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Monica Johnson
I'm Monica Johnson with Marshall Weber and this is Booklyn calling.
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Monica Johnson
Welcome, welcome to our show Booklyn Calling, where we talk about artists, libraries and social justice. We are Monica and Marshall, your hosts, and we’re also both artists who head up Booklyn, inc. an arts nonprofit located in Brooklyn, New York, on the un-ceded land of the Munsee Lenape people. And we created Booklyn Calling to amplify voices in the artist book field and to explore art making as a tool for community engagement and for social change.
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Monica Johnson
And today, our fabulous guest is Fred Rinne. Hi, Fred. Hello there. You are a San Francisco based urban folk artist who uses found materials outsider esthetics and your unique painting, drawing and writing style to create an astounding, astounding artist books that expand and then explode all preconceptions of both the book arts and cultural critique. Fred documents skewed underground worlds that few of us have been cursed or privileged to encounter with an equally disturbing perspective.
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Monica Johnson
Fred is also a musician and is a member of the band National Disgrace, and I think several others, as I’m learning and we at Booklyn have worked with Fred since our organization’s inception in 1999, and Marshall and Fred’s relationship goes back even further. Fred is a super prolific creator of over 100 unique artist books. I want to fact check that it might even be way more and has been collected at institutions all across the country and the world.
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Monica Johnson
Welcome, Fred Rinne to our show. Marshall and I had a really nice conversation right before we hopped on, and we’ve been sort of reminiscing about, you know, Marshall and I both spent a long time living in San Francisco, not knowing each other whatsoever, but during the same time period. And so we were kind of talking about your relationship, your identity, your relationship to San Francisco.
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Monica Johnson
Do you guys want to start about talking, start off by talking about your relationship, where you met, which I believe was in San Francisco in the 1980s.
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Fred Rinne
Well, it is in the inky past. There was something called Club Nine that was kind of a combination disco kind of scene downstairs and a bunch of art installations upstairs. And somebody told me about that. And I go in and talk to some somebody there about having an installation and says, Yeah, sure, no problem. And I get back and talk to my friend,
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Fred Rinne
I said that this guy I talked to, he was in a business suit and he wasn't an asshole. I couldn't believe it. So it turns out to be Marshall. So it's like, Holy crap, it was the best. Oh, yeah, We had a great time there. We go upstairs and plug our stuff into the next kind of these little rooms, you know, and it's just.
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Fred Rinne
Just crank.
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Monica Johnson
So. So you guys met at a disco and.
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Fred Rinne
We met at a disco.
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Monica Johnson
And then. And now you make collaborative artist books together. That's what. What's between that? What? What transpired?
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Fred Rinne
Well, it well, it's like the lyrics of that song back then, I was looking around the room and it was getting really strange. And then as soon as I knew it, I began to change. I flap my arms and proceeded to cluck. Look at me. I'm a disco duck.
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Marshall Weber
Yeah, I remember that.
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Fred Rinne
Yeah, it started the whole thing off, but it was just.
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Marshall Weber
It was just what it was like.
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Fred Rinne
Yeah, but we played.
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Marshall Weber
Music together for a long time before we made books.
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Fred Rinne
Yeah. Yeah. He, he had one show we had with them. National Disgrace. We were twanging away on stage and I look over and Marshall’s got this giant kind of decrepit fur coat on and a pig mask. So he kind of looks like some mutant penguin, and he’s doing some sort of wild, gyrating disco dance. And the fur is literally flying off in chunks into the audience.
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Fred Rinne
And it was such a sight.
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Marshall Weber
Marshall. Those days.
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Fred Rinne
We were hanging out in Berkeley and somebody said, Yeah, you know, a friend of mine was at a melted record party in New Jersey. And I said, Oh, what? They just played melted records all night. I said, shit, let’s give that a try. And so we did. And that was our vocalist. So instead of a vocalist, we just played Melted Records and.
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Monica Johnson
Melted records like you, you melt them and then you still try to put them on a turntable and play them? So it’s kind of like a wavey record? Is that what that means, okay.
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Fred Rinne
Yeah, Yeah, totally.
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Monica Johnson
That’s a thing. And I know that now.
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Fred Rinne
You have to kind of tie the arm down. Cause once, it just flip right off it, you know? But it’s, what happens, is you get like a focus on that song. It just kind of kind of knocks into this one groove that really defines the entire sound. So you take like a Peter Frampton record. Okay,
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Fred Rinne
He had this one song, I’m in You, You’e in Me, and all this song that if you melted, okay, you got to get a tape somewhere where Peter Framptons in the background just going, You’re in. You’re in your in. Holy shit, I mean, how do you top that? You just can’t, you know.
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Marshall Weber
When did the book start for you, Fred? Because you were doing band books?
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Fred Rinne
Yeah. I’m trying to remember what the first one was, and man, it’s, well, let’s see. I had, I had a project for a - I took a printmaking class. It was actually a bookbinding class. I barely got in, too. I mean, the teacher looked at my stuff and kind of like, Oh, okay, if somebody else cancels, they did, so I got in.
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Fred Rinne
Anyways, so.
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Monica Johnson
It was kind of on a whim, you know, that you got into this.
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Fred Rinne
I know like, I kind of, you know, thought the hard won battle of learning how to do this, this, you know, technical stuff, you know, which I don’t know, some of which I got, some of which took a lot it took a lot of improvement, couple of my books had to be rebound once they got there. I heard that people looked at them said, oh, Jesus, well, we have to send this to somebody who could sew. Anyway, I used to write for these underground publications and then my friends started something called Filth magazine.
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Fred Rinne
So yeah, I was on the staff of a filth, you know, so you can go to a show like you were a reporter, you know. So yes.
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Monica Johnson
What was Filth Magazine, what what did Filth Magazine report on.
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Fred Rinne
Kind of a culture scene? You know, it sort of had whatever people were interested in. Somebody covered music, somebody else covered art a little bit. Mainly, just weird, weird, ugly, horrible culture stuff. I guess it was kind of a culture critique mag centered around Oakland and San Francisco. So anyway, I wrote this article about all the bands I had been in called All My Bands,
00;08;03;08 - 00;08;31;03
Fred Rinne
and then so sort of like at this class that I was taking a couple of years later, that kind of made that my class project to get that. So I ink jeted it, found some decent paper and then sewed up a bunch. So I went up with this edition. I forget 25 or 30 of them or something, and that was kind of my first book, one of the only multiples actually I’ve ever done everything else
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Fred Rinne
was hand done -What year, fred?- I did this. Oh, man, that was yeah, 90-something. Back then I was trying to get a job. I remember being in an office downtown and some skyscraper and Im getting along okay. And in the application the guy looks at it, you know, and he says, Well, Mr. Rhyne, what did you do between 1983 and 2000?
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Fred Rinne
Or something like that, and I just was completely blank, I guess. It just yeah, I couldn’t come up with anything, right? I think I said I don’t do anything. I just hang around, you know? I don’t know. But I remember this one I did I think the first one I did, cant remember what the contents of it was, but I remember I, I found it with a shot period jeans that I had.
00;09;28;05 - 00;09;49;05
Fred Rinne
I just glued that on to the uh, the cardboard and shipped that off to Marshall and and then sometime later said, okay, that’s, that’s sold. Do another one. So I just kept doing it and that’s still at it.
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Monica Johnson
I feel like I’ve heard that a lot in Booklyn’s history, just talking to people that somebody will send Marshall a book or hand Marshall a book and then it sells. And then Marshall just says, Can you do another one? And that’s kind of the artistic career arc of like so many people’s experience within Booklyn.
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Fred Rinne
Yeah.
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Monica Johnson
And is that sort of the progression of like you did another one and you did another one and then you decided to do one together, or how did you start like making them together?
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Fred Rinne
That sort of started pretty early on, as I recall. But yeah, we just kind of pitch ideas back and forth, you know, and whatnot. So it becomes, I don’t know, it’s kind of weird. It’s almost like, like, like an idea factory starts happening, you know, like, like what about, you know, Yeah, like, okay, the the of current event political stuff as science fiction, you know, and just, just, you know, just kind of take this particular chunk, maybe this piece of history like we we collaborated on one called bedtime for Bremer talking about L Paul Bremer, who was like the supposed to be the viceroy of Iraq, put in there by by Cheney and Bush.
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Fred Rinne
Bush Jr or senior. Anyway.
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Monica Johnson
So like Bedtime for Bonzo. Yeah. Spin off, in other words.
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Fred Rinne
Right, right, exactly. Exactly.
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Monica Johnson
That movie that Ronald Reagan started in 1951.
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Fred Rinne
Well, yeah, Yeah, exactly. Ronald Reagan was an actor, a fascist actor also. I never saw that movie. It’s there’s a picture of him hanging out with a chimpanzee. And I figured that chimp probably did a better job, really.
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Marshall Weber
I think it’s interesting, though, in that what Fred’s describing is a relationship with underground press and publishing and writing that turns into, you know, documentation of music. And, you know, there you have lyrics and writing and then making your own liner notes and making your own book about the bands. When me and Fred started talking about artists books, both of us had already kind of experience in DIY publishing.
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Marshall Weber
So that's interesting to me.
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Fred Rinne
Yeah, one thing, the thing kind of feeds the other. I think how art came together for me, as is really kind of where you do these different things and they kind of feed off each other. So the writing would feed the painting, the painting would feed the music with national disgrace. We tried to have a slogan We like to sing about sculpture, sculpture and sound and soundy sculpture.
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Monica Johnson
So, Fred, I hope this doesn't make you uncomfortable, but I want you to know that I am a member of the Fred Rinne Fan Club, and for as long as Ive been at Booklyn, I’ve really loved your work. One thing that we don’t really talk about that often is that Booklyn has a zine club and you happen to be a member of our zine club, which I think is a wonderful.
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Monica Johnson
And I so appreciate that you joined our zine club and you receive I think we send you a zine every few months or so. And so in communicating about the zine club, I’ve enjoyed two, two interacttions with you. Okay, so one is when you join the zine club, we send you a little survey and we say like, you know, here’s, here are these check boxes of like subject matters to help us understand what kind of zines you like to read or what kind of reading materials you like.
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Monica Johnson
And then we also ask, are there any subjects that you do not want to explore? Like we don’t want to, you know, be tedious and send you things about a particular topic if you’re like already maxed out or you’re just not interested and you didn’t check any of the like the pre scripted boxes, but we always leave an other box at the end.
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Monica Johnson
So if there’s something we missed, we didn’t consider you could you could let us know and you check that box and you wrote poultry processing.
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Fred Rinne
Well.
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Monica Johnson
Do you remember?
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Fred Rinne
Well just Yeah. Yeah it does I think. Yeah. Oh wow. I don’t know what. Wow the antihistamines must have been kicking in that particular day. Yeah, but if anybody does
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Marshall Weber
do you not care about poultry processing?
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Fred Rinne
No, I really do. I just was joshing, I guess, on this turkey plant. I had a flashback. I actually, that is, I worked at a turkey factory one summer in Turlock, California, actually, that produced turkeys. I mean, yeah, Yeah. They they come alive and come out dead. Holy crap, yeah, that was something else. But you know, if anybody does a zine about poultry processing, that probably would be, you know, kind of unique.
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Fred Rinne
I mean, it would stand out and.
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Monica Johnson
I know it definitely put me on alert for zines about poultry processing. But, you know, those are not going to come to you. The second thing that you offered our zine club was a testimonial. And so these are things that I think the platform we use, like automates, like requests, like write a testimonial for Booklyn. You wrote Rejoice and Pop the bloated ticks of inequity, exclamation point.
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Fred Rinne
Well, yeah yeah that's that's pretty much.
00;15;17;15 - 00;15;31;07
Monica Johnson
Which I want to use as our, our theme yeah. I wonder do you remember writing that? What, how do I, how, how can we love this more by understanding. Yeah. What is that?
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Fred Rinne
Well, yeah, it just. I don't know. You know, sometimes the philosophy just. Just pops right out.
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Marshall Weber
You know, you got to remember that, Fred lives in California, the land of, you know, Nancy Pelosi and - bloated ticks - Feinstein.
00;15;48;21 - 00;15;53;21
Monica Johnson
Yeah, Yeah.
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Fred Rinne
Yeah, yeah. It’s particularly inaccurate inequity. It’s that the din of inequity is what, what somebody described it, the situation we have. And yeah, it’s pretty extreme. I mean, this is like tale of two cities over here in San Francisco. It’s like, holy crap.
00;16;14;16 - 00;16;17;14
Monica Johnson
How do you how do you enjoy zine club so far as a member?
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Fred Rinne
It’s nice. I like I like to get surprised. You know something, I’m also well, I like to see what’s going on, what people are doing and it’s it’s I like to get a broad spectrum. You never know where it’s coming from next. And that that’s. That’s my favorite thing, really. I used to like that with with radio, like a lot of my friends actually, and some band mates as well
00;16;41;25 - 00;17;10;12
Fred Rinne
were in college radio for a long time, which it says as a genre it’s almost going extinct now because of the Internet radio, although WFMU rules, but, anyway. Yeah, but so I, I kind of got really a I really enjoyed that because you turn it on, you wouldn’t know what the hell was going to happen next, you know, And that, that, you know, classical jazz, free jazz.
