Monday, June 4, I will be attending the BEA Bloggers Conference. The regular Book Expo America (BEA) is from Tuesday, June 5-7, but first I’m looking forward to hearing from and meeting many other book bloggers. I’ve been attending this convention virtually every year since 1978, and it’s always a thrill. This year is going to be an exciting one, and it all starts in a few hours.
Saturday was a perfect day for me and Kyle to go to Bushwick Open Studios (BOS) in Brooklyn. Our plan was to meet up with Kyle’s friend, painter Louisa Waber, and see as much as we could over the course of the afternoon. Before leaving we checked the BOS online catalog and jotted down several art venues that we knew we to wanted to hit, while still leaving opportunity for serendipitous discoveries. This year, the sixth annual BOS, there were more than 525 studios and galleries open to the public—so much to see and not enough time to see it all. What struck us immediately, and held true throughout the day, was the fresh, open, and unselfconscious quality of the artists and the work they were showing.
Our first stop was Norte Maar on Wyckoff St., where we’d read that we could pick up a printed catalog including helpful maps of the six zones where BOS was happening. After viewing the show of paper and film collages by Oliver Ralli and a video by his music group PassKontrol, we headed over to the exhibition AllTogetherNow organized by Julie Torres at The Coin Locker on Starr Street. The group of eleven artists in this show came from Australia, Europe, and across North America, having first been drawn to each other’s work on Facebook. Torres organized the exhibit and invited them to Brooklyn to show their paintings and spend time working together on collaborative pieces. All of them had met in person only for the first time in the past week. Hanging the show, she gave the artist the opportunity to step back from their work while she made connections among individual pieces that might not otherwise have emerged. The artists told us that Julie instructed them to place their works on the floor in front of the wall it would hang on and then “go get a cup of coffee.” Julie then translated the art on to the walls.
A sentiment expressed by several of the artists we spoke with, including Brian Cypher, Peter Shear, Vincent Hawkins, Inga Dalrymple, and Ian White Williams, was how they appreciated the chance to better understand each other’s creative process by collaborating on small works on paper. An artist would begin a piece and then another artist would choose to respond to the last artist’s drawn marks, shapes or color. The piece would be passed around and worked on until they felt that it was ready to put on the “finished pile.” The exhibition included works by the individual artists and the collaborative pieces they’d completed together.
Back out on Jefferson Street, we stopped for a free hot dog and iced tea outside the newly opening Cobra Club. A word to culinary carnivores: the hot dogs were from the cool Brooklyn butcher Meathook.
The next stop we made had not been on our list but the door was open and so we walked in, meeting two young female artists sharing a space on industrial Johnson Street, Alison Kizu-Blair and Sophie Stone. They told us that they’d been working in their apartments on very small-scale pieces until they decided to rent this space together. Close friends—Alison a painter and Sophie working more sculpturally—both are finding a new kind of freedom sharing the Bushwick studio. Alison said that earlier she’d only been able to work on small collages, while the studio space now allowed her to work larger and in oil paint, while her friend Sophie is able to create free-standing sculptural tiles and works in paper pulp and corrugated cardboard which she could not do in her apartment.
Next we continued on foot down desolate Johnson Street which was lined with idling trucks emitting odors and parked cement-mixing trucks until we reached The Active Space on Stewart Street to view Deborah Brown’s exhibition “Freewheeling.” The large space showed off Brown’s vibrantly painted canvases in hot saturated color that contrasted the junk cars and derelict junkyard landscapes.
Later, at The Active Space we walked in and out of studios where artists were working and meeting people. We met painter and fiber artist Emily Auchincloss who draws inspiration from weavers in Morocco who make boucherouite rugs. Another studio we visited was that of Jen Hitchings, who makes paintings related to her emotional connection with photography.
On 117 Grattan Street we were welcomed by artist Sharon Butler of the blog Two Coats of Paint where we viewed a group show curated by Austin Thomas, mounted in Sharon’s studio. This was a selection of four artists’ work that quietly related to one another. We noticed an old Royal portable typewriter that Sharon said she uses when she’s working in her studio. She does not have a computer in the studio and prefers staying offline while there. She uses the typewriter to make lists of different ideas and thoughts that come into her mind. Her views of Brooklyn rooftops and buildings provide an inspiration for her own paintings.
As the afternoon waned and we began to tire, we just had time for a visit to StorefrontBushwick on Wilson Street to see another group show. This was a collection of pieces by artists Abdolreza Aminari, Drew Shiflett, Paula Overbay, Lauren Seiden. Matthew Mahler, and Nancy Bowen. Aminari, from Iran, had delicate gold thread sewn through paper pieces, a nice contrast to Shiflett’s “Easel Sculpture #2” made from paper, fabric, glue, cardboard, wood polyester stuffing, Styrofoam and wire. In Seiden’s work, the layering of graphite on paper had a dense materiality.
