Judging a Book by Its Cover, and Then Some, Part III
by Perry Brass

Her question: “Carnal Sacraments could be marketed as a queer book, or as Science Fiction (SF). The cover makes it pretty clear that the publishers intend to market it as a queer book; there’s hardly any hint that the contents are very much in the speculative realm. What are your thoughts on that? Do you have any plans to reach out to a more general SF reading audience? Do you think queer SF is its own subcategory, or are books that are both destined to be called one or the other? How do you draw from the queer tradition and from the SF tradition?”

I was a little lost about this “queer tradition” of books reference, considering that up to 1960 the U.S. Post Office could stop any book espousing homosexuality in the mails on the basis of “obscenity.” So if it was queer, you couldn’t mail it; ergo, was the “queer tradition” to be stopped at the P.O.?

But I answered:

“Carnal Sacraments is a literary novel, not an SF novel. What drives it is basic human impulse and conflict, not the hardware and software that drives, too often, SF. The ‘marketing’ of the book was to get people interested in it, which a hot cover does. I don’t think of myself as an SF author, but a storyteller who uses some science fiction elements—mostly because I like the richness of them: the idea of imagining inaccessible places and times, a concept which goes back to The Arabian Nights.”

I knew I was in bad shape with Ms. Fox from the very onset of that interview, but had no inkling that her 550-word review would spend 20% of its ink “reviewing” the cover.

“The cover of this paperback,” she begins, “is mostly occupied by a photograph of a buff, shirtless man staring coolly at the camera as he eases down his unzipped jeans. Next to his head are the words “a historical novel of the future.” The juxtaposition of gay lust and science fiction is not an entirely comfortable one, which neatly sets the tone for the story. Mr. Shirtless is presumably meant to represent Jeffrey Cooper, an American septuagenarian living in a near-future Germany. As long as he retains his ability to package and sell just about any thing, the network of conglomerates known as ‘the system’ finds him useful enough to provide him with anti-aging treatments. Driven to the brink of breakdown by job stress, Jeffrey struggles to hide his anxiety from his colleagues and system-mandated therapist; he knows any sign of weakness will see him culled from the herd.”

How she got the idea that the cover model, “Mr. Shirtless,” is Jeffrey Cooper is anyone’s guess. There are other male characters in the book the cover model might have represented, or he might have simply been put there to entice people to buy the book (an idea I’m sure has never happened before in publishing). It didn’t take me very long to see that Ms. Fox was simply prejudiced against the book by the cover; she did not like it and it offended her idea of the kind of moral “purity” good Science Fiction books should have. In other words, getting her to review my book was like having a woman from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union review a guide to bartending.

This brought to mind what has perhaps become one of the most celebrated examples in publishing of a book both epitomized and overshadowed by its cover: the notorious Bantam mass-market paperback edition of James Purdy’s Eustace Chisholm and the Works, from 1968—it’s almost impossible to find this book on the Web now but it must be out there. Bantam got a young gorgeous Italian ragazzo with, in some opinions, the world’s most beautiful ass, to pose exposing all of his rear end in profile-view to the camera. The book sold half a million copies, and put Purdy’s name on the popular map. As far as anyone could see, the model “represented” no one in the book, but just made a lot of people very happy, and did alert the “normal” bookbuyer that he/she was in a for a hot time in the Old Town tonight, just from the cover of the book.

In her wrap-up (of Carnal), Fox goes on to say:

“Jeffrey’s story is emphatically a gay narrative and also emphatically science fiction of the Huxley and Orwell school. As on the cover, the two look for ways to coexist, but they don’t always find them.”

Again she judges the book by its cover, and she ends up hacking the book to pieces in a way that’s so clumsy it’s hard for me to quote it here (please go to the Lambda Literary Foundation to find the review). The real shock of this story was that I had never a book so harshly judged, so reviewed by its cover. I always thought reviewers were sophisticated enough to know (certainly book buyers are) that the basic role of a cover is 1) to entice people to buy the book, and 2), of course, get past the various censors who will stop the book if the cover is too suggestive (the Post Office; customs agents in certain parts of Canada, Iran, or Saudi Arabia; book buyers at Walmart). But I never had the cover reviewed, and felt very bad about that until I learned of David Leavitt’s recent review in the New York Times Sunday Book Section of John Rechy’s memoir About My Life and the Kept Woman.

In his review of the book, Leavitt doesn’t just review the cover of the Rechy’s book, but reviews Rechy’s “cover” as well: the photos of himself that Rechy has placed on his website, that show him as a hunky, well-muscled young man and hustler. Leavitt stays fixated on the “beefcake” aspect of these earlier, and often famous shots of Rechy, and says he associates these kind of photos [with] “different kinds of websites,” i.e. porn. Leavitt laments that there is not one “typical author photo” on the site, again, a desire to maintain that squeaky-clean, Gap-khaki image so beloved now by younger queer men and the older late-bloomer generation (Leavitt’s) who love them.

“Leaning in classic muscle queen posture against an invisible wall,” he complains. It’s the very opposite of a typical author photo.” Later he goes into a diatribe against Rechy that reminded me of Fox’s barbs about Mr. Shirtless on my book cover: “Literary ineptitude is as much a part of Rechy’s persona as the oiled chest and the jeans unbuttoned to the top.”

Perhaps Rose Fox and David Leavitt are one person, railing against the enticements of those unzipped jeans, those shirtless models and authors, those reasons why the unwashed masses still buy books thought too worthless by the Fox y Leavitts.

(Leavitt also jumped, too early, on the grave of Oscar Wilde Bookstore in New York, when the tiny venerable old bookstore was about to go under, and Leavitt said in another NY Times piece that he was sick of having his books stuck in queer bookstores, instead of the mainstream where they deserved to be; Oscar Wilde got a reprieve. It’s still open, and probably still sells David Leavitt books to the “beefcake” types who shop there.)

All of this has made me wonder, now that we live in an age when almost every image is available and can be instantly zipped back and forth through time and space, what do covers and author photos actually mean? Do they mean this book is meant to entice and seduce us, or brands us as being “queer,” and therefore, without any qualities of depth or meaning? (As in Rose Fox’s strange dichotomy between queer books and Science Fiction books—as if one group of qualities and ideas can’t possibly bleed on to another.) And when people are “caught” having undesirable images in their possession, such as “porn” on their hard drives, does it mean the images themselves are evidence of “unspeakable acts,” or is it that the images simply speak for what they are: enticements for us to think on our own?

——

Perry Brass’s newest book Carnal Sacraments, A Historical Novel of the Future has just been named a finalist in gay and lesbian fiction for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award. He can be reached through www.perrybrass.com. His website does not take PayPal payments.

In the Writer’s World appears the last Thursday of every month. More about Perry Brass

Judging a Book by Its Cover, and Then Some, Part II
by Perry Brass

I soon learned that even doing a small poetry book was much harder than I had anticipated: choosing which poems to include, their sequence, front and back cover material, and how the design of the book would sell both the book and the poetry inside. I also had to deal with printers (back in the days before POD), a designer, and the distribution of the book. Even getting a printer was daunting in 1990: many printers refused to handle “this kind of material,” especially if the cover was at all sexually or homoerotically suggestive. One of my fellow publisher friends told me flat out: “It would be a lot smarter to go with a neutral cover. You don’t want to be too obvious, and frankly, I think that hot covers on poetry books are out.”

Of course, his idea of a hot cover was a drawing; this was a photo, and there were no poetry books with covers this hot out there, the idea of which was either too daunting or too totally exciting. I decided to stick with Joe’s shot for the cover. It sold to the walls. By some sort of dumb accident I printed 3,000 copies. I didn’t know any better; but was later told that even big publishers are happy to sell 750 copies of poetry books, despite a print run of thousands. Sex-charge sold 2,500 copies within its first two years in print. The book became a phenomenon and I’m sure the cover had a lot to do with it. Gay men who’d never bought a book of poetry devoured it. The book was reviewed all over the place, including a glowing review in Dutch from Holland, and it was included in a German PhD thesis that said it was one of the few examples of sexual freedom in the United States.

My next several books had covers that were just as suggestive, although none of them would have made the general run of Harlequin books blush, except for the fact that (often) there were two shirtless men on the them, instead of one half-naked man ripping off the bodice of some young woman. None of the men were kissing, though, and I learned that to really stick heat in the sales, it was important that there be some kind of ambiguity in the “narrative” of the cover art. In other words, the men should look like they are attacking one another with unbridled lust, passion, savagery, hostility, fury, or any combination of the above. So I liked these images and they worked. The books I was putting out were successful, gay bookstores were selling thousands of them, and I became known for a kind of commercially workable book that most of the larger presses with merely a “gay line” would not touch; their salesmen would not sell books with covers this hot out in the hinterlands.

This allowed my books to be very comfortable in gay bookstores, and just squeak into Barnes and Noble where they were sold in larger urban stores, but probably not in some outposts out in Topeka. People were judging the books by the cover, and most of my gay male readers as well as hordes of female readers liked them.

