Sarah McCarry on Messiness

Hey, look! I interviewed Sarah McCarry over at SFCB Blog. Sarah—who is creator of Glossolalia (zine), the mastermind behind The Rejectionist (blog), and author of All Our Pretty Songs (forthcoming novel)—is an old pal, and it was great to catch up. She also works as Presse Manager at Ugly Duckling Presse, a publisher dedicated to incorporating handmade elements into the titles it releases. Sarah dishes up the inside scoop on UDP, as well as the dirt on her own life as a writer/blogger/zinester/letterpress printer.

You should be in Beecher's

And I am! Just like their first issue, Beecher's 2 is a really beautifully designed and constructed book. I'm proud to have my prose poem, "Pluck," appear in its pages, along with a lot of other great writing. You can order the magazine here!

Photos from SH IFTS

Here are some photos of the broadsides I had on display at Berkeley's James Rowland Shop a couple weeks ago. The space seemed made for them! To read their text, visit my website. 

To-Done Lists

As I get ready to leave Oakland, it's hard for me not to pay some sort of tribute to the nice situation I've had here: in addition to getting unemployment, I've had my own workspace. Thus, the luxury of enough time to really give some love to the headers of my to-do lists, to grab those doodles and overwork 'em to death. It got to the point where it felt talismanic: the more love I put into the TO-DO, the more items I'd end up crossing off. And maybe there was something to that. I've had a really productive year, and I'm grateful for it. 

Letter from Pedestrianica.6

We here in Pedestrianica rarely offer our opinions on cinema, but one movie came down the shit tube off-ramp recently that raised a lot of questions: What is up with Drive? The future of fossil fuels has looked bleak for decades. We know it's making you a lot of money, Corporate America, but look: that aura surrounding the automobile? It's fading fast. And leaving aside Drive's motorcentrism, it seems to have gone unnoticed that this is just another movie about a smug, brooding white dude trying and failing to act tough (bitch, we saw you at the Mormon talent show) as he woos a blandly wholesome and weakly written romantic lead, and forms a relationship with her son that reeks of Indiana Jones-style imperialism. When the love interest's husband comes home from prison, he's punished for failing to appreciate how well our hero has "taken care" of his wife. And when our hero beats up Christina Hendricks, a) it can only be described as extreme slut shaming, and b) it makes his already punchable face fifty times more so. How is this shit even remotely okay, let alone the best movie of the year? While we Pedestrianicans are used to hegemonic car glamor being shoveled at us by the oil lords of sovereign nations, our numbness lessens daily. The gap between what an absolute turd Drive is and the praise it's received is astounding. And (according to one Pedestrianican citizen) the only way to make it through this film is to re-imagine it as an extended Michael Scott fantasy sequence. 

Dream Poster Featured in YBCA Occupy Show

Wow! This Saturday, July 7, is the opening of the Occupy Everything show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Included will be the Dream poster conceived and designed by Miriam Klein Stahl and Gabby Miller. There were originally a couple versions of this poster, and I had a lot of fun helping typeset and print the letterpress edition. The best thing about it is that we left a dream-space for a whole bunch of other collaborators to fill in, which they did, and the results were first displayed at the WE ARE THE THERE show in April at Rise Above Gallery in Oakland. The collaborations turned out beautiful; look at some of them here (including my own, which features a fold-out essay on San Pablo Avenue you can read here). Miriam is also leading a workshop later this month, where she will print a new batch of Dream posters and invite more collaborators. Come see the original Dream posters this Saturday at YBCA! Meanwhile, here it is featuring Rocco (via Gabby's Nice Dogs tumblr):