After interviewing Deb ‘Boss Lady’ Dormody (of If’n Books) and Ray ‘jazzy funk’ Fenwick (of Drama Club infamy) in issue 0.5, we introduced the two, dropping numerous clumsy hints about the unstoppability of a potential collaboration. And the result? Deb and Ray have teamed up to create this hot jammin’ smacker journal: DANCE IN2 THE POSITIVITY. Fresh! It’s a hand-numbered edition of 100 available through Etsy— better get your electric boogaloo on crazy-fast, girl.

The seventh issue of the ANP Quarterly is out, sporting an ecstatic Phyllis Diller on the cover. (Scroll down below the first fold of the ANP site for the intro to the current issue) The ANP is a free, sans-advertising quarterly (published by RVCA) that promises to “bring forward people and phenomena that deserve acknowledgement and coverage regardless of their place in time.” Yarly! In Portland, you’ll find it at Reading Frenzy, Jackpot Records, Motel Gallery, and Ozone Records.

An excerpt from the interview, with Miss Diller talking about what she paints:

Whatever comes out of my head. It all comes out of my head. Now my natural thing is a face. I see faces, faces, faces. Millions of faces. And faces are the part of the body that’s the most expressive. We have body language but faces are the most powerful beams you give out.

And Phyllis sure knows how to beam some powerful stuff. I’ve had to keep the magazine upside-down on my desk so it doesn’t give me the heebie-jeebies everytime I walk into the room. Yowza!

David Byrne, in the introduction to Sensacional: Mexican Street Graphics:

As true perfection appears on the horizon, as the fruits of the enlightenment and of centuries of scientific progress appear within grasp, we take a bite of the perfected tomato or a huge flawless strawberry and realize that something has been lost. Flava. Soul. Humor. Funk.

He adds:

Perfection, one must conclude, is not acutally perfect at all. In fact, it is almost the complete opposite. Perfection is bad. But bad is good. But bad perfection is not good, only good bad is good. It’s all very simple.

You can find the whole essay here: When Bad Art Is Good
(republished in Utne)

Ray Fenwick and Julie Jackson, kingpins of the shady industries of illustration and cross-stitch, have combined their crafty perspicacity into a beefy new cross-stitch kit: Meat for the Beast. Can it get much better than this? It can and it will: the gory-yet-playful design glows-in-the-freaking-dark. Bone-chomping awesomeness! The kind that inspires fits of typing phrases-connected-by-dashes.

More meat for the insatiable browser monster: check out this redonkulous Craft Query interview with Mister Fenwick on Subversive Cross Stitch. A tiny sample of the meaty innards of the interview:

CQ: Will you start carrying a man purse when blue Q comes out with those excellent Fenwick coin purses?

RF: Are coin purses not masculine? I am so clueless. I guess the word purse implies feminine, but whatever, I would totally carry a coin purse. I would carry my brass knuckles and PCP in it. Open the purse, take the PCP, put on the brass knuckles, and then just go for it! I know PCP is not something to joke about. I’m sorry. But do you really want to make fun of the coin purse of a dude who is amped on Angel Dust and swinging his brassed knuckles around?

We’re pleased to say LAB is now at the library. And not just any library— a traveling library, run by the The Itinerant Poetry Librarian (founder of the Poetry Cubicle). As she passed through Portland, The Librarian (AKA Sara Wingate Gray) installed a temporary library at Reading Frenzy, the IPRC, In Other Words, and several other locations. In its last year of travel, the library has signed up nearly 500 members from 10 countries and 14 cities. Find out more about the project here.

LAB joins a collection of eclectic and obscure small press books, pamphlets, magazines, and ephemera as the library hits the road and heads to its next destination: Seattle, WA. And if you’re the type who enjoys getting any kind of excuse to zoom around in Google Earth, then voila! : track the nomadic library’s sojourns via this nifty link.