Fujichia

Rolling Egg

2020/07/27
INTRO / ROLLING EGG ISSUES 1-4 / GRANT BS / DIGGING DEEP / BROTHER / NAMES / "ROLL ON YOU EGG ROLL ON" / TOM'S PAINTING / FOLLOW UP TALK / LINKS / WATERGATE
Rolling Egg
- 4 issues of a daily publication
- each issue a single page of 8.5x11" printer paper, printed double-sided on a consumer printer, also released daily as a pdf
- written at and for the Providence Fringe Fest, a festival of theatrical works including plays and dances, August 1-5 2018


In August of 2018 I made a daily newspaper at the Providence Fringe, a four-day theatre festival of short plays and dances held across a few venues within walking distance of each other. My work was a total endevour, and it was on me to do every part required of "making a daily newspaper". I checked out plays in the evening, took notes, then typed up the notes in the morning, layed them out on the computer, and printed up a few hundred copies each afternoon on my home printer. Then I delivered them in the late afternoon on the way to that night's shows, and then the process would repeat again. Luckily I only had to make 4 issues, I think that's just about my limit for a daily solo periodical.

I guess I have other notes on this but I'll post those after the issues themselves. Each issue was printed out double-sided on a single piece of 8.5x11" printer paper, and also posted online as a pdf so people can print them at home. I am distrustful of the pdf format because it can be used as an attack vector for malware, and because people post them without saying in the link "this is a pdf" and then you click on it and you're suddenly downloading something you didn't intend to download. It's bad security. But in this instance I thought it was a good choice.


click to download or read in browser

Rolling Egg August 1 2018 [pdf 2.4mb]
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Rolling Egg August 2 2018 [pdf 1.0mb]
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Rolling Egg August 3 2018 [pdf 2.7mb]
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Rolling Egg August 4 2018 [pdf 1.4mb]
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Other Notes

Grants

The idea for this project was Darcie Dennigan's, she's great. And not only did she have the idea but she won a grant-writing contest that paid me to do this! I've never won a grant-writing contest before, but I must've entered a dozen fruitlessly in the past, and there was one other time someone won by writing in on my behalf. I used to get really soreheaded about not getting grants, but now it's casual, I don't take it to heart. A lot of these contest winners just write about a project that's easy to describe and falls well inside of established formats, and that's not my field of interest. It's as simple as that!

I think the only reason I even had a chance at this one is because someone else was jumping through all the hoops and I had almost no input into it. In fact it was the exact same way with the other one I got. The crazy thing to me is that Darcie wrote to the grants people before the deadline to be like "what about this, is this the sort of thing you guys like to hear?" and they wrote back like "actually we'd rather hear this sort of thing". That's mindblowing to me. Darcie is the opposite of vulgar and cynical, but asking "what do you guys usually fall for" before you shoot your shot seems like, very vulgar and very cynical! Is this common???? I guess I'm a romantic.... Anyway we got the money.

OK I would like to dive a little deeper on this because local art grants bullshit has been a massive and periodic motivation hurdle for me over the past couple years. If you also struggle with a feeling of failure based on not getting recognition from establishment art mechanisms, here's my tips:

OK "Local arts grant riffing" is a great example of Last Year's Reality, but anyway these tips work retroactively, and are posted here for anyone out there still beating themselves up over coulda-shoulda-woulda along a local arts framework. Let's light a candle for these gripes and float them off on the wide river of time. So long, baby...

Digging Deep

Working on this project was fun, although there were moments where I was at the theatre and I was really not having a great time, and I really had to dig deep. "If you can't say something nice don't say anything at all" is what Bambi's mom said and though that's not a credo for all occasions it certainly befits a high-amateur / semi-pro theatre fest, especially one where you're going to see the same people the very next day and the day after that and the day after that. But of course I couldn't say "nothing", the whole point is that I had to say 2 sides a day. That's why there's a lot of atmosphere notes, talking about the infrastructure, the food, etc..

