ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

Sparky Taylor, above left, in the Microcosm hoodie, is one of the seven people who run Microcosm Publishing, a seven-person collective that publishes and distributes books and zines. Below, her thoughts on working in a collective, getting BoingBoing’d, and doing what she loves—getting ethically-produced reading material out to the world.

VITAL STATS
Occupation: Book-slinger
Location: Bloomington, IN
Age: 26
First Job: Ugh. Telephone surveys!
Best Job: It’s an even tie between the 3 jobs I currently have
Greatest Professional Challenge: My name is Sparky Taylor
Salary During 20s: I get paid hourly. I’d say it’s mostly a labor of love.

1. Hi, Sparky Taylor. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
A combination of a deep passion for books, and luck, I’m pretty sure.

2. Tell us a little bit about Microcosm.
Microcosm is a collective of 7 people who publish and distribute books and zines. We have a general focus on DIY, and that includes veganism, comics, bikes, and a whole lot of other things. Our goals are to ethically produce reading material that is affordable and educational. We do mail-order, primarily through our website.

3. Did you always want to work in independent publishing, or did it just kind of happen?
I definitely always wanted to do something with books. It was my life goal to work in a bookstore. I got the chance to volunteer at Boxcar Books here in Bloomington for 3 years, which was an amazing opportunity. It’s how I met Joe who founded Microcosm, and it ultimately lead to my job here.

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Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

As head of A&R (that’s “artists and repertiore” to you) for XL Recordings, Kris Chen has gotten to sign Thom Yorke, Vampire Weekend, and Sigur Ros—which is pretty much what he was dreaming about doing since long before his mom told him to major in something sensible in college. (Click through to the band names to get a listen.)

VITAL STATS
Occupation: Head of A&R for XL Recordings
Location: New York and sometimes London
Age: 37
First Job: Janitor in the Peterbilt truck factory in Denton, TX
Best Job: This one. Seriously. Or do you mean the best job that exists which is not mine? In that case, Anthony Bourdain’s job looks incredible. I’d eat anything to get it.
Greatest Professional Challenge: Being polite and doing my expenses.
Salary During 20s: When I was 20 I clocked $4.50 an hour.

1. Hi, Kris Chen. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
I ran the US office of Domino Records for 4 years, and my friend Miwa recommended me to Richard Russell (owner of XL) as someone to consider for A&R. I met with Richard several times over the next few months and got on really well. I’d done almost everything else at Domino—sales, press, and accounting (all at the same time) so I wanted a challenge and XL felt like the right fit musically. In the last 4 years that I’ve been with XL, I’ve been really fortunate to sign Thom Yorke, Vampire Weekend, Sigur Ros and Holly Miranda and work with some really inspiring bands like Ratatat, the Horrors, and Titus Andronicus.

2. So what exactly does an A&R person do?
On one hand there’s a very basic process of listening to new music, seeing shows, and trying to find artists that you’d like to sign because you believe they fit with the label and could be successful. Once you’ve signed that artist though, you’ve got so much more work ahead of you. I tend to be very hands-on helping people maintain the creative detail of their album from the track sequence to artwork to planning videos. After that, when you’ve got a finished album, you have to work with your staff of publicists, sales, radio promo, and marketing folks to help the project get the best shot.

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Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

Kate Bingaman-Burt is known for her drawings of everyday purchases, posted online at What Did You Buy Today? She’s also adjusting to a new home-town—Portland, Oregon, where she teaches graphic design at PSU (check out the department blog she set up, and the student group she advises), and works on projects in her colorful, jam-packed home studio.

VITAL STATS
Name: Kate Bingaman-Burt
Occupation: Assistant Professor of Visual Communication/ Founder of Obsessive Consumption / Freelance Illustrator
Location: Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
Age: 32
First Job: When I was 13 I worked as an after-school janitor and part time pin peddler. After I finished cleaning the school’s toilets, I went home and made pins by cutting images out of magazines and catalogs. I would mount them on foam core and color the edges with a gold pen. FANCY! I sold them at the local floral shops and to anyone who would listen to me. Growing up in a town of 600, my market was limited. I have said this a billion times, but I so wish the internet had existed in the late 80s early 90s. Then I could have sold these amazing accessories to at least TEN more people. Ha!
Best Job: The three I currently have! Teaching at PSU, illustrating for good people and making my own personal work underneath the Obsessive Consumption umbrella.
Greatest Professional Challenge: BALANCE. Not being able to step away from my workspace. MYSELF. Realizing that sleep and a schedule and sometimes stepping away is conducive to producing more work, not less. LEARNING TO SAY NO. (I usually want to say yes).
Salary During 20s: Ranged from nothing to $25,000 (first design job) back to nothing (grad school) and then it touched $40,000 once I started teaching full time at a university when I was 27. I am starting my sixth year teaching full time. OMG.

1. Hi, Kate Bingaman-Burt. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
So many good turns of events! I will try to keep it short—this is the cliff note version.

