ANNIE HECKMAN

Jason Lahr's studio

(first posted on the StepSister Press blog)

Lately I’m feeling lucky — lucky to have a family and home that support the explosion of art and publishing projects into the cave, and lucky to be learning new ways to help good things happen for words and images.

Jason and Robert are two big heroes of this lucky era!

So I’m feeling particularly fortunate to be seeing (and smelling — they smell amazing!) the new print run of Words for Paintings. This book was a first in two ways — the first StepSister book to fully feature ONE artist’s writings and images, and the first to be filtered through the careful and innovative mind of an outside designer (not me this time — I phoned it in from a train between Prague and Berlin, what better way to watch magic happen?).

I am still overwhelmed at how unique the product of this collaboration is. Jason Lahr’s writings have some clear overlap with his paintings (they’re like, in them) but having the opportunity to read them at greater length in a sit-down format has given me an entirely different view onto his world. Do you know the feeling you get when you read someone’s work and are sheepish the next time you see the person, for all good reasons? This is what happened to me after reading his fuller texts.

Then Robert Sedlack took all this material and did something I can best compare to weaving. I’ve been reading some Bruno Latour and am finding myself comparing more and more structures to fabric, and it certainly applies to this project.  If you have an artist in your life who works anything like I do, take a quick mental snapshot of a work table in the midst of a big project. There’s a logic, a complex layering, and a sense to be made of diverse sources, objects, and materials. This is the feeling that Robert has recreated, right down to strips of blue tape that Jason uses for masking.

These books are beautiful. I feel lucky and kind of awesome and smart having my copy at home.

Here’s the link if you’re ready to hold this book in your hands and put it on your shelf.  And here’s where to go if you want to grab a copy while you shop for other books on Amazon.

And here’s a link to the place where you can learn about Jason’s work if you’d like to enjoy it in person: Packer Schopf Gallery.

If you’ve followed this site for a while, you may have noticed that I keep my alter-ego at StepSister Press fairly separate. And the blog over there hasn’t been updated since the moon landing. So it may be some surprise to see me propping up a StepSister book here. It just isn’t done.

We’re finishing up a new printing of Words for Paintings (Jason Lahr, design by Robert Sedlack), so as I’m shuffling through the numbers and looking into the possibility of making a hardcover version, and thinking about how on earth this book could be ‘read’ in the traditional sense of an author’s book reading, I wanted to put in a few personal words about it, de-publisher-voiced. I’ll do it here, and then perhaps use this new mode to thrash the dead-StepSister-blog-horse later on. In this post I’ll tell you how much I love Jason’s work, and later this week I’ll tell you how much I love Robert’s work, and why I think their collaboration is so brilliant.

First of all: I love Jason’s paintings. I’m not a neat person, and as such learned early on how to resent the flatness of flat and the taped-ness of taped edges. But Jason does neatness so seamlessly, and uses it to house the images of the painting like a screen: the flat, smooth screen of messy adolescent remembrances, a rich display for the projection of wishes and fantasies.

Then there are the writings. Jason draws on pop references and certain remote voices, but in the end he lets you into his own (twisted - - sorry Jason) world more than the surface might suggest. Please imagine yourself for a moment drafting a detailed note to a print vendor to make sure that the following words are italicized: Dear baby, welcome to Dumpsville, population: you… If you want to do something that indulges in your-favorite-things multiplied by your-oddest-thoughts in a critical way, then doing it with a rigorous studio habit and attention to detail seems to be the way to go. It allows you to send that message to a publisher, “Just so you know — ‘welcome to dumpsville’ is not in italics.” This specificity is the part of working with Jason, and his texts, that I love the most. While his approach to painting and writing has some raw enthusiasm at its core, it is a thoughtful, carefully edited way of working.

Then there is Jason. Jason’s (amazing awesome artist) partner Krista Hoefle has been in Chicago doing a residency with Anchor Graphics, and we had the chance to see them the other day. Jason is a brilliant, dedicated artist, curator, and educator, has a cool dog, and is the nicest of nice guys. It makes it a pleasure to throw yourself behind his work. He’s able to talk about the complex expectations and symbols for masculinity, with humor, because he has such a lovely sense of humor about himself.

Here’s his book on our site (signed copies available): http://bit.ly/cbqKSe

And here it is on Amazon:

Or here’s the PayPal button to buy it straight from StepSister (signed copies available) if you’re feeling so great about this book that you don’t even want to click around on the site ($45 + $2 discounted shipping):

In preparing for my residency I pulled together several books, choosing some more consciously than others. Packing the suitcase forced me to narrow my selection, and the most important titles stood out from the rest and made their way to Budapest with me.

Death: Current Perspectives is a hefty anthology edited by John B. Williamson and Edwin S. Shneidman. I was fortunate to stumble across it when Elise Goldstein and I were doing some initial digging for Hungarian research on death and found the study by Maria Nagy, “The Child’s Theories Concerning Death,” included in this collection of works on thanatology.

