late Friday night/early Saturday morning: while others were sleeping, we were making challah bread. Thanks everybody!
10:34 pm. Mixing the dough:
10:35 pm. “Can I use my hands?”
10:36 pm. It feels soft, squishy, and good.
10:39 pm. Kneading:
Finally (and only a week late, really) the layout of the bread poster is done! Actually, really only half the layout is done, since the transparencies for the other two colors will be made by hand. However, that will be the relaxed part, this work on the computer made me a little crazy, with its pretenses of / pressure towards precision…
The two transparencies for the text and the line drawings will be printed by the very professional and excellent I-O Labs in Pawtucket! It’s costly, but really not that expensive in the grand scheme of things: and at this point I’ve messed around enough with these layouts on the computer that I don’t want to mess around any more with piecing them together from photocopier transparencies…
As you can see, this idea has shifted its format away from the previously mentioned vertical poster style. Here’s a screen-captured fragment of a version of that one:
…which was just too hard to read, besides which, I ran out of room on the paper (which is stuff I had around from an older project, cut very precisely in long strips (7.375″ high) on the big cutter at Black Cat).
The sequence of the steps simply flowed better horizontally, and for some reason I could fit more in. No theories about this right now! Here’s the main poster layout (center) with the two color layers at top and bottom:
One more detail:
Conclusion: lots of fun to draw stuff freehand with ink & brush on Bristol board. Less fun (though rewarding in its own way) finagling the scans around on the computer, in a seemingly endless fashion. Satisfying to have it ready to go (still, however, there’s that computer-work feeling of “but isn’t there more I could do?). Scary to be turning it over to the printers’ and hoping the transparency comes out well. I’m predicting it’ll be hard for me to print accurately since it is so long, lining things up will be a pain. But overall, I am pretty psyched with this concept and execution, so far.
Next step thoughts: One of the other layers will be rubylith cutouts to track the shape of the dough through the process… The other one will be messy ink painting and scraping on mylar, to form large letters behind the line-drawings and to highlight the path through the sequence. This color will be printed low-contrast to the paper… maybe even just transparent base to change its value a little… we’ll see…
…and yes, this is what I used my extra hour of daylight savings time for!
it’s been a little rough recently: emotional turbulence, lots of questioning of current and future paths, stressful deadlines… compounded by photoshop crashing repeatedly for some reason, continuous bullshit and noise from the downstairs neighbors, daily logistics that I really should have more under control at this point, and other random crap. Everything from poster projects to simple endeavors (ie. buying new sneakers) is always more complicated than it seems like it will be at first… also I keep forgetting to eat meals which just ends me up in bigger trouble later on, when I’m then extra-hungry and trying to scrounge up food for myself…
on the plus side, however, I did go to the beach and make a bonfire with friends last night, it was great. The night before that (when I was already really emotionally overwhelmed) the base of my desk chair came apart all of a sudden, which caused me a huge amount of stress: since my back has been hurting recently, this chair is more or less the only place I can sit that doesn’t feel terrible. however… I did manage to repair it!
yeah, it’s kind of shoddy. when I get this next set of things done, I’ll try to do a more comprehensive repair: but for now it does the trick. Hooray!
I am drawing for the bread poster. After some meandering speculation with making it dense with text like a 1700s broadside newspaper, I finally picked up the pencil and started doodling out the steps… and it turns out that it’s going to be a 7.5-inch-wide, 35-inch-tall, strip of graphic bread-making narration. In a totally different visual and narrative style from the zine. (These things are rarely within my control.) The format shift has something to do with the idea of “the difference between reading and seeing”, which comes from a quote from Chris Ware (re. differences between comics, paintings, and books) which I wrote down six+ years ago, in a sketchbook that I cannot put my hands on at the moment…
… nor can I articulate my version of this idea very well at this hour of the morning/night! However, you should all clear a 36″ high strip on your walls in your kitchens, somewhere where you can see it from your counter area…
detail: 
As I was drawing these images I realized that this poster will owe a debt to my friend Lauren O’Connor’s artwork. I’m not sure this picture does her awesome ink drawings justice, but here is a shout out anyways! This is from the installation she made in the Dirt Palace front window in 2005.
