shelflife by visitor

Glen’s another example of doing it right. I’m not sure he could avail himself of the convenience of tarnishing his integrity if he actively sat there at his stainless steel desk and tried. This zine didn’t really start it all for him, but in a way, it started him for him. Specifically, it marked the start of his independence from the corporate publishing world–something he’s maintained right up to the KYEO fugazi book he just published. It’s a practice he’ll likely never stray from.

The guy was a professional photographer by age 12. What exactly does that mean? It means he knew that the things he loved watching were worth documenting. It means that he had the drive to pick up a camera and document those things. It means he’d put up with being the grom–getting beat up, ripped off, scammed and laughed at because he was a child with a child’s instinct that what he loved was, in some way, pure–elemental–the atoms that would smash together and outgas the culture we all accept as ubiquitous today. He was getting published in Skateboarder magazine regularly. He was shooting his friends–not just doing what they were known for, but enjoying themselves away from those anchors.

Album covers, publicity shots, magazine spreads–punk, hardcore, rap, skateboarding–it was all the same. It was all energy as far as his affinity to it went. Initially, though, he didn’t edit it that way. I’m not sure Glen felt comfortable telling people, “it’s all the same thing. get used to it”.

At the start, he delivered the goods piecemeal. MY RULES, is indicative of that. There’s an ad for Thrasher in it, but there’s none of Glen’s iconic skate photography in the zine. He kept that in the skate mags back then. There’s no rap in it, but it was ‘82 when he released it, so he wasn’t really shooting enough rap yet to have it make much contextual sense. So, in the canon of Glen Friedman, MY RULES, has, until relatively recently, stood alone as a crystalline composite of singular focus–music–or, more precisely–the aggressive music that Ronald Reagan’s America helped inspire. In the past few years he’s bookended My Rules with the DogTown book, the Jay Adams book, Recognize and KYEO which have all been content specific–but in the decades connecting My Rules to KYEO, he took the liberty of allowing the diversity of the images he composed to be the message.

While we were designing one of his other books, he gave me a few copies of My Rules and made me promise to keep them safe. They’re under lock and key and that’s where they’ll stay.

Thurston and Byron have always been models of “doing it right”. Take this zine. They wrote this ridiculous, yet visionary, thing–a David Bowie discography in the form of a set of 27 tankas. The guys cranked out 100 of ‘em on a home office printer, stapled them, numbered them, boxed them up and took them down to Galapagos (when it was still down on N.6 St in Williamsburg) from Massachusetts on a particularly snowy night in 2002 for a reading. As far as I remember, they sold them cheap–for gas money, I reckon. They wrote a fucking book expressly for a single poetry reading–and you know what? It wasn’t the first time and it wasn’t the last.

Why? Why the hell would someone do such a thing? Because those motherfuckers write tankas and like glam. Why the fuck not?

When people have not just multiple passions, but also unique personalities–they have a responsibility to concoct mediums thru which to share their knowledge and perspective with others in interesting ways. That’s what creativity is. It’s what art is–making impractical things that have no business existing and no viable market, then loading your bladder with them and pissing wildly from the tallest barn, bridge, rock or tree into a gale wind and seeing what happens. People tend not to know how much they enjoy an accidental golden shower until they catch a couple of drops on their tongues. Next thing you know, 100 people are flipping Webster’s open to T to figure out what exactly a tanka is and then browsing thru the Bowie discography to see just how much sense this truly makes:

HUNKY DORY
(RCA 1972)

limp wrist hoot rock gas
naive enough to make lou
spit out a mouthful
on john giorno’s old black pants
very same place andy did

Here’s an 8-minute long reduction of the hour long process required to make each copy of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK. I wish I had documented the illustration, stencil making and stamp making processes. Too late now. I’m not going back and faking it for the sake of documentation.

I’ll do one of these for FORE in the next few weeks.

I submitted a bunch of artwork for DQM’s Fall/Winter 08 line. Most was so outlandish that I couldn’t quite imagine it being printed on anything–Nazis, foot fetish imagery, crack addicted bald eagles… They went with the eagle. For the shirts, I had to tone his addiction down to nicotine from crack. I still think the crack pipe would have made for perfect irony on the chests of the drug addled children of Republican donors in Greenwich and Chappaqua, but crack–it’s the real thing.

Here’s my original pencil drawing along with the final vector artwork that I submitted to DQM.
I reckon they’ll update their website with the new stuff in a few days. They’ve got some gorgeous new vans and some beautiful waxed cotton jackets in for the season as well. There are some special Nikes too, but fuck Nike. I bought a pair of Colette’s weird-ass French dictionary Adidas while I was there today.

