Hello from the halfway mark of the Things Become Other Things mega-tour! Though it’s only been about three weeks since arriving in the States, it feels like I’ve been on the road for about seven years. I’ve done events at: Rizzoli (NYC), Notion (NYC), Politics & Prose (D.C.), Booksmith (S.F.), Microsoft (Seattle), and Third Place Books (Seattle). In the parlance of depressing tech company performance reviews: They’ve all EXCEEDED EXPECTATIONS.
Line down the block in SF
I’m in a constant state of awe at the kindness and generosity of my readers. And the event interlocutors have been stellar. Matt Rodbard, Rob Giampietro, Ross Andersen, Robin Sloan, and Liz Danzico — all fabulous, elevating these tiny gatherings to much more than they would be were it just me, some dummy, reading from a book. And anyway, they haven’t been that tiny — all the events have “sold out” (i.e., max’d RSVPs) and bookstores have been confused. See: Nobody knows who the hell I am. Craig? Mod? Oh great, we’re going to get four people. (We had a LOT of trouble booking events in many cities because I’m such an unknown quantity in the book world, and in fact couldn’t even find a bookstore to host me in Boston — sorry Bostonians.) The SF event had a line down the block nearly an hour before doors opened. The bookshop people were like: WHO ARE YOU. And the audience? LOCKED IN. It’s been such a pleasure to blab in front of you all — you’re so intent and focused and encouraging with your nods and smiles and laughs at my dumb jokes.
With Liz Danzico at Third Place in Seattle
It’s all to say: What a freggin’ pleasure. Thank you for making this first half worth all the pain and suffering that is hurtling a body through space and time in fart tubes.
BTW: Third Place Books has a bunch of signed (and stamped) copies of TBOT at all three of their stores in Seattle. (Maybe give a ring before going to make sure they’re still in stock.) And Booksmith SF had some signed copies, still, as of a few days ago.
Did you read TBOT? Did you not hate it? Would you mind leaving a review or little sentence of glee over on the usual platforms of doom? Amazon / Goodreads / Fable? These (seemingly superficial) nudges help the book find a bigger audience; grateful to everyone who has left a review / note so far. Thank you!
Tomorrow night (Wed 21st) I’m chatting with Dexter Thomas at Diesel Books in Santa Monica. A local pizza joint seems to be a fan of mine and has thus “sponsored” / blessed the event with free pizza. (One of these days we’ll do one with pizza toast.) To RSVP for this event you should buy a book on the website at that link. (You can also just show up, but buying a book on the RSVP site will help the store anticipate attendance.)
On Friday, super-supporter / old-school patron / friend Julia Huang has rented out a restaurant and is generously hosting a big dinner “thing” for me. A bunch of LA-based SPECIAL PROJECTS members (the first “in person” membership perk I’ve offered) have been invited. Looking forward to that.
A side note: I’ve been TERRIBLE at documenting these events myself. Did you come to one and take photos? Please drop them in this folder if you feel so inclined. Thank you!
Presently I’m sort of resting / recovering in a house on a hill in LA. Just hiding from the world for a couple of days as I recharge and re-calibrate my sanity (which is in constant peril on this tour).
So it’s from this place of performative “rest” that I’m excited to announce:
I think there’s something to be said for short turnaround and quick deadlines. I shot it in February over ten days on the Kii Peninsula (the same place of TBOT lore). I focused on people. Sequenced it in March. Printed in April. And we started shipping last week. Thanks to everyone who bought a copy.
Why do this now? Lemme break it down: It was the start of the year and I was gazing off into the distance and something upset me: I didn’t see any real making on the horizon. Real artists ship and all that bla bla bla. I have an internal anxiety meter and when I haven’t “done” “real” “work” (which is the making part) it starts to go wonky, and in order to assuage the beast, the Chemicals of Imposter Syndrome and Sadness, I must get Butt in Chair and produce.
