I have not written about turning twenty-nine very much because as I mentioned, I really wasn’t paying attention at the time.

I also realize that many people have been 29 before me, and most of them survived and it was not so tragic.

And also I am the first person to turn 29 in all the history of the world, and it is terrifying.

And really, the cultural shame associated with women and aging that soaks our culture is ridiculous and insulting.

And I do not want white hair.

And also I do, though not so much this little white party as a full head of flame-white superhero hair.

And all of these things are together true.

Though not a weather superhero: no.

I told Steven I had found white hair and was growing old and could actually feel my scalp aging like being covered with a weird tingling shampoo and that I was waving my arms like a distressed tyrannosaurs and he told me to suck it up. Do you think the t-Rex complained when he got white hair, he said? And I said no, Steven, the tyrannosaurus didn’t have hair. He didn’t complain when his scales turned white at the edges either, he said. He really didn’t have to worry about growing old at all. You should be more like him. And then I started laughing, and went back to work.

Featured image credit goes to here, licensed under Creative Commons.

One of the things about being a crafter is that I tend to generate stuff. Scarves and jewelry and clothing and drawings pop up in my wake like so many troublesome dolphins. (I know that’s a weird image, but I couldn’t resist the idea of troublesome dolphins.) I have so many scarves. I love them, and I love yarn, and I like crocheting on the subway. I am tempted to try and calculate how many square feet of scarf I’ve knitted in my lifetime. How would I do that? I’d bet it’s a ridiculous number.

Lately I have been trying to find ways to make things that are more special. Partially because they take longer, and partially because it means I haven’t just made another scarf. Which is how this happened.

I like the idea of hidden messages, and of using code in interesting ways. And I had this beautiful yarn (link is similar but not exactly the right brand) that I wanted to make into something special. And I thought it’d be cool to try and learn Morse code. But it turns out that if you google “Morse code scarf” the results are a little sad. (These, however, are gorgeous.)

So I started with this, from here, translated here.

..   -.. —   .-.. — …- .   -. — – …. .. -. –.   .. -.   – …. .   .– — .-. .-.. -..   … —   .– . .-.. .-..   .- …   -.– — ..- —…   .. …   -. — –   – …. .- –   … – .-. .- -. –. . ..–..

I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is not that strange?

This quote chosen because it feels hopeful and bemused and bewildered. Because it’s romantic. Because it makes me smile, and because it was stuck in my head that day.

I made myself a handy sheet and loaded beads into my pockets.

This scarf started very thin and got thinner when I doubled it over to make a channel for the beads to sit in. I made it mostly on trains and buses.

Keeping track of stitches on this ribbon scarf got a lot easier after I remembered I don't have to count in base ten. http://t.co/kb50llTM

March 17, 2012 3:03 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@SaraEileen

Sara Eileen Hames

Crocheting on a bus is easy, but beading on a train is an adventure in trying not to stab yourself or your neighbor with a very small needle.

I ended up using a teardrop bead for the dots and three round beads strung together for each dash.

The quote turned out to be not quite the length of the scarf, as Morse code is hard to estimate in beads and I’ve never tried something like this before, so a lot of my spacing was wonky for the first few words. I added the heavy gold bars to mark the beginning and end of the quote.

Here’s a shot with the code highlighted that can show you exactly how bad my spacing was. It started poorly and became much better toward the end, after I’d standardized the space between letters and the space between words. Toward the end of this project I did find myself reading this easily without using the translator, which I will call a win while quietly ignoring that Morse code is really meant for audio messages. Not for scarves.

I have a hard time making scarves this thin that don’t twist oddly at the ends. It’s something to do with the twist when turning to a new row in the crochet; all of my wee scarves end up looking like corkscrews. I decided after the fact to sew the two ends together and just make an infinity scarf. Infinity scarves are one of those odd trends I missed when they were in stores and all of a sudden find a little fascinating. I sort of want to try and make continuous landscape scarves now.

One more shot of scarf in demonstration mode because this weird up-angle of my face makes me look like an alien, and that amuses me.

It is all of a sudden cold again (what gives, New York?) and I feel a little less chagrinned about spending two weeks of my subway time on this. I wore it out on Sunday for brunch and East Village wandering.

Scarf in the wild. This makes me happy. What next?

I have been thinking that I would try to make this a year of 29 fantastic things. But what makes a thing fantastic? I don’t know just yet, though I have some ideas.

1) It is enormous.

The magazine was enormous. Huge, in that it took over my life for weeks before and after, and that it was hard, and successful. Enormous in that we will do it again. And again. All of the ideas, we have them.

2) It takes up more space than the expected allotment in one’s heart. (Alternately: It is more wonderful than one’s expected allotment of wonder.)