Though there was much more we wanted to see, we stopped for a cold drink and a Mexican snack and the three of us shared our impressions of our afternoon’s long ramble through what amounted to only a mere sliver of BOS. We hope this report and the photos below give our readers a sense of how working artists have come together to forge a strong creative community in Bushwick, while it continues to evolve in new ways. / / more. . . click through to see all 50 + photos
As an in-house editor at more than a half-dozen publishing companies over twenty-five years, one of my biggest challenges was always to try and keep somewhat current with the enormous volume of printed submissions (full manuscripts and proposals) that was continually flooding in across my desk. And once the Internet fully entered the workflow, the volume–owing to the greater ease with which agents and authors could submit material–took an exponential leap. The required reading, to borrow a phrase from school days, was enormous and punishing, and sometimes it really did feel like homework. My colleagues and I fought a mostly losing battle to read it all in timely fashion, while maintaining an appreciation of the vision and imagination with which the work had been created, and then deciding if it was something we could acquire, edit and publish with a fair chance of critical and commercial success.
I always kept a log of incoming submissions, and to impose organization on the printed material I used shelving units with cubby holes alphabetized by author or agent last name, at least in theory helping me keep a visual and mental track of it all. But even with good intentions, and frequent resolutions to do better, we inevitably fell behind. This meant that first weeks, then months, and sometimes many months, might go by before we’d let an author or agent know if we wanted to pursue a project, or that we were declining it. I knew it was hard for agents and authors to accept the situation, but the truth then–and still–is that the dynamic generally favored buyers not sellers. And given the many in-house duties that editors must shoulder, there just was no way to be more on top of that part of our job.
I have not been an in-house editor for the past three and a half years, and while I am still working as an editor, now independently (and sometimes as an author reprsentative or agent)*, among the very best things about my self-employed life has been gaining some control and a level of choice over my reading life. I began reflecting on this yesterday after reading two recent opinion articles by a pair of young publishing professionals who happen to be in Britain–one an agent, the other an editor–each of which shines an up-to- the-moment light on this perennial issue in publishing. In the first article, by the agent, pseudonymously calling herself Agent Orange, “Do editors not say no because they can no longer say yes?” she laments the absurd difficulty of getting any answer at all from many editors, even a decline on a project. In anger, she writes,
In a direct response to the gauntlet thrown down by Agent Orange, the editor, Francesca Main,** avers that “Working 9 to 9 Editors are More Accessible than Ever”. She writes,
For the record, both these commentaries were published in the online publication edited by Porter Anderson, *** Futurebook, described as “a digital blog from Europe in association with Bookseller,” the publishing magazine. Both make fair points, and if you care about these challenges each piece is definitely worth taking a few minutes to read. Taken together, they pretty well sum up the dilemmas and the challenges of working as an agent or an editor in our business today. The challenges of the agent I have come to learn recently, as I represent the handful of authors with whom I’m working. Were I still working as an editor in-house, or if I end up working in-house again at some point, I can only imagine, and sympathize, with the pressures that acquiring editors operate under nowadays, even compared to when I was last on staff.
I know there are authors among the readers of this blog, and I want to say I recognize how disappointing it is when you sense that your work is not read with the attention it is due, nor with the level of intention and focus that led to its creation. One of the toughest things about publishing is that it is a ‘cultural business’–those conjoined words create a veritable oxymoron. But, for better and worse, that is the hand we’re dealt–editors do the best they can under difficult circumstances, as do agents. As the two articles by the young British professionals attest, I hope we can all cut each other a bit of slack, and somehow make our work and creative lives a bit more rewarding and fun.
*Ethical full disclosure: Generally speaking, authors who pay me to edit their work are not authors I represent as agent, except in unusual cases, and even then only first explaining to the author this isn’t normally done to avoid conflicts of interest. These circumstances are rare.
**Though Ms. Main’s article does not reveal the house where she works, it is discoverable online that she appears to be an editor at Picador. Agent Orange, so as far as I know, has remained anonymous since posting her piece. In fact, Futurebook‘s editor Porter Anderson, makes an appeal to Ms. Orange in a comment below her published post, asking that she consider revealing her name, at least to him, so that he might continue publishing her commentaries.
*** In a comment published below Philip Jones of Bookseller clarifies the relationship of the magazine to Futurebook, and Porter Anderson’s role.
When I began my career in the book biz as a retail bookseller, among our busiest months were May and June–graduation season–when young people were often gifted with dictionaries, atlases, books of quotations, and other works of popular reference. The gift book buyers at this time of year seemed to want to say by their selections, “I want you to have a useful book, a pragmatic book of practical instruction that will aid you as you embark on your life’s journey.” To me, this was one of the most ennobling duties of being a bookseller–helping a gift purchaser pay an implicit compliment to their recipient, investing them with an expectation that they would soon be going places in their still-young lives. At Undercover Books, when we gift-wrapped and shipped out or hand-delivered a book selected as a result of this process, I felt it was forcefully communicated to the recipient that their benefactor really cared about them, and believed they would amount to something. Here on the first day of June in 2012, thirty-four years after opening that bookstore–and twenty-six after I became an editor and publisher–I find that while my new vocation yielded many new and unexpected satisfactions, the sacred exchange of helping customers choose gift books like this was one of the things I still miss most.
