gordonzola

I went to Modern Times last night for the "Clamor Magazine" post-mortem. Jen Angel has put out a zine/pamphlet called “Becoming the Media” about what they tried and why they went under. “Clamor” published from 1999-2006. I think it’s best described as an activist/lefty general interest magazine. Political issues were covered but often from a personal standpoint. Unlike many other lefty publications though, “Clamor” also published articles on varied subjects with no obvious “political” tie-in, acknowledging that whatever our politics, it’s not all we are.

It was gracious of Jen to invite me because, while I did have an article published in “Clamor”, I was also critical of the project at times. The second issue published the meanest letter to the editor I ever wrote and when I reviewed later issues for “MRR” or “Zine World” I wasn’t always kind. I think I once said, in my typical style of faint praise, that it didn’t seem like every article was someone’s slightly revamped college assignment anymore.

I may have more to say when I read the pamphlet, but what I said last night was that I liked that Clamor thought big, and tried to make lefties less alienating to a bigger audience. Even if thinking big often ends in failure, we can be better off for it. I am so sick of movement papers (or websites) where you can read a headline and know what the entire article is going to say. Sure, “Clamor” published some flat-out bad pieces over their six years, and even if I liked to kick it around a little, I miss it now that it’s gone. Plus, they actually paid (a token amount, but still… ) and supported new writers.

A magazine that I have some similar issues with is also in trouble now. If you want, head over to Bitch Magazine and buy a subscription or make a donation. They seem to be very close to going under. Even if they drive me crazy sometimes, that would still make me sad.

I didn’t expect to be markedformetal’s handler when she came to town to promote her book Indecent:How I Make it and Fake it as a Girl for Hire but there I was. It turns out I’m good at handling ( and I don’t mean it that way you big pervs). If the cheese ever turns on me I guess I know what my next profession will be. Maybe I’ve been watching too much "Entourage".

I find it incredibly satisfying when someone from the zine world reaches a bigger audience. I know that there was a lot of debate about the merits of that back in the day, and it was always special to be in-the-know enough to read some of those amazing works of the ‘80s and ‘90s, but good writing deserves to be read. Those of us who care about such things have to be happy about writers coming closer to being able to make a living on their work. I can think of, literally, 50 zines written by people with wit and insight who I wish could have kept writing and improving. Maybe some of them have been and their books just haven’t come out yet.

I know Sarah Katherine because I bought zines for Epicenter in the early/mid ‘90s. My process for finding new zines was to look at the ones I liked and order 5 copies of anything that they recommended highly. The zines of that time almost always had a review section. I would also do the same thing, much more selectively, with Factsheet 5 and MaximumRocknRoll. I don’t remember where I read a review for "Pasty" , but I ordered it and it stood out as a great zine. Selling 10-15 copies of an issue was big for us and I think we even had a standing order for each new issue. SK and I, in those pre-internet days, became pen pals.

Zines will never die out completely, but places like LJ provide a lot of the drama, excitement, community, and support that the zine world did with, for good and ill, a much faster response time and much easier distribution mechanism. No dollar bills arriving in the mail, sure, but no one was really trying to make money on their zines anyway.

The audience for SK’s benefit reading for the St. James Infirmary was straight out of LJ. Like seriously, I don’t think more than 3-4 people were not Ljers and one of those was black_pearl_10’s mom. Partly that’s because there wasn’t much (any?) advertising for it outside of our friendslists, but partly it’s because, intentionally or not, we’ve created a community here. That probably half the audience were also published writers was also reminiscent of the zine days of writers supporting writers.

Her reading at Black Oak the next night was the opposite kind of crowd. We got there really early because we were hiking around the Albany Landfill and it got dark.* When we got to Black Oak we found a huge stack of her books on a handtruck which was exciting. By the time we got back from getting some food, about a half hour before the reading, the room had been set up and most of the chairs were already taken. Her publicist did an amazing job getting it co-sponsored with Peralta JC’s Women Studies Department because they came out in force and mixed with the stereotypical older Berkeley liberal set. The Black Oak workers had to keep adding chairs and there must have been at least 60-75 people there by the time SK started reading. Geez, I was nervous and I wasn’t even reading. My job was to sit in front and laugh at the funny parts so other people would know it was ok. By the end of the night I think only four books were left on the table.

