There Isn't a Grand Narrative
Lots of things are happening to, with, and through me right now. One of my friends (T-GEENZ) asked me for an enlarged print of a photo I took recently, which may have made my year. I feel overwhelmed a lot and end up going to bed at like 8:30 'cause I am burnt toast. I taught a homie to weave for free, because they were audacious enough to ask me. My dog is vomiting a lot and got a sports injury in his neck. I met up with an artist who has beautified the world I have walked through in Denver for over a decade and gifted him a print of a piece of his that I photographed. My daughter started kindergarten. I completed my first death work weaving in a minute that wasn't related to a pet memorial. I completed my first zines! My dog died after I completed a death work ritual letting him know he could pass on. I am working on a book of all my spring and summer film photos.
You know what you aren't gonna find in this write up? There isn't gonna be a grand narrative that you can hang the whole thing on. This is just my life right now. It's full of struggle. It's full of striving. It's full of bittersweet moments of realization where I cannot believe that I am here in this moment living out this beautiful life that I never thought I would get to experience as a kid. It's full of moments of struggle where I question whether to not I am gonna be able to keep it up. It's human, without any one story being dominant.
I could write each of these vignettes up as a different story and offer a riff on what it means. I don't want to do that today though, especially given my little dude Winston wasn't here to come trundle through my in-laws' door with us. I don't really feel like it. That is its own form of resistance to a culture that has a certain formula for a digestible story. You probably know it well. Recount personal vulnerable story, talk about how you came through the wilderness of the experience, and then note how that helped change who you are in some fundamental way for the better. I know that formula well, because I have often used it. Frankly, however, it's exhausting to continually to try to make your chaotically-beautiful life into some made for TV Hallmark movie with some discrete beginning, middle, and end. We don't need to fold reality back in on itself to tell human stories. We can just let things be messy and open-ended. That's sure as heck is how I feel right now grieving my fur buddy.
I would rather embrace a more haphazard approach to writing up my experience that considers life like a "loose-leaf novel," a collection of vignettes. I first encountered this loose-leaf approach while reading Thomas Moore's The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, which was suggested to me by Big Homie M.Graves (No Shock – M. Graves is a trusted colleague for a reason). In his chapter Stories Imperfect and Impossible from that volume, Moore cites Ted Estess' thoughts on the story that refuses to be told:
"We can get carried away," he says, "in our enthusiasm for stories and overlook the many ways life simply won't fit into a story. Writers sometimes give the impression that life is like a well-integrated plot. It may be that life is more often like a loose-leaf novel." (pp 244)
Any honest writer that faces this essential truth will tell you about the seductive option of forcing their life into an easily digestible story that will elicit a certain reaction out of their audience. Any more now, I resist writing about my life like it's a pop song and instead explore how I may craft a complex experimental song that doesn't follow any set formula. I trust people are smart, caring, and curious, so I want to leave the vignettes I share in this project up for your own meaning-making as well. May you riff off them in the way you see fit. I will tell you what it brings up for me as a way to highlight how the experience pulled at my heart strings in some way. That's all I have to give – emotion, passion, and care for the world. I am not here to reify any social constructs, because I don't need to sell my stories to eat. I already sell highly specialized, technical reports to eat, which likely shapes why I am so particular about storytelling.
You know who is really really good at this? Kailea Lofton of Loam. My glob, I will be reading a vignette she wrote and she will be moving between the personal/ political and the local/global like it's nothing. It's wild to behold. She will be describing a vignette of her life, and I will just immediately be able to feel, not just understand, where she is at with navigating some specific aspect of the polycrisis that we are moving through as a society right now. She doesn't try to wrap the vignettes up with a bow and have a happy ending, nor does she treat her vignettes as a form of horror writing where everyone dies and hope is lost. No, she deftly maneuvers between these poles by shirking the well-trodden path of "happy ending" or "doom and gloom" and instead offers us the opportunity to stand in her shoes for a moment in all its possibility and fear of living in this open-ended moment where the ending of the story isn't written yet. This is an essential public service that Kailea (and her oft collaborator Kate Weiner in their books) offers in showing us how we can look toward the abyss of the many deaths of structures and ideas that are occurring right now and not dissociate into whatever one uses to numb themselves from the grief that accompanies being alive right now. I want that sort of complexity to be the genre I write in. It's the bearing witness genre. Ok, enough navel gazing. Let's write some vignettes to give you a taste of the world I have been living in.
Teachin' Weavin'
I hadn't taught in a minute, but a homie asked me. I always have extra frame looms on hand for the moment when a homie asks me to weave. That is a weaver's Christmas. Looking bashful and shocked after being asked, "Oh, you want to learn the enchanted, mystical art of yarn painting? I can help you with that." It's no wonder that very few people every take me up on the offer. I am way too eager for 21st century folks. I am sure I must elicit a cellular level of fear from folks when I seem like I am ready to pull out a travel suitcase of weaving supplies to teach them on the spot for free. I am not changing though. Folks just need to get on my level already.
