8 posts tagged “geoff”

i am *slammed* in my last two weeks until final book due date. slammed! i'm glad i was ahead most of the process-- because i have SO much more to do. i am in that last sprint of the marathon.

still, got to take a moment to blog about geoff and my amazing trip to memphis last weekend. some friends of ours were playing in a local garage band music fest called gonerfest and we promised if they ever played in my hometown we'd come and help show it off. to boot, geoff's old friends own goner records, the organizers of the fest. goner had sold out of geoff's last memphis zine in little more than 24 hours so he figured he'd try his hand at photographing bands-- something that had always intimidated him-- and see if he couldn't come up with enough good stuff to produce a mini-goner zine.

but in the days leading up to our flight we were wondering why we booked the trip. geoff was slammed at work and i was in the homestretch of the book-- and getting over a nasty cold (that unfortunately took a worse turn for stomach flu on sunday- gross!) still, we sucked it up and went.

as it turned out several bands were from san francisco and bay area kids just flooded the joint taking over much of midtown memphis. and-- my years of preaching how great memphis is and yelling at people when they mistakenly said i was from nashville-- were finally proven true as nearly everyone fell in love with the town. my friend andy had two great lines on the subject. at one point he came inside the club, holding up his cell phone and said, "this is the danger of living in the cell phone age. i just bought a condo across the street and joined the local country club." he later remarked, that real estate agents should set up a table alongside all the bands' merchandise tables asking people if they prefer their property by the acre.

of course in true memphis-style, few people actually LIVING in the city came out. this is what keeps memphis from selling out: it has no idea how great it is. many of the bands participating marveled at how goner had seemingly pulled off the impossible in the fourth year of this festival: keeping the quality top notch, the crowd small, the scene non-commercial.

oh, and geoff's photography was simply amazing. it's fair to say he's conquered his fear. here are some shots on his blog of Jay Reatard, who headlined Thursday night and was discovered by the Goner folks. geoff very impressively elbowed his way to the front of a near-mosh pit to get them. i was sitting on the bar a safe distance away supervising. i'm too old to mosh.

What makes your best friend so special? 
Submitted by Jessmiloo.

that he's also my husband!!

but here are some other reasons (appropriate since this wkend is our wedding anniv.)

• he not only makes me laugh, but works at it. he says he plans little IM witticisms all day hoping for an "lol"

• he always knew i'd write a book, making a deal with me three years ago that if i didn't take his name i'd have to dedicate said book to him
• he's absurdly adorable

• he's a good dad to winnie, vinnie and boo

• he likes TV and the A's as much as i do
  

Show us what you hold in your hands the most every day. 
Submitted by lezlee.

unfortunately the real answer is this:

the thing i wish i could hold more is this:

when i married geoff, i knew he was talented. in addition to being an amazing graphic designer, he's a photographer

who has been working the better part of the last ten years to build an art career. it's hard when you are a photographer. there's a sense of "well couldn't i do this myself? i have a camera!" trying to get in galleries takes connections. connections that we didn't have.

After years of spending every free moment shooting, he started to get really serious in the last year or so about promotion. He made these amazing press kits he mailed to galleries. no dice. after getting a slew of rejection letters he still didn't want to give up. he thought, what else can i do? he used his graphic design skills to build a photo blog and decided to self-publish a four-color zine. He was partially influenced by the guys who do the photo zine Hamburger Eyes and have parlayed it into very successful art careers. He didn't care if he made money on it, he just wanted to get his work out there. He sold out a run of 75 and was happy.

Then he produced Sadkids #3 (#3 is his second zine. #2 is a very specific idea that he hasn't done yet.) Sadkids #3 went insane. It was written up on influential art web sites and sold in stores in san francisco, portland, la and paris. it sold out two runs of 75 and has still been in demand. Geoff has gotten amazingly personal emails from people all over the world who somehow got their hands on a copy, loved it, and wanted to know when the next one was coming out. It was even in a zine show in Tokyo and got Geoff into more group art shows in one year than he'd had in his art career combined. And the gallery arm of the SF MOMA has asked for four of his pieces.

This brings us to Sadkids #4. It's the culimation of ten years of photographs of Memphis, where Geoff and I met. It was the biggest undertaking yet, in part because there was so much material and because very little of it was digital. And there was the pressure to live up to #3. He has finally finished it, and it's beautiful. But it was hard for both of us to judge it because the images are so familiar and, for me, so personal. this one he used for the invitation was of a sign i saw nearly every week in Memphis as my parents drove me around town doing various things. i love this photo in part because like so much of his work, geoff made me see Memphis differently. but i can hardly look at it with fresh eyes.

His release party is June 7, and so far the buzz is building. It was blogged about by one of his resellers who got his hands on a promo copy. Already stores in Sweden and Paris (random!) are asking if they can sell copies. since it isn't officially out, the only place they are on sale now is at a few stores in Memphis, because i was there for the past week and hand delivered some. That was on Monday afternoon. They've already sold out and want more copies.

i know anyone who knows me has heard all of this (and the other good art news we can't divulge yet because it's not public!). but it still blows me away, because i watched all the years of set backs and am watching all this success just as i'm writing a book about the inherent power in the democratization of the Internet. yes, it is a printed zine, but he used the Internet-- his blogs, other people's blogs, online stores, MySpace-- as his personal marketing and distribution engine. these are literally some of the exact same images he was sending to galleries years before, but until his grassroots campaign they wanted none of it. this year he already has his first solo shows booked.