Nagy’s study appears in a section titled “Children and Death.” Her approach to treating children as the creators of theories about death has continued to interest me over several readings, and I keep returning to the words of the children she interviewed in 1948 Budapest. An example of words from an eight-year-old child:

“When death goes away it leaves footprints behind. When the footprints disappeared it came back and cut down more people. And when they wanted to catch it, it disappeared.”

Nagy’s study first appeared in the Volume 73 of the Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1948.

After a few years of hiding my eyes during the bathroom scene in Room 237/217, I decided to confront my fear of The Shining by digesting it in book form. I can vaguely recall a feeling from when I was a kid, a comforting reassurance after reading the story behind a frightening movie. There’s something about the depth of knowledge you gain about the characters and setting in a novel that offsets the shock potential of cinema. By the end of a scary book I sometimes feel more satisfied in my curiosities, more secure about the subjectivity of the images in the story, than if I had just seen the film.

This phenomenon has happened for me again with The Shining: I do feel a little bit better knowing where the scary lady in the bathtub came from after reading the book — a little (tiny) bit better. There is also the theory that reading a book freaks you out more because the images you generate about the story are from your own subconscious, but as much as I like to think that I have a deep disturbed mind (and as much as I am a devoted fan), I’ll take my subconscious any day over Stanley Kubrick’s.

The book definitely got under my skin in its own way, creating a lower hum of fear compared to a month of darting around my apartment afraid of the dark after first seeing the film. Overall it was really a sad story, but it inhabited such a specific exploration of sadness and terror that it persuaded me to commune with supernatural horrors in its pages.

Instead of comparing the book and the film, I’ll assume that many of my gentle readers have seen Kubrick’s adaptation of the story (1980) and haven’t read Stephen King’s novel (1977), or viewed King’s more closely overseen, (and vastly unacclaimed) version of the story for miniseries (1997). With this in mind, I’ll just offer you some tips in case you want to take a stab — or hurl a roque mallet — at The Shining.

Ten Tips for successfully reading The Shining without undue duress:

1. Make peace with your entire family before you even click on the Amazon link. I mean everyone, even distant cousins.
2. Give up alcohol, but particularly gin, a few days before starting to read.
3. If it’s your job to give medicine to a spouse, pet, or child, take a deep breath and start thinking of ways to say ‘Come out and take your medicine’ without, erm, saying that.
4. If you’re a once-successful writer whose fallen on hard times, or an academic in a particularly deep career rut, choose a different book.
5. Resign yourself early on to the fact that the book is different from the movie. ‘All work and no play…’ — not part of the book. I spent a lot of time trying to guess what would happen next based on the movie, and it’s really not worth it. You can go forward with the ‘This can’t be good..’ prediction instead.
6. Just leave the bathroom door open for the duration of your time with this book. It’s better than getting stuck in the same room with a scary bathtub and no way out. Your family/friends/roommates/co-workers will absolutely understand.
7. Prepare for some sociological issues with the ghosts — they’re racist, sexist, and classist, total bigots. There are many passages of the book that are scary for reasons other than blood.
8. Prepare to love Jack Torrance. He’s one part sympathetic and two parts terrifying, but he’s definitely someone I still wished I could help all the way through the final pages of the book.
9. Just leave your furnace alone. It does NOT need to be adjusted.
10. Sleep with a blankie and the lights on.

That should help you get started, and maybe you’ll have some things to add. Post any tips you’d like to share in the comments below. And if you’re in Chicago, this is a great week for Kubrick fans at the Music Box Theatre.

It was about a year ago that I was working with Matthew Dal Santo & Terri L. Russ to put the finishing touches on the book form of Airline to Heaven, Part I. Some of the writings had been in the works for years, but the final words of the preface were written in March of 2008.

Recently I cracked open the book again as I was sorting through some things. I try to check in with all our books regularly to keep cultivating ideas for how to talk about them, promote them, and to decide what to do next. Opening the book quickly became a full read. Do you remember finding writings or drawings you made in 3rd grade when you were already a year older in 4th grade, and being like ‘Oof, this is so embarrassing, who would say that — ugh yech’ etc. etc. This has pretty much consistently happened to me throughout my life (and then after maybe 5 years pass the work becomes a relic of a precious, unknowing, naive time), but I have to say that this book is passing the one-year test very well. Phew.

Things have been really busy lately with painting, trimming, and drawing bones, but this being the start of the new year, I’ve resolved to actually finish some of the books I’m reading and learn something during the frenzy. I have to thank the fantastic Krista Hoefle for recently reminding me about Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (Krista and I are both into creepy, gross stuff, and as such have a special bond — so here’s a shout out to go see her new show). I had seen this book in its famous entry into Six Feet Under when Nate’s niece handed it to him, but just picked up my own copy recently on Krista’s recommendation. It’s excellent. Written in a remarkably entertaining and humorous style given the morbid content, it leads the reader through all variations of what can happen to a cadaver after it’s been donated for science, what happens to your body if you volunteer to be plastinated or included in a bone library — the list goes on. There’s so much information in it that I think I need to go back to reread it some day, but first I have to start up on Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, another book by Roach that’s sitting next to my bed and at the top of my reading list.