Teaching weaving wasn't always easy. Luckily, I watched Sarah Neubert teach many a class at Fancy Tiger Crafts (RIP to our OG craft utopia) back in the day. So, even before I taught my first weaving class, I sort of got an idea of the flow of the class and what is a realistic amount of skills to cram into the class. With experience, I learned that less is more. I will typically teach starting a strand of yarn, plain weave, changing colors, and adding shapes. Then I make myself available for follow up sessions to teach braiding techniques, finishing, other shapes, and anything else the person wants to learn. Teaching 1-on-1 is great because, I can always add in more building-block skills if the person I am teaching is flying through the initial steps.
With my basic lesson plan in place, most of the work to get ready for the class is just in prepping the kit. That part is fun though, because I get to select yarns from my stash, take little samplings of them, and wind them into little balls. You would be surprised how often this gets delayed. I kid you not. I have two people waiting for kits. I shame myself publicly to get me to put it on the to do list. I may even getting froggy tonight and do the two kits after I get the kiddos down.
One great help is that Denver-based Flax and Twine decided to make little learning looms that are similar to the Hokett Looms I weave on. You cannot buy those looms anymore, because Jim Hokett passed away (RIP to a real one!). So, the next best thing is to help out a locally-owned business who offers looms in a similar style. NERD OUT ASIDE BEGIN: I still prefer the 6 ends per inch (EPI) of the Hokett Looms, because it gives you more control of the designs you do in each inch of warp. However, 5 EPI is still preferred over 4. NERD OUT ASIDE DONE. The kit is typically the biggest expense in teaching someone for free, but even that isn't crazy at the rate I teach folks. I typically will ride over the Flax and Twine store front up in north Denver and bother some folks who I am buddies with that work there now. It is about the closest I get to feeling like I am back at Fancy Tiger.
The next folks up are T-Geenz and Jenna of Current Fair. TEEEG is lucky, cause she's Canadian and sick tight. So, she doesn't have to worry about me bothering her too much, save during game night. I might get lucky and she will send me more stickies. I always love including her stickers in my mail art packages. Jenna pulled a shenanigans card at our tattoo appointment and gifted me my tattoo, because it was my 40th bday. SO, I am forcing them to get a weaving class! hehehehehehe. I love treating life like it's the gift olympics.
Zines
Finally, after all this time of saying I was gonna make zines, I did it. I mostly owe it to my local librarian, author of the Yellow Rake zine, and drum maestro Brian Polk. He was on his walk through the neighborhood, and I ran into him coming back from a bike quest. If I got everything set up into a workable file, he said he would help me print out my zine the next day at the library. The Denver Public Library allows you to print 100 pages a day for free, so I knew I had plenty of leeway to test out my first zine without having to break the bank. I just now needed to put something together.
Later that night after a blistering hardcore battlefield 6 session with mine homies, I set to work. I was really tired, but I didn't want to not show up after Brian offered to help. I retrofitted a zine template that I made on Canva for my "This Analog Life" zine I want to make to chronicle each one of my weavings, made with the help of a Bratty Bre tutorial on YouTube. I went with the single page, half letter press style of Marc Fisher of Public Collectors, Temporary Services, and Half Letter Press. I threw seven of my favorite photos of local artists into the various pages of the zine from a recent roll of 35 mm film that I got developed and scanned by Not Another Film Lab. I paused for a moment when I thought about a title. I didn't want to spend too much time on it, because I wanted to go to bed. I thought about how my bike quests each day explored codes that people often overlook everyday. Mundane Ciphers seemed to perfectly capture the core of my documentary style of photographing those codes that speak most to me when I am riding around. I slapped some more details on the front cover, mis-spelled Denver as "Demver: ob accident, made sure that I left enough room for bleed margins, exported to pdf, and saved the file to a USB Stick.
A whole slew of acknowledgments scrolled through the background of my brain as I took these initial steps in Star Wars style. Big thanks to Rikki of Starmoth Press for the BB recommendation here – I wouldn't have made a zine without this resource. Also, just generally, Rikki helped me see this was all possible by her consistency in her own practice and her mail art subscription, which I am a member of. Without Curtis of Backdoor Publishing, I wouldn't have had a constant reminder of how cool it would be if I just published my own stories and film photography in print and distributed to people. Without Curtis, I don't know if I would have stayed focused long enough to get this off the ground. I am super indebted to Marc Fisher whose incisive, thoughtful, get-it-out-into-the-world single page, half letter press style missives is what helped me let go of the idea that my zine needed to be some long, detailed thing for it to be "legitimate." Fisher also answered a key question of mine over email at a critical juncture of my process of getting to my first zine that helped me just get on with the work of making one and going from there. Stewing in this same pot of print self-publishing was my fren Sharon, who also released a zine in their Loose Leaf mail art subscription. Countless voice memos have gone back and forth between us that helped me get to this point. I threw some of my favorite photos from a recent roll of 35 mm film that I got developed and scanned by Not Another Film Lab.