To be honest, some of the plays I liked, some had cool parts, and a small number I hated straight up and down, but overwhelmingly the feeling I got was "this doesn't have to be good". What I mean is that there were times where I looked around and it seemed like I was the only person in the audience that wasn't related to someone on stage-- plays like that have their own merit that's completely removed from any sort of critical review. My notes from a play I didn't enjoy: "the only thing wrong about this is that I'm here".

One of the days was really rough and I didn't like any of the plays at all, so I just decided to make stuff up. Since there are 3 or 4 shows running at the same time, I figured it'd be impossible to see them all and so therefore no one would ever know that I was fabricating details. But check this out-- the next day I was talking to one of Roommate Ellen's friends and told them I made stuff up, and they said "well, I'm in an improv thing later today, I'll work in some of the stuff you made up". So it was only a lie for a day, not bad!

Printing

A big part of the reason I said yes to Darcie about doing this project was that I had been investigating new ways of printing zines and had recently got a new printer because it was fast and could do full duplex (printing on both sides of the paper). I figured this was a good way to put it to the test. Well geez, it worked great.

The printer I have is a Brother HL-2270 DW, I love it. It looks fine and it's way cheaper than making photocopies. It's slower than a photocopier but if you factor in the time it takes to get from your house to Staples and back, it's crazy fast. People in small press publishing stopped prioritizing making things inexpensive, but if you're still stapled to that particular cross, I strongly recommend any cheap black and white printer that can do full duplex and has decent reviews.

Name

This was my third go at making a newspaper-- the first was called New Parisian (1 issue) and the second was called Mothers News (41 issues). Mothers News was close enough to New Parisian that on the first issue I felt like it was fair to say "Previously New Parisian". And then that became a riff I'd return to, and every issue I'd list a few (made up) names that the newspaper was "Previously". Oftentimes it was a riff on some other publication, or some reference to an item or theme in that issue. I pulled "Rolling Egg" from this list of previouslys. Naming things can be such a pain in the ass, one that quite honestly tanked more than one project in the past. I was very happy to avoid a fatal boondoggle this time.

Only one person IDed the original reference-- congratulations to O Horvath of Baltimore MD for stomaching the disappointment of recognition at, indeed, a Howard the Duck reference. NB: I hate Howard the Duck, this is not an endorsement!!!! I just liked the name. Please, no one send me links to a Howard the Duck thinkpiece, just save your energy. For a good Steve Gerber comic read Omega the Unknown, or Man-Thing. For a good duck comic with horrible undertones read Carl Barks or Dane Martin. For a stupid movie I hate, and maybe the comics are good but it's too late because I already saw the movie unfortunately... Howard the Duck. If you want to see a cartoon duck with big boobs go to deviantart dot com.

"Roll on, you egg, roll on"

Sometimes when I make something I check online to see if anyone's talking about me, which is a terrible habit. For Rolling Egg I didn't have time to even think about it until much later, and I looked on twitter. No one was really tweeting about it except for the fest organizers (which is fine / no problem), but I got a few results in Chinese that I couldn't make sense of, they were all in Chinese, with the only English being "rolling egg". So I looked up "rolling egg Chinese slang" and got this: image

Pretty incredible!!! "Egg" is in a lot of Mandarin swears, either as a synonym for testicles or, more commonly, to mean offspring. The canonical egg in this situation is the river turtle egg, for reasons too elaborate to get into here, but I think it's because the river turtle's head looks like a little weiner??? The way you'd say "rolling egg" is maybe better translated as "roll away, you turtle egg [you penis product]". But the closest direct translation seems to be just "rolling egg". There's a strong negative connotation-- unlike in English where you can say "I'm just going to fuck off for a while", I don't think there's a fun way to say "I'm just going to roll like an egg". That's more my mood but it's not available in this particular idiom. Anyway it could've been a lot worse! I'll leave links at the bottom if you want to read more about Mandarin swears.

