salty snacks

I just wanted to mention this show going on at pageant gallery in south philly featuring Chris Kline, the dude who did the back cover for the first volume of four thousand flavors. He collaborated on these amazing 3D sculptures with fellow space 1026 artist Jason Hsu. Snacks also writes a zine called Real Raw which is one of the best in Philly. I picked up a copy of Jason Hsu's zine holy shmolyz this weekend at the flea market and it is absolutely dialed. Go check these guys out.

Covers printed, table secured for punk rock flea

Just got back from the print shop in Kensington. I got through 84 prints before I ran out of ink, and a fair amount of them are not quite what I would try to pass as sellable quality, so I have about 50 copies of volume one with a screenprint cover on sale for the release party. I decided to print the rest of the covers on cardstock on an inkjet printer. Those will be $2, and the screened covers will be $5. Huge thanks to Jeremy Jump Start for letting me print those at his shop. It was my first time screenprinting in probably over two years and it was rad to get back into it, even though it didn't go quite as well as I hoped.

I also must thank Jeremy for letting me be a part of the Jump Start Records table at the Punk Rock Flea Market this sunday Feb. 1st. Four Thousand Flavs volume one will in fact be on sale at the flea so if anyone doesn't get a chance to come to the release party saturday I'll be at electric factory sunday hopefully with some of the screened copies left, but definitely with inkjets. More info on the punk rock flea here.

I recently finished my second book by an author named Hubert Selby Junior(Requiem for a Dream). I read some of his short stories a few years back and I've been wanting to read more of his stuff ever since. I just borrowed Last Exit to Brooklyn from my downstairs neighbor and I'm pretty bummed that the book is over. It's a novel, but it's written in a way that it's kind of like a bunch of short stories taking place in this terribly poor and destitute part of New York City. Selby Jr. Has this way of writing about low class, ordinary people with all kinds of personal issues that is extremely engaging and elegant yet at the same time incredibly disturbing and often a little depressing. But the way he sets up his characters for their ultimate inevitable failure is brilliant. He writes in this absurd train of thought-vernacular speech that is never one thing or the other, just a jumping randomly between narration, things that are happening, what people are saying, thinking, doing and looking at, throwing parentheses inside parentheses inside parentheses, deeper and deeper into the emotional complexity of the characters in a story. Like several other writers who I believe came after him, he has virtually no regard for grammar whatsoever and I think it fucking rules. 

There's this one part earlier on in the book about this drag queen, and normally I wouldn't be into this sort of thing believe it or not, but the language he uses to describe this character totally makes you feel for her(/him) as some sort of protagonist and somehow makes it seem completely ok that this person is living this outrageously sexually confused life and that she could easily be one of your buddies you hang out with at the bar:

Georgette was a hip queer. She (he) didnt try to dis-

guise or conceal it with marriage and mans talk, sat-

isfying her homosexuality with the keeping of a secret

scrapbook of pictures of favorite male actors or athletes or

by supervising the activities of young boys or visiting turk-

ish baths or mens locker rooms, leering sidely while seeking

protection behind a carefully guarded guise of virility (fear-

ing that moment at a cocktail party or in a bar when this

front may start crumbling from alcohol and be completely

disintegrated with an attempted kiss or groping of an at-

tractive young man and being repelled with a punch and-

rotten fairy-followed with hysteria and incoherent apolo-

gies and excuses and running from the room) but, took a

pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and

esthetically superior to those (especially women) who 

werent gay (look at all the great artists who were fairies!);

and with the wearing of womens panties, lipstick, eye make-

up (this including occasionally gold and silver-stardust-

on the lids), long marcelled hair, manicured and polished

fingernails, the wearing of womens clothes complete with

padded bra, high heels and wig (one of her biggest thrills

was going to BOP CITY dressed as a tall stately blond (she

was 6'4" in heels) in the company of a negro (He was a big 

beautiful black bastard and when he floated in all the cats

in the place jumped and the squares bugged. We were at a

crazy pad before going and were blasting like crazy and

were up so high that I just didnt give a shit for anyone

honey, let me tell you!) ); and the occasional wearing of a 

menstrual napkin.

