I find it amazing that Google.com celebrates every occasion under the sun but not Helen Keller's birthday. I only remembered it this time around because I have a beautiful calendar from an organization for the blind in North Carolina (came to me by way of my grandmother who's originally from NC.) Anyways, here's to you Helen, you really were an amazing lady.

Here she is with Anne Sullivan, her teacher/companion/friend. Sullivan is reading and holding Helen's hand to sign the words to her (obviously I know they posed but it's still such a scene of empathy and friendship, and neat dresses, that I can't help myself).



And there are even more reasons to respect and love Helen as an adult than knowing from grade school that she learned to read, write, and speak despite being deaf and blind:
"A prolific author, Keller was well traveled and was outspoken in her opposition to war. She campaigned for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and socialism, as well as many other progressive causes." -- Wikipedia
(It is well documented that the press even in her own time treated her very differently when they realized her political views. Instead of her being a success story they would emphasize her disablities. Now everybody tries to hide or ignore her activism. Yay!)

Hey guys, don't forget that the deadline for Hot Tea, Cold Water #2 is this Friday! E-mail me if you need more time or have questions: leannleake@gmail.com

My computer doesn't go online anymore (I'm working on it) so I have been out of it, lj-wise. I made this picture on my marooned computer though. This is my guinea pig Kiwi -- I was going through my photos and I saw I took a bunch in a row I could put together.



Deadline coming up soon for Hot Tea, Cold Water#2 ! Here's a link to a flier with all the info, feel free to repost or just read it to get info.

http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i258/whisperdryad/transportationflyer.jpg

Sorry for cross-posting and mentioning this twice -- but everyone must know!! I would love to include you!

Deadline June 12
send work to leannleake@gmail.com

This issue's theme is "Transportation." Seeking fiction, research, comics, articles, essays, reviews, illustrations, paintings, photographs, games, interviews, and more, closely or loosely related to transportation!

Last issue was great -- let's keep going! If you think it applies to the theme, it applies to the theme! Are you traveling across the boundaries of gender? Are you thinking about train rides? Are you bemoaning the state of public transportation in the US? Or writing instructions for would be runners? Are you musing about the refuge/immigrant experience? Do you commute to work? Do you repair bikes? Do you walk to your mailbox?

Visual artists: 300 dpi TIF or JPEG, stick to 8 pages 1/2 US letter.
Wordsmiths: stick to 8 pages single spaced.
Publication planned in black and white but color pages submitted. Laid-out pages and art can also be mailed, please ask for address.

Special thanks to joedecie for submission #1!

Hot Tea, Cold Water now has its own myspace page:
http://www.myspace.com/hotteacoldwater

Please friend me if you like keeping in touch this way. I will post news about the zine, deadlines, reviews, and new info as it comes up. All that will still be appearing here, too, but ... yeah, well, you can see it on there, too!

Meanwhile issue #1 is going into it's second printing (ok the first printing was 40 copies, but I can still say second printing). You can still order copies and see who's in the issue here

half-sized b&w with blue cardstock cover, 50 pages

This is the first issue of the open-submission zine Hot Tea, Cold Water, we have a group of great photos, e-mails from a concerned dad, comics, prose-poems, work journals, drawings, and essays about teaching, being unemployed, organic farming, pizza delivery, dishwashing, bugs, and more. As a bonus there is a five-page review section of relevant films, books, and zines in the back!



Edited by Leann Leake (Hunk & Bird, DREAM DREAM DREAM ZINE, 18 Long Days)
Contributors:
Ygrii Blop, Amanda Faith, KC Green, Erin Griffin, Hooroo Jackson, Andrew Lorenzi (AKA penrod_pulanski), Melissa, and Rob Nussbaumer.

USD 3 via mail/ paypal/ stamps or trade! International buyers please add one more dollar.

Fine print: all rights stay with the creator, price at finish will only be enough to cover printing and postage (this is a zine!), people submitting will get at least one free copy, depending on expense of printing.

Here are some of my past zines to get you an idea of my work/projects I organize. I am distributed at Black Light Diner Distro in the US and Marching Stars Distro in the UK.

Oh man, Christa Donner's Ladyfriend ("for ladies and all their friends") zine is over at ten issues. I just found out!



Christa is a Chicago-based artist who does murals, sculpture, and all kinds of stuff. On top of that she has been teaching art classes for the community and running this collaborative zine. Anyone was welcome to contribute, and all you had to do to get a copy was write in. I first read about Christa when I as in high school, in a little blurb in Jane magazine (Jane is also over these days). I had to sneak the magazine into my house since my mom disapproved of the admittedly depraved (but pretty inaccurate for what was inside) article descriptions on the cover. We could only go on my dad's computer about half an hour a day on a dial-up connection, but I looked her up and devoured her website.

This was a contemporary artist whose art touched on so many of my interests: she used comic-book and beauty-magazine images, played with adding sculptural elements, drew beautiful guts and innards all over everything. In one image she was painting, back to the camera, and I saw that she wore punky buckled platform boots and had a dark brown pixie cut. A real idol for teenage me! From her website, I found out about her zine project. It took me months and months to get the courage to write to her for an issue (I think I had to send cash) and this might have been the first zine I ever read. Always good writing, interesting art, so many different takes on the themes of each issue. And they were really exciting themes: hair, cuteness, driving, health. I kept going back to her site periodically and seeing new issues, always great. I never dared to submit anything. When I was a sophomore in college Christa came to my university (University of MA Amherst) and gave a short talk on her work, including zines. It was cool, and a little disappointing. She was just a neat person, not a superhero who cut her own hair and only did amazing things. I guess I preferred to stare at her artwork and read her zines on the floor!

