novembre

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retain pentimenti

the roughest of drafts, and i don't think they're even accepting applicants / start of a dream letter

Dear 500 Capp St Foundation

Dear 500 Capp Street Foundation,

Your artist in residency program sounds idyllic, much like the opportunity to live in a deeply effective affective space as favored by Francesca Woodman. I want to live there. I want to live there for six months, and sublet my room here in Oakland while I am in that space, reverberating within it.

I currently live in a crumbling Edwardian in Oakland's outer Piedmont area, close to the freeway onramp with the giant giraffes grazing on its cylindrical cement legs. My street loops onto Fairmount Avenue, which is exactly one-half well-kept old beauties, popping up in the spaces between one another as design changed over the years. The other half is section 8 housing, built to have little or no personality, pure flat-faced modern function. There's a strange crop of people hereMy room is called the treehouse room. It has red velvet wallpaper, striped accoutrements. My bed is a giant iron thing spraypainted brass gold.

This is my room.
< show a picture of room >

It is so packed that it is almost a shrine, and I need out for a while. I want to live in its inverse, to really feel what it would be like to get to strip all that wallpaper away.

(And here I could insert a reference to the yellow wallpaper, but I think you already got that feminine creepiness thing from the Woodman mention. Best keep myself less Victorian, more contemporary.)




Dear 500 Capp Street Foundation,

I am writing to apply to your

Please let me

Are the shreds of wallpaper still there? How interesting. What in the heck can I possibly make with that?

Dear 500 Capp Street Foundation,

If I could live there for six months, I could sublet my room and thus be able to only work part time during the length of the fellowship residency. My requirements are that I be allowed to build equipment that I need in the construction of book art, and I need the reassurance that a holistic, process-based approach to artistic practice will be respected. I will need to be admitted on the basis that I am a writer and a book artist, with heavy leanings in library science and egalitarianism. I believe in research as an artistic process. My friend just invented a nonsense research algorithm, and I want to make an artists' book about it. I think it's slightly Dada, but with an insane punk twist. Where the I basically want to make an artists' book about everything. I studied book art at Mills College under Kathy Walkup and Julie Chen during both my undergraduate and my MFA; I minored as an undergraduate and completed the bulk of my coursework excepting my thesis before they announced the dual MFA program. But I need to be given the time to write creatively as well. Writing shuffles and calms my feathers at the same time. Printing stands them on end. I'm currently a (describe professional life) and I am currently studying InDesign and HTML/CSS, because I want to figure out how to make interactive books on the web. I want to make a website that is an artists' book. Near as I can figure, the only person who has accomplished with with any personality is Miranda July.

I also want to write the

iii
Papermaking in the backyard
Designing prepress & polymer plates
Handpress?

(Would I be allowed to volunteer at SFCB during the same time so I could get press access?)

(What is my work about? It's about what it's made of, the emotional scurf of intellectual love. Those wizened old library discards create a texture that literally peoples the product. And face it, papermaking is product. Fine artists, or at least the established, respected artists, mostly treat paper as a tool, or a vessel. I want to use it as both

And relief printmaking; text based /

And odd teeshirts

And an art zine curated by me with different artists featured each issue. Will be 1/4 size and letterpress cover. Binding probably a converted dos y dos to allow for inserts and possible nesting books or other structural special issues or

(This is what my journals have looked like for years.

And I just want to make something amazing, first. Those ideas are just rings around the saturn of the short story I'm writing about working at a public library in Oakland during the budget crisis. What does that mean? We were supported in our strike and its happenings by anti-austerity organizers. (Summer) It was summer, and
< show photograph of
did i take a photograph of it, or did i just write it? and
if i wrote it, where is it?