On Being a Good Parent

The End was just translated into French and published by Atrabile. The life of that book has been curious. The first half came out in 2007 to fairly limited notice as part of Fantagraphics' Ignatz series. I'd promised them a book in the series years before my fiancee Cheryl had even gotten sick. in 2007 my time was up and I had nothing to give them. So I turned to various scattered ruminations on grief I was filling my sketchbooks with. When The End #1 came out it felt very much like half a book to me, even then. Material already existed for the follow-up, but I just wasn't psychically prepared to wade back into the material for a second issue yet. So I let it languish. But as an author, there is something pretty uncomfortable to me in knowing I have a kind of crippled, half-finished child out in the world struggling to get by without my full care and attention. It's not really a fair thing to do to a story. Time passed. In 2013 I felt like I had enough distance to go back to it.

And it's done pretty well, without its handicap. It's an unusual book, even so. But people seem to respond to it. Voices as diverse as Zak Sally and my own mother have ventured that it may be their favorite book of mine. Which is saying something – it's probably also the piece most likely to make you dissolve into a puddle. It was nominated for an LA Book award, and now for the Selection Officielle at Angouleme (along with like thirty other books, it should be said). It's remarkable to see one's work grow up, leave home and have a life of its own out in the world. As someone who started out self-publishing in runs of 20 or 50 it still feels magical and inexplicable to me that something so deeply idiosyncratic, made for my own reasons without an audience in mind finds that audience nevertheless.

Anyway, I'm doing my best to help it out, now. I'll be heading to France a week before Angouleme to be in Besançon for Goat Without a Face an exhibition of artwork from PFC5, the residency I helped organize at MCAD last summer (see below). Then to Paris to be on hand for the opening of an exhibition at Galerie Martel honoring D&Q's 25th anniversary (January 26th, I'll have pages from Big Questions in the show), and do a signing at Super Heros (January 27th). Then to Angouleme, where I'll be doing some sort of talk or workshop or something, (exactly what is yet to be decided).

Holly's next record

Early last year I did a record cover for my friend Holly's first record. Somehow I never got around to blogging it, but she's crowdfunding the money for her second record now, ending today (January 5th), in fact, so maybe now is as good a time as any. Aside from Holly being one of my favorite people on the planet, I have an interest in the fundraising, because I'm slated to do the cover of the second go round as well. Here's an image of the first record, a gatefold with foil stamping:

And the inside:

Part of the connection is that one of the songs on this first record, written before I ever met Holly, was inspired by a piece in my book The End.

The cover of the second record will be a continuation of the visual ideas as the first, so they'll be something of a set. Also it's a double LP.

Holly's already been in the studio a bunch. The new record is being recorded at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco, produced by John Vanderslice. Alan Sparhawk (of Low) is playing on it, as are a few other great people you can read about here. Some of my sketches and preparatory drawings for the design are also on offer as rewards in the campaign. So go help a girl out.

If you want a copy of the first record you might be able to get one from her, but I also just put a few copies up at my store site, here.

Magic and Loss

I just read that Lou Reed died. Which is crazy. There aren't that many artists of his generation whose death would stop me in my tracks. Fewer that I'd be compelled to write something about. But one of his records was a particular touchstone for me. If I was in New York right now I'd probably feel compelled to go to his house and leave flowers. Which sounds ridiculous.

Like any kid, I had phases with lots of artists from my parent's record collections. They all had their moments. Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Neil Young, all the usual suspects. Lou Reed was the same generation, but he was different. The music never felt tied to an earlier era. It wasn't old music that I was nevertheless able to relate to; it didn't feel old. It felt like it was mine. It always felt honest and straightforward, even when some of the records didn't quite connect. In high school, along with Transformer and Velvet Underground and Nico I listened to New York over and over. In the nineties when I was in college Set the Twilight Reeling came out and I listened to that on repeat. When the tape wore out I bought the CD (the design of that CD, too – brilliant, with the transparent blue plastic and the yellow ink...).

I still consider that one of the best records about falling in love ever made, which is saying a lot. And the fact that it was about Laurie Andersen only made it that much more awesome. Songs for Drella is one of the best biographies in any medium. It makes you feel like you kind of knew this Andy Warhol person. And I don't even really like Warhol that much as an artist. I still play those songs, twenty five years after the fact. It's truly great music. But that's not why I would go to his house.

Magic and Loss appeared in the early nineties, around the time I was heading to college in New Mexico. I think I got the tape in the mail as part of some sort of "10 tapes for 99¢" deal in an ad in Rolling Stone. The record is about the deaths of two close friends from cancer. The songs are heartbreaking and some of the most inspired music he ever laid down. But I also remember listening to this incredibly raw, intimate record on my walkman as I paced the stacks in the library for my workstudy job, and sort of wondering if it was really meant for me to hear. It felt a little like, as good as it was, maybe he should have kept it to himself. It was just... so... heavy. I listened to it a handful of times and then put it away. For about twelve years.

