Steve 2: Farrell

Designer / artist behind one of my favorite books in my personal library, Vas: An Opera in Flatland, Stephen manages to blend typography, unconventional layout, photographs and illustrations in ways that shouldn't work but are ultimately tremendously successful (IMO). Strangely devoid of much of an Internet presence, the best I could find on his background is his faculty page at the AI Chicago.

I feel like I must have written about this book before, but if not, here's a smattering of spreads worth checking out. Honestly though, it's an object best experienced in person, in hardcover.

It looks like the hardcover print run has been extinguished and current options for purchase are limited to a suspect paperback reprint or a $498 hardcover leftover from an independent seller. Mine? You'll need more than $500 to pry this guy from my ink stained hands.

Steve 1: Heller
A nice interview with hyper-prolific design writer Steven Heller. Perhaps the most inspiring bit about his life is the sheer amount of productivity he manages to pull off. On what would otherwise be a burden of a schedule to an average Joe:

You’ve managed this freelance career on top of a full time job for 30 years, you’re co-chair of this MFA program, you answer emails lightning-fast and I’m pretty sure you have a life, too...can you divulge for freelance writers some of your Steven Heller time management secrets?

I don’t think it’s a matter of superb time management as much as filling up time. Without getting Freudian or Jungian or Marxian (Groucho that is), I make up for my deficiencies by appearing to be prolific. Everyone works at their own rhythms, which, if we’re lucky, is in sync with our interests and curiosities. You at UnBeige post six items a day — and you probably do a lot of legwork to do that — for some that’s a tremendous amount of work. But it’s your job, and your passion. I simply do what turns me on (and turns off some of the demons and voices raging in my head). I also like being able to tally up accomplishments, and these come in waves. This year my wave is establishing new MFA programs at the School of Visual Arts, like the brand new MFA in Design Criticism (to be chaired by Alice Twemlow) and a few others that are top secret at the moment. Next year, maybe it will be knitting large scarves.

Here's a snippet from a recent essay I translated by Japanese political commentator Minoru Morita:

Mao's Cultural Revolution brought about the huge fantasy of Mao-style Communism, and the Chinese people joined in the dance of social destruction. The Koizumi Cultural Revolution's goal was to Americanize Japan. Or more precisely, it was to bring about Republican-style Americanization of Japan.

The true leader of the Koizumi Cultural Revolution was US President George W. Bush. Koizumi tried to remodel Japan into a country that embraced Bush's Republican-style politics. The former prime minister was supported in his efforts by the Liberal Democratic Party, New Komeito, government officials, the financial sector and the mass media.

In my view, Koizumi was the most irresponsible and frivolous prime minister in Japan's postwar history. The former premier took a stable Japan and destroyed it; and after it had collapsed, he simply walked away. Now the Cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is left to shoulder the giant burden left behind by Koizumi politics.

For the Abe Cabinet to reverse Koizumi's burdensome legacy, it needs to repudiate the very politics that brought the legacy about. But the Abe Cabinet can't do this because Abe's political power was created by Koizumi, and the new prime minister is seen as Koizumi's successor.

Prime Minister Abe's stance is similar to that of Taira no Shigemori, son of Taira no Kiyomori, as recorded in Rai San’yō's Nihon Gaishi (An Unofficial Japanese History): "If I obey my father, I can't be loyal (to my country); but if I am loyal, I can't obey my father." If Abe is loyal to the people of Japan, he can't possibly continue with the policies fathered by Koizumi. But if Abe decides to break with Koizumi, he would take a beating from a mass media that still foolishly supports the path set by the former prime minister, and inevitably, Abe's support would dwindle. The Abe administration is caught between loyalty to the country and duty to its "father," Koizumi.

I love this job. For more of his columns, check out the Morita Research Institute website and click where it says "Minoru Morita Unravels Japan."

The librarians — a full 15,000 of them — were in Seattle this weekend for the American Library Association midwinter meeting. The exhibits filled two large rooms in the Convention Center downtown. I roamed through them, stopping by our distributor's booth from time to time, and I couldn't help but feel a bit at sea with so many books on display. I've never attended Book Expo and only have been to a few large regional shows, so this exhibition space was by far the biggest I've seen (grizzled publishing veterans may laugh at me here).

It made me think a lot about how small presses can stand out amid the din. We can't keep up with the flash of the larger publishers (although having our distributor, Consortium, on our side is a big plus — their booth was one of the most interesting and eclectic, and I'm not being paid to say this).

