There is nothing less like a zebra
On the role of the artist, the amount we should worry about a comma, what is left says Dianna Settles, José Saramago making sentences, Stake your entire life on the here and now, and other stuff
As artists who run a print shop, Andy and I turn to making art as a survival tool and a form of resistance. It’s how we affirm our existence and make meaning. It’s how we live in unlivable times.
At the end of every month, we publish an edition of Making Art at the End of the World sharing what we’re thinking about and what’s encouraging us. We hope it encourages you, too. Most of all, we hope you make art, and then more art.
Imagine if you had an idea and someone else could immediately understand it. If you could make something and someone would see it and so fully get it. Imagine if we could know with great ease that we are not alone. Art can do that.
I think this is what this Toni Cade Bambara quote I’ve been seeing so much is about for me: that the “role of the culture worker” is to “make the revolution irresistible.” Art can do what other forms and intents cannot do.
Meanwhile, a rabbit visits our tomato plant and eats it all.
And another idea about the role of the artist that we came across, this one from Toni Morrison:
"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.'"
In so many ways, this is the point of Los Angeles Print Shop, and also the point of making art for us.
We started the print shop because back in time, at state school BFA I would spend entire nights making prints. The printers were ours to learn how to manipulate and we had access to the equipment to do so — to calibrate our screens, make our own profiles for our paper, and to keep nuancing and dialing in a method until the prints I got were the prints I wanted.
Listen to this whole album. I have laid awake at night with the beach air through the windows listening to this album, fallen asleep to it in the desert dusk. Listened to it alone with headphones. We had been saving it for the right newsletter, but what are we saving for? There will be more newsletters later (or there won’t be) and we can listen to this now.
And then, at the fancy MFA, I got prints out of the well-maintained but locked machines (we couldn’t get in there to profile papers, we couldn’t print outside of the RIP system). There I learned how to get great prints in one shot from the print bureau. Even with all that student loan money, we didn’t have any we were trying to toss on reprints.
Once we got a print shop of our own — our some power — we couldn’t hoard the printer or that training. So roll by and let’s make some prints.
And also with your job that you have been brilliantly trained for, do your real job. We feel so alive when we tap into our real job, even when that’s the job we’re doing as two kids under one trenchcoat.
This work by Dianna Settles, is like an affirmation and a slow exhale outlaid. On a big national holiday I once went on a walk on the sand, feeling sad and listening to the music from all of the families and people laughing, and when the sun went down and sand was dark I saw people were lighting up their small grills and sand pit bonfires and sparklers. I saw what was left. I hope to see this work it in person sometime.
What’s left? This season of heat and wind, this dinner tonight, and those large bands of trembling waves of various shades of green that split my heart with their incredible beauty. We’re witnessing the last days of this civilization as we know it.
2024 32”x48” acrylic and pencil on panel. —Dianna Settles
The rabbit is gone now, having visited the tomato plant and found it tomatoless.
This month Andy has been working on her copy edits for the book. She has been looking closely at every comma, every hyphen, every every every. There’s part of that work that’s beautiful, wonderful. Sometimes the technical aspects of how a comma and a word or two interact are so moving that we feel it as deeply and emotionally as a whole poem. It’s one of the reasons we love making prints — getting something so exactly right so it can convey something precisely is satisfying beyond belief. When we dial in the exact right color and the print is perfect the feeling echoes in the room, in the day, on the walls.
We play this one a lot when we are in a personal brownout. I am transported so instantly to when I first heard it, which when I first heard it I felt I had already heard and known it. It is an emotional song, weighted and with an almost jubilant piano and then it ends like the highway ended just below the car.
Down the rabbit hole she went, researching commas, which took her to this José Saramago paragraph from the opening lines of Blindness, where one idea leads to the next to the next, no periods:
The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called.
Then researching more specifically about commas before dialogue (turns out sometimes you don’t need them), Andy found this beautiful note to calm her soul:
Writer or editor, I wouldn’t want to waste more than a nanosecond worrying about it, probably because—let’s be honest—the stakes here are low. The sentence looks fine with or without a comma. In cases like this, writers should do as they please, aim for consistency if similar sentences are nearby, and rely on a good copyeditor. Conversely, a copyeditor who’s unsure should defer to the writer.
In many ways, this is a mantra for her making art right now: I wouldn’t waste more than a nanosecond worrying about it, probably because—let’s be honest—the stakes here are low. Oh, to make art like I make coffee. Every day and with precision and confidence but not with fear. The stakes are low, tomorrow I will make another cup.
This part too: Writers should do as they please.
We say, Artists should do as they please. And also, Rely on a good print maker. We’re here for you. This month an artist reminded us how cool of a job this is because we get to talk to artists all day and then offload so much of the hard stuff for them. It is really so cool.
There’s something so comforting about the way the layers of voices accumulate and then are gone. A bit of my deep loneliness is soothed, then revealed, then soothed again.
It might be the end of the month, but in so-called Los Angeles, it’s still somehow just the start of the summer. Be good to yourself and make some art. Also, we haven’t finished watching Neptune Frost yet. We will.
Sorry all the songs were sad this month.
We are here making prints at Los Angeles Print Shop. Let us know when you’re ready to make yours. We operate on a sliding scale for artists, and pay-the-list-rate for institutions and those endowed with capital and power — all are welcome and when you’re ready you can reply to this email, or DM us on Instagram.
Fugazi! That band shook my 90’s high school soul.