If you have bux, Ladyfriend is $3 (US) for each issue. I don't think she's gonna make a lot more copies, so hop to it! The website says there are plenty of #10 but she's running low on all others.

Jonathan Safran Froer =
not snotty
not overly precious from being famous
just a thoughtful good speaker



He talked a lot about just being a writer. I've been really blocked lately by a lot of stress in my non-creating life and he was very helpful. The creative for him had intuitive steps -- collecting images and words you fetishize/obsess over naturally, letting them grow, shaping them, and finally pruning them as an editor.

Wish he had read though. He claims nobody really likes that but I definitely do.

This is a minicomic about a dog who wants a moustache. It's 12 pages long. I made up the story in one sitting and then rewrote it a few days later ... lots of fun. The first 20 copies have a hand-colored cover. It was a good summer project.




Here's a view where you can see what the pages are like:




It's US l.50. As with all of my other stuff, don't worry penpals, I am sending you one! Everybody else I would love to trade zines/comics with, swap for stamps, bla la lalaaaaaa.

Here's a button for paypal:

I hate talking about money. And this zine was very inexpensive to copy since it is so short and dense. But US$1.50 covers the paypal fee, the current stamp needed, and copying cost. If you are in Canada or international, two more dollars would be nice.

Tomorrow I'm gonna post about a NEW comic I made and "published" as a zine this week. For now here is a few-week-old comic about a cat who lives in my apartment complex. When we were locked out the other day she hung out with us. She's nice but she thinks I'm weird.




( second page )

I drew this in anticipation of Monday, which was supposed to be (FINALLY) my move-in day to my promised studio in the new art building.

It wasn't. I have a studio reserved now but have to wait an indefinite amount of time to get a contract for the space (like a lease -- I have to say I won't destroy everything). They say optimistically that we may be able to move in during finals (in a few weeks). It's not even certain we can work in them over the summer! which is the whole point! I HAVE BEEN WAITING SINCE JANUARY 29!!!!!!! I would have been fine with my shitty studio in the crack house if I had known that I'd be there for a while. I would have got so much more work done! But every week I've been trying to keep my stuff in boxes and not get to involved in any projects. Bluhhhhhhhhh.

I did see this awesome card at the convenience store the other day, though:

Hunk & Bird is a zine by myself and Hooroo (my man). This is the first issue but I hope there will be more! I plan to use it to showcase whatever we happen to be excited about or working on every two months -- reviews, writing, comics, art, essays, articles ...

This issue is all new material with the exception of one essay which appeared in an earlier form on Hooroo's site. We both did drawings and writing for this one. I put in hourly comics that I made as a warm up for Hourly Comic Day but never posted. There are also fun drawings from TV and an article on Salvia Divinorum (with personal experiences).

28 pages quarter sized, black and white!

US $1, cash, stamps, trade, paypal, or free (as the cover says) if you are nice!
The money I ask for is just to cover copying and postage expenses! This is a real zine, fun & nonprofit. E-mail me (whisperdryad@gmail.com) or comment for a copy! yaaa! And you can see more zines by me n' Hooroo at my website (which will be updated shortly to include this one)

I don't know how he got in. Sometimes it sleeps. Mostly he just chirps real fast because it's so warm next to the radiator. I guess since he survived last night the radiator ain't gonna burn him. But I think he only has dust to eat. And he's not gonna find any girls in there.

PS
Old computer = totally dead. New computer just has the tablet's free version of Adobe Elements (very basic photoshop). As I do not feel like making comics in paint, I made this one in Elements. It's okay. I might buy Manga Studio 3, though, since it's way affordable and looks like it actually has tools I'd use.

Yeah so sometimes I give Kiwi and Misty shirts to sleep on (they adore soft things to sleep on, as a matter of course). But Kiwi likes to bury herself.

Michel Gondry's ("Science of Sleep", "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") new film. He wrote and directed (as with "Sleep"), so most of the criticism has been that this is "too weird" and he needs to be steadied by outside writing. IT IS NOT WEIRD ENOUGH. The beginning half is fun and awesome and doesn't necessarily make sense but I <3 seeing these bizarre characters re-make movies badly, in their own way. There's some of that homemade crappy-but-perfect aesthetic from "Sleep." But then the female lead gets NO development and the story is sucked into a predictable hollywood machinations. Although I did like Sigourney Weaver as the Ultimate Corperate Bitch character. Anyway. A super fun weirdass film that's actually getting wide realease.



(I'm not a movie plant or something, I just saw two solid movies this weekend and I wanna talk about it!! OK!!!)

A pretty solid adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's two-volume comic. The visuals work surprisingly well -- letting the really basic artwork move and breathe in a larger space. The film is a lot more explicitly political than the books, taking big detours to give history lessons or let you see news broadcasts. Her childhood is charming and scary -- a lot of scenes that would be new to readers. But when she leaves for France and goes through puberty, the film launches into a lot of montages with voice overs. It doesn't really come back to the detailed moments of the first half. Still! Very excellent. Not the best film of last year but definitely the best animated film (against "Bee Movie" and "Ratatoille").

This trailer tries to cut it together into a very tight action movie. Ignore that.



(in French with subtitles)

Man, it's been a while since I've posted over here. University started again at the end of January and I've been pretty overwhelmed. Starting to get into the swing of things, though!

I have been obsessively occupied with the state/ non-state of my promised studio in the art department. First I was promised a studio in the fancy new building. Which isn't finished being built. Then I had no studio. Then I had a piece of a hall in front of a door. Now I have a studio in a crackhouse! It's a very nice sized room with great natural light but no insulation on the outside wall (read: freezing).

In summary: