Mark Manders, Traducing Ruddle
Newspaper, 16 pp., web offset 1/1, 350 x 480 mm
Insert, 48 pp., offset 1/1, 215 x 280 mm
Edition of 3000
ISBN 978-0-9738133-7-1
Published by Fillip Editions, Roma Publications

above: 1:1 scale, Waste Bookmark

Jonathan Maghen, Waste Bookmark
Bookmark, offset 1/0, 2 x 5.5 inches
Edition of 11 + 2 proofs, unnumbered
Published by Textfield

Card used by Pressman to indicate any waste, errors, bad sheets, etc., on a printed job to the Bindery; typically made from the waste sheets of other printed jobs. Re-reused as a bookmark; part of an unfinished book, used to bookmark the pages of a finished book.

“I really just don’t think imagery should be owned, including my own. If it’s part of our world…– it’s like owning words…how can you own words? It’s stuff to use!”

Slavs and Tatars & Ooga Booga present the west coast debut of Kidnapping Mountains. Featuring a selection and sale of Slavs and Tatars posters, editions, and printed matter.

Ooga Booga
943 N Broadway #203
Los Angeles CA 90012
14 January — 7 February 2010

Ooga Booga is a concept shop vital to the creative life-blood of Los Angeles. It gathers an eclectic range of products. Spearheaded by Wendy Yao, Ooga Booga fosters a vibrant community of independent producers. For Swiss Institute, Yao installs a lounge in which one may read over 300 titles — from self to professionally published. The room contains contributions by:

Bookshop now open — email your order (or order online) and receive 15% off all books, catalogs, editions, magazines, monographs, multiples, and videos, between November 24, 2009 and January 1, 2010. All orders placed by December 11th, will be delivered by December 24th. Orders placed online will receive a 15% refund. Happy Holidays!

Publishers
032c, A&R Press, Bas Morsch, Book Works, Capricious, Charlie White, Christoph Keller Editions, C Magazine, Coins, David Kordansky Gallery, Fillip, FormContent, Four Corners Books, Glen Cummings, Adam Michaels, Harsh Patel, Hassla Books, Hunter and Cook, Hypen Press, JRP|Ringier, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Laura Bartlett Gallery, Laura Palmer Foundation, Manuel Raeder, Mono.Kultur, Museum Paper, Nieves, OK-RM, onestar press, Paperback, Paper Monument, Passenger Books, Peres Projects, Seems, Primary Information, Semiotexte, Slavs and Tatars, Steidl, Textfield, The Power Plant,Tramnesia, True True True, Turner, Vier5, Walker Art Center, Wallspace, Walther König, Wear, and more.

Keith Bormuth, The Occasion of Fracture
Softcover, 28 pp., offset 1/1, 160 x 240 mm
Edition of 500
Published by Keith Bormuth

The theme of the nineth issue of Here and There is HER LIFE. It deals with the various factors that make up the many waves in a woman’s life, such as working, becoming pregnant, giving birth. The colorful stories told by Elein Fleiss, Laetitia Bena, Yurie Nagashima, Miranda July, Midori Araki and Aiko Yamada, reflect each of their lives.

032c 18, Thomas Demand
Softcover, 272 pp. + Thomas Demand dossier, offset 4/1, 20 x 27 cm
Edition of 2000
Published by 032c

Laura Palmer Foundation, Stadium X — A Place That Never Was offers a selection of texts presenting a multi-faceted picture of that site’s deterioration and its existence as a ‘city within a city’ and also documents the series of live art projects. The Stadium and its parasites functions, which are now being erased form the map of Warsaw will likely become some distant planet, while the present publication, with the brilliant contributions from its authors, will attain — perhaps — the status of an unreal story about a place that, after all, never was.

3. The music comes directly from the artist.
Most of Rinse’s output is sourced directly from producers. Tracks are played as soon as possible, often without anyone but the DJ and producer knowing the credits and dropped before they risk becoming stale or come close to getting a release. As funky crew Circle said in response to someone asking for one particular track to be identified on an internet forum: “Tracklist? You’ll be lucky”.

Trim (above) on Rinse, 2004. This set on Deja Vu 92.3 was my intro to grime.

The art world is now both socially professional and professionally social. Curators visit artists’ studios; collectors, dealers, and journalists assemble for a reception and reconvene later for dinner; everyone goes to parties. We exchange introductions and small talk; art is bought and sold; careers (and friendships) brighten or fade. In each situation, certain behaviors are expected while others are silently discouraged. Sometimes, what’s appropriate in the real world would be catastrophic in the art world, and vice versa.

