I made this sour cherry jam the other day because I want everything to be a little sour and a little sweet.
July is lily time.
Lilies are my favorite.
Water lilies seem impossible, but then there they are.
My main question this week is: cherry jam or cherry pie?
I got two quarts of whole strawberries from the CSA fruit share this past week, which kept me busy.
I made jam too, for the first time, which ended up a little runnier than actual jam and more like sauce, but tasted amazing and made the house smell like heaven. Apparently I need to work on my technique.
Then I spent a surprising amount of time in Queens, where I found this:
And rode the bus with some teenage boys who told us all about their friend and his female romantic companions, and the bacterial infections they now share.
Which made me thirsty. I had a fantasy walking back home of leaving the glamorous world of arts administration and moving to the country and starting a bakery/residency program.
And then I got back to work.
is next weekend at the Brooklyn Lyceum, June 27th and 28th. From their website:
The mission of the NYC Zine Fest is to circulate and promote independent, homemade, self-published, and small publications. We aim to support and expand the network of creators who self-publish zines in and outside of the NYC metro area. The Fest will connect artists, writers, and collectors of zines and further the NYC zine community through a two-day annual series of events, including tabling, workshops, presentations and parties. The NYC Zine Fest ’09 will celebrate and highlight the spirit of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture that zines represent.
I’m trying to arrange for a sitter for my non-profit so I can help out at the binding demonstration we’ll be doing in the afternoon. Hope I can make it down there, it looks like a great time.
I can’t stop talking about food. I love that it takes everything I love and makes it practical, and you don’t have to justify it like you do writing or making pictures. Because everyone has to eat. I love how it’s slow. That it’s social and communal, celebratory, and cultural and political and ritualized, all of those things, are wonderful. But I really love cooking for myself. That I can bake a cake just for myself. That most of what I make is mine.
“…the very categories of language are created by intentional hand actions, so that verbs derive from hand movements, nouns ‘hold’ things as names, and adverbs and adjectives, like hand tools, modify movement and objects.”
The Craftsman-Richard Sennett
Progress is being made on at least one front.
1. My boss thinks “technologyogical” is a word.
2. that Richard Sennett thinks:
…commitments themselves come in two forms, as decisions and as obligations. In the one, we judge whether a particular action is worth doing or a particular person is worth spending time with; in the other, we submit to a duty, a custom, or to another person’s need, not of our own making. Rhythm organized the second kind of commitment; we learn how to perform a duty again and again.
(The Craftsman)
I revised the book again this weekend. I think this might be close. I started by collecting all sorts of transformational language: snippets from skin care ads, weight loss products, avant-garde manifestos, the Landmark Forum, Alcoholics Anonymous literature, Dale Carnegie, etc. I was looking for language that promises everything, but doesn’t actually say anything specific.
It’s got three voices right now; one in need of advice, one offering a variety of empty slogans, and one offering nonsensical advice, kind of like a half-cracked fortune teller. The sloganeering will be done in hand-drawn and carved type-
The advice seekers go with a series of portraits.
The fortune teller gets the most lines.
I hope to have all the blocks carved by the end of the summer. That might be crazy of me, though. I’m working on some posters with the blocks I’ve finished so I can work out colors, typefaces, etc. Also, since it’s somewhat of a half-baked self-help book, and I like to bite off more than I can chew, there’s going to be a Bonus Educational DVD in the back of the book, which will have a lovely stop-motion animation of slogans in black and white hand drawn type, which was going quite well until the Great Data Loss of 2009.
In the meantime, I’ve almost finished working on this:
Which was intended as a way to both calm my shaky nerves by manipulating type in a new and exciting way, and a way to hone my non-existent animating skills. It’s the proofs from a print that had a nice bit of writing on it and not much else going for it, cut up into tiny little bits. It’s a little rough, but charming. I think it’ll be ready to post next week.
Also this weekend, I bought this:
Doesn’t she look ready to strangle the wolf with her bare hands? MFK Fisher’s smokin’ hot. I’m excited by the chapter titles, which include:
-How to Be Sage Without Hemlock
-How to Distribute your Virtue
-How to Rise Up Like New Bread
-How to Make A Pigeon Cry
-How to Make a Great Show
-How to Have a Sleek Pelt
among many others. I can’t wait.
I hate name tags, just so you know. I like to be incognito.
We went to the Hybrid Book Conference and Book fair in Philadelphia on Thursday. It’s always nice to get out of town, and despite the lousy weather it was a good time. Book arts conferences seem to be happening constantly these days, and this one seemed well-organized. I liked that the organizers planned for talks in the morning and a book fair in the afternoon- most of the time at these kinds of events both happen simultaneously, which means if you have a table you end up missing half the event, and the talks aren’t as full as they could be, and the book fair has long lulls where there’s no one there.
Sitting at a table renders me inarticulate. There’s a lot of sitting and staring, and smiling vaguely at people. There’s usually some fluorescent lighting involved. It’s all a little exhausting. The good part comes if you are lucky enough to have someone with you to watch the table while you walk around and look at other people’s books. I don’t really think that standing at a table is the best way for me to absorb a book; I generally get overwhelmed fairly quickly, but since it’s one of those rare occasions when you can handle lots of artists books and talk to the people who made them, it is a great opportunity to see a lot of work in a short period of time.
Highlights for me included:
1. A new book by Katie Baldwin, Treasure, which she produced in residence at the Women’s Studio Workshop.
2. Sarah Bryant’s work, which I’ve seen before in images but not in person. It seems she’s been very productive up there at Wells College. I really liked Point of View.
3. Two new books by Macy Chadwick, The Topography of Home, and Letter by Letter.
4. Lots of fantastically great stuff by Gregory Pizzoli-why isn’t there more of this kind of work at book arts fairs? Is humor a bad thing?
5. The ongoing recruiting efforts of Impractical Labor.
6. A great presentation by the Combat Paper Project, followed by a great presentation by Amos Kennedy, reminding us all of the world going on outside the academic institution.
7. Patty Smith talking about gender and offset printing.
I think though, that the main highlight of the conference was the Malaysian food we had for dinner on Friday night.
You like how I took more pictures of food than I did of books?
Big thanks to Josh Harris for putting my cohort Corinna Z. (see above) and I up for two nights in his glorious renovated home. Apparently artists can become homeowners outside of NYC.
The rose garden at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens is in bloom this month. It’s an over-the-top sumptuous sensory experience, I promise. If you go early in the morning, you can avoid the bees. Tuesdays are free.