More news to come soon. Volume two out on valentines day. May I 

recommend seeing two films if you have the chance:

Waltz with Bashir . One of the only films I've seen recently during the late oscar season, but it was an amazing account of the Lebanese War and most of the animation is killer. It is actually an animated 

documentary which I did not realize until after I saw it. Incredible.

Beautiful Losers. Another documentary about 'alternative' artists 

including Barry Mgee, Mike Mills, Steve Powers, and one of my favorite people in the world, Ed Templeton. It's just made really well and the artists are amazing. Talks about all this art that came from graffiti and skateboarding evolving into a sort of pop culture presence, but not really in a bad way I guess. I saw it at a screening at International House in Philly and I don't know if it's really available anywhere yet but if it's being shown anywhere near you it is definitely worth checking out.

Beautiful Losers film trailer from beautifullosersfilm on Vimeo.

Volume one release- 1/31/09

Volume One is ready to hit the press! I've booked some bands to play the release party which will be at the Woodstove (house belonging to 3/4 of neighborhood choir and 1/4 of major leagues). Zines will be sold at the show for $5, featuring a silk screen cover, original artwork and six short stories. guests are encouraged to bring their own party supplies and consume at their leisure. Police Academy 1-6 will be shown on a projector all night. Come out and grab a copy! Huge thanks to everyone helping out with the first issue. There is some awesome stuff inside and I'm super excited for everyone to check it out. Stay tuned for other things going on with the first issue, including a table at the punk rock flea market(still working this out), and some other philly locations that will have copies of 4000 flavs on hand. I've already begun work on volume two, which is going to be a special valentine's day issue. Hope to see you folks on the 31st!

To find Woodstove:

From 2nd and Cecil B. Moore take Cecil B. Moore west to North Philip St. (between 2nd and American st.) Make a right. It is large and steel and spraypainted with the numbers "1712"

Introduction

4000 Flavors is a zine for and by anyone who has ever read something that spoke to them so powerfully it gave them a desire to write something that would have the same effect on someone else. It is for those who write not because they want to become a writer, but because they have something to say and I want this to be the place where those things can be said. 

After graduating college, I had some time on my hands to do things I had been thinking about for years but had been too busy writing papers, going to classes, working, moving across the city and back, and participating in extra curricular activities to actually follow through with. I had dozens of story ideas piling up in notebooks and on hard drives, and needed a reason to just finish one of them. I began taking one of them and developing it into a screenplay, not sure where the process would take the story, or if it could even work. But much to my surprise it turned out to be something i really enjoyed doing and as I kept going through it the story seemed to be more natural and just came together through some combination of instinct, intuition, and I guess a bit of sorting through my 'inner demons'. But as I wrote I couldn't help but think about the other stories, what was happening in them and where they were going. Each one had a place in my mind, taking place and evolving, and developing every day, whether I wrote it down or not they were constantly changing shape according to what I was feeling and the way I was looking at things. And new ones would form, starting with a mere thought or observation that before I knew it would snowball into an idea and eventually an entire scenario waiting to become a story.

I think of my friends as brilliant creative people with so much to say about the world, so many ways to see things, so many perspectives, opinions, experiences, dreams, nightmares, and fears; each one having their own ways of expressing these things. I want them to be able to interact, share their expressions  with each other, and collaborate in a way that they previously couldn't, or at least hadn't thought of. I've spoken to many people who have ideas, who want to write, who do write, who write poetry, who make art, and this zine potentially can facilitate all of those things. Perhaps you want to get feedback on something you've written, before you turn it into a longer story. Perhaps you need a short story to adapt into a short film. Maybe you've seen something you don't quite understand, and you just make up a story about it to ease your curiosity. Or maybe you've just written something you're proud of and you want someone else to read it. Well now they can. 

The purpose of this blog is to keep people updated with the zine's production process, but I will also post artwork, bits of stories, excerpts of amazing things I have read, and anything else I might feel compelled to share. And at some point I will have a link to a paypal site so you can get a copy of the zine through snailmail if you aren't able to pick it up from me or anywhere it ends up being sold in Philadelphia.

That being said I would like to share an excerpt of a short story I read recently which I find very appropriate for this occasion. It is from "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway:

So now it was all over, he thought. So now he would never have a chance to finish it. So this was the way it ended in a bickering over a drink. Since the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it. For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity. For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.