Making these distinctions on the spot can be nerve-wracking and disastrous. So we asked ourselves: What is the place of etiquette in art? How do social mores establish our communities, mediate our critical discussions, and frame our experience of art? If we were to transcribe these unspoken laws, what would they look like? What happens when the rules are broken? Since we didn’t have all the answers, we politely asked our friends for some help.

Textfield, Inc. is an independent publisher and distributor of artists books, catalogs, editions, monographs, multiples, and periodicals. We specialize in the distribution of quality publications from publishers in North America and Europe, to libraries, bookshops, galleries, and museums.

The focus of our publishing catalog involves the development of close working relationships with artists, galleries, museums, universities, and institutions to design and publish books and other printed matter.

Publishers: 032c, Capricious, Christoph Keller Editions, C Magazine, Coins, David Kordansky Gallery, Fillip, FormContent, Harsh Patel, Hassla Books, I-20 Gallery, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Laura Bartlett Gallery, Manuel Raeder, Mono.Kultur, Museum Paper, Nieves, OK-RM, onestar press, Paperback, Peres Projects, Seems, Slavs and Tatars, Textfield, True True True, Vier5, Wallspace, Wear.

Allan Kaprow, How to Make a Happening, Audio CD, 24:43 Minutes

Book launch & reception

Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
Director’s Roundtable Garden | LACMA

Please join the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department to celebrate the release of the WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES publication, meet some of the authors, and start your own discussions.

Books will be available for purchase at the special discount price of $25 (plus tax).

www.wordswithoutpictures.org

Story

by Martin Fackler

HIME ISLAND, Japan — If Marxism had ever produced a functional, prosperous society, it might have looked something like this tiny southern Japanese island.

At first glance, there is little to set Hime (pronounced HEE-may) apart from the hundreds of other small inhabited islands that dot the coasts of Japan’s main isles. The 2,519 mostly graying islanders subsist on fishing and shrimp farming, and every summer hold a Shinto religious festival featuring dancers dressed as foxes.

But once off the ferry, the island’s sole public transportation link to the outside, visitors are greeted by an unusual sight: a tall, bronze statue of Hime’s previous mayor, rare in a country that typically shuns such political aggrandizement. Rarer still is that the statue was erected by his son, who is the island’s current mayor.

In fact, the father, who died in 1984, and the son, who succeeded him, have won every mayoral election in Himeshima, the island’s village, for 49 years — without once being challenged by a rival candidate.

And it is not just the cult-of-personality politics that smack of a latter-day workers’ paradise. This sleepy island, just off Japan’s main southern island, Kyushu, has recently come under unaccustomed national media attention for a very different reason: it invented its own version of work-sharing four decades before the current economic crisis popularized the term.

Under Hime’s system, village employees earn about a third less pay than public servants elsewhere in Japan, though they work the same hours. This has allowed the village to create more jobs: it now directly or indirectly employs a fifth of all working islanders. Most of the rest are engaged in fishing, also government-subsidized. In fact, village officials say, there are few fully private-sector jobs on the island.

Islanders admit to the socialist parallels, even while proclaiming themselves political conservatives who vote for the governing right-wing Liberal Democratic Party. Some jokingly take the analogy a step further, comparing themselves to a much more repressive family-run regime in Japan’s geopolitical neighborhood.

“Hime Island is North Korea, just a livable version,” Naokazu Koiwa said with a laugh. Mr. Koiwa, 32, repairs fishing boats.

Unsurprisingly, the current mayor, Akio Fujimoto, flatly rejects the North Korean comparison. Rather, he and most other islanders call Hime a repository for traditional Japanese values, like economic egalitarianism and social harmony. They say the rest of the nation has lost these in an embrace of more competitive capitalism, especially under the prime ministership of Junichiro Koizumi from 2001-6.

“Our thinking is, ‘let’s all share the economic pie and get along, instead of giving all of it to the rich,’ ” said Mr. Fujimoto, whose father, Kumao Fujimoto, devised the work-sharing system in the 1960s. “Avoiding competition is the traditional Japanese way.”

Now, with the current crisis causing a national questioning of American-style laissez-faire economics, and business leaders and unions seeking alternatives to widespread job cuts, Hime’s work-sharing scheme is suddenly being held up as a new model. Islanders call it ironic that the current crisis has made traditional values appear progressive, even utopian.

Nor does the island’s penchant for equality stop at work-sharing. At an annual village ceremony to mark the coming of age of 20-year-old islanders, women are forbidden to wear traditional kimonos for fear the differences in quality could reveal their households’ economic status.