It was certainly a successful reading and hopefully, this is the beginning of SK becoming a full-time writer. But then I also think it’s a crime that beelavender’s Lessons in Taxidermy was not a best seller and that final_girl’s Jokes and the Unconscious isn’t being endlessly discussed in bars and cafes all over the country.

Congratulations markedformetal!




*Somehow, I got all muddy and SK stayed clean. I guess that’s one of the reasons I’ll never make it as a femme. More pics of the Albany Bulb art can be found here.
**springheel_jack wrote a really good and interesting review here which actually discusses the book. Check it out.

While organizing and weeding out zines from my, ahem, personal zine library, I found duplicates of a few that I didn’t want to send to some zine library where they would get stolen.

all the zines are claimed, sorry! thanks perigee

Cometbus #40
Doris #6
Doris #18
Doris #19
Mudflap (yin yang mudflap cover)
Mudflap (buttcrack cover)
SCAM #4

These are examples of how amazing zines can be. I found a lot of reasons why I love zines while going through the issues I felt were important enough to save. I'm happy to have the amazing zines I do: a complete set of Doris, Pasty, and Processed World, almost a full set of That Girl, the Epicenter anti-war zine from before I worked there etc. I do wish I had more copies of Pathetic Life, Murder Can Be Fun and Diseased Pariah News. And it kind of burns me that my i'm so fucking beautiful #1 is missing since I accounted for selling about 200 of those fuckers at Epicenter, but I'll live.

Whatever happened to the great writers of Theoryslut, Spawn of Satan, Teen Fag and so many others? Any zines you, my lovely readers, miss terribly and wish were still around?

I was going to make a post about all the movies I’ve seen recently but I realized that I am never going to get around to it and it would probably bore all of you anyway. But I do feel the need to mention that "Daredevil" was truly one of the worst movies I’ve seen in years. I wouldn’t have chosen to watch it, mind you, but it was the only bearable movie* on the flight to London so I was stuck with it.

The scene where he meets his future girlfriend was a masterpiece of nuevo repugnant-cool filmmaking.** You have this creepy guy pimping his own blindness to get a date with a "beautiful" woman, She resists his advances and he lurks along after her, grabbing her when she tries to leave. Then they had an unintentionally slow-motion martial arts scene which made Matrix 2 look stunning in comparison.

But dissecting "Daredevil" is like pulling wings off flies, lying to children or openly mocking sales reps. There’s just no sport in it.

Because that’s not enough for one post, I’ll give my readers a special bonus. In honor of anarqueso*** and wookiepocket’s poetry , and the concept of pulling off fly wings, I’ll end this aborted entry with a poem from a wonderful poetry zine I’m reviewing for MRR called "Skin Deep":****

"In the mirror I try to look big
but I feel small inside
A skinhead mouse
In a skinhead house
I strap on my suspenders
And admire the red
But still I’m lonely in my head
Whenever I feel like this
I stroke my knife for a while
Sometimes I feel sad"



*Not totally true. "Far From Heaven" was also playing but I didn’t want to see its beautiful filming and saturated colors on an airplane flight. And the other movie channel, playing "Narc" kept freeze-framing every 4-5 minutes so I gave up on it.

**ala Quentin Tarantino* having his hip white characters use racist terms in scenes with Black characters but, you know, it’s all cool.

***If you are not yet reading her, you are missing out.

****It’s a parody skinhead poetry zine. PO Box 13093, MPLS, MN 55414, $1

------------------

*I almost posted this as Trentino instead of Tarantino. Trentino is an Italian cheese much like Parmigiano Reggiano but not from the region of Parma that would allow it to be called by that name. It’s a very small production cheese in comparison and almost universally outstanding, better than most low-end Reggianos but probably not quite as good as the high-end ones. Sharp, nutty, full-bodied and often a little younger and sweeter than the Reggianos though that will vary based on the time of year it was made and how long it’s been sitting in some cheese distributor’s warehouse.

