Hive/Cave, a group show containing more than 35 artists at Pageant : Soloveev through July 17, sees Philadelphia as the breeding grounds for a disparate collection of insect-like hives where busy artists shack up and take shelter. Once settled in these spaces, they are able to simmer, grow, collect, and spit out their art like sugary vomit to nourish their neighbors and children.

"Icon" by Joe Boruchow - inkjet on masonite

Assembled by Daniel Dalseth, owner and director of Pageant, the show is packed with raw cutting edge art by both up-and-coming as well as established Philadelphia-based artists. With sculpture, video, sound, drawing, installation and photography, the show is a smartly curated hodgepodge of mediums reflecting the current state of contemporary art across the city. Hive/Cave was also rife with performances on opening night, which included live hair-cuts accompanied by a barber shop quartet, and a multi-sensory performance by gas-mask wearing painters with microphones amplifying their breathing and other surreal sounds.

Upon entering the gallery, high on the western wall is a large triangular wall sculpture by Liv Helgesen made from paper stacked between wooden planks and then burned. This is a really powerful piece with a menacing presence and volume in the room. It comes off as some sort of totemic symbol, a lo-fi mathematical hieroglyphic that alludes to a strange, pagan alchemy.

"Burnt" - burnt paper and 2" x 6" wooden planks

Helgesen’s triangle goes really well with Dante Blackstone’s excellent Christmas tree installation on the ceiling. Four Douglas-firs defy gravity and aggregate with each other in the middle of the ceiling of the gallery. Although this piece has a dangerously sacrilegious feel, it simultaneously portends to the existence of God. It’s as though God has used his great powers to summon his children into heaven – but they just can’t seem to get through the ceiling. One ponders whether the limitations lie with the divine power, or if humans have sealed their own fate and trapped themselves within the confines of their own creations.

Blackstone's Apparition Omniverse (Armada)

Another awesome piece, perhaps my favorite in the show, is an installation by Preston Link. A modest wooden box hangs just above an inconspicuous light switch. A horizontal slit at the center of the box reveals the outer edge of a band saw blade, which is housed out of sight inside the box. The blade is painted with the step-by-step modulations of an artist’s color wheel. When you flick the switch, it fires up the loud saw inside, causing the multicolored color wheel to spin so that all of the individual colors appear to mix together. The result is a beautiful grey-golden mud that shimmers and reverberates like a hallucination hovering from the box’s slash. This humorous piece speaks to the power of illusion through calculated visual editing. If you can cancel out the blaring sound of the saw, it’s almost like magic!

"Boutet's Mud" - wooden box, table saw, painted blade

Other standouts from this excellent show include Marc Zajack’s cement boat sculpture; intricate black and white paper cuts by Joe Boruchow; an eight-hour tape loop recording of an interview with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei by Hong Kong Phooey; and Michael Olivo’s self-destructing battleship/shark installation.

"Discover/Descend" - concrete and toy boat

A small sculpture by Zajack perfectly sums up the intention of Hive/Cave. A small piece of dollhouse furniture, with its cabinet doors flung open, spews an uncontrollable outpouring of waxen honey. It could be seen as a metaphor for the artist, who packs things away inside until a critical mass is achieved and the floodgates open, revealing a new body of work that gushes outward in an unforeseeable, new rush of expression.

"I Messed With The Best, Now I'm Dead Like The Rest" - hair weave, gold leaf, pedastal, fake grass, bee's wax, doll cabinet, persian carpet

All in all, the show is a great success, piecing together a beautiful, irreverent, humorous, alchemical, and immediate compendium of contemporary art from the many hives and caves dispersed throughout the city of cheesesteaks.

Things We’ve Made Since September at Sweatshop

Joseph Hu, Briefly Noted, 2009. acrylic on wood. At Sweatshop in Things We've Made Since September. Joseph has magazines in his show at Pentimenti until Feb. 27

It’s a simple idea for a show–ask a bunch of people in your network to make something new or show something they’ve made very recently.  Voila–a 17-person show with lots of new work, much of it understated with a couple of gems in the mix.

Sweatshop is a new space at the Amber Street Studios in Frankford, run by six artists whose studios adjoin a small common area they’ve dedicated as a gallery.   Gabrielle Lavin, the Galleries at Moore gallery manager, curated this inaugural show.  Notable are Joseph Hu’s two faux New Yorker magazine mock-ups–made of paint on wood.  Hu has a show right now at Pentimenti where you can see more faux real objects — Hu’s got a special touch with the world of false.

