Bananas, Rice, Apple Sauce, Toast!

Finally took a gander at Of Montreal's appearance on Yo Gabba Gabba. Fun stuff!

NSS newbie here... Do you have any advice that you would like to share? (small company, new to wholesale)

I think the biggest mistakes made by newbies at NSS is to not have enough product to look at, and to have a booth that doesn't look like much effort or creativity was put into it. It is a sad thing indeed to see someone with their 10 cards and a folding table with a computer printed banner-- nobody is going to visit that booth. You want enough stuff that will keep an interested customer in there for more than five minutes.

Here are a couple of other things I've learned myself:

1) Have several sample decks on hand so that more than one person can look through your stuff at a time (we have 3 decks plus wall samples)

2) Ask for a business card from anyone who shows interest, write on the back of the card any extra details you want to remember and follow up with them at a show.

3) have a give-away of some kind so that they will remember you better. having your booth number with your information may mean a return visit.

4) Do not get disheartened if you don't break even your first time at a show, it will be a bit depressing, but you should take into account that this is a long term investment, it is about maintaining visibility and eventually the money will be there. Some things to take into account:

a) Some people wait to order after the show, sometimes waiting as long as 6 months to a year.

b) if you pick up sales reps, if you are interviewed by the media, then that means dollars down the road.

c) orders you fill are just first time orders and are likely to repeat from the same customers several times a year.

If you have the opportunity to go to these shows as a visitor first I highly recommend it, it is a huge investment and researching your gameplan as much as possible beforehand is going to help make your first show run smoothly.

Ask me anything about letterpress, wholesale manufacturing, trade shows, Blue Barnhouse, and/or our fucked-up greetings.

OK! Wholesale manufacturing - when did you start doing it, what sort of scale are you cranking out these days, and do you only handle your own work, or others', too? And, yes, sorry...I know that was 3 questions and not one!

1) We started wholesale manufacturing in the summer of 2005, we needed products to sell for a street fair -- they did so well we decided to send samples to stores all over the U.S. and immediately picked up a rep group in Southern California, which created a snowball effect. The rest is history.

2)Most styles start out with a run between 300-800 on its first try-- 300 is a safe number for designs that we're not 100% sure will sell well (i.e. we find them amusing but we're not sure if they'd sell as a greeting card.) It allows us enough for samples for our reps and show plus at least a few months supply for orders if the card should do well. If I am certain a card will sell well we go ahead and bump that number between the 500-800 range. If the card is a 2 or 3 color card I try and keep the runs in the higher range as well- they require more intensive setup and I want to make sure that my labor costs are well spent.

As for reprints, we do much larger runs. If a card sells out within a few months we'll bump the reprints up between 800-1200 cards. If it doesn't sell out within a year then we usually discontinue it. We're trying a new formula for reprint runs for our older cards-- I look at Quickbooks to see how many cards were sold in the last 2 years, and then bump up that number by about 25%-- two years worth of stock is right where I like it-- we have so many styles that I'm trying to avoid getting crippled by reprints when a big show goes down- after our first gift show we were in reprint mode for nearly 3 months as style after style ran out--you'd think we'd be excited about that but it got old and expensive rather quickly.

Our largest client, Paper Source, skews the numbers quite a bit-- stuff we do for them we reprint between 2000 and 3000 per style.

3. We haven't printed other people's cards lines but that's only because we haven't been asked to.

Ask me anything about letterpress, wholesale manufacturing, trade shows, Blue Barnhouse, and/or our fucked-up greetings.

Get smart-ass answers for your dumb-ass questions.

Recently I've learned about a fairly new question and answer media called formspring, media which Delphine and Boxcar Press have started using to answer all sorts of queries regarding the business of design, wholesale, and letterpress. I'm always looking for new ways to interact with people who are interested in the work we do, and nothing makes experience richer than clearing up the fog for somebody else, but I'm also open to using formspring as a springboard for complete nonsense. And so I introduce to you: BBH on Formspring. Have at it.

So good you'll shoot the cook.

I've been wanting to make Puerco Pibil for a few months now. It was the mexican dish that Johnny Depp obsessed over in the film Once Upon a Time in Mexico-- at one point in the film, the Puerco Pibil is so perfect that after Depp finishes his plate he walks into the restaurant's kitchen and executes the chef. The recipe is made available on the DVD in Robert Rodriguez's Ten Minute Cooking School, I bought ingredients from 5 different markets: asian, organic, mexican, a specialty spice store, and the liquor store.


I purchased this banana leaf at the Asian Market. When I unrolled the leaves they were more than seven feet long!

