A nice little video about the letterpress process featuring John Christiansen of Firefly Press in Massachusetts.
ARTIST SOUGHT IN BLAZE AT APARTMENT HOUSE
Police were searching Tuesday for a 33-year-old artist and former bicycle messenger who allegedly set his own apartment building on fire on Monday, hours after he was released from the psychiatric ward of San Francisco General Hospital.Silver Warner is being sought in the 5:15 p.m. three-alarm fire that gutted upper floors of the building at 52 Page St. Monday and left a firefighter who jumped to safety with minor injures.
Warner is described as 6 foot 1, with collar-length hair and black frame glasses. He as last seen wearing a knit black beanie, tight jacket, blue jeans and tennis shoes, and he may be carrying a messenger bag.
Warner's father, Robert Warner, said Tuesday that his son -- a peace-loving vegetarian who loves yoga -- was in "crisis" on Sunday night. He said his son makes T-shirts and "zines,'' collections of photos of cyclists and life on the streets of San Francisco. He has had group exhibitions in Boston and Tokyo.
Created by the British agency LIDA -- see more excepts at "Twenty Four."
In the 1600s Dutch commercial freighters controlled Atlantic trade routes. Competing British lines induced America to produce pitch to protect hulls of their royal vessels. This arrangement lasted until 1776, after which a Scottish inventor tried to produce pitch from coal tar. By the time he succeeded the navy was using copper instead. Subsequent experiments with coal tar yielded gaslight lamps, waterproofed garments, a brilliant mauve dye that established the German chemical industry and nylon, the first of the miracle plastics.
"The human dream is one of all things first recognised, and then named, in accordance with their human utility, translated and metaphorised into the human realm. This dream is almost wholly pervasive, so much so we do not call it a dream at all; we even fall asleep and keep on dreaming inside it. The fact that we corroborate and reenforce the dream-rules in all our human intercourse gives it, of course, the appearance of reality. It is just as flimsy a consensual reality as money. It is a dream....So the theme for this week's blog posting, if you choose to participate, is to share some of your own artistic DNA. Is there an essay or a poem or a painting or a building or a theory or a fictional character that haunts you, or that informs your own poetics or artistic practice?
Whether you take this seriously or not - all this, for the poet, is much more than a little perceptual game. When we allow silence to reclaim those objects and things of the world, when we allow the words to fall away from them - they reassume their own genius, and repossess something of their mystery, their infinite possibility. Then the we awaken a little to the realm of the symmetries again, and of no-time, eternity.
The poet's specific talent: when the things of the world (in which we should very much include our own feelings, ideas, and relations with one other) that we have contemplated in this wordless and thoughtless silence reenter the world of asymmetrical concept, of discrete definition, of speech and language - they return as strangers; and then they declare wholly unexpected allegiances, reveal wholly unsuspected valencies. We see the nerve in the bare tree, we hear the applause in the rain. These things are, in other words, redreamt, they are reimagined, they are remade. This I think is the deepest meaning of our etymology as maker.
One more point: the poem having been translated from the silence, as my friend Charles Simic puts it, it has briefly kept the company of everything, of all natural things, and its desire to then declare a kinship with those things - to become a beautiful manmade natural object, with the integrity, symmetry and rhythm of the natural - should be no surprise."
I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it....I read this today and felt that it related to something Travis said about his zine-in-progress last class. Especially the idea that "a drawing must have a power of expansion" which resonated for me with the flexible nature of textile-drawings and their second kind of life as cyanotype prints, like an echo or a translation to a different dimension. Now that I try to articulate this passing sensation of relatedness, it recedes, like the textile flexibility that disappears from the cyanotype; the blog entry a kind of cyanotype of my sensation.
Composition, the aim of which is expression, alters itself according to the surface to be covered. If I take a sheet of paper of given dimensions I will jot down a drawing which will have a necessary relation to its format—I would not repeat this drawing on another sheet of different dimensions, for instance on a rectangular sheet, if the first one happened to be square. And if I had to repeat it on a sheet of the same shape but ten times larger I would not limit myself to englarging it: a drawing must have a power of expansion which can bring to life the space which surrounds it. —Matisse
I stopped by the SF public library this morning to check out the Little Maga/Zine Collection. It turns out you can contribute your zine to the collection...maybe we could do this as a class?
above: Susan Hensel Design, artist book "Surgery"