Preston Link, Pedestal, 2009. acrylic on wood. Looks like money -- funny money.

Preston Link’s chunky “Pedestal” also made of painted wood, looks like money as envisioned by a child–bigger than life, kind of pretty, and somewhat useless all in all.

Joshua Rickards, Brother and sister, 2009, Flashe on magazine page

Josh Rickards has a wonderful collage painting that seems a new direction…

Linda Yun, After RM, detail from row of 13 polaroids

and Linda Yun’s row of manipulated Polaroid film are tiny Mark Rothko lookalikes — which perfectly complements her recent James Turrell look-alike at Vox Populi.

Sweatshop shows will last for two months.  This one’s gone, ended Jan. 31.  The gallery, 3237 Amber St. 4th floor south, is open Saturdays 1 – 4 pm and by appointment  email afalsefront@gmail.com for more information.  Roberta’s flickr set.  Libby’s flickr set.

Isaac Lin: A Place Near Here and Don Colley: Cascade at Fleisher-Ollman

Isaac Lin collaboration piece. Lin did the drawn embellishment on someone else's photo of what looks like big Sur.

Isaac Lin installed a huge black-painted hut that’s glued together with oogy gray putty that takes over the main space at F-O.  Inside the hut Lin’s colorful cartoon and calligraphy images sprawl on the walls.  Outside the hut a series of large cartoon cutouts ring the room.  We asked John Ollman whether he had sold the black hut and he smiled saying he is trying to tell people it would look great in their living rooms but….Elsewhere in the gallery, Lin is showing more commercially-viable works — photo/drawings. Photo/drawings are works that involve photos by people who agreed to collaborate with the artist and drawings by Lin on the photos.

Isaac Lin's calligraphy is a swarm of gnats!

Lin draws swarms of his signature short calligraphic strokes in many bright colors onto the photos.  It’s like anointing the works with a kind of voodoo magic that’s close to grafitti only more playful.  Some of the photo/drawings are pretty funny –like when Lin’s rain of calligraphy bears down on a figure lying on a field of grass and what’s suggested is the weight of the world about to sit on the man’s chest.  Or when the storm of calligraphy comes barreling in on the Big Sur coast looking like something crazier than a Nino or Nina storm about to hit.  Meanwhile, Don Colley’s print of a scary clown adorns the gallery’s main window overlooking Walnut St.  And on a wall opposite sit a small group of Colley’s ceramic tiles picturing evil clowns.  The tiles were painted at a paint your own pottery joint and all we can say is we wish we had been there when Colley’s evil clowns emerged from the firing alongside the birdies, flowers and hearts on everybody else’s tiles.   Roberta’s flickr for F-O.  Libby’s flickr for F-O.

Don Colley, ceramic tile painted at a paint-your-own pottery place

Sean Stoops: Interstellar Medium at Rebekah Templeton

Sean Stoops, installation at Rebekah Templeton

We hadn’t remembered seeing art by curator Sean Stoops before but maybe that’s just our overloaded and aging memories.  Stoops made a wizardly installation with a projected interstellar video on a beachball.  It is a fabulous high tech/low tech mashup.

Sean Stoops, Interstellar Medium j2010 digital vidio installation, 4:56 mins, with, behind, the aureola around the eclipse.

The projection even creates an elipse-like stream of light on the wall behind it–all of which is very much fun to watch.  It’s a kind of lava lamp experience to see this work and we were longing for a bench to sit on — or mattresses or pillows on the floor.  The piece was generated using some algorithms and all we can say is awesome–get on up there.  The show is up til Feb. 20.  Roberta’s flickr. Libby’s flickr.

At Grizzly Grizzly

Brother and sister artists Joshua Abelow and Tisch Abelow were showing a bunch of remarkably similar, geometric abstractions when we stopped by.  Joshua, whose retro abstractions capture ’50s kitsch-en colors Harvest Gold and Avocado, also did a number of cartoony drawings. Here’s one by brother that broke the sister-brother mold:

Joshua Abelow, Untitled (Self-Portrait with di Chirico), 2007, oil on canvas

We met two of the Grizzly-ites who were opening up the gallery when we got there–Dennis Matthews, who’s a blogger, and Michael Ellyson. Here they are amid next to a large abstraction on the left, by sister Tisch. The gallery guys told us Tisch got the large, thick sheet of paper from Richard Serra, who, on decideding he wasn’t going to use the paper, sold it off cheap.