Last night I made the Achiote Paste and used it to marinate 5lbs of organic Boston Butt overnight but ended up eating 1lb of it fried straight in the pan pretty much immediately.

I've transcribed the recipe though, so you don't have to try and keep up with the guy.

Grind these ingredients to a fine powder:
5 Tbl Whole Annato Seeds
2 tsp Cumin Seeds
1 Tbl Peppercorns
8 allspice balls
1/2 tsp cloves

Put ground up spices in blender with:
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 cup white vinegar
8 cloves garlic (chopped)
2 Habanero Peppers (chopped and deveined/deseeded)
2 tbl salt
5 squeezed lemons
splash of nice tequila

Liquify, pour in ziploc bag with 5 lbs pork butt (chopped into 2" squares.) Marinate overnight.

Oven at 325 degrees, cook pork wrapped in banana leaves and covered in foil for 4 hours. (It actually was ready in 3 hrs so I pulled it early. Pork will be ready when the meat is roughly 180 degrees.)

Serve over rice, etc (I sauteed pineapples and served with avacados as well.) Use left over Tequila for Margaritas!

We're so sorry, Uncle Albrecht

This one didn't take much thought but we'll have some way more intelligent and disrespectful shit we did with Albrecht Dürer etchings momentarily.

Usually we wait until a month before a show before we start gearing up with new products, but its pouring out right now and we've got spare time to attack. NSS is not until mid May, and we're freshly recovered from the winter NYIGF. I think probably what set this off was a really inspiring talk with Delphine about how to make more money. We're about to be making a whole array of new products that we haven't offered before, but I won't reveal what kind of products those are just yet.


The irony of my mad-two-week-long-brainstorm-session-for-new-products-besides-greeting-cards-to-make-more-money-binge is that the 20 some cards we're about to print for the next 2 or 3 weeks are just our regular fare of greeting cards, though I have been focusing a bit more on Birthdays, Love, and Special Occasions.

Lots of 3 color cards coming up, which is something we've steered away since we started, but personally I'm getting bored with being locked into 1 and the occassional 2 color work. Maybe its because we got the V50, whose restoration has been put on hold since before winter NYIGF. When she's operational we can probably suffer a large 3 color reprint run, though some of these cards I'm only doing for fun and probably won't see reprint status.


My friend Erik said this to me at a party. He was pretty lit up.

I posted almost all of the designs here, though several of those images are early drafts. Dropping a load on paper, we have alot of work ahead of us. And then yesterday the complete etchings and engravings of Albrecht Dürer arrived, I got it off Amazon for $5. Also a book of engravings by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, which feature gorgeous depictions of every significant event in the Old and New Testament, $3. Both of which I will send directly to Tyler Dockery for captioning. We're about to unload some unholy shit.


I've been wanting to do this card for years, but this image is perfect, and I'm glad I waited. I love the Jesus's scowling face. Lots of gems like this from von Carolsfeld.

General Announcement regarding the book Adventures in Letterpress

Inquiries from participants regarding the status of my forthcoming book Adventures in Letterpress are starting to trickle in, so here's the skinny on something I don't really know that much about.

It's been 4 months since I've turned in or even looked at material for the book, original publish date was slated for March, but since I've signed on, Mark Batty Publisher has taken on Random House as its distributor, which has drastically changed their workload (and significally upped their press runs.) This is great news for the book as it will have much more exposure than was previously possible, but this change has pushed the book's release to late spring/early summer.

No firm dates have been divulged-- they haven't worked with any of the material I've turned in yet but as I understand it they will begin working on the book by mid-March. Farrell, who moonlights at Barnes & Nobles, saw the title listed for release in June, which is the most concrete piece of info I have so far, but is not to be relied on.

I'll post more news as things develop.

B.

Another bullshit holiday Hallmark made up so that Blue Barnhouse could make money.

How we got the nooky in the one-eight-double-zeros.

Today is that day that some of us celebrate the day that the Patron Saint of Lovers was martyred for our dirty little sins. And that Saint's Day was fabricated by Roman Catholics to replace another day which fertile pagans decided was a great day to jizz all over everything that moved. And today some of us fertile pagans are gonna raid their cash register of Valentine sales and blow their money on food, alcohol, and bowling, because they are in the business of making money off of love.

That's right all you love-starved fools, it's because of jerks like you that the greeting card became a cashcow for jerks like me. It all started in 1847, when Esther Howland of Massachussets took the popular British tradition of sending a handmade note to your loved one and made a successful business of it, i.e. selling handmade Valentines. Her wild success at the venture was the "harbinger of the future commercialization of the holidays in the United States." Today more than a billion Valentines are sent worldwide every year, though probably about 10 of them are handmade.


