Albertsthal Book of Broadsides \ Punk Flyers

Most of what I end up creating is a type of a list. A list of words or either a collection of pieces of paper stuck together. Clearly, I’m not good with transitions. I can’t really keep together a longer narrative so I try and stay away from that. My stories are short and jump from day to day, from event to event. Collages might have a face over there, but they’re not directly connected to the rest of the piece. Not really a criticism of my own work, just a statement of fact. While I write and make collages in some form almost every day, I often see them as separate things. I might write about collage, but I rarely have a lot of writing in a collage…a word or two, but not a story. Once again, no long cohesive narrative. 

A fun cover.

 

I didn’t connect the writing and the collage until recently. Like most things, it just happened, no real forethought. It came together in a book of 32 broadsides (I use this or punk flyers interchangeably, who cares?) that mix words and collage. The words are some play on a central idea, an asinine premise, or a smarmy comment. I embellish on that idea based on a found image that somewhat corresponds to the words. Put them together and someone will try and make a connection. The images are ones that I have constantly looked for in tossed out books, magazines, and random pieces of nothing. They’re always in black and white, or at least made into black and white. Monochrome! Most are line drawings. Many of the images are slightly surreal. For years I have looked for these images, scanned them, and then saved them on my computer. I have thousands of such images.

What further connected the writing and the collage, was a font called “albertsthal typewriter.” It looks nice, slightly clean, but not too clean. I guess I found it during one my dafont.com “shopping” sprees. I like to go there every few months and download a bunch of new fonts to play with. I made one broadside mixing writing, collage, a found image, and this particular font together. I made another, and another. Pretty soon, it looked like I had a narrative going, albeit a crazy and unhinged stream of conscious one, but a narrative nonetheless. I did this over and over again, making a couple a day over the course of a few weeks. When I stopped, I looked back at all of the images I saw a connection between all of them. At least it’s a snapshot of the random things I was thinking during this particular time. There was personal stuff in there, jokes, political things, surreal nonsense, and just stupidity. Maybe it’s my 2025 autobiography?

I was doing all of this right at the same time I was finishing up my Because No One Asked for It book. Since that was mostly clerical work, trying to get people to pay for things and what not, it wasn’t creatively taxing. The timing was strange, but they both benefitted one another. It looked like I was being very creative. During my monthly online mail-art meeting, when I mentioned the albertsthal book, someone actually said in the background, “Another book?” The money left over from the longer book, was used to print up nice copies of the albertsthal one. All I had to pay for was shipping. The work for one paid off in the other. 

 

While I enjoyed making the thing and I think it’s something that’s new for me, I wasn’t super happy about it when it showed up. It didn’t look like I wanted it to. My technical abilities are poor and my interest moves quickly, so it’s not a big deal. I made up 25 envelopes and mailed them off all at one time. I didn’t make an announcement for the new book, and I don’t expect any money to come of it. I’ve posted a few images from the thing, my favorite images. All 32 are collected in a book while some of my favorites will be printed into broadsides and mailed with my usual stuff. I also have tried to cut a few corners, by making some half-sized zines from them. These are quick and easy to print. I’ll send them out as my regular mail-art to whoever I need to send to next. If anyone is interested in a zine copy (the professionally printed ones are gone) I’ll send you one. 

Five images that appear in the book.

 

My copies will be printed from a PDF file. Whenever you open a PDF file, you have an option to use AI. You can ask the robot questions. Although I think AI can end up being the downfall of our society, causing the robots to rise up and destroy humans, it’s also neat. Why not ask the robot what the file is about? The answer I got was frightening accurate, insightful even.

Here’s what he robot said.

This document is a chaotic, satirical, and absurd collection of fragmented thoughts, humorous commentary, and nonsensical advice. ​ It touches on various topics, including coping mechanisms for daily frustrations, bizarre product ideas, critiques of humanity, and random musings about life, music, and aging. Key themes include:

1. Coping with Annoyances: Suggestions like covering your nose to avoid bad smells, scratching your eyes instead of poking them, and wearing a mask to block human interactions. ​
2. Fashion and Consumerism: Random mentions of clothing preferences, deals, and critiques of societal norms. ​
3. Satirical Advice: Tips for leaving work early, looking busy, avoiding coworkers, and using children as excuses. ​
4. Music and Morality: A humorous critique of rock and roll, dancing, and joy, linking them to moral decline and absurd warnings about "genital playing." ​
5. Aging and Old Man Smell: Satirical advice on preventing "old man stink" through wardrobe changes and physical trauma.
6. Random Observations: Commentary on melons, soup season, shame in America, and absurd musings about life and death.
7. Mockery of Religion and Politics: Mentions of "Republican Jesus," critiques of societal norms, and exaggerated moral warnings.
8. Absurd Humor: The document is filled with nonsensical phrases, surreal imagery, and over-the-top satire. ​

Overall, the document is a stream-of-consciousness-style parody of modern life, blending humor, absurdity, and social critique. It lacks coherence but offers a glimpse into a bizarre and exaggerated worldview. ​

 

Because No One Asked For It Is Dead

This is the cover.

