Zinefest + afterparty, Ex Lovers illo, music

Be sure to attend the Twin Cities Zinefest on at Stevens Square Center for the Arts, 1905 3rd Ave S., Minneapolis. Admission is free. Here is the schedule:

Saturday, July 11th
11am-5pm

1pm : open mic zine reading (by attendees and exhibitors)
3pm : MPLS Zines (documentary by Monica Anderson)
4pm : Presentation Night (Minneapolis’ own living zine)

Sunday, July 12th
11am-4pm

12pm : Starting a Distribution Co-op with Likeminded Publications (workshop with Microcosm’s Joe Biel - limit 20 participants)
2pm : If It Ain’t Cheap, It Ain’t Punk: 15 Years of Plan-it X Records (documentary by Joe Biel)

I will be sharing a table with Abby Mullen.

Also on SATURDAY is the Zinefest afterparty at Arise! Bookstore at 2441 Lyndale Ave. S at 6 PM. The show is FREE and features Teenage Moods, Bla Bla Blacksheep, Gerald Prokop and Zombie Season. I am a big fan of Teenage Moods and Bla Bla so I highly recommend this show!

This is an illo for the debut album by Minneapolis pro-union bluegrass band the Ex Lovers. I am told that the image will be made into a foldout poster. Songs about the union and love... reminds me of Billy Bragg. Which isn't what they sound like really, but reminding me of Billy Bragg is always a good thing, no matter how it happens.

Reynold Kissling's Kingwood Himself is up on Top Shelf 2.0. Reynold and I are working on graphic novel, Nils, that we are in the process of pitching to publishers. Renny's drawings, my words, concept by the both of us. I am finishing up the script for what should be a 80-page or so book (it's hard for me to tell because I'm not breaking it down into comic pages).

As far as the Go Negativ #2 release party, my attempts to attend were squashed by a flattened bike tire on the way there, after leaving Rainbow so Andrew could get money, and I bought corn and bananas. I hope to see the zine soon! "How Do You Fill the Void?" is one of my favorite pieces of mine and I'm looking forward to seeing it in print.


"Coney Island Baby" by Lou Reed, with someone throwing archive footage behind there...


I just bought this record. It's GREAT! It's Neil Young Live at Massey Hall 1971.


And I can't talk about music for too long without coming around to R.E.M.... live "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" from '85. I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new reissue of this record, Reckoning, in the mail.

Minneapolis fireworks at the Stone Arch Bridge were again wonderful -- the final Minneapolis summer is rollin along... I have to say, it was the most freewheeling day I can remember having. A lot of chance meetings and good luck. It was a good send-off, MPLS, and I'll miss you...
Someone is playing Chet Baker, I can hear through my window.

Go Negativ release party tonight

"New collection of locally created fiction, non-fiction, poetry, cartoon, painting, drawing, intaglio, photography and digital art

Issue #2 from the Twin Cities literary/arts zine that brought you such hard-hitting cultural commentary as "Jack Van Impe Battles A Satanic Tower of Upside Down Hamburgers" and "An Idiot Writes a Letter to the freecreditreport.com Commercial" is headed your way, primed to spread a new wave of creative sardonism, merry muckraking and general ill willery over our fair mini-tropolis.

Featuring original works by: Ann Schrempp, Brian Borlaug, Bryce Beverlin II, Christopher Matthew Jensen, Dan Kolbo, Dana Raidt, Danny Sigelman, David Hansen, Ed Choy Moorman, Joe Price, Josh Iwaszko, Nikki Miller, Paul Fonfara, Summer Binkley and TD Mischke

Zine release party details:

Friday, July 3^rd, 10pm

7^th Street Entry

Performers:

Magic Castles

Dark Dark Dark

Hurray for the Riff Raff (New Orleans)

Paul Metzger

$7 admission (all proceeds donated to Fremont Community Clinics: http://www.fremonthealth.org/)"

New Egon Schiele poster

Egon Schiele's death mask, 1918, after Gustinos Ambrosi.

New poster for Zinefest. 12.5x12.5", $5, on watercolor paper, signed and numbered.

