s Janeane Garofolo at a Pavement show.) En lieu of spray-paint, the ten-person ORTO collective relies on neon-toned industrial tape — the material best known for fixing disasters — taping over the city’s dull streets with scream-worthy graphics…

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Dutch author and illustrator Dick Bruna is probably best known as the creator of Miffy — Nijntje in Dutch — the cute but inscrutable rabbit dressed like a toddler and pictured, in bold lines and primary colors, at the zoo, in the snow, at the seaside, etc…

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Well, it’s old news that we’re killing the planet and along with it, many of these adorable fuzzy creatures! Need some crappy stats to scare you into action? The Nonlife Zoo’s mission statement is chock full of them. How about this doozy: “more than one kind of species vanishes from earth daily”…

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The generation of Cracked Magazine readers and skateboarder rats has found its mark in the comic world. Traipsing across a macabre scene of sand fleas, shadows, and black widows — this is the world which cartoonist Travis Millard imparts upon the viewer. His comics are indicative of an innate need for humor to more easily swallow the grotesqueness of the human psyche and social landscape…

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