I went to San Juan with my family the weekend after my grandmother’s service. We walked and saw live music and found art galleries hiding in plain white buildings without windows. I was sunburnt. I met a courtyard of kites.

I had a hard time being relaxed while we were there. I have in my head this picture of what relaxation should look like, and it looks a lot like the month I spent in Point Judith when I came back from Australia, in a tiny house on a beach by the Atlantic when the whole coast was still shaking off the winter. I would get up in the mornings and make coffee, wrap my self in a blanket against the cold and sit in the little living room with the picture window out onto the channel, and write. No one else there dictating my days or meals or bedtime. (Now I have a plan to run off to a cabin on a coast somewhere this summer, and maybe stay, and write for a week. Or a month.) I find it amusing that I think of that cabin as relaxing now, since at the time I was deeply depressed and my whole life in shambles, having just moved back to the States with no job, plan, partner or cash.

So I spent the weekend in San Juan bouncing around in child and family space. Nice but occasionally stressful. Ocasionally making me feel as though everything was wound up too small and tightly in my head.

Then that Sunday we went hiking in a rainforest.

And it was fantastic.

3) It is more special than it first appears.

Last night I finished a ribbon scarf with a Shakespeare quote beaded on it in international Morse code. Yea. It makes me giggle. I’m taking photos this afternoon to post here.

4) …?

2.11.12
Get an email on Saturday that Dor is dying. Really this time, not like the other times when she has had a stroke and been diagnosed with stomach cancer and has fallen down. She has stopped eating and they cannot make her start again. Come to Rhode Island. Come now.

“I can’t,” I write back, “I’m in California. I’ll come on Tuesday. No, next Sunday, no, Tuesday.” Send all of the emails I need to send to take Tuesday off. Go to Disneyland.

2.13/14.12
Get off a plane in New York at 8pm on Monday night and go to work to meet a deadline for the office in Israel. Work until 6am. Walk from the office to the train station and get on a train at 7. Rhode Island at 11. So tired.

Meet my father. See Dor. Dor sees me back, she smiles. She is not talking any more. Little noises. The nurse is serving lunch: thickened apple juice, a mustard-colored mush that is supposed to be chicken and another that is supposed to be potatoes. We have to read the slip of paper that comes with the tray to identify things. The yellow mush is lemon cake.

Dor is too weak to lift a spoon. My father feeds her the mush mixed up on the edge of the spoon, and she eats it. One bite. Two. Six. I wrap her hand around the glass of juice and my fingers around her hand, and I help her lift the cup to her lips over and over again. She is thirsty. I tell her that I am going to make a magazine next week. I tell her that it’s my birthday next week. I say happy Valentine’s day. My father and I talk about Australia.

We take her out to lunch. My father says she can still walk herself down the hallway in her wheelchair,  but I can barely make her lift her feet. I wonder if it is because she has gotten so much more tired in a single day, or I wonder if it’s that she doesn’t hear me. One of my uncles, the older one, comes in the front door of the nursing home and sees us. He asks her if she wants to go back to her room. He doesn’t believe in forcing her to do things. My father does.

Eventually I get her to the door and to the car and she stands with our arms under her elbows to be transferred to the front seat. My uncle says goodbye. We drive to the bowling alley, and meet my other uncle there, the younger one. Dor cannot lift her feet at all. Eventually I turn her around and drag her to the booth backward. “You’re rushing her, stop rushing,” my father says.

We order. I remember I have not eaten a meal since Sunday night. Snacks and airplane food and a bit of sushi. My uncle orders Dor apple juice. I try to eat and help her drink it at the same time. Every time she moves her hand to the cup I reach out and curl mine around it. We read her a Valentine’s Day card from relatives in Florida.

We take her driving. She falls asleep at the beach. I sit in the backseat and wonder if we would know the difference if she stopped breathing, sitting there watching the surf and the dogs tumbling over one another in the sand.

We take her back. We try to set her up in her chair at the end of the hallway so she can watch people come and go. She likes to keep track of what’s going on, usually. I think it is one of the ways she stays connected since she stopped being able to talk after the stroke. I remember that the stroke was three years ago.

She is too tired to sit. She is so tired she has stopped making noise, or moving. She has stopped responding to me. I say “I love you” and I try to get her to say it back. My father is at the end of the hall waiting for me, and I have to go and catch my train. I hold her hands and kiss her forehead, just above the hairline. Her skin is soft and warm and smells like my cat’s fur.

I put my arms around her gently and then stand up. I want to hug her again and kiss her again, but the nurse is there waiting to out her to bed. And I think it’s time to go, I cannot store up extra memories by staying here another minute. I cannot crush her in a hug, or cry on her shoulder. It doesn’t seem that she knows what’s happening any more. I cry as I walk down the hallway to the door.

