Westside Angst 10

By Ianto Ware (this zine is like eight years old, so who knows if that email address works)

Huh, it's been a while since I've reviewed a perzine. So many comics! I went back to the UK to visit my parents at Xmas, and one of the things I did while there was look through a bunch of boxes of stuff I'd left with them. One of them contained the remnants of all of these comics that my friend Jen had sent me a few years ago. Clearly that would not do! I have to review everything! So I put them in my bag to bring back to Canada, and a fair number of the reviews over the last few months have been of those comics.

But this (despite being old) isn't one! No, I picked this up at the Roberts Street Social Centre because I thought the way it was bound with a giant metal clip, and designed with multiple layers of different cardstock for the cover made it look really neat. Weirdly, I ended up reviewing another zine earlier this year that was also by Ware and from what seems to be about the same time as this one.

This zine is designated the quarter-life crisis issue, and is split into two main themes. One is about gender and sexuality, and how being a straight white male is deemed "normal" in our society. It says some interesting things about media's portrayal of gender, and raises some ideas that I've thought of before.

The other section is the quarter-life crisis bit, and is about Ware being upset with his job (which he doesn't like), wanting a better job and career (despite also not wanting a job or a career), and how society pushes us towards certain ideas of what counts as "success". Ware doesn't want to buy into the system and have a career, but at the same time he doesn't feel like he's left with many other options. He'd rather spend his time working on his PhD, but to pay for that he needs to work, and his attempts to get a grant to pay for university have so far failed. (I had a realization that the amount of aid money most students want is pretty small, and even the debt many graduate with is basically nothing compared to how much rich people earn. Just another reason to dislike our economic system I guess.)

I think I've approached many of the same ideas that Ware has, but at the same time I found this zine a little...complainy? Bitter? I mean, I'm sure that I've felt/thought/said many of the same things, but I don't know if I want to read about them. Maybe the most important thing this zine made me think about was my own thoughts and actions. Positive thinking!

Echo Echo #9

By Keet Geniza
nerdturd@gmail.com
wemakezines.ning.com/profile/Kagey

In some ways the name of this zine seems like a good descriptor of the contents. Short snippets of events in the life of the creator, lacking in context or larger narrative: a concert, an art show, a trip. Incomplete in the same way echoes can be, when you only hear part of the original. Eventually, these echoes of real life start to build up, creating not so much an actual image of the writer, but an outline that shows where, if not who, they are.

Most of this zine is about Keet returning to Manilla, the city of their birth, after five years of living in Canada. Once again we are presented with echoes, but this time of a different sort. These echoes are of the people and places that Keet left behind, and then returned to see again. Some things are the same, some are different, and some don't match the memories, though perhaps it is the memories that have changed, and not the reality.

In between the stories there are illustrations and comics. They range from the food Keet ate, to the karaoke bars they sang in, to the subways they rode. The thick-lined style is one I find appealing, and I'd be happy to read a zine that was just filled with them.

Neckmonster Seven

By Cheyenne Neckmonster

I spent about two years living and traveling through various countries in Asia, and my brother has lived in either Taiwan or China for almost three years. So I have some knowledge of Asia, and am interested in reading other people’s experiences with the continent.

In this issue of Neckmonster Cheyenne writes about the six weeks she spent in China studying as part of a program offered by her university. It’s kind of strange reading this, as the Cheyenne involved is different (and six years younger) than the one that I became friends with. I haven't read all of her zines, but her voice seems a bit different here.

I enjoyed reading Cheyenne’s account of her trip, even if, or because of, some of it was like my own experiences in those countries (I also missed Mexican food). Of course Cheyenne got to go to some places that I never saw (I am totally jealous that she got to see the Terra Cotta warriors), and I laughed at her crappy experience at the Great Wall of China (pro tip, don’t go to the nearest section, it’s worth sitting in a cab or whatever for another hour to get to a part that isn’t filled with tourists).

