Independent Publishing Resource Center

I can’t believe we stapled, folded and boxed up Stumptown-ready all 200 copies of the first Oregon History Comic in two hours this week at the IPRC! I think the box of a dozen cupcakes helped. And the long arm staplers.

Oregon History Comics is a project involving a dozen IPRC regulars, including myself, perfect-presser BT Livermore and talented comics teachers John Isaacson and Annie Murphy. Over the next year, in collaboration with the Dill Pickle Club, we’re putting together 10 short comics about Oregon history. 10 comics! 10 illustrators! 10 little-known stories from our local history! It’s a win-win-win.

We have just over 30 days to raise $2,500 to fund the project, via Kickstarter.com. Check out our video (plus a pdf of the first comic!) over at our Kickstarter page, and please consider kicking in a donation yourself to help us get off the ground!

After months of work, IPRC volunteer and membership coordinator (and excellent artist) Lori D. finally unveiled her new murals for the IPRC’s perfect binding room today.

“They’re the biggest paintings I’ve ever made,” says Lori, who hauled the two works to the center wrapped in three layers of garbage bags to keep off the rain.

The not-so-glamorous unveiling

The murals are tableus from the days when the IPRC stood for “Independent Pioneer Resource Center”—in one, a long-john clad cowboy hauls handmade books from a well, in the other, hardscrabble types consume flapjacks and zines while a yeti looks on.

IPRC regulars check out the new murals

You should come check murals tomorrow at their official wine and snacks unveiling for First Thursday. Stop by the IPRC anytime from 6-10 pm.

Since the IPRC has colonized the new room across the hall, Justin and A.M. get to have a spacious office of their very own. It’s better for their sanity and their paperwork but more importantly, it means we got to redecorate!

Thanks to some artfully repurposed wooden boards, a creative little nook and the beloved old fake campfire, the bigwigs’ office now resembles a cozy cabin.

Behold! The horror!

So fuzzy! So friendly!

I guess this means we have to think of a new name for it. What’s a good name for a Yeti who loves the taste of toner and text?

Here is the Yeti-fication in action:

caught!

A few nights ago I was rifling through the “Work” section of the zine library and came across a little book I have always wished existed. It’s too good to be true: the compiled incident report log from Peterson’s convenience store.

I know Peterson’s as the crowded little store you stop in to buy chocolate milk and PBR from before Zoobombing, a straight up snack and beer establishment that Brooks Brothers thought was too dirty for downtown, the only 24 place for cookies and magazines in Portland’s central city. It has two locations, both on the MAX line, and in my brief sojourns into Peterson’s, I’ve always run into some slightly off-kilter folks. Peterson’s Incident Report Book is a transcription of the best of the noteworthy incidents the Peterson’s staff wrote down in a series of notebooks behind the counter, thanks to former clerk Ms. George Black. Most incidents involve the police and the reports are seriously gnarly stuff. It’s an awesome glimpse of Portland life.

1/23/01: A drunk fratboy came in and repeatedly did that annoying, infectious “WHAZZUP?!” from the Budweiser beer commercial. For this infraction I ejected him from the premises.

1/24/01: Some maniac tried to give me a single old grimy glove in lieu of cash for a can of Budweiser (16 oz) and one of those nasty Sausage N’Egg muffins.

1/14/00: Joe came in and bummed a smoke from me so I 86’d him. He threatened to “go upside my dumpling with a crack snack”……….. “And not one of those cream-filled soft ones either but one of those hard, old, expired granola bars on the shelf” if I didn’t “Get off his jock.” He excused himself and leaned his face against the window all staring out and everything. After quite some time I asked him what was wrong. He said he was sorry and was just upset about missing the “All-U-Can-Eat Sloppy Joe Friday” at the airport. —Jack

1/15/00: About mid-shift, one Karl “Fancy Boy” entered the store yelling, “I have the right to remain silent, anything I say will be reported.” At this point I opted to ignore him. Then he proceeded to holler “Keep playin’ Satan, gimme your shoes!” He was scaring customers… I approached him from behind and laid down a righteous headlock but this didn’t stop him. He ranted dementedly asking me if I was the man “with the peppermint flavored penis?” Then he asked me if I had beer flavored nipples. He broke my headlock and ran free telling everyone he was going to call security! I was scared! I locked the store.

