Friday Morning in Williamsburg: ALLDAYEVERYDAY presents The Newsstand at the Lorimer Street - Metropolitan Avenue L/G Subway Station

Saturday Afternoon in Williamsburg: Pete's Mini Zine Fest at Pete's Candy Store

This afternoon we spent some time at Pete's Candy Store to attend Pete's Mini Zine Fest, the great Williamsburg bar and hangout's celebration of the duplicated arts

. The tables in the garden and front room featured: Andria Alefhi – We’ll Never Have Paris http://neverhaveparis.blogspot.com/ Darryl Ayo – Little Garden http://www.letsgoayo.com/ Elvis Bakaitis – Homos in Herstory Aida Binhas – Bon Nui Dreamland http://bonnui.tumblr.com/ C. M. Butzer – Rabid Rabbit Comic Anthology http://www.rabidrabbit.org/ Colin – Slice Harvester www.sliceharvester.com Marguerite Dabaie – The Hookah Girl http://www.mdabaie.com/ Christopher Michael Duffy – http://www.duffydrawings.com/ Jenna Freedman – Lower East Side Librarian http://www.lowereastsidelibrarian.info/ Abigail Geraldine – In These Shells http://www.silentinfinite.com/ Cat Gilbert – The 22 Magazine www.the22magazine.com Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz – Living in La La Land http://jennydevildoll.wordpress.com/ Dre Grigoropol – Dee's Dream www.dretime.org Alisa Harris – Urban Nomad http://www.alisaharris.com/ Katie Haegele – The La-La Theory http://www.thelalatheory.com/ Aaron Howard – Oilcan Press http://oilcanpress.blogspot.com/ Gus Iversen – www.iloanbooks.com Jemibook – Lolita http://www.jemibook.com/ John Jennison – Crisis of Infinite Cells http://www.dogoodercomics.com/ Mark Lerer – The Little General http://www.newyorkartworld.com/gallery/lerer.html Sara Lindo – Wall Street Cat http://www.thelindo.com/ L. Nichols – Jumbly Junkery http://www.dirtbetweenmytoes.com/ Morgan Pielli – Indestructible Universe Quarterly http://www.morganwritesabook.com/ Bill Roundy – Bar Scrawl http://www.billroundy.com/ Steve Seck – Life is Good http://www.secktacular.com/ Tiffany Stevens and Lindsay Marionara – Ooooh Yeah Press http://terrificterrificterrific.tumblr.com/ More coming . . .

Sunday Evening on the Lower East Side: Anne Elizabeth Moore and "Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh" at Bluestockings

This evening we were at the wonderful Bluestockings bookstore for an event featuring a writer/activist we totally admire, Anne Elizabeth Moore, who read from her new book, Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh, which USA Today's travel blog called "the best travel book I’ve read this year."

Part memoir, part investigative journalism, Cambodian Grrrl is Moore’s account of teaching publishing to the first large group of social-justice-minded university women from the impoverished provinces of Cambodia, a country scarred by genocide and political repression.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is a columnist for Truthout, and has written for The Progressive, Bitch, Annalemma, Tin House, the Boston Phoenix, and The Onion. The former editor of Punk Planet and the Comics Journal, Moore received a Fulbright to continue her work in Cambodia in 2010, and recently held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Her book Unmarketable: was said to offer “something distinctly more radical than merely protesting against consumerism: a total rejection of the competitive ethos that drives capitalist culture” by the Los Angeles Times; deemed “a work of honesty and, yes, integrity” by Kirkus and called “sharp and valuable muckraking” by Time Out New York. It was also named a Best Book of 2007 by Mother Jones.