2.15.12
Wednesday, have lunch with Steven. “How was seeing Dor?” he asks.

“Hard,” I say. I tell him it is hard for me to see my uncle and my father fight over whether they should just let her rest or force her to go outside, force her to eat when she stops lifting the glass on her own.

“I think I’m with your uncle on this one,” he says.

“But if we take her outside she’s happy when she gets there,” I say. “If she eats she stays alive longer.” I cry a little. We finish our lunch.

2.19.12
Wake up on Sunday morning and start cleaning the house. Steven comes over at 11:30, we kiss, we clean. At 12:30 my mother calls be to say that Dor has died. Cry standing up in the living room. “I can’t deal with this right now,” I say.

Guests at two. Text from my uncle: she’s gone. My brother comes early. We hug. “Did Mom call you?” I ask. “Yea,” Max answers, “and a good thing. I wouldn’t want to have found out my grandmother died from a shitty text.”

At 6 I want the party to be over. I go into my bedroom, draw the curtain, and sob quietly into my hands. I want everyone to leave, and I want someone to come and find me. I cry for a long time and think about staying there until everyone is gone.

Steven finds me. He sits down next to me and I try to think of something to say. It takes a long time. Eventually I say, “Did I every tell you how my grandmother met my grandfather?”

“No,” he answers.

“She was working in a button shop in Melbourne during World War Two, and he was stationed there. He came in to get the buttons on his uniform fixed.” I tell the rest if the story, how they were married and had my uncle there, my father in Hawaii right after the war. I think I get some of it wrong. Max comes in just as I get to the end. Eventually we go back to the party.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. My father sends us emails with obituaries attached, and asks if we have edits. I barely read them. I don’t know how to write obituaries. But I notice that some of them are badly written. My father sends new versions that are better. He calls me to ask if I can be in Rhode Island by Saturday. I say yes.

Thursday. Friday. I gather friends and we make a magazine. It is good. I draw and write about Dor, and my other grandmothers. Her portrait is one of the last pages in the magazine.

I do not sleep. The magazine ends in a way that is exhausting, and I feel terrible and responsible. I begin to think of all of the ways I could have done better. I go home and make a list of ways to be better next time. I fall asleep while Doctor Who is playing. I wake up to eat, and fall asleep again at midnight.

2.25.12
I get up at 7:30 and rush to the train station. I think the train is at 8:30, and I’m going to miss it. I catch a cab to get there faster. I call my brother and leave messages. I arrive. The train is scheduled for 9. I read my mother’s email wrong. My brother misses the train because his phone died, and I call his roommate at 9:05 to wake him up. We catch the 10am instead.

I read on the train. My parents pick us up. “We are going to see Dor now so that you don’t have to see her for the first time during the wake with everyone there,” my father says. We drive to the funeral home. The skin at the inside corners of my eyes begins to throb quickly. But it stops before we get there, so I ask my mother for Advil and then forget about it.

A man in a black suit with his hair combed back holds open the door for us. Dor is in a casket of red wood with Celtic crosses on the corners. She is in a lavender suit. I cry, and don’t stop crying.

Eventually I walk over, I stand and look at her for what I think is a long time. This is the first time I’ve seen a body. Put a hand on her shoulder. She is as hard as wood under the suit. Surprising.

I look at the parts of her. I lean over and kiss her quickly, but it is not right. This part of her forehead is supposed to be soft and warm and smell like cotton and cat’s fur, but is hard and smells like nothing. Her fingers are supposed to indent softly like the dough of apple pies. Her hands are supposed to fit quietly together. Her fingernails are not supposed to be lavender, they should be red, and the skin under her eyes should be gently translucent and she is supposed to be smiling. Everything is wrong here, all of this is wrong.

My father unlocks the bottom half of the casket and we settle her Florida Gators blanket and her teddy bear down around her feet. The blanket gets pulled down below her knees, and my father pulls it up again carefully. Still crying.

Go to eat lunch. Buy stockings from a mall on the way. Change into a dress. Stockings are too small; I cut them off into knee socks with my father’s Leatherman. Take the Advil I forgot about before.

Back to the funeral home. Dozens of unknown people. Dor lived here for forty years. Two of her sons raised four children here. Of course people. Max and I stand and watch a sideshow of photos of her so that we don’t have to talk to anyone. Some of them are amazing. Dor on horseback as a girl younger than me; sitting in the edge of a pool in a bathing suit; walking down a city street in a wide-brimmed hat; sitting with her legs swinging, a little child on a fence post. My younger uncle says he found the photos by forcing open a cabinet in her old house that had been bolted shut. None of us have ever seen them before.