Well, I know that most of you don’t care because you’re all online oriented. But there are some good zines I’ve read in the last couple months too. First off, I owe easilyirritable an apology for not mentioning her zine earlier. It’s a great zine describing blob by blow what it was like to grow up Mormon. It’s called, appropriately enough, "I was a teenage Mormon". The reason I actually never said anything about it was because I had a whole Mormon post ready to write in my head and I couldn’t find the exact right quote that I read somewhere and wanted to use to tie it all together. While I was looking I did find this one that I’m kinda partial to though. Not that it has anything to do with EI’s zine.

In a book about San Francisco history, Sam Brannan, a San Francisco founder, grafter, and at the time still a Mormon leader, was being pressed to hand over the money he was raising in the name of the Lord, ". . .he came West in the name of the Lord, and brought with him an army of servants of the Lord, and charged the servants a heavy tax in the name of the Lord. And, when some remonstrated and said, "But this money you are collecting is not really being given to the Lord." Then he said, "Go and tell (Brigham) Young I’ll give up the money when he sends me a receipt signed by the Lord.

In a strange concurrence of events, the zine "Emergency #4: Monsters" came into my life in three different ways. When I was on my hurried trip to Reading Frenzy in Portland, I bought a copy because I was attracted by the cover and I read the first sentence and it didn’t suck. Such are my hard-line standards for buying zines. Before I could read it however, I read the new Doris which raved about it. Then I looked in my review packet from Zine World and a copy was already in there waiting for me.

And it’s one of the best zines I’ve read in years. It’s like a non-linear, novelized version of a personal zine. Or the other way around, I’m not sure. "Monsters" is the very loose theme, and even though the author "admits" to not knowing exactly where she’s going with it, the zine explores real and imagined monsters in friendships, death, activism, drinking and drugs, 9/11 and herself. In exploring these "monsters", the author doesn’t try to defeat them so much as try to understand, manage and even embrace some of them. Because there will always be monsters.

It’s just great to read zines by people who take their writing seriously as a skill and craft that I was borderline giddy as I sat and read this. The only place the writing bogs down a little bit is in her first-hand 9/11 accounts (which, judging from what I’ve read elsewhere, may be indescribable at this historical moment) and when discussing the death of her friend and fellow writer (Sera from "Slug and Lettuce") But even that is a very minor criticism, and she snaps back with one of those passages that makes me proud to be punk:

"So began the Sera is Dead Tour, an indefinable odyssey that taught me a lot and taught me nothing. A journey in the traditional punk styles of avoidance and acceleration. The rules are simple. When the territory to be crossed is emotional, cross physical ground instead. And when something simply takes time – like grief or like love – speed it up, speed it up, speed it up."

But it’s not just a punk zine, it’s a great zine for almost anyone. There are so many parts that I want to quote to show how good it is, but I’ll just leave you with this one: "Back in New York, I missed the Johns and Mikes, all the people I’d lost. People I’d folded and left in drawers after meeting Laura, Joe and the gang. I tried to open up those drawers after two years of neglect but they were empty. People don’t stay where you leave them, when you leave them. . . They don’t forgive you for leaving. You went away for one reason and one reason only: to become a monster."

In keeping with my policy of not reviewing zines by people I actually know. I will just mention that tarynhipp just put out probably her best zine yet, that slanderous has put out a massive second issue of "Race Riot" that is available from Pander and well worth the price. Even if she is "simultaneously so mid-90s i.d. politics AND new millennium bored with i.d. politics?" Also mala106 should be putting out a wonderful zine soon also which I recommend sight unseen. Unless of course she hated my submission which she hasn’t even acknowledged yet.

I already told you to get "12 Items or Less", but I don’t think you were listening.

And hey, did everyone lose LJ access last night for a few hours?

So I went to the Alternative Press Expo on Sunday. I think I’ve come to terms with it. I’ve been resentful of APE in the past because their table prices have mostly driven out the zinesters and the entrance fee keeps many other people out. But if I think of it as a comics convention with a few zines thrown in, it becomes a much better event.