I was just going to post the blocks I etched for the packaging and titling, but since last weekend, the project’s evolved quickly. BUT THEY DON’T BLINK is a story about walls–hand-stenciled onto wallpaper. The story is a social snapshot reduced to a set of three five-line stanzas and spread out over fifteen 18″x24″ pages. Like FORE, it’s a poem and a children’s book. I’m considering delivering the story serially as a set of three five-page books–more or less making the volumes available as I finish illustrating each stanza and doing my best to make the overall project affordable to collect.

I’ve been disappointed lately in the cost of things like t-shirts and art prints. I always thought that the point of a print was to give people something exclusive at an accessible price. I’m not sure how deeply illustrators and designers are shoving their wrists up their asses to produce their prices, but arbitrary pricing, hyphy meatheads, corrupt gallerists, ebay and agenda-driven journalists have all had a hand in contaminating access via unrealistic artificial inflation. There’s no excuse for a hand-printed poster to cost more than 25 dollars. Frankly… traditional ink screened/stenciled/stamped posters on paper shouldn’t crest 10 dollars.

So, here’s the skinny. I have enough material to make 400 15-print books and 300 un-stenciled five-sheet poster sets. This isn’t set in stone yet, but I think I can split the book edition up into 200 fifteen-print books at $120 a pop and 200 three-volume print zines at $50 per volume. The 300 poster sets would be $25 per set. Books and zines–signed and numbered. Posters–numbered. I’ve never understood how people feel justified signing things they haven’t printed themselves.

If you want to reserve a copy of anything, email me: protest {at} visitordesign {dot} com
No commitment. I’ll just let you know as soon as whatever you’re interested in is ready.

page1&2:

page3&4:

page5:

BUT THEY DON’T BLINK VOL.1 OF 3
pinkslip in her purse, pink panties on feet, mom sells her ass to buy babies meat
when belts tighten up and it’s hard to pay bills we sell off our children to farms in the hills
to keep ethics low and prices less high, x mart takes cashiers to the dumpsters to die
gas guzzles dollars and trucks guzzle gas, so the makers of trucks are all out on their ass
they’re drinking away the economy spook as they pass out in puddles of piss and of puke

illustrations, text and wallpaper ©2008 chris habib / visitor

Nate traded me this lathe a few years ago for some Wolf Eyes footage I shot for them. Whenever they tour, it’s guaranteed that Wolf Eyes is hawking epic, editioned, handmade tour merch. They do it so frequently, that they lose track of the editions as they become superseded by newer output. I brought up the Mangled Mess lathe this weekend before the band played the final McCarren Park Pool show. Nate instantly recalled the edition from a description of the artwork, but was foggy on some specifics. He had cut each record into cardboard-backed and decoupaged plastic ice-cream lids on his Presto lathe. The cardboard jackets were open on two sides–the result, apparently of just having cut up and spraypainted over old 12″ jackets. Each record was enclosed in a different hand-collaged cover and etched onto an ice-cream lid with a uniquely collaged back. Mine has some pencil-written text–spraypainted over and then topped with fishnetted and booted legs.

I always loved Cynthia Connolly’s photos. Her icebox portraits were stunning–this collection of these forgotten artifacts of design, convenience and refrigeration–collected and documented with the same respect anthropologists would pay to a tribe of Algonquins in traditional regalia on a reservation somewhere. A few weeks ago, I saw one of her photos of Alleged Gallery’s last NYC group show in a Times article about Beautiful Losers. Monika asked if I was the sole person in the photo–crouched on the floor, working on a video installation. I was.

I dug up this invite that Cynthia had made for a show in SF back in 2001. I hung onto it as it was the first concrete reinforcement that came across my mailbox as to how accessible letterpress could still be in such a digital age. I remember emailing Cynthia after receiving the invite and asking her about the press and the type. She said she’d been rather ravenously collecting type sets and had a monstrously heavy press. I had always loved old dadaist and futurist letterpress work. I knew that the center for book arts here in NY had a press. I had always wanted to play around, but never mustered up the chutzpah to just do it. So, I filed this away and promised myself that one day I’d find a project that would force me to somehow experiment with letterpress.

Last week, I started pulling together all of the production components for a new book edition I’m about to release. The edition, like FORE, has two incarnations–a numbered collection of 5 offset posters bundled together and editioned at 300 pieces and a signed and numbered edition of 400 18″x24″ 15 page books–where each book has a different hand-stenciled painting atop each of the poster prints. As the posters are all riffs on a wallpaper line I’m working on, the paintings are each of something different that happens against, on or near a wall when society’s collective back is against a wall. In keeping with this theme, the project is titled, “BUT THEY DON’T BLINK.” It, like FORE, is another wayward children’s book.

