The Rich & The Poor

Our friend Frank Boross from Eye-Yi-Yi Digital Video and Toxic Coyote Press just worked on a music video The Rich & The Poor by Carl Morehouse, former mayor of my home town, Ventura, California. The sweet sound of a voice standing up for the basic dignity of people, for the possibility of peace and justice…

Everything Frank is involved with is top-notch. I wish he had a site with a gallery of his graphic design and printing that I could refer to. I can refer you to a very different project, a book he did with the comedy writer Sean Maher.

Sean is someone I met in the early 90s when he was starting to do stand-up at Ventura clubs I was too young to go to. His insightful spoofs of some of the most popular mental crutches are hilarious. Here are a couple of one-liners from his cards:

“If at first you don't succeed,
pout and mope around.”

“Human rights should be
reserved for the elite.”

My commentary on humor may be a little obtuse. Thoughts seem to be stacked on one another as if some would fall off the pile if they were no longer supported by the deeper ones at the foundation. I think that good humor brings thoughts out that most people don’t know how to handle. Ideas that might otherwise be depressing, cold, or frustrating are suddenly funny.

Obviously, Sean does this “pulling out the dirty thoughts” thing. But he seems to get at some of those deeper elements to really shake up the mind. Check it out. Am I romanticizing this guy’s talent because I lounged in his bachelor pad as a psychedelic 16 year old? No, he’s really funny.

Yma's art sale

Yma has been hosting an art sale this weekend in the front yard of the Lettre Sauvage studio. She is selling drawings of various sizes, and has also taken this opportunity to sell some toys and housewares. When I arrived to print this weekend, she greeted me at the car and convinced me to buy some of the work.

Yma's artwork has long been an inspiration for us at the studio. She's learned about printing from her parents and creates strikingly original work. We've also included some of her poems in the zine, brick. There are times when words seem to just spill out of her with tremendous poetic force. Just last week she said to us, "What do you know? Pomegranates can be secrets."

I'm particularly fond of this drawing. It demonstrates an unusual amount of restraint and shows how Yma is aware of the borders of the paper. The color choices, alternating between strong and soft tones, work so well with the smudging and blurring that are otherwise occurring in the piece.

When I asked Yma to sign her piece, she was at first confused and insisted that I sign it, since I would be the work's owner. I am impressed with her willingness to let go of her objects, to release them into the world without names or titles or figurative reference to cling to. It is a good lesson for artists of any age.

Green, city, beautiful poets

Greener & Greener

Lettre Sauvage has been added to GreenMaven.com, the premier
search engine for websites with social and environmental values.
We’re already learning about how to run our studio more
responsibly from other sites we found in their directory!

Check it out.

City Lights

The long wooden stairway lined with shelves and framed broad-
sides leads to the most exquisite seat in town: the simple
wooden chair under the small window where one can sit flanked
by floor to ceiling shelves of poetry. Upstairs at City Lights
is one of my most beloved reading spots. 

Genevieve has been in San Francisco for a couple weeks. She took
our latest publications to City Lights where they enjoyed a very
warm reception. We’re so thrilled to have our work in their store
and on their website.

Santa Barbara Summer Poetry Workshop

I visited the workshop to talk about my experiences publishing
collaboratively with poets. I couldn’t help but borrow the term
“the third mind” coined by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs to
describe that realm of shared thought and creation where
collaborative work is produced. I think the group shared my
enthusiasm about

“a praxis of two subjectivities that metamorphose into one”
-George Gerard Lemaire

While at the workshop I had the pleasure of hearing some
impressive work,
fresh from the notebooks of participants. 

I also sat in on their discussion time and learned more about the
monthly poetry journal, Sage Trail (cover above).  I had picked
one up at a Santa Barbara Poetry Series reading, and was honestly
surprised by how strong the writing was – not to sound jaded or
anything- but there are so many bland journals out there. This is
not one of them. And, this gem is only $15 for a year’s subscription
or free online.

Extra-Illustration

My history of the book class is off to a wonderful start and in recent weeks we've been looking at the practice of extra-illustration, or putting images in the margins of or in between sheets of existing books. We read essays about James Granger's A Biographical History of England, published in 1769, the first text to which extra-illustrated portraits were added. This practice came to be known as grangerizing a text, and last week we actually got to view a grangerized version of the Biographical History, among others. Alan Jutzi, the Chief Curator of Rare Books at the Huntington Library, visited our seminar and brought with him several of Richard Bull's meticulously grangerized books. For each paragraph or two excised from the original text, Bull added rare engravings and mezzotints, handwritten notes, and other fascinating ephemera and portrait into what could be considered an early form of scrapbooking.

