posted
is maoz in west soho? it is in compton street. i know i should know this but the geography of soho has always mashed with my heid. i heart maoz and miss their deep fried aubergine very very much indeed.
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posted
i was thinking of going to freuds, which is in covent garden (or someplace called "st. giles") and nice and quite cheap really.
but them i thought i'd try somewhere new, near pathfinder's office (golden square).
thanks for the tip, disco. much better than not's. anyway i am meeting my mate in st. james's at 12.30 which gives me plenty of time to be late for appointment
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quote:Originally posted by vikram: what are other good temp agencies? are there ones that specialise in jobs that allow vomitting in stationary bins?
Tate are pretty good in terms of getting work. They can usually sort me out in a day or so and they only tend to work with major firms. With them I've worked at Ernst and Young, John Lewis, the stock exchange, Warner Brothers, Research International, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Pay is higher than other places I've been to (brook street, reed)
[ 17.05.2006, 06:20: Message edited by: Dr. Benway ]
quote:Originally posted by Dr. Benway: Tate are pretty good in terms of getting work. They can usually sort me out in a day or so and they only tend to work with major firms. With them I've worked at Ernst and Young, John Lewis, the stock exchange, Warner Brothers, Research International, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Pay is higher than other places I've been to (brook street, reed)
quote:Originally posted by mart: What does "cheap" mean for you, Vikram? How much are you wanting to spend.
a fiver for salad is cool. that's enough, isn't it?
actually i went to a quite flashy dim sum restaurant on great marlborough street the other week. the toilet doors went swish!. was well cool. it was probably expensive though - american bankers were paying (thanks to my lovely flatmate). swish!, like in star trek. swish!Posts: 5190
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posted
I was quite enjoying this thread until Vikram spammed it with the same 5 posts he puts on every thread every day.
Dang- I reckon you could combine a small print run with some kind of survivalist treasure hunt (ie you have to follow a clue and trek across some moorland to find the next chapter). Get Ray Mears involved and stuff.
-------------------- What I object to is the colour of some of these wheelie bins and where they are left, in some areas outside all week in the front garden. Posts: 4941
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quote:Originally posted by Dr. Benway: Hey, it's not like I'm the frikkin keystone of the boards
Perhaps you're not the frikkin keystone of the boards, but you're certainly the mortar that keeps it all together. You shouldn't be so hard on yourself, Steve.
quote: With them I've worked at Ernst and Young, John Lewis, the stock exchange...
A friend was recently made redundant from Reuters, with a healthy redundancy package, and after some thought he decided that his ideal job would be gift wrapper at John Lewis. Immediate and frequent satisfaction of a job well done, a gift well wrapped, and interaction only with happy, content members of the public who were anticipating a joyful wedding or birthday.
Needless to say he ended up getting a lucrative job doing something with computers a week later and stashing a small fortune in redundancy pay out.
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posted
No, not an island, but they do have a few super discounted hotels and things. Plus they still do lunch for 30p, because john spedan lewis said it must always be so.
posted
It's Virgin who have an island for staff holidays, Ricky Branson's Necker Island to be precise, several people got to go there during the time I was working for them I think. God knows just how much corporate cock you had to be sucking to get to go..
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posted
I just thought I'd post this - the interview I did with the girl who 'vanity published' some books and stuff, seeing as it's relevant. Maybe I'm just desperate for some more sarcasm from Thorn, maybe it's relevant... maybe it's too long for any of you fuckers to read.
quote: DIY publishing: a term redolent of a hands-on, rough-edged, let’s-do-the-show right here approach to the creation of literarature, right? You know: a bunch of crusties sitting around in a squat, scribbling manuals on bike maintenance and cranking them out on a stolen lithograph machine. An A-Z guide to looking after your girl parts, from drinking raspberry leaf tea to tone the uterus to inducing a miscarriage with parsley and goldenseal, produced by a Brooklyn feminist collective in 1978 and in (self-) production ever since. A punk kid’s travel writings, all hand-drawn in pencil, fed through a photocopier, and distributed via underground distributors from Merseyside to Montreal. You know. Wacky shit: wierd shit, stuff too out there to ever be considered good enough for a ‘real’ publisher; stuff with deliberately low production values; stuff with a savage, even confrontational aesthetic; stuff that is – in the eyes of the mainstream – shitty; shoddy; lame. Right?
