C A L I F O R N I A

california.
spring
reading.

“It’s just how memory works for me -
these events are not chronological but they make the
most sense when placed next to one another”

California,
by Amra Brooks.

via teenage teardrops. here
and at ooga booga, here..



"This is a creative non-fiction book about growing up in California from the mid-1970's to early 1990's with post-hippie punk rock divorced parents who battle with depression and addiction. The story exists at a time when the fields of orange trees were still there, and continuing until they disappeared, the ideals vanishing. "

"Amra Brooks' California is beautifully written and felt. The spare, rhythmic sentences cut to the bone of experience; the novella is both compassionate and unsparing in its judgements. With her special intelligence and unblinkered eye, Brooks transforms the state of California into the state of her charchter's mind, its sense and sensibility becoming hers.
This is a marvelous book."

- Lynne Tillman

500 printed.Our second book




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youhavebeenheresometime
reading list.

(i'd love to execute a design/art book exchange.)

"My mother hid my father under the floorboards.
He stayed there for a year and a half, between two floors in the house.
He'd come out from time to time--I'm living proof of that!"

-Christian Boltanki

"The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski "
MFA Publications Text by Christian Boltanski, Catherine Grenier.
Forword by Luc Sante.

Christian Boltanski's votive installations, archives and objects, revolving around the fragile polarities of memory and amnesia, identity and anonymity, have made him one of the world's most renowned contemporary artists. And yet, despite the centrality of biography and testimony to his work, Boltanski's own story is little known and has never been fully told. Published on the occasion of the artist's sixty-fifth birthday, The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski, written in the form of a book-length interview (which the artist likens to a "psychoanalysis" or "confession") with the art historian Catherine Grenier, is Boltanski's oral autobiography. In it, he recounts his unusual wartime childhood ("my mother hid my father under the floorboards. He stayed there for a year and a half, between two floors in the house. He'd come out from time to time--I'm living proof of that!"), his career, friendships and marriage, successes and regrets, his approaches to art and teaching, how he created various installations, his relations with dealers and the public, and other matters that illuminate as never before his complex, enigmatic works. Boltanski is refreshingly phlegmatic about the realities of the world (art and otherwise), and he relates his remarkable stories--some enormously amusing, others tragic--with a matter-of-factness and self-deprecating humor that highlight his capacity for humane responsiveness. As both the self-portrait of a major contemporary artist and a frank, fascinating memoir, this is a document of capital importance."

go here for more info...