Anyway, letterpress–I needed a set of bold typography to be applied to the packaging I designed for the project. Once I had decided that I would hand-stencil 6000 paintings, I figured, “what the fuck! I’ll leterpress the 400 packages too!” I couldn’t though, so I’m faking it with block printing. I laser etched a set of rubber blocks with my typograghy, mounted them on foam and then to acrylic blocks. It’s not exactly letterpress yet, but I’m getting there. I just wanted to take this post to give Cynthia props for inspiring that.

Here’s Cynthia’s invite. I’ll post my stamps and posters as shelflife 13A later this weekend–along with a great Wolf Eyes lathe that Nate traded me sometime back as 13B.

I’ve mentioned before that I was asked to create and gather work from material in my archive for the upcoming Sensational Fix touring Sonic Youth exhibition. Something I’d been meaning to make for a long time, but never got around to–until last week–was an impressionistic audio/video collage about the making of Harmony Korine’s Sunday.

I shot 3 hours of material the day Harmony made the video. That was over 11 years ago, and re-visiting such old footage is difficult. Different equipment, shooting styles, subject-focus… I get this one thing I want to make–it’s done in my head–been done for years–ready to encode, burn and rip–but I jog thru the footage and the fragments I’ve edited in my memory don’t exist on the tapes. I experienced them, but never recorded them. Maybe I misremembered them over time.

So, a simple 8-minute edit becomes this painful exercise in compromising memory while trying to convey some sense of the experience to a viewer. All the while, I don’t really want to convey the experience–at all. I never really do. I just want to frustrate people, so I’m not so isolated in my perplexed recollection. This is why I’ll never be a real filmmaker.

I’ve got no stories to tell. I’ve just got this compulsion to document things and these thoughts I reflect on while I re-examine footage. I lack a fundamental interest in structure and basically want a viewer to vicariously experience my high blood pressure, confusion and angina more than anything else. Always Seems To Move So Slow is representative of that process–but somehow, the jarring sound edit, lack of anchors and surreal, sensual and sensational subject matter make a looming aneurysm slightly endearing.

Maybe I’ll stream it after the opening on June 17th. For now, I leave you with stills.

These are stills from a video I shot for Rita during an Ecstatic Peace showcase one balmy evening at the Learning Alliance. Rita wrote the story and designed the puppets/sets. Susan Cianciolo designed the puppet clothing. Kim narrated. I’ll write more about this later. I’m a little hurried to finish up some other work.

Just after America decided that war was the answer to terrorism, Thurston sent me a tiny little jpeg–a thick black outline on aged, cream-colored newsprint surrounding a single word set in Gil Sans–”PROTEST.” He wanted to start a record label that sold nothing and acted solely as a curated platform to support dissent in the form of song. He put the word out that we were looking for tracks with which to build our downloadable mixes. The call exploded with molotov urgency in the pre-blogosphere web.

We bought the domain for protest-records.com. I drew a bunch of stencils that we would link to and I built up a quick and simple site. Thurston sifted through the submissions and together we made playlists. The site was a hit. People were writing protest music, listening to protest music, playing previously unknown artists’ work on the radio–it was nuts. All of the voices were congregating in these playlists and speaking to individual concerns with unique, personal vernaculars. For at least the total duration of the tracks available on the site, it felt like you could suspend your disbelief just long enough to garner a glimpse of hope just off of the crest of the shitstorm that would come breaking down upon us, in seemingly endless slow-motion, to this very second.

The problem with reviving dormant phenomena is that you soon come to realize why so many forms of expression are cyclical. Someone sent me a pretty simple email with a few questions about protest-records and dissent the other day. I wrote an honest, meandering reply.

Basically, this country deserves neither democracy nor freedom, cos we’re all just a bunch of agenda-driven whiners with no interest in bridging divides or sacrificing for the greater good. We’re hardly even interested in examining what exactly “the greater good” means. My reply to the email is below. I guess I put it out there as a sort of challenge. Who’s got what it takes to really bring America together to collectively tell our government what they’d damn-well better give us? Who’s got that Fred Hampton desire to walk on up to the front door of the Whitehouse and announce herself with, “This is a stick-up, motherfucker! We come fo’ what’s ours.” My guess is… nobody.

______________________________________________

It’s hard to say. It’s obvious that people are angry–I’m just not sure they really know why anymore. As attention spans wane and the number of potential social, political and economic irritants multiply, it’s difficult to say–with any degree of confidence–that people aren’t just jumping on the first annoyance they educate themselves about. 

I stopped updating the site a while ago because of that. It just felt like people were boarding another genre bandwagon–the lyrics were all getting samey. The music was multigenerationally xeroxed and beginning to lose the definition that artists like the fugs, Pete Seger, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, crass, the Dead Kennedys, Bodycount, Rage Against the Machine, fugazi, Bikini Kill, Kimya Dawson and so many others had brought to the table.   

