Over the last few weeks I have had the privilege of working with the fantastic Pigeon Magazine, and for the next couple of weeks, will be displaying work alongside them at our show at Five Years Gallery.

Pigeon is the publishing body formed by Rebecca Field, Tamsin Devereux and Jake Evans. As practising artists in their own right, they crafted Pigeon as a curatorial platform, existing both in print and pixel, to cast a critical eye over the issues within the contemporary art world.

As part of their work for the Sites of Alternative Publishing exhibition, they are showing this delightful short video, which gives a snapshot of their collective practice.

“As a newly formed, independent and self-funded publication, ‘Pigeon,’ we readily admit to predominantly learning through doing. Rigorously documenting our processes both through film and through the material we originally discard, we assess what is deemed to be a success or a failure as we go along.

For our recent exhibition at Five Years Gallery, ‘A Pigeon, A Kitchen and An Annexe: Sites of Alternative Publishing’, we responded to a text written by curators, Ladies of the Press, in order to produce a series of prints covering issues from our own art education and the art market we will soon enter. Responding as editors involved a series of physical printing processes from home printing to hand rendering, re-appropriating the imagery and providing us with an opportunity to play with the different definitions. This film shows our process.

Thrown into a new context, exhibiting as an ‘alternative press’ has given us the opportunity to reaffirm what we value within our publication and the message we are sending out.

Don’t shoot the messenger pigeon, in this case the message, art.“

Filmed and edited by Tamsin Devereux, Rebecca Field and Jake Evans

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Pigeon is based in Brighton and resides online here.

Read more about the current Sites of Alternative Publishing exhibition featuring Pigeon, Annexe and Very Small Kitchen.

For 2012′s first edition of Two Poems, we bring you Anya Pearson. A co-founder of the poetry publication, Inc. Magazine, and a brilliant poet and writer, Anya is reshaping London’s literary scene. Today she reads one of her own poems and one by Felix Hodcroft.

I Told You I Was Ill

Baring Witness by Felix Hodcroft

Let’s start with your own piece. How did it come about?
It’s called I Told You I Was Ill and I wrote it about a year ago. I think I was getting a bit anxious because I constantly thought I was getting ill. So I took a step back and realised it was ripe for taking the piss out of myself a little bit. It’s a little ode to being a hypochondriac.

And you’ve paired it with the Felix Hodcroft piece. You mentioned the pairing came from the theme of mortality. How so?
I found out that Hodcroft used to be a probation officer in Manchester, I imagine he’s seen a lot of interesting stuff. His book is called Life after life after death and the first half is about life and the second is about death. I chose one from the life section, but it is still really about death. I find that his poems, especially this one, give a more positive attitude on mortality. It’s certainly saying, you know, we all have death coming, but let’s not think about that right now. So, I see it as a sort of answer to my poem.

You’re a co-founder of Inc. Magazine. How do you balance the two? Do you find yourself leaning more towards writing or the Inc. stuff?
I find that the more I coordinate Inc. the more I write. It’s inspiring to receive so many poetry pieces each day. The more I immerse myself in inc, the more I want to write and get involved in what people are doing, also the performative element of inc. really helps for the creativity too as I get to work towards performing my poetry. It gives a real focus.

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Anya Pearson is a poet residing in London and is one half of the team behind the must-see Inc. Magazine. Hear more from them @inczine.

The blank ‘Design Your Own Cover’ editions from Penguin are certainly not new. (They brought out the first six titles in 2006.) However, it seems like the partnership with Cass Art is much newer indeed and they certainly missed a trick by not making this connection back then!
Cass, in partnership with Penguin, are running weekend workshops (for kids and adults alike) in which you can take and design a book cover in-store absolutely free. We went along to flex our arty muscles.

Each book comes with a beautifully crisp heavyweight blank cover.

The range of titles on offer was nicely diverse, catering for both adults and children. From Aesop’s Fables to The Waves by Virginia Woolf, through Emma by Jane Austen and The Picture of Dorian Grey (Wilde).

These were some of our favourites from the day:

Unfortunately Cass don’t list their events online, so to find out when the next one of these is and what other activities they’ve got planned, go into one of their shops and pick up a free events calendar.

He keeps watching her. Her stomach fills with butterflies, because there’s something almost frightening, letting herself be looked at like this. She doesn’t catch his eye. She lets the warm air lift the glowing strands, flying out about her in a halo. It will be a mess.

Read the story after the jump

Say Cheese

When she opens her eyes it’s like she sees everything for the very first time. Winter sun streams in and coats things with dust: the overcrowded bookshelf, the piles of CDs, the profusion of bottles and pots and ribbons and brushes, and the clothes, scattered like the aftermath of a disaster. The bedroom belongs to a stranger – someone young and chaotic. Strung above the mirror is a collection of Polaroids: people wearing wigs and smoking roll ups, making the peace sign. There’s a poster on the wall for a film from the 1920s. This is the kind of person that lives here.

