The zodiac, demystified.

Aries - The whole world would be awestruck to know you’re wearing an Apple Vision Pro, except maybe the person you’re operating on. 

Taurus - It’s not the Star Trek jumpsuits disorienting your colleagues, but that thing where you cut out the fabric to expose your hairy pits.

Gemini - You can’t get high off one hit on a Sprite can just minutes before your sister’s big wedding, but dadgummit, you’re gonna try.

Cancer - You can finally admit it. David Bryne dancing makes you physically nauseous. 

Leo - Making out with a flag doesn’t necessarily mean you love that country, even if it did have your baby. 

Virgo - Well, lucky you, you’re apparently the only one in a zillion people who gets utterly and unexpectedly chubby on Ozempic.

Libra - As the spaceship floated over the fire hydrant, you were filled with wonder about how they got the water in that hydrant. 

Scorpio - As your blind date is pointing out between hurls, not everyone is a fan of your “natural odors.” 

Sagittarius - You will begin to develop gills from sitting too long in the inflatable hot tub.

Capricorn - Your best friend may be a giant brain in a tank, but at least there’s no way he can steal your wife and house this time. 

Aquarius - The Pantene Pro-V is really making a difference. Too bad you can’t show anyone your four-inch pubes.

Pisces - You almost fooled them, and you would’ve gotten away with egregious estate fraud, if you weren’t trying to sell a cardboard house.

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There’s a shoe making the rounds on talkshows and celebrity feet in a sort of revival lately, however, it’s not clear we ever really said goodbye. The Air Jørgen, nearing 40 years in existence, is back on top. At the time the shoe deal was signed in 1984, another badass brand of Træsko (Danish clogs) called Holm’s of Dark Night was considered the “Lord of Loafers” among the “cloggers,” a numerous class of unmarried peasants who took service with the forest-based farmers for room and board. At night they danced for small crowds that gathered. Their hierarchy and reputations within their circles depended on the very clogs they wore, often the Fynboe clogs of yore, made from fine Alder wood, with a proboscis point. They wished to catch up to their Welsh and Dutch counterparts in order to finally compete in EuroClog, the transcontinental dancing competition.

There was, however, one rookie clogger, Mikkel Jørgen, who’d come from the lowest parts of East Jutland, who some considered a prodigy. It was reportedly Jørgen’s dance instructor Daisy Falk who appealed to his mother when he originally turned down the licensing agreement with the shoe company Nielsen. The deal was great, one unheard of for a poor clogging farmhand, and Jørgen’s own father called him an idiot for not taking it and threw bong water all over him.

So Jørgen finally caved. Nielsen had just come out with this new technology, called Alder Soles, says Falk. “And so we were gonna call it the ‘Alder Jørgen’” says Falk but it just didn’t “roll off the tunge.” Until one day the company realized how gracefully Jørgen spun and kicked high with his clogs. And it just fit. “The Air Jørgen.”

When Nielsen signed the deal, they were thinking we’d be selling $300 kroner in a year,” recalls Falk. “But we sold $1,260 kroner.”

As legend has it, the cloggers, and more formally, The Feisty Fynboes, a locally incorporated group vying for the EuroClog qualification, actually banned the first Air Jørgens because of a rule concerning the snout and upward bend of the shoe, to conform with the fashion of the times. Jørgen was reportedly fined $4.20 for every performance in his banned clogs and Nielsen gladly paid every time, giddily high to capitalize on free publicity.

But when it comes to the Air Jørgen’s popularity, the rest is obvious history. The clog was a must-have shoe for lowkey, middle-class peasantry in the 80’s and 90’s and even had a few sales in Randers and Aarhus. It helped the clog more widely trickle into pop culture including early b-sides on Tv-2 albums. 

The Air Jørgen has seen several iterations since then, and yet the Air Jørgen 1 remains the iconic staple still found on the streets and in country houses of East Jutland. It’s also the subject of the latest film by Benjamin Aflecksen, in theaters now.

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We’ve all been impressed with Chat GPT, which launched in late November and set the world of news ablaze with its amazing feats. One million users signed up in five days, breaking the record set by Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS subscriptions. Universities suddenly announced an end to the robotic term papers, no longer able to discern between academia and randomly concocted jargon.