I liked the part where she wrote about trains, as they're a form of transport I still find faintly exotic. (I've spent most of my life living in places where trains didn't exist at all, and large parts of the rest in places where it's not really a functional form of transportation). I especially liked the bit where she wrote about watching people and places flash by outside the windows, and the tiny glimpses into people's lives that you got.

In some places I really enjoyed Cheyenne’s word choice (even if the fact that she never used capital letters kind of annoyed me). I liked how she described the "bleak landscape of roast duck and warm beer", when talking about being a non-drinking vegetarian in China.

Overall this wasn’t what I expected from an issue of Neckmonster (if Cheyenne ever told me she’d spent six weeks in China I’d clearly forgotten), but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Here. In My Head. Issue 9

By Cath Elms
catherineelms.co.uk

This perzine isn’t actually that personal, it focuses on things that Elms is interested in, instead of things that are happening to her. (Wait, is there a definition of perzine? I have no idea how to categorize things it seems. Some zine librarian I am.)

There are pieces on how technology is creeping into every aspect of our lives and how the internet makes us less productive (which I think says more about the person than the internet), feminism and how people in theology courses are not very progressive (shocking!), and female gods.

I was initially going to complain about how Elms says that her knowledge of Christianity is "shaky", as she just graduated with a theology degree, and apparently didn’t study any other religions (why you would want to study Christianity specifically when you are, as the author claims, not a Christian is kind of beyond me, but generally most people’s interest in religion is beyond my understanding). But then I realized that I graduated with a degree in Russian literature and I’m clearly not an expert in that area. I may know more than the average person (and some of the references Elms' uses show that they know way more than me about religion), but I definitely don’t know it all. As the saying goes, experts are people that know more and more about less and less, and it’s cool that Elms can admit that they're not an expert.

The piece on female religious icons is pretty cool, and I wouldn’t have minded if the entire zine was just profiles of female gods. Some of the pictures used to illustrate the write ups are kind of weird (really? That’s what you choose ti illustrate Freya?), but I thought it was kind of neat to read about these…characters? Entities? Mythological beings? My only complaints would be that the piece only mentioned stories from Europe and Asia, when there are lots of religions from other parts of the world.

One of the problems I had with this zine was that Elms is constantly referencing stuff, but not actually writing about it. Here are some examples:

"...in a future issue..."
"I could talk about..."
"...I can't write about [it] publicly..."
"...in my next zine..."
"...(long story, too personal)..."
"...Maybe in a later issue..."

I understand if you don’t want to write about personal experiences, but constantly saying “I can’t write about that” draws more attention to it. And if you want to have a “next issue” page or whatever, that’s cool, it’s a fine tradition of serialized publications. But dropping references to things, and then not explaining them? That just seems weird. Perhaps it would be better to spend the time now and expand upon those ideas, instead of saying that maybe you’ll get around to writing about them in the future.

But I guess that's just my opinion.

Awaiting an Epiphany

By Rachel
www.awaitinganepiphany.co.uk

The Manic Street Preachers don’t seem that popular in North America, and I don’t think I could even identify one of their songs if you played them (album covers I could maybe recognize). I understand there is something of a mystique around the band because of the disappearance/suicide of one of their members in the ‘90s, but I still can’t see what creates such love amongst their fans.

I’ve talked to several people who have friends that live in the UK who are obsessed with the Manic Street Preachers. It’s kind of bizarre to look at this fandom that makes zines about the band, gives them presents, and goes to multiple shows on every tour (and then waits for ages outside to see them afterward).

(Hell, living in Canada the idea of going to multiple shows on any tour seems absurd, but that’s mostly because in the UK you’re probably within two hours of multiple cities, while two hours from where I live wouldn’t even get me out of the province.)

Rachel clearly understands the appeal of the band, even if I don’t, and they continue to be one of the things in her life that make her really happy. Which is great! I’m not going to pretend I understand her motivations for some of the actions she does in relation to the band, but I’m sure I do lots of stuff she can’t understand either.

