shelflife by visitor

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.

“FIRST ISH    MARCH 1995 / MARK GONZALES    HARMONY KORINE” The ADULTHOOD zine was another Aaron Rose agitation. So much of the literature that Aaron’s released on Alleged Press has left an apparent impression on what exactly pop-culture tastemakers have chosen to plagiarize since the 90’s. Like that moment of confused discomfort that sweeps in waves about one’s body following a notable crunching of the testicles, ADULTHOOD has left a persistent mark on those groins displaced by its steel-toed wit.

ADULTHOOD rolled two brilliantly damaged minds into a stromboli of crack-mania and mushroom-sautéed-observation–glopped together with the odd mozzarella of intermittent imagery–like Stephen Hawking displaying a record album edited to read, “tap dance music” with images of a swastika and a male portrait drawn atop the text. 

The zine was also ripe with sage wisdom–gems–”I DON’T KNOW WHAT KINDA RELACHIONSHIP YOU EXPECKTED YOUR GIRLFRIENDS ONLY TWELVE”.  Harmony typed up a list of 80 rumors. They forever changed my opinions of Tom Petty, Jessica Tandy, Nick Nolte, Corey Haim, Nestor Almendros and Kate Moss. Six toes? Elongated vagina? Tonsil wrasslin’ your dying sister? A dirty fish tank? Hector? Rehab-lockdown skin-flute to the tune of a photo of River Phoenix hanged?

People spend a lot of time fishing for genius in the deepest trenches of our intellectual oceans. Mark and Harm have made it their life’s work to remind us that it’s easier to just splash around with it in the kiddie-pool.

Rita does lots of the right sort of wrong. Everything she does is haunted. She and Dave gave me this 12″ years ago at a performance she did at Roulette–her shadow-puppet show.

I’ve looked around for info on this, but it’s pretty scarce. Part of the purpose of this blog is to make sure that things that’ve made their way into my hands and inspired me in one way or another find a way of persisting. So many people I know have made so many beautiful things–things that I always fear will just be forgotten–the problem being, not that people don’t care or don’t pay attention, but that there are some people who just produce so much in so many mediums–that no one can really keep tabs on all of it. It’s not really a problem at all, per se. I guess it’s just more of an archivist’s nightmare.

Rita’s a great example of that. Somewhere I have a trading card she gave me for this band, Fuzzy Peach, that she, Dave and Chloë had going for a minute–literally, a minute–almost. That’s how a lot of people around here work. Do something. Strengthen it. Make it cohesive. Give it a context. Let it end and make something new. Rita’s never let her work stagnate.

So, this 12″… The jacket is hand-built–two edges taped with strapping tape. The front and back covers are smeared with thick, crimson globs of fingerpainted acrylic–much like the accents in many of Rita’s iconic paintings of fast girls and Marlboro men. The gatefold is a xeroxed pop-up assemblage. The record is translucent red vinyl. It’s got tracks and a red label with Rita’s fingerprint pressed onto it on one side and an etching of a bird and a girl with “FOREVER” radiating out from her third-eye on the other. The catalog number is E#100/CARNAGE PRESS.

The tracks get back to that haunting thing. The source is just cassette recorded cut-up vocalizations–Hungarian wherever there are discernible words–lullaby-for-Rosemarie’s-Baby jams. There are intermittent flickers of organ slicing thru the whispers, but they’re generally snuffed out by abrupt cassette-clicks. It’s hands-down, one of my favorite objects. This record basically doesn’t exist. I think fewer than 100 were made.

I was doing a bunch of sound experiments for Mokinox. I’d slapped some analog synths together–some built from scratch, some cobbled together from boards. I wanted to purely process vocals. I hadn’t heard much that was pre-existing and anything like what I was envisioning, so I just built, screeched and recorded.

I made some cd-rs of the recordings for my friend, Jim. He in turn made me some cd-rs of Henri Chopin’s sound poetry. Chopin was incredible. I’d heard of sound poetry, but in a lot of ways, I’m pretty culturally retarded. I’d never actually listened to any of it apart from the stuff that Burroughs and Gysin had done. Anyway, Chopin had more or less done exactly what I was trying to do–and he’d done it better than I could ever hope to.

It was a teepee teahouse. We were washing dishes in the shower of a gallery that had, just a tenant earlier, been the last gay-sex-friendly free-weight body-building gym in the not-yet gentrified meat-packing district. I wore a block-printed pink apron and fry-cook cum elf hat. Slippers–I was also styled in slippers. Maybe they weren’t so much slippers as they were oversized wool moccasins. It’s possible that they were even worn atop a pair of New Balances laced in a pair of hot pink fatlaces that I picked up in Milan. The details are as fuzzy as my prep-cook, dishwasher, waiter and documentarian job description. Anyone who attended could tell you that the only event I could possibly be describing was Susan Cianciolo’s amorphic and ever-mutable Run Restaurant.

Susan’s runway shows are rarely ever seen on anything resembling a runway. She’s always generated events just a unicorn-short of fantasy to showcase the ever-widening quiver of products she’s endlessly stitched, printed, bottled and stuffed. Run Restaurant epitomized her approach. The creative possibilities afforded by an ephemeral restaurant were ideal for showcasing clothes and a home line.

Jason Scandinaro, Susan, Mark Borthwick, Libby McInnis, Simone and Amadeo Pace and Stefano Giovannini were a few of the chefs whose grub was dished out in the gallery. I need to go thru some of the footage I recorded during that show. Mark, his kids and I made a little film–traveling around to produce, meat and fish markets to buy groceries and then filming the prep/cooking at his and Maria’s old new place on the west side as well as the ensuing cooking and eating over at Alleged. Below is the invite that Susan and Alleged sent out to announce the show. I still have one of Libby’s petit fours archived in the freezer.