Hi m’dears!

I’ve been a fan of Kate Bingaman-Burt’s work for a long, long time, and lucky enough to count her as a pal for quite a good while as well. When she mentioned that she was shopping for a massive amount of colored paper for her new self-produced book, I immediately wanted to know more. Much more. And I am betting that the sorts of fine folks who read this newsletter will also want to know all about what goes into creating hundreds of copies of a book that contains thousands of drawings—not all by herself, because such things take a village—but on her own and by hand. And so I interviewed her about the process so we could all learn more. And, the story is just as ambitious, wild, and fascinating as I thought it would be. So here, without further ado, is my interview with KBB about her new enormous “zine” Proof of Purchase.

Bridget: First off, for anyone unfamiliar with your work, can you give us a quick overview of your Daily Purchase Drawings and a description of your new book?

Kate: Proof of Purchase: Daily Purchase Drawings, 2006–2026 celebrates twenty years of my Daily Purchase Drawings project. Since February 5, 2006, I’ve made a drawing of one thing I’ve purchased each day, from cups of coffee and groceries to parking tickets, office supplies, houseplants, and the occasional (more than occasional) impulse buy. This project documents the mundane, but also the not-so-mundane, purchases of living a life.

Edited from the original 6,500 drawings, the book contains 1,154 drawings organized by category rather than chronology. I wanted it to feel less like reading a timeline and more like rummaging through someone’s life. I was also really feeling the pressure of it being twenty FREAKING years since I first started this drawing project and wanted to commemorate the anniversary with this book. I had been kicking this around in 2024 and 2025 as the anniversary loomed, but it wasn’t until my long-time friend Faythe Levinew invited me to have a 2-person show at Women’s Studio Workshop in Kingston, New York, that I really started making this book in earnest. I love a deadline, and this was the deadline that I needed! I made 10 proof copies for the show that opened in early June, and I have spent the summer recalibrating and recalculating this process. I’m currently producing an edition of 500. ACK!

BWP: What led you to decide to make this project, and specifically to make it as a self-produced, risograph book?

KBB: I’ve spent the last decade helping other people make zines and prints through Outlet, the risograph studio I co-run in Portland with Leland Vaughan, so it felt important that this book be made the same way I’ve encouraged others to work: collaboratively, by hand, and a little obsessively.

I also wanted the production to reflect the project itself. The Daily Purchase Drawings have always been about paying attention to ordinary things, and risograph printing has that same quality for me. It’s tactile, a little imperfect, colorful, and incredibly satisfying. There wasn’t really another way I wanted this project to exist.

This is by far the biggest “zine” I have ever produced. I put air quotes around zine because this has fully tipped into the BIG BOOK category due to the size and the edition of 500, but it still carries the ethos of a zine: it’s self-published and scrappy, and it doesn’t always go the way you think it will.

And “self-published” is also a funny term because it’s way more than just a solo self. Leland has been a huge help with production planning and execution, and we’ve treated this like a normal publishing job at Outlet, with several of our print assistants helping with printing, folding, and assembling. From Bailey creating a jig to assist with folding the cover flaps, to Miranda hand-collating the mini-zines that are included, to Zab printing many, many pages, to Leland doing all of the above and more…it takes a village (aka: our print shop) to make a book. My oldest friend, Zachary Schomburg, is lending a hand by helping me edit the introduction too. The first zine I ever made was for his poems in 1997.

BWP: Ok, let’s get into the nitty-gritty. You mentioned to me earlier shopping for supplies. Can you tell me what you bought? And how you calculated what you’d need?

KBB: This part felt stupidly on-brand. Here I am making a book about the things I’ve purchased and drawn over the last twenty years…and suddenly I’m making giant purchases so I can make the book itself.

Paper. Coils. Shipping materials. Labels. Tape. Protective sleeves. Ink. The list kept growing, and it keeps growing, since we’re only about ⅓ of the way through production.

I originally planned to make an edition of fifty books. Then pre-orders opened. Now we’re making five hundred!

So far we’ve calculated that it’s going to take 111 reams of paper, 500 apple green plastic coils, lots of paper trimming, and LOTS of collating. The one part we’re outsourcing is the actual coil binding. We have a coiling machine in our space, but doing 500 of these manually would be way too labor-intensive, and the book is too fat to punch the holes in one clean punch. We need a bigger operation for that part.

We’re borrowing our friends’ semi-automatic collating machine (shout out to Secret Room!) when it comes time to put all the pages in order, because we’re trying to save money by not sending that part to the bindery. Every time we can figure out how to do another step ourselves, we do.

BWP: What does the actual production process look like? Do you have help? How long will it take?

KBB: We print every page on our risograph printers at Outlet (shout out to Corita and Janet, our RZ 590 and 390). Once printing is finished, we trim and collate the pages, then send them out for hole-punching and coil binding. Once the books come back to us, we tuck the companion zines into the cover flaps, then sign, number, pack, and ship every copy.