Then something odd and discomforting happened about five years ago: I started to see that younger gay readers were now embarrassed by my book covers. They wanted images on their queer books that were blander, more Gap-khaki-oriented, more Dave Sedaris, more keeping with the (now) universal trend of “good-gay consumerism,” and at least a good country mile away from any sort of overt activism, confrontationalism, or unflinching evidence of deeper human involvement.

Mr. G. W. Bush and Mr. J. Ashcroft were swinging their axes in a right-shifting arc, and a huge number of kids were going along with it nicely, as if swept up in a vacuum. The worst example of the right-wing shift came when my website, www.perrybrass.com, was dropped after four years by PayPal, who declared that my covers “showing men touching each other” were obscene, and unless I took the images of these same covers off my site I could not do business with the behemoth. (I was not going to suddenly put T-shirts on my cover models and keep them from touching each other—and that was all they were doing: just touching, nothing else). But getting dropped by PayPal ended up costing me $1,000 my first year in credit card, shopping cart, and banker’s fees, which taught me a lesson: unless you run a XXX porn site, literature on the Web doesn’t pay.

About a year later, after being sited numerously in the Media for censoring the 400 sites they had dropped (for such infractions as selling penis-shaped macaroni: I am not making this one up), PayPal, in one of the coldest letters ever penned by a human hand, told me they were willing to reinstate me. (I’ve maintained a Go-f*ck-Yourself attitude toward the beloved PayPal ever since).

Here, of course, we do have the judging-the-book-by-its-cover attitude totally up the wazoo; still I was suffered to have my upfront covers thrown at me even worse, when my latest book was mauled in Lambda Book Report, one of the last vestiges of queer book reviewing left in America, in its Winter, 2008 issue. Rose Fox, a young woman I gather, and the Sci-Fi/Fantasy book review editor of Publisher’s Weekly, reviewed Carnal Sacraments, my latest novel.

I knew something was awry when Ms Fox did an online interview with me several months before the piece appeared, and the first question she asked was not about the characters, setting, premise, or plot of the book, but about the cover.

Part III, Tomorrow.

More about Perry Brass

Judging a Book by Its Cover, and Then Some, Part I
by Perry Brass

The story of how I started publishing my own books is curious, but hardly surprising to most people who fall into publishing, which isn’t known as the “accidental profession” for nothing. Up until about a decade ago when New Media became an accessory of accumulating teenage hormones, hardly anyone at twelve-and-a-half declared, “I want to be a publisher when I grow up!”

By 1990, I had been writing poetry since the Year Gimmel, as the Jews say (that’s for about twenty years), and by many standards had some success at it. I had been involved with the creation of a major poetry magazine, “Mouth of the Dragon,” the first ‘zine devoted exclusively to the poetry of gay men, which was gestated in my living room in Hell’s Kitchen in 1973; I was included in the world’s first anthology of gay poetry, The Male Muse, and had been published in enough magazines and collections that a growing number of people thought of me as “Perry Brass, the poet.”

(I know that also means, as in, “starving to death,” but it’s a nice way to be thought of when you’re young and romantic.)

So after a number of dry runs (or heaves) at it, I decided to publish a volume of poetry of my very own; the only problem was I had no idea how such a thing was done. I mean: do you just send off a “sheaf” of verses to people who publish poetry; do you schmooze and wine with other poets; or do you send off letters of inquiry to numerous iddy-bitty presses and hope one that already recognizes your name will say, “Sure ‘nuff, let’s see what you got”?

I did all of these things and got nowhere.

Zippo. Nada. Over and over again.

At the same time, by the late 80s, I was becoming more known as a writer through the graces of numerous small magazines and the editors thereof, who “loved” me but were still not going to publish a book of mine. Concurrently in New York, an interesting phenomenon was taking place: the birth of commercial queer photography. Suddenly, gay photography, as witness by the rocketing valuation of prints by photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, Duane Michaels, and Arthur Tress was becoming hot enough to gouge a pocket-deep presence in the New York art world. A major center of this was Wessel-O’Connor Gallery, which had opened on lower Broadway in a beautiful, well-designed space on an upper floor of a classy building. Before that time, to see pictures of naked men you had to rattle up a freight elevator to a dingy loft, with rodents scampering at your feet. Now you could walk into a marble lobby, press a button and step right up to see gorgeous men nicely framed, with serious price tags attached to them.

Since I was also doing journalism at the time, I became friendly with John Wessel, the co-head of Wessel-O’Connor, and after a visit to his gallery had a reasonable idea: why not combine gay poetry (mine) with delicious pictures of guys (theirs). I suggested this idea to John, and he said, immediately, and generously, “I’ll let you have any images in our gallery [for a very small fee].”

