Sunday night November 21st in Portland.
China Urban book release party should be lots of fun.

There is going to be some super puppeteering happening and a screening of Mad Detective.

The book has been six months in the making. I designed it in collaboration with Colley Gallery director Stephanie Snyder and Reed College professor of Art and Humanities Lisa Claypool. The cover is pictured above. It comes in a brown paper wrapper. There are only 200 of them. They will be hand stamped, editioned and signed at the event.

6 pm + at ace cleaners downtown portland
7:30 Chinese puppet theater
8:30 Mad Detective screening

My friend Anandi is currently undergoing chemotherapy for invasive breast cancer. Some of her friends have organized an art auction online to help raise funds for her while she is undergoing treatment to cover some medical bills and living expenses while she is undergoing treatment. 

I have donated 12 hours of graphic design work to the auction, should anyone out there need some work done affordably and for the money to go somewhere where it is really needed.

…and their blog logo is lower case, so you know they’re serious. Check it out at where else but thirtyconversationsaboutdesign.com . Above: one of our locals, Greg Hoffman at Nike.

This is the best book I have read all year. Period. Full stop.

A compilation of zines by Al Burian. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Al is one of the most talented writers of my generation. If I didn’t mean that, then I wouldn’t have busted my ass publishing some of his work myself years ago and illicitly carted thousands of the damn things out the back door of Kinko’s.

Get on it.

A perfect alternative to the artsy BS masquerading as “zines” in this day and age.

My new band Mammal with Mari Kojima will debut next week at Tokyo Art Beat’s 5th Anniversary party at SuperDeluxe in Tokyo.

Plazm 28 contributor Chris Jordan has amazing, yet horrible, images from his latest series on his website. “These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent,” Jordan says. “On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.”

Host Nora Robertson sits down with Michael Brophy, Stephanie Snyder and Dark Horse Comics’ Shawna Gore

Collected by the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum and Microsoft, Brophy’s work was the subject of a Tacoma Art Museum exhibition, “The Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy”, and appeared in their recent 9th Northwest Biennial. A 2007 Getty Foundation Fellow, Snyder is the director/curator of the Cooley Gallery at Reed and has co-hosted the Back Room discussion series. An editor at Dark Horse since 2003, Gore’s work on the CREEPY Archives and the Herbie Archives hardcover series earned her two 2009 Eisner Awards.

Urban Grind East, 2214 NE Oregon St
Wed, November 11th, 7-8:30 PM, doors open at 6:30, $5 admission.
More info here.

Pictured above: Food Night with Matt Lounsbury, Greg Higgins and Naomi Pomeroy
Photo Credit: Steve Fritz

Literary Arts recently announced its Oregon Book Awards for 2009 and Plazm editor Jon Raymond has won the prestigious Ken Kesey award for fiction. Jon will be on the radio tomorrow on OPB’s Think Out Loud at 9am PST, listen live here.

Plazm has signed first edition copies of Livability, Jon’s award-winning collection of short stories, as well as signed first edition copies of his first novel, The Half Life.