If I were you

and I were in Melbourne, I would go and see this:

Faults & Folds exhibition by Dexter Fletcher artist collective

2nd September to 29th September
City Library, Flinders Lane

Faults & Folds is installed in the six ‘niches’ that are scattered around the City Library. The title ‘Faults & Folds’ incorporates the work’s themes of exploration, mapping and topography as well as our interest in the artist book as a medium.

While in Melbourne I would also check out this gig:

which is free and features the zine related Church of Hysteria, who are launching a split 7″.

I’d also visit the Sticky Institute to purchase these posters by the Cross Border Collective. Here’s what one of em looks like:

‘The poster series aims to show that the Australian border is not a natural or inevitable thing. They explore the fact that the border is artificial, confront common assumptions about border-crossers, and consider how the border manages peoples’ movements to benefit industry and the state.’

Also located in Melbourne are t-shirts like this, made by the highly estimable (and impressively high, as in tall not ‘high’) Tom Civil, based on designs by a ye olde Australian anarchist called J A Andrews:

You don’t have to be in Melbourne to order the t-shirts though, just have a look at Tom’s blog for details.

So, by now if I were you I would probably be a bit sick of being in Melbourne and would be wondering what’s happening north of the border in New South Wales. So I’d drive along the Hume Highway, passing through countless country towns all painted the same shade of cack yellow, until I reached Sydney! In Sydney everyone would be busily pretending to not be freezing to death because it allegedly doesn’t get very cold or they’d be complaining about how high their rent is or that Marrickville is suddenly full of hipsters or that nothing ever happens in Sydney and even if it did they’d be too busy to notice. Then you’d notice this exhibition and decide to go along!

Crisis Complex, curated by Laura McLean and Sumugan Sivanesan, opens Friday 15 September, Tin Sheds Gallery (Sydney Uni)

Featuring a lot of good local and international artists, full details on the blog. There’ll be artist talks and a screening of Anathema (2011, The Otolith Group) and a discussion via internet magic with Mark Fisher (unless there’s some other Mark FIsher out there looking at the crisis/crises of neoliberalism and hauntological responses to the present I’m assuming that it really is this Mark Fisher). There’ll also be a forum with the aforementioned Cross Border Collective.

Ok, I’m tired of writing this in the hypothetical tense, final thing I want to tell you is that once again I will be contributing to the gentrification of Newcastle by participating in the This is Not Art festival! I swore last year that I would not do it again for reasons that I could not possibly divulge here, but anyway, I am doing it again, because, as Ivor Cutler said, happiness is realising that you are a hypocrite. So my collage series Risk and Chance will be displayed as part of a program curated by Danella Bennett called Secret Newcastle, which will be on for the duration of the festival.

 

Risk and Chance combines photos I found in an old Children’s Britannica under the entry for ‘Hobbies’ with text from a book about cave diving. The idea being to transfer the heroic tone of the text to the more gentle activities of the hobbyists. My main interest with these, and my main interest in general I suppose, is how we differentiate work and non work, why we value some ‘pointless’ pursuits over others, what we do or would do with our time if we had the time and didn’t have to worry about working for a wage etc. The title of Risk and Chance is appropriated from the title of a book (sometimes translated as Luck and Chance)   written by Asger Jorn in 1952, which I haven’t read but which I’m told contains the sentence ‘in defence of my adventure as an artist’, which is also sort of what the collages are about. I’ll put up more info about the show in Newcastle as it comes to hand.The program has been announced but I’m not exactly sure where my work will be installed yet. As usual, stay tuned.

Finally, Take Care will be tabling at the Sunday fair, which this year is free for zinesters. I’ve written details about it here.

Ok, that’s all, I think.

Photocopier art

I moved house recently so everything’s been a big shambles, but I’ve finally had a chance to make some pictures to send out to zine subscribers (look here, scroll down). Below are some scans of the pictures. They were all composed in-photocopier from black and white originals, relying as much on chance as deliberate compositional decisions. Each colour is a different layer. I’ll be using these as masters to make some (photocopied) prints on acid free, light-weight card stock. If you’d like one you must subscribe! If you have already subscribed, thank you! You’ll get one of these in the post soon…

This one’s about A4 size, eight separate photocopies on one piece of paper, only jammed the copier once…

This one’s four layers, about A5 size. First I did a yellow background, then copied the crystal twice, first in cyan then magenta, which made green and red. Because I was lining everything up by eye it’s slighty off register, so I actually unintentionally made a 3D image. But then I did a negative copy in blue over the top and ruined it. Oh well.

I think this is my favourite, it reminds me of the cover of ‘The Future Crayon’ by Broadcast. It’s also approx A4, but slightly smaller than the first one. Again, it’s four layers: black, cyan, magenta, yellow.

