when i started writing the story of jubilee zinevella in earnest, in january 2018, august 2020 really felt so far away, and now it’s here, and the story i wrote feels extra fantastic held up against our heavily-present present august 2020. Everything happens so much, said @horse_ebooks on twitter in June of 2012, which is still true.
this blog post is in honor of & a compilation of links & images both moving & still connected to the third-time’s-a-charm edition of jubilee zinevella, this time 21 copies; as before wearable & bespoke in their zinewear, custom fabric book covers on wire-rope handles strung with words made of letter beads a la the bracelets candy ravers like me trade with friends new & old on various dancefloors
the story of jubilee inside each zinevella is a quest and a question, and most of all a call for jubilee in this world, this 2020, where the need for redistribution of resources, forgiveness of debts and erasure of hoards, seems desperately needed to me, increasingly-desperately
off with their bank accounts!
(the things in italics are excerpts from the story)
if u are curious, u can read the story here as a google document, which might still change here & there/ has at least the potential for motion (tho the last edit at the time of my writing here was May 18, 2020), and here as a pdf, which is fixed still. If u find value in the story/ know anybody else that might, feel free to share/print the pdf freely (and i do mean freely).
as with the first two families of bespoke editions of this story, i plan to send these ones via mail to artists&friends i respect&admire, as well as artists&friends suggested by artists&friends who received prior editions themselves. this project is full of loops. i also asked prior recipients of jubilee zinevella if they had any material objects/images they wanted to contribute to the materiality of this edition, and i am very humbled & grateful & repeatedly moved to tears of poignant joy to have received & incorporated objects & images from hiba ali, sidony o’neal, penny goring, garima thakur, tabitha nikolai, anima correa, katie howard, hannah piper burns, holly childs, taylor hurley & dana dart-mclean. i also sewed in a scrap of calligraphy from jade novarino, a recipient of the first edition, who gave me a paper bag full of her practice sheets to tie in as i was working on the zinewear for the second edition. i had some left over.
i am also grateful to erika rier of the IPRC for kind patience & support during the printing & scanning processes, & david higel for tech support getting the scanned images of each zinevella out of the IPRC safely (8.7 gigs for 40 TIFFs! That’ll teach me not to check the file size when I save)
& to my daughter, Samimi, whom I love more than all else
Scanned images of each zinevella-in-their-zinewear below, front and back, acting as art each in their own way, playing with warped flatness, trompe l’oeil, & hands (ask me about my grudge against andrew norman wilson), resized to fit this blog post:
boxng joggng
2. bubbling kin (for samimi)
3. conch knot
4 & 5. cool escape thingy & puppy face zone (i was running out of time during my appointment at IPRC so I scanned these two together)
6. cozy bromance
7. deft punk
8. doomr jugglo
9. dwell & fumble & risk
10. fake blood
11. jazzy roomba
12. luxury fragment
13. marble tomorrow
14. mossy invisibility
15. muddy joy
16. pinch snarl
17. plarny rantasm
18. shadow journey
19. sonic pink quilter
20. spongy liquid
21. surge loop
… and an unboxing video I made last night at 7:57 pm in my childhood backyard, where i talk in more depth & detail about each one & some of the meanings they connect to for me:
i will also be doing a bedtime-story reading of this edition of jubilee zinevella in a few days, Monday August 24 2020 at 7pm on streamyard, and there might be more content ribboning outward too, all in good time. Tune in if u feel!
jubilee zinevella is a work in progress, a story i am writing and then wrapping in artifacts and remnants, suspended on strong wires with usb-cord protectors and words made of letter beads a la candy-raver bracelets curled around them
this blog post is part of the second edition. 6 months after its first version, this project is inflected with more distance, shadows, haze
i put out the first edition and its concomitant blog post august 2019;
story suspended on beaded wire strings, wrapped in fabric
, i asked artists and friends i respect and admire if they would like one
ppl who said yes, i sent them a copy, wrapped in found gold foil and bubble wrap and S.W.A.K. off to the post office (only one that i know of was lost in the mail/stolen from a doorstep after delivery)
the story wasn’t finished yet. the wip was and is still in progress.
