Happy Thanksgiving folks,
Start your day listening to this old Joe Frank favorite of mine, “The Pilgrim.” (<– click to download)
"The misery of elaborate Thanksgiving dinners; an examination of American Pilgrims. The idea of religious pilgrimage leads to a car trip across America."
Yesterday we were excited to open a new shipment and find Poemotion had arrived! This beautiful soft bound interactive book features a collection of graphic patterns, hand drawn by Japanese designer Takahiro Kurashima. These drawing are magical as they have the capacity to delight and bewildering viewers of all ages.
Following the theme of “School of Seeing”, a motif that resonates throughout Lars Müller publications, Takahiro’s book explores the ways in which optical overlays, patterns and shapes can create motion.
By sliding the screen included in the book across the pages the viewer activates a moiré effect, allowing for complex forms to develop by setting shapes in motion and graphical patterns to vibrate.
In the era of digitalization this book shows that interactivity is also possible in the format of an analogous, bound book.
Available in our analog bookstore or online here.
Here is a great video demonstration of Poemotion we found from PORT on Vimeo. Directed by Nick Thompson, edited by Neil Drummond and with music by John Barber
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/40808542]
For this week’s post of Tuesday Poetry we decided to highlight a zine tribute to the inspiring poet, Harold Norse.
Harold Norse was one of the last of the major Beat poets whose idiomatic works became landmarks of gay writing. As Michael Carlson described, Norse was “…beat before the Beats, hip before the hippies, and out of the closet long before gay liberation.”
Paul Bowles
Neeli Cherkovski
Mel Clay
Ira Cohen
Jack Hirschman
Gerard Nicosia
A.D. Winans
Eddie Woods
In F.A Nettelbeck’s poem “One More Vacancy At the Beat Hotel” he writes:
“the end
is the beginning”
was Harold
Norse’s
last words
before
dieing on a
Monday at 92
with his pages
pulled
up like a
blanket against
other voices down
the hall
The dedications of love and admiration are for any fan, or first time encounterer of Norse’s, amazing to experience. Many of the stories shared shed light on his electric personality and allow you to peer briefly into the scared world shared by beat poets. Their relationships served as inspiration for generations beyond their’s and you can feel the loss in the words written to or about Norse in these pages.
When you pick up a $4, black and white xeroxed zine and it makes you emotional, inspired and curious to learn more you know you have encountered something special. After reading through The End is the Beginning I delved into Norse’s memorial website which is filled with memories, photos, books and records. If you want to learn more about Norse I encourage you to visit: www.HaroldNorse.com
Elegy for the Carnivorous Saint available in the bookstore here.
Not included in the book, but something to share of Norse’s, is a poem from his time in Tangier recalling the visions and ecstasies shared with his young lover.
To Mohammed On Our Journeys
I was the tourist
el simpatico
and your brother offered you
and also himself
I forgot about your brother
and we took a flat in the Marshan
with reed mats and one water tap
about a foot from the floor
and we smoke hasheesh
and ate well and loved well
and left for the south
Essaouira, Fez, Marrakech
and got to Taroudant
thru the mountains
and bought alabaster kif bowls
for a few dirhams and watched
the dancing boys in desert cafés
kissing old Arabs and sitting on their
laps, dancing with kohl eyes
and heard the music down in Jejouka
in the hills under the stars
the ancient ceremony, Pan pipes
fierce in white moonlight
by white walls
with hooded figures
stoned on kif
for eight nights
and the goatboy in a floppy hat
scared us, beating the air
with a stick, beating whomever came close,
Father of Skins, goat god,
and the flutes maddened us
and we slept together in huts.
Festus, by Canadian artist and illustrator Jason Logan, is another gem published by J&L Books that we are particularly stoked about having in the & Pens Press shop currently.
Published in 2010, this handheld hardcover publication depicts the classic figure of the frontiersman in various incarnations.
Logan made these works while traveling to the Klondike Institute in the outer reaches of Yukon, by the Alaska border.
Loose, colorful and confident, these thirty-five variations on the frontiersman carry through the book in different forms as the hustler, magician and logger just to name a few. Feeling like a mixture of incantations and studies Logan’s characters feel simultaneously iconic and refreshing. He’s traveled in his own path and loving this work feels like rooting for the underdog.
Available in the bookstore here.
Josef Albers, the German-born artist and educator who taught at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale University created Interaction of Color as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students.
For those who have experience with this book (by teaching from or learning from it) knows it is a timeless and mesmerizing resource for anyone interested in color theory and human perception.
Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten color studies chosen by Albers, and has remained in print ever since.
With over a quarter of a million copies sold in its various editions since 1963, Interaction of Color has become a watershed on complex color theory principles and is as pioneering today as when Albers first created it.
Fifty years after Interaction of Colors’s initial publication, this new edition presents an expanded selection of close to sixty color studies alongside Albers’s original text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds.
To further celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary Yale University Press also released a new way to engage with Albers’s lessons by releasing the “Interaction of Color” App for the iPad.
The ($9.99) app combines the book’s text and color studies, video commentary, interviews and over 60 new interactive plates that enables users to try their own color experiments with color.
While we strongly believe there is something essential to holding publications in your hand, feeling the stock and tooth of paper and seeing colors in changing light, this app is an exciting way for Alber’s teachings to reach new audiences in studios and classrooms and that we are unquestionably in favor for that.
This past Friday we got a chance to see the newly completed Maya Hayuk murals at the Hammer Museum. They are beautiful and should definitely be experienced in person.
This smaller mural at the top of the stairs might have been my favorite.
Going hand in hand with Hayuk’s work was Generationalpictomusicapolis, a night of psychedelic sounds, organized by curator Darren Klein, featuring No Age, Sun Foot and Devin Gary & Ross.
Coincidentally it was the first night of No Age’s tour which lead to much excitement. Good times all around that evening.
Have you seen the amazing video for Sonny & the Sunsets’s Green Blood? It’s animated by Oakland based artist Teppei Ando and we love it!
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/68310078 w=500&h=281]