I went to the library the next day and Brian was away from his usual perch at the front desk. I had already sent a copy of the zine to the printer from my home desktop: landscape, double-sided, color options selected, so I forged on without his aid. I felt like his role in the cosmic process had already been played. He gave me the kick in the metaphorical derriere that I needed to get her to this point. I released the print job to the printer and watched as my single page zine came to life on the printer trey. The proof was right there in front of me. I could write something, take some photos, put it together into a zine, print it at the library and then ride around delivering it to my friends. This was all a dream come true. The world wide web got me to the point where I could believe in my voice but the print domain is where I wanted to make my mark as a community storyteller, embedded in my web of relations.
A new dimension of my existence was opened in that moment. In the weeks leading up to this event, I had hoped my 40s (I turned 40 this past wednesday) would be my zine decade. My 30s were my fiber art decade, so I felt it appropriate to devote my next decade to another craft I was passionate about: zines//book//self-publishing. Now here I am in the infancy of this new decade having already printed out my first ( "Mundane Ciphers") and second zines "Chronicles of Jahoulee," which immortalizes my scavenger hunt to find an OHURT throw that was only up for a week before getting buffed on the Clem-L quest machine. Now, all I do is dream about zines and what my next project will be. It's funny how once you figure out one little skill you can build off that foundation and start crafting your own worlds. That's the way it was with weaving. Fingers-crossed, that's the way it will be with zines.
Now I already have plans for my third zine and a plan for how the zines will interface with this newsletter. I never got word back on a photo essay entitled "The Seeds of a New World are Right Around the Corner" that I submitted to the open call for friends of friends zine. I sent a follow-up email after a month and half, so we will see if I still got a shot. They are totally within their right to deny my submission. I was late due to life but still wanted to give it a go. While I wait for their reply, I am just going to practice formatting the story as my own self-published zine. That essay chronicles a bike quest in July through an alley in baker that I photographed with Psychedelic Blues #4. OOOWEE, it's a scorcher and I kinda want to revisit the essay and add more photos anyways. The plan will be to release the zine physically in October in an addition of 100 and then add a digital copy as a newsletter in and around Halloween after all the folks who wanted to read it physically first get a chance to dive in. The plan moving forward will be to use this newsletter more as an overall studio notes and updates log than it will to tell you what I think or feel about anything. I want to save that for the printed page.
Technically, this new zine will help me build my practice some more. With it, I will practice producing a 12-16 (3-4 pieces of paper) at the library and assembling it at home. I love iterating in this slow, methodical manner. It's sort of baked into me at this point with my weaving. I just like adding one more wrinkle with each new project. That sort of helps me approach "THE NEW" (TM pending) as a fun realm of possibility and not a super scary thing that will disregulate my nervous system. Watch, I will hit publish on this post and get an email back saying that fof zine has accepted my submission. (hehehehe) That is highly unlikely, but in that event, I will write up the experience hosting my first bike quest to Rachel Ralph Gallery for Hennessy and Jae Mo's sick sick sick show.
Anyways, the two zines I have completed are free and I can mail them to you. If it's too weird to receive something for free, you can always trade me something in return. I love music, stickers, and friendship. Friendship is a cool thing to trade. Nice people who love analog culture are always welcome here. shoot me an email at local.autonomy@gmail.com with your mailing address to pick up either or both of the new zines. If you have my phone number, you can just text me too.
Docent of the Streets - Select Photos from Recent 35mm Rolls
No one gave me the job, I am just doing it. I was riding past Gary Albert Johnson's ongoing Aztlan Theatre art installation and the large ceramic painting was askew. I was aghast, so I put on my docent's uniform and adjusted the photo back in place. Later that week, I put on my docent's uniform again and cleaned off the 400 silly ad flyers for a boozy club that were added to the Larimer community art wall. As someone who is invested in this community, it just feels nice to honor the work by making sure that folks know it is cared for and appreciated. One easy way to do that is pretend I am the docent of the Plein Air gallery for buy community. It makes me giggle so hard. I love street cosplay – It is very situationist of me.
I will also not stand for any construction crews trying to cover OHURT in caution tape. FREE THE HURT! Leave the BIG HURT alone, I say! This also may be interpreted as "Caution, BIG HURT Ahead."
I saw a few thicker, larger NOMI's the last 2 weeks and the proliferation of the Sylph (sp?) tag (first noticed as a throw in the alley in between ogden and Emerson in cap hill). This is a wonderful nomi and makes me so so so happy.
Ugh, the layers of buffs, the REVOLUTION NOW, the ex-wife and Entuo, the Brady Heart Corey, and a Fage Yogurt container on top tell a story! This is pure and utter trashure (trash receptacle treasure), mine hosses. I was pretty surprised this wasn't buffed, but it appears that the apartments next to this strip of businesses are much less buff-happy than their neighbors. I think this is the first time I actually took a picture in this alley off 11th between ogden and corona.
Ok, that's all for today. I gotta go pack up zines. Consider subscribing to this newsletter if you would like. This is where I do most of my actually useful thinking. Was that a good sales pitch? lmao. It's free so, you do you! hehe
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