Bull's handiwork, and that of his family --he was clearly aided by many of the women in the household--is extraordinary. For one text, he cut out a window on each page so that when the sheet from the original text was inserted, you could see both front and back of the double-sided sheet. Portraits and other clippings were added in and around those elements. Because books were not sold as bound objects until well into the 19th century, people like Bull could take a text like Granger's Biographical History or the bible and insert many sheets, embellishing the text, extending its meaning, and show off one's personal collection of prints or curatorial perspective.

Last week our class was visited by two scholars: William Sherman from York University presented "Toward a Pre-History of Collage" and Matthew Eddy of Durham University explained the early 19th century notetaking practices of Dugald Stewart in "Words in the Mind and on The Page: Dugald Stward, Memory and Taking Notes." Though both were excellent, Bill Sherman's presentation was particularly intriguing for the way that it traced a long-standing practice of cut-and-paste well before the modern conception of collage as practiced by Picasso and Braque. He demonstrated that as far back as the Renaissance, people were cutting out ornaments, borders, illuminated letters, and other scraps of text and placing them into other books, a practice that was as creative as it was destructive, and one which calls into 

the question the very way that we look at books. Far from being pristine, inviolable objects, as we might understand them today, books in an earlier period were sites of change. You can almost see the process of thought taking place on the page, and it's a fascinating area of study to try to understand how and why such books were made and how they were used, whether

 for pleasure, boredom, or erudition. Sherman, who works in marginalia, will be publishing this work as a book soon and I'll post a link once it's up. 

In the meantime, here's a link to his most current text, Used Books: Making Readers in Renaissance England, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

And here's more from the Huntington about extra-illustrated texts.

the party

was so successful it took us 13 days to tell you about it! my god, there were so many hot girls and brilliant films screened in cameron's creative back yard projection-en-scene. naked three foot high plastic dolls, or a leg only, strewn about the property, handsome french wine-makers who talk about wittgenstein on vintage couches.

oh come along now, you should have been there! not just in house when dept. was rocking the spanish adobe print up imagination, liquid gel projections on our living room's inner walls. odd bulbs, colors, in each of the globe lamps. globe or some other shape more parabolic...ok, not just dept's incredible mix and progression of beats,...you should have been there, too,

when sophia kidd performed,
spoken word scribe, off the page (is recitation a lost art?), she explained how al gorisma brought zero from india to the muslim world and then to europe via moor encampments in spain...it went well, with interruptions that were so glandular, we all thought saturn had gone rhomboid (your author's been reading a titular lot of ezra lb.)


kameron and ceith

(keith ok)

rocked out of water in the basement studio, composed into psychic states from the ethers...many filmmakers were present to witness and document these two's wizardly states with a theramin (sp?) and odd casio intruments, instrument kinds and fucked up circuitry. scuze me for wearing skirts on this one, guys...i only know the sound you put forth stimulated me in ways i kuldn't keep b track of.

Geneveive spoke moments of truth, whispered with her eyes, from the next vortex, she was calm, bringing with her alan d. glass II, who hooked up a posse of mongolian horsemen to take him across the gobi desert, filmed it. we were so lucky. that guy drinks a glass of water with every cup of joe he drinks...never met a more sober genius.

and this part i nearly can't talk bout, is the heidelberg press that cameron got going, and going well. after performing, for about 25 minutes around 7:30, cameron hung out for a few of ken's video projections. then he did the unthinkable. he went into the garage and chugged up the heidelberg

and commenced printing a huge job and printed until one in the morning. after that, the ink and cleaning, after gen left.

there's so much else about the party you should know...people who were there, deals that were struck, minds...but ah's outta hea...maybe more later.

you know tho that the most important thing or person of all was fiona.

she reigned queen. she was the queen of the party. and yma, oh i'm gonna start crying when i think about how she handled that whole party. so damn regal.

lovely

(in case you din' notice by now, sophia kidd wrote this)

MOO mini cards

Being enamored with all things small, except maybe fleas and lint, here's a link to MOO mini cards. They're really inexpensive, lovely "widescreen" name cards in a very adorable size. And you can choose any number of images to put on them as well, so you can have lots of different cards. We like in particular the fact that you can put any text on them, so these would make an affordable complement to, say, a wedding invite or announcement.