At the very least her stories about going to shows and meeting members of the band make me think that the Manics are very appreciative of their fans, and generally seem like nice people.

I addition to all the stuff about the Manics Rachel also discusses her chronic fatigue syndrome, which isn’t really something I know much about but which sounds pretty awful, and a not very good article that was published after she was interviewed. She felt she had been misrepresented in the article, and it makes me kind of sad that journalists will write about people in such a way.

There’s also a well written piece on extinct animals, and the ways humans are driving more and more spices to extinction. This piece also touches on global warming, and reminded me how, like obsessive Manic Street Preacher fans, I cannot understand what is going on in the minds of climate change deniers, or, worse, those that acknowledge that it exists, but are continuing full steam (or oil burning) ahead with destroying the world.

So overall this is maybe not the most uplifting of zines (though this isn't to say it's depressing either), but it’s well written, and if you’re a fan of the Manic Street Preachers you should definitely check it out.

Culture Slut #25

By Amber Forrester
fight-boredom.com

Recently I met Amber, the creator of this zine. I’d traded zines with her in the past, but we hadn’t really stayed in touch or anything. Just before Christmas she was visiting Halifax with a friend of mine and several of us got together and played Pirate Fluxx (as recommended by Alex Wrekk, super zinester gaming). We also went thrifting at a Salvation Army shop and found a book about feminist zines. We talked about reviewing zines (oh the hilarity!), which isn’t really a topic either of us get to talk about very much, and traded the newest issues of our zines.

Amber’s zine is a perzine, which, for those that don’t know, means it’s about her life. Sometimes when reading perzines I am impressed by the brutal honesty of the writer. They talk about incredibly personal things in their lives: their failures, their successes, their relationships, their problems. It’s kind of intimidating if you’re thinking about writing a perzine yourself, because you wonder what it is that you should be revealing in them.

In the last issue of Amber’s zine that I read she had just broken up with her boyfriend and moved to Montreal. This time (several years later), she’s just broken up with her Montreal boyfriend and is having a hard time. She’s dealing with her alcoholism (a pretty scary thing that definitely isn’t discussed amongst young people), her feelings of self confidence and self worth, and her times feeling suicidal.

It’s all pretty intense stuff. But the entire zine isn’t just about those things.

Amber also discusses her “job”, which is being a guinea pig for various medical experiments at McGill. These range from the banal (smelling things), to the downright bizarre (a test on genital pain, twice, during which she fell asleep), to the scary (all the pharmaceutical tests). She says that she’s not taking things that aren’t already on the market, but it’s still a bit scary nonetheless.

One of the things I learned while talking to Amber is that she writes and edits her text before she gets them ready for this zine. This may surprise some people who have read her zine, as the entire thing is either handwritten or done using a typewriter, but I think the extra effort really shows and makes Amber’s prose more readable.

If you're into perzines, or living in Montreal, Amber's zines are worth reading, even if there is a distinct lack of monsters and ray guns.

Echo Echo 8

By Kagey
wemakezines.ning.com/profile/kagey

Reviewing perzines is hard sometimes because they are so personal. When someone is spilling out their mind and their soul onto the page it's difficult to criticize their layout or their writing style. It's even harder when the person writing the zine is a friend of yours. You can find out more about what they think and how they feel by reading a zine they made for dozens of strangers than you ever did by talking to them.

Saying all that I did enjoy this zine. I felt a connection to Kagey and her fears and anxieties. The physical and metal actions she describes rang true with me, and I thought about putting on masks and pretending to be someone you're not, drinking in art galleries, and awkward conversations. "One thing you hate about being drunk is that, while you forget your shyness, you're still as awkward as ever, so you cringe harder in retrospect." (And even if you're not actually that awkward, your mind still concentrates on the small details and ignores the larger picture.)

