Here’s the deal. You haven’t heard from me in a while and although I feel kinda bad about it, I also kinda don’t.

I've mostly been painting these days. That image up there is a recent one. It’s about slavery and it’s about being Portuguese. And it’s about how, until you atone for the sins of the past they are forever mapping your future. It’s a whole thing.

Here’s another one:

TL;DR: Click here to give me money.

A few months ago my friend Betsy Streeter posted an illustration to a chat room. I saw that illustration and it evoked a story, so I typed it out and hit reply. We did it again.

Today we are excited to announce that we’ve filled an entire volume with these wacky collaborations. We call it Sofa Stories. The illustrations are a fucking delight. Check out Reggie:

TL;DR: click here for free zine.

Hello. Some friends and I have made a zine of our favorite holiday movies. When I gathered folks together I asked them two things: define “holiday” however you want, and you can't do Die Hard. To discuss Die Hard is to discuss Bruce Willis, and to discuss Bruce Willis in 2022 is to discuss both elder abuse and worker exploitation. (Not to mention that any time we’re discussing movies we’re most likely discussing the labor of union workers.) There’s more about this in the zine.

Some of these movies will be new to you, and some will be comfortingly familiar. Some reek of the arthouse, and some just reek. But they are all glorious and worth your time.

There is a movie for every day in December. I hope they bring you some comfort. Whatever holiday you may be celebrating, let’s remember to take care of those around us. 

Still from Felix Revolts (1923) where Felix the Cat unionizes all the cats in town and they go on strike against unfair labor practices.

• • •

So here’s the thing, I don’t know why you signed up for this newsletter, but I know it wasn’t to see paintings because I wasn’t painting when I started this newsletter. Then I started painting, and I stopped sending out newsletters because I thought “well, the certainly didn’t sign up to see paintings.”

Fuck it. Here’s a painting I just finished. I’m into it. Maybe you are too, but if not… well, go make your oh paintings. Or zines. Or ceramics. Or weird videos. Or dinner. The world is shit. Go make stuff.

It’s called Quiet Quitting Felix. It’s made of wax and razor blades, and it’s four 11x14" panels.

Hello. I have a new book out today. But you already knew that because it’s the subject line. Or maybe you heard about me talking about it online. It’s the second edition of my first book, Design Is a Job. It’s very different than the first edition which came out ten years ago. The world is very different than it was ten years ago. You can buy it from A Book Apart. I would, for reasons, encourage you to grab a copy of the paper edition. It’s so satisfying.

Anyway, I love you and here’s an excerpt, along with a soothing promotional shot:

Ridding Yourself of Imposter Syndrome

The idea of a perfect movie is stupid. After all, perfection doesn’t exist. But neither do ghosts, goblins, zombies, vampires, werewolves, or the Candyman, or the Candyman, or the Candyman.

And yet, every October, as the weather cools, the leaves turn, the pumpkin spice products take over the supermarket shelves, and the interminable family season of Thanksgiving threatens to peak out from behind the bushes, our minds turn to horror movies. (True horror will always be family.)

This year I gathered some friends together and asked them to write up their favorite horror movies. Some of these movies will be new to you, and some will be comfortingly familiar. Some reek of the arthouse, and some just reek. But they are all glorious and worth your time.

There is a movie for every day in October. I hope they scare the shit out of you.

Every summer, my Dad would begrudgingly throw us in the car and drive south to Maryland. Why he did this I don’t know. He didn’t want to do it and we didn’t want to go. It was always hot, our 70s clothes were made of polyester, the car was always sticky, and the air conditioning in the Volaré never worked. At some point during the journey someone would get slapped and someone would cry. Sometimes they were the same person. Sometimes not. All of this is beside the point, but if I’m going to tell a family story, I’m going to tell it real. So… once again here we were. Driving down I-95 to a friends’ house for the day, with a pitstop at the beer distributor because not even my dad shows up at a crab boil empty-handed.

My parents’ friends had irritating children my age that I was supposed to play with while I was there, but like I said, they were irritating. I avoided them by hanging out in the backyard watching the adults get progressively drunk and grabby while their Sears’ polyester leisurewear succumbed to the stress of their hairy sweaty me-generation flesh. This is also where the food was being prepared.

“Why is there no lid on the crab bucket?” I asked my dad, in his Kiss the Cook apron.

“Get the fuck away from the crabs,” he answered helpfully.