She goes and stands underneath the shower for a long time, her heart pounding. The piping hot water runs through her eyelashes, fills her mouth. She spits. She takes her flatmate’s razor blade, shaves her bikini line.

When he wakes first of all he catches her reflected in the mirror. She’s on tiptoes, has her arms lifted above her head and her long red hair caught between her fingers so it’s all fragments of light. Her hip swells in the kind of way you feel you have to touch. The word is Rubenesque.

She knows this because people have said it of her before. Always the arty boys, the bookish ones. It is a generous word for girls who are a bit on the curvy side. She tried several angles in the mirror before she looked at herself and thought: ‘Rubenesque’, then switched the hairdryer on full whack.

He keeps watching her. Her stomach fills with butterflies, because there’s something almost frightening, letting herself be looked at like this. She doesn’t catch his eye. She lets the warm air lift the glowing strands, flying out about her in a halo. It will be a mess. She doesn’t care. He places a pillow behind him, folds his arms behind his head. The sheet falls away from his chest, and it’s partly that he’s so, so beautiful, that she feels so very ordinary.

She turns off the hairdryer, and quiet floods in.  She grabs her camera from where it sits on the mantelpiece. ‘Say cheese’, she says. Her voice is too loud. She giggles: ‘Yeah, baby, yeah!’, holding it in front of her face.

He puts his hand out like a celebrity getting papped and dives beneath the covers.

“Not one photo?”

The lump in the bed is silent.

Instead, she turns the lens on herself and pulls a porn star pout, shoots. It isn’t her best angle, and the sun is making her squint. She tries again, bounces on to the bed beside him, finds what she thinks is his arm and shakes it, shows him the screen.

“This one is for you.”

“Very nice”

“I’m going to print it out and put it in a heart-shaped frame for you. You can keep it on your desk.”

He rolls his eyes and then he smiles, pulls her on to his shoulder. They gaze at the image on the screen.

“One day it won’t be enough, you know.” She says “You’ll be able to conjure me in 3D at the flick of a switch, airbrushed and with a less annoying laugh, exactly how you want me to be.”

“How about less difficult questions?”

“Whatever you want.”

He lies back and looks up at the ceiling.

“I don’t think I’d like that” he says

“Yes but I’ll give you blow jobs and cups of tea whenever you like” she says

“Still.” He says

She points the camera at him again and he bats it from her hands, grabs her, turns her over and does that thing to the back of her knees.

No one could say he isn’t handsome. He’s got this George Clooney thing about him, a silver fox, tanned skin wrinkled in laughter lines around his eyes, combined with a kind of self-aware academic geekiness, dark rimmed glasses, even a jacket with elbow patches. But most of all it’s the respect he commands, without even trying, he speaks with such clarity and passion, even those who don’t like him have to admit he knows his stuff. So, of course, there must have been others. So many girls in his classes, and many prettier ones than her, naturally. She tells herself this, of course.

Later when he’s dozing she has another go, slipping out from beneath the duvet and trying to snap him while he sleeps.

“There are cultures, you know, where people refuse to have their photos taken. They believe that it will capture their soul. Are you trying to capture my soul?” he asks, with his eyes closed.

She shrugs and smiles, looks down, self-conscious again, standing there, naked, the camera dangling from a black strap between her breasts. He says something about photography being the opposite of life.  It’s the kind of thing that makes some of the others think he’s a bit of a knob. But her notebooks are strewn with quotes like this, in red pen, surrounded by stars.

“But… it’s just a photograph.”

“Why does it matter so much? I’m here, aren’t I?”

It is difficult to explain so she just nods, yes, he’s here, he’s here.

“You just have to let some moments be. Not everything has to be recorded. That’s missing the point. You’ll become like a butterfly collector: with a glorious display of dead corpses for company, and a total lack of understanding of what makes butterflies beautiful.”

She thinks about how just a few hours ago she watched him in the slice of street light, searching his face for signs that he was dreaming. In the darkness she held her breath and felt that everything was possible.

“Besides,” he says, “my wife.”

The room is small. She moves to the window, presses her head against the glass. Outside, the day is already getting old, people hurrying about their business. Everyone always has to act like they are in such a rush to get the day out of the way, walking so quickly, keeping their heads down, never stopping to look around them. Sometimes she wonders if it is possible that they are actually making time go faster. She wills someone to look up at her, to see her standing here as naked as the day she was born, to catch her eye.

She turns around and looks at him.