And there is A LOT of help! This is definitely not me sitting alone at Outlet making 500 books. Leland and our print assistants have all been part of the production, and we’ve basically turned the shop into a little book factory for the summer that goes into action whenever we are not printing with other folks or giving workshops in the space.

We’re still aiming to have everything shipped out before I have to start teaching classes at Portland State at the end of September. So please light a candle for us and say a little prayer.

BWP: When does the book go on sale? Where can a person buy it?

KBB: Pre-orders are open now through Outlet, and we will also have the book available in person at our shop in Portland and at the many markets that we do throughout the year. I haven’t figured out whether I can afford to wholesale this to shops outside of Portland, but we’re always happy to ship to anyone inside the US!

BWP: Would you recommend this way of making a book to others?

KBB: Absolutely…with one giant disclaimer. If your goal is efficiency, this is probably not the route for you.

But if you enjoy the process as much as the finished object, it’s incredibly rewarding. Making a book this way forces you to understand every decision that goes into it, from paper choice to printing to binding to packaging. It also makes you appreciate just how much labor goes into independent publishing.

BWP: Is there anything else you’d like to share, either about your larger Daily Purchase Drawings project in general, or this book in particular?

KBB: One of the biggest surprises was editing the book, which I did most of during the first several months of 2026. After twenty years, I had more than 6,500 drawings to choose from. I knew I couldn’t include everything, so I stopped thinking chronologically and started looking for conversations between the drawings. I broke things into 7 categories: Food, Drink, Clothing, Media, Medical, Mementos, and Receipts. The rule has always been one purchase drawing per day, which means part of the ritual is deciding what that day’s drawing will be. Sometimes there’s only one thing to choose from, and sometimes there are options, but after doing this for so long, that decision has become part of how I mark the day.

People sometimes ask if I ever get tired of drawing the same things over and over, but I don’t really think of them as the same things. A cup of coffee in 2006 isn’t the same as a cup of coffee in 2026. So much changes…the prices change, the packaging changes, my drawing changes, and my life changes. I love seeing the repetition and the accumulation, too.

At this point, making my daily purchase drawing has become part of how I move through the world. I honestly can’t get through a day without thinking about what I’m going to draw. It’s become less about documenting what I buy and more about noticing everyday moments that might otherwise slip by. Marking time by saying I was there with my pen and my sketchbook.

Kate Bingaman-Burt is an illustrator, educator, and daily drawer based in Portland, Oregon. She has been making a daily purchase drawing since 2006, and her work explores memory, consumption, and connection through drawing, zines, objects, and Risograph printing. She teaches at Portland State University, where she heads up the Graphic Design program, and is the founder and co-owner of Outlet, a community print space and Risograph studio in Portland that she runs with Leland Vaughan.

Alongside teaching and her personal projects, Kate creates illustrations for editorial and commercial clients including The New York Times, Highlights Magazine, and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). She also speaks and leads workshops around the country on creativity, developing your voice, and building a sustainable art practice. She also shares drawings, stories, and her creative process on Substack.

Book Club

Not for nothing, but we are all having so much fun over in the Bay Area Book Club. Folks are loving the monthly book selections, the extras and goodies they receive throughout the month, and the discussions at the end.

I’m about to announce our 4th book next Friday so now would be an ideal time to hop on board. If you’ve been wanting to do it but waiting for your moment, now could be that moment. Just saying. You can do it right here:

Mix Tape

This month’s mix tape was in large part inspired by my family’s summer vacation road trip across part of the northern Midwest. Imagine yourself popping it into your car’s tape deck and hitting the open road to enjoy these last few weeks before the equinox.

xo

b

Welcome to Further Reading!

Here are some books to …

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Welcome to Field Trip Notes!

Now we will discuss places you can go to enrich your reading experience of Hua Hsu’s Stay True. With, as always, apologies to our pals outside the Bay, who will have to en…

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I could write you my autobiography in beverages. In fifty years there have been five drinks that I have consumed with almost religious loyalty. And my timeline is marked by when I suddenly stopped or started drinking them. With only one notable side dalliance along the way.

For the first eighteen years of my life I drank milk almost exclusively, at every meal. From earliest childhood until my parents split up when I was in high school. My dad was the the big milk enthusiast, so once he was no longer around the house I stopped drinking it almost entirely. Although I will still occasionally enjoy a glass with pancakes or a brownie or cherry pie, if the thought occurs to me.

Then I drank Diet Coke like an absolute fiend. In college I’d tuck a 20 oz. plastic bottle in one pocket of my giant cargo pants alongside a box of Red Vines, and a stack of 6 or 8 CDs in the other pocket, and head out to the computer lab at 10pm to go write a paper. I drank many, many cans of the stuff and all through my twenties and early thirties. Then I got pregnant and stopped, I thought temporarily, so as not to inflict aspartame on the unsuspecting, non-consenting zygote. But when I eagerly tried to pick it back up again, after the baby was born, it tasted absolutely horrible and I never ever drank it again.

For coffee I used to loved lattes with a lot of sugar. This also started in college and lasted until I was around 40. Then I tried a fad diet (a fad diet? What was I thinking? Well, I do know, actually: it promised to make me less tired and at that moment it felt like that would be worth trying anything) which required you to drink your coffee black. I thought it would be unbearable but it turned out to be totally fine after the first day or two. In fact quite tasty. And so much easier. And I’ve had it that way ever since.

It was also around the age of 40 that I—along with every other middle-aged, middle-class white woman in America circa the mid-2010s—discovered and fell in love with La Croix. And it remains the main thing I drink today, other than black coffee.

Throughout my twenties and thirties, I also quite enjoyed drinking alcohol: a glass of wine with dinner, beers on the weekend, bourbon and ginger-ale—delightful. But slowly, slowly, I figured something out. I’ve always been a person who wrangles with anxiety. And drinking, even small amounts, made the anxiety worse. The reason it took me a really long time to understand this is that, for me, the cause and effect is quite delayed. If I have a drink on Saturday evening, I’ll be more anxious on Sunday evening. Once I finally saw how it worked, it no longer felt worth it. I still have a drink on the rare special occasion, but mostly I don’t.

There’s one other funny postscript to this story. I take a medication, for sciatica, that has maybe the weirdest side effect I’ve ever heard of: it makes carbonated things seem to me not to be carbonated. So if I drink La Croix, or any other carbonated drink, out of a can or a glass, I experience it as totally flat and horrible. The drug is apparently messing with the nerve endings on my tongue, so the solution is to drink fizzy drinks through a straw—which allows me to experience their fizziness via the roof of my mouth instead. This actually works. I now always drink my La Croix with a straw. The world is a very weird place.

Welcome to the Secret Video Store!

What sort of videos do we have today to augment you reading experience of Stay True by Hua Hsu, you might wonder? Well, I’m so glad you asked! Because it’s a panopl…

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Hi m’dears,

Ok! Are you ready for your August book selection? It’s another nonfiction title, but very different from last month’s pick. For one thing, we’re departing San Francisco and crossing the B…

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My art-looking this past month was divided just about evenly between the Bay Area, where I normally do such things, and Baltimore, where I happened to be for the ICON Conference. This made for a most excellent variety and assortment. Summer tends to be like that. Travel, combined with a proliferation of local shows and events aimed toward our own travelers, tourists, or even just locals in the summertime mood to kick it and do things like look at art means I get to see a whole wide range of stuff that might not show itself to me the rest of the year. And then I turn around and show it to you.

But before I do that, I’ll take a moment to invite you on over to the Bay Area Book Club, where we’re about to start a new book next Monday, August 10th, and it’s going to be a really really good one. So now would be a great time to join, if you’ve been thinking about it.

Mildred Howard

Poetics of Memory, the Mildred Howard show currently at the Oakland Museum, is a wonderland and a revelation. It starts with a couple of more or less normal galleries of Howard’s sculptures, paintings, and other artworks, which are very enjoyable. But then you move into an enormous, dimly-lit room of much larger installations involving light, video, textiles, and various structures, and this is where it gets really magical. The show—the first major museum exhibition of the work of this beloved Black Bay Area artist—is up through October 18th, so if you’re local you have loads of time to get in there. So, rather than try and describe it more I’ll just show you some of my favorite images and tell you that need to experience it for yourself if you can.

Slice of the Pie

This group show features work from more than 40 artists gathered across a surprising conceit: “Fraenkel Gallery presents Slice of the Pie: Fourteen Bay Area Galleries & What Makes Them Different, a group exhibition that brings together a vibrant cross-section of some of the Bay Area’s most influential and idiosyncratic art galleries.” For one art gallery to curate a show featuring work from itself plus 13 other galleries certainly strikes me as an unusual move. But the result really does offer a really great collection of what one thinks of as Bay Area Art. If you want to see this you need to do so before it closes August 15th. Here are the things I liked best.

Walters Museum

While I was in Baltimore for the ICON Conference I got a chance to check out the Walters Art Museum. There are a great many things there, but with limited time I knew I wanted to head straight for the floor that houses the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque painting. And I was not one iota disappointed. I loved stepping away from the hubbub of a gathering full of living breathing people moving around, to spend an hour in cool solitude with these gorgeous painted people suspended in the act of turning their heads in various directions. Also, this museum is free, making it perhaps one of the last great bastions of culture in America. Great job, Baltimore.

ICON Gallery Show

And, last but not least, one of the great many great fun things of the ICON Conference is the Gallery Show, an art show with works drawn from amongst the conference participants. There show is curated from a call-for-entries and I am vastly proud to be able to tell you that two of my very own pieces were featured this year! See just below. Plus loads of other super cool stuff, of which I am showing you a few of my very favorites here, for your enjoyment.

Welcome to Further Reading!

Did you enjoy Portal? I …

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Hi m’dears,

I just got back from a long weekend in Baltimore at the ICON Illustration conference. This is a gathering primarily of professional illustrators, plus the people who love them (art educators, designers, art directors, and so forth) that happens every other summer in a different US city. Since 2014 I’ve gone to all of them but one, and I really like it a lot.

