more finds from the lab boxes

a box of binders... a vestage of our pre-digital e-commerce days. why the hell we kept these for so long, i don't know. anyway, to say we knew shit about business when we started the lab is an understatement. our first mixer sold was a fraudulent order. price margins? we calculated them wrong. and keeping track of orders... i think we kept a notebook where we'd write down your name and have check boxes like processed, shipped (with a bunch of check boxes in between)...

then my roommate, who worked at Other Music, told me that they printed out all the orders, put them in binders by order number, and stamped them when orders were shipped. this was better than the notebook, so we aped it. so everytime yall called about an order, we'd have to locate the correct binder, locate the order in the binder, and hopefully there was a stamp on it. at the peak, we had 100 of these binders in the office. it was paper-induced madness with pages falling out and binder rings breaking. i'd like to think we've come a long way....

who the hell keeps a funkmaster flex sticker for so long?
when i first came to NY, the term "quality of life" wasn't around yet. every flat surface downtown was bombed with hip-hop stickers. packs of grimy kids (aka the Street Team, Moe Choi ran one) went around slapping stickers everywhere. i'd walk around with my head up looking at all the cool shit that would change daily... it was really effective too: everyone knew when the next GZA or Mic Geronimo album was dropping (thanks to giant 8.5" x 11" stickers everywhere)...

De La's Stakes Is High campaign was one of the most fruitful for the hip-hop nerdus. They put out all sorts of limited edition shit like those 12"s they only had at Fat Beats, those Rocksteady lanyards, import Dilla remix... one week, the streets were bombed with the blue version of the sticker above, then a couple weeks later they came these orange ones with the words flipped...

these aren't graf stickers, i found these in a market at Thailand. i still don't what they say. some lucky lab customer will get these in his box...

haha... early computerized graf sticker. i made this in the computer lab at Stern (the business school at NYU). i was using paint bucket or something and there was no anti-aliasing, so it was basically pixel art. this was our crew Freshman year... all city we weren't.

club kids were HUGE when i first came to nyu... they ran the city... shit would never happen now. one of the dudes in my dorm was Baby Joe, who was a key player in that whole Limelight scandal (he later started that avant garde fashion store, 7, in soho), he got us into a some clubs... and we'd hear crazy stories about Disco 2000 parties where'd they would pass out twinkies laced with MDMA... shit was weird, no one drank back then...

finally, a keeper...

ok, one more for today... this was a pic from our first office in my apartment on 12th street. this was like the meeting of the turntablist powers! sugarcuts, excess, p-trix and his crew... plus Frogman.... they're holding up the Tableturns shirt I designed... that was like the second shirt i designed (the first was the TURNT(L)ABLE one)... there was probably a major skratch sesh that night and probably passed a blunt of some garbage weed... haha