Since my own book on the same subject came out a few months ago that record has come up more than once in conversations about what it means to tell such an intense, intensely personal story, to bare the rawest moments of one's life in a work of art and make it public. I remember that feeling, and I know there are people that feel the same way about The End. They've told me. On the one hand I understand, now, from my new vantage point, that, at the time, Reed probably just didn't give a shit. That's the music he was making and if people didn't want to deal, fuck 'em. Grief does that to a person even if he's not the great uncle of punk rock. But on the other hand I also know now that it turns out that work like that does have an audience. It may not be 19 year old college students who've never lost anything precious. But others have. They might get it, and be grateful that someone was able to put feelings they didn't know how to wrestle with into words, into music, into pictures. That record got played by me when I was in that place. It did that weird thing that art does. It helped me  actually feel.

I'm sure a thousand blogs will be choosing among his songs to say thanks and goodbye in the next few days, which is as it should be. He wrote better rockers than this one, he wrote great songs that are about loving life, ice cream, how awesome it is to love a girl. For what it's worth, if I was him I'd probably rather be remembered for one of those. But fuck it. Here's one about being sorry that someone who was important to you has to go. Thanks. And goodbye.

The End: Outtakes and Curiosities

Apropos of the release of The End  this week, below are a few outtakes and curiosities from the book, beginning with the layout 'map' of post-its that I used in the last few weeks to keep the overall sequence of pieces straight in my mind while moving them around. It can be a bear keeping everything flowing just right – balancing the rhythm and content of the individual pieces with chronology while also keeping two-page spreads on even/odd pages... there is also one 16 page color section (signature) that had to begin on a page number that was divisible by 16 (the pages in red outline mark the beginning of each 16 page signature). Keeping all this straight can be a little crazy-making.

One of the main anchors of the book is the piece solve for x. An early draft of the piece was done originally for a show at Junc in L.A. in 2006, curated by Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson. They sent participants a small accordion book to draw in for the show. I used mine to adapt and rework some of the messy venting I was doing in my sketchbooks at the time.

The piece always worked in a way, but felt ever so slightly incomplete, even as I was laying it out for The End #1 later in 2006. It was late in the editing/proofing process for that book that the idea for a parallel algebraic monologue fell in my lap. This is a sheet of corrections to be scanned and inserted, which includes that parallel monologue for the first time. I've always liked how these corrections sheets can become like weird poems all on their own.

One of the main pieces that didn't make it into The End #1 is this piece, You Were Born and So You're Free. Originally I did this as a screenprint in an edition of 120 (I think) on a collection of topographical maps of Cheryl's, though it also existed as a slide reading, which is closer to how it appears in the new book.

There is one section from The End #1 that I ended up cutting from the new book. A few months after Cheryl's death I went to Europe – Dogs and Water had just come out in French and my publisher brought me to Angouleme to promote it. I extended the free trip to just get away from my life for a bit. My friend Ryan met me in Spain for a week to skate, and I went to Berlin after that to visit my friend Nina. The End #1 had a few pages of sketches and lists from that visit. I included them in The End #1 half as filler and half as a sort of juxtaposition of normality.
The last few images are included to give a sense of how this material existed in my sketchbooks, where it began, and a few of the half-finished fragments that didn't make it in the book for whatever reason (there are many many dozens more pages in that category). Even most of what did make it in was not originally intended for publication, so there are no 'originals' in the usual sense.
Below on the right is a drawing of me and Mike McGinley working brunch at Lula. Which has nothing to do with anything.

In 2007, about a year and a half after Cheryl's death my sister had a son. I wrote a piece for a family gathering in his honor. Later that year I added visuals and it was turned into a six color screen-print in collaboration with Sonnenzimmer, this image is an early version of the idea for that print. It was probably this piece more than any of the others that made me feel like there might be a good reason to publish the material as a whole – finishing the story started in The End #1 – that it might add up to something greater than a well-crafted, but bitter, self-pitying lament. This piece also appears in substantially altered form in the book.

Empty Words

The revised and expanded edition of The End is now out for real. Today a little interview I did about the book with It's Nice That went up, with some excerpts. I'll probably do a few posts of outtakes and process things – the book's own biography that I mention. But first I'm going to take the moment as an opportunity to remember Cheryl. She made tons of little hand-made books of all sorts: sketchbooks, her own work and in this case a sort of reconfiguring of a selection from John Cage's Empty Words. She made several versions of this (I actually made a small screen printed edition the year after she died). More of her work is here.