As e-reading has taken hold, with new models of digital publishing emerging every month, I have often wondered how, and whether, booksellers can find some way to lend the presentation of a free download some of the nobility of the process I always relished. Music doesn’t offer much of a model, where say the presentation of an ITunes gift card lacks appeal. It may well be that giving something insubstantial like a download is just not the same as a gift that has some heft.
I thought of all this today after reading an article at geekwire.com which reports as in so many things related to e-commerce, Amazon.com has already spent some time and corporate brainpower thinking about the gift-buying process, even going to the extent of filing for and now receiving “a patent on what has become a common method of giving presents—a system for selecting digital gifts such as movies, music or e-books, sending an electronic notification to a recipient, and allowing them to download the gift.”
Well, Amazon has the patent they sought, but there’s no sign in the article that they’ve discovered any way of imbuing the purchase and presentation of a download with any special significance. For that, we’ll have to wait for another day, if indeed it ever arrives at all.
#FridayReads, May 31–Richard Ford’s mesmerizing Canada, which I blogged about earlier this week, and am savoring. The hapless bank robbers in it, teenage narrator Dell Parsons’ parents, remind me of the crooks played by Al Pacino and John Cazale that try to pull of the bank heist in Sidney Lumet’s great 1975 film, Dog Day Afternoon: utterly heedless of the consequences of their actions. I’ve also begun reading United Breaks Guitars: The Power of One Voice In the Age of Social Media, Canadian musician Dave Carroll’s good-humored personal account of how an airline manhandled his Taylor guitar, then refused to take responsibility for their bad conduct until he humiliated them with mocking videos which drew more than a million viewers on YouTube. Inspiring.
Following three articles on this topic earlier in May, which I blogged about here, and an earlier piece I wrote after seeing tree pruners at work in Riverside Park, the NY Times has published another revealing article about tree care in New York City, or more accurately the decline of tree care in the city. While the Bloomberg administration has commendably pledged to plant one million trees before it leaves office at the end of 2013–and it claims to be halfway to that goal–the budget for maintaining and pruning the city’s existing trees has fallen drastically. Reporter Lisa W. Foderaro writes that the city’s tree-tending
In the city’s parks, where hazards posed by untended trees often go undetected, she reports that
Despite the promise of greater safety such training offers, she reports on the decline of the tree care budget even while multi-million dollar damage awards continue to be paid to civil litigants, after fatalities and serious injuries occur. The city has a legal and moral responsibility to keep its inhabitants and visitors safe, within reasonable limits. While all urban hazard cannot be eliminated from our urban midst, the ones that are avoidable should be prevented to the maximum extent possible; when New York City fails to do so–even as reasonable safeguards are within reach–it is a moral and ethical failing. I cannot understand how the Mayor’s office allows this to continue. I will call my city councilperson to request that they restore the budget for tree care. Any other course is just stupid and negligent.
While devoting much time and attention to this blog of late, I am also working as a manuscript editor so it was gratifying to find yesterday that on my LinkedIn profile one of my editorial clients left this blushingly good recommendation of the editorial services I provided him:
In addition to covering Book Expo America (BEA) next week as a member of the press I will also be attending the North by Northeast Festival, aka NXNE, in official capacity as a blogger. This annual extravaganza–held in in Toronto each June since 1994–features music, film, and interactive/digital/publishing elements. Their website trumpets “650 bands and 40 films” over the week of activities. I attended last year and had a great time, discovering such bands and artists as Imaginary Cities, Gramercy Riffs, Harlan Pepper, Zeus, Mohawk Lodge, Carolyn Mark, Graham Wright, Wayne Petti of Cuff the Duke, Matthew Barber, and Brian Borcherdt. I also participated in a grand meet-up of many friends from the informal community that congregates on the CBC Radio 3 blog organized by host, friend, and author Grant Lawrence. So it’s a real treat to be going back this year, and this time as a blogger with full access to all festival events. Among the artists on this year’s NXNE schedule I most look forward to hearing live are Matt Mays (#1 on my personal bucket list of Canadian indie rockers I’m eager to see play), Andre Williams and The Sadies, Plants & Animals, and The Flaming Lips. And of course then there will be the serendipitous performances I can’t predict–new musical discoveries–the very thing that makes festival-going such a rich and exciting experience. I hope to be live-blogging and reporting from on the spot as much as possible.
While in Toronto I will also meet with book biz friends and contacts and a new company called Speakerfile that I’m representing to literary agents, authors, publicists, and publishers, in New York City, and elsewhere in North America. They’re building a great platform–think eHarmony®–for conference organizers and meeting planners on one side and experts and authors on the other. I will also be working with them at Book Expo America (BEA) next week, and again when I’m in Toronto the following week. If you are one of my friends in publishing or the media and are intrigued by Speakerfile’s model, please ask me to brief you on them. We also have meeting times still available for next week at the Javits Center, and I would be happy to introduce you to their CEO, Peter Evans. They have a great product and services that will be helpful to many in the publishing community who are eager to surmount the discoverability challenges that face us all nowadays. I’m really excited to be working with them.
It’s sure to be a great week, attending and covering NXNE, and working with Speakerfile.