Jimmy Melnarik

Picked this up at the Microcosm shop in Portland a few months back. The text is made up mostly of interviews with printmakers and designers who participated creatively in various social and protest movements of the past. Of particular interest for me was the future of Xicanx printmaking interview and the Mexican Student movement of ‘68 pieces. The images are bold and arresting. Woodcuts, screen prints, linocuts... all made in haste, without much money at all. Art from the ground up. The segments on graffiti art and children's spaces were also really cool to see.

It seems that there's five volumes of this journal now, so I'll need to catch up!

Sublime musings on death, wine, horse races, women, loneliness, and poetry. There's something to poems about a curmudgeon at the tracks who's avoiding a woman at home that just feels true... in the way good fictions can be true. Stories about bar fights, aging movie stars, and other Angelino cast-offs feel like sweaty pulp paperbacks, with a nihilism and a sadness just beneath the ink.

It's cool to know how Narnia was created, how the wardrobe, witch, and lamppost came to be, etc., but there's not much of a story here. Might've worked better as a short story. Without having read the rest of the Chronicles apart from Wardrobe, I'm assuming Digory, Polly, and Uncle Andrew are throwaway characters? Here they are merely vehicles to get us to the creation of Narnia.

An engaging bottle episode. The terror of being physically chained to one spot without hope of salvation is pretty intense. However, this is a façade for the backbone of this story: a woman coming to terms with a childhood trauma inflicted by her father. This trauma may have led her to the very predicament she finds herself in, and with a variety of voices in her head, she must escape before death literally comes knocking.