Take Care is GO!

Yeay – we’ve finally got the Take Care site in sufficiently good shape to publish. That means we’re open!

takecarezines.org is where you should go if you’d like to check it out.

Take Care: opening 1st of January

Take Care: A status update

I thought that people would like to hear how we (Tim and I) are progressing with Take Care, our fledgling distro.

Well, progressing we are! We are very nearly ready to open, in fact, with about 80 items (zines, comics, artist books and what have you) in stock already. Last week we even found some fetching green milk crates to shelve them all in.

We’ve been incredibly busy writing up descriptions, figuring out how to price stuff (cheaply, needless to say) and loading everything onto the website (well, ‘blog’site, but it functions quite well in any case.) as well as all of the other things we’re ostensibly meant to be doing with our lives, but you don’t want to hear about that. We’ve barely had time to thank everyone who has sent us zines, and that is many of you. So, thank you! Especially to everyone who contacted us without us even having to harrass you. It’s been excellent. But we want more! So if you have, or know anyone who has, a zine to send us, do! To:

PO Box 4

Enmore NSW 2042

Australia.

Take Care: new zine distro

After a few months of deliberation Tim and I are putting a call out to zine makers to send us stuff for our new distro. It’s now called Take Care instead of Flying Machine and if plans go well we’ll have stalls about town and a new blog happening soon for mail order.

So send us your zines! We can pay by consignment or up front.

For more information email takecarezines(at)gmail(dot)com

TINA 09 and other stuff

So, TINA, obligatory update: car park = good. Ratio of zines to other stuff = bad. solution = segregate zines fair from other stuff fair? I don’t know, maybe other folks’ experience was different, but this year was quite disappointing for me. Hardly any sales and even less trades. What did other people think? I did manage to meet a few letter writers and the zines I did get were great, so I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it, but the energy I’ve witnessed & experienced in other years seemed to be missing. I don’t think that this is the organiser’s fault – perhaps just a reflection of how many people are making zines?

Well, I haven’t updated this blog in ages, so here are a couple of new things I’ve done, which you can order directly from here, or from Sticky in Melbourne.

A choose your own adventure zine by Lou, Anwyn & me, based on our experiences of living and growing up in Sydney. Read from cover to cover at your own peril (though, in truth, you’re just as likely to get confused if you follow the choose your own adventure structure). This one’s also available from Format in Adelaide.

Another collage zine by me, similar to the Maps one I did a few months back, if anyone read that. This one is an entirely two colour risographed thing, complete with dodgy colour separation and covers folded slightly too small for the inner pages. Oh well, it was my first encounter with a riso. With many, many thanks to Jess and Leigh of the Rizzeria collective for their time, help and patience. Check in the side bar for prices and what have you.

Pirate Cookbook: Fundraiser for Black Rose

Black Rose are looking for contributions for a new cooking/recipe zine: Pirate Cookbook (2). Here’s the flyer – there isn’t a precise submission deadline yet, but I imagine it’ll be around the end of Septmeber. Please contribute, and harangue everyone you know into contributing, too.

I’ve sold out

Temporarily, anyway.

I don’t have ANY zines in stock at the moment. I’ll update the individual zine descriptions when I make more photocopies. This could take a couple of weeks at least, because I’m a bum. In the meantime, please refrain from sending me money (difficult, I know). If you’ve sent me money in the last few days don’t worry – your zines are in the mail (well, they will be, tomorrow): this is just a warning for folks who might be about to order stuff.

While I’m here, thanks heaps to everyone who came along to the Digging show. The opening was great and I gave away 60 copies of the zine (see below). Which means even more photcopying. I suppose it’s about time I got used to that, hey?

New zines for Digging show

This is the zine for the Digging exhibition (see previous post), to be given away for free. As you can see, the cover comes in three eyecatching colours. If you’d like a copy, you must come to the exhibition.

It accompanies another zine, this one:

which will also be available at the show if  I get a chance to make more copies of it.

Afterwards both these zines should be available to buy/trade from this site.

Exhibition/zine launch at Little Fish opening on 24th of June

I’ve been busy organising a little exhibition of my latest work for Little Fish Gallery, which is a diy space at 22 Enmore Rd (a few minutes walk from Newtown station), sharing premises with Black Rose and the TuTu collective. I’d love it if zine folk and others who read this blog could come along! I’m in the process of putting together a little zine which will be free for everyone who comes to the show, and if all goes to plan I’ll have some more copies of my most recent zine  (I haven’t posted about it yet) which is also sort of related to the work in the exhibition. Also, there will be sangria. And snacks, in all likelihood. So, come! The 24th of June from 7:30pm at Little Fish!

Here are a couple of photos of the work in question, in another setting:

With thanks to Tim for photography

Thanks to everyone who came and said hello or bought/swapped zines with me at the MCA zine fair, by the way. I picked up a lot of great stuff, too, which I’ll hopefully get around to talking about in a later post.

Beard Wars!

Hey Anwyn, if you’re reading this, I’m going to buy you one  of these:

Because, as evidenced in this post,  featuring a book on the topic of pogonology, or the study of beards, no poet worth their salt ever got far without one. Where does your little bald chin rank in ‘poetic gravity’ among the veritable shrubs sported by the likes of Walt Whitman, or Lord Tennyson, or Joaquin Miller (who?)? More importantly, how much wattage is the thing giving off? It’s not good enough to just write stuff, you know. You’ve got to be able to generate power, too.

On the topic of the famously bearded, I’ve often wondered, when I’m drifting into sleep or stuck in a traffic jam at the intersection of Parramatta Rd and Norton St for so long that my brain is overcome with noxious fumes and I begin experiencing visions, who’d win the pogonological show down between these guys:

I bet they had names for them.

I like to think that the beards are detachable and possessed of their own volition.  Or that they generate so much beard power that they are able to be fly great distances. Coming soon: Beard Wars 2.0 – Beards in space!