art book fair finds, obsidian obsession
Index Art Book Fair, more CDMX riso hanging out, screenprinting, and ~50 links
Lots of riso friends time since the last CDMX newsletter. We went to S.A.R.A. a few more times! First, to crash the 2 color workshop they hosted with Aafke Mertens of Riso Pop, who runs an Amsterdam-based studio and is currently in town. I worked on the drawings for a little pamphlet of english-español translations of words related to the print studio. And Adam and I pitched in to screenprint a big batch of paper bag sleeves for S.A.R.A. for their upcoming fairs, with a cute dog design on it.
Index Art Book Fair was really interesting, we went with Lucía and Rodrigo to the opening party on Thursday, and then back on Friday for some more leisurely browsing and chatting, where we picked up some books, including:
Set Margins’ books Can You Feel It? and Diagrammatic writing
PUSSYBOW by April Gertler of WIRWIR Project Space in Berlin, a gorgeous riso printed book of collage and color photographs printed and published by Colorama. They had a really fun table setup.
Sobre Mesa from Idalia Sautto of Pitzilein Books, a riso printed publication which unfolded to a watercolor that was color separated in Spectrolite, shown below.
After exchanging numbers at Index, we hung out at the Pitzilein Books studio with Idalia, her boyfriend Alex, and WIRWIR crew April and Adrian. April and Idalia were making Muy Muy Bien, a documentation of their last few weeks together and celebration of their friendship. Hot off the riso, we helped a bit with collating and folding while chatting and having paletas and drinks. Also, Adrian made his first! zine! at Pitzilein, a red-yellow-black ink photo book with color separations in Spectrolite. It turned out amazing, I never stop being thrilled at seeing the things people make that incorporate Spectrolite in the process.
We’ve been lucky, so much fun time with new riso pals!
This winter we’ve been having fun with Spectrolite coding and design, after the usual summer break plus lots of extra travel this fall. More on that in a future newsletter, but there will be some new version(s) coming in the next few weeks.
The big ~~~studio process~~~ for me lately has been going through old notes, files, documents, snippets of saved text, pictures, screenshots, bits of notebooks. Pulling everything together and de-duping the like, five different files of similar content of the same project idea. What am I thinking about, spiraling around, revisiting… and how might those become projects, essays, or some sort of ongoing reference? Or get archived or deleted.
I’ve been doing my notes in Obsidian. It had a moderately steep learning curve for me, but now I’ve wrapped my mind around how I want to use it and started memorizing hot keys and making templates and coding little views of things. I sensed that it was time for some major cleaning up my old notes and files this year before I started on anything big or new (cookbook, book about money) and wow, it really was time. Seeing everything in one place: yes, super great. I’ve got about 56k words now, lots to move around and work with. Deeply into the phase where everything is clicking and ideas are connecting and visual — zing, zing feelings!
I’ll write more about Obsidian and notes and projects in the future, but I just wanted to mention it now in case there are fellow Obsidian / second brain / pkm / linking thinking / PARA / ACE / note making / digital garden / blah blah blah nerds reading this: please hit reply or comment and introduce yourself and send me your thoughts or links or websites or whatnot!
OH MY: I read The Last Nuclear Bomb by Amy Zhao and illustrated by Ren Chu and I’m still psychologically recovering from that experience! Wow! Graphic novel fans: get a copy!
MOVING: Recently enjoyed some some more Peloton yoga: 30 min yin yoga, a 30 min slow flow and (lol) 15 minute Zack Bryan standing yoga. (Country music yoga?! Actually it wasn’t a ~good combo~ exactly; I enjoyed the novelty though.) Biking around CDMX on ecobici continues to be delightful, especially on Sundays. Lots of good walking around too.
SALAD DREAMS: Conquer the caesar salad; a citrus + greens + avocado salad. Not salad, but my current pastry obsessions (yes, I always have at least one pastry obsession; yes, it will be a zine or webpage or something someday) are the danes fresa from Saint Panaderia and the kouign amann from Quentín Cafe. Cafe culture here is a dream!
BIRRIA: Aafke invited us over for birria, her cousins cooked, it was incredible. Flour tortillas with cheese and chorizo, quesobirria, consommé, salsas and guacamole. Salad from her dad’s garden. AND this incredible salad made of thinly sliced onions, variously colored bell peppers, fresh herbs and an italian-ish dressing marinade, to be piled on top of everything. After a second round of eating at 10pm, I ascended to food heaven. Please direct future correspondences there.
ARTICLES: So much good reading lately: Katherine May’s how I start a new book and Jack Cheng’s notes on a daily routine. I devoured all the back issues of my friend Kellianne’s substack, ahh how had I missed out on that previously… just go read the whole thing!! (Also, Bay Area friends, Kellianne is a hair genius and IMHO there are no better haircuts in the universe than ones from her.) Many things from people who read this newsletter: a winter happiness plan on Close Knit1, some notes on a hot springs plans for winter happiness and bunch of lovely writing from Alexander Matthews, and Learning to Dress by Juan.
BOOKS: I zipped through Ruth Ware’s latest thriller, Zero Days, and also System Collapse, the latest in the very fun Murderbot sci-fi series by Martha Wells. I’m going back in for a re-read of Stephen Markley's The Deluge… that was another book that required some recovery time: wish me luck. (And be in touch if you want to talk about it.)
LOOKING: Archives.design is a site curating selections from Archive.org, like Mastering Graphics and many other interesting graphics/typography/design books. And Infinite Canvas rounds up a lot of canvas based design tools, I found it quite soothing to look at.
— Amelia
P.S. — Speaking of Mac apps; I’ve gotten a lot of use out TextSniper recently. (I lost track, but whoever recommended this, thank you! Robin?) TextSniper sits in your toolbar or activates with `Command + Shift + 2` and you take a screenshot, then TextSniper does OCR processing of whatever text and copies it to the clipboard. You can also activate your phone camera from the computer to scan things or pull in phone photos. Surprisingly handy and rather delightful software.
P.P.S. — Adam says hi!
Here’s the link to my how-to musings, if you need to make your own Winter Happiness Plan.