After the slideshow comes back to the beginning, go to the back room of the funeral home and sit in a leather armchair. There are tissue boxes everywhere here. Check email. Still crying, like springing a leak that doesn’t close. Five emails about work for the magazine, then six, then seven. I am so disappointed in myself. There is so much to do and I cannot do it. My head hurts so much.

I wonder if this is it; this is the moment I have a nervous breakdown and go no further. This is the time I say it is too much. The worst since college? Junior year I thought my partner had shipped to Iraq. I lay down on the floor of my dorm room and didn’t move for two days. I wonder if I can stay in this chair for two days. Probably not. They have other funerals.

Max sits down next to me. We talk about the magazine. I tell him I am worried, I say I have so much to do. He says, “Oh whatever,” and laughs, and then says, “Are you okay?” I am crying again. I say, “No, I’m having a panic attack,” and the minute I say it I am having one. I start choking. Max sits on the edge of my chair and puts his arm around my shoulders. Eventually I breathe again. We talk more. I think it is not too much, this time. Answer emails. Go back in to the room with the people and the casket.

I sit next to my brother in the front row of the chairs. I notice that my family has been spending most of our time in the front of the room, near the casket. Everyone else is in the back or on the sides. My cousin’s five-week-old baby is on a blanket in the far corner.

“Embalming is some weird-ass shit,” I say to him.

“I know, right?” he says back. “Seriously, burn me.”

“Seriously, burn me too,” I answer.

My older uncle has not stopped crying. Glad I’m not the only one. I go over to him. “Can I give you a hug?” He nods, and I do. “This is nice,” I say. What to say? Momentary friendship scrounged from the mutual inability to stop tears from going down our cheeks.

I sit with my mother for a little while and put my head on her shoulder. I can’t remember the last time we did that. I stop crying. The wake ends. I carry one of the baskets of flowers to take to the bar. We go back to the house to change. In the kitchen my father throws his button-down shirt printed blue-on-blue with fish patterns on the table next to his suit jacket, and he puts on his t-shirt and sweatshirt and baseball cap. I put my jeans back on, keep the knee-high socks. It’s cold outside. The four of us stand in the kitchen, a blank moment between coming and going. My mother shivers. “She was so cold!” she says, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. She was just so cold.”

“I was saying to Max that I thought it was weird that she was hard,” I say. I wonder if that was the wrong thing to say.

“You two know that your mom and I want to be cremated, of course,” my father says to Max and me.

“Definitely burn me,” my mother adds, though it is not a conversation like giving orders. Everyone is just speaking into the middle distance.

“We want to be burned too,” I answer, and Max nods.

Briefly I think, what will I do if I thread my life to a partner who wants this, to be made hard and put under the earth still solid? Or to be tucked away immediately and plainly, a return to earth more quickly, but still a body, a solid thing. Will I be able to handle that without nightmares? Will I still be able to honor and protect them if I do not have a body to lay down next to theirs?

Irish wake. We walk in and everyone has Guinness. There is a buffet of fish wrapped around breadcrumbs, corned beef and cabbage, and buffalo wings. I go through the line and take little bits of things. And strawberries. I get a glass of wine and sit in a corner with my mother and brother. People come and tell us stories about my father growing up. We laugh. Dor’s sideshow is playing above the bar. Old photos of me go by, and my brother says he thinks I should grow my hair. “You have great hair,” he says.

“No I don’t,” I says. “I just have hair and you think it’s great because you’re my brother.”

Halfway through my second drink I stop being able to see. My eyes are throbbing again and the space underneath my forehead is on fire. I ask my cousins if they can take me home, but their car is full with their children. I go to my father and burst into tears again. My glasses are covered in little grey spots where the tears have splashed and dried throughout the day. “What is it? Is it Dor?” he says.

“My head hurts so much,” I answer. He drives me back to the house. In the parking lot he says I have a right to hit a wall after this last week. I am too tired to think of an answer.

Climb the four flights of stairs to the guest bedroom. It is only 8:30. So tired. Change gingerly and walk slowly to the bathroom. Forgot my toothpaste down the hall. Too tired to go and get it; I won’t come back. Extra blanket unfolded and spread over the bed. It is a cold house.

Call loved ones at parties back in the city. They answer, but they are at parties. What can they say? Comfort needs more than a quiet voice over a phone line.

Sleep. Wake up three times in the night. 1:15am. 3am. 6am.

At 11am, wake up again. Someone on the first floor is cooking waffles. The smell is all through the house.

Be a person again. This is the hard part. Be a person.