00;17;10;12 - 00;17;19;03
Fred Rinne
God knows what you know. Yeah. You know, that’s, that’s kind of how how media ought to be in my book, you know?
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Monica Johnson
I like that. I like thinking that, like Booklyn Zine Club is sort of like college radio where you just don’t know what you’re going to get, but you’re open to the experience. And that’s cool, I hope I hope that’s how it feels to to most of the people that are members.
00;17;33;23 - 00;17;44;25
Fred Rinne
They should. And if not, they should really take a good deep look in the mirror and reassess themselves. So, there.
00;17;44;28 - 00;18;24;02
Marshall Weber
So with looking in the mirror in mind, Fred, Im going to ask you to take a good deep look in the mirror and you have an entire audience and your work is shown fairly frequently at all these museums and libraries and classrooms, and it’s very painterly. So in a way, sometimes I use the word illuminated manuscript because you’re one of the few people who hand paints unique books, not just in the United States, but really in the world.
00;18;24;04 - 00;18;38;25
Marshall Weber
And so I’m wondering how you see yourself as a painter, and I wondering how you see yourself as someone who primarily paints artists books and what that feels like. And what’s that like for you?
00;18;38;27 - 00;19;09;20
Fred Rinne
Yeah, well, I guess with painting itself, it’s kind of like a sculpture in a way, as opposed to graphics. And so there’s just a certain physical hand-eye kind of deal, you know, you’re going straight, straight to your hands and your body is kind of in this dance, I guess you could say, to get this thing out, just sort of become a machine.
00;19;09;20 - 00;19;35;14
Fred Rinne
Yeah, well, if you listen to techno anyway, if you’re painting, I think we’re painting. I think, yeah, maybe your feelings come out more directly or not mediated as much than other other forms, but I don’t know. I mean, printmaking. I, I’ve always wanted to do printmaking, but I never had that time to lay into it, you know, because it’s a hell of a thing.
00;19;35;14 - 00;20;04;27
Fred Rinne
But I’ve done a few, you know, like silkscreens and things like, like that. I sort of wound up settling on, you know, acrylic, acrylic on paper and kind of developed that technique where you mix a little bit of gesso in there so the pages won’t stick together. And so, you know, you sort of get get a technique going that that works for you.
00;20;04;27 - 00;20;27;19
Fred Rinne
And I like to see how, what, what I can do with an image. I’ll get an idea and I have to just kind of let a picture form in my mind and then I shoot for it. And it may be what I had in mind. It may not be. Sometimes I’ll I’ll be going at it and I get down for the night and look at it go, Wow, this looks like crap.
00;20;27;20 - 00;20;43;11
Fred Rinne
You know, I’ll fix it tomorrow and then the next day I like, Well, actually, you know, I think I’m just going to leave it in time, you know? You know, so like, knowing when to stop is is is as important as knowing where to start. It’s weird.
00;20;43;19 - 00;21;22;21
Marshall Weber
We were talking about how important humor is to your work, especially because in the field in general, I think I don't know. There's not a lot of humor done in artists books. But very often people see you as like you're the humorist in the field, and I think that’s kind of interesting. I always try to have one of your books if I’m doing a big selection or a show or something like that, just because, you know there’s a lot of work to be done along the lines of like the environment and racism and like you said, inequity and, you know, anti-war stuff
00;21;23;11 - 00;21;48;00
Marshall Weber
and and you provide or you know, you have very progressive politics and ah, you know, I was me and Monica were talking before about your anti-war kind of protests. You’re, you know, the the Slammy Windshield antiwar protest crew. So tell us about the humor. Tell us about like how how you use humor.
00;21;48;03 - 00;22;18;08
Fred Rinne
Well, I actually you know, it’s funny because I remember one anti-war demonstration that we got dressed up as the bring down gen, you included, and and we were like dressed up as like kind of decrepit 1970s glam rejects. And we had signs, you know, like, like just kind of knock off anti-war signs like, war is like nowhere, man, you know, we’re standing right
00;22;18;10 - 00;22;54;09
Fred Rinne
And like, it was cool because people like, we sort of were entertaining the the anti-war troops and people really got up on that. And there’s this huge demonstration Market Street, which is full of people. And it was kind of like the mascots gone bad, you know, demonstrating, I think our friend Charlie had like this weird donkeys, full donkeys head, realistic donkeys head mask on, you know, and god damn, you know, just that that sort of feeling of, I guess, kind of a solidarity thing.
00;22;54;11 - 00;23;24;13
Fred Rinne
You know. But, yeah, you know, just kind of then, you know, the idea I think is towards victory of any struggle, morale is imperative. So, you know, basically we must maintain discipline and morale at all times. So, you know, to to glean the fruit of the victory from the pride for the broad masses of the lumpen.
00;23;24;16 - 00;24;00;20
Monica Johnson
So one thing that we say a lot and probably in a lot of podcasts, is that something in Booklyn history is that artist books are like children’s books for adults and there are certain artists who really help us bring that point home very clearly. And your your unique artist books really do that. And I don’t know if you know this, Fred, but there’s this one really beautiful moment in our recent history where we were hosting a classroom of about 20 high schoolers.
00;24;00;20 - 00;24;31;25
Monica Johnson
I think they were juniors or seniors, and we were doing lots of like bookmaking things, but we were also were showing them an array of different takes on artists books. And I have this wonderful photo. Maybe if I’m with it later, I’ll post the photo within the podcast notes. But it’s Marshall reading, kind of like reading a bedtime story style, like page by page, reading a trip to the liquor store by Fred Rinne.
00;24;32;10 - 00;25;08;19
Monica Johnson
To this and seriously, like, rapt audience of not children. And it was, it was so won- It was it was so, everyone was just so quiet and listening. I’m like, this is exactly the point that we’re trying to make. But another thing that, you know, Marshall and I have been talking about a lot is like, you know, tactile learning, especially in the context of all the education programing that that Booklyn has been doing, in particular with kids who, you know, kids ages like 7 to 10 who probably maybe not ready for a Fred Rinne book, but who knows?
00;25;08;19 - 00;25;39;14
Monica Johnson
I don’t know. Maybe they are. But your your books, when I hold them, like I have my own experience with your books, that that is that is mine and I love it. And one of them is that when I held it, I felt kind of that, you know, that that alive feeling like maybe as kids, we all have an experience with a book where the where the book becomes its own life and you’re holding a you’re holding a possiblity or something.
00;25;39;14 - 00;26;09;09
Monica Johnson
And and more than anything, it made me want to make books and I’m I’m really serious. Like, I still have like a book that I’m working towards that’s like it’s not an imitation of a Fred Rinne book, but I’m kind of chasing the the flame that I felt when I when I read your books. And I wondered if there’s like some more filling in the blanks of like how I’m meeting the book and how you see that play within the landscape of what Booklyn does.
00;26;09;09 - 00;26;14;22
Monica Johnson
And yeah, and tactile learning and, and children’s books for adults.
00;26;14;24 - 00;26;39;06
Marshall Weber
Well, I think it’s there’s something about the painted book, like Fred paints the whole book. He paints the covers, he paints the text, he’s he’s done a lot of different styles with mixing screenprint and painting, but primarily and and over the past few years been doing this very interesting cutting in the letters, you know, painting a color field and then cutting, you know, painting letters around it.
00;26;39;09 - 00;26;53;23
Marshall Weber
Fred’s books, they are completely handmade. They’re not bound perfectly. They’re there is like everything is painted, they’re heavier because there’s a lot of paint. It’s not like a you know, not like a little wash or something like this. A lot
00;26;53;23 - 00;26;54;04
Monica Johnson
of paint.
00;26;54;11 - 00;27;20;29
Marshall Weber
There’s more paint than there is paper. And what you’re talking about, Monica, is is, is is that that tactile feel the weight, kind of the chalky ness of that gesso acrylic mix that Fred is talking about and the fact that it’s really like, you know, it’s not a printed book, it’s it’s not a I mean, Fred has done editions of, you know, painted books.
00;27;20;29 - 00;27;49;17
Marshall Weber
He’s also done other books that are printed. But I think the the, the unique painted books are they’re just chunky, you know, it’s a it is a thing. And then you can go one step further and say it’s like, yeah, it’s a it’s a living. It’s a living thing. And I love unique books and I love painting. So and you know, and I knew Fred as a musician and a performer and a painter, and I knew he, you know, because Fred’s writing is like his painting.
00;27;49;17 - 00;28;14;07
Marshall Weber
It’s very expressionistic. And he’s got a persona that is always there. Like Monica asked me, you know, I’m scared to meet Fred because what if he’s not like my imagination, who he is, which is just simply a projection of his work? And I said, Fred is a projection of his work.
00;28;14;09 - 00;28;15;11
Fred Rinne
And Fred's work.
00;28;15;11 - 00;28;17;25
Marshall Weber
Is a projection of Fred.
00;28;17;27 - 00;28;19;27
Fred Rinne
But there's no.
00;28;19;29 - 00;28;21;16
Marshall Weber
There's no disappointment there.
00;28;21;22 - 00;28;23;05
Fred Rinne
There are none.
00;28;23;12 - 00;28;30;22
Monica Johnson
I am for the record, I am I am very pleased to meet you're fulfilling everything or anything I could imagine.
00;28;30;25 - 00;28;32;19
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Oh, my God.
00;28;32;21 - 00;28;42;24
Marshall Weber
We had thought that maybe you would read a book or two. Fred and I had mentioned that to you, and I wondered if you're prepared to do that.
00;28;42;26 - 00;29;20;08
Fred Rinne
What I’ve got right now is, okay, I did a website through other people’s pixels dot com, and so it’s frinne.com. And so there I have a pile of them done, the newer stuff, so I can read off this book One Night in NYC. And I think this is a gripping news story that that I did a very short book about one night in New York City. Okay. Mercer Street, New York City, May 6th, 2009.
00;29;20;10 - 00;29;57;18
Fred Rinne
Okay. And then in the club Sub Mercer, the after party for the Mets Costume Institute gala and there’s kind of gala looking people. Okay, Kiefer Sutherland and his date attend, and there’s Kiefer with kind of a grumpy looking much younger lady. And then Brooke Shields and her fashion designer date Jack McCollough is there and Brooke is holding a clutch.
00;29;57;20 - 00;30;28;14
Fred Rinne
Okay. And he’s in a black T-shirt. And then next, everybody was wasted and yeah, they’re all standing around drinking, talking, and their eyes are getting red. The next one is Jack McCulloch jostles or bumps or pushes Brooke Shields. So you can’t tell, there’s a controversy there. Okay. And and Brooke falls down, but not all the way. Okay.
00;30;28;16 - 00;31;08;03
Fred Rinne
The spectacle of the fall of Brooke causes rage and derangement in the mind of Kiefer Sutherland. Kiefie, Kiefie goes cuckoo. He head butts Jack McCullagh, breaking Jack’s nose to defend the honor of Brooke Shields. And he’s he’s bobblehead bumping him pow-pow PTOW and that’s it. The Northeast has just a rumpled looking Kiefer leaving the place and somebody else leaving and that’s that that’s the end of that particular one.
00;31;08;05 - 00;31;08;29
Fred Rinne
Let's see, we have.
00;31;09;06 - 00;31;24;25
Monica Johnson
I want to say I’ve been reading, I’ve been looking, I’ve been reading along. As you’ve been reading, I went to your website. I found the book. And so I’m like, it kind of reminds me of the, like deep pandemic moments where like there were all these online children’s book readers, maybe the still are, or they read children’s books digitally.
00;31;24;28 - 00;31;27;04
Monica Johnson
And I'm like, That's what I'm doing with this one.
00;31;27;05 - 00;31;54;04
Fred Rinne
I think it would work as a red book. I mean, you know, read it behind a wall of vinyl sleep. It’s all there. This guy knows a friend of mine who has the coolest record store in Ventura, California. And this guy is like, I don’t know, I never met him. My friend met him in Ventura, California,
00;31;54;04 - 00;32;23;13
Fred Rinne
And he this guy is like, obsessed with records. It’s like totally I mean, his mind is rock and roll. And so he would come in with a big pile of dreams he’s written down and hand them to my friend who forward them to me. I said, This guy, dreams are just wacky. You got to check this out. So wind up doing a book behind the wall of vinyl Sleep about that, which I could start out with.
00;32;23;18 - 00;32;35;00
Fred Rinne
It’s just the dreams of Kevin Anderson, transcribed by Grady Bennion imagery that I did black and white.
00;32;35;03 - 00;32;45;12
Monica Johnson
But is this that we distributed? Because if this is the same one, it’s at the Atheneum of Music and Arts Library in La Jolla. Yeah.
00;32;45;15 - 00;32;46;06
Marshall Weber
That's true.