I get to see old friends and meet new people. I get to see a lot of amazing artwork. And I get to hear talks from some super smart and interesting folks. The opening ceremonies always feature a marching band (for some unknown reason). And the closing night party is always a blast. I get to take a peek at a city I quite likely might not have any other reason to go to (places like Austin and Detroit and Minneapolis).

And, often, I get to speak or participate myself in some way. Back when I worked for Chronicle Books I would often teach a workshop about publishing and authorship for illustrators and other visual creators. People hear the word “author” and they most often assume it’s a synonym for “writer” but over the course of my 20+ year career, a remarkably small percentage of my authors have been writers. The vast majority have been artists, illustrators, photographers, and other makers of visual images of one kind or another. So explaining how that works to folks was always fun.

Then, two years ago, I first had to have the realization that I could still go as a free molecule, rather than as a corporate-attached person. After all, I am an artist myself! Then I spent that whole first conference kind of tripping out about how different it was, and yet how the same, and figuring out my role, and all that jazz. It was fun, but also kind of a mind trip. (You can read about that experience here. Going back and looking over this two-year-old post, I’m reminded how everything at that time, one-year into my freelance life, still felt so new and I-am-building-this-plane-while-flying-it. It was exciting but also a bit exhausting to be me in that moment).

So, this time around, it was just so delightful to get to go back as a repeat free-agent person. It felt so relaxed and chill. Without the pressures of cooperate life. But also without the pressure of trying to figure out a new way to be. Just hanging out, listening, learning, connecting. Great stuff.

I also have a short talk as part of this event called “Kaleidoscope” where you create 20 slides and talk for 20 seconds per slide. So you talk for just over 5 minutes, which enable 4 people to speak in what would normally be a 1-person speaking slot. My talk was called “Networking for Misanthropes” and was all about my experience of going freelance three years ago and learning to love connecting with people, despite my natural inclinations to hate people.

I may have mentioned it before but I’m a naturally pretty comfortable public speaker. I get a little nervous, but not very. I like speaking. Maybe it’s because I was a theater kid? So that part was ok. But what did make me really nervous was showing slides with my art them to a great big auditorium full of some of the best, most talented illustrators you could hope to gather together in one place. Woo boy! Hello imposter syndrome, my name is Bridget. But people were so nice and generous with their feedback afterwards—about my drawings as well as the talk—and ultimately I left feeling proud of myself.

You go to these sorts of things to make connections. Yes, even misanthropes like me. I mean, sure, in a logical and practical sense, there are business and network-y type connections to be made. These are the kind of folks I want to work with. But there is also a deeper sense of connection to be achieved. A feeling of understanding. Of affinity. Of being on the same page and the same team. Of learning from one another. Of being together in the world rather than alone.

One of my favorite talks was by LA Johnson, an art director at NPR who was very clear-eyed about the many challenges facing not only art and illustration in particular but our world more broadly—both politically and technologically—and yet, despite quite a lot of very grim information she had to contend with in her working life, still had some practical and hopeful messages for the artists she hires and works with. She talked about how the desire to make work that is “clearer, safer, and more broadly appealing” will “sand down the weirdness” off of things.

Another great moment came from artist and disability activist Jen White-Johnson who quoted Audre Lorde: “There is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives.” White-Johnson also described her own artwork, in collage, as “improvisational. It is jazz.” I loved that. It reflected my own experience with collage so accurately.

And those speaker insights are just the tip of the iceberg. Lectures, one-on-one coffees, passing conversations—throughout it all I really just felt the connections so strongly this time around. And that’s not always easy for me. I feel really grateful go get to go be with a group of people where that can happen.

Bookstores

There’s a new bookstore in town and my friend and I just went and checked it out. It’s called The Love Potion Library and it’s in the Castro and it sells romance novels. Romance bookstores have been cropping up all over the place in recent years as the genre has been enjoying a boom (I went to a great one when I was in Ventura California called Smitten Bookstore), but we did not have one in San Francisco, until now. This shop is also a tea room with cute little café tables and sofas tucked all around the space. We were there to browse the selection and shop for books, but it would clearly be an absolutely delightful place to and read.

This also makes me realize that I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned the other new bookshop that opened relatively recently—this one back around the holidays. The Best Bookstore in Union Square is a cute and well-curated little shop on Powell Street (actually a block or so down from Union Square) which brings bookselling back to downtown. There used to be a number of bookstores in the area but haven’t been any for a number of years. This is the San Francisco outpost of a store from Palm Springs. I get the sense a lot of people thought it was a holiday pop-up or some such, but it seems to be here to stay, and I for one (as someone who doesn’t live so super far away) am very glad.

Mixtape

I have this dream that if you’re reading this, that means you’re about to slap on a pair of headphones and let this particular hour-long selection of songs into your ears while you go out for a walk, or paint a picture, or do the dishes, or whatever it is you need or want to do while listening to music. I’m aware that this is largely a fantasy. But nevertheless it is one that brings me enormous happiness.

xo

b

Welcome to Field Trip Notes!