so, i'm mainly writing this for anyone i don't know who for some odd reason reads my blog. if you are talented, there's no longer an excuse not to make things happen for yourself!

i'm having such a nice saturday morning. geoff is out running errands (read: getting me an anniversary present? our eight year dating- not marriage- anniversary is mid-week. we are going to a fancy dinner at le colonial. i could probably tell you what i got him and it wouldn't matter because he never reads this unprompted but i won't. at any rate i had asked for this. i think it's edgy and romatic at once and i LOVE it. but i think the fact that he's mysteriously running errands means i won't get it. there's no way he'd get me this AND something else.)

anyway. i was in recovery mode most of yesterday after a long week with too many parties. so i didn't do a lot of work. so i'm doing some writing this morning. CHAPTER SIX! i'm a bit behind in my 50-pages-a-month count but it's not because i've been slacking. i keep going back and tightening up the first five chapters and as a result 200 pages i'd written has whittled down to about 170. and i've spent so much time doing that and doing that freelance article for fortune, that i haven't been writing as much new stuff. so i'm hoping when i go to memphis next week i can churn out about 40 pages and catch up. if i do 60 pages this month and 60 pages next i'll be back on track.

another thing that's slowing it down is these last chapters are harder. they're less fleshed out and more about present time and -gasp- predicting the future a bit.

i've discovered finally what my two favorite parts of writing a chapter are. i like the very first part. coming up with a cool lead and seeing if it works, then sketching out what the chapter will look like. it's fun because it's totally creative and unrestrained-- my FAVORITE thing about writing a book, versus a magazine article where you start with a tight word limit, one very specific thing you're trying to get across and a pretty distinct formula you have to follow. i can do whatever i want in a chapter though. and the most liberating thing? i've already defined all the basic things like "what is venture capital?" etc in early chapters so i can just write.

my other favorite part is the end. reading back over it and fine tuning. it takes forever and is somewhat tedius, but there's a great sense of pride. you can see a BOOK coming together. it's very exciting.

unfortunately, there's that part in the middle where you essentially wrestle with the chapter trying to figure out how the hell to fix everything that doesn't work.

anyway. as i'm writing i'm also sipping some yummy coffee from ritual coffee roasters (the portland of SF) and watching my favorite guilty pleasure since rosie joined the view: PAULA DEAN'S HOMECOOKING. i love everything about it. except the recipes. i've never actually made anything from the show- so much butter! ugh! but paula has the best, most soothing accent and the most southern turns of phrases. it's funny  because normally i am such a stickler about how memphis is different from the rest of the south etc. and it's not like my mom is anything like paula. but it makes me feel very at home.

isn't it weird how you can become more southern once you leave some place? it's like you want to cling to it, so it becomes far more pronounced than it ever was in your life. i see that with people from the east coast too. i swear california new yorkers are SO much more new yorky and the same with california bostonians. by that i mean "obnoxious." (haha)

i'm in a good mood today!

i just thought i should share since i typically blog only when moody or slowly going insane. i had a great talk with my editor this morning and am super jazzed to get back into my death-march 50-pages-a-month writing pace. she had some great suggestions for a few things i'd been struggling with and i'm anxious to see how they work out on the page.* and i got to meet with a few people i always like meeting with. and geoff is no longer mad that i'm going back to phoenix this wkend because now he's going to JAPAN for a week! jerk. i want to go!

oh! i also got to talk to my brother today. i love my brother. i wish i had a photo of him to attach. geoff hogs all of our photos and only takes them in "raw" format. i know about as much about what that means as one of the cats does. all i know is it means he can't easily email me ANY of them. :(

so i'll just re-attach the image of my brother's cat dressed as his favorite character from oz:

i talked to my mom for a long time too today. ditto on the loving thing there. i think i am going to go to memphis for a week in may. i just feel a need. a need for family and bbq. and i can write there too right?

oh! and geoff promises to read oryx & crake on the plane to japan. in 12 hrs he might be able to get through the first 30 pages. ha ha ha (he reads v e r y slowly). i should sneak in my book so far....maybe he'd read that on the plane too....

here are some photos i just got from thanksgiving. we went to my sister-in-law's house in salt lake city. we did this formal family portrait shoot as a special treat for my mother-in-law, but i think these casual shots as we were prepping dinner are so much cuter. first, here's one of the formal ones (i was FREEZING!)

now some casual ones...don't you think they're way better?

why did i decide to come to memphis a whole week ahead of him? and the question of the day (who do you want to kiss under the mistletoe) isn't helping :(

slightly improving my sadness is the fact that i am my brother's "plus one" (a concept i newly explained to my dad) to his company's christmas party tonight. his selling point of free beer didn't work-- but free karaoke machine DID! i am thinking about doing something by my non-relative Justin Timberlake.

also slightly improving my moon is my general mounting excitement about how well my book is going. i feel like with every conversation it is coalescing more in my mind and coming together beautifully. i actually think it'll be incredibly fun to write. (and hopefully to read) interestingly, people totally outside the valley who don't even know what venture capital is seem to get more excited about the premise and some of the descriptions of it. i guess people in the valley just live it too much...

on another random note-- i am 450 pages into "disney war" which may be one of the best narrative non-fiction books i've read and believe me- i've been reading a lot of them lately. there are so many things that stewart has done so well but one of my rare gripes is how the action has slowed for the last 100 pages or so. OUST EISNER ALREADY!