i worked on the story for a few months more and wanted to send out another edition around the new year. Before i started fashioning this round of concrete objects a few months ago i reached out to the ppl i had sent the first editions to and asked them if they would like to contribute to round 2 in the form(s) of: things/ideas/adventures that might want to live in the story; favorite words to wrap around its wires; pretty trash and other remnants to incorporate into the zinewear; and ppl that might like a copy of the second edition.
i am very grateful to giovanna olmos, jade novarino, taryn tomasello, garima thakur, anima correa, and tabitha nikolai for their kind contributions to this second edition, and to all the artists and friends who were willing to bring the first edition of jubilee zinevella into their lives/worlds.
looking forward to where jubilee zinevella second edition goes, once it goes out into the world as did its predecessor, into the hands of more artists and friends i respect and admire
here in this blog post it lives together. take a look if you like
this round’s unboxing vid, cozy february 2020:
the A/V book/incantation of the story, read in the same cozy february 2020:
…and scans of each zinewear, named as before according to the words i strung in letter beads along their handles; one by one, front and back, this time presented in almost-alphabetical order since that’s where my filing system landed;
thanks again to jade novarino of conduit/penny press for letting me use her giant scanner and her nailpolish collection, so fun and deep (the scanner and the nailpolish collection and the experience of being at conduit and being so generously offered access to them)
here they are:
bobbi jumpi
2. bumpy charm
3. caterpillar mist
4. chug fog & vibe muck
5. dear fury
6. energy panorama (for samimi– inside is a blank book called “mimi’s dreams”)
7. gadget castle
8. goof sky tmi
9. math soup
10. movie bubble
11. path vision
12. plaid pantry
13. poppy mappy
14. quic fidjit
15. sry lvr
16. syzygy kappa
17. vicks & fax
18. vroommm dude
19. majorly achey (scanned on my parents’ scanner with different fingernail look, maybe gave away by jade as per my request)
❤ there u have it! reach out if u have any qs or answers
i’ve been thinking about jubilee for awhile– the xmen character Jubilee was my favorite back when my brother got the comic books in the early 90s. She seemed cool, her and Gambit
It was probably around that same time that i first heard of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee as well, the 50th year of her queenhood, a big celebration. I’m not sure if I knew about biblical jubilee by then but if not it came soon after, and that was the best jubilee of all to me– a forgiveness of debts
i read it or valued it as a regularly-scheduled reset pattern embedded in social time. or maybe that’s more a way the concept impressed itself to me as i mulled it
anyway, this idea of jubilee has been resting with me and bubbling up, i think it’s important to consider. so i’ve been considering it, and in my way, i have made something of this thought, woven slash tangled around some other ribbons of thought and feeling, memory and imagination i’ve got going on. where these thoughts and how i feel about them /act on them/ write about them/ make in order to hold them has gotten me, you can see or reach towards below.
it started off as a story, it’s a story about a person on a decidedly nonlinear quest at a future-fictional version of burning man 2020. i named it jubilee, and one of the places i keep the story is in a gdoc which you can see a version of here if you like. after working on this story very slowly and sporadically for years, it was getting to the time where 2020 didn’t feel much like the future anymore, it was creeping up quickly, and i was feeling a little urgency to “do something with” the story somehow while it could still seem speculative. something about having it set in 2020 and having 2020 be the future was important to me for whatever reason, certain plot elements play factors probs
and an opportunity to do something with it presented itself this summer, when I went to the Art Farm Nebraska for a residency type thing. I had initially applied to Art Farm with a friend to work together on bringing new life into a long-dormant epic poem collab we had started on MySpace back in oh 06 or so– but she ended up not being able to make it, and so I had this time on my hands to do something with Jubilee.