00;32;46;06 - 00;32;49;02
Monica Johnson
Yeah. Yeah. So that's where it is.
00;32;49;04 - 00;32;55;10
Marshall Weber
Yeah. That was a big double whammy for them. Art and music together. No brainer.
00;32;55;17 - 00;33;18;08
Fred Rinne
Yeah. This. Yeah, This is this guy’s dreams. I mean, he’s got I just pulled, I think, I think it’s ten of them off of him. 2/18/98, the police have a large cornfield surrounded. Gregg Allman is hiding out in it. An officer with a bullhorn is ordering him to come out. Suddenly he drives out of the cornfield.
00;33;18;10 - 00;33;46;16
Fred Rinne
He’s driving a van covered with paintings of skulls and tombstones, drinking a beer. He drives through the crowd of police. They jump aside. He escaped. And then Dan Quayle is riding and Dan Quayle is riding a bucking bronco in a rodeo. He gets thrown into the grandstands. I leave and walk to my car. In the parking lot is a 25 foot tall statue of Rocky Ericson.
00;33;46;18 - 00;34;18;09
Fred Rinne
What the hell? A T-Rex, oh, okay, 7/20/99. T-Rex is playing at my old elementary school auditorium and they are excellent. The set ends and the emcee comes up and tells us the move is going to play next. The curtain rises and on stage are four department store mannequins holding toy instruments. The crowd starts booing and throwing bottles.
00;34;18;12 - 00;34;46;27
Fred Rinne
Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. 9/11 Wow. 9/11/07 Okay, I’m staying at my friend’s Buddhist apartment in Old Town Ventura. The television has a news flash on it that Peter Fonda robbed a car wash in Reseda. And then uh, yeah, okay. Blue Oyster Cult and me are on the run from Russian agents. We are in the Midwest driving a muscle car up past fields of corn.
00;34;46;29 - 00;35;16;09
Fred Rinne
That’s a hell of a dream. I mean, really corn. Yeah. You know, some of them are really kind of inspiring. I, you know, this one here? I think this is the most inspirational. I’m really kind of really curious about maybe this this is a possibility for a performance. I’m in a group watching a club, watching a group called Spider Brain.
00;35;16;11 - 00;35;27;10
Fred Rinne
The lead singer just sings gibberish off a three by five cards on stage with them are people doing jumping jacks and slapping themselves in the face. That’s it.
00;35;27;12 - 00;35;34;09
Monica Johnson
What makes you, what drives you to make books? Do you do you know? Or is that a question that doesn’t even need to be answered?
00;35;34;11 - 00;36;10;22
Fred Rinne
I guess you kind of get an obsession about something or other and you just sort of got to got to get it out. You know, it’s kind of like, I don’t know. Yeah, I, I, I, I was, I did some art up north in Portland and the guy said, well, okay, I can I can’t pay much for this painting but I can do is, is, you know, give a small amount and also I can send you some records Id say okay that sounds cool because you know, they let me have a show there and it was nice.
00;36;10;22 - 00;36;20;17
Fred Rinne
This record store Turn, turn, turn in Portland. It’s really cool place. Smegma hangs out there so you know it’s good and.
00;36;20;19 - 00;36;21;03
Marshall Weber
That is a band.
00;36;21;03 - 00;36;45;28
Fred Rinne
They sent me a whole a whole - a whole box okay, a whole box of Pat Boone records. I mean, I’m not kidding. A whole box of Pat Boone records. I know. I There are horrible. You played them on, and you just get sick of it musically. It kind of saps you and makes you feel sicker and weaker listening to it.
00;36;46;00 - 00;37;08;09
Fred Rinne
I don't know. I just think something must be done, you know? It just. I don’t know. But. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I. Yeah, I guess it’s just how one reacts, I don’t know. It’s like, you know, you just remember these weird pieces of stuff that one kind of happens and I don’t know why those things stuck to me, but god, I don’t know.
00;37;08;09 - 00;37;09;18
Fred Rinne
It seems like it deserves wider circulation.
00;37;09;22 - 00;37;27;05
Monica Johnson
I kind of understand it. Like, do you, I mean, do you feel like having made all these books about these things that are not one type of thing, but as you describe them, like things that you just need to get out? Do you feel like you get them out and they’re like a little bit like before they were in you and now they’re outside you.
00;37;27;05 - 00;37;34;06
Monica Johnson
Are you or like, does it what what is the difference between the before and after of having made the book?
00;37;34;09 - 00;38;00;25
Fred Rinne
You know, I, I kind of feel I guess it feels kind of almost a sense of completion. I hate the word closure because it really doesn’t describe anything. But I guess there is kind of a sense of, you know, you’ve sort of maybe put the thing to bed or something. It’s you know, because you have a feeling that, you know, wow, something I should do something about this or with this or this is material.
00;38;00;25 - 00;38;28;07
Fred Rinne
Damn. Yeah. You know, Yeah, I think it’s like it’s like some science classes, you know, biology type classes at one time or other, and some teacher said there was some quote about some explorer botanist or something is up to his neck and freezing water bitten by leeches, you know, and he’s saying it’s all data. You know, it’s it’s it’s all it’s all good for something.
00;38;28;09 - 00;38;36;15
Fred Rinne
And I don’t know if he survived. But you know but yeah, it’s just one kind of I guess Yeah. Perspective you know.
00;38;36;17 - 00;39;06;01
Monica Johnson
Now that you’ve I mean now that we’re sort of thinking of it this way, there’s a there’s a new perspective I have on your work, which is not to put like a rationale in your own brain, but like I can kind of see these books as like the maybe that the data of life that didn’t find its application or something that they just like hung out in your head and they were you just, they were there and it was like, what, what's and what?
00;39;06;05 - 00;39;14;03
Monica Johnson
We make sense of things sometimes by making a book out of them and it sort of Yeah. Becomes its own sense, right? Once it’s done.
00;39;14;06 - 00;39;34;05
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny. I think I sort of have a attitude toward art or creating things or whatever. Like I just create the thing and it will find a home at some point, you know? And so this, this, these ideas or whatever will kind of come out in the wash.
00;39;34;12 - 00;40;07;02
Marshall Weber
You chronicle, you both chronicle real subcultures, but you also look at pop culture through the lens of subculture or underground culture, you know, So there’s a critical element. But I also think you’re like kind of a little bit of a California artist. And I one thing I’ve always really amired about your books I’m I’m a really big fan about using techniques of vernaculars from different media.
00;40;07;04 - 00;40;43;06
Marshall Weber
and, you know, works on paper artists books and a lot of you’re like a lot of artists books and a lot of illustration and a lot of graphics are very like, you know, straight on, like almost a theatrical stage. You’re just looking and the stuff happens to you across, you know, it’s almost like the horizon line is always present across the, the kind of horizontal composition of the book. But you frequently use cinematic angles like you, you do illustration lines from below, from above.
00;40;43;09 - 00;41;06;29
Marshall Weber
You were doing drone illustrations, you know, Godzilla illustrations long before drones. You even did a book about drones. But can you talk to me about, like, how you paint with that knowledge of like three dimensionality? Because I think it’s an important it goes back to what you were talking about. Sculpture I think is really interesting, the kind of that cinematic eye.
00;41;07;01 - 00;41;36;04
Fred Rinne
Yeah, it’s kind of like, well, I guess because really, you know, film and video and whatever is kind of how I guess it’s, you know, informs how we see the world and just getting outside and bopping around. You really have kind of a different, different angle on stuff. And it’s good to just kind of import that into words.
00;41;36;07 - 00;42;07;20
Fred Rinne
You know, it clashes with the book structure to an extent. It’s kind of good to challenge that structure to the greatest extent possible, really, you know, to see how far out you can get with just, you know, a different whammo on on, on a view, you know, and just, you know, sort of doing 3-D paper engineering and stuff like, like, like, you know, pop up books and stuff which are good to actually as an artist as well.
00;42;07;23 - 00;42;41;03
Fred Rinne
But I don’t know, it’s it’s a lot of fun as just looking at this one. Okay. Yeah. A trip to the liquor store, actually. And I just kind of look at that. Yeah, but part of it, too, is, is just sort of like your own personal experiences, your own visual experiences, I guess, you know, where, like, this thing is about kind of their sets in Los Angeles, you know?
00;42;41;03 - 00;43;07;26
Fred Rinne
So I start out, I’m up in the mountains with a bunch of coyotes, which really happened out of Chatsworth, California. Me and my friend went out. We tried to go night hike and and we got out of the car and in about 15 feet, suddenly we hear what sounds like 60 coyotes screaming bloody murder. It sounds like they’ve hauled a big animal down and are screaming blood. Its scared the shit out of us.
00;43;07;28 - 00;43;33;07
Fred Rinne
We got the hell out of there. But I mean, it was clear that that they they rule, not humans. You know, at night you really kind of had that that feeling in. And so you’re up high looking down on everything which is is just totally perspective like you know, in the mountains or in the hills, especially at night you’re very disoriented, you know.
00;43;33;07 - 00;43;41;17
Fred Rinne
And so I don't know how to relate that to a flat surface. You know, it's fun.
00;43;41;19 - 00;44;07;19
Marshall Weber
Yeah. You know, my one of my favorite examples and we mentioned it earlier, a trip to the liquor store, one of my but the point of view as you’re looking up from the ground at the Sol of the main protagonist shoe as he runs along and I just flashed to that book and it’s interesting, your, your style is almost contagious.
00;44;07;21 - 00;44;28;13
Marshall Weber
So I wrote this description of that book for our website. I just want to read that real quick because I just felt like I was using your voice and this book. It was really interesting too. This book went off to some some private dealer really liked it and they took it and they kind of never did anything with it.
00;44;28;13 - 00;44;59;18
Marshall Weber
And years later I realized, where is that book? And I went and I got it back from them after. That’s like kind of pulling a tooth out. And like the book had been away for years and I was like, Wow, that’s crazy. And essentially two weeks later it got sold to Tufts University. But when I first got it back, I looked at it and I was kind of rolling on the floor and the description I wrote was essentially Fred Rinne, our nation’s best loved narrator of white trash Americana shenanigans.
00;44;59;20 - 00;45;09;14
Marshall Weber
This book has it all Canine cops, Tar Pits, the Little Smoke, a treasure for any library or collection.
00;45;09;16 - 00;45;11;24
Fred Rinne
Yeah, yeah.
00;45;11;27 - 00;45;20;28
Monica Johnson
You know, when I read that I also was like, you channeled, you know, Bill Hader’s character, Stefon on SNL.
00;45;20;29 - 00;45;21;19
Fred Rinne
All right.
00;45;21;19 - 00;45;24;27
Monica Johnson
Wrong crowd, maybe, But but like the you know
00;45;24;29 - 00;45;25;11
Fred Rinne
Yeah.
00;45;25;13 - 00;45;34;23
Monica Johnson
he’s like, this club has it all, and it lists like three anyway. And I was like, maybe you channeled someone else there too, but great description nonetheless.
00;45;34;25 - 00;46;02;11
Marshall Weber
Yeah, you have to be open. I mean, for me, it was like, I think Fred’s books are always kind of a satire on everything, including themselves. And so it’s like that description is a satire about the whole bookselling business, as much of it is a description of the book, but only the book allows that to happen. It’s like this essential culture bomb.
00;46;02;14 - 00;46;07;11
Monica Johnson
Fred, do you have anything like that you would call a children's book?
00;46;07;13 - 00;46;14;24
Marshall Weber
You did one for me. We did an edition of ten, I recall for Thorn.
00;46;14;27 - 00;46;16;28
Fred Rinne
Right? Right. Yeah.
00;46;16;28 - 00;46;19;25
Marshall Weber
That took a long time.
00;46;19;27 - 00;46;47;03
Fred Rinne
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, it was fun there. I did. Yeah. The imagery on that was from a trip I took was a couple of trips I took hitchhiking, were meet a friend, went to. Well, we drove across country to New York and then then hitchhiked back. We got a ride to actually was Rhode Island.
00;46;47;06 - 00;47;16;07
Fred Rinne
At this one place we stopped at with a shattered billboard was occupied by Jodie Foster’s army. Actually, at one point, there was this trip we took where this place had been just kicked apart, just like and and all this graffiti was spray painted on this shattered kicked apart building, but cowboy shithole and Jodie Foster’s army.
00;47;16;09 - 00;47;18;23
Fred Rinne
And so we said, Arizona, this.
00;47;18;23 - 00;47;21;15
Monica Johnson
Is a band, right? Yeah. Yeah, this is a band.
00;47;21;17 - 00;47;48;15
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, they were inspired by John Hinckley. Tried to shoot Reagan and and he was said to have been inspired by Jodie Foster, and he did it to impress her. So I guess we were watching the taxi driver, you know, And so. So this band calls itself Jodie Foster’s Army, you know. We’ll impress you, Jodie.
00;47;48;21 - 00;47;49;11
Fred Rinne
And what.
00;47;49;11 - 00;47;50;12
Marshall Weber
The heck? Okay.