So a for awhile I've been saying that I was gonna make a zine about my experiences in museums in Vienna. That seed grew into this thing. I made the drawing in the Leopold Museum, and I made the design on my porch in Minneapolis.
Shout out to Alex R. my travel buddy on the trip (Prague too), and Jenny who recommended this and the Albertina. (The Belvedere Museum was my other favorite.)

The final Minneapolis summer is well under way. Come mid-August I make my way to the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago. I will miss all the friends I've made here and I look forward to a new chapter in the little book.

The medium is the Thai massage.

My Schulz-inspired parody of the Experimental Jetset-created Beatles shirt (shown below). My version dedicated to Brad, Abby, and Maddie.

You know it. The design which has been re-interpreted by many since its inception.
Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam-based designer team, visited MCAD after their lecture at the Walker Art Center and I was lucky enough to chance upon their critique of a student "sandwich board" project. I love the above shirt and for some reason had the idea to bring Peanuts into it -- go figure -- I think I was listening to the Vince Guaraldi Trio's Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack for the billionth time.

Since U Been Gone

MoCCA Fest

I'm laughing and saying, "Someone kill me now."

I am pictured here in the middle standing by Meghan Hogan of 2D Cloud and tall Sean Lynch during the MoCCA Fest in NYC. Co-tablemates Raighne Hogan and Nic Breutzman not pictured, nor is trusty table-assist Mako Homura. Photo stolen from Shawn Hoke. I couldn't resist the rhyme in the above title.

Speaking of Breutzman and Hogans, if I were in Minneapolis this weekend, I'd go to this. Yearbooks is really something, a fucked-up tense, paranoid vision of high school. I don't get the European spelling of 'colour' but everything else I do.

Buy Ghost Comics!
Ghost Comics is now available at several Minneapolis stores, including Arise! and Big Brain Comics. You can buy it on-line from Magers & Quinn.

Review Round-Up Round 2
Dark Cloud Comin' reviewed at The Comics Reporter. Tom Spurgeon says, "I would suggest paying attention to what Ed Choy Moorman does over the next few years."
And review at High-Low. Rob Clough says, "There are a number of striking images in this comic... Moorman is bursting with ideas, and each successive comic of his I read is better than the last."

I'll be interviewed by the Inkstuds radio show sometime soon... I really recommend this podcast, and am thrilled and confused that this is going to happen, as I have been listening to the eps in which Robin McConnell interviews Jaime Hernandez, Mariko Tamaki, and Ivan Brunetti. Listening to Mariko's interview was especially good to hear as I am working on some comic projects as a writer only, and Skim (drawn by Jillian Tamaki) is a blinding beacon of comic book brilliance. I think graphic novels or indie comics from teams as opposed to just solo creators is making a slow resurgence. Eddie Campbell and Dan Best made a wonderful book called The Amazing Remarkable Monseur Leotard that was also an inspiration to me showing a great team effort.

Europe


I recently visited Vienna and Prague as a mini version of the classic post-college European trip. I stayed with family friends the Reichmeirs and my friend Alex Roche came along for the ride, as I joined her in Prague during her own, longer Eurotrip.

Pictured above is the statue of Jan Hus in Prague's old town square. I was crazy about this thing for probably obvious reasons. Every Czech statue looks pensive, tense, some of them ready to cry. Statues in Vienna are all flexing their muscles in righteous victory or crushing their enemies.

I didn't see the Kafka Museum or anything relating to him, unfortunately. He was a favorite in high school. I strained my foot walking up big cobblestone hills, which hurt my mobility a bit for the rest of the trip.

I was lucky enough to see an Egon Schiele retrospective at the Leopold Museum. Schiele is pictured above, 60 years too early for post-punk.

Schiele is my second favorite painter, after Ben Shahn. Klimt is third, and a number of his works are available to see at the Belvedere in Vienna (including The Kiss, which it turns out has gold and silver plating). Other museums seen and recommended: Momuk (modern, was lucky to see the animations of Maria Lassnig and the Cy Twombly retrospective that gave me a new view of his work) and the Secession (only thing to see then was Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, but it is worth the insanely expensive entrance fee).