Anne spoke about her mission in Cambodia over the years and what she's accomplished and taught, and even more, what she's learned from the young women she lives with in Cambodia: really, the first generation of women who are empowered by higher education. She read several excerpts from Cambodian Grrrl, which is the first of a projected four volumes, and all of these excerpts showed her to have a first-class intelligence and sensibility, and she's also a fluid and graceful, if informal, prose stylist. Here's a version of one of the vignettes she read (richer with detail in the book excerpt we heard), which we've taken from her blog Camb(l)o(g)dia:

So Christmas Day I got up early and made the girls pancakes even though I’d been up all night puking because they love pancakes and it was Christmas and also because I would have just killed myself if I hadn’t done something. Although the night before I said the same thing which was how I ended up eating half a pound of malted milk balls with the girls watching Tum Teav, a very important Khmer movie, which was probably the reason I ended up puking all night. As it turns out, chocolate is hard for the body to process when you don’t eat it for a month. I never believed people when they told me that. Umm, and then I went shopping. Specifically, I went to buy all the Christmas presents for all the people I probably should have gotten them for before I left town, and I also went to pick up my handmade Apsara skirt, and while I was there some cute shopkeeper foisted some handmade green silk on me so I asked my tailor to make me a dress. I’m not going to tell you what this costs. The US residents will cry with jealousy and the girls will tell me I am stupid for spending so much, unless, as Kalyan says, the dress is VERY beautiful, in which case it does not matter how much you spend.

So, my consumerist duties fulfilled—and, honestly, after spending three days in bed, and musing on the role of the American in Phnom Penh today, I felt like a leech, also kind of a bad friend—the only thing I could think to do with the rest of my day was go to the Killing Fields.

Here is the thing that stays with me, that, I think, will haunt me: that the clothes that littered the site when the Khmer Rouge were killing people there in great droves of 20 or 30 per day—later, 300, when they could manage it (remember, they had to work at night so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, and you know what? They’re still living there, a short distance away, in fact about those between Starbucks in most US downtowns), the clothes that were stripped of victims, or fell off through more natural means, I don’t know: the clothes are still there. Not memorialized (although I guess some are, washed in 1980 because the smell in the stupa was overwhelming), but scattered throughout the grounds, mashed into the dirt, still peeking up near more recently excavated spots. Bones, too, but the clothes somehow are more jarring. They look normal, as if the grounds had been used as a schoolyard for several years and the ripped t-shirts and socks of playing kids had just been left in the dirt to amass, a natural aspect of the utilization of such an environment.

It’s true that people believe that the whole memorial is a bad idea, that it really would be best to chuck it, move on, close it. It is in the best interests of the Khmer people, they say, not to dwell on this. One of the documentaries I mentioned [HERE] here interviewed several Pol Pot regime survivors who still lived in the area who argued quite eloquently for the site’s closure.

And they might be right. There’s not much really to be gained from a genocide museum that can’t be gleaned from an after school special: people can do great evil for very little reason. We know this instinctively, and no amount of further learning, it seems, will compel us to find a way to stop it. At least, so far it hasn’t.

But there are so many things you can’t realize, that you can’t possibly understand about life under the Pol Pot regime and after it that they don’t think to explain. Things that offer small lessons in humane treatment, in decency, in how others stack their agendas. That the watery rice the lucky survivors who did get fed ate is in fact rice porridge, and it’s quite good. I’m eating it right now. But eating it without utensils of any kind? Eating it by the handful? Not an easy way to consume a thick soup, or a bowl of oatmeal. Even this small indignity, though, a lucky option. That the neighbors of Cheung Eck could be heard singing quite clearly, a few meters away, and that going undetected by them for several years considering the volume of work undertaken here is an astonishing feat. And what we learn from this is: to people who do harm to others, appearances matter more than human rights. And: small things hurt too.

Which is why Cheung Eck is valuable. But the urge to profit from the destruction, from the horrible fuck-ups of others who have greatly wronged you and everyone you know—this must be irresistible. I watch few bother to resist: the tuk-tuk drivers who gleefully offer a visit to the memorial as an option to golf, the young boy begging by first impressing you with his English and then asking you for money (How old are you? 12, he says. Where are your parents? I ask. We don’t have. Where are they? Killed by Pol Pot. Ummm, you’re a little young for that), the Japanese corporation JC Royal Co. Ltd that manages the site, extracting two dollars each per international visitor (few, if any, Cambodians visit. When I get home, I discover one of the girls in the dormitory has never even heard of it). And in the last year, visitors to the site have doubled, more a sign of increased tourism in the country than the supposed renewed fascination with the Khmer Rouge the Tribunal has supposedly elicited.