I'm just kidding. I know lots of folks who make a decent living off of handmade Valentines, and the one's I love most have Valentine attitude. This one is from BBH alumnus Kyle Durrie of Power and Light.


And this one comes from BBH employee Emily Wismer's own press, Lady Pilot Letterpress.

What does this all mean to me? Well... truthfully, I am sucker for Valentines day, and have been making handmade greetings for Valentine's Day LONG before I got anywhere near being in the business of letterpress and greeting cards. I don't think its a bullshit holiday, though it is a great day to hate on if you are angry at "the man," or have been burned too many times, or if you are love-sick and alone. It's also a day for someone to get brave and put themselves out there into romantic possibilities with a card, it's a day to let someone know how hot they are, or how they give you a boner, or make you wet, or smile, or shit your pants, or whatever. It is a day that you can put a little extra romance into what is hopefully already a romantic relationship, and a day for lazy men who don't know romance if it bent them over in the showers to say hey yeah I can do that once a year. Wait, today's Sunday? Sports are on TV, and my ass is permanently stuck in an easy chair. Nevermind.

It's a day that has changed meaning in so many ways over the centuries that it can be just about anything we want it to be, so I say we give this day back to the fertile pagans who started it and cover everything in something white besides snow.

Everything the internet taught me about Omer Fast was simply not enough.

Stills from Bill Viola's video installation, THE CROSSING. In this piece, the viewer walks into a pitch-black high ceiling room with a towering screen hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. The viewer can walk around the screen to view either side, to see either the figure under a trickle of falling water that grows into a deluge, or the same figure as a flame grows into an inferno that engulfs him. By the end, both figures are entirely consumed, and the water and fire die down, leaving nothing.

For a while there I lived in San Francisco, getting my M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Whenever my brain got stuck or stumbling over useful writing material, I ventured out to a museum to absorb, inhabit, and react to various mediums of artwork. For the most part I divided my time between the SFMOMA and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, armed with a pocket moleskine and a pen, and during one of those forays I was sucker punched by more than 16 installations from video artist Bill Viola on display at the SFMOMA. I frequented the exhibit for several months and immersed myself in Viola's work for hours at a time.


SLOWLY TURNING NARRATIVE. A screen mounted on a floor-to-ceiling shaft rotates at the center of the room, as accompanied by a voice recites a long list of states of being and actions in a repetitive, rhythmic chant.


These barrels of water in THE SLEEPERS each have a black and white monitor floating a few inches below the surface, portraying faces of various sleeping individuals.

I am realizing that having easy access art museums was something I'd taken for granted. A single visit would keep me jazzed about writing and creating for weeks on end. But then I moved to a tiny mountain town, and the business of letterpress slowly ate away at my creative hours, and over time I sort of let that side of me go to waste. I would say its been at least five years since I've set foot in a museum that was worth a spit.


Pictured: (INDEX) FINGER 1997 by Tim Hawkinson. Though I am the poster child for gore-a-phobia, I sometimes torture myself by confronting that which makes me involuntarily coil in terror. Ten years ago, when I paid my first visit to the Whitney Museum in NYC, I latched on to this "sculpture" immediately because a) it filled me with horror, and b) I had already been traumatized by a photo of the same severed thumb in the CD Booklet from the Beck album, MUTATIONS. (Images of several sculptural works by Hawkinson filled the pages of the foldout booklet from MUTATIONS, all of which were in the Whitney collection.) The actual size of the severed fingertip can be imagined once you recognize the assortment of red pens and pencils meant to resemble "finger guts."

New York City has been a three times a year destination for the trade shows for a while now, but my trips have always been a rat race centered around the shows, leaving me little time to explore more than the nightlife. The last few times I've been to the city I've had an itch to revisit the Whitney, and this time around a small window of time opened up for me to pay a visit.

Enter Omer Fast



CNN Concentrated (2002) by Omer Fast. Aside from a discussion & some excerpts from what looks to be a very piece of fascinating work called "The Casting," there is virtually nothing else you will find video-wise from Omer Fast online or even on DVD.

Currently the Whitney is exhibiting Omer Fast's latest work, "Nostalgia," which is a seemingly harmless piece when you first approach it, the first screen you see is nothing more than a British gentleman in the woods, building a snare trap from two branches and some twine, voiced over by an African refugee interviewed by Fast, who describes how the trap is made.


