Collaborative art
Jay L. has been in the Bay Area this past week, doing his day job in the early morning through early afternoon and then BARTing to San Francisco to write a short story in Borderlands Books. He's been collaborating with artist Alan M. Clark and sculptor Paul Groendes. Alan painted a painting; Jay started writing a story based on the painting; Paul started a sculpture based on both; the three of them discussed where the story was going, and Alan did three more paintings over the course of the week as Jay wrote and Paul sculpted. A nifty collaboration, made even niftier (imo) by doing it all in public.
I didn't make it up to the city this week to watch the works in progress, but I did attend the reception last night that marked the end of the project. Drove to Millbrae, hopped on BART (takes a little longer, but it sure beats trying to find parking in the Mission on a Saturday night), arrived at Borderlands (on Valencia, around 19th or so). Turned out the folks there weren't going out to dinner, so I wandered over to the Ethiopian place next door for a quick meal. Good food, and partway through dinner Frank Wu and his fiancee Alison showed up, so I chatted with them while I finished eating. They were waiting for a friend of Frank's who he hadn't seen in 15 years.
The reception was fun; nice to see Jay and Tim and Heather as always, nice to meet the artists and some of the store staff (and the store cat, a remarkably soft sphinx cat who liked to walk on the paperbacks and knock them over). Good reception-type food. A stop-motion video of one of the paintings in progress; Alan would pause every thirty seconds as he worked on the painting to take another digital photo. Jay read a brief scene from the story, then there was Q&A about various aspects of the process. I neglected to suggest that next year they add a musician to the mix.
I think I'd never been to Borderlands before, somehow. I like them—nice people, and a remarkable selection of small-press stuff and 'zines and so on. I finally picked up copies of Greetings from Lake Wu, 3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once (which was nigh-invisible on the shelf, for some reason, possibly just 'cause I was looking for a thicker book than it turned out to be; I ended up asking one of the staff if they had it, and she found it for me), the Other Cities chapbook, and Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories—all items I'd been wanting since World Fantasy or earlier but hadn't gotten around to ordering. Now if only I had time to read all this. . . .
Next weekend, Tim will be reading there, in honor of the trade paperback release of Little Gods. (Boy, the Powell's image of the gorgeous cover is awful. Tim, maybe you should ask the Prime people to send them a better one.) I'm looking forward to that, too; I've been holding off on buying it 'cause I prefer trade paperbacks to hardcovers. Though after seeing the really lovely hardcover at Borderlands, I may have to get it after all. I don't think I had seen Prime's books before; I'm impressed with their production values.