I got my copy of Alan Moore’s new underground magazine Dodgem Logic in the mail a few days ago and have been reading through it, pretty excitedly. Just finished it last night. And this thing is weird. Yet accessible. It’s very clearly in the spirit of 1960’s counterculture magazines, complete with the bizarre cartoon nudity, but does an excellent job of… normalizing radical politics? That’s a phrase I’m obsessed with these days. But basically, it’s good at saying “hey, of course you’re concerned with equality, surviving the apocalypse, and sticking it to The Man, aren’t we all?” The magazine isn’t all “a magazine for anarchists!” (though that can be done well, of course). But the very first person described, on the inside front cover (as “hipsters in history”) is Emma Goldman. Anyhow, there’s an excellent overview of the underground press, a recipe for a delicious pumpkin & quinoa soup that I’m eating as I type this, a piece on living without money (which was interesting to compare to my own traveling/crusty version that I pulled off for several years), and lots of other entertaining matter, like comics about guerrilla gardening or why you should dump people.
Category Archives: Projects
Public Domain For The Win!
Today I started a new website, Public Domain For The Win, in which I will dump public domain etchings and woodcarvings and general graphic goodness as high-quality tiff files. This is one of the main resources I use personally for my graphic design and such, so I figured I would try to make it as available as possible. Right now I’m going through my collection of illustrations from a 19th century book of fables (well, the fables are older, but the illustrations are 19th century).
Dodgem Logic – Colliding Ideas to See What Happens
Well, the first issue of Dodgem Logic is out, the new “underground magazine” published by Alan Moore. It’s an attempt to bring elements of the ’60s counter-culture into the current era, I believe, and I’m pretty excited to get my hands on it. The second issue will feature an article I’ve written expounding upon post-civilized theory.
Interviewed by Alpline Anarchist Productions
My friend Gabriel from Alpine Anarchist Productions—a sort of comparable distro to Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness—has just interviewed me for their new Alpine Anarchist Meets series. The format was a single prompt: “In your book Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: anarchist writers on fiction you have fourteen writers tell you about how their work ties in with their politics and their lives. How about yourself? How do your political beliefs and convictions relate to what you do every day?”
Looking for radical goths
update: since this blogpost comes up a lot on google. The project I was speaking of has come into being and has published its first issue. It is called Graceless: A Journal of the Radical Gothic and it is available in pdf and print format.
For a couple of years I’ve been talking about starting a zine that explores radical goth. The other day, I met someone in Asheville who said to me “people said we should talk, since apparently we have a lot in common, people say that we’re both recovering goths.”
“I’m not recovering,” I said. “I’m quite happy about it.”
“Me too,” the other person said.
Anyhow, it goes this way. Goth is looked down upon in mainstream radical circles (that’s right, motherfuckers, I just called you mainstream!). And politics, which used to be a more vibrant part of gothic subculture, seem to be losing their foothold. So, solving all problems through publishing (which doesn’t actually work, but it’s the way my brain seems to be wired), I figure to start a zine/magazine or something by and for us radical goths. And I’m looking for people who are interested. Whether ideas, or contributions. Please don’t just respond in the comments thread with ideas… instead, if any of you are out there, post expressing interest and I’ll email you. Or, if you know me anyhow, get in touch with me.
Review of “One Fine Summer”
My biased friend Dea wrote an excellent review of Being The Adventure of One Fine Summer (which you can download for free). Dea is one of the better writers I know, and I appreciate that she gives a proper review, the bad as well as the good (in fact, her blog title, Darlings Will Be Killed, explains a bit of her propensity for such things). But here’s some of the good:
The photographs, of course, are striking- punks playing guitar and fiddle in a West Virginia family’s living room, tattooed fingers bloodied from digging in to roadkill, an abandoned mailbox at a mountaintop removal site, a tintype photographer on a shoot. The anarchist photographer and founder of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness Distro has a knack for capturing overlooked and unusual detail.
Surprise! I have a second book out!
Being The Exploration of One Fine Summer
I’m proud to release my first photo book, 52 pages that document my explorations with mountaintop removal, roadkill, and Cascadian forest defense. I’ll make a free PDF available as quickly as possible, since of course this book is Creative Commons. But you can buy it online for $7 from CreateSpace, the print-on-demand publishers. I’m really excited by this idea, that thanks to print-on-demand I can basically make photo zines at reasonable prices.
You can download it for free from tangledwilderness.org as well! (But beware, it’s a 83mb file.)
The Earth First! Journal is here!
After two months of work, we’ve finally got the new issue of the Earth First! Journal. For anyone who isn’t aware, EF!J is a quarterly magazine/newspaper/thingy that has been coming out for 29 years now, and it’s an amazing insight into the culture of radical treesitters and above-ground direct actionists. This issue has tons of interesting stuff, like a discussion with Barry Sanders on the pervasiveness of military pollution, a ton of reportbacks from awesome actions and training camps that happened this summer, and of course, lots of pretty photos (some of which, like the cover, were taken by me).
We got our 4,000 copies back from the printer and have already gotten the subscriber’s copies out into the mail. Exciting stuff!
And… Pre-Order!
Pre-order Mythmakers & Lawbreakers over at AK Press!.
It’s a little over a month till the release of my book Mythmakers & Lawbreakers, and it’s now available for pre-order. Ideally, get it directly from AK Press, my collectively-run publisher. This way, they (and I) get a larger chunk of your money. Or, if you must, it’s available from Amazon.com for pre-order as well.
The last edits have been made, the book is ready. And to say that I’m proud of it, and excited, is to understate things a bit. I’ve been working on this book for two years now, between tracking down authors and researching, editing, designing, etc. I genuinely believe that this book is useful: it helped me at least wrap my head around what I’m doing, writing fiction and trying to end government.
MMLB to be out October 1st!
We now have a release date for Mythmakers & Lawbreakers. It will be available October 1st!