Ok! THIS is all i do nowdays. And hangovers…

DAMMIT!

Oh yeah, and facebook.

So Nike SB BBQ party took place last friday and let me tell you that it was good times. Free food, sun and good peoples.

jucci from kkkkovalevy - kiitos leo ja jussi jatkoista!

these guys! got to love’em. Kaarle & Kemppu

what whoa old mashmarket stickers there! arvo stan

couple crazy ass kids..

cop some new ctrl tees from mashmarket soon..

dj arsi

photo creds miika saksi.. I lost my camera couple weeks ago. fuck.. if I’ll ever find you I’ll never take you for granted again and promise to be the man you need me to be. Please come back! Me and the blog misses you..I know I fucked up. Forgive me.. just come back and make it all right again pleease. we still have good times ahead to take pictures from

thanks J!

Could someone please explain to me what the hell are these and why people are wearing them? I mean it’s not just old people suddenly I’ve seen these all over the city.. like I don’t usually care what pair of nikes or whatever you’re wearing but seriously crocks.. and I don’t know what the fuck their telling you about “Ultra-hip Italian styling” in their website..

Dave at the SSUR headquarters.

Meeting up with guys like Dave of SSUR really gives you a reminder that there is a hell of a lot more beneath the “this t-shirt matches these sneakers” -phenomenon that seems to define the oversaturated stylistic vaudeville going on with 80% of the independent clothing market today.

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Frank151 cru taking it easy at the Chop Shop.

Hello people! I know it’s already been a few days since I came back from The Big Apple and these posts are a little late but better now than never. Let me start my NYC journals off with humbly introducing you to the totally rad guys of Frank151/Frank’s Chop Shop…

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Every once in a while we get linkage from the most suprising sources. Like this one today. Don’t get me wrong we love to have more visitors and links referring to mashmarket which we’ve had really hard time building up and cultivating but I always find it bit amusing to be listed along with biggest names in the industy with staff and label list over 100+.. we’re still just a bunch of young ambitious people who try to earn their next weekend’s drug money and our workhouse is still a dusty underground cellar where we try to maintain the market and as well the production of our cut & sewn and printed garments(yes we have something up in our sleeves).. Although we never consider us to be anything related to mass”mode eller trender”, thanks ekonominnyheterna for the linkage…

I´m on a graveyard shift again at the Bisquit Stash office and about an hour and a half ago i heard knocking on the door and checked out who is it. Ther was just this dude hanging out on the street and i thought it was just some random drunk kid slamming against the store windows. After a while i heard some noise at the door and when i went to check on it, there was two guys trying to break in and they took a instant run when they saw me.
How fucking dumb are these guys trying to break in to a store 00.30 am on a sunday night. Some criminal masterminds….

The “Russian criminal tattoo” books have been poppin to my screen for a couple of times today and i havent seen em´ or heard about the books earlier and had to find out more…
After some google magic i found out the books are full of lovely stuff to impress your parents-in-law with.

My birthday´s also comming up (june 15th) and i’d just love to get a tattoo with the guitar playing skeleton, saying “If you sing karaoke on a cut off dick, you´re doomed to dance with Johnny Cash (R.I.P.), naked.” in russian.
But after a while i realized the fact, that in Russia it propably would get me killed or laughed at pretty bad. So please bring me the regular presents: cake, booze, exotic dancers, money etc etc. Thank you.

I also found a good article about the first encyclopedia by: Justin McGuirk @ Icon magazine

“A graphical lexicon of the skin art of Russia’s convict classes impresses.
For 50 years or more Danzig Baldaev frequented the Soviet Union’s prisons, hospitals and city morgues. It was a personal project that took him to these places, but his profession granted him ease of access. Baldaev lost 58 family members to exile or the gulag and yet he ended up working first as a prison warden and then as a criminal investigator. His father, an ethnologist, was imprisoned as an “enemy of the people”, and it was at his suggestion that the young prison supervisor began to document the tattoos of the inmates.
Here was a history of the republics to parallel the official version. On the skins of thieves and hooligans existed an iconography so rich and impenetrably elaborate that even the KGB supported Baldaev’s work when so many other cultural historians had written themselves into a ticket to Siberia.
“For a long time all of us lived under the leadership of villains, tricksters and bandits,” writes Baldaev in the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia. No wonder he empathises with his subjects. With needle and ink they pricked their political commentary on shoulders, chests, fingers – even eyelids and penises. Horned Lenins, porcine Brezhnevs, vampiric Yeltsins (“I’m not a punk like Mishka Gorbachev, who only drinks ryazhenka”) – the one place you could get away with such images, and their sexually obscene variations, was on the incarcerated body. But for all the anti-Soviet invective, this wasn’t and isn’t genuine political dissent as much as plain rebelliousness, spleen-venting.
The only politics the hardcore inmate respects is the internal politics of organised crime. Among inveterate criminals, authority is measured by a hierarchical system of ornamentation: tattooed rings, epaulettes, acronyms and religious or pornographic iconography signify an underground social order. Your tattoos are your CV, and where one man’s winged skull says “boss” another’s ace of diamonds says “stool pigeon”. This language, which is evolved enough to send messages on couriers, is inviolate. If any unearned regalia is detected – any exaggerated work experience, say – it is removed with a knife, sandpaper or shard of glass.
An untattooed convict, of course, is a hopeless stooge. But that is far from the worst he can be, because just as tattoos communicate status they also enact justice. Much of the pornographic imagery, for instance, is free of any erotic or sexual subtext and is used just to degrade. A con who can’t pay a gambling debt might be branded a “blyad”, or whore, for which read social death. One’s badge of rank determines a strict behavioural stereotype, which, along with religious talismans protecting against “narks and the court”, contribute to the mythology of the “legitimate thief”.
Half of the book is dedicated to female tattoos, but they make no concessions to the fairer sex. “If you’re unfaithful I’ll cut your balls off,” reads one, from the hip of a convicted hooligan, and you couldn’t mistake the imagery. But underneath Baldaev’s painstaking drawings, it is when he is able to tell us something about the person that a sense of social tragedy emerges. Some of these women are in jail for stealing food for their children or for killing men who tried to rape them. On a woman’s stomach in 1971 Baldaev found a barbed-wire heart inscribed: “I never hold anything heavier than a glass or a prick in my hand … I’m no Soviet serf.” Underneath, Baldaev simply writes: “She lived at flat 150, 4 Veselnaya Street in Leningrad and was stabbed to death by her lover, K Gerasimov, a chauffeur, in a jealous fit of rage.”
This is a remarkable book, even if it does rely on a certain morbid fascination. Here is an iconographic language understood in and out of correctional institutions from 
St Petersburg to Siberia and across Central Asia. These are not mere doodles but often sprawling, allegorical art works consuming entire torsos, inspired by icons and even Raphael madonnas. Their owners may have some of the toughest faces you’ve ever seen but the language is accessible to most of Russian society, such is the pervasiveness of mafia culture.
Like trustafarian mockney in London, Moscow society finds prison jargon chic. And this is, as the introductory essay notes, “simply because every fifth inhabitant of our country has passed through the camps and every second has been through the army ‘zones’. And we honest, upright philistines and law-abiding petty bourgeois have long ago become used to seeing ourselves in the role of noble bandits, downtrodden victims and fearless inhabitants of tattoed slums.”

BTW
Mishka summer preview also referred to it/them.