Playing The Game: Janne Karlsson

Janne Karlsson

H&P: Why did you take cartoon/comical form of art as your medium of expression? who inspired you ?

JK: It just came naturally, I think. It´s a convenient medium. Just grabbing a pen and a paper and getting on with the job. I´ve tried painting too, but I´ll never be good at it. I don´t like the process of blending, mixing, waiting and cleaning. I´m too impatient.

H&P:  Your four favourite writers  you dream to work with?

JK: I already work with the best writers. Can´t really think of any other. Ace Frehley, maybe? He´s a musician though. I´d love to design his next album ha ha ha.

H&P: Someday you see that all your arts are on fire – your reactions?

JK: I never save any of my drawings. They´re all made on cheap printing paper and wouldn´t last more than a couple of years. I throw everything away. I´d welcome the flames. They would save me the work of disposing them myself.

H&P: As a cartoonist/comic writer/artist, do you get proper space from people around you to express your views  to the extent you want? If not, how do you handle your social affairs?

JK: I´m a hermit. Though I consider myself to be a fairly social person I don´t really "hang around" with people. I prefer to be alone.

I get my social needs satisfied from day jobs, like the one I currently have, teacher´s assistant at an asperger school.

H&P:  The artists you follow.

JK: I don´t follow any artists, but I love J.J campbell´s blog "Evil Delights". He´s a great and under appreciated poet.

H&P:  Do you suggest a newcomer to take art as a full time art job for living?

JK: I don´t know really. I can´t live off my art full time myself even though I live under simple conditions. Occasionally I make it a month or two, but then I´m forced to take odd jobs and temps. I guess it´d be easier for someone who doesn´t have kids to support.

H&P: Where do you hone your knife when  it gets blunt?

JK: In a bottle of wine/beer/jägermeister or between the legs of the woman I love.

H&P: Can you create art if you are completely broke?

JK: Yes, I´ve been doing that since I was born.

I don´t know if I´d be able to create art if I had lots of money though....

H&P: When will you stop doing art?

JK: Probably the day when I experience perpetual happiness or the day I die.

H&P: Briefly let us meet your family

JK: Two sons aged 15 and 18.

H&P: What are your further suggestions for Hash n’ Pumpkins!!

JK: Keep doing what you´re doing. You´re supporting the underground and for that you deserve many readers and appreciation.

This is my love, my sweetheart

 © Debdatta 'Riju' Mukherjee

i'll not tell her

that my lips were mad to kiss you

All I wanted was to hold your body in my arms and

let my body melt in yours.

Maybe she'd scream, or maybe she'd softly

loosen her fingers from mine

and sob silently.

her trees would whisper to me

GO AWAY!!

her birds would chatter to me

GO AWAY!!

her fishes would laugh at me

GO AWAY!!

and again I have to walk alone, moonbathed

while you give your husband a handjob

and try too hard to think of me

-by Nilimesh Dutta

Nilimesh Dutta lives in Kolkata. He writes very seldom, and writes in Bengali alternative little magazines.

Photo Courtesy: Debdatta 'Riju' Mukherjee

Debdatta 'Riju' Mukherjee lives in Kolkata and barely survives his insufferable job as an IT professional through poetry, photography and whiskey.

For Marisol, Who Said No

      © Shota Voskanyan

She’d borrowed my sister’s perfume,

smelling like summer at Huntington Beach—

drugstore lotion and cigarettes,

seaweed and oil drums

burning, smoke sick with fast food wrappers,

Styrofoam cups, plastic lids—

her black hair spread

over the white sand,

eyes pretty rinds of Tequila-soaked

lime littering an empty face.

She curled cute

little brown toes when she laughed,

adjusted her tits.

Her tan-line hips said

sex and Don’t touch, at the same time.

When she turned over, on her belly to sun,

untiedher stringy

tangerine bikini top,

time stopped and wound back. My hands

becamedumb white explorers

for Pre-Columbian treasure,

searching for warm doors opening into

the mystery of Yes,

the magic of lips and tongues

spun around as the serpent eats its own tail,

hopingKinichAhau

could sacrifice us both

on a star-golden altar of teenage ecstasy.

-by Michael Dwayne Smith

Michael Dwayne Smith proudly owns and operates the world's most unusual name. His poems have been around the block a few times and his mother (God rest) kept a switchblade in her bra the one year she spent in high school. Those two facts are parallel in the small universe of this paragraph. He lives in the desert. He is publisher/editor of Mojave River Press & Review. He is a meat Popsicle.

Painting Courtesy: Shota Voskanyan

Shota Voskanyan was born in 1960 in Yerevan, Armenia.  He Studied at the Moscow University of Arts and he is a member of the Union of Artists of Armenia since 1995. He did his personal  and collective exhibitions all over the world.