And...go! #24mag

February 23, 2012 3:00 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@24magazine

twenty-four magazine

I may write a very long post at some point about the physical, mental, and emotional experience of staying awake for thirty-some hours and engaging with such an intensely creative group in such a focused way. It was amazing, and the aftermath difficult, which is why this post comes on Monday and not Friday.

But that’s not what I want right now. Right now I really want to tell you about the ways in which these ten people are great. You could, of course, buy the magazine and see for yourself. Or you could go look at the documentation and get some of the background. But there are a lot of little details that didn’t make it in.

Andrew set himself a writing challenge that sounded impossible, and then he not only pulled it off but made it enthralling. So many times in those 24 hours I found another person stopping their own work to read his next piece, because they were all so fascinating. Nuanced and full of detail and context, mixed between personal reflection, factual articles and philosophical musing. And it is from Andrew that we have the miracle berries photo shoot, which was so odd and wonderful.

Elissa came to this project even though she hadn’t worked with magazines, and she came up with this brilliant idea to do an erasure of a play. (Which did not make it into the magazine, which is my fault and a damn shame. It will be on Tumblr soon for all the world to see.) Her work was all about adaptation, white space and contemplation. In a time when we were all so focused on the ferocious generation of content, Elissa took a completely different path, somehow more restful and lovely.

Elizabeth was willing to throw herself into writing a longer article as well as several short pieces, which were consistently thoughtful, funny, and interesting. But that is to be expected from Elizabeth; that is, in fact, exactly her status quo. I loved that she was there because she also was willing to pick up everything else, offering her help at every moment and every turn so generously. And because she and I became giddy at the same times during the night, and made dinosaur noises at one another, and shared in our exhausted glee.

Rose Fox is one of my personal heroes, infinitely more so after this experience. She was by far the most organized person in the room. She is so good at what she does, and it shone through every word she edited and every conversation she had; not only her skill, but her seemingly infinite patience and kindness with each of us, regardless of skill, topic or relative levels of exhaustion. Her optimism, willingness, and quietly wry humor carried a huge part of the night and the crushed morning hours as we tumbled toward the finish line. And in the meantime she also managed to interview each of us and create a great piece of her own.

Rose Ginsberg took her experience as a director and turned it toward interviews, coaxing each of us to speak freely and generating so much amazing content about trust. Her work was very much the capstone on the entire magazine, tying all of us together through a single theme and focus. And she was also incredibly kind in her offer of transcription, which was one of the ways in which we managed to put out 60 (60!) pages of content in a single day. As another contributor said to me, “Rose is the unsung hero of our revolution.”

Rich followed Andrew’s first few pieces and decided to illustrate them, which was perfect. His illustrations—like Andrew’s writing—are nuanced and polished, simple but with enormous impact. The thread of his visual sensibility makes the entire magazine incredibly more cohesive. And meanwhile, while creating an enormous number of illustrations, he was also doing fun stuff through unexpected channels, like hosting an AMA on Reddit, and keeping our Tumblr tumbling, and helping me make food happen. Quietly generous; as I said, this is Rich.

Kevin. I love working with Kevin. I love listening to the music he wrote us, which is quiet and restful even though the space itself was not. He worked from Elissa’s piece, and the combination of their work in tandem is this lovely contemplation of creativity and emotion, in turns yearning and content. He also wrote a fantastic final draft from a terrible first draft, which is hard to do with weeks to spare, let alone a few hours. He was consistently funny, excited, and full of ideas, and every hour or so he would walk over to me and check in. Not check in with the magazine, but with me. It was just what I needed, and he saw that, and handled it perfectly.

Jack took on an enormous task in designing this entire thing, and he did it so well and so thoughtfully, even though it was so hard. At the end of the day it was just me and Jack at our computers with InDesign, and even though we were stressed and struggling, he pulled us through, building form into our content relentlessly and beautifully. We have a magazine because of him. I am so grateful.

Garnet’s contribution to the magazine amazes me. Granted, everyone did great work, but Garnet did great work in a medium he’d never worked in before. He came in thinking he’d “just” take photographs, and now in the magazine you can read a piece that he wrote, something I know he didn’t expect to do. The piece is not only interested and perfectly crafted as a small story, but is written in this gorgeous, vibrant voice, the content and the language balanced in what feels like the work of an expert. I am going to have “I knew him when” stories about Garnet, and I am thrilled he took the leap and decided to do this.