I have a hard drive full of submissions. It’s just difficult for me to decide how to shape any sort of context from them. I need to make some playlists to share with Thurston and instigate some sort of dialogue about it. I’ve been meaning to for a while.

Though hardly a musician, my fundamental gripe is that what this country is selling as democracy–is not democracy. The system needs to be scrapped and re-built as it was envisioned during the American Revolution. We need a new revolutionary democracy. It’s easy to say that, but damn near impossible to do anything about it. The systems that exist to counter any sort of revolution have metastasized, mutated and bulked up to the degree where overthrowing them is more or less a pipe dream without the most remote of opportunities for success. The leadership, organization, focus and determination simply do not exist to do much of any consequence beyond the partisan, trite, laughable, polarizing and stereotypical “dissent” that United for Peace and Justice, ANSWER, moveon.org and worldcantwait have taken to endorsing.

Change is, and has always been, only possible through unity.

I’m not really getting any songs about that. Obama, Hillary, McCain–none of them will notably change a thing, yet I’m mailed advertune after advertune praising the empty rhetoric of someone or another. Politicians don’t want to end plutocracy and empower Americans with direct democracy–it’s simply not in their interests. War? OK. Go for it. Write another anti-war song. Maybe you’ll explore a concept that’s not yet been euthanized on that beltway track. Hegemony? Sing that tune. Maybe you’ll find an as of yet unplucked key. These songs have all been sung before. Dissent is healthy, but there’s a point at which the choir tires of the reverberation and wants to see a fucking miracle or burn the damn church down.

Or, as is the case in contemporary America, they just angrily acquiesce and watch as the preachers stand there, conducting in some imaginary and illegitimate semaphore–status quo in hand–dragging, shoving and shuffling the lot around but keeping it always on a tight leash, never out of reach. That pseudo-active state of stagnation has been the bureaucratic disaster that America buys and sells as democracy for as long as Americans have provided a market for it.

I really don’t remember much about my time at college. I was at Boulder for Environmental Design. I swung by Cooper Union for Civil Engineering–walked out one day and decided to get a diploma from Parsons for design. At Parsons, I spent a lot of time absent from my classes. William Bevington was an incredible department Chair and gave me a lot of leeway to travel with clients, friends and collaborators while generating credits thru independent studies of my own design. I’m grateful for the freedom I had in school. I remember it fondly. One of the only other things I remember from my time at Parsons was the day Cecilia Dean came to hang out with one of my classes.

Zipped, pinned and coiffed to an immaculate T… this woman had class. She dropped by with a slideshow about VISIONAIRE. At some point in her discussion, she brought up heroin chic (it was 1995 or 6, after all). I told her she should do an issue of VISIONAIRE etched on the skin of a heroin sheep. She was not amused.

A few years later, I get this cryptic letter in a crimson envelope from VISIONAIRE. It references some work I’d done with Sonic Youth, includes a concept briefing about a Parisian future punctuated only by a finite palette of Pantone greys and includes an invitation to submit a project for inclusion in the Hedi Slimane edited VISIONAIRE 34. “Damn.” I thought aloud. “I guess she forgot about the sheep.”

I considered Paris. I imagined the future. I recollected the past. I spun my wheels on the palette of greys. I wrote an elegy for a grey Paris. It mourned the misinterpretation of the DNA of Jean Prouvé and pondered how digital chromosomes would look on a tactile, luminescence-free computer monitor as they scrolled on by–anonymously–lacking the context of a life’s work of sublime brilliance.

So, that’s what I drew–a single moment of scrolling, digital chromosomes. The thing was… the tactile display–that was important to me–as was this sound I created that went with the illustration. I tried to convince VISIONAIRE to let me use IC-chipcorders embeded in the spine of the edition to generate the sound I associated with my piece. They’d trigger as my spread was opened. Cecilia and Stephen seriously considered it. They even actually fought for it. Just in showing that sort of interest in preserving the context of concepts, they gained my undying respect. Ultimately, though–sound was not to be in Paris’ stark, grey future–so sad… No color. No sound. Pauvre Paris.

Anyway, VISIONAIRE *did* give me a 2-page, glossy, blind-embossed spread. I got my tactile terminal screen. It’s really hard to photograph the spread. It’s super-subtle, but the curves and angles are actually hyper-intricate. Below are a photo and an illustration of the same piece.

The coolest thing about the issue was that Hedi’s case for it mirrored my spread in a lot of ways. It was an awesome, injection-moulded contour map of vertebrae type of a thing set inside of powdercoated steel. I love that issue.