Back in July 2008, Microcosm did a bike move from the house where two operatives lived to our new store in inner industrial southeast. Here’s the field report:

Anavlog: Hunter-Gatherers Never Looked This Good from Joe Biel on Vimeo.

CATALOG COVER BY Alec Longstreth. Yeah, it’s nerdy.

We’re got our 2010 Publishing and Distribution Catalog printing! It’s  filled with published and distributed books, zines, videos, tshirts, patches, stickers, buttons, tshirts, posters, postcards–and everything else we do.

There will be tons of new stuff from Microcosm in 2010 and this is the first chance to get a glimpse of what we have planned. Right now we’re concerned with getting 2010 Catalogs in as many hands and places as possible. This is where we need your help!

Unlike major book publishers, we do not have a large budget for promotions and advertising. In fact, we don’t pay for many ads anywhere, even in publications or on websites we whole-heartedly support. In keeping our books cheap, we forgo the luxury of having a promotions department almost entirely.

So how do we get the word out about our books? Our existence is owed almost entirely to people like you telling your friends and spreading the Microcosm word.

If you’d like to help, please email your full name and full address and how many catalogs you think you can distribute.  catalogs@microcosmpublishing.com

Typically folks ask for 25, 50, or 100. It’s super easy to drop a stack of 50 each at your cool local coffeeshop and record store! Please don’t ask for more than you think you could pass out.

So…
1. Full Name
2. Full Address
3. How Many?

Thank you so much in advance for your help. We couldn’t do this without you, for real.

Get in touch with any questions and thanks again!

-Steven
steven@microcosmpublishing.com

After seven years of faithful service to zine distribution, Billy Da Bunny retires from Loop Distro during the Milwaukee Zine Fest 2009. I got the scoop on why he decided to quit as well as his future plans with zines, life, and other creative endeavors.

Raleigh Briggs, author of Make Your Place and other fine DIY publications, will be teaching a class on herbal home and body care at this weekend’s Portland Plant Medicine Gathering. The event, which takes place November 21st and 22nd at The Bamboo Grove on 134 SE Taylor Street, is billed as celebrating “the wealth of herbal and plant knowledge of our finest local Portland Plant People.”

Says Raleigh, her class, which takes place on Sunday from 5-6:15pm, will teach people to “use plant medicine to make a strong, clean, happy home and body.” She continues, “In this class, we’ll learn some basic preparations for herbal cleansers for your house and your body. I’ll provide some recipes, but we’ll also talk more broadly about how you can create your own formulas at home. This class is for folks who haven’t worked with DIY products before, and will probably be too basic for advanced and intermediate practitioners.”

Registration for the Portland Plant Medicine Gathering is $100 for both days, $60 for one. Other classes will include Colette Gardiner’s Magical Herbs for Healing and Protection, Women’s Health and Herbal Medicine by Dr. JJ Pursell, and Ben Pixie’s How To Raise Honeybees.

Go to PDX Plant Medicine.org for more info and to see the full schedule.

To read more about Make Your Place check out Amy Karol’s excellent blog right here. Raleigh’s book and zines can be found here.

The event runs from 10am-6:30pm daily.

The zine world got some awesome props recently in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Autumn 2009, issue 1, vol. 35). Published by the University of Chicago Press, Signs‘ Jenna Freedman, a zine librarian at Barnard College, writes how if it weren’t for zines, notably Krissy Durden’s excellent fat positive publication Figure 8, she would’ve never thought to question fat prejudice and body image.

Says Freedman, “Although some of the resources Durden quotes are online … since I had never done any research on fat power, I had never encountered them. I somewhat unquestionably believed that fat equals unhealthy until reading this zine.”

Freedman goes on to say that Figure 8, “[E]xpands the zine canon on oppression, making strong arguments against sizeism, something many young, skinny punks may not have thought much about previously.”