4/27/98 A black man, aged 27 (approx) tucked two Hostess products under his coat and walked out. I stopped him and he gave me the products. I told him to leave and he refused and suggested I call the police. At this time a black woman, probably in her early 30s, walked in. She had been in earlier in the evening telling me that she had sickle-cell anemia and needed immediate attention. I tried to call her an ambulance but the folks at OHSU didn’t seem to think it was an emergency so I told her to leave. This time she refused to leave and proceeded to lay on the floor moaning. The shoplifter remained in the store eating beef jerky. I called the police and reported both of them… the police came 40 minutes later and directed the woman to where she could find some social service. The shoplifter is a regular and I’m sure we’ll see him later. I think he is probably a little crazy but he is a friendly enough guy.

Whew, what a weekend.

IPRC volunteers and staff spent all of Saturday and Sunday under the cruel lights of the Oregon Convention Center, tabling for annual book revival Wordstock. The crowd at Wordstock is a funny mix ranging from very established literary celebrities to young kids in trenchcoats who tack the moniker “Published Author” onto the front of their name when they introduce themselves.

We explained the IPRC to these passerbys until our voices were hoarse and in the meantime we ate a lot of pretzels. It was the perfect chance to show off the hot new things the IPRC is able to produce thanks to our wonderful perfect binder, the Bindfast 5. Check out this stack of journals created like magic by B.T. Livermore that caught lots of wandering eyes during the festival:

Saturday night was the first real cold night of the year—dark early and windy, too—the perfect setting for our annual costume party fundraiser, the Text Ball. Under the warm lights of Gallery Homeland, dozens of individuals fabulously dressed to the theme of “Novel Idea” mingled, listened to accordion music and completed giant crossword puzzles.

Of all the Novel Ideas in the house (including an adorable DaVinci Cold and two Wrinkle in Times), the top prize ironically went to the lovely Farenheit 451.

Copyright lawyer  Kohel Haver stopped by tonight to talk us through the zine he made with his daughter, “The Law and the Zine Artist: Free Speech and Copyright.”

“I want to teach you how to protect what’s good and also the value of stealing everything in sight,” he said, launching into the basics of what’s legal and what’s not when it comes to pilfering others’ work for your own art. The law bascially comes down to protecting intellectual property but also protecting the right to free speech by allowing zinesters and others to reprint people’s work if they’re making some sort of scholarly commentary about it. The most fantastic song of my 6th grade year, for example, ws Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” which later won a copyright lawsuit filed by Mattel because their use of Barbie and Ken had been pure satire.

Haver also spelled out that you can use only as much of copyrighted material as you need to prove your point – including a picture of Mickey Mouse to talk about musophobia in modern society is fair game, but including an entire old Mickey comic in your zine would be pushing it.

To those that disparage copyright law as one of the many evils of capitalism, Haver acknowledged that some people and businesses exploit the system but that there are many benefits to copywriting your work – it’s insurance that someone (say, Disney) doesn’t rip off your brilliant idea. And a lot of brilliant ideas start small. “Giving people the tools to make zines is an important part of what makes this country work. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was a zine,” noted Haver.

Stop by the library to read Haver’s little zine in full. As a quick copyright primer for those of you too lazy to read, Haver points to this creative cut-and-paste video a Fair(y) Use Tale.

You may have heard that the IPRC recently acquired an amazing piece of technology. It will revolutionize you, me, books, zines and everything in between. It is called the Bind Fast Five. It makes real books. Books for you, by you. Not to rag on the side-stapeled photocopied zines, but these new Bind Fast Five books are “perfect press” bound, which means the pages are permanently glued into the cover. You can now print and bind your very own very professional very real books right here in the overheated confines of the IPRC.

Justin just about went crazy today when he put together the first practice books. It wasn’t just the thick glue fumes going to his head. Check it out:

The compact machine runs your stack of pages over hot glue and presses them into your cover

ta da! look! a book!

It’s funny and wonderful that today is the day we figured out how to make books for the very first time because all the hot jibber jabber in nerd world this morning was that advancing technology (specifically Amazon’s e-book reader the Kindle) is killing print and paper books page by page. Maybe instead of a library we should start referring to ourselves as a paper museum? Someday children will flock to the Bind Fast Five to touch real paper blogs and smell glue between pages.