I didn't dig everything in here (the poetry didn't register, as usual), and I wish that Kagey included more of her drawings as I like those, but I enjoyed the writing style that Kagey used; it was filled with loss and loneliness and little truths.

Go For Broke! #2 Klimbing Kilimanjaro

By Lani

I travel quite a lot, and I love reading about other people’s travelling experiences. So it was with excitement that I sat down to read this zine about a trip to a place I’d never been to before, Africa!

Our story begins several months before the trip when Lani discovers that her dad has cancer. Not willing to spend his remaining days wasting away (physically or mentally) he’s decided to do as many of the things he’s always wanted to as he can. First stop is the tallest freestanding mountain in the world: Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The whole family decides to go along with him, and they spend several months preparing for the trip before heading off and participating in a type of travel I’ve never experienced before: namely using guides and having porters carry all your stuff for you.

The trip itself is interesting, and while I had meant to read only half of this zine (it’s quite a lot of text) I decided I had to know what happened and read it all in one sitting. It’s pretty crazy to read about the massive differences in temperature, climate, and land type that can happen in just a couple of days of walking. While the health problems, such as difficulty breathing due to low oxygen levels, that some people encountered just from going up high are pretty frightening at times.

This does however lead me to a few questions: Why on earth would you want to climb this thing? (Yes, yes, “because it’s there”.) What must it be like to have your job be to help rich foreigners climb a mountain? Does the guy whose job it is to carry a toilet up the mountain hate the people who hire him? Why can’t they just pee outside? How much does this sort of trip cost?

Lani’s account of her trip is told mostly through diary entries, a form that both has its benefits and its drawbacks. The benefits are that we see, learn, and experience things at (almost) the same speed that Lani does, creating an immediacy in the story that other styles don’t allow. We feel her pain as she climbs the mountain, we struggle for breath as she gains the upper reaches, we worry about the other people on the trip, and so forth. Another benefit of this writing style is that we don’t know what’s going to happen next because Lani doesn’t know either. Do they make it to the top of the mountain? Does everyone but Lani die? You have to read the full zine to find out! Even the introduction (whose style showed the effort put into writing it, and which I enjoyed) was written before the rest of the zine and doesn’t supply any hints as to the outcome.

The downside of this style is that the text can be prone to errors, both grammatical and factual. While Lani’s writing style is generally pretty good, it is, as are most journals/diaries, a first draft and falls to the problem of not supplying us with enough information about certain things the author takes for granted. Generally this isn’t that big a deal, but the occasional reference or Japanese character included in the text just left me utterly mystified. Thankfully there is a brief Swahili/English dictionary in the back, so at least I can figure out those words.

There’re a few problems with layout/design, such as the blank pages at the end that I wish had been used to reproduce larger photos of the trip, but they’re by no means a deal breaker, and I do love the full colour cover (and inside cover), which look really nice. Despite these small problems Lani’s trip is definitely worth reading about, and I hope she does some more travel zines in the future. Especially if they’re about places I haven’t been to yet.

Deary Beloved

By Amy

My history of relationships isn't great. Not that the people I've gone out with haven't been awesome, and I still talk to most of the people I've been involved with, it's just that my longest (consecutive) relationship ever was about six months, and that was years ago.

I've never been dumped or dumped someone, in fact most of the relationships have ended by mutual agreement or because someone was moving somewhere else. So reading about someone's five year relationship, and the way it ended is both kind of intense and kind of confusing.

Here Amy tries to deal with being "just Amy" instaed of part of "Amy and David" after her relationship of almost five years finally ends. The zine is a collection of random thoughts and memories. Thinking about the good parts of the relationship, wondering where it went wrong, and hoping that the other person is as miserable as she is.

It's not the happiest of stories to read, and when it turns out that Amy was basically dumped so that her boyfriend could go off and be with someone else it makes him seem like kind of a dick. Though with only one side of the story I guess you never know everything that happens.