00;47;50;14 - 00;47;51;18
Fred Rinne
So that was if I.
00;47;51;18 - 00;48;18;28
Marshall Weber
I gotta break in here, because I remember that trip. That was when we were on our way to New Orleans because we wanted to go to the Republican Convention, because you had printed a thousand posters that said crack heads for Bush all over the country. And then we actually went to the Republican convention and we posted those everywhere.
00;48;19;00 - 00;48;49;09
Marshall Weber
And we had all these conversations with Republicans about crack heads for Bush. And yeah, it was hilarious. We met one kid at the Republican convention there it was in New Orleans, which is insane. Yeah. And and and and and and he had totally the opposite response. I remember we would pass them out to people and we’d also put them up when we passed it out to this one guy, he was like a Ken doll.
00;48;49;11 - 00;48;57;11
Marshall Weber
And he said, Yeah, this is totally true because George Bush will keep the crack coming.
00;48;57;14 - 00;49;01;23
Fred Rinne
Because he was glad
00;49;01;25 - 00;49;09;24
Marshall Weber
He was glad that crackheads were voting for Bush. And he said, Are you guys working for the crack heads?
00;49;09;27 - 00;49;36;25
Fred Rinne
And yeah, I mean, now now if you did that, you’d probably get on the the anti-terrorism watch list, no fly list, no anything list. I don’t know what or just it’s got pretty. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Actually that that’s probably I know it was pretty, pretty pretty leaden these days.
00;49;36;27 - 00;49;53;16
Marshall Weber
Okay so listen to this. The description for the poster at the Destroy Art Gallery says that it’s a crack heads for Bush 88 poster, 1980 Rare. It’s so it’s rare, Fred. It’s hard to get now. It’s a rare poster.
00;49;53;17 - 00;49;54;27
Fred Rinne
Oh, no, it's mint.
00;49;55;00 - 00;49;57;22
Marshall Weber
It's a mint condition, though. Who's James Stark?
00;49;57;22 - 00;50;02;23
Fred Rinne
Wow. Do you know? I don't know.
00;50;02;25 - 00;50;07;11
Marshall Weber
I bet it's that kid. I bet it's that same kid. It's that same kid.
00;50;07;13 - 00;50;38;10
Fred Rinne
It’s like, Yeah, we go. There we go. Yeah, probably, you know? Yeah. It’s strange. You have, like, the. The ideologues and then the vast crowd that just doesn’t give a damn one way or other, you know? I just. I don’t know. It’s just they, they could go any which way politically or culturally, I guess. Yeah. Well you know, is that as long as long as the the Met gala keeps happening, I guess
00;50;38;12 - 00;50;42;03
Fred Rinne
people feel like it’s still okay for everything.
00;50;42;06 - 00;50;56;11
Monica Johnson
I’m going to. I’m going to totally derail myself. I need to clarify something. I almost said your full name. I realize that maybe we’ve been saying your your name wrong this whole time. How do you say your name, Fred? Your whole first and last?
00;50;56;11 - 00;51;18;06
Fred Rinne
Well, let’s see Fred or Frederick full name. The last name would be pronounced Rinne-a. Kind of like that. It doesn’t translate. I mean, it’s Finnish. So everybody pronounces it differently, so. But yeah, okay. So it’s.
00;51;18;07 - 00;51;20;03
Monica Johnson
Flexible.
00;51;20;06 - 00;51;22;25
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just like we've.
00;51;22;25 - 00;51;28;19
Monica Johnson
Been saying, Rinn this whole time I took Marshall's, but I heard you say Rinne a couple of times.
00;51;28;19 - 00;51;29;18
Fred Rinne
Yeah.
00;51;29;20 - 00;51;30;18
Monica Johnson
I like it.
00;51;30;20 - 00;51;39;22
Fred Rinne
Anyway. Yeah, Yeah. It's one of those things that I think it means small hill or low mound of something. Something like that.
00;51;39;22 - 00;51;44;05
Monica Johnson
Google Translate says it. It means slope. That's what Google says.
00;51;44;05 - 00;52;12;23
Fred Rinne
Slope. All right. Okay, cool. Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s this slope of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s crazy. Yeah. When I was a kid, we were in Los Angeles and there was only five of them in the L.A. phonebook, which is. It’s like. Like the Tower of Babel of all phonebooks. I mean, it’s got every name, you know, it’s, it’s kind of like the book of God, really. You know, it just every surname you could imagine.
00;52;12;26 - 00;52;18;26
Marshall Weber
So one last question, and that is, what are you doing now, Fred? What's next?
00;52;20;14 - 00;52;49;14
Fred Rinne
I think that collaboration we’re talking about sounds like a winner or it’s a bread spirit soup. Now, I don’t see what happens there, but yeah, the imagery that the text seems to conjure up, which you wrote, you say it’s about the Velvet Revolution that happened, I guess back Well, you know, it seemed like these countries Czechoslovakia, now it’s Czech and Slovakia
00;52;52;10 - 00;53;11;21
Fred Rinne
Anyway, they’ve all, the Balkans have balkanized. It seems like there’s was freedom coming forth back in the nineties. That turns out to be just how you said it. Just it just they think, Oh yeah, right now I’m sorry. It’s just now the idea was that okay, the winners of the Cold War were just, just did it for the money, you know, just.
00;53;11;21 - 00;53;34;15
Fred Rinne
Yeah, just. That hasn't changed a bit. So. So here we are looking back on it. Wow. That was something else because they were supposed to celebrate the end of the Cold War in 1989 90, whenever the hell it was, you know. But wow, we won Triumph, Peace Dividend. Oh, my God, Everything’s going to be so cool. And now that lasted two weeks.
00;53;34;18 - 00;53;54;14
Fred Rinne
It just totally evaporated. And it was like it never happened. You know, the Cold War was like, what, 50 years longer? I mean, what I know said, poof, you know. So it’s yeah, it’s weird. I mean, history is surrealism. It’s just there’s no way around it anyway. It’s just going to be weird.
00;53;54;14 - 00;54;16;28
Monica Johnson
I’ve really had a wonderful time talking with you, Fred, and I can’t. I don’t know. I almost feel like the ending is irrelevant now and completion is irrelevant. I’m just happy to have met you and thank you for talking with us. Yeah, I need nothing.
00;54;17;00 - 00;54;18;07
Marshall Weber
Yeah, there is no end.
00;54;18;09 - 00;54;28;27
Fred Rinne
Right? Well, I can see that. You know, the work has completed any stage of its production, something like that. So. Yeah, like that.
00;54;28;29 - 00;54;33;08
Monica Johnson
Maybe it's like there's no ending. There are just pee breaks.
00;54;33;10 - 00;54;55;21
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Absolutely. I think it’s time for a nice try. One of these IPAs over here and see how they’re doing. And there’s a thing called Laughing Monk Brewery over here, and they’ve got that’s what’s gotten me through the pandemic and being isolated and all from everybody. You know, with COVID, I never caught it.
00;54;55;21 - 00;55;03;24
Fred Rinne
I was just hiding out. But these microbreweries deliver, okay? And so, yeah, that's what saved. Saved my bacon.
00;55;03;24 - 00;55;04;19
Monica Johnson
What more do you need?
00;55;04;24 - 00;55;09;01
Fred Rinne
Saved my bacon. Well, yeah, I
00;55;09;03 - 00;55;10;01
Marshall Weber
Not say goodbye.
00;55;10;01 - 00;55;12;11
Fred Rinne
Thank you very much. Yeah. All right.
00;55;12;11 - 00;55;14;11
Monica Johnson
Thanks Fred.
00;55;14;13 - 00;55;16;19
Fred Rinne
Thank y'all. Later.
00;55;16;21 - 00;55;22;06
Monica Johnson
Wow, that was. That was a trip.
00;55;22;09 - 00;55;27;00
Marshall Weber
Yeah, a trip to the liquor store.
00;55;27;02 - 00;55;51;01
Monica Johnson
Yeah, man, that. So that was Fred Rinne after all this time, getting to talk with him was pretty great. Uh, I feel. I feel so tickled, and yet I feel a little distracted by what our normal structure would be, where I would do a closing, because I feel like I just entered into a Fred Rinne book and forgot my way back.
00;55;51;04 - 00;55;53;01
Monica Johnson
Yeah. How are you feeling, Marshall?
00;55;53;01 - 00;56;18;17
Marshall Weber
Well, I. I love that Fred is such a singular character in the world of publishing and artists, books and libraries. He’s he’s like kind of mythical, you know? I just recall the times that I’ve been gone to book fairs with Fred. He often appears at the Codex Foundation book fair with us every other year in February or March or whatever.
00;56;18;19 - 00;56;43;18
Marshall Weber
And he’s he’s just like a character from one of his books stepping into the place and he’s he’s, well, beloved and and I love that, you know, he provides this comic relief for like the entire field and he’s inseparable from his artwork. There’s such continuity. It’s like he drew himself.
00;56;43;21 - 00;56;44;05
Monica Johnson
Yeah.
00;56;44;06 - 00;57;11;27
Marshall Weber
It's like a his his whole life. It's rare that you see artists really immerse themselves in their work and you can't really tell the difference. AAnd it’s kind of a healthy thing. I’m thinking of like Candace Hicks has, you know, a good part of her work is all about her personal experiences. And I think with Fred, he just lives in this different universe that kind of walks around with him.
00;57;12;00 - 00;57;36;16
Monica Johnson
You know, I feel I feel the continuum of what that means. I feel a little bit like there’s, you know, the myth of pan with the flute and chanting people to follow him into the forest or whatever. I feel a little bit like enchanted by the journey. Yeah, in a way that sort of spun me around. But not, not unpleasantly.
00;57;36;19 - 00;57;44;03
Monica Johnson
Yeah. What more can we add to this? Aside from just appreciating what space we entered.
00;57;44;05 - 00;57;50;01
Marshall Weber
And just listening to the interview again and again and again.
00;57;50;03 - 00;58;06;27
Monica Johnson
I really love the idea when, when, when Fred was reading his books out loud and it just it made me think of those like, stories, you know, that at least as a child, for me, you’d get these books and then you get a record and you play the record and it would give you a little ding and then you’d turn the page.
00;58;06;27 - 00;58;20;07
Monica Johnson
And I feel like there’s such a nice opportunity, especially with the way his website is laid out, where every single book is inventoried page by page and you can spend hours just going through and reading yourself the books.
00;58;20;10 - 00;58;21;17
Marshall Weber
Yeah.
00;58;21;19 - 00;58;33;12
Monica Johnson
And just, I don't know, his background in music at all sort of feels like that's a wonderful project. I want Fred Rinne to be on a record reading me a book, and then I can go through them on his website, page by page.
00;58;33;15 - 00;58;37;23
Marshall Weber
Yeah. Or even on our website. That would be optimum entertainment.
00;58;37;25 - 00;58;38;17
Fred Rinne
Yeah.
00;58;38;20 - 00;59;09;14
Monica Johnson
Yeah. I’m just going to close us out and say thanks to everyone for listening and for joining us for another episode of Booklyn Calling. Check out our show notes for more details and for lots of ways to view Fred’s work on his website and on ours. And as always, if you’re a librarian or a curator at an educational institution, anywhere in the world and you’re interested in collecting Fred’s work or other works like it, you can always email us at hello@booklyn.org
00;59;09;20 - 00;59;52;19
Monica Johnson
It’s like Brooklyn, but no R And you can check out our entire collection at Booklyn.org, and we’ll see you next time. This podcast was made possible in part by funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and in partnership with the City Council and from individual donors to Brooklyn, Inc. You can support this podcast by making a donation at Booklyn dot org slash donate.
Monica Johnson
I'm Monica Johnson with Marshall Weber and this is Booklyn calling.
00;00;23;23 - 00;00;52;01
Monica Johnson
Welcome, welcome to our show Booklyn Calling, where we talk about artists, libraries and social justice. We are Monica and Marshall, your hosts, and we’re also both artists who head up Booklyn, inc. an arts nonprofit located in Brooklyn, New York, on the un-ceded land of the Munsee Lenape people. And we created Booklyn Calling to amplify voices in the artist book field and to explore art making as a tool for community engagement and for social change.
00;00;52;03 - 00;01;24;18
Monica Johnson
And today, our fabulous guest is Fred Rinne. Hi, Fred. Hello there. You are a San Francisco based urban folk artist who uses found materials outsider esthetics and your unique painting, drawing and writing style to create an astounding, astounding artist books that expand and then explode all preconceptions of both the book arts and cultural critique. Fred documents skewed underground worlds that few of us have been cursed or privileged to encounter with an equally disturbing perspective.
00;01;24;21 - 00;01;55;20
Monica Johnson
Fred is also a musician and is a member of the band National Disgrace, and I think several others, as I’m learning and we at Booklyn have worked with Fred since our organization’s inception in 1999, and Marshall and Fred’s relationship goes back even further. Fred is a super prolific creator of over 100 unique artist books. I want to fact check that it might even be way more and has been collected at institutions all across the country and the world.
