It’s impossible to talk about this book without talking about how it was made so we’ll get that out of the way first. Kaelan has embraced the idea of the book-as-object, adding another layer of immersion for the reader.

Interior pages of the book are 100% recycled paper, but the cover is the impressive feat of printing: All first editions have been letter pressed on seed paper, a kind of recycled paper containing birch tree seeds that, once planted, have the capability to offset the carbon footprint of the book 10x over. It’s part of the Zero Emission Book Project, Kaelan’s effort to release and support a book without the use of unsustainable energy.

Most products of the green movement are not made to benefit the environment, but to make the consumer feel better about themselves. To alleviate a degree or two of the inherent guilt the consumer feels for being a consumer and not a sustainer. The reading experience is permeated by the objectness of the book: Running your fingers over the spruce seeds embedded in the pulpy cover, the debossed orange silhouette of a naked man swinging a coyote around his head by the tail, serve as a constant reminder of the production means used in the printing of the book.

Strange (and somewhat depressing) that it takes a book of fiction to embrace the idea of a sustainable printing. Meanwhile, mountains of nonfiction reference and instrucitonal books on becoming environmentally conscious employ conventional production means, completely dismissive of the ideals they tout.

This wildly inventive and ambitious project veers close to overshadowing the content of the book. But after reading, it’s clear that the story is only enhanced by the production means. We’re Getting On is the story of Dan, a man who can best be describe as an environmental regressionist. Dan recruits a gang of four strangers, almost on a whim, to follow him out to a tract of land where the plan is to fully remove themselves from the trappings of modern living. But it’s not long until the experiment in sustainable living fails and morphs into an exercise rejecting forward, or even lateral, movement and moves toward the direction of  regression. Dan’s totalitarian control over the group is tenuous. Cracks and divides show themselves until the structural integrity of the collective falls apart completely.

This is a book about the effect of restrictions. The object restrains itself from using simpler, cheaper forms of publishing for the sake of producing a book that has little-to-no carbon footprint. The characters in the story restrain themselves from using any sort of innovation or mode of being that would make them human. Dan strives to become something less than human, something that doesn’t that doesn’t have aspirations to rise above its environment, a struggle to become just another insignificant organism.

The story and the object make a statement in two parts: sustainable living is possible, but it doesn’t have to be what you think it is. It could be seen as an attack on sustainable living, like, taken to its logical conclusion we should all be aimed toward Dan’s goal, tearing ourselves away from progression and devolving back to homo-erectus status. But the statement the object makes is that humans are capable of living sustainably, we’ve done it before, we can do it again. And it’s possible for us to do that without backtracking on the evolutionary ladder. Dan illustrates this in the last chapter as he’s been exiled from his collective and wanders, starving and fragmented, among the harsh elements, “(A) new beginning seems beyond my grasp. I’ve gone too far in the other direction, and this isn’t a circle or a cycle, but a spectrum at the ends of which are two terminal extremes.”

Taken by itself, the story stands alone and is worth the read. But taken with the object, the reading experience becomes something larger: a book that whole-heartedly embraces a polarizing issue in a way that is passionately creative in execution and radically practical in its ideal. It’s more than reading a work of fiction, it’s actively participating in a movement.

Buy it here from Flatmancrooked.

My blood pumped a little faster when I opened up my RSS feed this morning and saw two things that I loved were combined into one great thing: The Rumpus had interviewed  Jesse Hlebo. To be honest, I’d let Jesse fall off my radar a little bit since he sent us some photos for a piece we ran in Issue #4. What a mistake. For the past year, Jesse has been putting a lot of his contemporaries to shame with his never-ending enthusiasm and work ethic. Check out Swill Children, a small press and record label started by Jesse and a few of his friends. Already they’ve released  a fistfull of 7″ records, a zine featuring the photography of David Potes and a lit and arts broadside called _Quarterly. Oh, and he’s only 21.

For your dedication to positivity and community within the arts, for your inspirational work ethic, for your accomplishments in creating beautiful things, Annalemma salutes you, Jesse Hlebo.

Issue Five contributors Danny Jones and Jonpaul Douglass have started a new monthly online publication dedicated to gentlemen and the crafts that they love. Grain & Gram interviews men immersed in, and enthralled by, the process of making things.  The second issue went live yesterday and features letterpress guru Nick Sambrato, of Mama’s Sauce Print Shoppe. My favorite thing about G&G is the scroll-ability of the page. Most websites are obsessively all about the clicks. Danny’s meticulous attention to detail and angular design style paired with Jonpaul’s rich, textured photos eliminate any desire to leave a page, making the G&G reading experience a smooth and engaging one. Cheers to Danny and Jonpaul for, yet again, making something very cool. Looking forward to seeing who they spotlight next.

Happy Birthday,  USA.

I hope you did something yesterday to make you feel patriotic and I hope you didn’t work, like more than a few people did.

If you did work, you probably felt like you were in Communist Russia. And last time I checked, this was still America. Tell that Rooski boss of yours to quit treading on you.

I hope you ate some American food.

And saw some things that reminded you why this country does, on occasion, kick much ass.

Digital designer, Judy Rush, offers insight into the realm of 21st century photo editing with real/fake. Rush pioneered the surreal aesthetic that’s been dominating the ad campaigns of Fortune 500 companies lately. real/fake shows the process, from digital editing software to old fashioned smoke and mirrors. It’s always interesting to see things get made. Is it just me or does it remind you of the writing process? You start with an image or a sound that captures your attention for wahtever reason and you try to create a world to give it some context. Strange that photographers and digital media artists have to rely on software to get their vision across. Sometimes it’s inspiring that all a writer needs is her noggin.

Check out the modern mythology of Caitlin Hackett. I’ve got half a mind to start an internet petition to get her and Matt Bell to work on a fucked up storybook together somewhere down the line. How sick would that be? {via}

Haven’t done one of these in a while. 120 in 2010 kinda bumped them out of ranking as of late, but since I’m sloughing through a short story collection right now I’m happy to return to reviewing book covers.

Apologies for not finding a bigger image for Paul Blooms’s How Pleasure Works, an exploration into the inner-workings of our desires. It’s really hard to use embellishments like the ones flanking the subtitle without it looking like you’re trying to cultivate a look of high falootin’-ness. The stark, empty space background is nothing new but the oyster with the pearl inside is provocative and the most interesting thing about this cover. There isn’t cover design in recent memory as overtly vaginal as this one, the designer pulling a double whammy of desirable imagery, albiet in a not-terribly-subtle fashion. If neither of these images is desirable to you then here’s the boring, cheesy SFW cover:

Oh, Florida, you really made me love you a lot last night.

Our very own Jen O’Malley curated a show for the Snap! Orlando Photography Festival, which Annalemma sponsored. It was dedicated to photographers from Florida and their images of the Sunshine State.

Annalemma contributor, Kim Vang.

An excellent point the show made last night is that Florida (Central Florida in particular) has this cultural perception of being strictly a tourist destination, an entire section of the country existing as this homogenized and commodified culture made safe for mass consumption. Let’s not kid ourselves, that’s a big part of this state. But, like everything, this is just the veneer, and if you’re curious or adventurous enough, Florida will surprise you with its treasures.

Treasures like the photography of Christopher Bolton. This one sold within minutes of the gallery opening. Not surprising in the least.

Another big seller was our very own, Rose Wind Jerome.

Louise Erhard’s photographs of a dilapidated, yet still operational, motel near West Palm Beach, another pocket of Florida that’s got more stories than anyone can handle.

My mom and the kitsch wall.

Kitsch has been a part of Florida long before the mouse invasion. That comes with being a sunny climate most of the calender year.

You can either be annoyed by this crass expression of consumerism, or you can be charmed by the ideal and naive worldview that it represents. I think most Floridians look at it through both lenses from time to time.

Here is a secret of Florida that outsiders don’t know. We have springs. They call to us. We go to them. They fill us with life.

A new (to me) photographer who’s work I regrettably failed to capture last night was Ted Hollins who photographs the Zora! festival every year. The images on his website are hard to find but check out the photo grid in the lower left. Some amazing shots. More to come on Ted in the future.

This man makes works crazy hard at making a good living doing something amazing in Florida.

Congrats to Jen for not only curating an amazing show, but for helping shed light on the unseen pockets of beauty and horror that lay just beneath the saccharine manicured surface of Florida.

There is some cool shit happening tonight if you live in Orlando: Annalemma is sponsoring “Hello from Florida: Photographs of the Sunshine State” a photo show curated by none other than our own print designer, Jen O’Malley.

The show will feature all works by Floridian photographers including Annalemma contributors Rose Wind Jerome, Ryan Marshall, Kim Vang and Wheat Wurtzburger.

6-10pm at Gallery at Avalon Island (39 South Magnolia Ave. Orlando, FL 32801) as part of the Snap! Orlando Photography Festival. Come on out folks, it’s gonna be tighter than my hands around the throats of BP Oil executives, given the opportunity.

The idea behind 48 Hour Magazine is an interesting one: Using all the tools of media available today to create a magazine that’s cool, fast and cheap.

In the opening letter the editors state they’re trying to marry the immediacy of the web with the permanence and beauty of print. A few weeks ago they announced a call to submit, people gave them their email addresses and the editors of fired off the starter pistol in the form of announcing the theme. Then a 48 hour frenzy of writing, photographing, illustrating and designing an entire 59 page magazine. Using a print-on-demand service called Mag Cloud, they uploaded a PDF file, figured out how much to charge for the magazine (Mag Cloud charges 20 cents per page) then folks go online, order it and it gets printed and shipped to them in a couple of days. Take a moment to catch your breath.

The only thing I’m having a problem with is this “beauty of print” part of the equation. While the print design is clean and straightforward, the images colorful and immediate, the actual quality of the book itself is inscrutable from anything you’ll find on the newsstands. I guess when I think of the “beauty of print” I think of magazines like Cabinet or McSweeneys, publications that treat the magazine as an artifact, another arena and opportunity to make something beautiful, to make a statement, and hopefully differentiate itself as much as possible from anything you could ever find on the web. But maybe that’s just me holding unrealistic standards.

The content is fun and resonant, the charts and graphs are colorful and informative. But the words seem to only skim the surface, a roadblock they no doubt hit due to their time constraint. It’s hard to come up with in-depth writing in less than two days.

The most impressive and appealing thing about 48HR is the speed with which it was created, a speed that speaks to the youthful feel of the book. The energy and exceitment, even the theme of the issue (Hustle), radiate this kind of vibrancy and possibility that’s downright sexy.

Final verdict: awesome (revolutionary?) media experiment. Future of print? Debatable.