Yes, this is the real forecast for the day after tomorrow in Oakland, California. So let’s just give it up, guys. Use all the plastic you want, gorge yourself on factory farmed burgers and have tons of Catholic babies. We’re clearly fucked as it is.
For the person who found this blog by searching “don’t understand the ape temporary seller’s permit thing” — it’s really easy, but sort of a pain. To sell anything in California, you have to have a permit and pay the state an exorbitant rate of sales tax on everything you sell (that you report). You can apply and receive the permit in person at any Board of Equalization office in the state, or send away for it in the mail. Then you have several weeks to pay the tax to the state.
Which reminds me that I owe mine from Zine Fest… Gotta keep those coffers full for the fat cats!
It’s not year-round, and I wonder how dust-proof it really was, but this bike trailer house made for Burning Man is pretty sweet (minus the shirtless [but crafty!] neohippie). The thing only weighs 100 pounds dry, which may or may not be easy to tote on a bike — I don’t really know. Click through to “Turtleman”s blog for more photos and documentation of the inside — including a big box of cat litter? Yikes.
(This is only one of the sweet morsels on Tiny House Design.)
I haven’t subscribed to the New Yorker for a couple years now since it’s pretty pricey and it’s not like I read the thing for the cartoons, so I don’t mind getting the articles online. I haven’t been blown away by anything since the profile of David Foster Wallace many issues ago, but this, now this… this is good.
Elizabeth Kolbert profiled Colin Beavan, a.k.a “No Impact Man,” in terms of the absurdity of his project to live with a carbon footprint of zero — in Manhattan. She also writes about other Thoreau-wannabes who’ve undertaken similar pseudo-eco-friendly stunts in order to propel their writing careers (including one woman who gave up toothpicks but bought a three-story house and went on several cross-country plane trips).
The nouveau Thoreauvians have picked up from “Walden” its dramaturgy of austerity. Their schemes require them to renounce (if only temporarily) various material comforts—cars, elevators, Starbucks—that their neighbors take for granted. Renunciation sets them apart and organizes their lives in the name of some higher purpose. The trouble—or, at least, a trouble—is that it’s hard to say exactly what that purpose is.
At twenty-eight, [Vanessa] Farquharson is almost exactly the age that Thoreau was when he set off for Walden Pond. And she’s a lot like him, too, if he’d been the type who, as she writes of herself, enjoys blowing a “month’s savings on a bottle of pink Veuve Clicquot and pairing it with back-to-back reruns of ‘America’s Next Top Model.’ ”
(Yeah, she’s the one who bought the house and started going to “eco-friendly spas.”)
These projects are about guilt, gimmicks and cold hard cash. But of course Kolbert, writing for a print publication, looks over the most absurd bit of all: that the goddamn “No Impact” book is printed on a whole lot of environmentally unfriendly paper (really, is it even New Leaf? and how many copies will be sent back coverless to the publisher when the next gimmick rules). Still, at least someone is calling these people out while they sit in the scented soy-candlelight eating their organic grass-feed kobe beef and counting their money.
I wrote up my thoughts on the SF Zine Fest for the Daily Cross Hatch, an internet repository of indie comics news and reviews. Feel free to disagree with me if you think it’s a good and logical idea to pay $400 for a table at a convention where you’ll likely not even make that money back in sales — I’d love to hear your reasoning! (And if it’s “networking,” please show your work on the page next to your answer.)
Also, look forward to a neat series of interviews with cartoonists whose talent to press ratio is far higher than a lot of the cartoonists you read about.
I think Rachel Maddow is one of the most talented journalists working today. She has both normal human social skills and sincere reporterly interest, and when combined, she can ask Tom Ridge the sorts of questions we’d like to ask — but she actually coheres her anger into dutiful follow-ups. Plus she looks just like Ira Glass you guys OMG!