What I saw from my perch in January was a lot of meta activity. Important activities ostensibly in support of the success of TBOT (although, maybe they weren’t so effective, as we’re finding out) — planning the tour, going on all the pods, prepping for travel, booking travel (this entire tour is out of my own pocket; costing me $10,000+ with plane tickets, hotels, rides, food, all in; again, thank you for buying a book!), and doing the events, the performances of pods, all that mastodonic rigmarole. And while, yes, honored in many ways to be able to do all this stuff (truly and daily!), I’m also cognizant that this is not the work. The work is the work, and the work is not talking about the work. (Talking about the work may be some other kind of work, but it’s not The Work. And it’s pernicious and seductive because it’s easier than the work and has more of a public-facing angle and “feels good” because you’re no longer in your lonely, crushing isolation pod, but makes me feel quisling-esque and fundamentally evaporates like so much smoke.) So I sort of freaked out. I felt a spike of anxiety back in January and thus shoehorned into my very-not-open schedule the ten day shoot and the production and all that other stuff required to land OTHER THING in tandem with Random House TBOT.
We (my team: printer, binder, distribution warehouse, studio manager) landed it. And it feels GOOD to land it. And while it might be “insane” of me to have done this all simultaneously, like a self-infibulation, I am eternally grateful to January Craig for pushing through and making this happen. I love seeing this work out in the world and while I am hardly objective, I think it’s my favorite and perhaps most cohesive body of photography I’ve yet done. And makes me think I should do more of these three-months-to-ship photo books. (Note: Ten+ years of looking, thinking, talking, writing, shooting … three months to ship.)
Aside from alternating between Public Mode and Curled Up By a Lake Mode, I’ve managed to see two movies in the theaters (movie going, alone, on a weekday, is my happy place). I saw Sinners in some fancy format at Alamo Drafthouse on Dekalb in Brooklyn. I believe I was the only white person in the packed house. The two wonderful, boisterous, mega-chatty (SO CHATTY), life-pulsing women sitting next to me adopted me like a Snickerdoodle, offering snacks and commentary and all but pet my head.
The other film I saw was the inversion of Sinners, of Michael B. Jordan’s glistening sexocity. If you flipped the man inside out and asked the LLMs for Bizarro Jordan you’d get Tim Robinson with his “dolphin fin” nose and impenetrable asexuality. I saw Friendship at Vista Theater projected in 35 mm (because: Tarantino?) squeezed within a packed audience of pretty much only white people. Never have I been in such an unhinged / uproarious crowd. It was a SCENE of the highest movie-going order. Everyone had some coded wink of a tattoo that, just ten years ago, would have only been seen on an old timey sailor or European drug-smuggler in a Thai prison. (The white guys next to me, one of whom looked suspiciously like Judd Apatow, did not adopt me in any meaningful way.)
Anyway, the point being — for both films: They were elevated by the audience, by the shared experience, by the physicality of it. The screams and “oh no, don’t you” and “oh, he didn’t”s and cackles were like shared, spontaneous public legislation to enjoy the thing ever more. And dovetailing with a point that’s come up on this tour over and over again: Being around people, feeling the energy of the group — this is an important thing. To get out of the bubble, away from the tiny screen, the small small terrible evil grimoire of the world of The Device. Do we understand why Ryan Coogler choose the formats he chose? Not really. Do we care if something is projected in “real” 35 mm? I guess? Sort of? It’s less the actual things themselves and more the act of saying: Gimme something real. (However fraught / impossible that notion might be; me: shooting OTHER THING on 6x7 and 35 mm film, etc.) Tangible, even if it’s tangible only in theory (35 mm projection).
I’m very glad to have gone to those films with those crowds, and very glad to have seen so many people in so many cities so far on the tour. Thank you for the handwritten notes and emails of encouragement. I hope to see you somewhere else out there. And if not on this round, I would like to come back and see if we can convince those other cities, those other bookstores (Boston? Portland?) to maybe give me a chance, since we’ve Exceeded Expectations everywhere we’ve been so far.