Well; yes. And no. While seizing the means of production in order to disseminate all that crazy subversive jive-talk is of course an excellent and time-honoured offshoot of mainstream literature (though somewhat redundant since the popularisation of Old Mama Internet), there’s more to independent publishing than this. There’s the magazine you hold in your hands, for one thing. Sniff those shiny pages – tasty, huh? Stroke it across your cheek. And then there are the beautiful art books put out by Passenger Books, a new pan-European publishing imprint that has its roots firmly in the underground / DIY scenes – though you wouldn’t necessarily guess it from the three beautifully printed and bound books they’ve put out so far.
Passenger Books was founded in 2005 by sisters Corinn and Simone Gerber, and their friend Peter Gorschulter. Each resides in a different European city (Corrin lives in Cologne, Simone in Zurich, and Peter in Dusselldorf) and their books are printed in Istanbul, with production overseen by Linda Herzog, an artist and friend who currently lives out there. So far, so swish. But the people putting out these books aren’t trust-fund babies, rich kids pissing around producing vanity projects to promote themselves and their friends. They’re people like you and me, and they had an idea, and they made it happen. DIY in action, baby!
‘Simone and I were visiting our friend Linda in Istanbul’, explains Corrin, as we sit in her attic apartment surrounded by proofs for the book she’s working on. ‘She’s an artist, and she was awarded a grant to live out there and work with. She’s an avid photographer as well, and had a huge collection of images from her time spent living in Istanbul, Birmingham and Zurich. At the time, the discussion around the EU was very active, and the images can be seen to be a part of that - all of these cities are in Europe, but only one of them is in the EU: what does it mean to be from Europe in this day and age? In what ways are we united or divided?’
‘So we decided to publish the photographs as a book (‘Birmingham, Istanbul, Zurich, Linda Herzog, Passenger Books 2005). We began researching printers in Istanbul straightaway, and I was astonished – the companies out there have very high-tech Heidelberg machines, so they can produce beautiful books; but at the same time they don’t really know how to use them, so you have to be very careful when overseeing the production.’
Publishing a hard-back book with little experience isn’t the easiest thing in the world, of course. ‘Production was a bit of a nightmare’, Corinn says. ‘I was back in Cologne, while Linda, who didn’t speak Turkish at the time, was trying to liaise with the printers. We both didn’t know much publishing lingo – and of course my first language is German… so I’d have to try and find the English word for something like ‘stitch binding’, tell Linda that over the phone, then she’d have to get someone to translate the English word into Turkish.’
But this, she explains, is part of what the whole project is about. ‘Passenger Books is not just about the object you hold in your hands. It’s about the social aspect – working together despite being based in different countries – and also the idea of the book in itself; the method and means of production. It’s important to us that the books are produced in Istanbul. It’s not just about going for the cheapest printers, which is usually the deciding factor…though of course, that was a consideration.’
Ah yes, the money question. It’s rude to talk about money, but as someone who spent a good few years pouring cash into a fanzine which was then given away completely free, I feel entitled to get to the nitty-gritty. Birmingham, Istanbul, Zurich is a hard-cover art book with glossy, thick pages and full-bleed photographs. How do you fund all this?
‘The first book was funded through Linda’s grant – but printing costs in Istanbul are very reasonable. We published 1000 copies and paid a very cheap price for everything, including high-tech scans. The books are sold throughout Europe and I can combine this with my day job as a bookseller. But even so, it’s not so much about numbers of sales – and we can afford that, because we all have full-time jobs as well as running Passenger Books. What’s important to us are the books themselves – the design, how they look, how the reader interacts with the text. We want to make stuff that is special.’