Of course, this month’s edition is inevitably a little bit different, because the only place you can really go to augment your reading experience of John King’s Portal is,…

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I used to get up at four-forty-five in the morning to swim at a gym near my house with a three-lane indoor lap pool. This despite the fact that I hate—and I do mean loath—getting up early, and I also hate gyms. I didn’t matter. I love to swim.

It was like an early morning meditation. Thoughts drifting in and out of my head as my body moved slowly through the water (I’m a very slow swimmer). And the pool itself was lovely. The gym seemed to be from the 1980s or 90s, but the building it was in was much older and so was the pool. When you swam on your back you looked up at a ceiling exactly the color of the sky, crowned with an elaborate white plaster molding that made you feel like you were in the dining room of a Victorian mansion. It was a delight.

Then that gym closed down and I was very sad.

But I guess the fates were smiling upon me, because I heard through the grapevine about another gym, this one near my work, with an outdoor three-lane lap pool. The pool is tucked away behind the gym in the middle of a city block, surrounded on all sides by 1980s and 90s apartment buildings. You’d never in a million years know it was there unless a coworker happened to tell you. I mean, I had spent good long stretches of time googling pools in San Francisco without finding this one. But there it was. Pretty much exactly like the previous one in shape and size. But outdoors instead of indoors, so when you swim on your back you look up at the actual sky. And it’s surrounded on two sides by a wall of glass bricks.

This led me to think of the two other times in my life I’ve spent time near a wall of glass bricks. There was one in my elementary school. In the hallway that led from the first-grade classroom to the bathrooms and out onto the playground. One side of the hallway had glass bricks and the opposite wall had a mural of a dinosaur. It is clear in my mind.

Then there was my first apartment. It was a fancy loft I sublet from owners who lived in the Philippines. In theory they kept it as a San Francisco pied-a-terre, but in fact they never used it so had decided to rent it out for a year. I was lucky and got it at a bargain price. It had been one of the earliest factory-to-loft conversions in San Francisco in the 1980s or 90s. It had a beautiful exposed brick wall and an enormous window and wooden beams and, yes – the partition dividing off the sleeping loft was made of glass bricks.

But I have digressed. Which is a very accurate depiction of what my mind does when I swim. Thoughts come and go, and I watch them come and go like watching clouds. A memory. A movie. A person. A book. A philosophical question. An observation of a particular bird or tree in my line of sight. This. That. Nothing in particular. This is almost the only time that it’s like that. Most of the time I’m a person who’s always thinking, usually planning, often spinning, frequently anxious. Which is why a blithe state of meandering thought is such a pleasure.

No doubt it has something to do with the fact that I don’t push myself physically, like at all. My body is also a cloud, drifting slowly across the sky that is the top of the water. The pleasure of floating, of water on skin, of moving through a liquid medium, of feeling strong and buoyant and as if I could just go and go forever – man oh man, it’s just great.

All of which is what keeps me coming back. It isn’t easy to fit this sort of thing into a busy life, as we all know. Hence the ridiculously early mornings back in the day; and nowadays I’m lucky if I can squeeze it in one afternoon a week, late in the day, after working. Frankly, no amount of exercise-is-good-for-you virtue or guilt would be enough to get me to bother. I don’t know if even either the mind-pleasure or the body-pleasure alone would be enough.

But. You take this almost stupidly simple thing of submerging yourself in chlorinated water and pushing yourself forward through it and, if you are a certain sort of person, it makes your body and your mind feel so good. It turns both your body and your mind into clouds. How can you say no to that?

I just lay eyes on a swimming pool and I feel reverent.

Welcome to the Secret Video Store!

Let’s peek inside and see what videos we have to watch today to augment our enjoyment of this month’s book club book.

Which for July, is of course, Portal: San Franci…

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Hi m’dears,

Welcome to our second month of Bay Area Book Club shenanigans! I’m so glad you’re here. Now that we mostly all know how this works I won’t spend quite so much time explaining everything. W…

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Man, what a delight to traipse around in the early summer and look at a bunch of art! Don’t we like that? Yes, we do! I’m excited to show you what I saw!

Before we dive in, however, I must tell you that now would be the perfect time if you want to join the Book Club. I’ll be announcing a new book next week so, if you’ve been thinking about getting on board, this is the ideal moment in the cycle to do it!

Karen Smidth

I could not begin to tell you the last time I went to a gallery at 49 Geary. Probably before I had a kid, which means more than 15 years. Damn. Back in the day the thing to do was to go after work on First Thursday and wander up and down the vertiginous stairways with your little plastic cup of warm white wine and look at all the art at all the galleries amongst the tremendous crowds. There used to be so many galleries. Some are still there. For all I know that might still be the thing to do, I could just be out of the loop. But I somehow kind of doubt it. But when I found out about this Karen Smidth Show at Maybaum Gallery I hustled right over there on a random weekday afternoon. And let me tell you I am glad I did. Her paintings epitomize Northern California in a way that makes my heart sing. The show is over now, alas, but check out some of these pictures:

Delicious

I’d never been to—or honestly even heard of—Studio Gallery, though it’s not so very far from where I live. But when I saw they were having a food-themed group show, called Delicious, I knew I needed to make my way over there. This show was vast—so many works from a huge array of artists were featured. But, as I suspected would be the case, there were a handful that were very precisely and specifically to my taste (ha ha, see what I did there). This show, too, is done now, but you can see these favorite images of mine, anyhow.