I didn't come up with any concrete strategies while walking through the halls, but I did find a publisher that gave me hope:

Tara Publishing: This Indian publisher had some of the most high-quality, innovative children's books I've ever come across. The production quality is excellent, and thus, the books are not cheap. But it was refreshing to see a house do high-end work. The website's two-dimensional photos of the books don't do them justice. This house spends a lot of time on material selection and comes up with innovative ways to produce books that share a lot of qualities with our very own literary objects.

That was the needle in the haystack for me. And it gives me hope for CMP's future.

Seattlite, this looks like fun: Ellis Avery is reading from her first novel, The Teahouse Fire, at 7:30 next Monday at Elliott Bay. Ellis tells us she will also be performing "a basic Japanese tea ceremony, modified for a western room." Should be interesting.

Ellis wrote an excellent review of Kuhaku in The Kyoto Journal last year. Now it's her turn to hit the road, promoting what sounds like a real page-turner. We wish her luck.

So the Saints lost and the city of New Orleans' football joyride is over.

Next up: Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday is on Feb. 20 this year, and the Mardi Gras season is in full swing, with a couple of parades already finished and the colorful Krewe du Vieux scheduled to ramble through the French Quarter a week from Saturday.

Last year during Mardi Gras season, we launched our second title, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, at the Saturn Bar in what was personally one of the most memorable moments of my career.

This Wednesday night, four of the contributors to the anthology will be reading from their work at the Jefferson Parish library at 7pm. It's free and open to the public. Writers will be running the gamut of the New Orleans experience, from Dave Rutledge's "Corners of the Quarter" to Sarah Inman's "A Lesson from Below" to CW Cannon's "New Orleans Manifesto," which was handed out by costumed revelers at Mardi Gras 2003 and is even more relevant today, and finally, to Ray Shea's hilarious "I Was a Teenage Float Grunt."

This is something I won't be mentioning on our Voices of New Orleans blog, but since you folks are ostensibly reading this blog because you're interested in the travails of a small publisher, we are getting excitingly close to deciding whether to produce a second edition of Do You Know. We printed a little fewer than 6,000 copies of DYK and have just several hundred left in our warehouse in Seattle. If we don't get hit with massive returns in the next month or so and if sales stay on pace, look for a thicker version of DYK as early as later this year (which means, of course, the first editions will become more valuable — so if you don't have one yet, get your butt to the Jefferson Parish library or order one here!)

It's with a heavy heart I have to report that one of my favorite English language bookshops here in Tokyo is closing its doors this week. Intelligent Idiot sits next to Yoga Jaya in the Las Chicas courtyard in back-alley Omotesando. It's small and it's selection is limited. But thanks to the masterful eye of proprietor book-mistress Mika-san, almost every tome on their walls is a keeper. And they're a CMP supporter.

The building is being smashed and rebuilt and at the very least, Mika-san reports, they'll be closed for a year with very little chance of opening again in the new building.

So we've all got a mere 10 days or so to clean out all of the remaining inventory. Rumor has it there's going to be quite a sale on Wednesday, January 31st, with most books selling for a measly ¥100. And probably, if you put on your best puppy dog eyes, you'll get a couple freebies thrown in too. So if you can read English, like books, and have a big bag, bring your love and the bag to Intelligent Idiot and load up on the best of what's left.

Bill Moyers kicked off the The National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis last Friday with a terrific keynote address that runs through the whole of American history and draws comparisons between the cotton plantations of slavery days and the media plantations of today. It's not to be missed, but it's long, so if you're not into listening to the whole audio version of the speech linked above, try the text version.

Moyers also penned last week's cover story for The Nation.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the keynote speech to whet your appetite:

For years, the media marketplace for opinions about public policy has been dominated by a highly disciplined, thoroughly networked, ideological “noise machine,” to use David Brock’s term. Permeated with slogans concocted by big corporations, their lobbyists, and their think tank subsidiaries, public discourse has effectively changed the meaning of American values. Day after day, the ideals of fairness and liberty and mutual responsibility have been stripped of their essential dignity and meaning in people’s lives. Day after day, the egalitarian creed of our Declaration of Independence is trampled underfoot by hired experts and sloganeers, who speak of the “death tax,” “the ownership society,” “the culture of life,” “the liberal assault on God and family,” “compassionate conservatism,” “weak on terrorism,” “the end of history,” “the clash of civilizations,” “no child left behind.” They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war into a “surge,” as if it were a current of electricity through a wire, instead of blood spurting from the ruptured vein of a soldier.

On our lackluster press corps:

I think what’s happened is not indifference or laziness or incompetence, but the fact that most journalists on the plantation have so internalized conventional wisdom that they simply accept that the system is working as it should. I’m doing a documentary this spring called “Buying the War,” and I can’t tell you again how many reporters have told me that it just never occurred to them that high officials would manipulate intelligence in order to go to war. Hello?