The second book they distributed, a collaboration with Cologne label Tomlab – is certainly that. Called ‘The Empty Sleeve’, it’s an album by artist / illustrator David Shrigley, except – well, there’s no album inside. The publication looks like a normal gatefold album sleeve, but then you open it up – to be greeted a couple of bright, impasto paintings spelling out the words ‘UGLY’ and ‘*****’ – and there’s just a songbook, and an empty paper sleeve. The sleeve has a drawing of a record on it with the words ‘I DIDN’T MAKE A RECORD / I COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO MAKE A RECORD / IT WOULD HAVE BEEN TOO DIFFICULT / IT WAS EASIER NOT TO MAKE A RECORD’ in distinctive Shrigley handwriting.
‘There were 2000 of these, and they’re all sold out now. This is a song-book with song-text, and the idea is that you can sing the songs if you want. It’s an art-object, this one – it costs 25 euros – but we’re thinking of making a soft-cover book, a cheaper one, that everyone can afford. Tomlab are currently getting submissions from various bands who’ve recorded songs with the lyrics Shrigley has written, so this time, the book will include a CD of these songs with the soft-cover version – and maybe a full-sized LP as well.’
Passenger Books’ next project – the one scattered across the table on which we rest our elbows - is a collection of the drawings of Ingo Giezendanner, the artist behind grrrr.net. These are highly detailed black and white felt-tipped pictures –reportage of industrial scenes done with such intricacy that it sometimes tips over into eye-wateringly beautiful surrealism. They’ve also just produced a series of limited edition buttons featuring works by Maurizio Cattelan, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, GRRRR.net, Wilhelm Hein, Diango Hernàndez, Linda Herzog, Jörg Immendorff, Mickry3, Jonathan Monk, Linda Neutral, Daniel Roth, Allen Ruppersberg, David Shrigley, and AK Wehrli – ‘something tiny, that everyone can afford’, explains Corrin. With Birmingham Istanbul Zurich recently awarded ‘Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2005’ and selected for the German Photography Book Award 2005, the existence of Passenger Books is testament to the fact that independent publishing, DIY ethics and high production values can make very happy bedfellows indeed.
quote:Originally posted by London: ...a bunch of crusties sitting around in a squat...
Passenger Books was founded in 2005 by sisters Corinn and Simone Gerber, and their friend Peter Gorschulter. Each resides in a different European city (Corrin lives in Cologne, Simone in Zurich, and Peter in Dusselldorf)...
Linda Herzog, an artist and friend who currently lives out there...
But the people putting out these books aren’t trust-fund babies...
‘Simone and I were visiting our friend Linda in Istanbul’...
we sit in her attic apartment...
‘She’s an artist, and she was awarded a grant to live out there and work with...
huge collection of images from her time spent living in Istanbul, Birmingham and Zurich...
Linda, who didn’t speak Turkish at the time...
of course my first language is German…...
It’s about the social aspect...
It’s important to us that the books are produced in Istanbul...
it’s not so much about numbers of sales – and we can afford that...
[/QUOTE]
I agree with you totally AMPage... Completely down-to-Earth... Just like U an' Me
-------------------- If sir requires spall, may I suggest the .90 calibre depleted uranium ? Posts: 794
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posted
Oh come on. I have a friend who lives in Berlin, who I visit. I know artists and writers who get grants to do stuff. I've lived in Mexico and, er, Brighton. I paid money to publish something and then gave it away for free, because it was FUN... you don't have to be a globe-trotting yuppie to be creative. What is wrong with EVERYBODY ON THIS FUCKING WEBSITE.
posted
I would say that there's a world of difference between self publishing like you describe in your article London, where the point is to be involved in the entire production process be keep control of how the final work looks and feels, and 'vanity publishing'.
By handing your work over to any publisher you lose control to a greater or lesser extent, and the Passenger Books people seem to think the production and presentation of the work are just as important as the end content.
Under those circumstances I would say self publishing is a completely valid form of expression.
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