To Confuse the Matter
I’ve been posting blogs almost every day at this address:
PAPERKILLSTREEES.BLOGSPOT.COM
So go there, please.
behold the holyneonsexyspiders(water)
Since I’m on an envelope-making kick, I figured I would try to sell a few. They come in packets wrapped in yarn that I found in a hat box in an attic, and also include a typed note from me. If you’re interested, send an email to kleighmueller@gmail.com. I’m happy to trade envelopes for a zine or a small cash donation or rubber insects or something else you have lying around that I can glue to my blue and yellow walls.
Yesterday I joined SendSomething.net, an address-generating website for those who like to send and recieve mail. You can find users randomly or by typing words into a search engine.
I've been Stacksed!
Utne Reader intern Kari Volkmann-Carlsen reviewed my zine last week on the magazine’s website. You can read it here.
It’s been a month since I’ve had a room to call my own, a place where I can stack all of the odds and ends I collect off of street corners and at bookstores, not to mention the two backpacks worth of clothes and cut apart magazines I hauled from Milwaukee to Portland just three weeks ago.
To celebrate, I covered the paint-stained floor in the aforementioned scraps of paper and art supplies and books. It felt good. Really good. For about a week. And then it just got annoying, I kept losing my feet in the mess, so I tidied up. My maps are stacked in a pile of maps. My Portland Zine Symposium zine stash fills a box and is pressing flat the gig posters pulled off of local poles that I’m saving to make notebooks with. I have a pile of found clothing to trade at a second-hand shop for fall clothes, and a corner devoted to my zine pages in progress. And all of this is just to say that near the end of my cleaning binge I found a small business card for Parapluie Press and took a break (okay, stalled) to check out her Etsy page. And now I’m salivating over new objects to fill my new room, especially the Ziegfeld Lady (above) and Wright Brothers notebooks and the zines “Things That Float,” “Hidden Jewels,” and, “Petit Discours.”
Powell’s Books, the largest independent bookstore selling new and used books in the US (plus a great selection of small press, graphic novels, and zines!) now stocks Paper Kills Trees. It’s right there, on the third shelf from the top.
We Make Zines
I’m now a member of We Make Zines, “an online community for zine makers and readers,” where “You can create a profile, list your zineography, post images of zines, partake in the forums, find other zine writers, read about new releases, read reviews from your favorite zine writers and leave comments about the zine you just read on the actual zinesters profile.” Find me under the name “k-leigh-m.”
Top:
“A rope led down into the dark abyss. It was the way to some kind of peace and personal balance.”
Bottom:
“A fairy harp hangs in the wood/Played by every breeze,/Vanished to-day are the fairy-folk/Who hung it high in the trees.”
At yesterday’s “Art in the Pearl,” a downtown Portland festival where locals sold art, demonstrated metal forging, and doused an entire car in brightly-hued paint, I sat at the IPRC’s table and helped kids Gocco-print the “Knitting for Ponies” logo onto handmade notebooks, while the table next to me, sponsored by the Pacific Northwest College of Art, provided plastic ponies and yards of yarn to knit into miniature leg warmers, saddles, or blankets. The ponies were then sent off into Portland, where they’re asked to be tied to the metal rings that line sidewalk streets, a throwback to when Oregonians rode horses instead of cars, and needed a way to tie them up.
Although I’ve yet to see a live horse in town, their tiny plastic counterparts can be spied here and there thanks to the PNCA program and Scott Wayne Indiana, who began “The Horse Project” as a collaborative art happening in 2006.
“Thought Cloud Shrines,” some resembling a multiplex of cuckoo clocks, a tower of tiny chairs stacked on each others’ laps, or a Mardi Gras mask on steroids, reach moon-ward from the tops of human heads or from the backs of men dressed for space travel in Theo Ellsworth’s booklet of meticulously-drawn fantasies, and the simple composition of black ink on tan paper can occupy the careful viewer for hours.
