BEYOND THE STREETS (2018), PHOTO BY BRENT BROZA - BROZAPHOTO.COM | IG: @BROZAPHOTO out, thinking, Nobody should see that. They would definitely get the wrong idea. And though this should be at the end of the story, when I told that person who said to me, “Those postcards are not art,” that’s why I was doing these books [Mark's bigger book in progress and Apotropaic Beatnik Graffiti], they went, “I never said that!” And I thought, Oh, shit, I probably should have asked them to repeat that instead of just being in shock when I thought they said something they didn’t say. But it did make me start wanting to put together this bigger book. And I thought, I’m going to go through all these [red binders] and start pulling images out of them. And at first I was going to do it properly archived by time. Then I realized I’m at odds with our part of the universe. There’s a part of me that’s really pissed off that we’re in a part of the universe where time just flows one direction. You know, it’s not that way everywhere. Somewhere in the universe there’s a bow tie right here, a knot, like a birthday bow and you could go phew — 1976 — vroom back again — oh, 2007, oh — here we are again — 1842 — and you could go off on these loops and come back. For a long time, I’ve always wished I was in that part of the universe instead. Well I told a publisher who had been calling me what I was doing and they said, “You don’t make any money on coffee table books.” They wanted to do black and white pages so it was cheap to print. And I go, “I’m not trying to make money on it, I just wanna have this idea out there.” I just wanna explain why I have this storage container at a warehouse that’s 20 feet long and 8 feet high. And the walls have 700 red binders that each have 100 pieces of art that I’ve done in them. Because I don’t know what’s gonna happen to them if I like, walk home off a stage next year with Devo and impale myself on something and I’m laughing about it saying, “Oh, fuck, I died with a yellow plastic Devo suit on!” I’m going to think, I wonder what’s going to happen to those cards if nobody’s really looked at them or has any idea that there’s a reason for them. Maybe they’ll just all end up in a dumpster. So I thought, I’ll just do Blurb books. It doesn’t have to have pages with black and white words on it. It can be all imagery and all pre-existing statements, phrases, poetry, observations, illustrations, collages, collected imagery, all this stuff that I’ve been doing for myself. But there are limitations to what you can do with Blurb. So I thought it’s going to be four editions, this 1,600 page, 11-inch by 17-inch size book, and they’re going to be expensive. So I’m putting this book together and it just coincided with this guy I knew, John [Bakasetas], who called me up one day and said, “Hey, I’m doing my first book with a photographer from LA. She shot the LA punk rock scene between the late 70s and early 80s.” Siena Goldman aka S. Putnik: Melanie Nissen. Mark: He says, “I was wondering if you have recordings of Devo at Starwood. She took a lot of pictures at the Starwood and I have three other bands like Go-Go’s, Germs, and the Dils. And she said, ‘I’d like it if each of you did a song to put on an EP and in the back of the book.’” And I was like, “Oh yeah, that sounds interesting.” So John happened to be bringing over the book one day and he was totally jazzed. And Putnik and me loved it. And I go, “You’re gonna laugh, but I’m making a book right now,” and we showed him. We had about a third of this big book in progress, like 600 pages. And he said, “Let me put out your book.” I’m like, “Don’t get involved, this one’s a weirdo book. I’m making them one at a time because not many people are gonna understand it or be interested.” But he says, “I want to do it.” And I go, “Well, I’m not going to hold you to it. But I will keep you up to date with what we’re doing.” While I was working on the book, after he left, I thought, Wow, what if he really got it printed instead of Blurb? I collect books, catalogs, comics, a lot of things from older times. And I remember seeing these catalogs that came out in the 20s and 30s that had over 1,000 pages in them. They were beautiful books and they had this spine that was separate from the back part of the book, so I said to John, “Hey, if you’re really serious about this, would you do a little research and find out if there are printers that can still do a spine like that?” And I showed him what I was talking about. And he got on the project really fast and came 9
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