other stuff that happened recently: worked on re-starting kitchen thinking at Forbes; my brother helped me make a good plan for the next two months; found myself glued to the most recent presidential debate; helped set up and clean up at New Urban Arts, since the program year is starting (I’m not going to be a mentor there this year, but will be helping out with the silkscreen studio); got paperwork and logistics done (more or less on time!) for shows I’m gonna be in; finally bought new sneakers (after accepting the fact that wearing super-busted sneakers for the past six months is probably what is making my back hurt a lot recently); and…. cleaned off my desk: all of it this time, not just the minimum corner! There is more work to do on room/work area functionality, but the clear desk is a real start. My housemate helped me make this animated gif!!!!!!!!! to promote my work on the Craftland website. I got two great letters in the mail today from internet/faraway friends… thank you! watch your mailboxes…
Reading/looking:
okay, that last entry in the list probably means it’s time for bed.
So, long-story-made-short: My downstairs neighbor slapped me in the face Wednesday night/Thursday morning, after I knocked on her door at 1 am to ask her to turn her music down. Glasses broken, landlord called, police report filed…. then Friday all day the music was on loud again. (Their stereo has now moved to directly under my room.) I went down to my friends’ house for the day, in an attempt to get some work done. In a long conversation in Spanish and English on Friday evening, I was able to convince our landlord that he needs to actually take the legal step to force the neighbors to leave: send them a “termination of tenancy” letter, which can then lead to an eviction if they do not move out by the end of the month. I returned to the house later that night, the music was still loud, I packed up sleeping bag and some other stuff and headed back to my friends’ house…
Having slept here the past two nights now, I think I will return to my house to sleep tonight (Sun.)… after I call my housemate and make sure the music has ended. It’s not that the music is annoying, though it is: it’s that now, after being hit, I feel completely justified in thinking that the lady downstairs is crazy and really needs to move out… and completely afraid to confront her again. It’s hard to type that; somehow it’s easier to say that in Spanish, “Tengo miedo…”, the implications are simpler. My landlord understands: after we filled out the termination of tenancy letter together on Saturday, he described our neighbor’s fake-crying reaction when she talks to him about her life, and then said: “Pero ella no és la victima in esa situación”…
From pretty much the first week of this nonsense (described a month ago in this post), my housemates and I have harbored secret fantasies about blasting our neighbors from above with exponentially-louder noise than their stereo can summon — two of my housemates are musicians; each of them owns a powerful, bass-heavy P.A. system. We have refrained. All four of us are in positions of relative privilege: we finished high school and are literate and intelligent, we don’t have children to support, we’ve completed higher-education degrees, and, we’re white [though you could also make the finer distinctions: J.) Anglo-Saxon/French/Germanic Quaker from Philadelphia, B.) Jewish (incl. Polish & French) from Boston suburbs, S.) French-Canadian & German via Woonsocket, and C.) pure Italian from Silver Lake, the next neighborhood over!]. Our privilege gives us a certain amount of societal power. However, when faced with bullying actions and physical intimidation, we have little understanding of how to respond — very little that happens in our social groups ever has to do with non-ironic or non-playful violence, it’s not really in our experience base.
Our best recourse (or our only recourse?) is to try to hold some kind of higher ground, not blast them with our stereo, not jump up and down on the floor, not yell at them, not hit back. We talk to the landlord and reason with him, appeal to his judgment and/or need for money, attempt to persuade him of our points… My Spanish is getting better through many conversations with him, and though these defenses seem to have worked (after much effort), they are still pretty weak. None of us want to get hit or even have another aggressive confrontation, and the coming month is bound to be pretty shitty, since they will be moving out and will probably not be happy about it. In this situation, despite any theoretical power we may have, we are at a disadvantage.
