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Anthony Alvarado

Anthony Alvarado

Tag Archives: DIY Magic

Comics conventions VS Author Readings

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

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Comics, DIY Magic, Lineworks NW, number one, readings, riker, tabling, writing

Here is a quick update on how things are going this week: fantastic!

DIY Magic is currently a “hot new release” on Amazon. It is a the #1 new release in creativity right now. Which has me celebrating this morning by drinking extra coffee. (What, no champagne, just extra coffee? Yeah, pretty exciting. Hey, I’m getting old.)

number one

Yes, it feels good to be “number one”.

Will-Riker

So that’s cool. Even more fun for me has been connecting with readers at events. I learned something really surprising this weekend: comics artists get to connect with fans in a way more personal and approachable way than authors do. Let me explain. I did two events this past weekend. One was a reading at Elliot Bay up in Seattle. It’s a fantastic bookstore and it was an honor to read there. The other event : I sort of piggybacked my way into Lineworks NW. An independent comics convention here in Portland. I just sat at a table, with a stack of my books and chatted with folks. (Also I had some beer and pizza—something you can’t really do during an author reading without looking like a weird slob.) Pretty low key, and I felt like I got a much more real & human connection at the comics event than my own reading!

The thing is most authors just do readings, that’s just what you do. You get up in front of a microphone and read a chapter or two and maybe do a Q&A afterwards. And most comics artists don’t do readings they do “tabling”. (I think that’s what it’s called.)

Obviously this has as much to do with the nature of the two mediums as anything. It is easy for an author to read their stuff out loud. With comics you need to be able to see the pictures so a reading doesn’t make sense.

Here is my point: the author/audience relationship, just by the way readings happen, put the author on a pedestal (literally) and make it harder to connect. When you are tabling at a convention it feels way more democratic, you’re not up on a stage with a microphone, you’re just chatting to people across the table. It feels like comics artists have a more level relationship with their fans simply because of the way the events are handled!

I’m noting this because I know that a lot of fans of this blog are writers and creators themselves. And it is important to think about how we connect with our audience. I think in this case us writers might be able to learn a thing or two from our comics cousins about community, communication, and connection.

Expand yr Mind with Erik Davis & Maja D’aoust

26 Thursday Mar 2015

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anthony alvarado, Author, DIY Magic, Erik Davis, Expanding mind, interview, Maja D'Aoust, podcast, Progressive Radio Network

Had a fantastic conversation with Erik Davis and Maja D’aoust on Expanding Mind today! Check it out. I especially like Erik’s introduction here about how DIY MAGIC is as much about “secular magic” & everyday magic, Dadaism, & hippies as it is about the occult. These folks get it! I’m not tech-knowledgable enough to properly embed the podcast apparently . . .  so just click the link here. or here: http://www.podbean.com/media/player/m6yax-54db7c/initByJs/1/auto/1?skin=102

davis_erik_2008_rauner_michael.jpg

Asides from hosting Expanding Mind both Erik And Maja have lots of cool stuff worth checking out. A great place to start if you are new to these thinkers: Erik Davis just did a great interview with Jay Silva. And Maja did a podcast with Duncan Trussell recently. I recommend em’ both. maja

New & upcoming hot shit!

09 Monday Mar 2015

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DIY Magic, events, podcast, readings, tad's talks, writing

Glory, glory, glory, the sap bursts forth in the buds of March and bliss drips anew from the perennial architecture of our collective soul.

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Exciting stuff to share—I’m going to be a guest on Coast to Coast A.M. The super popular radio show that talks about the paranormal, the occult, and other strangeness on April 7th. I’m on at midnight so feel free to call in and say hi. (I’ve been listening to a lot of Coast to Coast A.M. in order to get ready, what a show! I really love the recent episode with Jacque Vallee, and also the episode about how our universe is probably a holographic virtual reality projection . . . that would explain a lot.) April 7th also happens to be the publishing date of D.I.Y. Magic, which means it will be on shelves everywhere, woohoooo! If you just can’t wait until April 7th to get yr. mitts on it you can pre-order the thing right now on Amazon.com. 

A few days later, on April 10th I will be kicking off my reading tour at Powell’s here in Portland, Oregon. This should be a good one folks! I will reading and then doing a panel discussion with three of the illustrators from D.I.Y. Magic! Jennifer Parks, Farel Dalrymple, and artist and musician E*Rock. We will be talking about inspiration and collaboration, and doing an audience Q&A afterwards. If you live in Portland please come and help me celebrate the launch of this book!

Let’s see, what else? I’ll also be doing readings in Seattle, Vancouver B.C., San Francisco, and New York. As well as a D.I.Y. Magic party at Floating World comics on April 25th. (More details on that later.)

I will also be telling a story at Tad’s Talks on March 16th, at Tad’s Chicken and Dumplins on the Sandy River. (Full disclosure: I used to work at Tad’s as a teenager. I was a lowly busboy. Once as I was clearing plates off a table, some customer, who wasn’t quite done with a bit of gristle laying on the plate actually and literally stabbed me in the hand with their fork!) Tad’s is beautiful and scenic, and the food is that good.

ls

And most exciting for right now—because you can listen to it immediately— I was just interviewed on the podcast PDX Darlings. I talk with host Martha Grover about my upcoming book and also about what the process is like going from being an aspiring writer, to a first time published author. So I especially  recommend this episode to those interested in writing. So download this, and wash those dishes, or walk the dog, or whatever it is you do when you listen to podcasts, and do it up!

http://www.podbean.com/media/player/vjxb4-5451f0/initByJs/1/auto/1

D.I.Y. Magic free giveaway !