Dennis Matthews and Michael Ellyson, two of the Grizzly Grizzly team. Also Bruce Wilhelm is part of this endeavor.

Upcoming First Friday at Grizzly Grizzly, which is in the Vox building, 319 N. 11th, 2nd floor, is work by Yevgeniya S. Baras and Robert Scobey.

Ted Larsen at Schmidt Dean

Ted Larsen at Schmidt Dean

Ted Larsen, this piece had fake wood trim from a car and some encaustic blobs. The piece was interactive--you could spin it round with your finger.

Ted Larsen’s sculptural paintings are made from junkyard car body pieces.  The colors you see represent the Mustangs, Chevies, Pontiacs and Cadillacs found on the scrap heaps out west in Santa Fe where Larsen lives.  John Chamberlain took car bodies and mashed them up like crumpled paper — art accidents — in the galleries they inhabited.  Larsen is more of a car parts zen master–part Mark Grotjean and part Mark Rothko.     Roberta’s flickr for Ted Larsen. This show ended Jan. 24, alas.

Drexel’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery shows IPCNY show!

Bitch Delux by Any Malfunction, Buttonwood&Holmes, Inthang; silkscreen on cotton in supermarket meat tray, unique

There were a number of standouts at the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery’s current exhibit, New Prints 2009/Autumn, a show of small prints juried by the International Print Center New York.

The highlight is a one-off print, Bitch Delux by Any Malfunction, Buttonwood&Holmes, Inthang. If it’s unique it’s the very opposite of mass production! You can make purchases online for $37, packed in its own styrofoam meat tray (if you can get the website to work).

Marc Blumthal, Mass, 2009, serigraph on inkjet print, ed. 10, 21 x 27 inches, printed and published by the artist

Two Philadelphia artists–Marc Blumthal are included in the exhibit of 60 works. Blumthal’s Mass obliterates a war photograph with a big blob–surreal and funny; Talia Green is showing her retro prints of people with masses of insects for hair. This exhibit is one of the many independent shows affiliated with Philagrafika. Thumbnails and checklist of the work in the show are here.

Amid the upcropping of new galleries like Grizzly Grizzly and The Sweatshop, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. AHN/VHS and its subsidiary gallery, The Cabinet, has closed. It was a good one, so Libby and Roberta have the blues.

Ribas’ choices for the Arcadia Works on Paper exhibit raise issues of sharing, reproducibility and loss of copyright control. They raise disturbing questions about the value of all art at a time when works on paper have never been more highly valued.

James Johnson, 14K Sentences on Conceptual Art, 2009, framed silkscreen print on letter-sized sheet of 14 K gold on acid-free board, 14.75 x 12.5 inches

Ribas first shots across the bow, the first pieces in front of you as you walk into the gallery, are Michael Davis Carter’s gator, a tissue paper piece that appropriates the LaCoste alligator logo, and James Johnson’s 14K Sentences on Conceptual Art, a 14K gold sheet of paper on which is silkscreened an appropriation of Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Contemporary Art. The reflective quality of the material and the art historical appropriation serve as a conceptual treatise on material value and creative value–Lewitt’s creative capital, Johnson’s creative capital, the means of production that crosses lines between the handmade and machine (computer) made and printed.

Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link, Health Care Bill, 2009 printed paper 11 x 8.5 x 3 inches

In that same front room, Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link offer on a pedestal another conceptual work–Health Care Bill, three inches of Congressional bureaucratese downloaded from the internet and stacked on a pedestal, the work representing value beyond the ability of most of us to calculate. I found it especially amusing that the gallery needed a young woman to stand guard over this particular piece, to make sure no one commandeered a piece of paper from the bill, a piece of paper of questionable value without the context! And

Bruce Campbell, Directional drawing, 2008, graphite on cut paper on board, 43.25 x 65 inches. This is the largest piece in the show.

Bruce Campbell’s Directional Drawing, with words scrawled over a paper incised with a Frank Stella geometric shape–another art-historical appropriation–brings into question 1968 aesthetics and value at the same time that Campbell appropriates and incorporates into his own value system a piece of Stella’s creative capital!

Robert T. Pannell, Revision, 2006, photo etching, 11.25 x 24 inches

Robert T. Pannell and Pernot Hudson pull the rug out from the assumptions of our common culture–oy, those Indians got such a bad deal, speaking of value. Hudson’s print/drawing of a sheriff’s badge, Samburg’s Finest, drips with irony.

Mia Rosenthal, Breakfast cereals of this great nation, 2009, detail, ink and graphite on paper, 32 x 22.5 inches

The counterpoise to all these rather cynical meditations on value is a wall of five drawings that range from contemporary deadpan to doodly to an old-fashioned elegance of line–all of them raising questions of aesthetics. In this group, Mia Rosenthal’s cereal box grid drawing, an obsessive Roz Chast-like reuse and filtering of mass produced advertising, most pointedly continues the conversation about authorship and value (this and Leah Bailis’ Corner were the only works in the show I had seen before, but I was happy to revisit both of them).

Andrea Beizer, Three In bed, 2009, graphite on Arches, 22.5 x 31 inches

The others in that group on the wall with Cereal… suggest that cultural fashion and value are fickle, from Andrea Beizer’s Three in Bed, which passes for a contemporary cartoon, to John Costanza’s What did you do to the Booze Hickey? #2, which passes for a mid-20th-century one. In the mix of shifting tastes–Erika Mayer’s Knapsack Nation and Dino Vasquez Gargas Positivas.

Erika Mayer, Knapsack Nation, 2008-9, etching, 11 x 14.75 inches

Turns out there’s nothing in this show that doesn’t raise these questions about value and aesthetics. But the conversation about value is the more interesting and edgy of the two.

Mark Stockton, Composition 3, 2009, grphite of BFK Rives, 29 x 22.75 inches

As the show moves into the back room, a number of works copy popular culture images, using hand-reproduction methods that reinterpret the original values. I especially loved Fay Stanford’s Indigenous Princess, a highly unlikely image that turns the sentimentality of kitsch into a wild thing. Closer to my point about copying are Kristina Martin’s movie still and Mark Stockton’s Composition 3, the latter a drawn clipboard of media-celeb images. Matt Neff’s prints may valorize or criticize the Wu Tang Clan. He doesn’t give enough away for me to guess, but he’s playing in the same pond of appropriated pop culture.

That art work appropriating manufactured imagery is so widespread surely shows how far behind the courts are in handling the phenomenon of Shepard Fairey’s reuse of an AP photographer’s Obama portrait. The contentiousness about Fairey’s authorship, ironically, raises the value of the hand work, cheaply reproduced and sold over the internet, and the value of the photo, even more cheaply reproduced and sold over the wire services.

Gabriel Martinez, Untitled (Peking Ducks),"Pink" 2009, archival pigment print, 31 x 59 inches

Gabriel Martinez Untitled (Peking Ducks), “Pink” photo raises so many issues of identity, ownership, advertising, beauty, cultural hegemony, gender, duplication, yadda yadda yadda that it leaves me breathless. Martinez took the photo with a Holga camera in a gay pick-up park in Peking. He asked the subject to pose for him with pink Peeps ducks serving as a mask, but the subject, afraid of being recognized, tore out a magazine ad and covered his face with the advertising image of a woman’s face, and covered her unseeing eyes with the Peeps. The clash of cultures  is played out here in numerous ways, especially with the Western photographer and his Western Peeps and the Western influenced Eastern advertising image. Not to mention, on the love front, that peeps will be peeps. Amazing!!!

Quentin Morris, Untitled (Dec. 2008), 2008, December 2008, black gesso and polymer acrylic, 28 inches in diameter, courtesy Larry Becker Contemporary Art

Quentin Morris, who is a perennial presence in the Works on Paper show, expressed disappointment during the opening because his black circle was hung high on the wall like on ominous moon threatening the art cosmos. In a way he’s right. His work’s meaning got highjacked by the curator for his own purposes! But even when hanging at the normal height, the piece serves as an elegant question mark. Is it reproducible? Depends on who you ask. It is a philosophical conundrum for its refusal to behave like an ordinary drawing or declare its value in quantifiable terms.

Hannah Heffner, Baby Bubble, 2009, cut paper and bubble wrap, 14 x 11 inches

Speaking of drawings, Hannah Heffner’s Baby Bubble is also slippery. The baby bump is bubble wrap and any sense of transcendent birth is completely undermined by the deliberate crappiness of the material inserted in the cut (old-fashioned) image, a page from a magazine. When I was in the gallery, I was sure the page was a hand-made reproduction. Now, as I look at the picture, I am not so sure. The action of the man’s hand becomes a giant question with the intervention of the bubblewrap. This was arguably the riskiest piece in the exhibit!

On the surface, the show had a tremendous respect for small work and for drawing and draftsmanship and craftsmanship and art history.  Although gray, black and white and conservative on the surface, underneath, the show is slippery.If it really is ushering the end of originality and the end of handmade in a world of infinite reproduction, all of this writing is about a bunch of wildly overvalued work–except for that sheet of gold. I don’t buy it–yet.

Here’s the complete list of who’s in the show:

Leah Bailis, Andrea Beizer, Gabriel Boyce & Preston Link, Bruce Campbell, John Costanza, Michael Davis Carter, Hannah Heffner, Pernot Hudson, James Johnson, Sebastien Leclercq, Erika Mayer, Gabriel Martinez, Kristina Martino, Quentin Morris, Matt Neff, Robert T. Pannell, Mia Rosenthal, Fay Stanford, Mark Stockton, Judith Taylor, and Dino Vasquez.

The Arcadia Works on Paper 2009 show runs to Dec. 21.

A woman stood guard over Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link's Health Care Bill, 2009, at the opening. printed paper 11 x 8.5 x 3 inches

Exhibit juror Joao Ribas, who is curator of MIT’s List Visual Arts Center (and former curator of the Drawing Center), selected 22 works by 22 artists  from 1,256 entries submitted by 567.  (The press release said 22 works, but I count 23).

In Ribas’ introductory talk just before the opening event, he immediately distanced himself from the talk’s ponderous title–4 Points Towards a Present History: Knowledge, Representation, Freedom and the Subject. “The real title is, Things I Have a Problem With.” That got a laugh.

Michael Davis Carter, gator 2009, detail, tissue paper, custom frame, 13.25 x 37.25 inches

Ribas spoke like a man with too many ideas–he started and restarted sentences, redirected them and then trailed off to begin again.Yet he still delivered a coherent talk, exploring aesthetics, the suspect reality of images, and the evolution of art objects as things that reflect symbolic value and freedom (of the artist) to make choices that don’t necessarily further society or its commercial ambitions.

Pernot Hudson, Samburg's Finest, 2008, silkscreen/graphite on paper, 19 x 25 3/4 inches

The aesthetics part of his talk was charming–including his projection of David Attenborough’s BBC bower bird video.  And the bit about suspect reality in art and images became especially interesting when he brought up Islamist beheadings on video as indisputably real and as the “most iconic images in contemporary culture.”  (The shakiness of Truth in art was another important theme underlying his selections for the show).

Kistina Martino, Subtitled Film Still: "And the Day After that..." 2009, black colored pencil on paper, 16 3/4 x 17 x 20 inches

But it was Ribas’ synopsis of the history of the value of art that interested me most. Here’s my synopsis of his synopsis (this is sort of like crunching down an image on the computer so it’s still recognizable but barely–and of course this too is highly suspect).

The story goes that society, hellbent on creating utile things that it values and needs, has no intrinsic commitment to art. So art is outside the needs of society. And art objects reflect freedom of the artist to operate outside the needs of society. Art represents “radical individual will–the antithesis of what was associated with capital [i.e. money].” So in the 15th century, a division grows between utile valuables provided by the craftsmen of the guilds and non-utile products of artists.

Fay Stanford, Indigenous Princess, 2007, ink on yupo, 21.25 x 15.25 inches

The freedom required in making art, the freedom to make choices and refuse others’ wishes, “creates a class of object that can’t fit into society in the normal way.” It cannot be priced in the same way ordinary goods are priced, and it is not based on consumer needs.

This history leads artists to later “commodify themselves as bohemians,” Ribas said.

As a symbolic marker of wealth rather than a manufactured product for consumers, art takes on a utopian identity, Ribas suggested, precisely because it is made outside the assembly line.