Our neighbor is not a scary lady: she’s in her 30s, short of stature and a little overweight, talkative (tending to dominate conversations), casually racist (when she moved in, she told my housemates, “I’m glad you’re not black!”), credulous, inconsiderate — an ordinary person. Ultimately, I’m not afraid of her. Sure, in some realm of possibility she could get a weapon or recruit a friend who is bigger and stronger to actually do some physical damage to one of us. . . . but what I’m afraid of in a confrontation with her is not her violence as much as my own reaction to violence. On Wednesday, my first response to being slapped was surprise, then an immediate grab for my glasses on the floor (I’m really nearsighted). I didn’t even think to hit back.
In the days since she hit me, however, whenever I’ve been at the house and there’s been music thumping up from below, my secret desire is not to plug in Scott’s amplifiers and blast some terrible noise music through the floor… but to go downstairs, kick in the door (which would be easy), push past anybody in my way with kicks to wherever necessary, grab the stereo or knock it to the ground, run outside with it, drop it from the porch and smash it on the sidewalk outside. Maybe set it on fire. Or something. It’s a violent desire. I choose to leave the house when the reggaeton starts blasting, not because of its repetitive beats, but because of the conflict it brings up within me. When the floor under my desk chair begins to shake, the fact that I don’t know how to throw a punch starts troubling me as much as I’m troubled by my newly arisen urge to punch someone.
Okay, in related thoughts, being in a new space is helping me focus on a different way on my work; or rather, I’m trying to let the different space kick me into some different habits. It’s interesting. It’s effective, to some degree. Being out of my comfort zone and being around a different group of people, I feel more observed, that there’s more attention on me: even if it may not be true, I slack off less, chat less, etc, which is good for getting work done. However, I miss being at the house, looking out my window at our tree, I miss having all my tools to hand. I miss talking to Buio every hour or so, and having him jump up on the desk and mess things up for me (though Bonecrusher is a pretty great cat in his own right!). I hope to be back at Amherst St. for real, full-time, soon. With better neighbors!
The bread zine is done, I kind of gave away all my copies at the zine swap, but… I’m gonna make more. It’s still a rough draft, so if you’d like to try out the recipe and give me feedback (on recipe, instructions, design, etc), I will totally send you one: email me!
Here are some sketches of the beginning of a new project:
[sketches in chronological order L-R, click for a larger version]
This has been cooking in my brain for a while, but it all came together just now thanks to a false-alarm deadline. I wanted to donate a print to the AS220 print lottery, and for some reason I’d convinced myself that I had to make a brand new print for it… in a week and a half. So I thought about it, discussed it with Mr. Monti my patient and distractable housemate, finally got an idea from a book that’s been sitting in our bathroom for months, and started working frantically, late-late-nite, on these sketches. A day and a half later, I came to my senses and realized I could just give AS220 an already-made print for the lottery, and not have to stress out about it. Yeah!
The drawings, however, kind of ended up embodying an idea I’d been verbalizing (but not yet envisioning) for the print I am going to make through Tiny Showcase: “kitchen, ordinary life, view out window… but no cat, that’s too cheesy.” So now, after a meeting with my distant cousin Dan Wood, the letterpress printer who will be printing the image for TS, the idea has taken on its own life: there will be a small (er… tiny) letterpress version, available through Tiny Showcase in the late fall (?), and a larger screenprinted version, hopefully by late November.
There will be some nice, elegant differences between the two, which have their origins in our different printing methods. The letterpress version will be printed on rice paper, which would get all wrinkly if I printed on it with silkscreen inks. The colors will be different, and will also be used in different ways within the two prints: for instance, I’ll use gray/brown paper and print white on top of it, but since Dan can’t print white over dark with his oil-based inks, the paper he uses will be white. The transparencies will have changes and reversals to make this possible… etc.