Chris is the only contributor I didn’t get a chance to post about before the magazine started, which was in part because I didn’t know him. He came to us through Elissa. How amazing is that? To drive up from D.C. to join a project where he was almost a complete stranger, to throw himself into an idea and an unexpected space so freely. He is responsible for much of the imagery of the magazine, all of which demonstrates a commitment to detail and the ability to capture tiny moments, expressions, and feelings. Chris wasn’t happy with the first photo we selected for the magazine cover, and so, with an hour to spare, he took his camera outside and shot it again. It is beautiful, all grey sky and the beams of the defunct subway stop that hung over our heads as we worked. I’m so glad he joined us, as I am glad to meet him and see his work and share in his easy laughter.

I have had a lot of time to think since Thursday, and I am still so happy with the object we have made. Tomorrow I will see the print versions and I might just fall out of my chair. It is a great testament to a very hard, very committed period of work, and to the brilliance of those ten people.

Of course I also see all of the ways I will make the next issue better, few of which are actually about the magazine itself. I treated the experience of building this issue rather like one treats a slinky at the top of a very tall staircase; give it a nudge and let it go. Next time I will be holding on a little more firmly. Next time I will be only an editor instead of also trying to create content. Not that I feel I need to guide the people involved. Oh no. But that they deserve a better infrastructure and further organizational care than I gave them this round, and I want to make that happen for them. Hopefully next time all of the little gaps we found in our process will be filled, and the entire experience will be even better for everyone involved.

One of the things I’ve thought about in the past few days as we’ve all recovered and gone slowly back to our lives is that our process lacked catharsis. There was no moment when we stood in a circle and held hands and cheered, no wild applause, hysterical laughter, physical release. Many of us have theater backgrounds, and I know that one of the reasons people come back to such intense, challenging experiences over and over again is because the applause at the end is so moving.

I know we will do that eventually, that next week or the week after we will gather and have drinks and toast to a job well done. But in the meantime, Andrew, Elissa, Elizabeth, Garnet, Jack, Kevin, Rose F., Rose G., Rich, and Chris, you brilliant, dedicated, inspiring people: please accept my standing ovation.

This is me, cheering.

Yea, three exclamation points. I went there.

AND twenty-four was given a really great write-up in the Publishers Weekly news blog! Wow! Thank you!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
almost last and possibly best with Rich Watts

Rich’s “official” bio:

Rich Watts
richwatts.com
@wattsei

Rich is a code-wrangling graphic designer and fabricator, currently in the midst of building a distillery from scratch. Rich has held jobs as a bookseller,waiter, carpenter, computer nerd, web developer, and designer. He’s a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Maybe you noticed up there that the word “official” is in quotation marks. That’s because, tell you a secret, I wrote Rich’s bio for this project. Because Rich is incredibly generous with his time, spaces and talent, and sometimes when one encounters incredibly generous people, one must support them in whatever way possible, even in little things like taking the time to write their bios for them when they are too busy.

 Twenty-four will happen tomorrow, and our space is Rich’s studio, which he offered instantly and without reservation, only specifying that he would need to make sure his fellow studio-mates were respected in their space. So to tell you about Rich I could tell you about that space, how full it is of beautiful prints, strange books, small and interesting objects, tools and wood dust. He has a neon sign and desks from a Catholic school, and a complete and working wood shop.

Rich works with Zac at The City Foundry, so my first real introduction to him was as a participant in a branding workshop I ran for them a few months ago. So I could tell you about getting to know him in those sessions, how he speaks his mind cleanly, smiles easily, and listens well. How he was the only one of their entire staff who did the homework I gave them.

Or I could talk to you about his fantastic design work, the best example of which that I have on hand is the Industry City Distillery website. I really need you to scroll all the way to the bottom on that one. I really need you to get to the flow chart at the bottom. Since meeting him I have also wandered many a time through his online portfolio, because the things he makes are beautiful, clever, and hilarious.

Or I could tell you about Trade School and OurGoods, organizations he has had a hand in founding, both of which are born from the idea that there is more to the world than money, and that collaboration and exchanges based upon mutual respect can make amazing things happen.

But I think what I’d like to do is simply post the description he wrote for himself to me, late one night at the very beginning of this project, when I asked him for a bio and he responded that he was so caught up on the distillery that his brain had liquefied:

Rich is a neutral spirit with a bright nose and rigorous pallet. Overall decent body and a lingering finish that develops slight undertones of kerosene and burning pine.  Best served neat or with an equal measure of bitters. A staff favorite.

Thank you for joining twenty-four, Rich! See you very, very soon!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
even more with Kevin Clark

Kevin’s official bio:

Kevin Clark
kevinclarkcomposer.com
@kevinefclark

Kevin is a composer, a producer of creative projects for film, theater and web, and Communications Manager at New Music USA. He writes music that tells stories using literature, theater, marimbas, cellos and plenty of jokes. He also blogs about the future of the arts. And cocktails.