“Just one. Please. I will never ask you again, I promise.”

He sighs and shakes his head.

“Just one,” he says. He lifts his face and bares his teeth at her. “Cheese” he says. The camera clicks.

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Amber Massie-Blomfield is a London-based writer and a publicist, particularly for theatre. Though relatively new to writing short fiction, her work has been read as part of White Rabbit’s Are You Sitting Comfortably and Storytails. Her flash fiction piece Beneath the Paving Stones is going to be part of our collection Volumes of Text for A Pigeon, A Kitchen and An Annexe: Sites of Alternative Publishing.

Read more of her work here.

This strip is by Kate Beaton of the hilarious and high-brow Hark, A Vagrant.

The exhibition opens on Friday 17th of February with a preview evening, to which you a cordially invited. Come along, have a gander at our work and say hello.

A Pigeon, A Kitchen and An Annexe: Sites of Alternative Publishing
17/02 > 04/03
Five Years Gallery
8 Andrews Road
E8 4QN

Read the full press release.

The exhibition is being curated by the magnificent Ladies of the Press* and, alongside ourselves, will include work from Very Small Kitchen and Pigeon Magazine.

Over the last month of so, we have been meeting to discuss our practices, create some collaborative texts and generally unravel just what it is that we’re all doing. Working with the Ladies of the Press* is always a dynamic experience and this has been no different. Our text-based norms have been taken to performative and art-based avenues that they weren’t so familiar with. But as with any journey, they have come out with a wealth of knowledge from the other side.

Over this week we shall be letting slip more about the show, but for now you can have a read of the press release for the show.

After a long and restorative holiday, the Annexe HQ is full again and bustling with treats for the Olympic year. And my, what treats we have in store.
In February we will be part of an exhibition at Five Years Gallery exploring a cross-section of indie publishing-based practices. We’ve got a series of writers’ trips coming up. (A bit like school trips, but with better packed lunch.) There’s a plethora of great writers and poets primed and ready to be unleashed upon you through the website. A couple of other projects are bubbling away for a little later in the year, but we wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise now, would we?

So, I’ll leave it there for now. Glad to see you again, hope you’re enjoying the new year so far and hope to see plenty of you here at Annexe as the year goes by.

Nick,
Annexe editor.

With the release of the Et Al Podcast, we thought it only fair to give you some extra bits and bobs too. It’s Christmas after all. So, at the Annexe event, we ran a little competition in which the audience had to fashion some first-class puns. The topic was books cross with bands. We weren’t surprised to see that the Annexe audience is comprised of a lot of witty and erudite folk. We had so many brilliant responses it was hard to choose between them, but we decided on our top four:

Fantastic Mr. Fleet Foxes
Girl with a Pearl Jam Earring
Northanger Abba

The top prize went to:
All Quiet on the Westlife Front

Since that night the entries have resurfaced every so often and without fail every soul in Annexe HQ falls into fits of laughter. We realised it was cruel to keep all this mirth to ourselves so, in no particular order, after the jump are ALL the book/band puns from Annexe Presents…Et Al.

Rage Against the Time Machine
Definitely Maybe Chatterley’s Lover
Touching the Floyd
Weird Scissor Sisters
Westlife of Pi
The Bravery New World
1984tet
System of a Down and out in Paris and London
The Road Hot Chili Peppers
The Arcade Bonfire of the Vanities
Hound of the BaskerVillage People
Catcher in the Rilo Kiley
Everything but the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Homage to Catatonia
Portrait of the Jarvis as a Young Man
Less than Zero 7
Never Jet Me Go
The Salmon of No Doubt
Of Mice and Men at Work
To the Lighthouse Family
Jane Air
Maroon Slautherhouse Five
Of Mice and Men at Work
Simply Red Riding Hood
The Book of Genesis
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Earth, Wind and Fire
20,000 Human Leagues Under the Sea
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone Roses
The New York Dolls Trilogy
Good Charlotte’s Web
A Midsummer Night’s D’Ream
Heart of the Darkness
The Art of Gwar
A Midsummer Night’s Cream
R.E.Emma

Not too long ago, we held our inaugural literary event. It was a roaring success (even if I do say so myself) and we certainly had a few giggles. If you were there, well done. If you weren’t, shame on you, but not to worry. We’ve got something that will make it feel like you were almost there.

As a Christmas treat, we’re giving you the Annexe presents… Et Al PODCAST! Crafted by the talented Mr Nick Taylor, the podcast revisits some of the highlights from the night and has a ton of extra features. There are interviews with all the performers and a lovely soundtrack too.

Each performer is highlighted as a chapter so you can jump around if you like, though we think it works best in its entirety. Enjoy!