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Although I’m still mired in the final throes of my current book project (this writing stuff sucks!) I’ve already begun compiling the material for my sophomore effort, Don’t Eat the Buttons, or as it will appear on the cover in its entirety:
Don’t Eat the Buttons
A Book of Haikus About
A Cat Named Haiku
It will be composed of one hundred haiku poems about my cat, Haiku. Each will be matched with a photo of her, so wherever you open the tome, you will find one haiku and one picture. The book, which I’ll self-publish through Lulu, will be an 8 ½ square inch perfect-bound full-colour paperback.
Beginning with Lounging in the sun, I’ll be posting individual two-page spreads here on yorkrules. You will see a project in process, and I’ll be motivated to steadily make progress. Who knows? I may finish my second book before my first.
My thanks to friend Zach and Julie My Love for encouraging another York idea. Your comments are welcomed on this and all future posts.
Item: 4 vertical sticker (3″ x 5″)
Price: $3.50
Buy it: cafepress.com/yorkrules
When I created my Boo!Qaeda bumper sticker, I was criticized for excessive enigmaticism. It’s a valid critique. Yorkrules is avowedly inaccessible because my perspective regularly lacks exposition. (The frequent alliteration and multisyllabic lexicon further muddy my intentions, I know.)
4 is fairly self-explanatory, of course, but as I appreciate the constructive criticism regarding my clarity, I’ll add a little explication.
The grammatically correct tag line of this design would read VOTE DEMOCRATIC. I’ve removed the “ic” to reinforce the ickiness. Democrat, when used in reference to the party, is considered a “political epithet.” A verbal flick to the ear, a minor moment of disrespect, it’s simply stated name-calling. It’s what our current president does.
This is a rare example of subtraction from a man who’s quite accomplished at addition (The Iraq War, for example, has cost over $517 billion, and is expected to climb into the trillions over the long term.)
With this sticker, I embrace such name-calling as emblematic of our present political era, and I look forward to the day* when we can move beyond such silliness and see what this country can really amount to.
My thanks to friend Memo for suggesting that I convert a recent post into this sticker.
Julie My Love explained in her Minute by Minute feature why she recently added a new tattoo. Now here’s more about the tattoo itself.
The art she imagined was made up of several flowers, each representing someone of significance in her life. (Being an Asian-loving iconoclastic half-Canadian, I asked to be Japanese Maple leaves.)
She found pictures of the specific flowers online, and I arranged them in Photoshop to create this pre-visualizion.
She used this pre-vis to explain her idea to the artist, Hannah Aitchison, who then sketched out her own interpretation.
The work of translating the image from paper to flesh began…
… and three-and-a-half increasingly painful hours later…
Julie My Love had her new tattoo.
Here it is in detail.
Bringing the creative process three-quarters full-circle, I then coloured in Hannah’s sketch with Photoshop, a sort of post-visualization of her interpretation of my pre-visualization of Julie’s original idea.
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Support Barack Obama
