Ack! Somehow, sometime, I broke the contact form! So if you sent me a message through there, I never got it. It’s fixed now. Please resend your message. I wasn’t ignoring you!

Run, don’t walk to Jessie’s Etsy shop! There you’ll find a boodle of lovely hand-made greeting cards, like:



Jess is Callithump!’s younger and more personable half, the Yin to Matt’s, well, whatever the orthodox skeptic’s equivalent of Yang is.

Please go buy stuff now!

If I’d any idea the drain that moving and starting new careers was going to put on our lives, I would have just officially put Callithump! on hiatus while we got our lives together. Finally, the creative recession that’s kept me from doing anything worthwhile seems to have passed, just in time for the Maine College of Art Craft Fair. We debuted a new vending machine there, as well as the first Callithump! boxes, which are finally done. They’re only, what, half a year late? I guess I’ll have to fire myself!



The new vending machine is currently living in the trunk of my car, but with any luck will soon find a happy home somewhere.

Jess did great at the fair, selling cards of her Gocco prints, photographs, and Victorian mash-ups a la Max Ernst. Hopefully, this momentum will carry over into her soon-to-be-opened Etsy shop!

Callithump! is now appearing in a new location, ellO Gallery in Portsmouth, NH. ellO is a great gallery, and we’re really happy to be there. The Callithump! machine feels very at home there.
It’s really great to see a gallery like ellO in Portsmouth. In their words:

ellO gallery & shop is a mixture of a (commercial+affordable) contemporary art gallery, alternative exhibition space, retail space for individual artists selling handmade goods & moderately priced works & also an infopoint for the contemporary art community in Portsmouth and beyond.

It’s a refreshing treat to see a place like Ello. Most galleries in Northeastern seacoast tourist towns tend to cater to the tourists. They’re fine for when you need yet another landscape, sunset over the ocean or boat painting. You know, artwork that matches your couch and is totally devoid of anything interesting, controversial or unpleasant. At Ello you’ll find work by aspiring artists who aren’t necessarily part of the local art establishment. You’ll also find work that isn’t traditionally considered to be art, such as t-shirts, postcards and buttons. There’s lots to like at ellO. It’s nice to find a gallery that’s willing to sell work that’s affordable and fun in a town like Portsmouth, which has a reputation for being pretentious and expensive. ellO is providing opportunities for new artists to connect with new audiences. Callithump! is delighted to be hanging out in the corner there!

Zoomdoggle is a website (or blagazine, as it’s creator, Jack Bronstein bills is) devoted to the most noble pursuits of having fun and getting others to have fun. Recently, Zoomdoggle has broken free of it’s InterWebly bounds and is wandering the streets of New York incarnated as the Fun-o-Meter, a vending machine that sells fun ideas for 50 cents! In addition to a fun idea, you also get a toy, a lucky penny, and a quarter because Jack wanted to sell his ideas for 25 cents, but only had a 50 cent machine.

Hey Jack! I’ve got a 25 cent machine I swap you! Our first vendor was a 25 cent one that the dealer sent us by mistake. We tried to make a go of it at that price, but the cost of our contents is too high, and it was killing us!

Jack’s been walking his Fun-o-meter around town and trying it in different locations to see how people react to it. You can read the whole story here.

I’m enchanted with this idea, of course! This is creativity encapsulated in its purest form. In addition to being the first artists to incorporate vending machines into art, the Fluxus artists also created scores. Instead of a fixed piece of art, you’d get a score, an instruction or set of instructions, the performance of which was the artwork. Thus, the line between artist and audience was obliterated. Everyone could be an artist. Everyone could be art. At the same time, the difference between making art and playing games also broke down. As well it should! Zoomdoggle’s fun ideas remind me very much of Flux scores, with instructions like, “Tag someone without warning and run. Now they're it.”


Thanks, Zoomdoggle, for making the world a more fun place!

Things are moving right along with the box for special collected issue #1! This is time trying to do a 3-color screen print. They’re looking great! The photo doesn’t do it justice. The wavy lines are actually gold & bronze metallic ink that look like ordinary cardboard until the light catches it just right and you get a glowy surprise!

Making production extra challenging is the fact that the weather got all hot & humid today, two things that don’t go at all well with screen printing. The inks take forever to dry! But the good news is, we’ll be able to start shipping these this week! Woo!

This is a truly limited edition. Many “limited” things these days are manufactured scarcity. With a computer print, print #10, #100, or # 1 million are all going to be identical. There are no plates or screens that wear out causing the quality of the print to decline. With these, however, after the 50 copies were printed, we discarded the screens. That’s it. That’s all there will ever be!

Well, we said the special collected edition of Callithump! #1 would be shipping in June, and here it is July already... Sorry about that! I’m afraid we were overly optimistic about how long it would take to settle into our new place. Our Callithump! gear didn’t even get unpacked until just a couple weeks ago! Plus, for the cover we’re doing a 3-color screen print, something we’ve never done before. It’s looking just lovely but it’s a bit of a technical challenge.

Anyway, enough of the lame excuses! If you’ve pre-ordered issue #1, you’ll be getting a special treat in the mail shortly, just to say “Thanks for ordering, sorry we’re slow.”

If you haven’t ordered yet, there’s still time to get in on the insanely low pre-oder price! I’m not sure we’ll even break even at the current price, so take advantage of us while you can! Buy now!

Callithump! has just arrived in South Portland! You can now find it at Artascope Studios, 352 Cottage Road, South Portland, Maine.

If you haven't been to Artascope, swing by! In addition to Callithump! There's an art supply store & gallery. They also have classes there, and you can rent studio time to get access to all that equipment that you've drooled over but couldn't afford. Artascope is doing wonderful things making creativity more accessible to everyone, and we're really excited to be there!

A Callithump! Special Edition is now available in Lord Hall, University of Maine, Orono!

Totally Buttons, as the name suggests, is entirely buttons. Each capsule contains one 7/8-inch button. The buttons are all hand-made by us Callithumpians. The machine in Lord contains around 450 of a projected 1,000 designs. Collect them All! Capsules vend for the special low, low price of just 25 cents, instead of the usual 50 cents. Get yours now! At this INSANELY low price they won't last long!

Why Totally Buttons?

Buttons, also known as badges or pinbacks, have been around since the late 1800s. Since that time, both their purpose and construction have remained almost unchanged. An image on paper is sandwiched between disc of metal and plastic (or celluloid, originally). A twisted pin is attached to the back to allow it to be affixed to cloth. In the 1800s, as today, people used pinbacks to proclaim their devotion to famous entertainers, political candidates and important causes; to make jokes, to display witticisms or conversation starters.

In some ways buttons can be seen as precursors to blogs, MySpace, Flickr and and other user-centered mediums. They provide a way to express your opinion publicly. The pre-Internet world provided few opportunities for this. By putting on a button, anyone who walks past you can know that you are a fan of Edwardian stage actress Lena Ashwell, or that You Like Ike, or that you're not As Think as You Drunk We Am. Callithump's mission has always been to get creativity into public spaces. Buttons are a natural medium for this!

As always, Callithump! is participatory media. Do you have a great idea for a button? A piece of artwork that would reproduce well in a tiny, tiny space? A slogan, cause, or curiosity that deserves public display? Let us know! You do the design, we'll do the production, and we'll reward you handsomely with buttons of your own design.