Required Reading (no. 3)

Exploring the short form right now. It seems an apt reflection of this flickering-attention-span world. And the low commitment can pay off with high returns.

Two favorites from anthologies we're reading now:

Orange by Neil Gaiman
Featured in: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
Edited by Kate Bernheimer, 2010
A modern book with a moth-eaten soul, this compendium features fairy tales re-told and re-imagined as never before, by authors such as Aimee Bender and Neil LaBute. Orange unfolds the story of an annoying-little-sister-turned-21st-century-deity in unusual and mesmerizing form: through responses to a written investigator's questionnaire.

how I contemplated the world from the Detroit House of Correction and started my life over again by Joyce Carol Oates
Featured in: Anti-Story: an anthology of experimental fiction
Edited by Philip Stevick, 1971
Another work exploring the boundaries of form, Oates' disturbingly raw and disjointed outline of a narrative leads us down an adolescent girl's dark, delinquent path. As relevant today as it was decades ago, Anti-Story is structured into sections such as Against Mimesis (fiction about fiction), Against Reality (the uses of fantasy) and Against Meaning (forms of the absurd). Can't wait to read more.

We also geeked out at Old Tampa Book Company this past weekend and picked up some fun items to stack the shelves:

Star Trek Concordance has amazing costume and scenery sketches inside, plus a working cover wheel allowing fans to look up original episodes by Air Date or Star Date. We're using "geeked out" in the literal sense here.

Live long and prosper.

Tired + Inspired

The Art House Co-op Sketchbook Project stopped off in Winter Park, FL, this year, to our great pleasure. Artists from around the world contributed some 10,000 sketchbooks to this mobile art library, permanently housed in Brooklyn, NY. At each stop on the road tour, visitors signed up to receive library cards and check out hand-crafted volumes, two at a time.

Our first discovery: Christina Choffe from France interprets sleeplessness.

A lovely, minimalist book by Samantha Sng from Singapore, on the theme of Secret Codes, fell into our hands by chance:

Sng writes, "Fight not what is in front of you, but what comes from behind. Weariness is but another intangible notion. When one is invincible, it is hard pressed for one to ever be knocked down. Down or out."

The sketchbook stacks seemed endless. Children, seniors, artists and students flocked to Full Sail University to dig into them. Soon we'll show and tell you more about Art House Co-op's inspiring project, including our plans to bring it to the Tampa Bay area next year. But for now, sleep beckons. Weariness has become tangible. Close the book.

Scrap Paper

At  The Globe tonight, a lovely young woman in a long, petal pink dress was reading Richard Dawkins. Couldn't see the title. She had a pile of books spread out across one of JoEllen's dinette tables. Very much wanted to tell her about the bus and give her a card.  It just doesn't pay to be shy sometimes.


For you, pale reader, a Dawkins quote from our notepad: 
"It feels good and true to know as little as I do about the true nature of the world. At least what little I do know, I can truly believe."

Later, we navigated a packed house at The Bricks to pick up a copy of Tony Patino's book The Road, a compendium of punk-rock memories from the touring circuit. A Tampa native now hailing from Kentucky, Patino appeared in Ybor tonight for an unusual book-signing and concert.


" ... A first-ever collection of real accounts detailing life on the Rock & Roll trail."  One signed copy, please!

The stories are down and dirty, short and wild excerpts from the likes of Superchunk, Bad Religion and Gwar. Creative Loafing's Julie Garisto further explores the writer and his work in this article.

Tomorrow, we journey to Full Sail University in Winter Park to experience the Sketchbook Tour 2011 before it rolls back to NYC. This exciting project, put together by the good people at Art House Co-op, is "like a concert tour, but with sketchbooks." 

Wonderful. Expect a full report.

Artists and writers, sign up by Oct. 31, 2011 to participate in the 2012 Sketchbook Tour.

On Sunday, we clear-coat the bus. No rest for the wicked this weekend.

The Work, Day 11

Take this 30 seconds of airbrushing, multiply by about 6 blue-soaked hours, and it soon becomes clear how no fiscal or verbal show of gratitude can ever begin to express thanks to Joe Griffith, the bus painter and artist without whom our project would be impossible:

And yes, that is a dent over the wheel well. It adds character, don't you know?
We are swiftly nearing the end of exterior work and gearing up to install fixtures. This bird will have wings in no time. We cannot wait to take flight.

The Work, Day 10

At last, after patiently sanding, scraping, taping, wiping, filling and caulking ...
today was a blue day.

Required Reading (no. 2)

Wonderful to see an exhibition like this one at the Tampa Museum of Art:

Syntax: Text and Symbols for a New Generation: Selections from the Hadley Martin Fisher Collection (above, Sean Landers' In the Garden of Gesthemane). 

TMA describes the show as examining the "current generation of artists' interest in text, symbolism and means of information transference." Those are all things we love. On display through September 25. 

Go, explore, translate and share.

Rumors, Unsubstantiated

By which we mean the bus is still white. A rather lovely shade of white, we don't mind saying.

Tune in again Saturday for momentous occasions, true blue. Not the least of them: a visit from Dean the Wonder Mechanic, who's taking a look under our hood. Oh mercy.