I made a newspaper

On experiencing digital fatigue, making real things in the real world, and inoculating oneself from doom

I took a few months off writing digitally to spend a little time making things physically, mea culpa.

I think this is a psychic immune response to the world feeling so overwhelming and out-of-control. I am aware that I have little power to make change, but simultaneously feel compelled to create some kind of record… evidence that there are good things and people out there, caring for each other and working to make the world a better place, even if it’s just in their own neighborhood.

So I made “The Green Gazette.”

Inspired by my friend Anthony, who spun up the Los Angeles Review of the Moving Image in what felt like a week, using a simple print-on-demand service called Newspaper Club, I designed my first issue in homage to all the friends I have in LA who are really making a difference in their communities.

Featured in Issue One:

• Genesis Sandoval recommends what to plant for the fall

• Lynn Fang defines what makes “good soil”

• Bijan discusses what inspired her to start the Chinatown Cleanup Crew

• Director Mike Mills contributes original artwork

• + editorials on the importance of community compost efforts and some notes on how to build your own pile at home

Issues are completely free to own and I’ve been handing them out during my weekly volunteer shifts at Edendale Grove, in addition to distributing through a few local businesses. I’m also happy to mail them out if anybody feels like paying for shipping. (Just shoot me a reply here and let me know.)

Elsewhere in the world, if you happen to live in-or-around Boulder, CO, I currently have a piece up in a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art there. The work itself is part-media, part-physical sculpture: a 24/7 live feed of my community compost at work, enabled by a low-cost, solar-powered security camera I bought online. There’s no feed available digitally, you have to be in-person in the museum to see!

I really don’t have answers for what’s happening in the world right now, but I also don’t see any other option than to keep making things.

At any scale, in any size.

If you would like to, reply and tell me about something you’ve been doing lately that’s inspired you. And I’ll get back to regularly scheduled programming here, otherwise.

Love,

Cass