00;01;55;25 - 00;02;17;10
Monica Johnson
Welcome, Fred Rinne to our show. Marshall and I had a really nice conversation right before we hopped on, and we’ve been sort of reminiscing about, you know, Marshall and I both spent a long time living in San Francisco, not knowing each other whatsoever, but during the same time period. And so we were kind of talking about your relationship, your identity, your relationship to San Francisco.
00;02;17;12 - 00;02;24;07
Monica Johnson
Do you guys want to start about talking, start off by talking about your relationship, where you met, which I believe was in San Francisco in the 1980s.
00;02;24;13 - 00;02;51;14
Fred Rinne
Well, it is in the inky past. There was something called Club Nine that was kind of a combination disco kind of scene downstairs and a bunch of art installations upstairs. And somebody told me about that. And I go in and talk to some somebody there about having an installation and says, Yeah, sure, no problem. And I get back and talk to my friend,
00;02;51;14 - 00;03;12;21
Fred Rinne
I said that this guy I talked to, he was in a business suit and he wasn't an asshole. I couldn't believe it. So it turns out to be Marshall. So it's like, Holy crap, it was the best. Oh, yeah, We had a great time there. We go upstairs and plug our stuff into the next kind of these little rooms, you know, and it's just.
00;03;12;21 - 00;03;13;28
Fred Rinne
Just crank.
00;03;14;01 - 00;03;18;21
Monica Johnson
So. So you guys met at a disco and.
00;03;18;24 - 00;03;18;24
Fred Rinne
We met at a disco.
00;03;19;29 - 00;03;29;14
Monica Johnson
And then. And now you make collaborative artist books together. That's what. What's between that? What? What transpired?
00;03;29;18 - 00;03;55;05
Fred Rinne
Well, it well, it's like the lyrics of that song back then, I was looking around the room and it was getting really strange. And then as soon as I knew it, I began to change. I flap my arms and proceeded to cluck. Look at me. I'm a disco duck.
00;03;55;07 - 00;03;57;15
Marshall Weber
Yeah, I remember that.
00;03;57;17 - 00;03;58;21
Fred Rinne
Yeah, it started the whole thing off, but it was just.
00;04;00;04 - 00;04;03;03
Marshall Weber
It was just what it was like.
00;04;03;06 - 00;04;04;26
Fred Rinne
Yeah, but we played.
00;04;04;26 - 00;04;08;10
Marshall Weber
Music together for a long time before we made books.
00;04;08;12 - 00;04;38;17
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Yeah. He, he had one show we had with them. National Disgrace. We were twanging away on stage and I look over and Marshall’s got this giant kind of decrepit fur coat on and a pig mask. So he kind of looks like some mutant penguin, and he’s doing some sort of wild, gyrating disco dance. And the fur is literally flying off in chunks into the audience.
00;04;38;19 - 00;04;41;21
Fred Rinne
And it was such a sight.
00;04;41;24 - 00;04;44;18
Marshall Weber
Marshall. Those days.
00;04;44;20 - 00;05;09;18
Fred Rinne
We were hanging out in Berkeley and somebody said, Yeah, you know, a friend of mine was at a melted record party in New Jersey. And I said, Oh, what? They just played melted records all night. I said, shit, let’s give that a try. And so we did. And that was our vocalist. So instead of a vocalist, we just played Melted Records and.
00;05;09;21 - 00;05;18;03
Monica Johnson
Melted records like you, you melt them and then you still try to put them on a turntable and play them? So it’s kind of like a wavey record? Is that what that means, okay.
00;05;18;19 - 00;05;21;06
Fred Rinne
Yeah, Yeah, totally.
00;05;21;09 - 00;05;21;24
Monica Johnson
That’s a thing. And I know that now.
00;05;23;19 - 00;05;44;04
Fred Rinne
You have to kind of tie the arm down. Cause once, it just flip right off it, you know? But it’s, what happens, is you get like a focus on that song. It just kind of kind of knocks into this one groove that really defines the entire sound. So you take like a Peter Frampton record. Okay,
00;05;44;04 - 00;06;06;25
Fred Rinne
He had this one song, I’m in You, You’e in Me, and all this song that if you melted, okay, you got to get a tape somewhere where Peter Framptons in the background just going, You’re in. You’re in your in. Holy shit, I mean, how do you top that? You just can’t, you know.
00;06;07;00 - 00;06;10;25
Marshall Weber
When did the book start for you, Fred? Because you were doing band books?
00;06;10;26 - 00;06;36;04
Fred Rinne
Yeah. I’m trying to remember what the first one was, and man, it’s, well, let’s see. I had, I had a project for a - I took a printmaking class. It was actually a bookbinding class. I barely got in, too. I mean, the teacher looked at my stuff and kind of like, Oh, okay, if somebody else cancels, they did, so I got in.
00;06;36;06 - 00;06;40;01
Fred Rinne
Anyways, so.
00;06;40;02 - 00;06;44;04
Monica Johnson
It was kind of on a whim, you know, that you got into this.
00;06;44;06 - 00;07;19;01
Fred Rinne
I know like, I kind of, you know, thought the hard won battle of learning how to do this, this, you know, technical stuff, you know, which I don’t know, some of which I got, some of which took a lot it took a lot of improvement, couple of my books had to be rebound once they got there. I heard that people looked at them said, oh, Jesus, well, we have to send this to somebody who could sew. Anyway, I used to write for these underground publications and then my friends started something called Filth magazine.
00;07;19;04 - 00;07;27;24
Fred Rinne
So yeah, I was on the staff of a filth, you know, so you can go to a show like you were a reporter, you know. So yes.
00;07;27;28 - 00;07;34;07
Monica Johnson
What was Filth Magazine, what what did Filth Magazine report on.
00;07;34;09 - 00;08;03;08
Fred Rinne
Kind of a culture scene? You know, it sort of had whatever people were interested in. Somebody covered music, somebody else covered art a little bit. Mainly, just weird, weird, ugly, horrible culture stuff. I guess it was kind of a culture critique mag centered around Oakland and San Francisco. So anyway, I wrote this article about all the bands I had been in called All My Bands,
00;08;03;08 - 00;08;31;03
Fred Rinne
and then so sort of like at this class that I was taking a couple of years later, that kind of made that my class project to get that. So I ink jeted it, found some decent paper and then sewed up a bunch. So I went up with this edition. I forget 25 or 30 of them or something, and that was kind of my first book, one of the only multiples actually I’ve ever done everything else
00;08;31;03 - 00;08;57;14
Fred Rinne
was hand done -What year, fred?- I did this. Oh, man, that was yeah, 90-something. Back then I was trying to get a job. I remember being in an office downtown and some skyscraper and Im getting along okay. And in the application the guy looks at it, you know, and he says, Well, Mr. Rhyne, what did you do between 1983 and 2000?
00;08;57;16 - 00;09;28;05
Fred Rinne
Or something like that, and I just was completely blank, I guess. It just yeah, I couldn’t come up with anything, right? I think I said I don’t do anything. I just hang around, you know? I don’t know. But I remember this one I did I think the first one I did, cant remember what the contents of it was, but I remember I, I found it with a shot period jeans that I had.
00;09;28;05 - 00;09;49;05
Fred Rinne
I just glued that on to the uh, the cardboard and shipped that off to Marshall and and then sometime later said, okay, that’s, that’s sold. Do another one. So I just kept doing it and that’s still at it.
00;09;49;08 - 00;10;10;04
Monica Johnson
I feel like I’ve heard that a lot in Booklyn’s history, just talking to people that somebody will send Marshall a book or hand Marshall a book and then it sells. And then Marshall just says, Can you do another one? And that’s kind of the artistic career arc of like so many people’s experience within Booklyn.
00;10;10;06 - 00;10;10;27
Fred Rinne
Yeah.
00;10;10;29 - 00;10;20;22
Monica Johnson
And is that sort of the progression of like you did another one and you did another one and then you decided to do one together, or how did you start like making them together?
00;10;20;24 - 00;11;06;18
Fred Rinne
That sort of started pretty early on, as I recall. But yeah, we just kind of pitch ideas back and forth, you know, and whatnot. So it becomes, I don’t know, it’s kind of weird. It’s almost like, like, like an idea factory starts happening, you know, like, like what about, you know, Yeah, like, okay, the the of current event political stuff as science fiction, you know, and just, just, you know, just kind of take this particular chunk, maybe this piece of history like we we collaborated on one called bedtime for Bremer talking about L Paul Bremer, who was like the supposed to be the viceroy of Iraq, put in there by by Cheney and Bush.
00;11;06;20 - 00;11;11;06
Fred Rinne
Bush Jr or senior. Anyway.
00;11;11;09 - 00;11;14;09
Monica Johnson
So like Bedtime for Bonzo. Yeah. Spin off, in other words.
00;11;14;09 - 00;11;16;06
Fred Rinne
Right, right, exactly. Exactly.
00;11;16;06 - 00;11;19;23
Monica Johnson
That movie that Ronald Reagan started in 1951.
00;11;19;27 - 00;11;35;15
Fred Rinne
Well, yeah, Yeah, exactly. Ronald Reagan was an actor, a fascist actor also. I never saw that movie. It’s there’s a picture of him hanging out with a chimpanzee. And I figured that chimp probably did a better job, really.
00;11;35;18 - 00;12;06;11
Marshall Weber
I think it’s interesting, though, in that what Fred’s describing is a relationship with underground press and publishing and writing that turns into, you know, documentation of music. And, you know, there you have lyrics and writing and then making your own liner notes and making your own book about the bands. When me and Fred started talking about artists books, both of us had already kind of experience in DIY publishing.
00;12;06;11 - 00;12;09;06
Marshall Weber
So that's interesting to me.
00;12;09;09 - 00;12;38;02
Fred Rinne
Yeah, one thing, the thing kind of feeds the other. I think how art came together for me, as is really kind of where you do these different things and they kind of feed off each other. So the writing would feed the painting, the painting would feed the music with national disgrace. We tried to have a slogan We like to sing about sculpture, sculpture and sound and soundy sculpture.
00;12;38;04 - 00;12;58;29
Monica Johnson
So, Fred, I hope this doesn't make you uncomfortable, but I want you to know that I am a member of the Fred Rinne Fan Club, and for as long as Ive been at Booklyn, I’ve really loved your work. One thing that we don’t really talk about that often is that Booklyn has a zine club and you happen to be a member of our zine club, which I think is a wonderful.
00;12;58;29 - 00;13;27;02
Monica Johnson
And I so appreciate that you joined our zine club and you receive I think we send you a zine every few months or so. And so in communicating about the zine club, I’ve enjoyed two, two interacttions with you. Okay, so one is when you join the zine club, we send you a little survey and we say like, you know, here’s, here are these check boxes of like subject matters to help us understand what kind of zines you like to read or what kind of reading materials you like.
00;13;27;05 - 00;13;44;12
Monica Johnson
And then we also ask, are there any subjects that you do not want to explore? Like we don’t want to, you know, be tedious and send you things about a particular topic if you’re like already maxed out or you’re just not interested and you didn’t check any of the like the pre scripted boxes, but we always leave an other box at the end.
00;13;44;12 - 00;13;55;17
Monica Johnson
So if there’s something we missed, we didn’t consider you could you could let us know and you check that box and you wrote poultry processing.
00;13;55;20 - 00;13;55;23
Fred Rinne
Well.
00;13;55;27 - 00;13;56;13
Monica Johnson
Do you remember?
00;13;56;13 - 00;14;09;17
Fred Rinne
Well just Yeah. Yeah it does I think. Yeah. Oh wow. I don’t know what. Wow the antihistamines must have been kicking in that particular day. Yeah, but if anybody does
00;14;09;17 - 00;14;12;13
Marshall Weber
do you not care about poultry processing?
00;14;12;15 - 00;14;43;01
Fred Rinne
No, I really do. I just was joshing, I guess, on this turkey plant. I had a flashback. I actually, that is, I worked at a turkey factory one summer in Turlock, California, actually, that produced turkeys. I mean, yeah, Yeah. They they come alive and come out dead. Holy crap, yeah, that was something else. But you know, if anybody does a zine about poultry processing, that probably would be, you know, kind of unique.
00;14;43;01 - 00;14;46;05
Fred Rinne
I mean, it would stand out and.
00;14;46;08 - 00;15;14;13
Monica Johnson
I know it definitely put me on alert for zines about poultry processing. But, you know, those are not going to come to you. The second thing that you offered our zine club was a testimonial. And so these are things that I think the platform we use, like automates, like requests, like write a testimonial for Booklyn. You wrote Rejoice and Pop the bloated ticks of inequity, exclamation point.
00;15;14;16 - 00;15;17;14
Fred Rinne
Well, yeah yeah that's that's pretty much.
00;15;17;15 - 00;15;31;07
Monica Johnson
Which I want to use as our, our theme yeah. I wonder do you remember writing that? What, how do I, how, how can we love this more by understanding. Yeah. What is that?