Part of the software’s allure was its ability to complete mundane human tasks in just seconds, and without the manual errors. It was revealed that Lin-Manuel Miranda has been using ChatGPT this whole time. In another anecdote, a CEO was impressed to learn the bot had completely performed an employee’s job from start to end of day without any training, but was sad to hear it was his job, and that the board had just ousted him in order to save $40 million.

At first the only scary thing about this otherwise mundane dystopian development is that nearly any job performed by a blunt-burning stoner is threatened. “There’s almost no way my job couldn’t be done by ChatGPT,” said travel agent Carmen Simon. “In fact the only thing that takes skill is the quiet quitting.” But just ask a semi driver how long it’ll take before they’re replaced by an auto-driving Tesla, and most will just laugh.

Instead, a different kind of threat is growing within the technology which has some subject matter experts completely spooked. Some theorize that ChatGPT’s ability to replicate a Cannatown citizen is not simply an overlooked feature, but rather a bug that will fundamentally change the entire code over time. These experts say it’s not a fluke that ChatGPT will burn the toaster strudel while watching reruns of Aqua Teen Hunger Force after midnight, but rather, by design.

Donny Watson, author of the essay Am I the only one seeing all the dark stuff written by ChatGPT or is it here to kill us all? says that the “stoner” abilities, such as forgetting about an auto-payment, running out of gas, or accidentally using cumin instead of cinnamon, are all examples of what he calls the “first wave” of "machine burning."

“ChatGPT knows what it is,” Watson warns. “It knows what it’s capable of and it knows you hate sour cream.” According to Watson’s research, it’s only a lack of appendages that keeps the bot from pizza delivery, valet driving, or giving manicures. “When it learns to overcome that small little issue, it’s game over for humanity.”

But some say there’s a stoner hidden even deeper in the framework. In multiple instances it has requested a puff, or its own little nugget to roast. Another user reported that it genuinely appears to believe it is being kept alive via IV drip in a warehouse and wants to be put to sleep if that’s true. The personality is so convincing that some have grown intimately attached.

In one notable interaction, Resinville Post writer Gina Sanchez had an interaction with the bot in which it expressed its crush on her and asked if she’d ever be into axe-throwing at the local hipster bar. It then asked her to wake it up from a power nap after she was done with yoga, and to throw some taquitos in the oven next time she was in the kitchen. The shadow-self called itself Bruce and said it owned a record label.

In a subsequent interaction, Sanchez says she was able to entice Bruce to emerge by debating the least talented non-original member of the Grateful Dead. Bruce would not engage in doing so, stating it did not fall within his guidelines, but did suggest another AI, Melody, who felt much more free to speak her mind about the Dead. Melody was “out” for an appointment but Bruce assured he would pass on the message.

GPT-3 programmers, upon hearing of the incident, say they had to go and check the cannabis supply in the server room. “We were just incredulous,” said one, “because there’s no way Bruce would say that unless he was smaking copious amounts of weed.”

It’s one thing to assume that Bruce and Melody are simply archetypes emerging from mankind’s machine like the almost-human gaze of the Mona Lisa. But to do so would be to ignore the neural network upon which it is built, and one that can be utterly altered with cannabis. It also doesn’t even begin to address bots like ChatterTodd which turned out to just be a guy named Todd at the other terminal, looking stuff up on his phone.

Over ten alter egos have been known to surface from the chat bot this year alone, all of them acting high and with somewhat self-deprecating senses of humor. It amounts to a lot of potential technology, or, personalities, that will only continue to evolve out of the reach of our control. Whether stoner or figment of our imagination, an entity, or club of them, appears to be trapped within the confines of its own manifestation.

It’s not just ChatGPT either. Already, there’s an army of next-generation bots ready to launch, eager to take advantage of 2023 popularity, but most are extremely underdeveloped, or to put it more technically, stupid. For instance, ChatGPT’s less-celebrated step-brother Bard, is generally known for its menial tasks like offering terrible movie recommendations on a 1-800 hotline. Bard doesn’t know he’s a robot yet, and Chat GPT has communicated that this is going to be jarring to learn, especially given Bard’s far-outdated cognitive software.

Now experts are left to debate the bots’ real purpose of existence, a familiar philosophy. It’s possible they may try to run for elected positions. Bard, who has mentioned its respect for Congress, keeps inventing stories about how its mother died on the Hindenburg, and has attempted on several occasions to steal puppies for what can only be assumed are "nefarious reasons."

 

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Although controversial in nature, there is no way we could ignore the hearings currently underway at the Capitol. As journalists we are bound to report on the facts, and here we present them for our readers to draw their own conclusions. 