A simple hunting trap made of two branches and some twine is a recurring them throughout "Nostalgia." This interviewed African refugee, who is seeking asylum in Britain, uses his fingers to demonstrate how the two bent twigs of the trap interlock as he describes how the trap is constructed.

You move into a dark room in which two screens play simultaneously, where two actors, each occupying a screen, recreate the interview between the refugee and Omer Fast. We learn that Fast is interviewing various African refugees about their experiences in order to make a film. The scripted interview takes some unexpected and uncomfortable turns, in which it is clear that the refugee may not be exactly who he says he is, and says some things that makes the portrayed Omer Fast both impatient and uncomfortable. Likewise the actor playing Fast is made to admit things that makes him squirm in his own seat, when the refugee starts interviewing him.


A production still from "Nostalgia." Imagine the image as I saw it: Fast moves the camera in tight focus from the top of this image down, slowly panning downward from the senselessly clubbed refugee to her vomit in the dirt, which continues to spill out towards us until the screen is filled by a bouquet of grapes and tropical flowers.

To be truthful, the first two segments I've described did not hold my complete attention, until I understood their purpose and their relation to the whole. However, the third segment of this installation, a large screen in a dark room, had me bolted to the floor. Fast takes the essence of the first two segments and flips it on his head with a 30 minute 70's sci-fi flick in which refugees flee a dystopian Europe, seeking asylum in a rich African nation with closed borders. The film is gripping, unraveling harsh realities in a new and weird light, with surreal and mind bending twists and movements that only a video artist has license to pull off.

A week has passed since I've seen "Nostalgia," and it is still flapping around in my head like a trapped bird. I've poured over the internet, wanting to find more from Omer Fast, but despite a decade of film making and international attention in the art world there is surprisingly little on the guy. This is coming at a time when I have been thinking about how valuable and powerful the internet can be as a marketing tool for anyone who is trying to push their work into the limelight. So here I shall put up about Omer Fast as I have been able to find.

Omer Fast, born in 1972, is an Israeli filmmaker who currently resides in Berlin. Much of his work focuses on resplicing and reordering stories and histories in order to create dissonant and altered realities, often using multiple screens in order to create both discord and harmony between images and sound.

Filmography

Breaking in a New Partner 2000. In this comic piece that served as Fast's Graduate Project, two screens play simultaneously, one is a series of scenes from the movie Lethal Weapon that play silently, the other screen shows Fast himself, perfectly mimicking the scenes as both Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, complete with sound effects of fist fights, police sirens, etc that he creates while being filmed.

Glendive Foley 2000. In this installation two televisions face each other, on one screen are images of Suburbia from Glendive, Montana, on the other screen Omar Fast is in recording studio voicing sound effects that go with the images of suburbia (wind, birds, lawnmower; he cracks a watermelon to make the sound effects of a fist fight. etc.)

CNN Concentrated 2002. (Featured above.)

Spielberg's List 2003. Fast interviews citizens of Cracow, Poland, who played as extras in Schindler's List about the holocaust as it was played out in Speilberg's film. Fast recuts the dialogue in order to blur lines between historical facts and their portrayal on the screen in Hollywood.

Godless 2005. Portrayed on two screens, Fast interchange the lives historical reenactors must portray in Colonial Williamsburg with their personal lives outside their jobs in such a way that the characters become detached from both the past and present.

The Casting 2007. American Soldier who fought in Iraq recounts in an interview two differents stories, one of a date he had with a woman in Germany, the other of an fatal roadside shooting in Iraq. Fast splices bits of both stories into one single story. Two screens show a re-enactment of the story, on the other sides of these screens you see the actual interview take place.

De Grote Boodschap 2007. Not 100% sure what this one is about other than: "the stories of paired Flemish characters who appear to be caught in a time-warp"

Take a Deep Breath 2008. About a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in which a medic tries to resuscitate a young man who has lost his limbs, after the young man dies, it is revealed that he is the bomber. However mid-resuscitation we see the film makers start yelling at the actor playing the bomber because he is not convincing enough. An extra from the film is made to take the actor's place, as more complications arise that keep the film from being made, before the final dramatic scene of the bomber's death is finally allowed to unfold.

Nostalgia 2009. As described above.

For me video installation art really sets my mind on fire when it's done correctly, but what's so frustrating about it is rarely can the viewer get to take it into the privacy of their own home, and the video's life in the museum (which I now rarely have access to) is often short lived. Omar Fast's Nostalgia is at the Whitney until Feb 14th, De Grote Boodschap and Take a Deep Breath are at Postmasters (Chelsea) until Feb 13th.

