Sign In, Sign On, Sign Out
Time for a summer break
Despite feeling kind of crummy last Saturday, I set off into the rain to join the No Kings march in Manhattan. Hope and Dash had another obligation, so I had to talk myself into leaving the house by repeating that this was a big honking deal and that it was my obligation to add my still quite ambulatory body to the larger organism of resistance. I figured I’d just stick to the sidelines, but within moments of arriving at Bryant Park I ran into a group of friends that I knew were going to be there. We’d vaguely said we’d keep our eyes open for each other, but we made no plans whatsoever to meet up - as soon as we were there, there we were. I’m in no position to calculate odds, but with a reported 200,000 people in attendance, I very much did not expect it to happen.
I brought with me a couple of the signs that I’d created for the Hands Off march in April - these ones said simply “NO” and “FUCK THIS.” This was the third protest they’ve been to - luckily, their messages apply to nearly any occasion. I saw hundreds of far more clever and thoughtful signs, but for some reason people were really drawn to these (especially “FUCK THIS”). I guess directness is a virtue at this fraught moment in time.
Though the sharpie and foam core had survived the rain in April, on Saturday the Fuck This sign bled blue. My hands took on a smurflike sheen that took several days to fade. But it didn’t matter. Walking with friends and being surrounded by thousands of other people of all types, all connected by a shared desire to protect the parts of our lives that feel most worth living - it felt pretty good. I forgot about my other cares and rested content in the idea that there was nothing more pressing or important that I could possibly have been doing at that moment. But I knew my limits - after the hour and change it took for us to make our crowded way from 40th to 35th Street, I said goodbye and spun off to take the train home. While waiting for the A, a tiny old woman with close-cropped hair saw Fuck This and offered me a fist bump. I felt better leaving than when I arrived, which is a rare and wonderful occurrence.
On that note, I want to let you know that I’ve decided to take a temporary seasonal hiatus from this newsletter.
It’s been 25 months since I started The Jeff Stream, after a few years of sporadic newsletters under the auspices of The Jeff Lewonczyk Fan Club. I’ve posted nearly 140 items in that time, experimenting with different styles and formats - essay, memoir, fiction, poetry, comics, miscellany, etc. It’s been an incredible way to A) ramp up my writing practice, and B) create opportunities to connect with you folks who have been kind of enough to read it and reach out to me.
As great as it’s been, though, I gotta say, I’m exhausted. When this was my primary creative outlet, it was a pleasure to keep it going. But even after reducing my output to a single post a week, it’s taken up most of my available time - it turns out making these silly little posts even remotely readable eats up quite a few hours per week! And between working full-time, preventing my family from surrendering to dysfunction, ping-ponging between anger and despair at the state of the world, and engaging in a few half-hearted attempts to stave off my inevitable bodily decay, there’s not that many hours left over.
Working on slips slips has been a dream, and it will remain a serious priority moving forward. For a few months there, I did a decent job of juggling this newsletter with the weightier editorial duties that came with conceiving, curating, designing, and launching a new print publication. But I’ll admit, after the high of our first-issue premiere, I’ve been crashing a bit, both physically and mentally - I quite enjoyed myself throughout the process, but the aftermath is calling for some recalibration. I can’t power through stuff like I could in my twenties, when I was producing several theater productions at a time while running a theater space and working all day and drinking too much and sleeping too little and otherwise feeling immortal.
I make this sound like I’m ailing in my sickbed, but rest assured, I’m fine. It’s just that I’ve come to the latest fork in the road, and it’s time to reconsider my priorities. If I want to keep focused on making slips slips #2 even better than the first issue - not to mention gain some momentum on any of the 10,000 other creative projects I dream about every day - I need a little more time than I’m giving myself right now.
The upshot is that I’m going to take a bit of a summer break to think all of this through and consider how I’d like to spend my limited time moving forward. This doesn’t mean The Jeff Stream is ending - I’d like to continue with it in some form, and I might even drop a few sporadic posts over the summer when the mood strikes me. But it might not carry on the way it has up to this point.
So thanks for reading this far! As a reminder, I’ll still be posting through the slips slips newsletter, blips blips, which is currently running a series of profiles featuring our various contributors - please subscribe if you haven’t already!
To close out our today’s theme of “reading the signs,” I’ll share some photos from a delightful adventure I shared with my family on the day after the march. For Father’s Day, Hope bought tickets for us to visit the New York Sign Museum out near Broadway Junction, in one of Brooklyn’s less gentrified locales. The institution is a project of Noble Signs, a bustling fabrication and design studio that creates high-quality signage for businesses across the city.
The staff travels around the city and offers a permanent home to whatever objects of its constant shedding they can afford to salvage. The goal is to honor this ubiquitous but overlooked vernacular craft in the age of digitally printed vinyl banners and soulless LED displays. Whether handpainted, machine-fabricated, or neon-lit, each holding at the museum was viewed by neighbors in the open air millions of time over its life, its departure likely unmourned, even unnoticed. But here, they each get to live a second life, advertising the ghosts of a quickly forgotten New York history.
I love old things, handmade things, colorful things, big things, and weird things, and the Sign Museum delivered on all fronts. It’s not really a museum in the traditional sense - it’s a crowded collection of artifacts that surround an active workspace devoted to creating new signs every day. (There was a hand-lettering workshop underway at the same time we made our visit.) But every one of the signs on hand had a story, and our guide Seamus, who curates the museum, was eager to tell us all of them.
We dived into the minutiae of materials and regional variations - somehow the fact that thin aluminum frames are a trademark of NYC signs that isn’t found elsewhere in the country is something that I’ve been nodding at and mulling over for the better part of a week. We unpacked the stories of the neighborhoods where each of the examples came from. The names and businesses behind these signs are generally long-gone, but each one of them has so much to tell about the world it lived in. Amazingly, one older man taking the tour revealed that he’d run the business that donated one of the collection’s larger signs! His wife and daughter had to urge him to speak up - he was shy, he had just come to make sure it was being taken care of (sob).
I’m tempted to dive into the semiological significance of signs, but that’s too meta even for me. They’re out there, they’re open about their intentions, and with any luck they do their job with a level of artistry that makes us glad to see them. That’s the best any of us can hope for, I guess! So please enjoy these images, and we’ll catch each other again soon.
