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):

Flash Wednesday.8

Here's one last June installment of Flash Wednesday! I made a broadside of this story, which is the title piece for my art show this Friday at James Rowland Shop. Check out the broadside here. 

Shifts

My shift starts at 8:30. Belladon’s starts at 11. Sometimes we trade shifts, but always, always, we stay within the realm of our own.

The way Belladon does his job is like this: he struts. He’s majestic in his brown paper briefs, a grease spot marking the very nose of their slope. My uniform—which I wear even when I work the 11—my uniform is more modest: a burgundy velvet cloak. The way I do my job is still unclear.

Sometimes working the 11 makes me feel foreign, Belladon tells me. And when we trade shifts, it feels like I’m coming home. Belladon lies a lot. That’s how he gets me to take his shift.

The cook is sorting through tubs of coleslaw with a Sharpie, hastening their expiry dates with crunching strokes of his wrist. Is it a wrist? No. It’s the graceless place where his hand meets his arm, a collision.

Lately, we’ve noticed groundcherries poking out from between the tubs of coleslaw, finishing off their growth with husky bobs. Belladon says it’s because we’ve stopped ordering sauerkraut. The stink kept the weeds at bay.

I’ve never felt foreign, exactly, here inside my cloak, but then I’ve never felt the urge to strut either. Whether I’m the 8:30 or the 11, it’s always been Belladon’s body that explains my own.

**********

Belladon has stopped wearing his briefs. Are you working the 8:30? I ask. He tells me no. We’ve created a new shift, he says, to fill in the gap between the shifts that already exist.

And there’s no uniform?

More like there’s no copyright. We’ve bumped up its expiry date. The sight of a naked man has finally surpassed being embarrassing.

I shuck a groundcherry and pop it in my mouth. I study Belladon’s penis, which is thin and craggy, like a long shred of cabbage. The cook unloads chestnuts from a grease-stained paper bag. The place where his hand meets his arm crackles.

I reach around inside my cloak for my penis. All I can feel is forest, cicada shrieks, the lusty smell of dusk. I stagger, I tear at the night. I brush past a halo of pubic hair, push into the thicket, further until I trip on a freshly cut stump. Horror is lush in my throat. This, I think, is the nature of doom: the restless mortar between plastic tubs of slop.

Broadsides on display this Friday at JRS

I'm moving to Iowa this fall to study at UI Center for the Book, and so am getting ready to say goodbye—for now—to the Bay. If you're in the area this Friday, June 29, come say hi/bye at James Rowland Shop in Berkeley, where, for one night only, they'll be showing a collection of broadsides I letterpress printed. Each one features an original short story or poem, is printed on re-purposed office supplies, and will be selling for cheap! The show, titled             SH IFTS, will be up from 7-10 pm, and there will be pizza and drinks! James Rowland Shop is located at 2447 Dwight Way at Telegraph. 

The Taco Group now posted!

I finally posted my short story "The Taco Group," along with all its bells and whistles from a performance I gave last year at Headlands Center for the Arts. The piece tells of infighting among the members of a sinister kaffeeklatsch, a group whose goal is to build a utopia out of the remnants of the post-functional city in which they live. As I wrote the story, I realized my aim was similar to that of my characters': I was doing a lot of scavenging in an attempt to make something perfect. I processed this a little in an artist's statement, and used recycled materials to construct slides of the utopian city's streets, as well as fixings for a taco buffet. I also letterpress printed the Taco Group's progress report. All these elements came together to form a not-quite-reading/not-quite-installation. Is it something we could call a book? See for yourself!