Overall I found this kind of hard to get to grips with, and to be honest I hope I am never able to properly understand the opinions and views that Amy has here. Lets keep our fingers crossed for that one.

Larry - Spring '10

By Lee

I got the second issue of Lee's zine months and months ago, and as I think I'm going to get issue three at the Birmingham Zine Festival next week, I thought it would be a good time to actually read this one.

Despite being an art student Lee fills his zine with loads of text. Anecdotes about feuding accordionists, complaints about how the bus system where he lives is terrible (it certainly sounds awful), and things he's overheard at the barbershop.

There are also longer pieces dealing with social anxiety, which is certainly something I can identify with, relationships (or rather a lack of them), and a "how to" I will ever do (anything with ingredients that "will burn through your hands and corrode your bones into dust" isn't coming near me, even if it is for art).

While's Lee's zine isn't entirely personal, there are aspect that are. I find these zines kind of strange as they can allow you into a person's personal space, and know some of their fears and internal confusions. Considering how often zinesters seem to be somewhat awkward in social situations I wonder if they feel as though writing, isntead of spoken words, is the only way they can properly express their emotions. Strangely I think I'd rather tell people about my feelings in real life than print them in a zine.

Oh, and if you're at all interested in this zine you might want to check out the zine I made about the first Midlands zine meetup for which Lee wrote about desperately trying to finish his zine before hand.

City Sacker #2

By Ray K
raykisforeign.blogspot.com

This is subtitled "a short story", and I'm not sure if I would even call it that. A reminiscence perhaps, as Ray recalls a person he had liked, and who had liked him in return.

But nothing ever happened, and Ray wonders about what could have been if he'd been more forward, if he hadn't cared what other people had thought, if he just hadn't thought so much. The note on the final page that says "But I hear you eat meat nowadays" captures the way that people change, and how you can know someone really well for a while, but they can become completely different people.

Queenie #1

(This is actually a really small zine, that picture makes it look huge!)

By Rachel Lindan

Rachel has chronic fatigue syndrome and is often depressed. She tries to deal with both of these things through her writing, and reading this zine kind of catalyzed a number of things in my mind. For the last few days I've been thinking a lot about depression, anxiety, self worth, love, and other similar things that it seems Rachel is also trying to deal with.

Our society seems to create no end of depressed and self critical people (I just got an email from a friend of mine that, in a few short paragraphs, used the word 'depressed' to refer to three different people, and implied it (at least a little) about a forth), and yet to some extent I feel as though society itself is to blame for some of this depression. Movies and culture create the idea that if we are not happy all the time then we are failures. Yet if you think about it, who is actually happy all the time? Nobody. Depression (and anxiety, and all that other stuff) is part of life, but by thinking that we are wrong/not good enough/inferior/whatever because we exeprience depression, we only end up even more critical of ourselves ("Why aren't you happy like everyone else? Why can't you be more normal?") which only leads to more depression.

Rachel also talks about how she longs to be in a loving relationship again, but feels betrayed by both the people she has gone out with in the past, and by her own body. Our society/popular culture also seems to think that the only way we can be happy is to be in a monogamous relationship. Yet more and more I wonder about this. Why must I limit my love to one person? Why must love almost always seem to be sexual? Why do I feel as though I need to be in a monogamous relationship with one other person to the exclusion of all others? If I have friends to talk to, to hang out with, to care about (and yes, to have sex with), do I need to have a monogamous partner? I don't know, and perhaps I should just write about this stuff in my own zines instead of reviews.

I don't have the answers, and neither does Rachel, but she does have a recipe for chocoalate chip cookies, and a list of the top ten fringes, both of which are supplied in this zine. I recognized maybe three names on the list of fringes, and would only actually recognize one of them if you showed me pictures, but I still like the idea. Just like how I like this zine.