Durden writes about the issue, which focuses on feminist zines, on her blog, saying it is “good inspiration for anyone making a zine. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that zines can have an affect, especially when you can find anything on the internet in a second. But, there is nothing like having a zine to hold and read anywhere you are. It’s less distracting than the internet and a much more intimate experience between you and the writer. And, like with Jenna, it can get into someone’s hands who would have never sought out information on that subject.

See more info on Signs right here.

We don’t generally post press we get but this one is waaay too awesome to pass up. Recently Megan from the Say It’s Not Soy blog came up with a vegan version of the traditional dish migas after being inspired by the Snakepit 2008 book! If you want to check out the blog in its entirety go to http://sayitsnotsoy.com/vegan-migas/ but here’s how Megan’s article looks…

What is Snakepit? Snakepit is a daily three-panel autobiographical comic done by Ben Snakepit (Austin, Tx based punk rocker). It is one of my favorite comics and one of the longest running autobiographical daily comics that I know of. Ben used to print them up in a quarterly zine but now they are published once a year as a book. I just got my copy of Snakepit 2008 in the mail this week and I wanted to do a recipe out of it. One of Ben’s favorite foods is migas and it is referenced in this years comic. I had no idea what the hell migas are prior to reading the book but I was interested in them since he spoke so highly of them. Turns out they are some type of Mexican egg dish; which is super easy to make vegan (hello tofu scramble). You can find out more about Snakepit here.

Vegan Migas
Prep time: 30 minutes
Yields: 2 servings

Ingredients

Spices
• 1 Tb Nutritional Yeast
• 1 1/2 tsp Cumin
• 1/4 tsp Turmeric
• 1 tsp Paprika
• 1/4 tsp Pepper
• 1 tsp Salt
• 2 tsp Pepper’s Plant Original California Hot Sauce (or your favorite hot sauce)

Tofu Base
• 2 Tb Earth Balance,vegan butter
• 1/2 bunch of Green Onions (chopped)
• 12oz container of Extra Firm Tofu
• 4oz can of Fire Roasted Mild Green Chilies (chopped)
• 1 medium Tomato (chopped and seeded)

Instructions

1. Take all your dry spices and whisk them together in a bowl then set aside. Heat a non-stick skillet to medium-low heat. Add earth balance and chopped green onions to your skillet once it is properly heated. Cook the green onions for a couple of minutes; make sure to stir them around.
2. While you are cooking the onions, drain your tofu and pat it dry. After moisture is removed from the tofu place it in a medium sized bowl. Mash your tofu up with a fork and slowly add in spice mixture. Mash up tofu until the spices are well mixed in and the mixture is crumbly and void of large chunks.
3. When your tofu mixture is ready to go then add it to your skillet. Cook for about 5 minutes and then add in chopped mild green chilies and hot sauce. Cook for another 10 minutes then add in chopped tomatoes. After adding in the tomatoes cook for another 5 minutes. You want to make sure to add in the tomatoes last because they can easily get overcooked.
4. Serve with salsa, beans, tortillas, and roasted potatoes (Tamale House Style; supposedly the best migas in Texas). You can also try chopping up some tortillas and adding then when you cook the green onion if you want to have tortillas in the migas. Also note that letting the vegan migas rest overnight in the fridge will bring out a fuller flavor. I like to cook my vegan migas and then enjoy them the next day; it’s worth the wait!

Thanks Megan and Say It’s Not Soy!

Microcosm’s Joe Biel recently interviewed In Search of the Lost Taste vegan cookbook author/zinester Joshua Ploeg for an upcoming book. Here’s an excerpt from the interview. See the rest of the interview in Biel’s Beyond Resistance and Community, a look at, as Biel says, “People who grew up punk and took it to other places than music,” out in 2010 on Garrett County Press.

Q: Can you talk about your background in punk and how that came about in your life? What was your childhood like that made punk attractive?