When I was 16 I thought I was going to be a broadcast journalist, but instead I wound up with a double major in English and art. After undergrad I worked full time as an in-house packaging and product designer for a gift company in Omaha, Nebraska. Through designing my ass off and going to TONS of trade shows, I realized I was pretty fascinated with why people buy what they buy. Once I realized this, I then wanted to make self-authored work about people’s STUFF. I decided to go to graduate school where I focused on design and personal consumerism for three years. While I was in graduate school I realized that I LOVED teaching as well. I was hired as an assistant professor of graphic design at Mississippi State University my last year of graduate school and spent four years teaching rad kids about typography and design. I also made piles of work under the name Obsessive Consumption. Oh, and my husband and I started a non-profit called The Public Design Center while we were there too.

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Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

As the director of Columbia University’s Computer Music Center and the founder of the rhizomatic electronic art/technology/ideas/fun-time group dorkbot, Doug Repetto wears a lot of hats—including this fetching straw one when he works in the garden.

VITAL STATS

Occupation: Director of Research, Columbia University Computer Music Center; founder of dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity and organizer of dorkbot-nyc; founder and co-curator of ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show; artist
Location: New York City!
Age: 38
First Job: 7-11 where I was an underage cold cuts cutter (gross), learned how to clean coffee pots with Coke Slurpee mix, watched grumpy old cashiers steal their weekly groceries, and got horrible poison ivy when they made me mow the weeds in the back of the store. I think I made $3/hr.
Best Job: Current “jobs” are pretty great!
Greatest Professional Challenge: Lack of interest in $ vs. need for $.
Salary During 20s: $14-30k.

1. Hi, Douglas Repetto. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?

Some of them I made up (dorkbot, ArtBots, artist) and just started working. Getting my job at Columbia was luck and coincidence—I had decided to quit my previous gig (at Dartmouth College) to move to NYC and get a job at a record store or something and work on art. Then I happened to see a casual note at the bottom of someone else’s email saying that the CMC was looking to hire an art/music hacker type. I contacted them and said you don’t know me, but I’m moving to NYC and would love to be involved. It turned out that Brad Garton, the director of the CMC, did know who I was, since he was on a music-dsp (digital signal processing) mailing list I had started years before. So it all came together through lucky accidents. That said, I’ve found that being involved in lots of different things and participating in your community increases your chance of having lucky accidents!

2. You wear a lot of hats: teacher, working artist, founder and organizer of Dorkbot. How’d you get so diversified? What ties it all together?

I want to be useful. Making art can seem useless, but it ends up being useful in unexpected ways. Helping to make the world a more interesting place seems to me to be a good thing, so that tends to be my focus. I try to help students find their way, I try to put on shows and organize events that help people share their work with one another. I’m generally not very interested in distinctions between things like genres, disciplines, academic departments, high and low culture, etc. So I end up working with lots of different kinds of people with wildly varying interests. That’s exciting.

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A good yarn shop is a welcoming place where every customer is greeted with a smile, or even better, “You’ve got to touch this!” (Yarn, that is.) At Woolcott and Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sean Riley is that face—and it happened almost by accident.

Name: Sean Riley
Occupation: Owner, Woolcott and Company
Where: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Age: 44
First job: McDonalds
Best job: Owner/manager of Woolcott and Company.
Salary during 20s: 25-28K
Greatest professional challenge: Owning and managing a small yarn shop, Woolcott.

Hi, Sean Riley. How did you get that f&%*ing awesome job? Part work, part luck. I managed the store for some time while the former owner, Niki Bronstein, was sick. When she passed, away the family helped me to buy the shop. Before coming to Woolcott, I was working at an ad agency, in creative.

How did you become a professional in the yarn world? I was a longtime customer [at Woolcott], and Niki asked me to help out on Saturdays every now and then. It became more and more steady. Then I was teaching classes, then managing the shop…then owning it.

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Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

“We are lucky enough to live in an age where many companies want and need the personality of the individuals working for them to come through in the work they do.” That’s just the tip iceberg of thoughtfulness that is Dark Horse Comics Director of Public Relations Jeremy Atkins’ interview for ReadyMade.

VITAL STATS
Occupation: Director of Public Relations
Location: Dark Horse Comics, Portland, OR
Age: 32
First Job: Cart boy at an Indiana supermarket, before the ink had dried on my work permit.
Best Job: Duh
Greatest Professional Challenge: Myself
Salary During 20s: My age wasn’t the only thing in the 20’s

1. Hi, Jeremy Atkins. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?

Well, funny enough, I lucked my way into publicity after making plans to be a recording engineer. After moving to Olympia, WA, I took the only internship available at the indie rock powerhouse, K Records. I worked under the label’s publicist, and eventually took over the department after she left the company. Once I moved to Portland, I did freelance publicity for awhile, most notably for Temporary Residence Ltd, and a variety of other smaller labels and bands. As everyone will tell you, the hardest thing about being freelance in any field is GETTING PAID on time or in some cases, at all. (Let the record show that the previously mentioned TRL was one of the few that DID pay on time, without fail. Smooch.) Around the time I was out of money and patience, a good friend told me he’d started dating someone who worked for Dark Horse. After telling me that he wasn’t sure it was going to work out, I encouraged him to hold on long enough to extract information about working there. It turned out she was a very helpful and sweet individual, and I found myself gainfully employed soon after in the sales department. As predicted, however, she and my friend went their separate ways before I collected my first paycheck.