Recycled

By Charlotte Cooper
www.charlottecooper.net


This zine takes the odd decision to use the paper size of...A3? Whatever the UK version of 11 x 17 paper is. It's odd because there's no real reason to do so. The zine is folded down to half size, and all the pages are laid out as such. On the flip side there's some art in the margin, but the pages could have been rearranged so you didn't need to do that. Strange. Perhaps Cooper just didn't want to staple anything.

But enough about the design, what about the content? In her intro Cooper says that she's been writing zines for years and that this one is a collection of stuff from previous zines. I'm not sure if they're from zines that were actually distributed, or ones she made but never gave to anyone. I guess it doesn't really matter since I've never read any of them before.

The pieces come from all the way back in 1997 up until May of this year when this zine was made (though it took me ages to figure this out, I really had no idea what the numbers next to the titles meant. 5.10? 10.00? What on earth do those mean? Oh wait, month and then day in a nonsensical format, of course...), and talk about Cooper's band (where they members had "no intention of practising or learning musical craft", removed the strings they didn't need from their guitars, and learned a grand total of one song), old pets, relationships, the perfect day, and some weird art piece in the middle of nowhere in Norway.

I like the idea of reprinting things from older zines, especially if they represented important parts of your life. But the pieces Cooper has choosen don't seem to be presented in any specific order, and as there is no additional information (except in one case), I kind of wondered why she choose these pieces and what happened after each of them (did her band ever perform their one song?).

Somnambulist Number Nine

By Martha Grover
PO Box 148711
Portland, OR
97293
USA

In her introduction Grover talks about how she’d just been rejected from a whole bunch of different grad school programs for writing. Some of them were for fiction, and some of them were for non-fiction. With that as an introduction, and the way the zine is split into different sections with titles and bylines, I started wondering how much of the stories told were true and how much were made up.

The stories (true or not, they’re still stories) are told in the first person, and seem to tell about every day things, but they manner they’re told in, and the way dialogue is presented, seems stylistically more like a piece of fiction.

I would just accept that these are true life stories, and that Grover just spends more time writing and editing the content of her zines so that the writing seems “better”, except for the fact that the stories seem to concentrate on the negative (repetitive jobs, injuries, hanging out and drinking with a guy who’s anti-psychotic drugs stop working when he consumes alcohol) and are all kind of depressing (and, in the last case, scary).

Perhaps this says more about how I consume media than anything else. I always seem to assume comics that feature regular people doing regular stuff are based on real life events, while well written prose that is not straight up journalism (ie. newspapers or pop science books) or written by hand must not be real. This really shouldn’t be the case, as I write loads of zines about real life things that have happened to me. I don’t think I ever put much dialogue in mine though.

So yeah, there are stories about Grover’s meetings with various doctors, some time she spent with an urban primitivist, and a piece that flows surprisingly well considering it kind of jumps around between different people, places, and times. There’s also a piece by Kyle Sundby that seems to be about why lots of people think he’s a jerk? It was kind of weird.

I like the way Grover writes these stories, but I really don’t seem to be able to tell you why. This review isn’t very helpful. I’ve actually just gone and found a review of this issue on Broken Pencil. I don’t normally do this, but I wanted to see what someone else thought of this zine, and if they had perhaps managed to express it better than me. They have not.

That review is not very positive, but makes me wonder why the reviewer bothered to read the zine if they don’t like perzines. The reviewer says the zine is just filled with stories of depression, apathy, and embarrassment, and then asks how it’s art, and if it’s pleasurable. Yet you might as well ask the same question of any thing you don’t enjoy, from opera to comic books to TV shows. I suppose when you come down to it, the idea of art is in the eye of the beholder.

Queenie #2

By Rachel Lindan

I met Rachel through the We Make Zines ning, and we were both super excited to discover another zinester living so close together. We’ve hung out a couple of times (museum trips, parks, scrabble!) and, to be perfectly honest, I feel kind of weird reviewing a zine that I helped photocopy. (Not this exact copy, it was printed on Rachel’s printer, but we had a photocopying “date” and I showed her how to use the copiers and rearrange the flats for this issue so they copied more easily.)

