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.

Drool...

9spotmonk is baiting me on twitter to scoop this totally unaffordable cylinder press on the way back from picking up a free Miehle Vertical V50 from Boxcar Press next week, who was supposed to give it away via this contest, which I entered, but claims I won it because of this and this. I think I won because my twats are awesome.


The Miehle V5o in action.

Text Message transcript betwixt the younger brother Mateo and myself.

ME: Have you seen Wes Anderson's latest? MATEO: The Mr. Fox One? No not yet is it good? ME: It's very good. As good as his others. You really should check it out. MATEO: Will do thanks.

O ye of the doomed relationship past or present...

Found this anonymous blog about a writer who is making motions towards a separation with his wife that may lead to a divorce-- the fact that its written so well and that it's documented in real time makes it very compelling. It's like reality TV that doesn't suck. Not only are you getting all the juicy developments, but you are actually made to thoughtfully reflect on the joys/sucks of romantic life. If you've ever been through anything remotely close to this experience, this blog is for you.

Excerpt:
I know that one of the reasons relationships fail is purely chemical. The routine of the everyday becomes boring and we go into dopamine withdrawal. We take each other for granted, we stop flirting, courting, trying new things together. The addict in our skull cries out for a hit and finds none forthcoming. We go into deep funks and start looking around for a cause. And what are we likely to see? The person we spend the most time with. Oh, must be their fault. Surely, it couldn’t be me. I hang out with other people and I feel great (i.e. I get plenty of dopamine.) Even the scientific method absolves me and convicts you.

The blog is called Chapter After.

James Clarke´s Gran is dead.

My friend from Northern Ireland reports the details of the funeral via email:

The Funeral & all that was a nightmare. The hearse crashed into the church, creating a fireball. Gran never wanted to be cremated, but sure, easy come, easy go. Then, the ashes & smoke were blown across the street, causing a 10 car pile up... lets just say there'll be a couple more funerals next week. I drank too much & ambushed the priest before the ceremony... tying him up & stealing his robes, I then took control of the funeral & recalled stories of how such a wicked woman my gran was, & how she used to beat me & lock me in a cage in the basement with nothing but a bucket of fish heads to eat. It didn't go down too well, as you can imagine. This was followed by my hijacking of the choir, & then forcing them to play as I sung a swing version of the Sex Pistols "God Save The Queen" & Nine Inch Nails "Closer"... the line: "I wanna fuck you like an animal" went down exceedingly well.

Oh ye who knows not what cans of worms ye've opened. Process: Going from hand drawn art to Negative + Color mockup

The original drawing was done on a piece of scrap paper. Krystan hadn't intended on letterpressing this when she started.

So I walked into the shop today and our apprentice Krystan was scanning an image she wanted to letterpress. I asked her a few questions to make sure she was doing it right, and chuckled internally what I learned what she wanted to do with it, because I didn't think she really knew how much work it would take to pull it off. Below are various stages of pulling off her vision. One, she wanted the line work on the feet to be white, two, she wanted to have a lighter white fill inside the line work on the feet. Here's how the process went.





This 3-color separation for the negative took a couple of hours and some technically creative techniques not worth going into. Krystan got a head full of Photoshop and Illustrator functions she will more than likely not remember next week.


This is a low res color mockup we made to be sure what the final product would look like. Pretty f'n sweet.

Krystan Bruce's work will be featured in my book Adventures in Letterpress, and is one of many writers that have been compelled to join the ranks of BBH. She has a blog called Company for Dinner.

Card I started printing at 4 am sometime last week.

I mean, c'mon already. Seriously. Buy it here.

Adventures in Letterpress: Prelim sketch for Commemorative Poster

Preliminary poster sketch by Asheville print maker Andy Farkas. The poster will be inset into Adventures in Letterpress and printed by Boxcar Press. There are many details of this concept we have yet to fill in, but I love the roller gauge staff and the turned over type the figures are standing on. This will eventually be carved into a wood block.