 

Because No One Asked For It is finished. I mailed off the last round of copies earlier this week. It’s nice to be done. I’m over it, next thing.

Of all the projects I’ve done recently, this one was the most involved. I had nothing to write for this project since it was a collection of previously written stuff. I went through all of my files and found 60 or 70 articles I thought represented what I most often write. From there I whittled them down, and then whittled them down a little more, and more still. I wanted it to be oppressively massive, but I didn’t want it to be too much money for people to buy.

Since each printed copy was almost twelve dollars to print and another six to mail, I was worried about losing too much money. In the end, printing and mailing cost over $650.00. Because of this worry about losing money, I was very diligent in collecting what I could. This meant that I had to post over and over again, and send multiple follow up messages to more than a handful of people. In some cases, folks just ignored me when I reminded them they said they wanted the book. (This annoys me beyond belief, just say you don’t want it!) For others it was the hounding that I found so taxing. Asking people over and over for money is no fun…no fun. When the overhead is much less, I’ll print a bunch and go on peoples’ word. If they don’t pay, I don’t care. Not in this case. I wanted to print as many as I could without losing too much money. In the end I didn’t lose money, but the project drug on for over a month because of that. 

I used these flyers to drum up some guilt purchases.

 

Intrusive thought. When I was putting this thing together, I thought about the difference between me doing the thing and it getting published, like actually published. First off, no one would have published this thing, there’s no reason. What is the book even about? Why would anyone care? I did it because I wanted to see it exist, which could seem silly. If the thing had been “officially” done, I figure it would have been easy to move more of them. I think people would have been impressed, but without that corporate stamp of approval, I’m just another diluted self-publishing guy. At least I didn’t write one of those sad end of life memoirs…no, I’ll start on that in my 50’s.

This project was something I was planning on doing for about a year. It got put to the side when I worked on my dad’s book. The idea was to have a nice volume of stuff.  A collection of things under one cover I selected as many wide ranging topics as I could and brought them together. There’s no way that any one person has read everything in the book, it just isn’t possible.

I was thankful that Eddie Garcia and John Held Jr. were so kind to write things for it. Gerald Bosch supplied a tone appropriate blurb. Although I was excited they leant their words, I wanted them to know that only a few copies would exist and I doubt most of those people would ever read them.

I ended up printing 41 copies. Most copies I dropped off to friends and family. Since I was leaning on them, I made sure to give them a lot of stuff they didn’t want. I added in a bunch of broadsides and even some framed collages. I especially liked leaving one copy at the end of someone’s dirt road because I was worried a colorful character might appear from the brambles and shoot me if I went down it. When I relayed this information, the recipient never responded. I guess they received what I left.

I had two printings. The first was 30 copies and the second round was 10 copies. When everything was said and done, I had even made a little money off the project. That money is already spent. A few weeks ago I finished a book of thematically linked broadsides I’m going to print. Those will be sent to the folks that bought the bigger, more expensive book. All I want to do is for some of the more expensive projects to break even, or at best pay for the others. In this case it worked out. The book was a success and I made another thing with the meager profits. 

Back cover.

 

White Lines (Blowin' Through My Mind)

I’ve always thought that 10% of what I create is pretty good. A fraction of that 10% is great. Not sure if this is a high number or not. I make stuff and what comes out is what comes out. Most of it is mailed and rarely seen again, so it’s not a practical goal to create greatness all the time. When great comes, it comes when I least expect it. There’s no plan or rhyme or reason. The pieces of paper simply converge in a way that works. Not sure if the pieces are attracted to one another or if put them together. It just happens. It cannot be forced. Because of this, failure doesn’t really matter. If things don’t work there’s no reason to get up in arms about it. There’s always more paper to put together. (Why am I thinking about Tetris right now?) Failure can be cut up again and again.

For the past few years, I’ve forced myself to make collages with paper. I do the same process over and over again. Every few months I can see how things have changed slightly. Even if you force yourself to do the same thing over and over, you will stray, and the compositions will change. In these strays you grow. Unfortunately this growth happens in spurts. It’s so easy to get stuck repeating the same collage. You know…here are my rectangles and squares, here is my person’s face, and here is my text…the same. These are the things I’m drawn to, these are the things I want to see.