Later I got a great chance to use this meaning of "rolling egg", when someone left a jokey insult on an old instagram post: image

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I looked up "#戴绿帽子" and it means "green hat", which is an insult in China, which I didn't know when I wrote "#greenhat"--

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It's just a coincidence that the post is about Rolling Egg... Also it's from before I named it, and the comment was left 20 weeks later, after I was done. Otherwise I wouldn't have had the ammo at the ready. For reasons of their own, this person was just going around writing the insult version of "green hat" on every post that used the unseasoned, merely descriptive version. It's incredible that I had a rebuff right there in my pocket! I forget if the green of the hat is also a turtle thing... Roll on, egg, roll on.

Fan Art

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Got the pic a few weeks later:
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This painting was one of six that Tom made on a residency in Minneapolis MN, making paintings at night and still clocking in to his remote desk job during the day. The other paintings he made are about (or in his words, "have the callsign"): picnic, chainmail, dumplings, pumpkin, and Dracula. The residency ended with a show at the White Page gallery, called "Thinking About".

I feel like it makes perfect sense that Tom would select a moment in the text where two systems collide- one rigid and one bouncing. We rarely talk directly about paintings but that seems like a common motif in many of his endeavors in this field.

I reached out to Tom for some thoughts:

not a lot to add as this is a pretty self-explanatory painting idea, with the rare quality of arriving fully-formed in mind from the text, where "all I did was paint it" = that band of likely-illegible white on the bottom right is the literal quote from rolling egg it's made after, included literally on the painting because 1. at the time I was sort of thinking of it as like "an illustration plate" (as in e.g. like the arthur rackham dickens plates or whatever, the line the painting is illustrating is always underneath... I'm sure you know what I'm talking abt) 2. I was forcing myself "out of the comfort zone" by putting english language text onto one for the first time in a while (which I'd intentionally hard-stopped doing several years before), and 3. it was made in residency in minneapolis around my new friends thinking abt my old friends, and I kinda just wanted to rep the set as explicitly/loudly as possible, using the words directly felt like a powerful invocation at the time.

sorta unique too in that it's as close to a collaboration as I think I've got in paint, which if that's interesting to any of either of our collectors, they should get in touch, as I still have this one stored.

Follow-Up Talk

The grants people wanted me to do a follow-up talk on like, things I learned, or what my impact was, and their suggestion was that I do this on the last day of the festival, at the after-party. Really bad idea, honestly. When did this get invented, this whole arts non-profit impact score thinking? I'm guessing it's like a post-Mapplethorpe culture war thing???? Anyways it's for bozos. I said yes with the intent to dodge, but they withheld $200 from the funding as a hedge against me absconding, the scoundrels. So I changed my energy to "let's make it my idea" (pro tip) and months later I gave a talk, nominally about Rolling Egg but actually about the idea of shitzines, the cheap or free psychedelic periodicals of yore. To be honest I was happy I did it.

The talk was held at the RISD Library in connection with the opening of their zine collection. I admit, I started out in a bad mood because I got there early but got trapped in the stairwell on the way up, and for a sec it seemed like I'd have to spend the night there. Then when I finally got out and got to the room there there was a huge snack platter with tons of cold cuts and I was like a), you told me there was no money in the budget for me so who bought all these cold cuts, and b), I don't even eat cold cuts. But you know what, I'm a professional. So I just focused my chi and did the talk, and once I got going I really had a lot of fun. Great crowd. I got a watergate of it, I'll post the link below. image

I was proud of this font choice, this Dooley-esque scribble with piss line, and that I remembered to put the year on the flyer. I was not proud that I misspelled "January". I wonder if that's why I got caught in an endless doorway on the way in??



Links / Misc


Wow this post is long! Sorry about that. I hit reminisce mode and it was hard to curtail. Thanks for reading! If you're not getting these posts in you email and you'd like to be, you can sign up on the substack here: [substack]. If you really like this sort of thing and want to kick down a little money towards the upkeep of the castle, I set up a nice like temple / donation zone with a large bell that really rings, here: [link]. It's ok to ring the bell without donating, it's still good luck!
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