In addition to living in a kind of terrible part of England, Rachel and I share a sense of depression and social anxiety. It’s nice to read or talk about experiences like these, but it's nice to know that you’re not completely alone.

So what’s actually in the zine? Stuff about music Rachel likes (she really likes Manic Street Preachers, you should email her if you like them), the recent UK election, Shaun the Sheep, and her guinea pigs (who she calls “peoplefeets”, which implies they get stepped on a lot).

It’s just too bad the cover couldn’t be in colour, because it looks really nice that way.

Talking About the Weather November-December 09

talkingabouttheweather@googlemail.com

Despite my general dislike of zines without staples (it’s not that much effort!) this one’s actually pretty good. I believe it was made by a teenage girl I met at the Brighton Zine Fest.

At first it seems like your average cut and paste perzine thing, listening to music, meeting up with friends, getting really excited about things. And then suddenly she’s interviewing The Specials. Yes, the band. She’s back stage at a gig they did, and they all seem a bit drunk (or very drunk in one case), and I’m jealous. It’s also a pretty good interview.

Ghost Town apparently sold 900,000 copies, and reading about it now (just before the election in the UK) I’m kind of worried. I’m afraid it’s all going to happen again. Is already happening again. And I don’t know what to do.

There’re also instructions on how to make a paper boat, lists of things, a way of portraying the seaside at Brighton Beach that I really like, and some pieces of art.

But still, too much fighting on the dance floor. Sigh.

Your Pretty Face is Going Straight to Hell #9/Telegram Ma’am #18

By Miss Tukru and Maranda Elizabeth
www.tukrulovesyou.com knifecrime.etsy.com

I went to the Brighton Zine Fest earlier this year and on the second night there was a dinner with bands and stuff performing. It was pretty fun. I drank rather a lot because I am terrible at social situations. I had multiple cans of cider, and when I finished those I still didn’t feel drunk enough, so I asked the goth girl sitting next to me if I could have some of her red wine.

Now if sober I would know not to drink red wine, and in fact had said I shouldn’t earlier in the evening, but by this point I was drunk enough to think it was a great idea. Soon my memories turned into a haze. The show ended, everyone went to a nearby pub. I flitted about talking to lots of people I don’t remember. Then I’m outside walking back to the house I’m staying at and I’m cold. Then I’m waking up the next morning hung over, still in my trousers, and lacking my hoodie.

I got up and examined my stuff to see if I’d lost anything. I still had my wallet and ID, but all of my zines were gone. I must have given them to other people while drunk. I also had candy wrappers in one pocket, and a copy of this zine in the other, presumably things people had given me in return for my zines. I stumbled around for the rest of the day terribly hungover and even worse at social situations, but I did at least manage to get my hoodie back by going back to the pub (where the girl tending bar asked if I was okay after the night before, what had I done?).

This is a split/flip perzine, and isn’t really the sort of thing that I usually go for, though I do really like the cover of Your Pretty Face is Going Straight to Hell. It’s full of social anxiety, depression, and other fun things like that (and which I am experiencing right now, drat), but none of it is really written in a style that appeals to me that much. At one point one of the authors writes “i don’t re-read what i’ve written.” (yes, with that capitalization), and I can’t really imagine doing that with any of my zines.

At least I’ve learnt (hopefully for the last time), to stop drinking red wine.

Culture Slut #20

By Amber Forrester
helloamber.etsy.com
hello-amber.blogspot.com

Sometimes after I read zines I’ve gotten through trades with other people I really wonder what they think of the one I gave to them. Culture Slut is a really good perzine from Montreal that focuses on some queer and feminist issues. But what did I give to Amber? Why a zine filled with fake journalistic articles about Godzilla and a piece of pulp fiction about a dude fighting Nazis who ride pterosaurs. What on earth must she think about me?