Here is Schiele's The Family from 1918, one of his last paintings before he died. It is from Schiele's "Late Classic" period, where everything got calmer and steadier. More subtle. Schiele's wife Edith died of the Spanish flu while pregnant, and Egon died three days later. I couldn't get away from this painting at the Belvedere.

A zine of my drawings and notes from museums there will follow soon.

We also were lucky to see the opera Faust and the Tchaikovsky ballet of Anna Karenina at the Vienna Opera House.

Twitter
You'll see on the left that I just started using this Twitter thing. Kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Zinefest
I will be at the Twin Cities Zinefest on July 11 & 12 at Stevens Square Center for the Arts. I plan to be premiering 2 new zines:
Egon Schiele Draws Butt Hair: A Tiny Travelogue
Friendship Bracelet with Abby Mullen

Review round-up, MoCCA, Mazzuchelli, Byrne in Brooklyn

Kevin Bramer reviews Dark Cloud Comin' at Optical Sloth.

Henry Chamberlain reviews Ghost Comics at Newsarama.

Rick Bradford reviewed The Love Song of Kermit the Frog awhile back on Poopsheet.

There's so much I want to write about and so little time. I go to Vienna and Prague for 10 days tomorrow. I'll try to write more after my trip.


MoCCA was stressful and great. Highlights were seeing this guy for the first time since I was 17, saying hello to Ghost Comics contributors Corinne Mucha and Lucy Knisley, seeing Seth in his daily costume, tabling and hanging with my friends, and perhaps best of all, David Mazzuchelli's show at the MoCCA Museum (see the show! Up til August 23!) along with meeting the man and getting ahold of the best book of the year (yes, I know it's June), Asterios Polyp.

The capper to a crazy weekend was a day with Sean and Mako selling Sean & I's comics to Forbidden Planet (which was particularly a pleasure because FP's buyer ) and Jim Hanley's Universe, and Mako meeting a ukelele player and getting an impromptu lesson in a park. I also introduced the one Midwesterner and the one Japanese to the New York treat of Mr. Softee.
And then, a friend alerted me to a free David Byrne show in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. See a review here. I wasn't even in the actual show area (due to a crowd of thousands more than could be fit), but in an outside area in front of a screen and speakers. Amazingly, this seemed as good as being there. It must be the magic of the man and his backup performers. Being in the front row in front of a screen somehow had as much good vibes and dancing folks as any great show I've been to (and more space). And I smelled more weed smoke than I've EVER SMELLED IN MY LIFE. Apparently Brooklynites like to party. Thanks David Byrne, and thanks Brooklyn.

See you in New York!

At the MoCCA Fest, in the 69th Regiment Armory Building. Apparently, the same Armory where people shat themselves in anger or joy over Nude Descending a Staircase.

Info for the Fest and the Mazzuchelli opening here. I'll be tabling with Raighne and Meghan Hogan of 2D Cloud, Nic Breutzman, and tall Sean Lynch. Please come and say hello! I will be there with Ghost Comics, Dark Cloud Comin', The Love Song of Kermit the Frog, Chris Ware: Paper Musician, and Blue Blue Blues starring Sonic.

The David Mazzuchelli show will feature art from his NEW GRAPHIC NOVEL Asterios Polyp. And the show will include his Daredevil: Born Again and Batman: Year One pages, AKA the best superhero comics ever made, and yes I will stand by that. (Though if cornered, I would probably switch my wording from 'best' to 'my favorite'.)

And that same night there will be a great show / signing at Giant Robot, the opening for the Panelists show paired with a release party for Austin English's Windy Corner #3 (which is a wonderful magazine) featuring Lilli Carré and others.

That's all one day (except MoCCA is both Saturday and Sunday), Saturday. And I got invited to gay dancing (and I've been told that my friend's friend "knows people," whatever that means), as well as another party. DAMN. Gon be more tired than when my friend Anton and I spent a long summer's day at Coney Island at a free show seeing Modest Mouse and other bands that mostly sucked, packed in a mass of sweltering fleshy bodies.

I'll leave us with that.