Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing

WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing was an insanely rad magazine published out of Venice Beach by Leonard Koren from 1976 to 1981. Gourmet bathing was covered in full, no doubt, also girls, interviews, and features including Dribble, Places, Non-Human Life Forms, Food, Architecture, Fashion, the Last or Back Page–but what really lasted was its avant-garde graphic design.

“WET’s philosophy of bathing, however, has made only limited cultural inroads. Its basic tenets are:

~Water, steam, air, and mud—and the energy to heat them—are precious resources to be cherished and conserved.

~Cleanliness is next to impossible (but keep trying anyway).

~Nakedness is almost always an excellent idea.

~In addition to all its other charms, bathing is an accommodating metaphor.”

That was taken from the intro to the book. The book! Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing. In it, Leonard tells the story of the making of WET from its early formation to its emergence on the international pop-culture scene. The book also includes an extended commentary on the process of making WET, along with images from the magazine and advice for making such a creative enterprise happen.

We have copiessss….

Nin Kit

Here’s a nice little Anaïs Nin starter collection. A Woman Speaks was new for me. It’s been a pleasure to read through this Major Arcana auntie’s extra-literary words and thoughts. And certainly, it’s always a pleasure to come across copies of Little Birds and Delta of Venus designed by Milton Glaser, whose book of design we celebrated yesterday.

From the top left, we have Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories, published by Magic Circle Press, 1977. A Woman Speaks: The Lectures, Seminars, and Interviews of Anaïs Nin, edited by Evelyn J. Hinz and published by The Swallow Press, 1975. Delta of Venus, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Little Birds, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

Milton Glaser

My scanning/re-photographing abilities reached their limits with today’s book of choice, this wonderful overview of Milton Glaser’s designs published by The Overlook Press in 1973, so I’ve decided, dear reader, to resort to others’ work in this department. Probably I should do this more often, as I often feel that my poor attempts to transfer images from books up to this blog takes away from the majesty of the images, and certainly the online experience doesn’t come close to holding a book full of them in hand.

In any case, interested parties can see plenty more of Mr. Glaser’s designs at miltonglaser.com and buy prints at miltonglaserworks.com. I’ve taken the statements about these images from the wonderful overview book that we have available at the shop—plenty more where they came from, and a great reason to invest in the book itself.

These Cubismo blocks on the cover of Art in America were commissioned by the magazine as part of a series featuring toys designed by American artists. My idea was to produce a cube made up of sixty-four plastic blocks. Each plane of sixteen blocks contained a different design motif. Most of the blocks were designed so that, placed together, they produced a variety of continuing patterns. The educational premise was to expose the child to the idea of producing a series of changeable images without a naturalistic framework. They sold poorly.

A poster for an art show whose purpose was to support the effort to end the war in Vietnam.

The illustration on this page was for an article in Signature, the Diners Club magazine, suggesting how good coffee can be evaluated. I own the blue coffee pot and it is a favorite possession.

Found Poems

Found Poems by Bern Porter. Published by Something Else Press in 1972.

Bern Porter (1911-2004) began as a scientiest, contributing to the development of the cathode-ray tube (for television), the atomic bomb (with the Manhattan Project), and NASA’s Saturn V Rocket. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, he walked away from the Manhattan Project and took up art full-time. He became a master of collage, found poetry, and a publisher to like-minded artists, most notably Henry Miller. New Yorkers and visitors of New York may have had the stoke out of seeing his MOMA Library show last year.

This volume, Found Poems, is the first in a seven-part series of Founds. The last three books, The Book of Light, The Devil’s Wishbone, and The Porter Book remain unpublished.

Ron Nagle

ELEPHANT SHADOW CUP, 1993

DARK MARK, 1985

UNTITLED, 1975

Mission District native, Voulkos studio assistant, musician and song-writer, and long-time professor at Mills College Ron Nagle signed this copy, fellas.

Ron Nagle: A Survey Exhibition 1958-1993. Published by the Mills College Art Gallery, 1993.

Day & Night: Bolinas Poems

WINTER MIDNIGHT

after reading Michael McClure

Can I let the winter go without a poem?
Let the minutes disappear wordlessly
As the moon is gone by morning. And yet
It returns. I’ve seen winter enough times
By now to know it comes again. I am myself
The winter as it enters me, changes the complexion
Of the blood, turns my thoughts deep into themselves.

Why write a poem to commemorate this cycle
That is as much of what I am as my arm, or
The moon. I don’t get enough facts into my poems.
This year I saw racoons in the moonlight,
Playing with the abandon of creatures utterly
Untroubled by abstractions. They had come for our
Chickens, who sat inside their coop in a continual
Perplexity, almost human, seemingly sleepless

While the racoons, two little ones with a family foursome,
Wrestled on the lawn. The planet is set up for
Wild things, not money and reputations, not desks
And questions, but the obliterating intelligence of
Pure play. The mind indistinguishable from its own
Body, like the mind of a poplar, which is pure shape, mobile
Upon the air. There is no way to make a living as a poet
In America, and yet I often make some kind of meal

Of a poem. I see the light, the radiant suffusions
Of this world and I want a kind of geometric song
To speak of it, to say it—so it will be in speech too.
Like snow falling, like snow falling, like snow falling.

From Day & Night: Bolinas Poems by Aram Saroyan. Published in 1998 by Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. A beautiful book.

Book/Gold

Please come sneak a peek!

Vote On High-Rise Coloring Book

A pristine, as yet not colored in copy of Sixteen San Francisco Artists Present Alvin Duskin’s Vote on High-Rise Coloring Book. Robert Pease & Company, 1971.

I happen to kind of like the Transamerica Pyramid so I don’t think I’m such a great candidate for the honors of coloring it in. Too bad, because it would be divine to do. Allow me to allow Tom Wolfe to explain:

The Owner-Builder and The Code

Today is the first day of Erik’s Book/Shop run in our shop. There are so many wonderful books and pieces of art to share that I’ve decided to do just that every day for the next week. I’m going to pull from the group Lisa and I selected, and you may enjoy perusing Erik’s current selection on his site. I hope you enjoy!

Feeling you with the vacuum, anonymous sister. There are hippies, and then there a clean hippies. You be the one to decide.

The Owner-Builder and The Code by Ken Kern, Ted Kogon, and Rob Thallon. Published in 1976 by Owner-Builder Publications.