00;15;31;09 - 00;15;37;28
Fred Rinne
Well, yeah, it just. I don't know. You know, sometimes the philosophy just. Just pops right out.
00;15;37;28 - 00;15;48;18
Marshall Weber
You know, you got to remember that, Fred lives in California, the land of, you know, Nancy Pelosi and - bloated ticks - Feinstein.
00;15;48;21 - 00;15;53;21
Monica Johnson
Yeah, Yeah.
00;15;53;24 - 00;16;14;13
Fred Rinne
Yeah, yeah. It’s particularly inaccurate inequity. It’s that the din of inequity is what, what somebody described it, the situation we have. And yeah, it’s pretty extreme. I mean, this is like tale of two cities over here in San Francisco. It’s like, holy crap.
00;16;14;16 - 00;16;17;14
Monica Johnson
How do you how do you enjoy zine club so far as a member?
00;16;17;17 - 00;16;41;23
Fred Rinne
It’s nice. I like I like to get surprised. You know something, I’m also well, I like to see what’s going on, what people are doing and it’s it’s I like to get a broad spectrum. You never know where it’s coming from next. And that that’s. That’s my favorite thing, really. I used to like that with with radio, like a lot of my friends actually, and some band mates as well
00;16;41;25 - 00;17;10;12
Fred Rinne
were in college radio for a long time, which it says as a genre it’s almost going extinct now because of the Internet radio, although WFMU rules, but, anyway. Yeah, but so I, I kind of got really a I really enjoyed that because you turn it on, you wouldn’t know what the hell was going to happen next, you know, And that, that, you know, classical jazz, free jazz.
00;17;10;12 - 00;17;19;03
Fred Rinne
God knows what you know. Yeah. You know, that’s, that’s kind of how how media ought to be in my book, you know?
00;17;19;05 - 00;17;33;21
Monica Johnson
I like that. I like thinking that, like Booklyn Zine Club is sort of like college radio where you just don’t know what you’re going to get, but you’re open to the experience. And that’s cool, I hope I hope that’s how it feels to to most of the people that are members.
00;17;33;23 - 00;17;44;25
Fred Rinne
They should. And if not, they should really take a good deep look in the mirror and reassess themselves. So, there.
00;17;44;28 - 00;18;24;02
Marshall Weber
So with looking in the mirror in mind, Fred, Im going to ask you to take a good deep look in the mirror and you have an entire audience and your work is shown fairly frequently at all these museums and libraries and classrooms, and it’s very painterly. So in a way, sometimes I use the word illuminated manuscript because you’re one of the few people who hand paints unique books, not just in the United States, but really in the world.
00;18;24;04 - 00;18;38;25
Marshall Weber
And so I’m wondering how you see yourself as a painter, and I wondering how you see yourself as someone who primarily paints artists books and what that feels like. And what’s that like for you?
00;18;38;27 - 00;19;09;20
Fred Rinne
Yeah, well, I guess with painting itself, it’s kind of like a sculpture in a way, as opposed to graphics. And so there’s just a certain physical hand-eye kind of deal, you know, you’re going straight, straight to your hands and your body is kind of in this dance, I guess you could say, to get this thing out, just sort of become a machine.
00;19;09;20 - 00;19;35;14
Fred Rinne
Yeah, well, if you listen to techno anyway, if you’re painting, I think we’re painting. I think, yeah, maybe your feelings come out more directly or not mediated as much than other other forms, but I don’t know. I mean, printmaking. I, I’ve always wanted to do printmaking, but I never had that time to lay into it, you know, because it’s a hell of a thing.
00;19;35;14 - 00;20;04;27
Fred Rinne
But I’ve done a few, you know, like silkscreens and things like, like that. I sort of wound up settling on, you know, acrylic, acrylic on paper and kind of developed that technique where you mix a little bit of gesso in there so the pages won’t stick together. And so, you know, you sort of get get a technique going that that works for you.
00;20;04;27 - 00;20;27;19
Fred Rinne
And I like to see how, what, what I can do with an image. I’ll get an idea and I have to just kind of let a picture form in my mind and then I shoot for it. And it may be what I had in mind. It may not be. Sometimes I’ll I’ll be going at it and I get down for the night and look at it go, Wow, this looks like crap.
00;20;27;20 - 00;20;43;11
Fred Rinne
You know, I’ll fix it tomorrow and then the next day I like, Well, actually, you know, I think I’m just going to leave it in time, you know? You know, so like, knowing when to stop is is is as important as knowing where to start. It’s weird.
00;20;43;19 - 00;21;22;21
Marshall Weber
We were talking about how important humor is to your work, especially because in the field in general, I think I don't know. There's not a lot of humor done in artists books. But very often people see you as like you're the humorist in the field, and I think that’s kind of interesting. I always try to have one of your books if I’m doing a big selection or a show or something like that, just because, you know there’s a lot of work to be done along the lines of like the environment and racism and like you said, inequity and, you know, anti-war stuff
00;21;23;11 - 00;21;48;00
Marshall Weber
and and you provide or you know, you have very progressive politics and ah, you know, I was me and Monica were talking before about your anti-war kind of protests. You’re, you know, the the Slammy Windshield antiwar protest crew. So tell us about the humor. Tell us about like how how you use humor.
00;21;48;03 - 00;22;18;08
Fred Rinne
Well, I actually you know, it’s funny because I remember one anti-war demonstration that we got dressed up as the bring down gen, you included, and and we were like dressed up as like kind of decrepit 1970s glam rejects. And we had signs, you know, like, like just kind of knock off anti-war signs like, war is like nowhere, man, you know, we’re standing right
00;22;18;10 - 00;22;54;09
Fred Rinne
And like, it was cool because people like, we sort of were entertaining the the anti-war troops and people really got up on that. And there’s this huge demonstration Market Street, which is full of people. And it was kind of like the mascots gone bad, you know, demonstrating, I think our friend Charlie had like this weird donkeys, full donkeys head, realistic donkeys head mask on, you know, and god damn, you know, just that that sort of feeling of, I guess, kind of a solidarity thing.
00;22;54;11 - 00;23;24;13
Fred Rinne
You know. But, yeah, you know, just kind of then, you know, the idea I think is towards victory of any struggle, morale is imperative. So, you know, basically we must maintain discipline and morale at all times. So, you know, to to glean the fruit of the victory from the pride for the broad masses of the lumpen.
00;23;24;16 - 00;24;00;20
Monica Johnson
So one thing that we say a lot and probably in a lot of podcasts, is that something in Booklyn history is that artist books are like children’s books for adults and there are certain artists who really help us bring that point home very clearly. And your your unique artist books really do that. And I don’t know if you know this, Fred, but there’s this one really beautiful moment in our recent history where we were hosting a classroom of about 20 high schoolers.
00;24;00;20 - 00;24;31;25
Monica Johnson
I think they were juniors or seniors, and we were doing lots of like bookmaking things, but we were also were showing them an array of different takes on artists books. And I have this wonderful photo. Maybe if I’m with it later, I’ll post the photo within the podcast notes. But it’s Marshall reading, kind of like reading a bedtime story style, like page by page, reading a trip to the liquor store by Fred Rinne.
00;24;32;10 - 00;25;08;19
Monica Johnson
To this and seriously, like, rapt audience of not children. And it was, it was so won- It was it was so, everyone was just so quiet and listening. I’m like, this is exactly the point that we’re trying to make. But another thing that, you know, Marshall and I have been talking about a lot is like, you know, tactile learning, especially in the context of all the education programing that that Booklyn has been doing, in particular with kids who, you know, kids ages like 7 to 10 who probably maybe not ready for a Fred Rinne book, but who knows?
00;25;08;19 - 00;25;39;14
Monica Johnson
I don’t know. Maybe they are. But your your books, when I hold them, like I have my own experience with your books, that that is that is mine and I love it. And one of them is that when I held it, I felt kind of that, you know, that that alive feeling like maybe as kids, we all have an experience with a book where the where the book becomes its own life and you’re holding a you’re holding a possiblity or something.
00;25;39;14 - 00;26;09;09
Monica Johnson
And and more than anything, it made me want to make books and I’m I’m really serious. Like, I still have like a book that I’m working towards that’s like it’s not an imitation of a Fred Rinne book, but I’m kind of chasing the the flame that I felt when I when I read your books. And I wondered if there’s like some more filling in the blanks of like how I’m meeting the book and how you see that play within the landscape of what Booklyn does.
00;26;09;09 - 00;26;14;22
Monica Johnson
And yeah, and tactile learning and, and children’s books for adults.
00;26;14;24 - 00;26;39;06
Marshall Weber
Well, I think it’s there’s something about the painted book, like Fred paints the whole book. He paints the covers, he paints the text, he’s he’s done a lot of different styles with mixing screenprint and painting, but primarily and and over the past few years been doing this very interesting cutting in the letters, you know, painting a color field and then cutting, you know, painting letters around it.
00;26;39;09 - 00;26;53;23
Marshall Weber
Fred’s books, they are completely handmade. They’re not bound perfectly. They’re there is like everything is painted, they’re heavier because there’s a lot of paint. It’s not like a you know, not like a little wash or something like this. A lot
00;26;53;23 - 00;26;54;04
Monica Johnson
of paint.
00;26;54;11 - 00;27;20;29
Marshall Weber
There’s more paint than there is paper. And what you’re talking about, Monica, is is, is is that that tactile feel the weight, kind of the chalky ness of that gesso acrylic mix that Fred is talking about and the fact that it’s really like, you know, it’s not a printed book, it’s it’s not a I mean, Fred has done editions of, you know, painted books.
00;27;20;29 - 00;27;49;17
Marshall Weber
He’s also done other books that are printed. But I think the the, the unique painted books are they’re just chunky, you know, it’s a it is a thing. And then you can go one step further and say it’s like, yeah, it’s a it’s a living. It’s a living thing. And I love unique books and I love painting. So and you know, and I knew Fred as a musician and a performer and a painter, and I knew he, you know, because Fred’s writing is like his painting.
00;27;49;17 - 00;28;14;07
Marshall Weber
It’s very expressionistic. And he’s got a persona that is always there. Like Monica asked me, you know, I’m scared to meet Fred because what if he’s not like my imagination, who he is, which is just simply a projection of his work? And I said, Fred is a projection of his work.
00;28;14;09 - 00;28;15;11
Fred Rinne
And Fred's work.
00;28;15;11 - 00;28;17;25
Marshall Weber
Is a projection of Fred.
00;28;17;27 - 00;28;19;27
Fred Rinne
But there's no.
00;28;19;29 - 00;28;21;16
Marshall Weber
There's no disappointment there.
00;28;21;22 - 00;28;23;05
Fred Rinne
There are none.
00;28;23;12 - 00;28;30;22
Monica Johnson
I am for the record, I am I am very pleased to meet you're fulfilling everything or anything I could imagine.
00;28;30;25 - 00;28;32;19
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Oh, my God.
00;28;32;21 - 00;28;42;24
Marshall Weber
We had thought that maybe you would read a book or two. Fred and I had mentioned that to you, and I wondered if you're prepared to do that.
00;28;42;26 - 00;29;20;08
Fred Rinne
What I’ve got right now is, okay, I did a website through other people’s pixels dot com, and so it’s frinne.com. And so there I have a pile of them done, the newer stuff, so I can read off this book One Night in NYC. And I think this is a gripping news story that that I did a very short book about one night in New York City. Okay. Mercer Street, New York City, May 6th, 2009.
00;29;20;10 - 00;29;57;18
Fred Rinne
Okay. And then in the club Sub Mercer, the after party for the Mets Costume Institute gala and there’s kind of gala looking people. Okay, Kiefer Sutherland and his date attend, and there’s Kiefer with kind of a grumpy looking much younger lady. And then Brooke Shields and her fashion designer date Jack McCollough is there and Brooke is holding a clutch.
00;29;57;20 - 00;30;28;14
Fred Rinne
Okay. And he’s in a black T-shirt. And then next, everybody was wasted and yeah, they’re all standing around drinking, talking, and their eyes are getting red. The next one is Jack McCulloch jostles or bumps or pushes Brooke Shields. So you can’t tell, there’s a controversy there. Okay. And and Brooke falls down, but not all the way. Okay.
00;30;28;16 - 00;31;08;03
Fred Rinne
The spectacle of the fall of Brooke causes rage and derangement in the mind of Kiefer Sutherland. Kiefie, Kiefie goes cuckoo. He head butts Jack McCullagh, breaking Jack’s nose to defend the honor of Brooke Shields. And he’s he’s bobblehead bumping him pow-pow PTOW and that’s it. The Northeast has just a rumpled looking Kiefer leaving the place and somebody else leaving and that’s that that’s the end of that particular one.
00;31;08;05 - 00;31;08;29
Fred Rinne
Let's see, we have.
00;31;09;06 - 00;31;24;25
Monica Johnson
I want to say I’ve been reading, I’ve been looking, I’ve been reading along. As you’ve been reading, I went to your website. I found the book. And so I’m like, it kind of reminds me of the, like deep pandemic moments where like there were all these online children’s book readers, maybe the still are, or they read children’s books digitally.