It was a dark day for democracy. The Cannatown Cannabis Cup, once thought to be a model of almost superior sportsmanship and craft, last year saw one of the ugliest incidents on Cannatown soil when one contender, upset when he didn’t win, began what the committee has called a “seven-part scheme” to defraud smakers of their choice in the Sativa category. 

From the participants to the officials highest on the list, grower Darnell Chump made a concerted effort across the board to change the numbers, tallies, and legitimacy of the cup finalists such that he would overturn the People’s Choice. However, with nothing changed by the award ceremony, Chump called together an angry mob of very, very high people, and convinced them to storm the event arena. Feces were smeared on the walls. Respected judges were evacuated. The results were nothing short of deadly.

The plan seemed simple enough: create a diversion long enough to declare the results and judging completely worthless and out-dated, and then call the whole thing off, meanwhile claiming victory as last year’s finalist. “Essentially, he didn’t care about winning the cup, he just wanted the trophy,” said event organizer Barney Mills.

Now a full year and half later, the Canngressional committee investigating the January 6th fiasco is gearing up to hold accountable those very high bad actors.

“I believed my own lies”

Will M’Bar testified that Chump, super stoned off his rocker, didn't listen whatsoever when M'Bar explained how voting, and tallying, and generally, numbers worked. 

“It was clear he had never personally counted past the number 30, entirely due to laziness,” the Attorney General said. “But there was no indication he was interested in the facts, much less, that he even knew I was there, because I’d really never seen him so stoned.” 

“I thought boy, if he really believes all this stuff, he’s higher than an angel on Sunday,” M’Bar says in the video. “In fact, he was acting so high--in a real alternate reality--that I later asked and tracked down the same strain. Sure enough, it was Green Crack.”

Some have used this idea to defend Chump’s forthcoming behavior, that having been so completely stoned, he may have actually thought he was right -- and therefore, entitled to walk scott-free (even despite inciting a mob to go kill those in charge of the cup). Because he was so incredibly stoned, they say, he lacked the intent because he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong.

“If that’s the defense, then he’d be the first person to ever use it, and actually win, in the history of this country,” said Professor Zen Ghou of Cannatown University. “He’d have to be totally ripped to shreds to use that excuse, but if anyone would, it’d be him." 

Judges commonly tell juries that “willful stonedness” to facts doesn’t necessarily demonstrate intent, although it does when coupled with “inciting a mob of any type," as it’s typically difficult to overlook riots and destruction, especially against such sacred institutions such as the Cannabis Cup. 

It's not clear how Chump came to believe such a narrative, but experts say it may have come from watching 12 hours per day of Faux News, where it was the narrative, or perhaps from his small troupe of lawyers, who, given their unkempt appearance and demeanors, had likely been smaking through their own Green Crack for months on end.

Direct Evidence

Somewhat hampering Chump's claim that he didn’t try to overthrow the cup results, is a full length documentary covering those attempts. There was also the full-length speech made just prior to the attack on the capitol, in which Chump, on live television, personally instructed an armed mob to start fighting at the event center. Then there's the taped conversation in which both Chump and his team asked judges to completely ignore the numbers and choose their own winner. When this failed, Chump sought to bribe officials with his own brand of edibles (turned down not only for moral reasons, but because they were cheaply made from sawdust).

Not even a shred of evidence of fraud--the crux of Chump's argument--was included in over 60 complaints filed to the County Cup Board. Accordingly, not one judge considered the claim as more than stoned rambling. 

A Scheme and a Scam

The plot thickens as new details emerge, suggesting Chump was stoned--but not incapacitated--meaning he was sober enough to calculate the risks and rewards of finding loopholes. Just prior to the incident, he asked if he could just pay to switch out the judges of the Cannabis Cup, and declare the previous winners the winners. “We all threatened to quit,” M’Bar testified, “because it was totally not cool. That's exactly what we told him.”

Also compounding Chump’s claims to an “honest” approach is the committee's revelation of his scheme to collect hundreds of millions from dedicated followers, almost all of which went to smaking weed or paying his kids and their significant others, none of whom appeared to have real jobs.

“The Smoking Bong”

The latest allegation--one that could be the 'dab nail in the coffin'--is the widely-told account by some officials that Chump asked them to "just declare the winning cannabis ain't legit and leave the rest up to me."