Matt Neff's two Wu Tang Clan-inspired works, GZA 2009 letterpress, 28.5 x 20.5 inches (left); Protect Ya Neck, 2009, etching, 28.5 x 20.5 inches (right)

Technology, however, has messed with this evolution of art as a symbol of value and freedom and mystical power. “Everyone can express himself through technology. …Technology changes how freedom is expressed. The consumer is also the producer.” At this point, Ribas brought in an aside (or maybe not at aside, it being very much to the point) that the World Bank defines wealth as natural capital and creative capital.

With technology, the concomitant sharing/reproducibility and loss of copyright control give every ordinary Joe freedom to choose. How do you preserve the model of authorship when all around us that model no longer applies? Ribas asked. “The artist no longer has a place of privilege With sharing, now everyone has choice.”

Post on the show next!

"U.S., Russian Satellites Collide"

But Breaking News didn’t quite work this angle— and so much the better and wiser, I realized. That idiom, though less explored maybe in a gallery context, gets plenty of rotation already, in exacting parodies like The Onion and Stephen Colbert… so there’s less reason to explore its well-worn avenues.

Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link, instead, seized the content of headlines for their source, and in an interesting way. Celebrity deaths and public shaming, air disasters, health scares, tidbits of world gossip— things that occupy us for a matter of weeks then fade away forever into Oblivion. The great Now of telecommunications— the same shit on different days that demands worldwide attention without ever explaining why it deserves it.

What Boyce and Link seemed to be doing was trying to counter this Forgetfulness. To playfully expand this paper-thin Now— the newsfeed for the last year— into something a little more memorable and monumental; albeit lightly and in tokens and models… To give it a little more weight and reality.

For instance, the Airbus that skimmed to a landing on the Hudson last year, announced in the Breaking News blotter as a “Miracle on the Hudson.” That crash was miraculous and remains to this day the world’s very best illustration of the word “elation.” At the same time, there was something silly about the whole undisaster. The passengers almost looked bored waiting for rescue on the wings of the floating aircraft. And this incredulity gets captured nicely by the Breaking News team with a wooden, Playschoolish recreation of the event, sitting on the gallery floor.

"Miracle on the Hudson"

Another object that really made the fleeting concrete is their recent celebrity death memorial; a wall of black, stacked, faux-marble, inscribed à la Maya Lin, with the names of the deceased. J.G. Ballard. Robert Novak. Les Paul. Chanel. Farrah Fawcett… A monument not as much to any particular celebrities as to the strange character of celebrity mourning. You read all these headlines of infinite glibness and cannot connect whatsoever with the sentiment. You might, for example, read of the great death-triad of Fawcett, Jackson, and McMahon:

“I know we all are going to die at one time or another but the thing is we never know when or who will go next. I was so shocked to hear of these three dying. We look at these celebrities and think they will be here forever. After seeing what Farrah went through with her battle to survive it made me realize they are all just like us. They are humans too and they do have their problems also. Just because they are big stars doesn’t mean they are trouble free in life.” –Jan Barrett, Michael Jackson Dies–Makes Number Three in the Celebrity World, Posted on June 26th, 2009 at Blogger News Network

Judging from this passage, I imagine that the author should be moved to tears by the Breaking News memorial, which takes her eulogy to its ludicrous conclusion by setting the sentiment in eternal stone.

The Wall of Recent Celebrity Death.

So, Breaking News, rather than adopting the forms and format of the News idiom, took it the opposite direction: pulling these stories and moments out of that idiom and serving it up to us in a more concrete way. And though many of these stories— like the dying chihuahua— were not exactly world issues, there is something to be said for deflating sensationalism into small, palpable toy-models that sit comfortably on a desk. This way, they can finally be considered, collected, and properly measured; rather than just being flashed across the screen and washed away on a wave of cultural amnesia. They even went so far to make one of the pieces— the one about the typhoon in China— an interactive piece of the sort you may find in a science museum…  A making present of distant events, which oddly enough, actually works. I will most likely remember these news items for some time to come.

In the end, though, the Breaking News team still slipped in a few newsy accoutrements, like logo pens, a news blotter, and the name of the show written across the back wall in true newsroom font.  Just some fun, to appease gimmicky folks such as myself.

pens News goodies, available at Berlinchen.

Breaking News, Little Berlin, October 2-31, 2009.