Back Once Again For The Renegade (Spirit) Master

Things have been rather frantic lately, even when they’ve been really chilled. If that makes any sense. And predictably, just as things tap off and there’s a pinhole of light at the end of the tunnel, a fresh avalanche of Shit That Needs Doing arrives with a dry cackle, unannounced. Cry me a river of Bloody Mary, and don’t forget the celery, motherfucker.

Moving on, an update – The Wife and I are once again prepping for AfrikaBurn, and as always have set ourselves mad targets of an insane amount of Things To Make And Do (to add to the other list in title case). Amongst the many things we’re making and doing is taking a crack at creating a daily ‘newspaper’ called The No Spectator. This involves having a mate (thanks, Jacque!) create the front and back page templates as digital designs which are then printed out on an inkjet, and then scanned to master and one-colour printed on the AfrikaBurn Risograph machine at the HQ here in Observatory. Our dry run print looks something like this so far:

(But bear in mind that’s a pre-print of two colours, then run through an inkjet with test copy inserted to plot space restrictions). Once we’ve cracked that, with each master in one colour and each page run through a couple times to create the pre-printed pages, we’ll then be ready for stage two, which involves a Roneo machine. Some might remember these machines from back in the day – they were the protoprinters that created copies with a purple ink, and smelled of methylated spirits. That one. Which looks like so:

Now as you can imagine, these things are as rare as hobo billionaires, as are the user manuals. Luckily for us, it turned out that our man Ranger Jono was actually in posession of just one such machine, in perfect nick too. And equally as lucky the wild world of the web has provided great help in the form of one Mr Erwin Blok of The Netherlands, a mimeograph enthusiast, who somehow had just the right info to shed some light on how the bastard machine works, and what supplies are required to make it go clickety clack. This step has involved a fair bit of scratching heads, and the import of spirit masters (which sounds like a bad name for a trance DJ duo but is in fact the waxed master page used to transfer the type or image to the final printed page) from the US.

Once we have all pre-prints loaded with front and back page mastheads, they’ll be ready for type to be inserted on site, using a Sperry Remington TenFifty (thanks, Rob!) which we’ll use to transfer type onto the spirit masters. This enables us to create a schedule of daily and nightly events and gatherings as well as daily news reports of the event, at the event, and without having to rely on finnicky electronic machinery out there in the decidedly dusty Tankwa. It also makes for a great combination of both old and new technology. Well, that’s the theory.

Next step – collating all the info, running off the pre-prints and then (once we’ve packed our van with everything required for Camp AmaDeadly v.3) heading off into the dust the dust the dust of Tankwa Karoofornia on the morning of the 26th.

And that, for now, is that.