Hello 2010

I think I've been doing this blog for more than a year now, and so far I've averaged about 6 posts a month, and believe me, that's not bad for somebody who has a hard time committing to anything for more than five minutes. However, it's been more than a month since I've written anything here, December and alot of January has been rife with significant but unbloggable events, on both the good and bad extremes, and that's about all I've had time to ponder. Two days ago I did a few grand worth of damage with my truck, which is pretty on par for the course I've been playing into the New Year. 2010 for yours truly seems to be on the explosive track.

Here's some good stuff that's been happening:


Harold Kyle of Boxcar Press does practically all the work readying a Miehle Vertical V50 for transport from Syracuse to Asheville, including a gracious loan of a complete trailer setup, simply because I really don't know what the hell I'm doing and I don't have any money to do it anyway.

1) I was given a free Miehle Vertical V50 which I have been obsessively restoring for weeks now (along with the sometimes reluctant, but mostly diligent help of the BBH crew) using all kinds of elbow grease, scrubbing tools, and harsh chemicals, the NARSTIEST of them being carburetor cleaner, which I can only use when everyone has left for the day. On some days, despite protective gloves and a respirator, five or six cans of spraying the stuff has me coming home with my body totally juiced with what feels like an early onset of Alzhiemer's. And by free press I mean I think I spent two grand so far on moving, rigging, and restoration, despite its total zero dollar price tag.


I had started in on the center metal roller before thinking about before & after pics. Shortly after that with about an hour of scrubbing and carburetor cleaner, I got the results below.



But my god the results from a caustic cloud of carburetor cleaner are astounding. As my friend Casey, who commandeered the six hour press move into the shop said, "We only use 3% of our brains. Which leaves 97% to burn." What is 97% of one brain cell worth is what I want to know.


Casey Gullage attempts to lift the V50 with a forklift as Emily stands by, hoping she can somehow prevent four thousand pounds of disaster as I pull the trailer out from under the press.


I made sure absolutely everyone at BBH could effectively complain about the detail cleaning of the V50.


The once rusty beast now shines at night.

2) NYIGF Ahoy! As always we're gearing up last minute to churn out new designs and refurbish some old ones. Printing Xmas cards in January seems pretty odd but it's got to happen sometime. The New York Gift Show in January is our biggest show and generally what funds what is in store for the rest of the year, so of course we are all excited to get this over with and get paid!





3) I've had 2 years of experience in High School Theater. Four years ago I had 6 minutes of televised fame as a letterpress practitioner on HGTV's "That's Clever." But I have never officially acted in front of a camera for anything until last week when I was filmed as Thomas Paine rocking out with his cockring out as he prints Common Sense in a "Founding Father's" "Music Video Spoof" of a pop song who's title and artist I will refrain from mentioning just yet. It was for part a promotional video for Soomo Publishing, which specializes in online Poly-Sci educational supplements. It premiers on YouTube in February, it promises to be hilarious, and it captures your humble narrator in his dorkiest glory to date. The film shoot happened at Bookworks and was separate from most of the footage shot for the video.



Thomas Jefferson has a sunset violin solo.


TJ and the Founding Fathers unfurl their flag of Awesome.


This photo of my costume fitting at the Asheville Community Theater does not do what I had to do in front of the camera any kind of justice.

4) A Beautiful Snow Storm. West Asheville got 17" in 24 hours and all sorts of chaos ensued, both locals and travelers were stranded, as of day three 37,000 were still without power, rescue missions and snowball fights were as frequent as liquor drinks, but I gotta say, all of my experiences in Asheville when it's shut down by snow have been nothing but good times. The city of Asheville reportedly spent $500K on cleanup and emergency services over the course of the week.


A snow covered Haywood Road brings out the alcohol starved snow zombies.


A snowball fight between patrons of the Rocket Club and the Admiral raged for hours.


More than ample snowfall has more than ample possibilities.

5) Scoring Stalls Emptied. We keep all of our fresh prints waiting to be scored on display in wooden stalls in the front window of our studio, and often some piles have gotten up to 4 feet high, totaling up to 15,000+ prints in the window at any given time. Despite the dozens of interns who have hacked away at the ever growing "to-be-scored" piles, in three years since we've employed them they have never been completely depleted. No longer, thanks to the combined efforts of our new daily interns "Team Awesome," who decimated the scoring stalls in a mere 18 days.


It hasn't looked this way since they were first built in 2007.

4) I got a Pop-Eye shirt and a really cool wallet (not pictured) for Christmas.



Jesus, I guess that's not all the good stuff but that's all that you are going to get out of me. Up next, best 10 movies of the 00's.