[small sketch of the final composition, roughly…]
As I’ve drawn more on the full-sized drawing, I’ve gotten more and more excited about it. I’ve been looking at some Japanese woodblock prints, to inform the composition & other details. There’s a quote that goes along with the image (from that book in the bathroom!) which I think will be printed below it in both prints, large and small. The implications of the text resonate with everything that ended up showing up in the drawing… I think it will come together well, though it will be a while before I print my version of it.
not least: There has been amazing weather here in Providence for the past couple of weeks, an unusually cool and pleasant August. This makes all work and life so much more possible in our not-air-conditioned house, and the lovely days that mix rain and sun make the garden super bountiful.
also — the skies have been beautiful, tempting me out of the house for many bike rides!
click for the full image, looking north from Sprague St. in south prov:
…on the main secretdoor site, I updated the in progress page, and added a page for the near future, which, though already out of date, gives me a chance to put all (”all”) my projects on one page.
also, Jacob Berendes has finally put up an online catalog, where you can get awesome stuff from his Junk Store, including a poster I made and the classic “Worcester: Paris of the Eighties” T-shirt. If you like the stuff, buy it! and help HBML pay their rent & survive another two or two million years.
Out of the incredible ‘one-man’s-trash-is-another’s-treasure’ troves of my friend Rob C. comes this amazing stovetop “Stovey McTop”, which, despite being somewhat grubby-looking in this crummy partial photograph, is functional!
It’s pretty much exactly what we were looking for, for the Forbes St. kitchen project. An old-school, relatively heavy-duty electric stovetop, with coil burners (not the weird glass ones that are easily damageable and can’t heat up as hot…). It not only has a fifth tiny weird burner, as you can see in the upper left of the photo, but it has TWO large burners: important for a household which cooks meals for twelve people everyday in giant pots, and which, for the past two-and-a-half years, has scraped by with only one large burner on their stove. Hurrah!
Here are some drawings of the kneading process for the bread zine: made from photoreference pictures taken by Andrew P. It’s close to being done, now, with about 12 hours to go…
The bread zine is definitely in rough-draft form, even as I’m about to print up a bunch of copies and hand them out at the zine swap. It needs to be tested out by some people other than me; I really want feedback on the instructions and design, if they are clear and legible, and if the recipe works in other kitchens! So there will be a further, more finished edition after this one. I also have the feeling that the text and images from the zine are going to become part of my poster for the Sustainable Poster Show that Meredith Stern is organizing in Providence this winter. We’ll see…!
Well, the New Urban Arts zine swap is approaching, and I sideswiped myself into working on a zine about how to make bread. So I’ve been doing that for the last little while. I’ve never laid out a document consisting mainly of blocks of text before, so I’ve been constantly referring to Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, which Andrew lent me a while ago. It’s great — if I’d gone to school for graphic design I probably would have found out about it years ago — but I am delighted now to discover the many opportunities for distraction and nerding-out that exist within its covers…
I’ve been spending a lot of time at the computer, which is all right, but I am pretty ready to go back to actually drawing. The bread zine is going to be photocopied on good paper, possibly with a screenprint of some kind on the cover: 24 small pages of just one recipe for delicious homemade bread, that you can vary and adjust to your own taste, usable even by someone who’s never baked anything before. If you want a copy, let me know!
Additionally, I got a large fan, making summer a little sweeter:
(which happens to be the same model fan that inspired this project… hmm, I just realized I never put up any images of how that turned out…)
. . . Andrew brought me a giant jar of the burdock-root kimchi we started earlier in the spring. He and I made some more drawings, including, just yesterday, this one:
(a detail)
. . . and, I picked hundreds of green beans from my garden and made dilly beans, about which I can only say, home canning, though complicated, is easier than it looks, try it, try it, try it!
geographical expansion news: If you’re in or around Portland, Maine, you can now go look at and caress some of my posters and postcards at Eli Phant, a ‘handmade stuff store’ run by old friends, that just opened on the eastern end of Congress St!
I’ve been reading Lilah’s blog…
…and I’ve been really psyched about Mickey’s comics. All right!