Recent projects include a new music variety night, Ruckus Amongstus, which splits the difference between the Muppet Show and avant-garde music, with cocktails. Videos from the show are being posted to YouTube. He’s also produced films of his pieces. Cucumbers & Gin, a film of a solo violin piece, was funded on Kickstarter, and a case study of project was awarded by TechDirt. The Seafarer, a film of a piece for solo acting cello, setting an Old English poem translated by Burton Raffel, is screening at theSuper 8 Film Festival.

On March 17, Rhymes With Opera is hosting a salon that will include a new piece from Kevin for two actors, lute, saxophone and small ensemble. Not a note of it exists yet.

I didn’t know Kevin very well when I asked him to join twenty-four. A friend of a friend, a composer with an interesting blog, a lot of answers at trivia, and many, many thoughts about the art industry. We connected first over my post about my ideal office, which it turned out was his too. So when I asked him, I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, exactly, but I knew he’d bring energy to the idea.

That, it turns out, was something of an understatement.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone get so excited about an idea so fast, and I have never seen someone commit so much of their own time and energy so generously. Kevin is the reason this project has a Kickstarter. Kevin is the reason this project has a promotion schedule. Kevin is the reason this project has survived my illness and outside work and occasional swings into self-doubt. Kevin also scolds me when he thinks I’m being unreasonable, which is gutsy and hilarious and something I genuinely appreciate.

And it turns out I’m not the only person who’s seen Kevin do this to a project; apparently he brings this kind of energy to everything that he does. It’s remarkable. Kevin knows everyone. Kevin gets things done. Kevin has more hours in his day than the rest of us. (This incidentally makes him highly useful for a 24 hour magazine project.)

But speaking of reasons, Kevin is also the reason our Kickstarter page has a video. I wasn’t going to make one; to be honest I’ve never made a video in my life. But he insisted. And it seems that working with Kevin inspires one to stretch toward ridiculous things.

So in that spirit, here is another video, tentatively titled “The making of a Kickstarter video, Also, Kevin is Awesome.” It contains bad camera work, fuzzy shots, alcohol consumption and some soft swearing. It is very silly. I thought it would be fun. Turns out, it was.

Thank you for joining twenty-four, Kevin!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
onward with Garnet Burke

Garnet’s official bio:

Garnet Burke
garnetsnaps.com
@BleakWorld

By day, Garnet keeps companies up and running. By night, Garnet takes photographs.

I asked Garnet to join twenty-four because he told me once that he takes photographs, but refused to give me his URL so I could see them. That was a year ago.

Garnet and I work together at our day jobs, and it’s taken two and a half years for us to go from me asking him to connect me to the new printer to working together on a creative project. Many, many cups of coffee and half-finished kitchen conversations later, I finally found out his site and tracked down his blog, at which point I promptly freaked out at him in a perhaps overly excited manner.

Garnet is the only issue one contributor who is still in the very early stages of launching an outside creative venture as a supplement to his current work. That is such a common experience for people trying to find their way into creative fields. I asked him to join because he’s a great photographer, but secretly I’m also hoping he’ll write about that decision and the subsequent work he’s done. In particular, he has gone from a website with basic content to a consistent, gorgeous photo blog that posts on an almost daily basis. I know how hard that is, and I love seeing his updates, every single time.

His work, it turns out, is gorgeous.  And since I asked him because he’s a photographer, I’m going to let the photographs finish this for me. I pulled this small selection by going back three weeks in his blog. You should go back further. (All photos are copyright © by Garnet Burke and posted with permission.)

Thank you so much for joining twenty-four, Garnet!

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
putting it on with Jack Stratton

Jack’s official bio:

Jack Stratton
Art Director
writingdirty.com
@writingdirty

Jack Stratton is a graphic designer, writer, and eBook publisher. He has been writing in one form or another for about two decades, from the strange and heady days of BBS’s to Usenet groups, to blogs and now eBooks. He has always been curious about how and why people write online and how anonymity and community affect literature. He is also fascinated by media of all kinds and how mediums affect messages. As well, he’s pretty keen on all things postmodern, fan fiction, meta, kink and sexuality, ties, men’s fashion, fancy things, fancy gadgets, shiny objects, pretty people.

Jack was sitting at the table with me in our writing group when I first articulated the idea for twenty-four. And he, more than anyone else, gets the credit for making me believe the idea to be viable. I have a huge gap in my own personal experience of publications: design. I simply didn’t (don’t) always have the language to understand exactly what goes in to laying out and visualizing a magazine.

But then, this is Jack’s full time job. Jack is a designer working on weekly magazines. A more perfect thing I could never have imagined.