I was elated. No one had done this kind of thing at that point; so, being naive enough, I sent out several query letters to the newer gay presses that were also emerging, with this proposition: a volume combining these beautiful, now emerging images, with poetry. And I got back the usual, very standard answer: No.

As in, don’t even think about it.

(Go screw yourself, nicely; etc. etc.)

I was crushed—momentarily. The idea seemed commercial enough, even for poetry, which at the time was leaving its customary cloister and becoming popular, especially with gay audiences, both male and female, because often, only in poetry could you be so unashamedly open about feelings so normally repressed.

Then I had one of those rock-out-of-heaven-and-plunk-on-the-noggin ideas: I’d publish the book myself. OK, I mean I’d never published a book, had no idea how to do it, but had lots of friends who were published writers, and a few of them had, in turn, started presses (who would not publish me: lesson learned). But I turned to them for encouragement and moral support and they said, “Wow! Great! Go to it! It’s no skin off our behinds, and we’re looking for more publishers anyway.” The idea being that gay bookstores were, in turn, starting to pop up, and the bookstores were looking for more product (i.e., books), so . . . “this gives us a little more to throw at ‘em.”

Now I could go to John Wessel and say, “I’ve got the book, let’s look at what we can put in it.” I was immediately drawn to a photographer from Detroit named Joe Ziolkowsky, a young, extremely talented guy, then struggling in New York, who did nudes with such an elegant classical refinement, they were unsettling. They did not look like statuary come to life but more like men turned into statues and still deliciously touchable. John brokered the use of three images from Joe including an incendiary, bluntly powerful cover image of a man hanging upside down, face turned away. I decided to call the book, Sex-charge, after a poem I hadn’t even written yet, and we were now off to the races.

Part II, Tomorrow.

More about Perry Brass

Headline: Industry After Madonna’s “Hard Candy” Like Dog In Heat
by Josh Livingston

Of all forms of art, there is most likely none older or more primal than song. One can only imagine that singing emerged in tandem with language, which is estimated to have developed at least 40,000 years ago if not far longer. From Homo neanderthalis celebrating the hunt to Madonna’s latest album debut this week, we’ve come a long way, baby.

Madonna is a fascinating case study. She wasn’t cut from the singer-songwriter cloth and her singing voice has never been anything more than serviceable. In fact, her prominence in the pop star pantheon is in spite of her musical talents, not because of them. Through wisdom, foresight or dumb luck, she branded herself a rebel and iconoclast, a role never abandoned, but whose particulars she’s modified endlessly. Like so many Barbies, “Wrong-side-of-the-tracks Madonna” begat “Glamour Madonna” begat “Gothic Madonna,” who begat “Cowgirl Madonna” who begat “Disco Madonna” who begat the Hip-hop infused reincarnation currently dominating the airwaves. While the targets of her cultural aggression (restrictive sexual mores, religious dogma, Hollywood hypocrisy) change, her dissatisfaction with the status quo does not.

Madonna’s seamless self-reinvention is the polar opposite of the recording industry’s struggle to redefine itself as the traditional business model becomes less and less profitable. Modern recording has gone through as many formats as the Material Girl has had looks - minus the cone bra. Her first album dropped in 1982, when compact cassettes and the Sony Walkman defined the decade. Both she and the industry thrived through the age of the CD, but the burgeoning digital revolution split their fortunes for good. While her sales have been estimated as high as 55 million albums worldwide in the last ten years, album sales across the industry slumped dramatically, falling 23% from 2000 to 2006.

The bete noir here is digitial distribution, beginning with the Napster revolt across college campuses in the late nineties and still emerging as the iTunes revolution. While Madonna challenged piracy by flooding the Internet with decoy downloads asking, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” - she did it with humor and without alienating her fans - something the industry’s anti-piracy efforts have failed at miserably.

Despite the varying channel of distribution and cosmetic changes, some things never change. For better or worse, it’s all about the Benjamins. Record companies have long been accused by critics for indulging in risk-aversion by wimping away from what might be considered the best music. Madonna’s critics question her talent, artistic integrity and banal lyrics, but never her business savvy.

Her latest, “Hard Candy” is her last studio album under contract with Warner Brothers (a compilation is also pending). Her $120 million contract with the fledgling recording arm of top concert promoters Live Nation just may be her biggest rebellion yet. Everyone’s eyes are on her. And not for the first time. Success or failure will both bring big consequences and pose more questions than answers. What does this mean for the industry? Other artists will follow suit, but how many and how quickly? Is this truly a departure or will Live Nation be the new face of the same stale business model?

As she goes, so goes the industry.

Long Story Short runs every other Tuesday. Hard Candy Photo: Telegraph.