Dismayed by the inconsistent television reception across this mountainous island about half the size of Key West, the current mayor installed a free cable TV system that now reaches 97 percent of homes.

Even by clannish Japan’s standards, the island seems a friendly, close-knit place. Islanders cheerfully greet passing strangers. Roads, parks and even public toilets are immaculate. Doors are left unlocked, and the island has only one policeman.

Mr. Fujimoto also cites traditional attitudes to explain his own political longevity, a claim most islanders seem to accept. He says islanders shun public elections because of a deep-rooted abhorrence of confrontation. He said the last time the village held a mayoral election, in 1955, it split the island, creating ill feelings that took a generation to heal.

To avoid a repeat of such trauma, he said, the island decided to choose mayors by consensus, finding someone on whom everyone could agree beforehand. Last year, Mr. Fujimoto won his seventh straight four-year term, once again by default in an uncontested election.

“My job is to prevent elections by keeping everyone equal, and thus happy,” said Mr. Fujimoto, 65, sitting in a modest office in the village hall. His only visible sign of authority was a buzzer on his desk that he pushed to summon an assistant.

Mr. Fujimoto said he would resign immediately if a serious rival appeared in an election. “That would be a sign the village has lost confidence in me,” he said.

Many islanders say Mr. Fujimoto is able to stay in office partly because of the reverence still felt here for his father, who lifted Hime from postwar poverty by turning it into a loyal source of votes for the Liberal Democratic Party, which rewarded the island with generous public works.

“We have our own little personality cult,” said Shokai Dozono, a Buddhist monk who runs one of the island’s two temples.

The island and its mayor also have outside critics. Keizo Nagai, the ombudsman for Oita prefecture, which includes Hime, calls the island the least transparent local government in the prefecture. He criticized it for refusing to make information like detailed budget records available to non-islanders, which he attributed to a closed local culture rather than to a cover-up of wrongdoing.

“Hime Island acts like an independent kingdom,” Mr. Nagai said.

Many islanders say they accept the status quo simply because life here is comfortable. They say rocking the boat would only ostracize them on an island where everyone knows one another.

“Everyone is basically satisfied,” said Shusaku Akaishi, 29, who works at his family’s gas station. “This is a conservative place.”

That conservatism is strong enough at times to annoy even Mr. Fujimoto. His biggest complaint is that traditional attitudes prevent him from extending family control of the mayor’s office for another generation, because he has only a daughter.

“Hime Island can’t be run by a woman,” he sighed. “This place is too medieval for that.”

via South Willard

Photograph by Michael Wells

Municipal de Fútbol is distributed by D.A.P.

by Leslie Kaufman

PALM DESERT, Calif. — Rick Clark’s garage is loaded with fast toys for playing in the sun. He has a buggy for racing on sand dunes, two sleek power boats for pulling water skiers, and a new favorite: 48 solar panels that send his energy meter whirring backward.

Bronzed and deeply lined from decades of life in the desert sun, Mr. Clark is not one to worry about global warming. He suspects that if the planet’s climate is getting hotter, it is part of a natural cycle and will probably correct itself. “Experts have been wrong before,” he said.

But late last year, Mr. Clark decided to install a $62,000 solar power system because of a new municipal financing program that lent him the money and allows him to pay it back with interest over 20 years as part of his property taxes. In so doing, he joined the vanguard of a social experiment that is blossoming in California and a dozen other states.

The goal behind municipal financing is to eliminate perhaps the largest disincentive to installing solar power systems: the enormous initial cost. Although private financing is available through solar companies, homeowners often balk because they worry that they will not stay in the house long enough to have the investment — which runs about $48,000 for an average home and tens of thousands of dollars more for a larger home in a hot climate — pay off.

But cities like Palm Desert lobbied to change state laws so that solar power systems could be financed like gas lines or water lines, covered by a loan from the city and secured by property taxes. The advantage of this system over private borrowing is that any local homeowners are eligible (not just those with good credit), and the obligation to pay the loan attaches to the house and would pass to any future buyers.

The idea of public financing for home solar systems began two years ago in Berkeley. While it took months to untangle the legislative knots at the state level and get banks lined up to back the project, the concept took on a life of it own.

Cisco DeVries, who developed the program for Berkeley but has since moved on to a company that administers and finances similar programs for many towns, said: “I’ve never been part of something like this where the power of an idea has grabbed so many people so quickly. It is viral.”

In California, about a half-dozen cities including San Francisco and San Diego are already committed to their own solar programs. And outside of California, at least a half-dozen states, including Arizona, Texas and Virginia, have introduced bills to allow municipal financing. Colorado has already passed a version of the law, and the City of Boulder is on the verge of beginning a program.