Of course, on a professional level I am incredibly glad that Jack’s agreed to join us. But it’s not simply that I needed an art director; it’s that I wanted him. I am hoping Jack takes twenty-four as an invitation to bring his personal aesthetic into the field of magazines. I believe Jack to be deeply enamored of beautiful things. Not of beautiful things in general, but of a specific and detailed class of beautiful things, curated carefully from his surprisingly broad range of knowledge. My impression of Jack’s aesthetic is that he thinks a great deal about nuance.

Jack takes the quality of his life very seriously. It shows in his careful clothing choices, his colorful silk ties, and his open adoration of great food. It shows in the near reverent way he handles tiny, beautiful objects, drinks shockingly strong coffee, and flirts playfully online.

And it shows in every line of his writing, which ranges from deliciously, erotically purple to beautifully simple and sad. Last summer he set himself a challenge of writing thirty stories in thirty different literary styles, as a way to stretch himself as a writer. What a fantastic idea.

So much of the reason to produce a printed magazine, these days, is the opportunity to create a beautiful thing. With Jack’s direction, that’s precisely what we’ll get. Because he does great work, because he has an eye for beauty, but mostly because that’s just the way he is.

Meanwhile, Kickstarter continues to rise (seriously, thank you), and I am plotting the ways in which I will pile futons and pillows into the studio space and make all of my contributors little nests to work in.

Contributors to issue one of twenty-four magazine
presented in no particular order
singing its heart our with Rose Ginsberg

Rose’s official bio:

Rose Ginsberg
@MsEnScene

Rose Ginsberg is an NYC-based stage director who enjoys political theatre, experimental music theatre, classic plays, and everything in between. Favorite directing credits include Ethan’s People (Midtown International Theatre Festival, nominated for 4 awards; Manhattan Theatre Source); Hourglass (Planet Connections Theatre Festivity, Winner, Best Playwriting Short Form; Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, MA; Variations Theatre Group Harvest One-Act Play Festival, Finalist, Best Play); Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (Manhattan Repertory Theatre), and numerous new one-act plays for ESPA’s Detention series (Jimmy’s No. 43). Rose is an artistic associate at the Looking Glass Theatre, where she has helmed more than 10 productions, including Ready, Set, Story!: How Katie Saved the Sneaky Spider’s Tales, The Taming of the Shrew, and benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues (2007, 2011) and A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant, and a Prayer (2010, upcoming 2012) for Eve Ensler’s V-Day Campaign. Her work has also been seen at the Flea Theatre, ArtHouse, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Dixon Place, the Brooklyn Heights Public Library, Central Park, and the High Line. Rose is a graduate of Barnard College and a student at Primary Stages’ Einhorn School of Performing Arts.

Rose and I haven’t seen one another regularly since college, and I think that is a shame. Once, for a show of hers when we were both undergrads, I failed to find a black suit with yellow pinstripes. Instead, we decided to paint pinstripes onto a plain black suit, consequently covering me in yellow paint and sending Rose into fits of delighted giggling. To this day I wonder what happened to that suit.

Similar to Elissa’s work on the Skryker, that production was so clearly the result of a talented director delving deep into their library of works to try and find something new. The show was The Coronation Voyage. And similar to Elissa, Rose is a stunningly talented director who is wonderful to work with. She is opinionated, gleeful, wise and feisty. Not feisty in the way of small children who want their way; feisty in the way of a decisive woman who knows the kind of world she wants to live in, and will see that world come to life, damnit.

This afternoon I saw Rose’s most recent show at the Looking Glass Theater. The show was A Memoir, A Monologue, A Rant And A Prayer, a performance to benefit V-Day and raise funding for organizations in New York working to end violence against women. Twelve performers in a black box theater, simple words and a cause. Hard topics, rape and violence and systemic oppression and war, handled deftly and presented in turns with gentle feeling and outright rage. I cried. I haven’t cried so much at a show in years.

During the curtain call the actors raised their hands and clapped to Rose in booth above our heads, cheering, and she waved and clapped right back.

If that wasn’t enough, Rose can sing like nobody’s business. How much singing will we do in the magazine? I don’t know. I hope at least a little, in celebration.

I reconnected with Rose a year ago at a friend’s live band karaoke birthday party, and watched from the audience awestruck as she nailed a song I don’t even remember.  It’s not just that she can sing; it’s that you put her on a stage and she goes for it, sings her heart out and no looking back.

I remember her throwing her head back to hit the slippery notes of the bridge, and the band leader afterward telling her that no one ever hits the bridge. I remember the admiration in his voice and the way he shook her hand, as though she was slightly unreal. No one ever hits that bridge. Except Rose. Every time.

Thank you for joining twenty-four, Rose! Congratulations on the run of your fantastic show!