2. So what exactly does a publicist do?

In short, your primary objective is to solicit media coverage for the company, and all of its projects and creators. Probably the most important part of this process is seeking out and building relationships with as many media outlets and journalists as possible. Each project and artist is different, and it is imperative that you know who to pitch when and how, based on the project. A cookie cutter approach to everything will get you nowhere.

3. Was working with comics a long-time dream or plan of yours?

A dream, definitely. A plan, not so much. I have been reading comics since before I could actually “read” anything. I fell in love with Spider-Man and the Batman around the time I lost my first tooth. When other kids were “seeing Jane run,” I was learning about the Vietnam War in the pages of Iron Man. As I grew older, skateboarding and music became my focus, but comics always remained a huge part of my life, and my first love for sure.

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Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

For Andrew Milauckas, the idea to start a roadside fruit and vegetable stand with a ’50s aesthetic started as a joke. But the recent college grad found a 1930s Standard Oil gas station near his hometown of Douglas, Michigan—and now the joke’s on those who thought Milauckas was kidding.

VITAL STATS
Name: Andrew Milauckas
Where: Douglas, Michigan
Age: 22
First Job: Room service at my parents’ hotel at the age of 12
Best Job: Concepting, designing and opening The Summertime Market, and being a produce stand owner
Salary during 20s: Still there…
Greatest Professional Challenge: Managing my inbox (1763 messages, 423 unread)

1. Hi Andrew Milauckas, How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
Made it. I started planning in March, found the location around that time, graduated from college the first week of June and opened The Summertime Market the next week.

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Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

Christina Ray turned her passion for place into a job directing a gallery and organizing an annual festival of psychogeography—at which New York area readers can participate in a drugstore demolition and an iPhone drum circle, this Thursday through Sunday, September 17-20. Get all the information here. RM correspondent Chris Shott caught up with Christina last week to ask her our favorite question.

VITAL STATS
Name: Christina Ray
Occupation: Director of Glowlab Productions and founder of the annual psychographic Conflux Festival
Location: SoHo, NYC
Age: I’m going to actually take the ladies’ stance on that; I’m of legal drinking age and voting age
First Job: Working with my sister to sell drawings that we made to our parents.
Best Job: The one I’m doing now
Salary During 20s: In the $40,000 range
Greatest professional challenge: Balancing the desire to take on lots of really great projects with the time that’s available

1. Hi, Christina Ray. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?

I came to this in a roundabout way. After working in architecture and design, I started making my own artwork, and when I moved to New York City, I was represented for a few years by DCKT Contemporary. About this time, I become interested in psychogeography and started organizing algorithmic walking tours of the city and other events exploring the urban landscape. I started the Glowlab website in 2002 as a place for artists and psychogeographers to write about their practices. Then, the following year, I organized the first Conflux, which brought these same people together for a weekend to engage in various projects. This growing interest in collaborative artistic practice later translated into curating exhibitions. At that point, Glowlab was still nomadic in terms of spaces. But, as Conflux continued to grow, I wanted to have a space where artwork and projects could be presented on a regular basis year round, hence the gallery.

2. What’s distinctive about Glowlab?

We focus on artwork that relates to the larger urban environment. Artists work both in the gallery to create installations but also out in the streets. We actively seek locations for our artists to create and present work outside the gallery. Also, we work very closely with artists on the production side of projects, whether it’s assisting with securing permits, using social networking tools or scouting locations.

We’ve grown by working on collaborative projects with artists and producing events and exhibitions in a very DIY style. Our base or audience knows us from the days when we were organizing walking tours and hosting artist salons and throwing exhibitions in our Brooklyn loft space. We now have a gallery space in Manhattan but we still try to maintain the flavor of our original participatory and interactive projects.

3. Conflux, the annual festival of psychogeography, which Glowlab co-sponsors alongside various other arts organizations, kicks off Sept. 17 at New York University. Psychogeography? Explain.

The funniest description I ever heard someone say was, “Psychogeographic? Is that, like, directions to my ex-girlfriend’s apartment?”

Well, sort of. It’s about your experience with a place.

I got into learning about psychogeography through my own street topography, taking walks around the city, figuring out new ways to get places, like, taking every third left, just some really bizarre ways to travel. Maybe you end up doing a big circle, but that’s cool, you know? You see something different every time.

There are a lot of different interpretations and you’ll see that at the festival.

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