Video Craft

A friend invited me along on a tour of this exhibition, Video Craft, at the Museum of Craft and Design. Learning more about the overlap this show highlights between film and video on the one hand and traditional crafts like textiles and ceramics on the other was super cool. A lot of these pieces really need to be seen in person to be fully understood and appreciated, and if you’re local you’re in luck—this show is up through mid-August, so you’ve got time to get in there and see it.

Will Yackulic

I wish I could remember where I read it, or who said it, but sadly I cannot. But someone whose opinion I had reason to take seriously at the time wrote that Will Yackulic is their favorite Bay Area artist working today. That peaked my interest and made me decide to venture over to see his show at Pt. 2 gallery in Oakland (ok, it didn’t hurt that it also made a great excuse to have a lovely with one of my best friends at the Lake Chalet as well). And I am so glad I did this. Not unlike Karen Smith’s (though unlike them in just about every other regard) Yackulic’s paintings are a revelatory evocation of a vary particular Northern California. In this case, an East Bay light and landscape that is seared into my brain and heart forever from growing up in amongst it. This show is up through July 18th, so you’ve got time to get in there if you want to see it too.

Welcome to Further Reading!

Here you will find some suggestions of more books to read if you discover you now have a bit of an Automatic Noodle-shaped hole in your heart.

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Hi m’dears,

I’ve been thinking about how much I like making things. There is almost nothing that makes me so happy. I am a person who has a lot of ideas. This enables me to make a lot of stuff. Which means I get to be happy more of the time, because I get to be making things, or thinking about making things, more of the time.

Something I’ve gotten pretty good at over the years is evaluating my own ideas and discerning what to do with them. Which ones are things I make purely for my own enjoyment. Which are things I might share with a small group of other people (like a handmade zine). Which with a larger group (like an art show). And which might make sense to try and share with a whole lot of people (like writing a book).

Of course, I don’t get this right every time. No one can. I’ve mentioned this before: sometimes I think I’m making something really cool and it turns out that no one is interested. Example: I love and adore making monthly mix tapes. It’s one of the great little creative joys of my life. And, I can’t be sure, but I don’t think very many other people listen to them. Now, I could say: this doesn’t matter at all. I make them for my own pleasure and everything else is irrelevant. And to a large degree that is indeed true. But it is also true that I get such delight from making them that I want to share them with others. And so I persist in doing so even in the face of what I believe to be relative lack of interest. When really, if I were at my most discerning about what to do with which ideas, I might stop.

But, ah well. A certain amount of foolish persistence is perhaps inevitable. It might possibly even be a necessary part of the creative process. You have to be willing (and really not just willing, eager) to keep going in the face of a world which—when writ large—is, let’s face it, almost entirely indifferent to whatever you are doing. Eight billion people on the planet. Unless you are Beyoncé, the vast, vast majority don’t know what you are doing. And still you’ve got to be champing at the bit to make your work anyway.

Let’s be clear: I don’t say this too be discouraging. I say it to set us free. But I am always saying things that people hear as a downer when I mean them as just the opposite. Like that we are tiny specks in an infinite universe. Or that we are rapidly getting old. Or that we all will die. I mean, ok, I get it. That stuff is dark and bleak. Sure, sure. But it is also all simply true. To deny it is to deny the terms of life on this earth. If you pretend you don’t know the rules of the game, can you really get in there and play the game?

If we didn’t know our time was limited, could we appreciate beauty? I feel fairly confident that we could not. Most people will never know what you are making; you are next to nothing in the grand scheme of the universe; and soon enough you will get old (if you’re lucky) and die. And yet: you make stuff anyway. That makes you a fucking miracle.

The creative impulse is one of the most marvelous things. Finding ways to make stuff and share it with one another is a human need so deep and profound there is basically nothing else like it. No wonder it makes us happy. No wonder it makes me happy.

The notion of the tortured artist is bullshit. Oh, we torture artists. We’ve been finding ways to make artists lives’ miserable for quite a few hundred years now, no question. But I don’t for a minute believe that it’s their art, their creativity, their impulse toward making something that no one else has made before that has made them miserable. Rather, it was usually money. Or the ways we tend to treat people who are different. Or a few other fucked up things about the world that have tended to make life for artists a lot less than joyful. Not art.

Which is not to say that making art is always easy. It’s not skipping around in a field full of daisies, obviously. The process of creation can frequently be extremely difficult and it can certainly be tormenting enough to make you want to bang your head on the desk. But those kind of vocational struggles only turn you into a tormented soul if other aspects of your life are also going awry—and that happens not because your “artistic temperament” has unfitted you for life on this earth, but because the world as we know and have known it can so frequently be unkind, extractive, bigoted, and generally cruel. Or anyway, that’s my strongly held opinion.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying I’ve been coming up with and working on all kinds of new stuff. And enjoying doing so. When, of course, what I’m supposed to be doing is writing my book with Lisa Congdon. Of course, I am writing my book with Lisa Congdon. And it’s coming along very well. But, for me, there’s nothing like having a big project going on to spark a bunch of other little ideas for side projects.

