All ready to go into the mail tomorrow!
Hell or High Water…
It looks like the Powers that Be have chosen the hell portion of my ‘hell or high water‘ challenge.
In F: Sunday: 96.8 / Monday: 91.4 / Tuesday: 96.8 / Wednesday: 100.4 / Thursday: 91.4 / Friday: 91.4 / Saturday: 95 / Sunday: 96.8
Call for Zine Submissions: The Doomsday Book
Hi guys. I’m currently in the midst of putting together a zine called ‘The Doomsday Book’. It focuses on the cult movie Times Square (1980) and it’s main star Robin Johnson. It’ll be a one-off effort, A5, and B&W. My main goal is to have this ready to go at least a month before Robin’s next birthday (May 30th) as I will be sending a copy to her via a relative of hers.
I’m basically looking to include other people’s personal experiences in regards to the movie, the impact it’s had on your life etc. Poems and artwork are also welcome. I don’t want to push the deadline back any further than the end of April, so please contact me ASAP if you have any interest in this project. Also, feel free to ask me any questions.
I’ll include the movie in a youtube link for those of you who have no idea what I’m referring to (and I’m sure there’s plenty of you).
Times Square (1980) [full movie]
Many thanks, Sarah. xoxo (timessquarezine@yahoo.co.uk)
Eventually…
Eventually, I will stop being a workaholic.
Eventually, I will be strict and only allow myself to work normal hours.
Eventually, I’ll be able to say ‘no’ and.or ‘not right now’.
Eventually, I will learn to put the deadlines I set in my calendar. That way, when I say that Dear Anonymous 3 will be sent out to contributors at the end of January, Dear Anonymous 3 will be sent out at the end of January.
Hell or high water, these are going out to contributors on Monday. After that, I will actually stick to my commitments like posting up two reviews a week and engaging with other bloggers.
Happy Mail? No. Mystery Mail? Yes!
This is one of those posts that has little to do with zines. So if you’d rather not read about my strange shenanigans, you know what to do.
Well! What a way to start the week. No happy mail, even with a Monday stop to the post office. Well, none if you don’t count a Spotlight catalogue trying to get me to spend money that I shouldn’t spend. They did, however, include a small origami project which was nearly impossible to do because they kept referring to dotted lines that didn’t exist. I did manage to make the “koala” (heavy on the quote marks). Zine Ninja wasn’t impressed.
So. Mystery mail.
I already knew I was going to be up early today thanks to the roadworks notice slipped in our street mailbox last Friday. What I didn’t expect (besides the disgusting smell of whatever they were spreading on the road) was a knock on the door from our postie. (He always talks as if I’ve been awake for hours already when I always come to the door in my PJs. Adorable.)
Having experienced mail theft, I only direct mail to our street address if I absolutely have to, so I know when something is on its way. You can imagine my surprise at being delivered the small, light package. You can imagine my greater surprise when I took this fella out:
I stared at it for a good long while, trying to jog my pre-coffee brain into some sort of recognition. Nada. I put him aside, checked the name and the address (which were mine) and then began to – half-asleep – go through my Facebook groups trying to find the person whose address was written in big, orange letters on the front.
Nada.
After I woke up a bit more, I found a third address on the box. Someone I didn’t know, but this person lived maybe twenty minutes away. Taking a close look (tiny type) at the postage sticker, I saw that it must have come from that person because their local post office was on the sticker. Light bulb. I checked my address again and saw that it was actually an old box from May of last year from VistaPrint. I’d ordered some book cover postcards for my book launch.
This person, whoever they are, had found/taken/rummaged through the recycles for the box and used it to send the bird.
Disappointing, as I was beginning to like him.
This person had also forgotten to cross out my address before sending it off, which is why it came to me instead of going to where it should have gone: Queensland. (Bit of a bloody difference!)
Wanderer took the bird back to the original sender. She was very grateful to get it back but incredibly puzzled because she’d sent it out weeks ago. It was a fairly mundane end to the mystery (the mystery of where she got the box lives on – she couldn’t remember), but I’m glad she’s happy.
Sick Day
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.
Happy Mail Tuesday!
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.
Happy Straya Day
Here’s to my first Australia Day as an Australian citizen.
Zine Review: Fontainebleau
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.
Zine Review: Hand Job Zine Issue 6
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.