More about Josh Livingston

Even though some of his best work may be in black and white, street artist Bobby Hill’s past is probably as colorful as it comes: bumping into Andy Warhol at a Michael Jackson concert; accommodating rap artist Jay-Z with an art piece; illustrating for Slam Magazine (the first publication to marry hip-hop culture with basketball) and Coca-Cola. This artist is no joke when it comes to connections.

But as a hustling street artist, Hill also knows what it feels like to be evicted. Classic values like hard work and loyalty have laid a foundation for this artist’s career; his humility shines through, giving us a glimpse of street art soul. But soul, as Hill knows it, isn’t always enough to achieve your dreams. In this THINKTANK interview, Bobby Hill takes the Molecule “back to classic.”

UM: You’re a painter, screen printer and illustrator. Which one came first? Did your introduction to one influence how you acquired the others? Is there some sort of symmetry or symbiosis with which you use them?

BH: Illustration came first. When I was in high school I entered an art contest sponsored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I was one of the runners up so my illustration got featured on a bunch of bright orange tee shirts. Months later I saw a woman on the train wearing one of those tees and from that moment on I was interested in screen-printing.

But it wasn’t until I did research on Andy Warhol that I became interested in screen-printing as art. I had a chance meeting with him when I was about six years old. A girl from my class and her mother took me to see a concert with Michael Jackson and his brothers at Madison Square Garden—before or around the time of the Off The Wall album. Rick James was the opening act. Some guy with white hair sitting behind us asked to take a picture of me and my friend. We also took a picture of him. I asked the girl’s mother who the guy was and she told me it was Andy Warhol and that I would find out about him when I got older. So when I got older I did my research and found out he screenprinted his work on canvas and paper. That got me interested in the process.

The painting came years later after splashing paint on canvases which allowed me to understand how color corresponds to one another.

UM: Harlem USA. New York City. The big time. Carrying 48 shirts on your shoulders across town, hustling your art. Tell us about that.

BH: I was getting the rent money up for an apartment I had in the Bronx at the time. I got the money but they wouldn’t take it because it was after the deadline. I got evicted anyway but I learned that I could develop a market for my work.

UM: Your first editorial illustration appeared in Slam Magazine.

BH: I was evicted from a Bronx apartment in 1998. But before I left I sent a letter with some samples of my work to the owner of the publishing company that owned Slam and XXL magazines. This was during the time when the internet was in its infancy so I was still using snail mail mostly. I used my mothers return address because I knew that if they wrote me back at my apartment in the Bronx there was a fair chance I would not receive it. Three years later the art director for XXL at the time sent a letter to my moms apartment wanting to see my work in person. Come to find out later he found my letter and samples in the corner of the owners office while he was cleaning his office out. The guy was about to throw my work in the garbage. He came to my apartment with the art director for Slam. They both liked my work and as a result put me in both of their publications. Slam was first then came two consecutive issues of XXL.

UM: Hip-Hop artist Jay-Z purchased a one of a kind print from you. Which piece was it?

BH: This happened in 1996. I was at a club on stage presenting my work to the audience. He happened to be in the audience with a high school friend of mine. After I left the stage and was walking through the crowd he told me he liked my work. I went downstairs and set my work up in a corner of the club. Later in the evening he and our mutual friend walked over to where I was set upat. We talked for a while and he ended up buying one of the prints. It was a piece that featured street basketball players. He gave me my first big face hundred dollar bill when everybody else was using the small face hundreds. (He wasn’t lying when he said he was spending hundred dollar bills when they had small faces.) The print cost $90 and I went to the bar to get change. I gave him his $10 change.

UM: What is your involvement with Cool Grove Press’s WordBridge Fair?

BH: I met the owner of Cool Grove Press and his friend in 2007 while on the streets of Brooklyn selling my art. He liked my work, purchased some prints and told me he would include me in his upcoming shows. He kept his promise and has included me in two shows so far. I‘m currently involved in another show as a direct result of the Cool Grove Press WordBridge Fair shows.

UM: Your ink drawings have a very classic American feel to them. How have you drawn from your own experience to give these illustrations such a unique aesthetic?

BH: My pen and ink line drawings are what pours out of my soul. At the time when I first developed that style I didn’t want to make decoration art or pictures of flowers and things of that nature. I’m from NYC (the big city of dreams) and I wanted the subject matter to be about my life and what I go through. As a result, my drawing has that big city urban feel to it.

On a technical level, when I was first developing this style, I wanted to make it very fluid, to eliminate any crosshatching and shading. I was taught to do that in high school and my year at the School of Visual Arts. I wanted to give it the woodcut look.