Here is a large collage I sanded. It looks pretty good in a matte.

After doing essentially the same process for a few years, I’ve started to look out for a few things. The biggest thing that annoys me is when things come out too linear, too straight, to up and down. I hate this so much. No matter how often I try and avoid this, it just happens sometimes. I think, maybe…possibly, I can pinpoint when and why this happens. Mostly, I start with a face or a person, or a word, first. I like a focal point. If I don’t tilt the item when I put it down on the sticky tape, things more or less line up after that, which makes for a boring collage. This is made even worse if I don’t cut the other pieces of paper erratically. When I put the pieces down on the cutting board I chop without making sure the pieces are straight. You end up with weird shapes this way, which makes for a better collage. Some of them, almost all of them are unusable, but if you end up with a nice piece of randomly cut paper in the almost shape of a dodecahedron, then it won’t look too linear. Fun surprises are always the goal. Strange shapes keeps me from being too lazy when I start to create.

The only way to fix this problem is too cut the collage into other shapes and go again, but that doesn’t always save it. Because I use crappy paper like 19^th century paper, paper for kids to draw on, and magazines from the 1960’s, there’s a huge disparity in quality. This is mostly good, I like that mix. The problem is that mix can be jarring if it’s also too linear. Two wrongs make a bigger wrong. Nothing mixes together, nothing gets to know one another. It makes a firm line, a wall if you will. I hate this clash, I hate it so much. Unfortunately this clash has been with me the whole time I’ve been making paper collages. I call it “the line.”

And then I found sandpaper. Honestly, one of those sandpaper blocks fell from its position above my making space. It was in with the pens. It had been up there for years and I’d never thought to use it. Much like the tape transfer technique I played around with for years, this “new technique” randomly came to me. Why did no one tell me about sandpaper?

I started timidly with the sandpaper. Sandpaper kind of took away the line. It at least blended the different types of paper together, which made for a more cohesive creation. Most importantly, it made it look old. It looked something like Braque or Schwitters could have done a hundred years ago. Who cares about imitation, this is ME doing it. When things were going really well and I was sanding pieces of thick color paper, it came out looking like a Richard Diebenkorn painting, you know the ones with the squares and rectangles? It was a revelation. A problem had been solved!

And yes, a lot of people use sandpaper, it’s not new. And yes Ray Johnson used sandpaper. People loved to point out both of these things after I made my obvious realization and posted something about it, always helpful. Anyway, so I’ve continued to make paper collages and then sand them as much as possible. I’m going to continue in this way to see how things change over time. I’m going to play around with other grits and devices to distress the collage. The end goal, which has been my goal altogether, is to get as close to a roadside billboard as possible. You know the ones that have been neglected for years and years, baking in the sun, bits of paper flaking off…that’s a real inspiration. So yeah, like I wrote at the start of this, beginning with an idea of what you want never works out and yet I just described what I wanted to do in the future. I want a Kurt Schwitters through Ray Johnson / Diebenkorn sun burnt billboard like collage. One day I will get there, or not.

One problem I’ve discovered is that cheap black paper isn’t worth using. I’m talking cheap black paper found in 1960’s Life Magazines. When you put the sandpaper to that stuff, it smudges across the rest of the collage. It tends to muddy up the whole thing. Considering I like to use a lot of black and white when I make collages, this is a bit of a problem. The fix is better paper. Thick black paper, like paper found in high gloss art and fashion magazines, they smudge much less. 

See the black dust over the image? No good.

 

Another problem, I need to take this outside. My desk and surrounding area is lousy with paper dust. Some of that paper was made a couple centuries ago and might have some strange stuff in it. I might be patient zero for a new respiratory illness because of what I’m breathing in. I keep the fan going but that does little for the accumulation. It’s like a find brown snow.

A plus is the matching of the distressed collage to a frame. In the past few weeks I’ve done a lot of collages that I’ve put into frames and then given out to folks. All of these frames are recycled. Some of them came from thrift stores or left behind in old houses. They’re dirty, the mattes are often dotted with mold and random decay. I love this decay, I look for this decay. Putting one of my collages in one of these frames makes it look even older. Fake old! Although I like this effect, I did have to explain that it was meant to look like that recently. I handed them the framed collage and then felt like I needed to explain it. I pointed at the mold and dirt and said, “That’s meant to be there.”  

So, to get ahead of things…what else can I do to these collages? In other words, what would Ray Johnson do?