16 Monday Feb 2015

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anthony alvarado, DIY Magic, goodreads

Hey guys & gals! I wanted to let readers of this blog know: Goodreads is giving away five free copies of my book D.I.Y. Magic right now! You don’t have to do anything to enter. The contest runs for the next two weeks. It’s such a good deal I almost entered it myself. The book release date is April 7th, so excited! Here is the link: Do it! free book

The Flanuer

13 Friday Jun 2014

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DIY Magic, flanuer, James Yeary, walking

Hey guys, here is an interview I did a while back with James Yeary, as research for DIY Magic.

Talkingwith James Yeary a poet, and a friend of mine; James does a project called “My Day”, where he takes long walks around town for an entire day and creates poems based on the walk. James, care to introduce yourself and how you came to the role of flâneur?

Image

Hi Anthony, I’m so happy to be here talking with you. That’s an interesting question. I’m pretty sure flâneurs are born, not made.  I’m inclined to say that it’s a role any black sheep might be thrust into. I think for various reasons I’ve felt like an outsider in the community I grew up in, and still even where I live today. Like “on the outside looking in.” You suggest the peripatetic aspect of the flâneur, but I think the character you’re describing is much more complicated than someone who walks.

 

What exactly is a flâneur? Is there more to it than just going for a stroll?

My understanding is that the flâneur is someone engaged in the spectacle of modern life. And it is a two-way street. The prototypical flâneur, I think, is the impressionist painter. I am thinking especially of Degas and Manet. These painters (so very likely to use each other, the other Impressionist painters, as subjects), even their subjects are the city life, the shop windows, people of cafes, etc. They have a moving eye, and to some degree I think you can see that moving eye that is framing their portraits and scenes. And as that subject, the flâneur is also a bit of a dandy. A bit of a spectacle. The flâneur wants to exchange glances with you. It’s sort of optically sexual.

 

Put it another way: What is the essence of the flâneur?

Anthony, so I’m giving you very paraphrased answers, but I want to talk about Benjamin for a minute. Walter Benjamin was sort of the first person to look back at the emerging world of the early-to-mid nineteenth century, and declare that there was a new aspect to the visibility of the world. This was epitomized in the Arcades of Paris; great halls of commerce and spectacle, by and for the middle classes, importantly; places to be seen as well as to see. They weren’t much more than cafes and shops. Benjamin wrote thousands of pages about them, an encyclopedia of the auras of things like the shop window and the poodle and the hat, as well as the characters that were experiencing it at the time, people such as Baudelaire, the Symbolist poet of ennui.

This is sort of roundabout, but in a way, the hipster, as we’re sort of describing or failing to describe them “today” (because I think thirty and forty years ago the persons being called “the hipster” were something different), the hipster is a sort of grandson, or goddaughter of the flâneur. Not very different, though they’ve taken on this sort of wretched character. I mean the hipster is sort of universally despised (this may have been the case with the flâneur, too — look at Baudelaire, truly wretched…). I actually think it’s terrifically interesting, because they have the same sort of basic trait, except, and I’m not sure this is even an exception from the flâneur, it’s very clear that today’s hipster is completely obsessed with kitsch. I think that mutation on the flâneur is something interesting that’s maybe eschatological, because the flâneur is a profoundly middle class thing, historically speaking. And tomorrow there isn’t going to be a middle class. So the hipster sort of is wearing all this end of the world shit hanging from his bullet belt.

That’s obviously a tangent, but I think the essence is actually something that glows like that. I think the flâneur is someone obsessed with the feelings that radiate from objects, in a nostalgic sort of way, like Degas and his ballerinas, or hipsters with ninja turtles. I don’t think it’s actually that shallow; in the end, it’s, you know, all about death.

 

Image

 

I’m interested in the idea of the flâneur as a sort of activity that pretty much anybody can just get up and go do; let’s say a reader asks you “How can I go try this out today?”

I think a flâneur is a sort of character that people end up becoming as per their interest in the world about them. It is particularly and peculiarly urban, in my mind, or I think that is what the term “flâneur” refers to, walking in and of the spectacle. But that’s not to say that being a flâneur is not a part of something wider. I’m not even sure that it is possible to be a flâneur. I’m not saying it isn’t, but today’s flâneur is not the flâneur of 19th century Paris. Perhaps the gesture is the same, but when I am out investigating the suburbs, I am investigating decay. Maybe it isn’t different. I’m sure the decay to me is just a lichen that will prove more generative for the later generations, and maybe I’m being totally hypocritical, because I’m generating pages of texts trying to take them all in. I’m sure I am. You can call it what you will, but to be aware of the world around you is a philosophy and a way of life, both absorptive and generative, and one that can begin and end in practice.

Most of my work, and I’m not talking about the “my day books”, is catching myself thinking something. Cocteau said the most important thing about being a poet is having an ear, as opposed to composing anything. I like to aspire to a Cagean ambience too, if I can go there; though I don’t really use true “chance” or aleatory, I like to write poems that represent the clouds of sound we actually move in.

Objects outlast their ages, and magic comes in to our world when we stumble upon an object that doesn’t make sense in our own time. A fossil is the most important thing in the world because it resists death. And when you hold a fossil you know it is the only resistance against death, in the irony that this world is the afterlife of objects.

 

 

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