I’ve been making boxes of curiosity. I’ve been doing drawings of 1980s and 90s Solano Avenue (if you have any photographs of this place and time please, PLEASE contact me! There are some specific places I really need to see). I’ve been learning how to needle felt (thanks for the lesson Risa Iwasaki Culbertson!). I’ve been having an awesome time putting together playlists and video selections and fieldtrip maps and other goodies for my new book club. I’ve even been toying with the very baby beginnings of some new book ideas which, I know, I know, is ridiculous, but it makes my brain so happy.

I want to make stuff because I am making stuff. Making begets more making. And I am both lucky enough and compulsive enough to keep on doing it. I kind of hope for your sake that you are, too. Because it can be such a source of joy.

New Books

Back when I worked in-house in book publishing I used to get very excited at the moment when I had in my possession finished copies of all my books for a publishing season and could take their pictures and show them off to the world. I would have assumed that particular pleasure was now over and done with. But I’ve come to realize there is actually a somewhat similar moment that’s evolved where I get to show you the books I’ve worked on recently. And it’s still really cool. Because nothing ever does beat a real book that you can hold in your hands. So, without further ado, I give you:

Jim Melchert: Where the Boundaries Are by Griff Williams — the first monograph of this important Bay Area ceramicist, sculptor, performance and conceptual artist.

Galloping Horses: Joan Francke Remick’s Quilts by Anne French — a beautiful self-produced book by a daughter honoring her mother’s boundary-pushing textile work.

Dr. Fun Guy’s Mushroom Journal and Foraging Guide by Dr. Gordon Walker — how-to guide and journal for learning to forage your own mushrooms safely and enjoyably.

Women Shaping the West: Stories from Wyoming by Lindsay Linton Buk — gorgeous photobook celebrating contemporary dozens of diverse contemporary women.

Link Pack

We haven’t done a round-up of fun links in a little while. Let’s have one, shall we?

Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog (and Dr. Teeth) on Jimmy Carson, circa 1975. Proof, if proof were needed, that Kermit is in fact a person. And that Henson was a genius. And that both things can be true at the same time. In true 70s fashion, the segment is rather slow to get going. Things warm up when Kermit appears at minute 2:45. And the hilarity really ensues around 4:40.

You Don’t Need to Pick a Lane You Need to Build a Studio. I have mixed feelings about this one. For one thing, I have pretty deep misgivings around all notions of “personal brand.” Nevertheless, I love what she has to say about a “Studio Model” approach to creativity. And I heartily agree with letting people who do a lot of different things keep on doing lots of different things. Worth a read.

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It. If the new AI features on Google are starting to drive you crazy (like they are me) there might be some solutions for you here. Hana of the substack Card Catalog is a librarian specializing in what she terms “information literacy”—or how to access good information as a source of power. This particular article teaches you how to improve your searches using all kinds of tools that are part built into Google, but not made obvious (like, at all).

Mix Tape

The other thing about mix tapes is that sharing them with others is entirely part of the point. Like, a really big part of the point in fact. This one, for instance, has one of the best opening tracks its been my pleasure to get to use in ages. And part of that pleasure is the giddy delight of thinking about putting that song inside other people’s ears and brains. And how then maybe they (that is, you) will feel some of the same “holy shit!” feeling I felt when I first heard it, and we will be connected by a ribbon of music and feeling, twisting through time and space. Dreamy.

xo

b

As always, all bookshop.org links are affiliate links. Thank you for bearing with me in late-stage capitalism.

Welcome!

Today I’ve got an update regarding our upcoming Book Club Meeting. Plus all the details on how to attend.

Normally we’ll meet at 1pm Pacific, on the first Friday of the month following our m…

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Welcome to Field Trip Notes!

This is the part where I suggest places to go to augment your reading experience of Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle. It is also the one post of the month where I have to…

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We’d been taking ballroom dance for half a year or so. They taught a different dance each month: rhumba, cha cha, waltz, foxtrot, west coast swing. Maybe it goes without saying that it was really fun. And it was around the six-month mark that we got to the tango.

As was usual in the class, we started by learning the steps without music, and then the teachers would use a few different songs throughout the rest of the class. And one of the songs they played that week was the tango song.

You know the one. DUM dum dum…DA-da-da-da-da. DUM dum dum…DA-da-da-da-da. I looked it up later and it’s called La Cumparsita. If you think of any music when you think of tango, it’s almost certainly this song you are thinking of.

So I was talking with Bill on the bus on the way home and I was, a bit sheepishly, admitting that almost my entire mental association with the tango—other than a few sultry scenes in movies over the years—comes from childhood memories of the playground.