That style was influenced by Japanese art, an artist named Ernie Barnes (the artist that supplied the work for the 70s TV show Good Times), 80s pop artist Keith Haring, and Al Hirschfield (artist/illustrator for the NY Times).

UM: Danny Boy of House of Pain emailed you after catching your work on Ebay.

BH: I had just left my job doing stock at FIT. I had done some magazine work, used up all my money from my first Coca-Cola illustration and developed a new style in the process. I was selling prints of my new artwork on Ebay and I received an email from Danny Boy saying he loved my work. He then featured me in a magazine called Mass Appeal and suggested I enter my work for an event called Gen Art. I ended up getting selected for the Gen Art events in NYC and was able to showcase my work at various high profile nightclubs and studios around the city. That experience was truly spectacular.

UM: Do you still use clothes as your canvas? Any other medium you haven’t used that you’d like to?

BH: Recently I’ve been focusing on fine art and using actual canvas as my canvas but even as I’m doing that I’m always thinking of how to turn a new painting or drawing into a T-shirt design. So now my canvases influence the new T-shirt designs I’m making. As far as other media, I’d like to get into moviemaking later on down the line. At its essence it’s about moving pictures.

UM: You’ve had a mixture of success and failure. Can you tell us more?

BH: As an artist there is no script on how to make it. I have had a lot of ups and downs. A lot of the ups came as a result of taking initiative with my work and submitting it to different people, being in the right place at the right time or knowing somebody who knows somebody. To be very honest with you the failures have come as a result of hesitating when a move needed to be made and making quick decisions with an unclear mind. I had to make a conscious decision to cut a lot of the extra stuff out in order to be able to make quick decisions with a clear mind going forward.

The success and the failures go hand in hand even though it’s not that easy to rationalize when you’re in the middle of a failure. After having a good amount of success between 2001 and early 2005, I made a bunch of bad decisions that set me back from late 2005 through 2007. At the end of 2007, I decided to hit the pavement, sell my wares on the street again while attacking this art game from all angles at one time. As a result, this year I’ve been in a group show or two man show every month (I’m still looking for that one man show). I also got my work back into magazines, got a new deal with a fine art print distributor, and I’m working on several new designs with a T-shirt screen-printing and distribution company. I am doing all this at the same time because I like the feeling of success a lot more than failure.

UM: Where can we find Bob Hill Tees?

I don’t have any T-shirts in stores at present. Once you get to a certain level in the fashion biz it’s about a lot more than just having dope designs. You need a team in place so you don’t have to do everything yourself. At one time I had my line of tees in about 60 stores on the east coast but I was doing everything myself from the designing and the actual screen-printing of each garment, to dropping them off to retailers, to getting new accounts and policing the bootleggers. I also used my own money to extend credit to stores for months at a time. After a while it becomes too much on your pockets, your mental well being and health.

UM: Three words for Bobby Hill: Relentless. Forward. Motion. How far have you come since your first dream? Where do you see yourself going now?

[Bobby Hill in Willamsburg]

BH: I‘ve accomplished a lot in terms of my artistic dreams. My first dream was to have an art show in an actual art gallery. I accomplished that for the first time this year with The Cool Grove Press Shows and several other shows since.

I’ve done everything I set out to do from working with Fortune 500 companies to selling prints of my work through various frame shops around the country. But regardless of those accomplishments and the fact that I make a living from my art, sometimes I feel like I’ve not come far enough because I’m not financially where I want to be.

I feel like I’ve gone in a complete circle, but the circle is up another notch. Sort of like a spiral journey. It seems as if there is no ONE big break, like there are a series of little breaks that turn into bigger ones over time. Treat every break like it’s your one big break.

Be on the lookout for Bobby Hill mixed media originals at a frame shop near you. For updates goto www.myspace.com/bobhillsparadise, or email him at bkhill83@aol.com.

THINKTANK interviews run every other Tuesday.

“In the spring of 1999, the Family Learning Channel commissioned animator Don Hertzfeldt to produce promotional segments for their network. the cartoons were completed in five weeks. the family learning channel rejected all of them upon review, and they were never aired…”

the Molecule loves crazy. That’s why Don Hertzfeldt’s “Rejected” is one of our faves. (And the banana in the beginning sounds like this voice Christopher does when he talks to pugs named “Bubba”)

Writing on the Wall
by Josh Livingston

[Photo: Political/Social Graffiti Wall, freetoeknee]

Choose one of the following that best describes this photo:
A) tagging
B) senseless defacement
C) street art
D) the first step toward total anarchy

If you said
A) We can smell your street cred from here.
B) You’re a high school principal.
C) You still owe $40K in grad school student loans.
D) Thank you, Rudy Guliani.