Sometime in the latter days of the 12th century two armies clashed on the west coast of the Iberian peninsula. The land where this battle took place would soon become the nation of Portugal. The general who commanded the army that won that battle would become that nation’s first king.

Because he had designs on becoming a king, and because it never hurt to have God in your back pocket, this soon-to-be king decided to commemorate his great victory by decreeing that a church should be built somewhere in the vicinity. Surveyors were sent forth. They found a good spot where the River Alcoa and the River Baça met. They built their church. A town sprung up around it. A sea-faring empire sprung up around the town. A line of kings gave way to a dictator. A world war was fought. The town grew. Many buildings went up, including one that went right up against the River Baça. Another world war was fought. My grandparents met. My father was born. The three of them moved into the top floor of that building right up against the River Baça. My father met my mother. They were married in the church that was built to commemorate that battle. They had me. They immigrated to the United States.

This is a story about turds.

At the end of the school year, my immigrant ass got shipped back to Portugal to spend summers with my grandmother. This wasn’t my choice. I wanted to spend the summers with my friends riding bikes through the neighborhood, playing baseball in the abandoned lot, and going to the arcade. In short, being an immigrant kid, I was constantly looking for activities that made me more like my friends. Being shipped off to Portugal for the summer had the opposite effect. It reminded the other kids that I was different than them. Shipping me back for the summer also wasn’t my parents’ choice, but since they were scared of my grandmother they did it. So every year, my parents would pack two giant suitcases, mostly with contraband (my grandmother would send a list), drive me to JFK, take me to the gate (this was pre-9/11), a flight attendant would put an “unaccompanied minor” pouch around my neck with all my documents, and walk me to my seat. I’d read chapter books for six hours. My grandfather would meet me at the gate at the Lisboa airport, and we’d drive the two hours to the house at the edge of the River Baça where my grandmother was always poised in the window waiting for us. At which point, I would immediately forget that I hadn’t wanted to come, because I loved my grandmother.

Since every platform on the internet is now apparently run by garbage humans, I've spent the last couple of days working on setting up a blog. Yes, a blog. Like it’s 2003. Today I was going through some old posts from the last time I had a blog, and I found this story from 2012. I’d completely forgotten about it. It’s fiction. Probably.

Enjoy.

The Ukrainian

Last Monday, I took a hot shower, put on a wool hat, hopped into a rented car, and drove to the Walgreens in South San Francisco. I took a hot shower because this felt like a medical thing, and my mother taught us that you shower for medical things. Also, if we’re being totally honest with each other, I stank. Good hygiene was an early casualty of the pandemic. But today was a new day, so I wanted to start it like a human being, and not like the semi-feral thing I’d become in lockdown.

Cause I

I put on the wool cap because my head was recently shaved. Clippers were the first thing I bought during the lockdown. I figured if we were gonna be stuck at home, with no access to professional haircuts, we should learn how to shave our heads. (My family did not share my enthusiasm.) Personally, I love a freshly shorn head. It’s an action haircut! I am ready for action! You can do anything with a freshly shorn head. Except retain heat. So after my hot shower I put on a wool cap to stay warm.

Our family doesn’t own a car. We’re city people. We mostly get around on public transit, although we’ve been avoiding it during the pandemic. My daughter doesn’t have this luxury. She’s what we now call an essential worker. She takes the bus to work. She double masks and puts on gloves, which reduces the odds but not the anxiety. We’ve been getting around on our bikes a lot this year. We’re lucky to live in a place where we can ride bikes pretty much year round, so that’s nice. But South San Francisco is outside of my bike range, so I rented a car.

There is a street in Lisboa called “Rua do Poço dos Negros.” Roughly translated it means “Negro Pit Street,” or more honestly — that street where we dug the giant mass grave where we threw all the bodies of stolen people once we’d exhausted the life from them.

It’s not to far from the Casa dos Escravos de Lisboa (Lisbon Slave House) and one imagines that you'd want your mass grave convenient enough that it wasn’t a slog to carry all those dead bodies, but also far enough away that the scent of death wasn’t constant.

The Lisbon Slave House and the Negro Pit were both built by my people. My people were in shipping, which is also the name of my new talk. The goal of the talk is to get people to deal with the shame of their past in order to move forward to a better future. We can keep making excuses. We can keep attempting to rewrite the past. Or we can acknowledge it, make reparations for it, and work together to build a better future. But we can’t keep whitewashing it.