More letterpress! So far, my two strongest impressions of printing on a press are related:

I gave a little five minute survey to my students on Friday. I do this kind of thing occasionally because I never have any idea how effective I am. But also, there are always comments like this and I love them:

I’m suddenly one those people with not enough time. That in itself wouldn’t be so strange if it weren’t for the fact that, just a few weeks ago, I was fully embedded in the opposite circumstance. Now, I’m writing to-do lists and falling asleep at nine thirty on Friday nights.

But no matter: the postcard (film) project is done!

Well, almost done. Nowell is going to comb through edit #26 on his own to fix the few shots that still bother him, which will probably resemble something like airbrushing out someone’s pimples from a satellite photo (another reason to love collaborating with him). Wow: when we started this project, Nowell was single, I was still in grad school, and nobody knew who John Edwards was. Now Nowell is a married homeowner, I teach the classes, and John Edwards has his own bus. Look at this soundtrack:

We will have all four glorious minutes in streaming Quicktime for your video iPods in no time.

In parallel, I am screen printing a set of postcards for the Castro Street Fair, which takes place at the world’s gayest intersection this October. My art friend, Adrienne, two of her art friends, and I are setting up a booth to sell stuff. This will be my first official set so I am going to try extra hard. My goal is to make fifty sets of twelve San Francisco postcards, all stuff south of Cesar Chavez St.—a continuation of the “anti-San Francisco postcard” theme. (Oh God, if I ever put an art idea in quotes again, please punish me with, um, a week of nothing but reading A.P. Democratic primary articles.) Here are two of the photos I’m printing from:

Oh, and letterpress: I began my first printing workshop a few weeks ago. You know, like Gutenberg-style. If my screen prints bored you, well, prepare for a whole new way to be underwhelmed that you didn’t realize existed. But this stuff is cool. It makes me think intently about words and, to a greater extent, letters. And not just semantics, but the physicality of letters: typefaces and spacing and the way you can turn commas into apostrophes or quotation marks.

Maybe you kind of have to be there. The first night we were pummeled with a comical barrage of 500 years worth of esoteric vocabulary (”hold your composing stick flush with the galley in order to avoid pied type and then tighten the quoin [with the quoin key, of course]“). There are even the letterpress-originating idioms (e.g.: because a “sort” is an individual piece of type, you are “out of sorts” when you run out of e’s). Anyway, it’s still all quick foxes and lazy dogs. Every person in the workshop contributed three lines to the first exercise. I had the Garamond 18:

Another great photo booth shoot, taken with the outstanding unit at The Knockout, after Thursday night Bingo. I especially like the second one: