Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice officially ships today. Apologies for the delay, shipping software was being a fickle pickle. Click here to order. But first, please observe this primer:

A couple of homo sapiens are walking around in the forest, hunting for some wily beasts to fill the bellies of their women and children. They stumble upon a boar foraging for mushrooms, oblivious. They take aim with their bows and arrows shaped from twigs and tendons and kill it. They hoot and holler around the dead body of the boar. The hooting and hollering subsides and they stand above the boar, silent. They experience the emotion of guilt. Once back at the village, they proclaim to the women and children that they’ve murdered a living creature in order to live another day and that they must offer the creature up to the gods as a token of thanks, lest the gods think the villagers ungrateful and find reason smite them upside the head. And thus, the notion of taking a loss for the greater good, the notion of sacrifice itself, was born.

It’s hard to say that the human race has changed all that much since the concept was created. The last decade began with an act of martyrdom so primitive and barbarous that it couldn’t be mistaken for anything less than an offering of sentient life to an angry god. But the term has also taken on a new definition. Nowadays survival hinges not on the appeasement of deities, but on working an extra 20 hours a week without health insurance. Sacrifice pervades our lives, whether we’re the ones reaping the benefit or remitting the payment. Acts of selflessness and altruism evoke powerful feelings within us. We tend to raise up individuals with purpose beyond achieving personal gain. It’s with these thoughts that we put out the call for stories of sacrifice for our sixth issue.

Artists are a conflicted group when it comes to the theme of sacrifice. On the one hand they’re used to giving up comfort and happiness in the pursuit of a larger ideal. On the flipside, sitting alone in a room working on a story or a painting is one of the most self-indulgent activities one can engage in outside of downright masturbation. Contradictory as artists may seem, they’re experts on the subject.

Two questions kept surfacing in these stories: What are you willing to give up for your loved ones? What are you not willing to give up? We all like to think that we’d give up everything for our spouses, our siblings, our parents. But unless you’re forced to make that decision, you can’t ever really know. The answers to those questions offer quick insight to what a person’s really made of. It’s our hope that through these fictions you might find what your own answers to these questions could be and discover something about what makes you human.

Click here to order your copy.

Introducing the Annalemma postcard collection, featuring words and images from Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice.

Click on over to our print store where you can purchase all five of these handsome art pieces printed on recycled matte stock for $5.00 plus s&h.

Got a college student you haven’t heard from in a couple semesters?

Or perhaps a long distance significant other who swoons with every mention of your name?

Or maybe you’ve got an estranged sibling that lives in remote part of the country.

Or maybe you want to impress guests with all of the international contacts you have by displaying fake correspondences with people you just made up.

Many reasons to buy, no excuse not to.

p.s. the entire set comes free with purchase of Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice, while supplies last!

The following is an excerpt from the story A Flawless Pick by Ian Bassingthwaighte, appearing in Annlemma Issue Six. Image by Anthony Cudahy.

I gave our boy a photograph of his mother and I the day we met his doctor. In it, we look disheveled, as if we’d recently been laid, been robbed, taken drugs, or regressed into stupidity.  It really is a splendid photograph, from an artistic point view.

His doctor said I should bring the boy a picture of something he might be inclined to remember.  He said it should be original, memorable.  Has he seen before?  Yes, he took it. Would it be an image he might remember?  If there were an image in the world he’d remember, it’d be this one. Might it conjure an emotion?  Yes, yes, yes—of course. Whimsy. It would conjure whimsy. Is that an emotion?

His doctor says the best way to track down a memory is by recalling an emotion and chasing it back to where it came from.  I’d hoped the photo would have brought him here: it was a cold night on a rock beach in Oregon.  Our son, behind the camera, shouted, “Be ugly.”  We laughed and we tried as best as we could to oblige: Laura tussled my hair and I tussled hers, I pulled off my shirt and she took it and wore it over her wind-breaker, and we both made an equally disturbing face, halfway between orgasm and hemorrhoid.   He took the photograph.  It was a Polaroid and so he stood for a moment shaking it, waiting for the image to appear.  When it did, he began to chuckle.  He looked at us and said with a smile, “You guys are disgusting.  If I ever look like that, please just clobber me with a hammer and get it over with.”  He must have been fifteen.

But when I gave the picture to our son, his face was blank.  I wasn’t exactly expecting an immediate recognition, but I was quietly hoping for one.

But hope is a funny contradiction. It has a way of always letting you down.

To read the rest of the story click here to pre-order Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice, which ships April 12th.

Ian Bassingthwaighte lives and writes and drinks and dances and meanders aimlessly in and around Cairo, Egypt. He has become permanently sunburned in his time there. His favorite food is Cheerios and he is afraid of only three things: death, swimming in very deep water, and ostriches.

Anthony Cudahy is a twenty-year-old illustration student in Brooklyn, New York. He is from the South and doesn’t appreciate this winter.

Random thoughts:

Don’t go into We Did Porn hoping for the alt-porn version of David Foster Wallace’s Big Red Son or Eric Schlosser’s An Empire of the Obscene. This book isn’t an investigative look into the recent trend of adult film stars covered in tattoos and Technicolor hair. This is a diary from the front lines of a culture war. Zak Smith rarely takes a microscope to porn. Instead, as someone who’s performed in a handful of alt-porn titles himself, he writes from the perspective of an insider, rarely delving into the personal histories of his subjects, mostly showing them as they are in the moment: actors, actresses, directors, various producers and production people engaged in the often unsexy process of performing sex on camera for money.

Only towards the end of the book does Smith try to tackle the how’s and why’s of women’s reasons for pursuing a career in the adult film industry. It’s the most interesting chapter as he challenges the general conception that most women in the porn industry are there because of a history of sexual abuse.

Smith’s writing style reflects his paintings: meticulous–borderline obsessive–with the detail. The images he chooses to show look washed out and spent, with spikes of color just to make sure you’re paying attention. He’s so generous with the scenery that sometimes he forgets a scene needs to reveal something about the people in it, which is a nice way of saying there’s a handful of excerpts the feel directionless.

Points off to Tin House for design. The thickness of the cover stock makes the book feel like it would fracture your skull if dropped from a height of a few feet. The inside pages are a weird semi gloss finish, presumably chosen to accommodate the images. The appeal of the paperback is that it’s somewhat malleable. This thing is just goddamn unwieldy.

This is a hard book to read. Zak Smith’s admittedly cynical worldview is refreshingly honest at times, but isn’t necessarily something that calls to you from the bookshelf. But Smith is writing about the zeros, as he calls the previous decade. It’s hard not to write cynically about a dark chapter in the history of the US, a time that we still live in, where it feels like things couldn’t possibly get much worse and we long for the innocence of only a few years ago, when we felt that things couldn’t possibly get much worse. The form of the memoir demands honesty, so it’s rings false to offer glints of hope when there doesn’t seem to be much of that going around. Of course, the drawback is that if your audience already knows how fucked up things are, they’re not necessarily going to want to be reminded of that every ten pages or so.

The above is from Mark Weaver‘s Make Something Cool Every Day project. Check out his flickr page to see the whole set, each image more magnetizing than the last.

I know there’s a lot of you out there who make it a point to write every day and sometimes it feels like a job, that you’re just sitting there typing away at some bullshit because otherwise you’d feel lazy and unproductive. What if instead of telling yourself, “I’m going to write every day,” you tell yourself, “I’m going to write something cool every day?” Whatever the definition cool means to you, you write it.

I try to write every day. Sometimes it feels like a job. Like I’m just typing away at some bullshit because otherwise I’d feel lazy and unproductive. As an experiment inspired by Mark Weaver I’m going to stop telling myself, “I am going to write every day” and instead tell myself, “I am going to write something cool every day,” and see where that gets me. Go, Mark Weaver, go!

Thanks to Gia for the heads up!

Via the Design*Sponge blog:

Brooklyn artist John Welles Bartlett’s woodcuts and prints of mythical and extinct creatures make me happy. And I’m not really sure why. Reminiscent of childhood? Desire for the unknown? Wolfboy? Who’s to say? The folks over at Berdorf Goodman have taken note as they’ve given Bartlett the run of their windows until next month.

Thanks to Wiggle Worm for the heads up!

We tried to work with Russian artist Eika Dopulo for Issue Six but circumstances got the best of us and we couldn’t make it happen.We have resolved, however, to work with her in the very near future. Check out her behance and her flickr and imagine what could have been and what will be.

We’re fortunate enough to have the meticulous and beautiful line work of Xenia Fink in our roster for Issue Six. Xenia’s humans are inviting at first but seem to become more warped the longer you look at them. Enough with that arts talk. Go check out her site.

Our intrepid intern comes at us with a report from the burgeoning art capital of the world, Orlando, FL. Take it away, Janelle!

Good friend and Annalemma contributor Gianelle Gelpi held an art opening at Stardust on Saturday night.

Fans and friends came together to celebrate Gianelle’s first solo show.

I donned my newly dubbed “Montana” jacket in honor of the furry family.

Gianelle’s choice of medium ranged from rich, seductive oils to bright and yummy acrylics. The most beloved though were her drawings.

By the end of the night they were all $OLD! Cha-ching is a good thing indeed.

Gianelle’s style, influenced by World Mythology, has evolved into a kind of mystical optimism. Through the creatures of the Grand Family, she conveys a belief in the connectedness of all things alive and imagined. Their serenity may be ours as well.

I especially loved the lion. Just look at his eyes! Gorgeous. Someone else snatched it up before I got there. Boohoooo.

We are just bursting with pride. Gianelle owned Stardust. (And the dance floor a little later that night.) Expect to see more of her.

We are just bursting with pride. Gianelle owned Stardust. (And the dance floor a little later that night.) Expect to see more of her.

Like setting sandbags against the portals for an oncoming flood, we’re bracing ourselves for the deluge of work on our next print issue. Which means a few months from now a giant semi truck is going to arrive at our doorstep delivering ten or so heavy boxes full of books. Our storage space is bursting at the seems. To empty it a little bit we’re giving you the opportunity of a lifetime:

Annalemma Issue #4 is on sale for half price! That’s $5 for stories by Joe Meno, Nick Ostdick, Thomas Cooper and many more. What else does $5 get you? Illustrations by Spanish illustration sensation Raquel Aparicio, photos by Simi Valley photographic inspiration sensation Alex Martinez, and an essay by Sam Weller about Kiss.

What are you waiting for? Forget that five dollar foot-long, spend your money on something that will last!