I traded with Amber because I met one of the organizers of the Brighton Zine Fest at an alternative press event in London. I told her that I had lived in Canada (though really, everyone in the UK can tell I lived _somewhere_ else because of my accent) and had been to Montreal recently, and she asked me if I knew Amber/had read her zine. I hadn’t.

But I did know of Amber, because she was on the wemakezines ning, so upon getting home I sent her a message and initiated a trade with her. And now, a mere two months later I’m actually getting around to reading her zine (I have piles of zines waiting to be read and keep getting new ones, this is good for the blog, bad for me).

And it’s good.

Amber’s just moved to Montreal, and she’s got a sweet job learning French. Getting paid to learn French! Awesome, if I move to Montreal I totally want to do that. She tells us about what it was like moving to a big city (after living in a small Ontario time for, I believe, all of her life) and how adjusting to a place where you don’t speak the language can make even buying stamps hard (I know how that is...). She tells us about awkward doctor’s visits, her first period and other menstrual stuff (I think I have read more about this than most guys, probably for the best really).

There’s a lot of stuff about being queer in Montreal, and reading about how the gay pride events are being incredibly commercialized with banks paying attractive (presumably) gay people to walk around in not much clothing and give out stickers. Amber’s personal opinions on being queer (but going out with a boy!) reminded me of some of Erika Moen’s comic Dar, and how western culture/society really does try to fit everyone into binary holes.

She talks about her childhood crushes and pets, about going on adventures in Montreal, about being shy and socially awkward, and reviews other zines (I’ve read one of them! How exciting).

Maybe I’ll make my next zine a perzine and Amber will review it too : )

Cat Week: Independent Kitten

By Shelly

IK is a perzine filled with the seemingly completely haphazard content you often expect from such projects: book reviews, collages, musings, and pictures of cats.

However, I do generally like those things, and, despite the randomness, there is some stuff in there I enjoyed.

Shelly lists her four favourite places in Portland, one of which is a Mexican place that I repeatedly failed to go to both times I was in the city. It will haunt me forever. Damn you taco truck and your delicious, ghostly, vegan food.

There’s also a brief essay on Shelly’s relationship with her grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s. The last line is really sad: “I also wonder if it makes things hard on her, if it would be easier to leave her routine and not have these strangers appearing and occasionally crying.”

I don’t know how I could deal with that, from either end.

Larry #1

By Lee
myspace.com/the_screever_lee

This is the other zine I got at the recent Midlands zinester meetup in Nottingham, and it totally helped me pass the time on my train ride home. I was a little worried when I first opened it, as it stated that it was made to fulfil the ideas of “anti-perfect” and that spelling and grammar mistakes had been intentionally retained. This kind of drove my inner editor insane, and I worried that it’d be almost unreadable.

Thankfully, Lee seems to be able to spell and put together a sentence, so any errors that existed were ones I didn’t notice. Larry is sort of like a personal magazine, filled with loads of different content. There are little essays about his social anxiety (which I can totally relate to, having gone through pretty much the exact same things, though I’m sure he won’t believe me based on how I acted in Nottingham), why he’s straight edge, a piece on his university, and a completely valid complaint about the bus system near where he lives (“We’ve subcontracted the buses on that route, so your bus pass is no longer valid.”).

There’s also instructions on how to emulsion transfer (which were a little hard to read as they were hand written, but which I think I might try), a piece on single player rpg books (like choose your own adventure I think?), photographs (which generally didn’t reproduce that well), reviews, an activity page (!!!), a picture of dinosaur (!!!), and a piece on why you should turn your cellphone off at night if you’re not in the habit of getting emergency phone calls in the middle of the night. Holy shit, that’s right! I will be saving electricity by turning off my phone. Thank you Lee! I feel really dumb now. I hope issue two will have similarly life changing information.