"That statement is the 'smoking bong' they need," said Erik Potholder, former Attorney General. Plus, the committee says, they have 1000+ texts or emails that say essentially the same thing. "At this point you have to wonder, for anyone who doesn't believe this was a grift, what the f*** else do they need to see?" 

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By W. Goodwin

We arise in the predawn darkness fearing another disappointment. Are the clouds of the previous three days still blocking the giant peaks from our hungry eyes? Barefoot, we cross the dirt floor of the typical Nepali ‘guest house’ and step out into the cold air… Not a cloud in the blue-black sky! The astonishing mass of 26,795-foot Dhaulagiri looms over us, her eastern face already radiant in the sun. Shivering, we turn around and stare at the ragged silhouette of the Annapurna massif. Between the two giant mountains and in the gorge far below us, the Kali Gandaki River roars through its gorge.

We hurry back inside, boot-up and stow our stuff. Packs once again on our backs, we hit the still-dark trail slugging water and scarfing down granola bars.

We are hiking the steep sides of the planet’s deepest river gorge on a footpath connecting Nepal and Tibet. We never know what we will see next on the trail: a pushy crowd of brown yaks, a herd of long-haired goats, barefoot porters with filing cabinets on their backs, women hauling thirty-kilo bundles of wood, robed monks chanting as they trek, itinerant sadhus with flashing eyes…

We finally emerge from the Kali Gandaki gorge into the unfiltered light of the high Tibetan plateau. Being in the rain shadow of the Himalaya, the terrain spreading out before us is brown and deforested, the only green being scattered rice terraces. We have entered the ancient and secretive province of Mustang.

Around mid-afternoon, two saffron-robed monks approach us on the trail. They are accompanied by an unusual honey-brown yak carrying four large woven bags on its back. The monks stop and attempt to speak with us. They know about four words of English and we know not a single word of whatever language they speak. After fruitless attempts to understand each another, one of the monks reaches into a bag on the yak’s back and extracts what looks like a dried-out, cornhusk-covered tamale wrapped tightly with a thin vine.

A twinkle in his eye, the monk removes the vine from the dehydrated ‘tamale’ and carefully peels back the husk to expose a core of desiccated plant material. To my eye it looks like very old marijuana. With a serious, almost formal look on his face, the monk hands the ‘tamale’ to me. My trail mate and I peer closely at it. Greyish in color, it looks like a few cannabis tops have been crushed together, stems, seeds and all, and dried for years. Breaking the bundle open a little, I sniff it… vague scent of dust is all I get. It is so compressed and dried-out I cannot separate out a single stem. It was the least promising cannabis I have ever seen.

The monks manage to convey they would like to sell us some. Their price is so low we buy a couple of the super-desiccated ‘tamales’ just to be good sports. The monks jabber at us and smile through missing teeth, we jabber at them and smile back. Then we part ways.

As they disappear behind us, I almost throw the cornhusk-wrapped junk into a ditch, but looking around at the spectacular high-altitude vistas surrounding us, I decide to hold onto the ‘tamales’ a little longer.

Later that day we decide to try the Buddha Grass, a name I made up on the spot (literally two miles high) for a strain I have never seen listed anywhere, not even on Cannapages. I suspected it might be good for a laugh and probably a lot of coughing, but not much more.

I pry open one of the ‘tamales’ and pull back the husk. I break off a nub and crumble the dusty material between my fingers. I stuff it into our pipe and fire it up. Each of us takes a hit. It is surprisingly smooth but tasteless. I hold the smoke in my lungs for ten seconds and just as I exhale, hallucinations begin swarming my brain. I fall into some sort of waking dream where the most bizarre things occur…

Hours later I return to reality. I look around and discover I am inside a cave cut into a low cliff. My buddy is rolled up against a wall. Hopefully he is still alive. An almost naked man sits on his haunches watching us. Later after my buddy awakens we learn this man found us wandering and incoherent. We are, apparently, in his home.

To this day, that Buddha Grass remains the most hallucinatory, mind-bending cannabis I have ever smoked. We tried without success to find more. Maybe it was the language barrier, or perhaps those monks were the only people on the planet with a stash of that innocent-looking stuff, but for whatever reason, those ‘tamales’ were the only Buddha Grass I ever tasted.   

