The latest release from Frederick Publishing, Grass Valley High LIfe, is a collection of police blotter calls from the small town in gold country, Grass Valley, California.
Grass Valley was established in 1851 as Centreville and renamed Grass Valley the following year. Grass Valley is about an hour's drive northeast of Sacramento and, as of the 2010 US Census, has a population of 12,860.
Somewhat of a magnet for interesting people, artists such as Terry Riley, Gary Snyder, Meri St. Mary, Monte Cazazza, Joanna Newsom, and Supertramp bassist Roger Hodgson call it home, to name a few. If that is not enough to raise your interest, then the contents of this book will surely display how colorful Grass Valley is.
Preface: “The Police Blotter, blotter of the stains of the community, the county-wide water-cooler of the improbable, the desperate and the bizarre. The laundry line of the unexplained, agony column of the indigent, gossip sensationalist and sacred confessor all at once, usually over coffee in the morning. A place to catch up, a place where those who have rejected society inbounds meet those who enforce those bounds. Like the executioner once kept the rabble in line, the blotter exposes our neighbors as they expose themselves. The vicarious allure of ridicule, finding out why the police lights were shining on the apartment, why that guy had a black eye, where those dudes on those ATVs were going- and why did they have that mannequin? No questions, “Just the facts ma’am.” Did you see that too? I totally heard that and was like, “What is that?” The blotter doesn’t answer, it just says. Like a statue from Easter Island with a mullet, it gazes back at the county with it’s newspaper gray face and speaks the truth about the people below: they’ve had too much to drink, they’re getting high, they got guns. Retirees, Ridgies and Rednecks; Crits, Clampers and Christians; hicks, hipsters and healers; Juggaloes, townies, yoga moms, emo kids, gaze into the looking glass of your greatest foibles and remember the peak just before it all went to shit.
- Chris Streng”
Grass Valley High Life follows the size and format as the previous Frederick Publishing titles in a perfect bound paperback. Complete with 15 illustrations of what author Chris Streng perceives was taking place in a number of the calls.
Frederick Publishing is pleased to announce the release of j.frede’s “Glass Music”, the entire score for the performance of the same name that was presented at The Berkeley Art Museum on May 6th 2011. Consisting of 28 hand painted photographs that were used by the performers as visual sheet music, each photograph has been recreated to match the lines of the originals. Following in the direction of many Avant-garde composers, Frede choose to use visual sheet music in an attempt to interpret the buildings interior architecture while staying with the experimental nature of both the medium and the structure itself. Previously j.frede has photographed interior structures and converted the photographs to sound using software, the glass music score is a graduation of this practice.
Excerpt from Essay for The Berkeley Art Museum Blog
On May 6, 2011 I presented my Glass Music performance at the Berkeley Art Museum in the vast interior that is the museum’s main hall. Fourteen performers placed on five different levels of the museum, each performer with two water-filled wine glasses and visual sheet music created from the lines of the museum’s interior architecture. The mysterious angelic sound of the wine glasses singing moved through the space forward, backward, and above the audience. The clean crisp tones made their way around the space and seemed to breathe and flow in a non-directional manner, creating a thick aural cloud that dissipated and grew, seemingly by its own will. The museum’s normally difficult acoustics aided the performance, allowing the sound to reverberate softly and amplifying the natural sounds of the singing glasses.
The second book from Frederick Publishing, American Idle is a collection of journals from author j.frede's time as a taxi driver in Los Angeles as well as his eyespy journals detailing the things he encountered commuting in the City of Angels.
Preface: "AMERICAN IDLE is a collection of journals that were originally blogs I kept in 2006 & 2007. The Taxi Travel Logs were a weekly blog I kept of people and situations I came across while driving a cab in Los Angeles in 2006. In 2007 I started the eyespy journals, a blog documenting the things that stood out to me on my daily commute from the east side to the west side of Los Angeles. The response to both blogs was positive and my readers often posted comments about their own observations and funny things they encountered that reminded them of the blogs..."
The first offering from Frederick Publishing, WALK documents Dave Paco's descent from Los Angeles to Tierra del Fuego. His journey to lands end took him twenty two months and a lifetime of experiences.
Introduction Except: “You hold in your hands now a collection of emails I sent back periodically to friends and family during my trip. Some grammar and awkward segments have been treated, but more or less the text has been left raw to reflect the progression of my involvement with the writing and eventual burn out of my wandering spirit. I’ve also included at the beginning of each chapter some snippets from my personal journal. Although I could never completely convey the immensity of my time on the road I hope you enjoy this account and that it inspires you to take on some travel of your own.”
- Frederick Publishing is now on Facebook, visit the facebook page to see photos from the books and addus to keep updated on news and releases.
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