And finally, on the digital revolution:

The other story of America that says, free speech is not just corporate speech. That news is not just what officials tell us. And we are not just chattel in the fields living the boss man’s story. This is the great gift of the digital revolution, and you must never, never let them take it away from you. The Internet, cell phones and digital cameras that can transmit images over the Internet makes possible a nation of story tellers, every citizen a Tom Paine.

Lou Major Sr. of the Daily News in Bogalusa, LA, picked up the latest issue of Louisiana Cultural Vistas magazine and was mesmerized by the Poppas excerpt juxtaposed with Philip Gould's captionless photos of Louisiana politicians. He wrote a column about it today.

And for those with too much time on their hands this Martin Luther King Jr. Monday, here's a post I wrote a few weeks ago on the same topic.

Postscript: Jason Berry will be reading from Last of the Red Hot Poppas at Jefferson Parish Library at 7:30 tomorrow (the 16th). The event is free and open to the public, so go check it out. And next week, we'll be hosting a Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans reading at the same place. More on that later.

Does your local library stock John Grisham but not Charlotte Bronte? James Patterson but not Thomas Hardy? When was the last time you checked? This opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal describes a disturbing trend among libraries to dump classics and save shelf space for the latest hot sellers. Good bye Swann's Way, hello Who Moved My Cheese?

Check out our Voices of New Orleans blog for much more.

MySpace recently refused to post this ad from Common Cause. MySpace, owned by NewsCorp., apparently didn't like the way its dear leader was portrayed in the ad.


Is anyone counting how many rights are left in this bill?

This Thursday, concerned residents of New Orleans will be taking to the streets in a march on City Hall to bring attention to the appalling rise in violence in the city. The protest, called Silence is Violence, is a plea to the city's leaders to do something to stem the violence and destruction.

It's as if our country's and New Orleans' leaders are stuck in one of those horrible dreams where they can't seem to move their legs even though danger approaches. But instead of waking in a cold sweat and realizing that it's just a dream, the nightmare just goes on and on. Good people around the city have decided to take action.

"Our point of view is that we can't not do something. We must make our voices heard," says writer Ken Foster, one of the rally organizers.

Over on our Voices blog, Colleen Mondor has been rallying the rest of us who can't march to send a message to city leaders via fax. The relevant numbers are at the bottom of the post.

The blogosphere has chimed in with support, as in this post and this one.

So folks, send a fax, march, do what you can to make sure that people in New Orleans and in places of power know that we won't let American cities disintegrate before our eyes while we wage unnecessary wars in foreign lands.

Check out the latest review of Poppas in the Press-Register of Mobile, Alabama.

Here's a taste:

Rather than attempt to summarize a complicated story line that features Gulf Coast mobsters, strippers, toxic-waste injection wells, double-dealing, murder and so on, suffice it to say that the book is funny and engaging. To use a well-worn regional analogy, if it were a bowl of gumbo it would be one-quarter John Kennedy Toole and three-quarters Elmore Leonard, seasoned by Berry's journalistic-style reportage and insights.

Jason Berry is the Mobile Writers Guild guest tomorrow at 7 pm at the Mobile Public Library. The reading is free and open to the public, so drop by and hear Jason bring the characters of Last of the Red Hot Poppas to life.

Browsing the web at my real job, I came across the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) website. Beyond the fact that I think it's pretty damn cool that there is a society of people who like fonts and they decided to start up a nonprofit, I'm excited they also do fundraising and hold an annual conference called TypeCon in a North American city. Guess where TypeCon is this glorious new year?

During the summer months, my beautiful hometown will be host to type designers, graphic artists with a proclivity for text and letterforms, printers, publishers and book artists from all over the world. So come spend some time this summer in the Pacific Northwest, hang those quotes, drop Chin Music Press a line and kern baby, kern.

TypeCon2007
August 1-5, 2007
Crowne Plaza downtown
Seattle, Washington
S {o} T A

Happy New Year, all! Here's to a 2007 as exciting and entertaining as yesterday's Fiesta Bowl. Wow, what a game!

Here is this week's recommended reading:

Friend and Kuhaku contributor Roland Kelts is writing the Powell's Books blog this week to promote his new book, Japanamerica.

Also, we're translating the weekly columns of one of Japan's most astute political commentators, Minoru Morita, and the first one was posted on New Year's Day (scroll down a bit to see the English column). "Minoru Morita Unravels Japan" will be posted every Monday.