🌌🧠Action Potential #2
Hello! This is the email newsletter for Galaxy Brain, a creative studio, small press, and Risograph printer in North Beach, San Francisco. Action Potential tends to contain a lot of “here’s what it’s like to run a tiny artistic business” along with a touch of “here’s what we’ve done lately”. It’s published on roughly a biweekly cadence, depending on when we have something to say. If that sounds good, then wonderful, because you’re already subscribed.
A new year is upon us! We have exited the season that Kurt Vonnegut calls "Locking" and have entered the heart of Winter. It is, as he says, cold as hell. This is the season in which we mostly visit our studio in the dark, after our day jobs have wrapped up. We see our breath as we print, pack, and scheme in our North Beach hideout. It's also an optimistic time—the scheming isn't idle, and we have a lot to look forward to this year. Much of the steam we exhale this season is in the service of vibrancy and growth in the next.
It is also the season of Vivaldi's monumental 18th-century bass drop, and that ain't nothing. I would also like to personally recommend Max Richter's re-imagining of the work. It slaps.
What's New
As you may know from our last missive, we now have a full complement of ink colors, and that means we were finally able to finish printing these:
Our initial supporters made it possible for us to commission Ren, Gillian Dreher, and Lindsay Santiago for these prints. We're going to mailing these out in the near future with our thanks. We’re also making them available to new and existing subscribers of Adult Juice Box on our Patreon for a limited time as we gear up for our second year of wine-soaked shenanigans.
We cannot overstate how cool these prints are or how grateful we are, both to the people who got us here and to the artists that agreed to work with us a few eventful months ago.
Subliminal and Superliminal
Galaxy Brain is still only months old, and a lot of our output thus far (Adult Juice Box, our art prints) has been our work alone. It was only with last month’s release of 13032 Sky Valley Road that we became a publisher of other people’s written work.
That puts us in a tricky spot, because not only do people not know who we are, they also certainly don’t understand yet what kind of work we’re interested in. Our job is to listen for people quietly saying things we want amplified. To get in range of those people, we have to broadcast to them first. How do we do that?
One way is to be thoughtful about the effect of the work we’re already putting out. Each new release reminds people that we exist, and introduces the notion of us to some new people. One of our company mottoes is “never do something for just one reason”; everything we release has to both stand on its own and advance the narrative of what we stand for as a publisher. Over time, our body of work starts to form a coherent (but patchwork) voice. We’re putting up beacons, telling people where and who and what we are.
There’s also a more straightforward way to get the kind of work we’re looking for—asking for it. There’s an early 2000s Simpsons episode in which a Navy recruiter demonstrates his method of “superliminal” advertising by leaning out the window and shouting “join the Navy!" at passers-by. Our version is a little more subtle; we just straight-up ask if anybody wants to make a zine about a topic we love. This also takes the form of us meeting interesting people at parties and telling them (with a sudden starry-eyed expression) that they should make a zine. There’s no benefit in us being coy when we find an interesting subject. We might as well ask the question.
For now these are our strategies, and they’re proving reasonably effective; there’s more than one very exciting email chain in our inbox right now. We’re unreasonably excited to be in this business—you should hear the oohs and ahhs we emit every time something rolls off of our press. It can be maddening having more ambition than we can satisfy ourselves, but it’s incredibly gratifying to have a job where we turn “wouldn’t it be cool” into “how will we make it happen"