Maybe around the third grade, it was a common game at recess for girls to grab one another and pretend to tango across the blacktop. Arms out stiff, facing in one direction, chanting the song “DUM dum dum dum…DA-da-da-da-da!” then a quick pivot to face in the other direction, including switching which arms were thrust out (something you’d never do in the actual dance) and march off in the other direction “DUM dum dum dum…DA-da-da-da-da!” Back and forth we’d go.

And Bill said, “Oh yeah! We totally did that too. And there was also the idea of the rose between the teeth.” Oh, yes, the rose! Yes, I agreed. Now, here’s the thing: I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bill grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. This was in the early 1980s, long before we had the internet to transmit memes into the brains of children nationwide.

How, and why, were Gen X kids pretending to do the tango on the playground on both coasts? This knowledge feels, in my brain, like all the jump-rope rhymes and handclapping games I picked up from the ether around the same age and still know to this day. Just childhood folklore that was transmitted unavoidably into my brain and the collective brains of all of my peers. But jump-rope rhymes make sense as a thing for school children to know and do. A fake tango categorically does not. What’s the deal?

So we started researching. The first lead we turned up was that there was a real and serious revival of tango going on in Argentina in the 1980s, where it had just been made legal again after having been outlawed for many years by the repressive junta. This led to it spreading in popularity through South America and eventually to the US as well. But, as cool as that sounds, I’m pretty sure it did not immediately reach a bunch of little school kids in the USA. We’d have had no real way of seeing or hearing about it.

Because it pretty much had to be TV right? What else was there for our generation? And we wouldn’t have seen the new exciting real Argentinian tango revival on the TV we were watching. But even knowing we were looking for some TV thing, finding the relevant TV references took some digging.

What you have to remember is that, as kids, we weren’t only watching current television. We watched so many reruns. I don’t know if they just weren’t making enough TV programs to fill all the hours in the day yet, or if they simply didn’t make enough programs for children specifically. But, whatever the reason, watching syndicated reruns of shows from twenty or thirty years before was a totally normal part of the viewing habits of 80s children (as you will of course recall, if you were one), even though this fact does now seem odd in retrospect.

But that’s where we found it. In a Tom and Jerry cartoon from 1956, Tom and a dancing bear do the tango to La Cumparsita. And in a famous I Love Lucy bit from 1957, Ricky tries to tango with Lucy while, for whatever reason, her blouse is full of eggs (which of course inevitably all break in the denouement)—the music, naturally, is La Cumparsita. In a 1964 episode of the the Addams Family, Gomez teaches Lurch to do the tango—at one point Gomez has rose between his teeth and they even do the switching-arms-back-and-forth thing.

There’s not a doubt in my mind that all three of these shows were being watched by large swathes of kids my age growing up in 1980s. And so this idea of tango-as-comedy, which apparently originally belonged to comedy writers of the 1950s and 1960s (the origins of which I haven’t uncovered but which I’m sure involved more than a little cultural prejudice), got passed down. And we picked it up the same way we were picking up so many other bits and bobs of cultural literacy, much of it inaccurate (ideas about quicksand and germanic opera divas and manifest destiny).

The thing that’s funny about this one, though, is that it’s also ironic. Not in the say-one-thing-and-mean-the-opposite sense, exactly, or the Alanis Morrissette rain-on-your-wedding day sense (which, I know, I know, is not really ironic, but we know the sort of situational “the firehouse burned down” irony she was trying to convey). But in the way the Oxford English Dictionary describes thus:

“In 20th-cent. criticism the application of irony has expanded to encompass non-verbal expression in fields such as art and music where it denotes a distancing from and playful engagement with what has come before.”

A distancing from and playful engagement with what has come before. I think it’s fair to say that the midcentury comedy writers were mocking the tango. But we as little kids couldn’t know that. We had never seen and weren’t engaging with the real tango at all. We were engaging with the only tango-related cultural products we had seen: the 50s and 60s cartoons and black-and-white sitcoms. And we were engaging with them playfully. While at the same time distancing ourselves from them so fully that it took me a week of digging to find my way back.

Many years ago, when anyone talked about Gen X at all—back when we were young enough to be worrisome—we were often described as a generation defined by irony. There was a fair amount of hand-wringing over our sarcasm, our cynicism, our disinclination to take things seriously. As if we were a whole generation of Ethan Hawkes and Winona Ryders, tossing our floppy hair around and rolling our eyes and smoking cigarettes, forever on the verge of saying something snarky that revealed the depth of our disengagement.

I found this exasperating and nonsensical at the time. But now I wonder. If a whole generation of kids were doing the Ironic Playground Tango before we reached the double digits, maybe there was something in it after all. Maybe our capacity to ironically deconstruct culture was baked into our brains all along. And maybe that was something for an earlier generation to feel intimidated by.

Or maybe that song is just really, really catchy.

It’s not too late! If you want to join the Bay Area Book Club, go ahead and do it and I’ll forward you the email you’ve missed with this month’s (very short) book selection (plus extras)!

Welcome to the Secret Video Store!

Here you will find videos to watch (usually a selection of shorts, though perhaps occasionally a full-length movie) that I hope and trust will augment your enjoyment…

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