I knew I wanted to print it in zine form, center stapled and I wanted to call it a zinevella, zine+novella mal- or slant-portmonteau (a la chocoholic)
i knew i wanted to customize copies to give away to artists and friends i respect and admire but i didn’t have a real sense of what I wanted to do customize-wise until one day in maybe late July when i was grumpy i did a strange stretchy dance on my front porch to soothe myself and a few minutes later the idea / materials / making-way made it into my head:
a la book jackets, the floppy flat sturdy pages that curl around hardbacks, i thought i could make zinewear, which i envisioned as more femme and purselike protective structures, with long looping handles and a wire suspension to catch the center of the book on. this was a couple weeks before i left for art farm so i started collecting the materials: welding wire and ring terminals from my bosses and vendors in the mechanic shop at the tree farm i work for day job, candy beads and fabric from my stash, various implements, scissors etc and I packed it all up. i got a couple more things in grand island once i got to nebraska, too, clothes from the thrift shop to cut up.
once i got to the art farm, i was lucky that i had the time and space and things to make something pretty similar to what i had envisioned, including some relics below: a reveal video, an unboxing video, scans of the front and back of each zinevella in their zinewear; i also planned on having a videobook of me reading jubilee aloud there to share, but my computer didn’t accept the file, so i had to re-do it here once I arrived back in Boring, Oregon, in my parents’ side yard.
Anyway, this is all a WIP, I like the zinewear and i’m gonna keep working on the story cause it needs it and especially the reading-aloud process helped me get a better sense of what and how i want to edit– i had thought somehow it would be cool or important to *not* edit it much, and maybe it was, but now i think it might be time. so feel free to check back at the link above to track changes, and in the meantime or whenever, you can also see Jubilee zinevella in its various forms as it was in mid August 2019 below ❤
reveal vid:
and the unboxing vid, seeming very happy and relaxed, i had such a good time at Art Farm Nebraska : ) :
and scans of each zinewear, named according to the words i strung in letter beads along their handles; one by one, front and back, on an old scanner that allowed for some fun approaches, in the order i scanned them in:
flower love (belongs to Samimi)
2. vocal cave
3. moody and fancy
4. tinkerbell
5. hummingbird
6. part fake
7. disco flag
8. numb jig
9. rock dove music
10. this woozy
11. plur moodz
12. prank meme
13. urge pact
14. gnomic binge
15. xtc jester
16. mock vampy
17. witch hymn
18. aqua sox
19. squid kid
as the scanning process progressed, it was fun to play with hand placement and movement and watch smeary rainbows and extra fingers emerge in the images–
i think they turned out nice, i love making scanner art
one more piece of this collection: the videobook i made reading the story aloud, captured in ~10min sections– a link to the youtube playlist thereof here, and below the too-long description i tried to include as the playlist description:
welcome to the audiobook version of jubilee zinevella wip recorded in my parents’ side yard on the night of August 25th! this was the 3rd time i had read this zinevella out loud into the photo booth program of my macbook– the first two times (first up in the treehouse at Art Farm Nebraska, second at Dodge Park where the Bull Run and Sandy Rivers converge) i read until the battery was dead and/or the memory was full — the first time the file was invisible, the second unreadable, so this time i did it in littler slivers of time/energy and guess what 3rd time’s a charm 🙂 i’m a little sleepy at the end of a long weekend, and the sound is a little choppy and muffled from the rustling of the pages and the weight of them sometimes hiding the mic from my voice or vice versa. enjoy as you can given these conditions and the rest of the conditions in your life! it’s a story about a person on a decidedly nonlinear quest at a future-fictional version of burning man 2020 ❤ xoxo (if you are watching this beyond 2020, imagine it in a future-fictional version of burningman one year ahead of you)
all this with made with PLUR and other fond feelings from me ❤
the drop of water down the back of jeff goldblum’s hand
twice
THX sound for the first time at the mall theater in 6th grade
the way it whined down to prove itself, sonorously
clackamas town center
forrest gump summer
jurassic park theme song on the saxophone in 7th grade school band
what did she play? clarinet.
i told her ghost on facebook today,
“holding memories of us close to the surface,”
but it’s all a swirling nearbyness–
death’s uncanny valleys
curvatures
feeling spotblind
but then , following the creek past the gravel on the side of the drive, thru the fir grove where we climbed trees defiantly, hid in them, there you are
your magnetic backyard, the trampoline, the treelined sunshine
your mom’s lop warren to the side there, we never really went in anymore,
physical presence in the form of surroundings
as they say, a sense of place
o how your suite of feelings fascinated and preoccupied me!
your handwriting and your maudlin disdain
moments of confident hyperfocused taste, how much you loved what you loved
maybe it was the strength of the love that skewed the rest