Municipal financing comes on top of other government supports. California residents receive a straight rebate for about 20 percent of the cost of a solar power system. In addition, a federal income tax credit for 30 percent of the cost of installing solar panels was extended to participants in the municipal loan programs as part of the economic stimulus bill passed by Congress. And there are efforts to change the federal tax code further so that cities can borrow the money to lend tax free.

But public financing of solar power also has critics, who say government is essentially subsidizing and encouraging a form of energy production that would otherwise not be cost effective. Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California Energy Institute in Berkeley, who is concerned about the proliferation of the programs, said, “It would be better for local governments to do energy efficiency and skip the solar panels.

“If you count the full-interest cost without the tax subsidy, residential solar panels never pay for themselves,” he said. “We shouldn’t be making it a major public priority.”

However, cities, which are charging 7 percent for the guaranteed loans, do not have the same financial risk as the consumers. And for cities like those in California that are required by state laws to reduce their carbon emissions, officials have to make calculations other than costs and are going ahead anyway.

No city is as far along as Palm Desert.

Instead of waiting to get financing through third parties as other cities have done, Palm Desert tapped into $7.5 million of its own reserves to run a pilot program. In what is widely seen as a measure of public demand, the program was almost immediately fully subscribed. Already, nearly 100 households have been approved for solar panels, and about half of those have already installed them and have a system up and running, according to Patrick Conlon, director of the city office of energy management.

From its arid climate to its conservative politics, Palm Desert could not be more different from Berkeley. But with 350 days of sun, the city is making a calculation that has nothing to do with saving the Earth.

“We live in a severe climate,” Mr. Conlon said. “To cool our buildings, we have to be energy gluttons. So renewable energy is important here as an economic choice. It’s bigger than politics.”

For Mr. Clark, that is certainly the case. His monthly energy bill for a 3,400-square-foot home and a guest house routinely surpassed $1,400 in summer months when the air conditioning ran all the time. Now his solar panels are producing more than enough energy in the daytime to power his home. The additional power is sent back to the grid and is credited on his utility bill against night and summer hours, when he might consume more power than he produces.

Mr. Clark estimates that at the rate he is going, his power bill will be at most $500 for this year. The savings will be great enough that, taking into account his investment, he will still save $3,000 a year or more.

The blue panels above his garage and his meter — which also tells him how much of the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide he has avoided creating since the panels were installed (over 2,200 pounds) — have in fact had a kind of viral marketing effect in his upper-middle-class neighborhood. Homes here run well above $1 million, yet solar power was a rarity until the city program started.

“It can seem like a large and intimidating task,” said Valerie Van Winkle, a bank manager and a friend of Mr. Clark, who persuaded him and three other neighbors to take the solar plunge.

Ms. Van Winkle said the environmental cachet has also been fun. “I don’t even know anybody who voted for Obama,” she said.

Still she has become a proselytizer for solar power. “It just makes so much sense,” she said. “And, you know, I am happy it’s also good for the environment.”

Down the street, Debbie and Chris McNicol have a different take. Mr. McNicol used to be part of a professional drag racing crew and still races as a hobby on weekends. Their garage houses its own set of speed mobiles, including a 24-foot-long purple-and-yellow gas-guzzling dragster that goes up to 180 miles an hour. After installing solar panels, their first monthly energy bill dropped to $1.89.

Mr. McNicol is elated: “We can use the money we’ve saved to race new toys.”

The artist Shannon Ebner is perhaps best known for her photographic and sculptural works that investigate language and its meaning. Ebner’s The Sun as Error, a book published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, coordinated by Dexter Sinister, and distributed by RAM Publishers, will have its New York launch at White Columns on March 6.

COSMIC WONDER Light Source 3
Light Streams

Launch party for Light Streams, a photo book published by Nieves

Wear 2008, the journal of Elaine W. Ho/Homeshop, Beijing is now available.

Wear is a new independent artist-run publication from Beijing. In part a documentation of a series of public activities, discussions and interventions organised at HomeShop space during the 2008 Olympic Games, the first issue of Wear also serves as a broader platform to invite other artists, writers and contributors to reflect upon — from the point of view of a small alleyway in the centre of Beijing — a spectacular everyday amidst broader contemporary urban sociopolitics.

Wear is distributed in North America by Textfield or contact your local bookshop.

Paperback (London), issue 2 out now!

Paperback is now distributed in North America by Textfield or contact your local bookshop.