One of my first books was a small, hand made digital sketchbook titled Every Thing Created Is Stolen and dealt with the concept of inspiration and copyright. Pedestrian is sort of the jumbo-sized sequel, a stream-of-consciousness book that attempts to grasp the intensity of every day encounters with people, billboards, news broadcasts, and the simple thought of being alone.

The basic concept is that of maintaining a desire to hope, to fight and to live in your dreams in the face of situations both global and immediate that present themselves crushingly on a daily basis. The act of living a 'normal' lifes becomes almost an act of survival, as the weight of the elements of existing only get heavier over time. The book offers no solutions, or questions really, but just glimpses into what problems may present themselves through stories I've heard or seen or experienced, and in the end tried to translate into a visual diary of simply being.

When I initially thought of Issue Two, I was going to go for a more text-based, journalistic approach and ended up with the complete opposite. Conceptually based around the idea of living through a day (or lifetime), each booklet represents a personal interaction with a greater idea or reality, and fighting it. Content is nearly all appropriated from other sources in order to define how our lives are goverend by what we interact with both by choice and by circumstance, however by the end more content becomes original in text and thought as the world begins to make more (or less) sense.

The title stems from the initial idea of how we live our lives; through fact and what we are presented with or faith and what we are told. This basis of never having a concrete grasp on an institution to grow with (unless one is free of doubt, at which point, how open can your eyes truly be to the world?), the roads we walk are paved with misdirection and whispered lies from shadows. Is what we see really that bad, or does the fact it is able to appeal to us in advertising, art, or culture reveal more about ourselves than we wish to acknowledge?

Since this issue is based around the idea of individualism versus a system, the printing and construction was all done by me. Unfortunately this means there is no available purchase on Lulu, however I have posted a .zip file of all necessary high resolution files to bring to a print shop and have printed. They are already set up and paginated and simply need to be printed double sided, cut and bound. Also included is the file for the box.

After deciding on moving to the Bay Area, I began to consider the hazards of living in a location that scientists guarantee will have a major disaster within 30 years. This got me into thinking on the both minor and major events, which take place instantly on random occasions, and how they can send shockwaves throughout the rest of our lives. From this, I started thinking about the things I've done that would perhaps impact others negatively, thinking about who believed who was at fault and why, what was said and what came of those words. These are our fault lines; what keeps us up at night, staring at the ceiling through all hours.

We're all living in hazard, whether an immediate danger of an unknown is an earthquake or a failed love or one simply not met yet, a chance not taken and a day left to rot; we're all at fault, together, alone, somehow.

I love music, I always have and I always will and one thing that really irks me is that for as much as I love music, I am completely hopeless around notes. I can't identify them, can't harmonize or even tune my guitar without, well, a tuner. I noticed on Wikipedia that these are abilities most 'normal' people have; that somehow I was defective, and though I have gifts in visual arts, I am a lost cause for the one art that strikes me more than any other.

This bothered me and so I set out to create my own record of sorts; love songs for the tone deaf. To take what I am good at and create the kind of sound I would, were I instead a talented musician. The result is a collection of twenty three songs; each a two-page spread, each having two separate narratives that create a story. I used as little typography as possible to make most of this pretty open for interpretation, as it's never fun to know exactly what someone is singing about anyway.

Issue One was, and I suppose still is, my sort of take on gonzo / slant journalism. I wanted my work to come out semi-regularly but to hold some sort of coherent direction, and publishing a magazine seemed logical. Within the first issue I went after all sorts of ideas, from parodying advertising within the pages to a number of pages dedicated simply to White House press transcripts and released quotes showing off the manipulation of the public by the Bush Administreation in the lead up to the Iraq War. What I wanted was a collection of my work, published through a channel that would also show why I do what I do.

At heart, the magazine was simply about the idea that there is always a fight to pick, and one should always step up to it. That some fight with words and some with pictures and some with sticks and some with stones, and this is my fight. And it never ends.