00;31;24;28 - 00;31;27;04
Monica Johnson
And I'm like, That's what I'm doing with this one.
00;31;27;05 - 00;31;54;04
Fred Rinne
I think it would work as a red book. I mean, you know, read it behind a wall of vinyl sleep. It’s all there. This guy knows a friend of mine who has the coolest record store in Ventura, California. And this guy is like, I don’t know, I never met him. My friend met him in Ventura, California,
00;31;54;04 - 00;32;23;13
Fred Rinne
And he this guy is like, obsessed with records. It’s like totally I mean, his mind is rock and roll. And so he would come in with a big pile of dreams he’s written down and hand them to my friend who forward them to me. I said, This guy, dreams are just wacky. You got to check this out. So wind up doing a book behind the wall of vinyl Sleep about that, which I could start out with.
00;32;23;18 - 00;32;35;00
Fred Rinne
It’s just the dreams of Kevin Anderson, transcribed by Grady Bennion imagery that I did black and white.
00;32;35;03 - 00;32;45;12
Monica Johnson
But is this that we distributed? Because if this is the same one, it’s at the Atheneum of Music and Arts Library in La Jolla. Yeah.
00;32;45;15 - 00;32;46;06
Marshall Weber
That's true.
00;32;46;06 - 00;32;49;02
Monica Johnson
Yeah. Yeah. So that's where it is.
00;32;49;04 - 00;32;55;10
Marshall Weber
Yeah. That was a big double whammy for them. Art and music together. No brainer.
00;32;55;17 - 00;33;18;08
Fred Rinne
Yeah. This. Yeah, This is this guy’s dreams. I mean, he’s got I just pulled, I think, I think it’s ten of them off of him. 2/18/98, the police have a large cornfield surrounded. Gregg Allman is hiding out in it. An officer with a bullhorn is ordering him to come out. Suddenly he drives out of the cornfield.
00;33;18;10 - 00;33;46;16
Fred Rinne
He’s driving a van covered with paintings of skulls and tombstones, drinking a beer. He drives through the crowd of police. They jump aside. He escaped. And then Dan Quayle is riding and Dan Quayle is riding a bucking bronco in a rodeo. He gets thrown into the grandstands. I leave and walk to my car. In the parking lot is a 25 foot tall statue of Rocky Ericson.
00;33;46;18 - 00;34;18;09
Fred Rinne
What the hell? A T-Rex, oh, okay, 7/20/99. T-Rex is playing at my old elementary school auditorium and they are excellent. The set ends and the emcee comes up and tells us the move is going to play next. The curtain rises and on stage are four department store mannequins holding toy instruments. The crowd starts booing and throwing bottles.
00;34;18;12 - 00;34;46;27
Fred Rinne
Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. 9/11 Wow. 9/11/07 Okay, I’m staying at my friend’s Buddhist apartment in Old Town Ventura. The television has a news flash on it that Peter Fonda robbed a car wash in Reseda. And then uh, yeah, okay. Blue Oyster Cult and me are on the run from Russian agents. We are in the Midwest driving a muscle car up past fields of corn.
00;34;46;29 - 00;35;16;09
Fred Rinne
That’s a hell of a dream. I mean, really corn. Yeah. You know, some of them are really kind of inspiring. I, you know, this one here? I think this is the most inspirational. I’m really kind of really curious about maybe this this is a possibility for a performance. I’m in a group watching a club, watching a group called Spider Brain.
00;35;16;11 - 00;35;27;10
Fred Rinne
The lead singer just sings gibberish off a three by five cards on stage with them are people doing jumping jacks and slapping themselves in the face. That’s it.
00;35;27;12 - 00;35;34;09
Monica Johnson
What makes you, what drives you to make books? Do you do you know? Or is that a question that doesn’t even need to be answered?
00;35;34;11 - 00;36;10;22
Fred Rinne
I guess you kind of get an obsession about something or other and you just sort of got to got to get it out. You know, it’s kind of like, I don’t know. Yeah, I, I, I, I was, I did some art up north in Portland and the guy said, well, okay, I can I can’t pay much for this painting but I can do is, is, you know, give a small amount and also I can send you some records Id say okay that sounds cool because you know, they let me have a show there and it was nice.
00;36;10;22 - 00;36;20;17
Fred Rinne
This record store Turn, turn, turn in Portland. It’s really cool place. Smegma hangs out there so you know it’s good and.
00;36;20;19 - 00;36;21;03
Marshall Weber
That is a band.
00;36;21;03 - 00;36;45;28
Fred Rinne
They sent me a whole a whole - a whole box okay, a whole box of Pat Boone records. I mean, I’m not kidding. A whole box of Pat Boone records. I know. I There are horrible. You played them on, and you just get sick of it musically. It kind of saps you and makes you feel sicker and weaker listening to it.
00;36;46;00 - 00;37;08;09
Fred Rinne
I don't know. I just think something must be done, you know? It just. I don’t know. But. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I. Yeah, I guess it’s just how one reacts, I don’t know. It’s like, you know, you just remember these weird pieces of stuff that one kind of happens and I don’t know why those things stuck to me, but god, I don’t know.
00;37;08;09 - 00;37;09;18
Fred Rinne
It seems like it deserves wider circulation.
00;37;09;22 - 00;37;27;05
Monica Johnson
I kind of understand it. Like, do you, I mean, do you feel like having made all these books about these things that are not one type of thing, but as you describe them, like things that you just need to get out? Do you feel like you get them out and they’re like a little bit like before they were in you and now they’re outside you.
00;37;27;05 - 00;37;34;06
Monica Johnson
Are you or like, does it what what is the difference between the before and after of having made the book?
00;37;34;09 - 00;38;00;25
Fred Rinne
You know, I, I kind of feel I guess it feels kind of almost a sense of completion. I hate the word closure because it really doesn’t describe anything. But I guess there is kind of a sense of, you know, you’ve sort of maybe put the thing to bed or something. It’s you know, because you have a feeling that, you know, wow, something I should do something about this or with this or this is material.
00;38;00;25 - 00;38;28;07
Fred Rinne
Damn. Yeah. You know, Yeah, I think it’s like it’s like some science classes, you know, biology type classes at one time or other, and some teacher said there was some quote about some explorer botanist or something is up to his neck and freezing water bitten by leeches, you know, and he’s saying it’s all data. You know, it’s it’s it’s all it’s all good for something.
00;38;28;09 - 00;38;36;15
Fred Rinne
And I don’t know if he survived. But you know but yeah, it’s just one kind of I guess Yeah. Perspective you know.
00;38;36;17 - 00;39;06;01
Monica Johnson
Now that you’ve I mean now that we’re sort of thinking of it this way, there’s a there’s a new perspective I have on your work, which is not to put like a rationale in your own brain, but like I can kind of see these books as like the maybe that the data of life that didn’t find its application or something that they just like hung out in your head and they were you just, they were there and it was like, what, what's and what?
00;39;06;05 - 00;39;14;03
Monica Johnson
We make sense of things sometimes by making a book out of them and it sort of Yeah. Becomes its own sense, right? Once it’s done.
00;39;14;06 - 00;39;34;05
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny. I think I sort of have a attitude toward art or creating things or whatever. Like I just create the thing and it will find a home at some point, you know? And so this, this, these ideas or whatever will kind of come out in the wash.
00;39;34;12 - 00;40;07;02
Marshall Weber
You chronicle, you both chronicle real subcultures, but you also look at pop culture through the lens of subculture or underground culture, you know, So there’s a critical element. But I also think you’re like kind of a little bit of a California artist. And I one thing I’ve always really amired about your books I’m I’m a really big fan about using techniques of vernaculars from different media.
00;40;07;04 - 00;40;43;06
Marshall Weber
and, you know, works on paper artists books and a lot of you’re like a lot of artists books and a lot of illustration and a lot of graphics are very like, you know, straight on, like almost a theatrical stage. You’re just looking and the stuff happens to you across, you know, it’s almost like the horizon line is always present across the, the kind of horizontal composition of the book. But you frequently use cinematic angles like you, you do illustration lines from below, from above.
00;40;43;09 - 00;41;06;29
Marshall Weber
You were doing drone illustrations, you know, Godzilla illustrations long before drones. You even did a book about drones. But can you talk to me about, like, how you paint with that knowledge of like three dimensionality? Because I think it’s an important it goes back to what you were talking about. Sculpture I think is really interesting, the kind of that cinematic eye.
00;41;07;01 - 00;41;36;04
Fred Rinne
Yeah, it’s kind of like, well, I guess because really, you know, film and video and whatever is kind of how I guess it’s, you know, informs how we see the world and just getting outside and bopping around. You really have kind of a different, different angle on stuff. And it’s good to just kind of import that into words.
00;41;36;07 - 00;42;07;20
Fred Rinne
You know, it clashes with the book structure to an extent. It’s kind of good to challenge that structure to the greatest extent possible, really, you know, to see how far out you can get with just, you know, a different whammo on on, on a view, you know, and just, you know, sort of doing 3-D paper engineering and stuff like, like, like, you know, pop up books and stuff which are good to actually as an artist as well.
00;42;07;23 - 00;42;41;03
Fred Rinne
But I don’t know, it’s it’s a lot of fun as just looking at this one. Okay. Yeah. A trip to the liquor store, actually. And I just kind of look at that. Yeah, but part of it, too, is, is just sort of like your own personal experiences, your own visual experiences, I guess, you know, where, like, this thing is about kind of their sets in Los Angeles, you know?
00;42;41;03 - 00;43;07;26
Fred Rinne
So I start out, I’m up in the mountains with a bunch of coyotes, which really happened out of Chatsworth, California. Me and my friend went out. We tried to go night hike and and we got out of the car and in about 15 feet, suddenly we hear what sounds like 60 coyotes screaming bloody murder. It sounds like they’ve hauled a big animal down and are screaming blood. Its scared the shit out of us.
00;43;07;28 - 00;43;33;07
Fred Rinne
We got the hell out of there. But I mean, it was clear that that they they rule, not humans. You know, at night you really kind of had that that feeling in. And so you’re up high looking down on everything which is is just totally perspective like you know, in the mountains or in the hills, especially at night you’re very disoriented, you know.
00;43;33;07 - 00;43;41;17
Fred Rinne
And so I don't know how to relate that to a flat surface. You know, it's fun.
00;43;41;19 - 00;44;07;19
Marshall Weber
Yeah. You know, my one of my favorite examples and we mentioned it earlier, a trip to the liquor store, one of my but the point of view as you’re looking up from the ground at the Sol of the main protagonist shoe as he runs along and I just flashed to that book and it’s interesting, your, your style is almost contagious.
00;44;07;21 - 00;44;28;13
Marshall Weber
So I wrote this description of that book for our website. I just want to read that real quick because I just felt like I was using your voice and this book. It was really interesting too. This book went off to some some private dealer really liked it and they took it and they kind of never did anything with it.
00;44;28;13 - 00;44;59;18
Marshall Weber
And years later I realized, where is that book? And I went and I got it back from them after. That’s like kind of pulling a tooth out. And like the book had been away for years and I was like, Wow, that’s crazy. And essentially two weeks later it got sold to Tufts University. But when I first got it back, I looked at it and I was kind of rolling on the floor and the description I wrote was essentially Fred Rinne, our nation’s best loved narrator of white trash Americana shenanigans.
00;44;59;20 - 00;45;09;14
Marshall Weber
This book has it all Canine cops, Tar Pits, the Little Smoke, a treasure for any library or collection.
00;45;09;16 - 00;45;11;24
Fred Rinne
Yeah, yeah.
00;45;11;27 - 00;45;20;28
Monica Johnson
You know, when I read that I also was like, you channeled, you know, Bill Hader’s character, Stefon on SNL.
00;45;20;29 - 00;45;21;19
Fred Rinne
All right.
00;45;21;19 - 00;45;24;27
Monica Johnson
Wrong crowd, maybe, But but like the you know
00;45;24;29 - 00;45;25;11
Fred Rinne
Yeah.
00;45;25;13 - 00;45;34;23
Monica Johnson
he’s like, this club has it all, and it lists like three anyway. And I was like, maybe you channeled someone else there too, but great description nonetheless.
00;45;34;25 - 00;46;02;11
Marshall Weber
Yeah, you have to be open. I mean, for me, it was like, I think Fred’s books are always kind of a satire on everything, including themselves. And so it’s like that description is a satire about the whole bookselling business, as much of it is a description of the book, but only the book allows that to happen. It’s like this essential culture bomb.
00;46;02;14 - 00;46;07;11
Monica Johnson
Fred, do you have anything like that you would call a children's book?
00;46;07;13 - 00;46;14;24
Marshall Weber
You did one for me. We did an edition of ten, I recall for Thorn.
00;46;14;27 - 00;46;16;28
Fred Rinne
Right? Right. Yeah.
00;46;16;28 - 00;46;19;25
Marshall Weber
That took a long time.
00;46;19;27 - 00;46;47;03
Fred Rinne
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, it was fun there. I did. Yeah. The imagery on that was from a trip I took was a couple of trips I took hitchhiking, were meet a friend, went to. Well, we drove across country to New York and then then hitchhiked back. We got a ride to actually was Rhode Island.
00;46;47;06 - 00;47;16;07
Fred Rinne
At this one place we stopped at with a shattered billboard was occupied by Jodie Foster’s army. Actually, at one point, there was this trip we took where this place had been just kicked apart, just like and and all this graffiti was spray painted on this shattered kicked apart building, but cowboy shithole and Jodie Foster’s army.
00;47;16;09 - 00;47;18;23
Fred Rinne
And so we said, Arizona, this.
00;47;18;23 - 00;47;21;15
Monica Johnson
Is a band, right? Yeah. Yeah, this is a band.
00;47;21;17 - 00;47;48;15
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, they were inspired by John Hinckley. Tried to shoot Reagan and and he was said to have been inspired by Jodie Foster, and he did it to impress her. So I guess we were watching the taxi driver, you know, And so. So this band calls itself Jodie Foster’s Army, you know. We’ll impress you, Jodie.
00;47;48;21 - 00;47;49;11
Fred Rinne
And what.
00;47;49;11 - 00;47;50;12
Marshall Weber
The heck? Okay.
00;47;50;14 - 00;47;51;18
Fred Rinne
So that was if I.
00;47;51;18 - 00;48;18;28
Marshall Weber
I gotta break in here, because I remember that trip. That was when we were on our way to New Orleans because we wanted to go to the Republican Convention, because you had printed a thousand posters that said crack heads for Bush all over the country. And then we actually went to the Republican convention and we posted those everywhere.
00;48;19;00 - 00;48;49;09
Marshall Weber
And we had all these conversations with Republicans about crack heads for Bush. And yeah, it was hilarious. We met one kid at the Republican convention there it was in New Orleans, which is insane. Yeah. And and and and and and he had totally the opposite response. I remember we would pass them out to people and we’d also put them up when we passed it out to this one guy, he was like a Ken doll.
00;48;49;11 - 00;48;57;11
Marshall Weber
And he said, Yeah, this is totally true because George Bush will keep the crack coming.
00;48;57;14 - 00;49;01;23
Fred Rinne
Because he was glad
00;49;01;25 - 00;49;09;24
Marshall Weber
He was glad that crackheads were voting for Bush. And he said, Are you guys working for the crack heads?
00;49;09;27 - 00;49;36;25
Fred Rinne
And yeah, I mean, now now if you did that, you’d probably get on the the anti-terrorism watch list, no fly list, no anything list. I don’t know what or just it’s got pretty. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Actually that that’s probably I know it was pretty, pretty pretty leaden these days.
00;49;36;27 - 00;49;53;16
Marshall Weber
Okay so listen to this. The description for the poster at the Destroy Art Gallery says that it’s a crack heads for Bush 88 poster, 1980 Rare. It’s so it’s rare, Fred. It’s hard to get now. It’s a rare poster.
00;49;53;17 - 00;49;54;27
Fred Rinne
Oh, no, it's mint.
00;49;55;00 - 00;49;57;22
Marshall Weber
It's a mint condition, though. Who's James Stark?
00;49;57;22 - 00;50;02;23
Fred Rinne
Wow. Do you know? I don't know.
00;50;02;25 - 00;50;07;11
Marshall Weber
I bet it's that kid. I bet it's that same kid. It's that same kid.
00;50;07;13 - 00;50;38;10
Fred Rinne
It’s like, Yeah, we go. There we go. Yeah, probably, you know? Yeah. It’s strange. You have, like, the. The ideologues and then the vast crowd that just doesn’t give a damn one way or other, you know? I just. I don’t know. It’s just they, they could go any which way politically or culturally, I guess. Yeah. Well you know, is that as long as long as the the Met gala keeps happening, I guess
00;50;38;12 - 00;50;42;03
Fred Rinne
people feel like it’s still okay for everything.
00;50;42;06 - 00;50;56;11
Monica Johnson
I’m going to. I’m going to totally derail myself. I need to clarify something. I almost said your full name. I realize that maybe we’ve been saying your your name wrong this whole time. How do you say your name, Fred? Your whole first and last?
00;50;56;11 - 00;51;18;06
Fred Rinne
Well, let’s see Fred or Frederick full name. The last name would be pronounced Rinne-a. Kind of like that. It doesn’t translate. I mean, it’s Finnish. So everybody pronounces it differently, so. But yeah, okay. So it’s.
00;51;18;07 - 00;51;20;03
Monica Johnson
Flexible.
00;51;20;06 - 00;51;22;25
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just like we've.
00;51;22;25 - 00;51;28;19
Monica Johnson
Been saying, Rinn this whole time I took Marshall's, but I heard you say Rinne a couple of times.
00;51;28;19 - 00;51;29;18
Fred Rinne
Yeah.
00;51;29;20 - 00;51;30;18
Monica Johnson
I like it.
00;51;30;20 - 00;51;39;22
Fred Rinne
Anyway. Yeah, Yeah. It's one of those things that I think it means small hill or low mound of something. Something like that.
00;51;39;22 - 00;51;44;05
Monica Johnson
Google Translate says it. It means slope. That's what Google says.
00;51;44;05 - 00;52;12;23
Fred Rinne
Slope. All right. Okay, cool. Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s this slope of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s crazy. Yeah. When I was a kid, we were in Los Angeles and there was only five of them in the L.A. phonebook, which is. It’s like. Like the Tower of Babel of all phonebooks. I mean, it’s got every name, you know, it’s, it’s kind of like the book of God, really. You know, it just every surname you could imagine.
00;52;12;26 - 00;52;18;26
Marshall Weber
So one last question, and that is, what are you doing now, Fred? What's next?
00;52;20;14 - 00;52;49;14
Fred Rinne
I think that collaboration we’re talking about sounds like a winner or it’s a bread spirit soup. Now, I don’t see what happens there, but yeah, the imagery that the text seems to conjure up, which you wrote, you say it’s about the Velvet Revolution that happened, I guess back Well, you know, it seemed like these countries Czechoslovakia, now it’s Czech and Slovakia
00;52;52;10 - 00;53;11;21
Fred Rinne
Anyway, they’ve all, the Balkans have balkanized. It seems like there’s was freedom coming forth back in the nineties. That turns out to be just how you said it. Just it just they think, Oh yeah, right now I’m sorry. It’s just now the idea was that okay, the winners of the Cold War were just, just did it for the money, you know, just.
00;53;11;21 - 00;53;34;15
Fred Rinne
Yeah, just. That hasn't changed a bit. So. So here we are looking back on it. Wow. That was something else because they were supposed to celebrate the end of the Cold War in 1989 90, whenever the hell it was, you know. But wow, we won Triumph, Peace Dividend. Oh, my God, Everything’s going to be so cool. And now that lasted two weeks.
00;53;34;18 - 00;53;54;14
Fred Rinne
It just totally evaporated. And it was like it never happened. You know, the Cold War was like, what, 50 years longer? I mean, what I know said, poof, you know. So it’s yeah, it’s weird. I mean, history is surrealism. It’s just there’s no way around it anyway. It’s just going to be weird.
00;53;54;14 - 00;54;16;28
Monica Johnson
I’ve really had a wonderful time talking with you, Fred, and I can’t. I don’t know. I almost feel like the ending is irrelevant now and completion is irrelevant. I’m just happy to have met you and thank you for talking with us. Yeah, I need nothing.
00;54;17;00 - 00;54;18;07
Marshall Weber
Yeah, there is no end.
00;54;18;09 - 00;54;28;27
Fred Rinne
Right? Well, I can see that. You know, the work has completed any stage of its production, something like that. So. Yeah, like that.
00;54;28;29 - 00;54;33;08
Monica Johnson
Maybe it's like there's no ending. There are just pee breaks.
00;54;33;10 - 00;54;55;21
Fred Rinne
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Absolutely. I think it’s time for a nice try. One of these IPAs over here and see how they’re doing. And there’s a thing called Laughing Monk Brewery over here, and they’ve got that’s what’s gotten me through the pandemic and being isolated and all from everybody. You know, with COVID, I never caught it.
00;54;55;21 - 00;55;03;24
Fred Rinne
I was just hiding out. But these microbreweries deliver, okay? And so, yeah, that's what saved. Saved my bacon.
00;55;03;24 - 00;55;04;19
Monica Johnson
What more do you need?
00;55;04;24 - 00;55;09;01
Fred Rinne
Saved my bacon. Well, yeah, I
00;55;09;03 - 00;55;10;01
Marshall Weber
Not say goodbye.
00;55;10;01 - 00;55;12;11
Fred Rinne
Thank you very much. Yeah. All right.
00;55;12;11 - 00;55;14;11
Monica Johnson
Thanks Fred.
00;55;14;13 - 00;55;16;19
Fred Rinne
Thank y'all. Later.
00;55;16;21 - 00;55;22;06
Monica Johnson
Wow, that was. That was a trip.
00;55;22;09 - 00;55;27;00
Marshall Weber
Yeah, a trip to the liquor store.
00;55;27;02 - 00;55;51;01
Monica Johnson
Yeah, man, that. So that was Fred Rinne after all this time, getting to talk with him was pretty great. Uh, I feel. I feel so tickled, and yet I feel a little distracted by what our normal structure would be, where I would do a closing, because I feel like I just entered into a Fred Rinne book and forgot my way back.
00;55;51;04 - 00;55;53;01
Monica Johnson
Yeah. How are you feeling, Marshall?
00;55;53;01 - 00;56;18;17
Marshall Weber
Well, I. I love that Fred is such a singular character in the world of publishing and artists, books and libraries. He’s he’s like kind of mythical, you know? I just recall the times that I’ve been gone to book fairs with Fred. He often appears at the Codex Foundation book fair with us every other year in February or March or whatever.
00;56;18;19 - 00;56;43;18
Marshall Weber
And he’s he’s just like a character from one of his books stepping into the place and he’s he’s, well, beloved and and I love that, you know, he provides this comic relief for like the entire field and he’s inseparable from his artwork. There’s such continuity. It’s like he drew himself.
00;56;43;21 - 00;56;44;05
Monica Johnson
Yeah.
00;56;44;06 - 00;57;11;27
Marshall Weber
It's like a his his whole life. It's rare that you see artists really immerse themselves in their work and you can't really tell the difference. AAnd it’s kind of a healthy thing. I’m thinking of like Candace Hicks has, you know, a good part of her work is all about her personal experiences. And I think with Fred, he just lives in this different universe that kind of walks around with him.
00;57;12;00 - 00;57;36;16
Monica Johnson
You know, I feel I feel the continuum of what that means. I feel a little bit like there’s, you know, the myth of pan with the flute and chanting people to follow him into the forest or whatever. I feel a little bit like enchanted by the journey. Yeah, in a way that sort of spun me around. But not, not unpleasantly.
00;57;36;19 - 00;57;44;03
Monica Johnson
Yeah. What more can we add to this? Aside from just appreciating what space we entered.
00;57;44;05 - 00;57;50;01
Marshall Weber
And just listening to the interview again and again and again.
00;57;50;03 - 00;58;06;27
Monica Johnson
I really love the idea when, when, when Fred was reading his books out loud and it just it made me think of those like, stories, you know, that at least as a child, for me, you’d get these books and then you get a record and you play the record and it would give you a little ding and then you’d turn the page.
00;58;06;27 - 00;58;20;07
Monica Johnson
And I feel like there’s such a nice opportunity, especially with the way his website is laid out, where every single book is inventoried page by page and you can spend hours just going through and reading yourself the books.
00;58;20;10 - 00;58;21;17
Marshall Weber
Yeah.
00;58;21;19 - 00;58;33;12
Monica Johnson
And just, I don't know, his background in music at all sort of feels like that's a wonderful project. I want Fred Rinne to be on a record reading me a book, and then I can go through them on his website, page by page.
00;58;33;15 - 00;58;37;23
Marshall Weber
Yeah. Or even on our website. That would be optimum entertainment.
00;58;37;25 - 00;58;38;17
Fred Rinne
Yeah.
00;58;38;20 - 00;59;09;14
Monica Johnson
Yeah. I’m just going to close us out and say thanks to everyone for listening and for joining us for another episode of Booklyn Calling. Check out our show notes for more details and for lots of ways to view Fred’s work on his website and on ours. And as always, if you’re a librarian or a curator at an educational institution, anywhere in the world and you’re interested in collecting Fred’s work or other works like it, you can always email us at hello@booklyn.org
00;59;09;20 - 00;59;52;19
Monica Johnson
It’s like Brooklyn, but no R And you can check out our entire collection at Booklyn.org, and we’ll see you next time. This podcast was made possible in part by funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and in partnership with the City Council and from individual donors to Brooklyn, Inc. You can support this podcast by making a donation at Booklyn dot org slash donate.