It moved from Ft. Mason this year to a place within walking distance of my house. It was a big improvement. Carpeting made it not as loud and there was a full bar. The best thing was that there was a lot more space. It was much easier to avoid people with whom I have drama and not make eye contact with the sad tables and artists.

Last year a cartoonist blocked the small aisle trying to sell his comics by offering hugs to anyone who bought one. He wasn’t fooling anyone. Especially when he started offering hugs regardless of purchase. For some, APE is the best chance at human contact they have all year. Well, except for riding public transportation during commute hours, I suppose. Anyway, with more space, it was harder to be a victim of the needy, nerdy touchers and I think that made most people happy. Maybe it was me, but it seemed like there was a much friendlier atmosphere, in a non-threatening way, this year.

There were a lot more tables this year too. I spent a lot of time* picking up old comics at the 40 cents an ounce table, of course, but other memorable booths were PunkPunk, Not My Small Diary, (lots of comic zinesters) and Penny Dreadful. PunkPunk and Penny Dreadful produce amazingly beautiful zines. The new PunkPunk is six different small zines packed in a little burlap baggie and the Penny Dreadful "Travel Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area" is three volumes of different artists divided loosely under the titles of Personal, Dream, and Place, bound into one fancy package.

Though I love their stuff, there was definitely a lack of non-comic, not-so-artsy-and-produced zines. It’s just the nature of the event I guess. To echo another zinester, there just wasn’t much press at the Alternative Press Expo.

Confidential to Ericka: No "Cherry Comics" this year. Sorry.



*and it took a lot of time because there was so much crap there.

So yesterday I criticized The Feederz. But oh, how I appreciate the directness of their sarcasm and pointed comments compared to hippies. Below if my review for Zine World (http://www.undergroundpress.org/) of "Communities" magazine. It won’t be printed until issue #18, so consider this a sneak preview:

Communities "Journal of Cooperative Living" #113 Anyone considering living "in community" should read this. I mean that literally. If you can stand the passive aggressive, new age, pseudo-therapeutic, bullshit masquerading as "communication" within this zine, than it might work for you. This is the "Communication and Process" issue of this long-running publication aimed at (mostly) intentional rural communities (communes) which also contains a "communities" directory and classifieds. It’s not all bad. The article on one community’s solar power successes is interesting. One article on "True Consensus, False Consensus" could be useful. My frustration with this zine is that I agree with the importance of communication and process (I work and live collectively myself), but this issue mostly presents issues of power and language in a way that would make any sane person run for their lives. Words and phrases like "having a clearing", "checking out a fantasy" (not as titillating as it sounds), "non-violent communication" and "pushing my own buttons" do damage to the language and, in my humble opinion, hide the power of skilled manipulators by creating a new set of rules in the name of clarity and process. Unintentionally funny at times, but mostly useful as a flashing neon sign saying "DANGER! If you’re not a hippie, new-ager, or needy process queen STAY AWAY!" Communities Journal of Cooperative Living Rt. 1, Box 156, Rutledge MO 63563, www.ic.org [$6 US $8 world 82M 1:30] –Gordon

But even though I doubled the amount of words I’m supposed to use on a review, I still have more to say.

At first I thought that these people have a fundamental misunderstanding of language. That’s the only way I could figure that they could write/publish some of the inane shit in this magazine. Obviously different communities vary in their belief in the practices of any given issue of "Communities" But the creepy part is how many write in similar veins of therapeutic doublespeak.

The article "Towards Clarity and Honesty (Part 1)" leads off with this gem of an example:

Bill speaks to his best friend Andy because he feels Andy has been giving him the cold shoulder.
"Andy, can I check out a fantasy with you?"
"Sure, go ahead."
"My fantasy is that you think I’m a bad person because I was late to the meeting this morning. Do you think I’m a bad person?"

