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A few weeks ago I saw Ban on a Can perform Music for Airports. Here's a great documentary about Brian Eno and ambient music.


Bowie's Minimoog from Brian Eno.

Ryuichi Sakamoto and Derrida. 

Remember SOPA? So do lobbyists.

President Obama's big sticks.

Funk dumpling.

Notes from Woody Allen to Diane Keaton.

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A painting by Mark Chadwick. This painter I found through Lion Skeleton.

This story of Himalayan honey hunters fascinates me.

I'm just thinking about climbing as well.

Passive voice day ya'll.

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The Philip K. Dick android.

I've always been fascinated by the idea of transhumanism. Here is a great article from Harper's about the blurred line between man and machine.

Did you know that Arthur C. Clarke was responsible for the development of the geostationary satellite. If it weren't for Clarke, we might not have cell phone communication.

The Artificial Ape- a book about how technology has influenced human evolution.

Lithic technology and human evolution.

Brain Cookies 23

The journal has gone to the printers.

Love these photos of horses.

Read Markson. That is something we should do.

How about two L.A. Review of Books Pushcart winning essays here and here?

Harvard University protests journal publishing fees.

From a ten-year editor, part 2: My offset fetish

Leadership is stunning and weighted and breathlessly vulnerable. In the ten years leading this mag, I have learned many lessons, crossed many lines, risked friendships and futures, and stretched far beyond what I thought was possible. So in the lead-up to Versal's 10-year anniversary and tenth edition, I would like to share some of what it's been like to be Versal's editor, stories that intersect, inevitably, with the larger conversations out there around editing, writing, publishing, women, and inclusion.


Part 2: My offset fetish

Yesterday, Shayna and I traveled up to Velsen-Noord, a village north of Haarlem with a population of about 5000. According to Wikipedia, it was originally founded by the Romans. Today, it's a steel town -- or a post-steel town, depending. It's also where our printer, Pantheon Drukkers, makes its home.


For an offset printer, Versal is a pretty straightforward job, its layout, design and requirements fitting nicely into the offset mindset. Usually we've only had to check a few plot proofs before the machines start running. But as Versal has evolved and particularly the art choices have become more complex, working with the printer has taken on a more collaborative relationship. This is the first time we've made site visits, in fact. Years of working closely with Milly and René at Pantheon have fine-tuned our processes, and this year, with our top-secret cover, it was clear we needed to travel up there and do some tests. We would also look at high-res proofs of the artwork to make sure the color levels were accurate, and test those on the new paper. Every factor can make a difference in what comes out at the end.


Versal 1 was printed, I'll admit, on a digital printer. We didn't have the resources back then to go offset, and we only printed 150 copies anyway. We received a small "starters grant" from a Dutch literary foundation in 2003 -- the only external funding we've ever received -- and took Versal 2 up a notch, gave it a spine, offset and a print run of 500. Those first offset issues, up until Versal 4 I think, were printed somewhere in Prague. I never knew much about the outfit, just that they were artists and printers, and they gave us a good deal. But problems arose quickly. They didn't speak much English or any Dutch; we had to work with them in broken German. And they would ship the copies over via large and rather creepily empty semi-trucks. What a sight to see that black semi parked outside my small Dutch apartment. Then one year, the truck was stopped at the German border (this was before the Czech Republic entered the EU). It was almost turned around. Somehow, the driver made it through the interrogation and we got our Versals. But for months after that, Annerie and I were finagling with Dutch customs agents, even taking trips out to Schiphol Airport where we left our passports as we entered through "Door 14" and basically paid someone a lot of money to get off our backs.


***

I love the smell of printers. My uncle owns a printshop in Nashville where my cousin and I would spend summers working for pennies, and I even manned the design desk at Kinkos one year in college. The combined smell of paper, ink, and those massive machines. I freakin' love it.


And though I also love letterpress and handmade, and all the beautiful books coming out of that right now (including mine! soon!) offset is where my heart lies. I'm a child of the 90s desktop revolution, of Quark and Pagemaker, CMYK and Pantone. I like imagining plates of Versals cracking in a recycling landfill somewhere (are they recyclable?). I like reams of paper, the boxes of envelopes with the sample tucking out. And seeing the cover come off the press yesterday, the plate circulating quickly on its roller, the ink still wet to the touch -- yeah, it's a fetish, it's my love of office supply stores, school supply shopping, pens and the smell of new books.


Will I jinx Versal 10 if I say it's my favorite so far? I fell in love with it all over again yesterday. I really hope you'll love it too.

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An art centric Brain Cookies 22. 

Here is a fantastic post on the WFMU blog about the failed Dune collaboration between recently deceased artist Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky.


It's the book within a book t-shirt!


Two scary stories of solitary confinement here and here. 


If you remove the last panel from a Peanuts cartoon ...


Do you like Vincent Gallo? 

Here's one for fiction editor Robert Glick: artist Nina Katchadourian making Flemish portraits using airline provided accouterments. 

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Thanks to the excellent If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger blog for bringing together to T.V. favorites in my RSS feed this morning. Robot and man as one.

Any who, Brain Cookies number 21.

Did you know publishers have a punctuation clause in most contracts? Neither did I ...

Now that U.S. taxes are filed, here's an article on why you can't do your taxes in five minutes. Glad I didn't see this before filling out line 52c or whatever the hell it's called. I hope I carried that zero ...

We got it all. Don't we? What else do we need from the internet?

Savage Europeans ... I don't know how to feel about this.