Although he's been active in the Houston street art scene for almost a decade, the work of the artist known as Give Up has only recently begun to gain wider attention within the larger extreme art underground. His work has been featured on numerous blogs over the past year such as Hammer Smashed Sound (which is where I learned of him) and Cvlt Nation, and he has created several shirt designs and record sleeves including one for the UK hardcore band Rot In Hell. When I saw his stuff posted on HSS, I was instantly attracted to Give Up's stark, high-contrast black and white images. They reminded me of old hardcore punk 7" sleeves from the 80's, or the ascetic designs of Industrial cassettes, or the heavily saturated black spaces found in xeroxed black metal fanzines. Once I investigated his stuff further and found that there were a couple of books and zines that Give Up has produced, I snatched up everything that I could get my hands on, and found that this guy has produced a hefty amount of work, ranging from extensive and ambitious guerilla-style street art pieces to xerox-damage collages to abstract landscapes. And it's all consumed with visions of urban decay, Satanic symbols, death and dissolution, drug abuse, eroticism, violence, and an overall nihilistic attitude that appeals to my general worldview. The bottom line is that I love feeding my eyes with Give Up's art, and his massive softbound book collections are filled to the brim with this stuff. He's received most of his accolades for the actual street art that he has plastered all across Houston, but fans of grimy zine art, nightmarish xerox atrocities, and graphic design steeped in both occult and dystopian ideas would probably be hooked by Give Up's negatory, inky hallucinations.

Where Give Up's Hate Fuck compendium and zines focus on the xerox/collage art that serves as the source material for his large wheatpaste posters and street art displays, this reprinted edition of Lonely Days And Wasted Nights documents the actual street art itself, with tons of photos of prints, posters and tags taken from around Give Up's home base of Houston, capturing his work between the years 2001 and 2008. Mixed in with all of the photos of his work are various other pics and poster designs, images of garbage heaps and drug paraphranalia, scantily clad female forms, urban decay, Satanic goat adoration, dead animals, suicide poetry, urban slime. This guy is doing my favorite street art right now, and this book is another visual feast of his dark, nihilistic, occult-stained work. Lonely Days is a 6" x 9" perfect-bound book wrapped in a black and white paper obi band, and has one hundred and eighty-eight pages, and includes a 4x6 color photo, a two-color 4x6 screenprint card, a photocopy card reproducing the poster that came with the original first edition of the book, and a Give Up sticker.