Ugh. Isn’t Bill pathetic? In his mind he jumps from being late for one meeting, (he’s described earlier as being the most punctual person in the group) into feeling that people think he’s a worthless human being. Isn’t living in "community" supposed to help your self-esteem? Not only that, but he manipulates the situation away from his fuck up (being late) into passive aggressively making Andy tell him he’s not a "bad person". Andy should say, "I thought we were best friends and now you’re all (whiney voice)’am I a bad person’ cuz I didn’t say hi to you or something. You were late, don’t make this about my feelings. Have some self-respect you needy little shit."

But no, direct communication and a flair for talented insults and clever word choice are frowned upon in the name of "process". There’s even an editorial piece at the beginning of this issue that warns against joking in meetings lest you be misunderstood. "Towards Clarity. . ." is all about using new phrases to prevent misunderstandings. The "Can I share a fantasy?" formulation is meant to acknowledge that an issue might only be going on in the initiator’s head. Fine. But what’s wrong with, "Hey, are you mad at me?"

Language is complex. Duh. You can’t take away misunderstanding, power and hierarchy by playing word games. It’s as if they think that you can take all the potential hurt out of words and process it away. You can "have a clearing" instead of saying what’s on your mind. You can "share fantasies" (yeah, there’s a phrase that’s impervious to misunderstanding and abuse) instead of saying, "what’s up?". But really it’s just creating a language that’s more insular, mysterious to outsiders and isn’t really any more clear.

I actually visited Twin Oaks (one of the communes involved in "Communities") in 1993. It was interesting on many levels, but one of the most striking things was the absolute disinterest on the part of community members about anything going on outside the land they lived on. Everywhere else I went people asked about SF and cities we were visiting. At Twin Oaks it was (I can’t remember the exact language, I’m sure it was more obscure) "Are you going to join Twin Oaks?" They had created a lot of great systems for involving community members in decisions but they actually had to pass out a glossary of terms used at Twin Oaks so we could understand what they were talking about. Again, how does this achieve clarity of process?

Later on in "Communities" I just decided that they hate language. How else can one interpret the following sentences?

"We wanted a ‘co-creative community’ – reflecting the integration of feminine and masculine virtues and whole-centered consciousness . . .This alignment of Self to Self, horizontally and vertically, is what we mean by ‘co-creation’."

Obviously utter nonsense of course. But what’s beyond it? I wish I could believe it was a carefully crafted, neo-Dadaist protest of the impreciseness of the written word. I’d disagree but appreciate the effort. Or maybe a Trojan horse-style word bomb? I know when I read too much of this type of crap I have a harder time thinking clearly. Maybe a KGB-planted time bomb wired before the end of the Soviet Bloc? I can’t think of any other way to explain the disregard to common practices of avoiding redundancy, avoiding random capitalization and having an overall, understandable series of words.

But finally I settled on the idea that these linguistic challenges are simply power grabs and control issues dressed up in "democratic" and new age robes. Check out this passage by a regular columnist:

"My roommates had decided to have a party in the middle of the night. I was not amused. After letting them know exactly what I thought of them, I went to get someone to referee. Imagine my surprise when he pointed out that I was the one making myself upset!"

In most articles in this issue there are references to "Making oneself upset", "Pushing one’s own buttons" and other examples of warmed over ‘70s self-actualization. In the above citation (which at least attempts to be lively, style-wise), the columnist realizes that he/she can’t control other people so they just need to let their anger go. I can’t think of an example better suited to the maintenance of established power.

In fact, the answers to most of the problems posed in these pages are all about looking within for answers. Introspection and self-examination have their place of course, but inward looking thought combined with a paranoid obsession with process and "non-violent communication" always leaves me looking for who’s really in control. Tools for "democracy" can become tools of manipulation rather easily, especially as language is rarefied into more and more esoteric constructions. In these situations, it’s usually the most skilled at word games who can keep deflecting issues away from their own actions and towards their feelings.

"When you got mad at me for partying and waking you up, it made me feel that you don’t appreciate all the work I do to make Commune X a wonderful place. It makes me feel like you think I’m a bad person. Do you think I’m a bad person?"

As for process, read "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" (http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm) and move on. Even if the author is some reform Democrat these days, It’s the best thing ever written about collective process.