So. Someone profits here. Some merely survive, sure, but others, few, amass wealth and power from the suffering and destruction of many. Again.

We're looking forward to reading the whole book. Thanks so much to Bluestockings, which is undergoing an renovation these days and is temporarily without a cafe or a bathroom. But the books, and the great events like tonight's, are still there. If you haven't discovered Bluestockings, one of New York's most important bookstores, you need to visit one of these days.

Tuesday Night in Williamsburg: John Porcellino and "Map of My Heart" at Desert Island Comics

On our way home from work tonight we stopped off at Desert Island, Williamsburg's wonderful store filled with comics, graphic novels and related stuff, for an event featuring John Porcellino, whom Entertainment Weekly has correctly called "a master at miniature poignance."

His new full-length book, Map of My Heart, celebrates the twentieth anniversary of John's seminal and influential comics zine, King Cat Comics, which he started self-publishing in 1989. As the Drawn and Quarterly website states:

In this collection, while Porcellino is living in isolation and experiencing the pain of divorce he crafts a melancholic, tender graphic ballad of heartbreak and reflection. Known for his sad, quiet honesty rendered in his signature deceptively minimalist style, Porcellino has a command of graphic storytelling as sophisticated as the medium's more visually intricate masters. Few other artists are able to so expertly contemplate the sadness, beauty, and wonder of life in so few lines.

We find his work low-key, sweet and melancholy and were not surprised to learn during the slide show and talk that began around 8 p.m. that most of his comics begin as poetry. He captures the little moments of life, the profound small details that never make it (thankfully) into Facebook status updates but whose signifance is much less empheral and which may haunt us for years to come.

Desert Island was crowded with his fans and some of his friends, and when we got there, John was signing books - both Map of My Heart and some of the issues of King Cat and other books and zines.

He had a lot of trouble with the computer during the slide show. The technical difficulties, which necessitated starting over, let him talk without any visual presentation for a while about the events of his life that were the fodder for the new book, which covers the years from 1997 to 2002, or King Cat numbers 51 to 61.

It was a pretty dark time in John's life. He suffered from a hearing disorder, hyperacusis, an extreme sensitivity to sound which made everyday noises intolerably loud and painful: "God forbid I heard a fork on a plate."

Before this, John had played in a band and was an avid punk rock aficiando. Indeed, it was the DIY ethos of the punk scene which had inspired his zine and its deceptively simple, unadorned line drawings. The ear disorder forced him to stop playing and listening to music and to isolate himself somewhat to avoid harsh sounds.

Then he got even sicker, spending a long time in the hospital and losing a lot of weight. The crazy rock 'n' roll life he knew became a quiet, reflective existence. Previously agnostic, he became more spiritual and eventually a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, involved in meditation and yoga after, as he described it, he had a kind of mental breakdown (John said he "went crazy") after his physical health rapidly improved.

During these years John and his wife were forced to leave Denver and return to the Chicago area to stay with her family. Later, they got a divorce that was very painful to him.

A lot of his physical, emotional and spiritual changes are reflected in the work in the book: "Ghost Eyes," "The Weight of My Bones," and other pieces that started as poems or prose poems.

We especially loved some of the sequences like "Hsueh-feng's Spiritual Light."

It was really a pleasure to see John Porcellino and hear him discuss his work, the interaction between his life and his art, and to take questions from people who were obviously longtime fans. We look forward to reading Map of My Heart and are grateful to the fabulous Desert Island, as always, for being close by.

If you live in Williamsburg and haven't checked out the store, pay them a visit.