Like Rodney Dangerfield, spray paint gets no respect. But it is – or can be - more than just aggrandizing one’s handle in a flashy font. Graffiti can protest, memorialize, comment on current events and solicit action (several colorful exhortations on men’s room walls spring to mind). It can be divisive, socially-aware, inflammatory, poignant and funny. Under examination, graffiti is the (literal) brick-and-mortar equivalent to blogging. As extensions of man’s primal urge to self-express, blogging and graffiti share a legacy as old as the Lascaux caves, tagged by pre-literate man some 16,000 years ago. They parallel in several key ways.

Both are incredibly democratic forums that allow anyone to broadcast their views, often anonymously, to a wide audience. The minimum capital investment – a few cans of spray paint, an internet connection - is negligible, boosting accessibility. Furthermore, practitioners need no diploma or culturally-licensed authority, just an opinion (which, in ubiquity, are second only to elbows).

Both are stomping grounds for developing artists. As skills honed by continuing execution, visual arts and writing are perfected by practice. Try to find a graphic designer without a book of street art or an aspiring novelist without a rant on blogspot. But neither is a much of a career move. Only a few high-profile blogs generate enough traffic to lure advertisers and there are only so many luxury handbag collaborations for graffiti artists to go around.

Both are unbound by corporations, but are exploited by them when it’s useful. As the vox populi, their messages often resonate at the grassroots level. Viral marketers plant endorsements, extol products or spread buzz and fashion houses co-opt the graffiti aesthetic for credibility or edge.

Both are vehicles of dissent, challenging the hegemony of culture-at-large. While national coverage of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign was marginal, his supporters can articulate their devotion endlessly online; the more spray paint-inclined have also created a powerful arsenal of graffiti-style “Ron Paul Revolution” art.

In both media, it’s difficult to censor messages that could be repulsive or offensive such as swastikas and pro-anorexia blogs. The aggrieved have little choice but to look elsewhere. NY Times fashion editor Catherine Horyn recently discussed certain European designers’ adversarial view of online commentators; in their profound resentment of critical bloggers, they wanted to know how to control or remove unflattering posts (I can only imagine the look on their faces when informed they couldn’t).

Ultimately, the crux – and the real power - of these disciplines is their absolute editorial freedom. There are no gallery owners, art buyers, editors, patrons, advertisers or other cultural gatekeepers to pander to or appease. More than the big businesses of books, films and paintings, both are essentially non-profit.
And in a world where everything feels focused on the almighty dollar, that’s more than writing on the wall.

Long Story Short runs every other Tuesday.

More about Josh Livingston

With a recent conservative groundswell of rants against “deviant” lifestyles and the murder of Lawrence King by his 14-year-old classmate because of his sexual orientation and gender expression, the Molecule wants to raise the question: What does gender mean to you? But before you take a quick minute to think about answers, check out this piece:

Marilyn Manson has been called many things by the conservative right wing during his illustrious career, and it’s safe to say “artist” isn’t one of them. Even the “Prince of Darkness” himself seems to have quite the hand with a brush. This watercolor, entitled Die Deutsche Kampferin, is a clever little comment on the Third Reich. Manson writes:

“The name comes from what I believe was a women’s magazine during the Third Reich that was kind of like the Cosmopolitan of propaganda, and it was about being a strong woman for Germany. That painting was sarcastic….I thought the flowers in the background were a cross between columbines, which some people don’t know are flowers, and palm trees. It was also around the time of the Columbine event, which I was blamed for….People don’t realize how [Columbine] almost completely destroyed my career. My life was at risk, and I basically wanted to give up. It’s great that I’ve kind of come full circle.”

While we’re not entirely sure if Marilyn Manson Images (from which the artwork was taken) is a sanctioned offshoot of the gender bending cult creator, the depth to which it displays his artwork is remarkable. The nifty gallery is a pure delight for those who are obsessed with filling their eyes at a glance.

Marilyn Manson has pushed the limits of gender expression time and again. And for that, his Charlie Chaplin influenced piece is one of the Molecule’s faves.

The third volume of short fiction by Jillian Elisabetta Ciaccia is now available. Monstrosities is composed of eleven literary portraits concentrating on the creation and process of objects, both organic and inorganic. Animal crackers. Maraschino cherries. A freckle and Nylon stockings. You won’t look at your world the same.

As with the two previous volumes, absurdities and peculiarities, Monstrosities is FREE to download and every paperback is bound and signed by thefictionist. For your copy and the latest news, click the link.

Ciaccia will be featured right here later this month.

Read “A Story the Size of a Freckle.”