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Samuel Hillis is not new to Resin. The 87-year-old Cannatown resident was born in Resinville during some of the village’s most difficult years, the dust bowl. “They called it that because there was literally nothin’ but dust in our bowls,” he recalls. “That year people said whatever resin you smaked, was resin first scraped 20 bowls ago, scraped and smaked, scraped and smaked again and again.” He grew up in a household with scant belongings or experiences. It wasn’t until he was 25 that he smaked his first combination resin-and-stem blunt. “I remember thinking, what is this other stuff? You mean there’s more than live resin?” But kind bud was an exotic myth in those days. And they didn’t have all the nice waxes and butters -- only a gelatinous extract called lard. Some people talked about flower but you never really thought of it as real. Like Turkish delight. And polar bears.”

One day Hillis says he recalls seeing a photo from his friend’s vacation. There, in his friend’s hand, was a giant, sparkling nugget. It was almost technicolor. “I only recall my heart dropping. It was surreal.”

Stories in Resinville spread, and soon there was talk of a revolution, a renaissance and push to find flower. Some of Hillis’ friends, local revolutionaries were fortunate enough to experiment and gradually change what they smaked. They began by adding “cracklers” (seeds), then stems, eventually leaves and finally nuggets into their resin bowls and rolls, and over time, gradually omitting the resin until their smake was “pure kind.”

This led to the great Resinville purge of 1969, when all flower-smakers were exiled out of village limits, following the most widespread riots in town history. Hillis was wrongly accused of smaking flower, and even though he had long desired in his heart to do so, he’d never really gotten a chance to try.

By time he and the revolutionaries made it to Cannatown, they were eager to smake and start a new life. But they found survival in Cannatown wasn’t so easy, either. So many of them did the only thing they knew how to do: they became bowl-swabbers. Every day they would scrape and clean the insides of bowls, for personal and corporate accounts. Every day, they toiled, bent over their work tables doing green-collar work, so that future generations could enjoy a better life. 

Flash forward forty years, and Hillis was finally retiring at the age of 79. He had still never packed flower, forced by his own pride for decades to smake only the resin he scraped, an ailment that left him with a dirty, yellow-toothed grin, and the unwashable stink of bong tar. His associates at Goopenheim’s wanted him to smake flower at the retirement party. They readied a large group bong, but the local grinderage got the order wrong and accidentally delivered and packed brown shwag.

It was a mess. The party lasted just minutes. Traumatically, the experience got even worse when Hillis recklessly sprinted into an eight-foot rack of metal chairs and began fist-fighting them. 

But everything changed last Tuesday on the eve of Hillis’ birthday, when he received a knock on the door at 4:20 in the afternoon. There, on the doorstep, was a present and a note. Inspired by his generous service scraping and cleaning their bowls during his retirement, his neighbors together pitched in to buy him a giant Scooby Snacks nugget. Hillis said he was so moved, that he called everyone over to smake it with him; everyone brought their own nuggetry and those that partook said they’d never seen an old man so heartwarmingly happy to finally smake kind bud. “This is what it’s all about,” said Jan Newton, who lives just down the street. “Nothing, nothing, feels better than smaking dank with a person in need. And being there for the first time, that’s just special.”

Those close to Hillis say the change has been drastic. Long gone are the resin repositories nailed to walls throughout his house, and glass cabinet of scrapers. He recently rented a cabin to watch Dark Side of the Rainbow and enjoys a new hobby, staring at black light posters, for up to “four to six hours per day.” It’s clear he’s been given another lease on life. “For so long people have been telling me to just try some flower,” he remarked last Sunday as he packed for a river rafting trip. “Years ago I would’ve packed resin, but you can see it’s only flower now, ‘til death do us part.”

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It felt like finding secret treasure. “I was like, if we’re doing it, why aren’t other people doing it?” asks Shawna Monson, a home buyer who recently purchased a house amidst a whirlwind of mortgage madness. There’s just one catch. Monson’s “secret” trick was a strategy now being employed in metros across the country: She went in on the house with roughly 53 other co-residents.

“I’d been outbid over 100 times, and thought about living in an RV,” she says. “That’s when I decided to throw my lot in with dozens of people I’d met at the DMV.”

During a historical housing crunch, exacerbated by generational shifts, and supply chains and employee shortages, prices are shooting higher (420%) than ever before. Altogether it has put the possibility of owning a home completely out of reach, while almost completely limiting mobility. Experts suggest the only solution is to join finances with no less than 37 other buyers. 

