Yesterday was a sick day for both me and my computer. I required a lot of rest and sleep; my computer required a rebuild. *wince* Today I’m a smidge less foggy than yesterday, so I’ve spent most of the day finishing up some cards while reinstalling all of my programs.
Very exciting stuff, I assure you.
However, just in case you are bored, this happened:
Back soon.
Hello, hello!
Because yesterday was Australia Day, the post office wasn’t open. I did manage to get there today and found that I had received such a cool zine package. Not package as in box but definitely package as in ‘zine with extras!’. Those extras? Really cool art!
Check that out. Isn’t it cool? The ones on the middle and left with solid navy blue backgrounds are actual postcards, and the one that is about the same size on the bottom (with the cool man in the moon) has been drawn on the back of the cover for watercolour postcards. I love being able to see the marker/pen strokes and such. The two bigger pieces at the top have drawings on the front and back, but I forgot to take pictures of the back. Oopsie. I am looking forward to digging into the zine itself. Very happy mail!
I received a couple of other things in the mail, too, but they aren’t zine-specific. I’m going to tuck those behind the more tag so you can view if you want to and not it if you don’t.
May your mailbox bring you happiness.
Here’s to my first Australia Day as an Australian citizen.
Fontainebleau
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9.5cm x 11.5cm
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I bought this little lovely on my big ol’ Sticky Institute distro last year. It was a zine that forced me to face my attraction to pretty things, my uncontrollable judgment-by-cover nature, and my unbridled, passtionate affection for 3D glasses.
Yep. That happened. And I even took a selfie. Ugh. I am thoroughly disgusted.
But enough about me.
Fontainebleau – if you hadn’t already guessed – is French. Beyond that, I’m not sure. I took one semester of French when I was a teen, and I can only remember enough to be able to say “My name is Nyx” and “You petite cabbage”.
But, as seems to be my custom with zines I enjoy, I don’t care! I don’t care about not knowing the words because the novelty and experience of the zine is so much fun.
Fontainbleau is printed on lovely glossy paper – something I wholeheartedly approve of for art zines. Its size is odd, but that is no deterrent, as it’s packaged with an A6 piece of thicker board to protect it. The zine, the glasses, and the board are all packaged together in a clear cellophane bag. I felt a bit like a child opening it and looking forward to my ‘toy’ 3D glasses that came with the ‘main’.
Perhaps stretching a metaphor thin, but I’ll move along.
I won’t lie; art is often like poetry to me in that I can appreciate it but am often left with the feeling that it is saying something that I’m not understanding. The pleasantly strange images are a curiosity to the normal gaze. That surrealism (not using the art term, just picking the word) takes on a whole new level when you slip the red and blue glasses.
There’s a quote in the beginning that starts with the line ‘Under the water’. Those words repeated in my mind as I looked at the pictures with the glasses on. Everything seemed suspended in a strange world…
If you don’t like art zines, then not even the novelty of 3D glasses is going to make this any more appealing. If you do, however, why not take it a bit further and make some popcorn as well.
**If you know anything more about this zine, feel free to contact me. I’ve done sweet little research with my swamped schedule, if I’m to be honest, and I would appreciate any factual tidbits.
What a whopper of a review! Forgive my long-windedness!
Hand Job Zine Issue 6
Jim and Sophie (and contributors)
A5
https://handjobzine.wordpress.com/
Sometimes you just know when you’ll like a zine. I do come into these reviews with a bit of naivete because I’m hoping for a good zine, but this one? This one I had a good feeling about.
Right away, I was taken to what I view as the more ‘traditional’ (not a bad word!) style. There are copied edges and smudges, different fonts and handwriting, pictures, stories… It rings true with cut and paste style. Seeing all this in my initial flip through had me eager to dig in.
I’m used to a table of contents of some sort in zine, used to being gently invited in to continue on reading. HJ6 doesn’t have a table of contents or even page numbers – but it works! It works to a magnificent degree with this zine because of the tone set on the very first piece – a poetic, melodic (in my mind) welcome from Jim and Sophie.
I have no idea who Jim and Sophie are, but I already think they’re pretty cool. The introduction is excellent in that I think you’ll know straight away whether this zine is for you. Either you put it down or you feel that ‘Boom. You’re here, so why not keep reading?’ that the intro really set the stage for in my reading experience.
Pull up a stool, have a smoke and enjoy.
The pieces including were all interesting and sometimes shocking in the way that a story can lure you in, calm you down and then slap you across the face, all while maintaining the same tone. I went back more than once to read a sentence here, an entire piece there. While that might be something that puts others off, I liked the feeling that written pieces were as much art as literature. (And all that without needing to read Jane Eyre!)
I can’t say that I’ve understood all the poetry, but I’ve taken enough English classes to know that I’ll come ’round.
