S**t Happens When You Party Naked

Dmitry Samarov

Dmitry Samarov is a local cab driver and artist who puts out a semi-regular blog called Hack, stories from his hours spent driving a hackney through the streets of Chicago. His most recent entry is about waiting out late-night revelers with a man who’s been driving a cab since ’73, the man’s scraggly white beard yellowed around the mouth from the nicotine who we learn, through the course of the entry, has been writing science-fiction stories on a manual typewriter for years, the latest involving a human-sized insect who’s also a detective. At the end of the post we learn that the detective has discovered ‘the remains of a person’s arm, chiseled to the sharpest point ever detected on his planet…’

Samarov was born in Moscow in 1970, emigrated to Boston in ’78 with his family, studied art at the Parsons School of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago, and has been driving cab for god only knows how long. The story of his first days as a cab driver is some of my favorite stuff, both awkward and lude, the drawings crude and poignant, full of vignettes with hookers and undergrads. Samarov is like a cross between Bukowski and Scorsese as seen through a murky watercolor-drawn world.

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

For our second Is Still Cool S**t, we wanted to showcase an unknown artist & author who has been lurking in the taxi’s of Chicago and all the while recording this seedy world through words and images. Welcome to the universe of Dmitry Samarov!