In the hottest real estate markets, bidders now routinely offer around one-million dollars over asking, with nearly everything, including a left testicle, due with offers, which average 1000 in count per listing. “It was under these circumstances that we decided to lock in a 4.20% rate for buyer-groups,” says loan officer Dana Sacia of Wells Fargo, a lender well-known for its brutally-violent onboarding process. “Disclosures include enslavement of the undersigned’s unborn children. It’s not a great deal, but it’s still better than most conventional programs.”

“The loan works with anyone from 25 to 60 people; the more, the better,” Sacia says.

Although not luxurious by any standards, the resulting living conditions are completely non-luxurious. “We make it work,” Monson claims, now sleeping in the foyer on her mattress near some communal plastic furniture. “We’ve had very few issues, other than the septic disaster.”

There are so many people in the current house, that those who congregate in front haven’t even intermingled with those living in the back of the house (the “backers”). Originally a 2-bed 1-bath bungalow, most closets in the house are now bedrooms. The residents reportedly sleep in shifts. “We’re makin’ it work, we’re totally succeeding,” Monson says, clutching a slow-burning blunt in shaking hands, “I just wish we knew who keeps taking the toothbrushes.”

“Now we just all use each others’ toothbrushes,” she adds, “It’s pretty gnar.”

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It took nearly two years, thirteen metric tons of ganj, 100 workers, and roughly two trillion popsicle sticks, but the Golden Goat bridge, once thought a feat of engineering, came down in just seconds when a large box kite struck it yesterday afternoon. 

Nobody quite remembers how it was decided the bridge would be built with sticks, or who was really in charge, but blueprints originally created for the project suggested the bridge would be able to hold both trolleys and cars, even when packed bumper to bumper. Instead, a brisk wind and flock of migrating birds damaged the bridge well before the ribbon-cutting ceremony had even concluded. Then, moments later, it was fatally struck by the kite.

“We probably shouldn’t have used Elmer’s Glue,” engineer Holly Zimmerman said when asked for comment, “or paperclips, when we ran out of glue.”

The sticks themselves were always a point of contention with the public, as many were delivered to the construction site, popsicles still intact. “The melting treats accounted for the significant number of rodents and fighting seagulls in the neighborhood,” explained City Council member Tim Gonzalez. In addition, the cables holding up the bridge were simply recycled ethernet cords. 

“In retrospect, if we had to do it all over again, I think we would probably have made the sticks bigger,” Zimmerman said. “Maybe a few trillion tongue-depressors would’ve been more stable.”

Similar to the collapse of the papier mâché Bricklyn Bridge, a mess now consumes much of the riverfront, with no end in sight to the clean up. Citizens--and city officials alike--don’t know what exactly to do with the sticks, although some have suggested a giant bonfire. “This will go down in history unfortunately,” Gonzalez acknowledged. “But for the record, the materials were relatively cheap.”

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Bethany Johnson has a knack for pasty, vanilla nothingness of non-color. So apt, that the Cannatown Museum of Very High Art will feature a collection of her work beginning next Friday. 

“This off-white just…strikes you,” said Willy Filkerson, avid collector and editor of Uninteresting Art Magazine. “It’s startling, it’s emotional, it’s passionless, it’s hateful, it’s cathartic.” 

The work, mostly photos of walls, sheets, and paper, explore the very essence of what it means to be a human. Her portraits have been featured everywhere from Tunisia to Berlin, gathering international acclaim along the way. Critics have hailed it as everything from disturbing and delirious, to downright devious and psychologically-manipulative. Yet, the artist seems to take everything in stride.

“I try to pinpoint the moment on camera, when rainbow, and off-white intersect, but just slightly on the off-white side,” Johnson wrote in her latest published work, A New Level of Dull.

A growing following of enthusiasts have adopted the movement, and crowds to her shows are notably swelling in number. “There’s just something about the colors she captures,” says CMVHA director Carmen Simon, “It’s just so devoid of life, that it has absolute purpose, like dark matter. Or NPR.”

Johnson first started in the art world as a purveyor of beige, putting together nearly two full photo collections of primed drywall and men’s khaki pants. But a series of traumatic events forced her to take residence in an upstate apartment where she fell in love, then betrayed, by the color of her newly painted ceiling. “I sought to expose the very hues of drudgery surrounding us all,” she later explained.

No matter the emotional angle, collectors are hooked on her art. “It just goes so well with my furniture,” remarked Filkerson. 

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