While a zine maker who accepts contributions can only work with what they have, I feel like this zine was set up in a way that screws with my expectations. The aforementioned English classes could have me reading into it too much, but I found myself shocked out of my expectations more than once. ‘Him Upstairs’ was a slap across the face (at the end), followed by a picture, followed by another piece with something special about it (no spoilers), and so on. The review toward the end and the very last piece – a list – continued to take my expectations and laugh at them. A strange but enjoyable experience.
This isn’t a zine to sit down for a casual flip-through. There is a lot of content and a lot of room for contemplation, so you be so inclined.
PS. Hand Job Zine is calling for submissions! Be sure to click on their blog link at the top of this review and check out their blog.
Do you want to know what this is? No? Darn…
Just kidding. I am so happy! This is a top view of Dear Anonymous 3! It’s finished! Kind of. I still need to make the master copy so I can put this away, make copies and print off the cover as well. But I’m very close to completely finished!
If I recall my numbers correctly, this is twice the size of DA2. I’m still going with the less protective paper to cover it, though, because I can’t find minty/sea green cardstock for the life of me. Grr.
Anyway, woohoo! It’s a touch after 11pm my time, and I’m happy about that. I was shooting for midnight.
I love making Dear Anonymous. The Perfect Pocket Guinness Guide might be the first zine I ever made, but Dear Anonymous was my first zine idea.
Whenever I receive a letter to put into the zine, most times I know exactly how I want to present it. The picture of what to do with the words, what art (if any) to include, pops into my head almost instantaneously. There has been one or two times when I have stared at a letter and come up with a big zero, but I shrug those off.
So, what’s up with the grocery list?
From my attempts at sketching in the first zine to this zine, my style has changed a lot. I use a lot more typing, more elements, etc. This grocery list? Well, I got it into my head that one letter for DA3 had to be a note on the front of a refrigerator. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. Not a clue. I just cut up the bits of paper, drew on them and taped them to the page…
So, because I’ve taken so long with DA3 and because I missed the reviews last week, I figured I would break my own rules and give you a full-page sneak peek of one of the DA3 letters. This is the original, so it will look different in the finished zine. I think you can imagine what the black and white version will be like.
I’m currently working on a fake yearbook autograph page for a background for another letter. It never lets up, this crazy mind of mine.
It’s interesting how quickly something can become a part of your life. While, in reality, I missed two reviews and Sunday Call for Subs (the latter not really ‘missed’, as no one had a claim on it). Not the end of the world by any means. But I do still feel a little odd when I miss a day here.
All for good reason. Wanderer had a rather significant birthday on this weekend, so I did have to dedicate some time to finding memes to plaster all over his Facebook wall. My favourite:
I was also responsible for the birthday cake. Wanderer requested chocolate cheesecake with chocolate chips. I did him one better and included a chocolate base, chocolate ganache, and chocolate chips sprinkled on top. This is what that looks like:
On another note…
The good news is that my technical difficulties appear to have stemmed (knock on wood that it remains in the past tense) from a software problem rather than a hardware problem. Also, while I have run out of some ink on my printer, I still have plenty of good ol’ black so I can finish up DA3 without a problem. I’m hitting that hard today because I *love* some of these letters so much and want to see them in final form.
A little stumble in the beginning of the year is certainly nothing new for me. The world keeps turning.
Now for zine-making!
*Chookless Head? Well… Headless Chicken = Headless Chook + switch it around = Chookless Head
Looking for personal experiences or ideas written in first person, to go into a zine by male identified people about unpicking societies conditioning and sexual abuse. All comments, collaborators welcome, email me at tedmullin@hotmail.co.uk
Mock up draft of what the zine could look like with subject ideas I’d like to write about. Male Survivors *Download link of articles I’m interested in, not for publication, I don’t own texts.*
I won’t edit your stories only copy and paste. I’d like 50% to be dedicated to unpicking abuse and learning good consent. But not necessary to include in every text if you feel your story stands alone as valuable experience.
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Table of Contents Continue reading “Call for Submissions: New Zine on Male Survivors”
It’s interesting how much time, energy and worth we put into technology. I don’t think you can really comprehend the degree to which it is part of your life until the connection with it is threatened.
I’m thinking about this today because my computer is acting up. Anything more complicated than an email has become irritatingly difficult. But it wasn’t until things started freezing and not even opening that I began to feel the threat to that connection.
What I find interesting is that – after I copied my files onto an external drive – I thought of this blog. I was unhappy about the prospect of being late (again) with zine reviews. I didn’t like the thought of being disconnected from this cyberspace. I knew that this blog and the people I am ‘meeting’ here have made me happy, but I didn’t realise to what degree until the possibility of not being here arose.
This post is a bit scattered. You’ll have to pardon me. I meant to simply get on here and post that the zine reviews might be delayed this week.
Alas, sometimes my train of thought is more like an old hiking path – interesting but often hard to follow…
Haha. Until next time!
