mr191122 Halfwood Press Book: To be or not to be 

Seven years ago

Seven years ago, I wrote an essay for my video ‘zine on November 7, 2012 after Barack Obama won the election for a second term. From the perspective of this day – after weeks of hearings into the corruption of Donald Trump – I can see it was under Obama that there were signs that teaching might come to restore the damage done to the USA under George W. Bush’ administration.

Today, November 22, is the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy – a reminder to me of what might be considered the end of the United States experiment in democratic government and the beginning of tyranny evident in the Trump era.

I wrote in 2012 that there were ten good reasons to pull back from making presses and turn my attention to the next level of the enterprise. Not that presses would cease to be made because Tom and Margie Kughler stood ready to take it over, even the detailing and shipping of presses, and they could do it continually.

My new enterprise, if there were to be a “next level,’ was to figure out how best to use my skills in marketing and selling presses – not he hands-on work of making them. I could participate in growing the market. My hands were no longer needed; indeed, there are idle hands aplenty that can do the work of finishing, testing, packing and shipping presses.

Today I recovered the 2012 essay – ten reasons to stop - and it struck me how I had often thought of making a book about the first fifteen years of my part of the Halfwood Press project – 2004-2019 – along with writing my memoirs.

It would be a picture book including images of the presses and images of the people, their art, their pets with the presses – anything that showed the relationship of the presses to their lives as artists, crafts people, hobbyists, teachers or whatever. Such variety!

I wrote emails to five people – the first five listed alphabetically on my database of press owners – to ask if they were interested in participating in this project. Two responded to the affirmative.

My memoirs and finishing other books I started got in my way. Now I’m thinking about it again.

ri191116  Wrapping up my story  

I am wrapping up the last two months of writing my autobiography, an exercise in examining my life. It’s a story of many failures and I wonder why I failed, where I went wrong, and what other strategies I might have pursued toward a success.

However, there are successes, too. I can, of course, remember the old chestnut, “He who cannot point to many failures has never tried anything.” There is some truth to this, but it doesn’t make me feel good about the failures.

Especially on a day-to-day basis of what the prospect of the coming day offers. Instead of looking forward to a day at the International Print Center Incubators and Workplaces, I am going to our Mini Art Gallery, there to resume my videos about publishing on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform.

The IPCI&W has always been a fantasy, a mirage on the horizon of my life. In my most intellectual view, the most rational, I see I am in a desert. Seattle – and the whole of the USA (and some might say the whole Earth) is a cultural dustbin.

What I have called the “printmaking community” is not the bastion of technical and cultural innovation and aesthetic development. It’s not the creative economy and experience economy brought to bear on my day.

Maybe in a micro-manner it is manifest in the Mini Art Gallery. There, in that 300-square foot space, I am a big fish. Like a fish, I have adapted to the size of my aquarium. However, I cannot make a larger aquarium where many fishes of all varieties can live and work.

It’s like the recording by Pinto Colvig and Billy May that I listened to over and over when I was a kid. In the song, “Honkety Hank” built an amazing soap box racer and impressed the whole town; but it was only a dream. At the end of the song the kid wakes up, scratches his head, washes his face and goes to school, “Just like any other boy.”

There’s no school for me to go to. I’ve used up all my school days.