When people see a Skyler Chen for the first time, the reaction is either hot or cold. There’s no in between. So when someone tells you they like his work, they mean it. Chen is about to explode, so if you haven’t had the chance to see (or buy) one of his pieces, the Molecule suggests you hurry up. Doma in Manhattan’s West Village is currently exhibiting work from his “The Republic of Norman” series through mid-April. Then, it’s on to SoHo.

Chen’s work may be intimidating but you’ll find he’s quite down to earth. If you’re not finding him working side jobs waiting tables, you’re probably watching him work in his Queens art space alongside carpenters and fashion designers, to name a few. We caught up with him to see how he feels about the current New York art scene, and if there is any hope for us amidst the bourgeois bullshit of gentrification.

UM: You have your exhibition at Doma café and gallery through April 13th. How did you land the gig?

SC: I always liked the place. One day I dropped by with my portfolio. Someone saw my work. A month later the curator got back to me.

It’s my first ever exhibit in the city. That night was great. It was an amazing feeling being there, showing my work to the public. There were a lot of young professionals there, people I know. Fashion designers, artists, people in finance. I remember when I put it up. The second day I went in. Nobody knew me. I overheard someone say they liked the work. That really meant something to me. It was like a validation. It was the greatest feeling.

UM: Have there been any interested parties since that night?

SC: I’ve gotten many emails from people who are interested. Two pieces have been sold. Delicate and Beyond Reason. I don’t know anything about the buyers.

UM: And you have an exhibit at another gallery coming in August.

SC: Yes. It’s going to be a stronger statement about my work. Video installations and sculptures. It’s very important as a second step. All of the work is mine, a solo show.

UM: How would you describe the New York art scene?

SC: I was at the Chelsea Hotel recently and they happened to have this fair. I spoke to these artists who were living there. The hotel is pushing them out.

There are artists in Brooklyn and Queens. Everyone is still trying to do what they’ve always done. But New York’s become so commercialized and it’s now much harder for artists to survive. New York was always a place for art, but now it’s going away. It’s kind of sad. New York won’t be New York once the artists leave.

And so the Chelsea Hotel is trying to go condo, to get more money. They are forcing out artists who have been living there since the 60s. It was an interesting conversation.

UM: Do you think the art scene will come back around?

SC: I believe so. Art has to come back at some point. Galleries are moving to the Lower East Side now. Chelsea is filling up. Art is very important to our history, to human existence. It will live on.

UM: Will the Republic of Norman live on?

SC: I don’t think I can say now, but I definitely think it will become something different. It will go to the next level. I have something in mind, but I don’t want to reveal it before I’m sure.

UM: That’s probably smart. You discovered an art space in Queens.

SC: It’s an amazing group of young artists. 20 year olds to 60 year olds. They get together and they, you know, have a community. They have a gallery where they present everyone’s work each month. There’s a good spirit there. I think that type of community doesn’t exist in New York as much as it once did. Not like in Andy Warhol’s time.

These artists aren’t only painting. Some do furniture, video installations, fashion design. The first Friday of each month they have the open house. They present their work. You get to know them better through their work. You should come.

UM: I think I just might. How are you inspired?

SC: I go to galleries, museums. New York has the greatest information. This new art mixes with old art. Walking through the streets, watching people brushing their faces. This is how I find my inspiration. In the subway. This is how you remember. These experiences often reflect in my paintings — people’s faces.

Right now my favorite artist is Henry Darger. (It changes once in a while.) He’s from Chicago. He’s one of the artists we call an “outsider” artist. That means they never presented their work while they were alive. People find their work after they pass away. He was very much a lonely person, doing his work alone in his apartment. He died in 1973. They found…he wrote this novel. It’s supposedly the longest novel in America. Along with the novel he did a painting with the story. It was this massive, massive work. He’s influenced a lot of artists today, including myself.

UM: And you really can see his influence in your work. So, what’s next? Where do you see yourself in, say, five years?

SC: Hopefully I’ll still be in New York in five years. It’s important to fill out my resume, to be in different shows, for people to know me.

UM: You see New York as a place to build your resume?

SC: Yes. I see myself networking here.

[photo of Skyler Chen: Christopher de la Torre]

UM: And then what?

SC: I’d like to present my work all over the world. As an artist it’s very important to create a new message — even to create a feeling sometimes is good enough. To me, the purpose for being an artist is to create new ideas.

Ultimately, I think that’s what we all want to do.

For more about Skyler Chen, go to his site.
See pics from the March 18 reception at Doma.
UM1.1 | The Republic of Norman

Catch a new THINKTANK interview every other Tuesday.
[All artwork courtesy Skyler Chen]