A: Sure! I was pretty open-minded about music as a kid, and punk was a part of the whole tapestry. My sister was a punk first, I always liked her music. The whole attitude and politics of it was great and pretty appealing. I seemed quiet and a bit odd but once you got me going I was hard to shut up. Thus, I liked all of the yammering that punk tends to do. And as with most young people, the aggressive music helped get the yayas out (and I had a lot of yayas). Reagan sucked. Idaho sucked. People picked on me a bit (I didn’t care) but the punks were always cool to me. Also later on there was some solid support for being queer in the punk/DIY scene, especially in Olympia, which needless to say I loved. 

Yes, make ME GAY the center of attention, please! At first I was more of a metal/goth type and punk was appealing as a more left-wing but equally offensive variation. It was in the ’80s that I started digging the music and going to shows, which, hey! punk shows were a couple of bucks and metal ones were $15-20. Punk shows had a small room where you knew everyone, and a pit. Metal shows were at the coliseum with 20,000 assholes, security and a huge barricade. No contest. Punk had good attitude—like me, elitist and egalitarian, at the same time. Once I moved to Olympia and went to college, it was so easy to participate. I dove into going to shows, putting on shows, zines, and playing music; a fast progression ‘cuz of the way things
were in the ’90s: more emo and guilt! Love it! It made it easy to just do whatever I wanted.

Q: How did you get involved in travel chefery/cooking and authoring cookbooks? How do you feel you have evolved and developed that interest into adulthood?

A: The cooking started the first time I became vegan. I was hosting bands all the time and also loved having people over. I loved to eat and loved taste. Thus, it was incumbent
upon me to try to make the vegan food taste better. After much failure I finally began to succeed. Then one day Jeff
Bettger said, “I’d pay for food like this,” and I started a secret cafe in my house pretty much immediately. For this I would constantly research and experiment with different dishes and styles until I developed quite a repertoire and a lot of my own recipes. My friend Andy Gilligan convinced me to have a book group. I would work on my cookbook and he on a children’s book. He insisted I put the recipes together. Eventually I finished it and when this was done the only model to pedal it I had was touring, so I did that. But I didn’t have a car so I just took the Greyhound and Amtrak everywhere. The often dire circumstances of cooking with whatever was available in so many different kitchens and towns honed my skills and brought out whatever latent talents that I had to the point that it turned into
an obsession/profession. It developed into a passion from experience.

Q: It seems what’s most impressive about your work is that you transitioned very directly from touring
with your bands to touring alone with your knives. Was this choice conscious? In what ways were the skills you were employing a direct result of your experience with punk?

A: Yeah, it was the only way I knew how. I didn’t realize how novel it was until the touring was well underway. Promoters were like, “Oh, you’re coming down. What’s your new band? What do you mean ‘dinner party’?!” It was great ‘cuz it could happen anywhere, anytime, any night of the week! Easy to book.

My punk touring experience was the whole thing of it. We would play at noon or at midnight—any time. In a club, barn, gazebo, hall, basement, vacant lot, church, garage, record store; anywhere! For punks, middle-aged types, kids, heshers, hippies; anyone! And with Lois Maffeo through Man Is the Bastard; any style! Van breaks down, skinheads show up, stay in collectives, squats, dirty-ass places, cars—great PA or no PA, power going out, getting electrocuted; Whatever the circumstances were, do it for the experience. Always some kind of thrill, good or bad. Even boredom is kind of exciting. All of that translated to the cooking in crazy kitchens, hauling huge bags of groceries for a mile or two, abundance or lack of gear or customers, shopping for groceries wherever possible until the ingredients are all there; if you can find them all! Hanging out waiting for stuff to happen; I was ready for that; it carried over in spades!

Q: What are you most excited about in your own future? What can we expect from you?

A: I’m excited about upcoming tours and doing some new things with food and recipe books. Combining all of the mediums we’ve discussed into the realm of recipes and live food events. The latest experiments this year in combining food and design were pretty cool. More of that to come. I’m stoked to go to more countries and really live up to these monikers like “The Traveling Chef” and “The Touring Chef.”