The images of crysals all come from various encyclopedias and look and learn books I’ve collected over the years. The bigger project I’m working on at the moment (and which the harmonograph that I mentioned in an earlier post is part of) is based on a book Anwyn gave me that was at her mum’s place about exploring caves – ‘The Marvellous World Beneath Our Feet’, I think it was called. So I started sifting through my books for images of crystals and and geological formations, and have been working on some paintings and collages, hopefully to be exhibited somewhere this year, if anyone will have me, sob.

Anwyn also alerted me to this rather amazing place in New York, the Reanimation Library! A home for unwanted books. It was rather uncanny to hear about it, because Tim and I are doing a work at this year’s National Young Writer’s Festival with books that have been ‘weeded’ (that’s the technical term) from public and university libraries, or  that otherwise fall out of circulation, or are deemed unuseful, unproductive. Of course, the Reanimation Library is much better than our project is ging to be, but if you’re planning on heading to the NYWF this year, you should keep your eyes peeled for paste ups and walls that have been papered with the pages of books.

Speaking of libararies, Vanessa’s excellent new project, Biblioburbia, is to visit Sydney libraries, check it out.

Zine of the month

This recent issue of YOU zine arrived at Take Care HQ last week. I read it in bed a few nights ago, thinking I would then cosy down to sleep: wrong! I might as well have had a shot of espresso, such was the stimulating effect this had on me. Indeed, I had so much excited energy after reading it that I had to get up and pace around for a bit. Yes, PACE, dammit. Bigger and more zine-like than your average edition of YOU (which, as you probably know, is usually a single page letter addressed to ‘You’, folded up and stapled/taped into a paper bag), the whole thing was written at The Fall’s Melbourne Billboard gig last December. The more eagle-eyed readers of this blog will note that I’m a bit of a fan completely obsessed with The Fall. This zine captured precisely the anticipation I felt while waiting through Safi’s awesome (in my opinion) video mash-ups before the gruppe got on stage and destroyed my hearing for the next week. Marvelling at Mark E Smith’s drunkenness (though, from the sounds of it, he was more sober/generally ‘present’ in Sydney than Melbourne) and keyboardist Eleni’s vast array of handbags, which she kept close at all times (perhaps trying to match her husband’s rep as ‘carrier bag man’). Anyway. This zine is awesome, that’s all I wanted to say, and thanks to Luke You for writing it. You’ll be able to pick it up in the usual locations, including though Take Care, if you’re quick.

Tonight at Serial Space: We Flew Here

A bit late for a heads up, but I recommend checking this out if you’re in Sydney town tonight:

‘We Flew Here’ – Tony Osborne & Rishin Singh

Tony and Rishin will undertake a 5-day residency period at Serial Space, which will culminate in a public showing on Friday 1st October at 6:30pm.

Tony Osborne (Theatre & Sound Artist) and Rishin Singh (Trombonist) are immigrants. In ‘We Flew Here’, they improvise using sound, movement, and text to explore their very different migrant experiences.

Improvising about immigration, immigrating about improvisation – as much of a self-interrogation as a celebration, ‘We Flew Here’ is the cheap motel where the banal and the sublime’s illicit affair is consummated.

Public Showing: Friday 1st October, 6:30pm. Free.

Serial Space – 33 Wellington St Chippendale

(More NOW now gigs)

Rebel girl, you are the queen of my world

Riot-grrrl was an antagonistic feminism, and one of the last movements in contemporary popular culture to maintain a genuinely antagonistic relationship to capital. Its partial recuperation by capitalism, an agonising experience for many participants, was part of the great ‘Nirvana wars’ (as I like to term them) of the early 1990s, whereby the independent music scene that had flourished throughout the 1980s in the wake of punk was transformed into the substantially profitable ‘Alternative’ racks at the HMV mega-store.

The above is from this amazing article by Anwyn for whom, in my head, I am now singing ‘Rebel Girl’ and whom I miss considerably, not least because she makes sense in a way other people and things tend not to. The article is about ‘anorexia, feminism, capitalism, pornography and assorted other cheery things’, but I wanted to pull out this quote about the commodification of riot grrrl as a sort of response to this article, which I have read but have not responded to (other than to feel a heightened sense of spiritual exhaustion and despair). Fortunately, Anwyn has quite a few more IQ points than me, so please read her article if you want to better understand where I’m coming from in the whole politics in zines ‘controversy’ (as Sticky put it, with a justified air of taking the piss).

While I’m here talking about zines yet again as if they were the very substance of my life, we (me and Tim) updated the Take Care site yesterday, which might be of interest to you (or, quite possibly, won’t be at all). Ta-ra!

Blood & Thunder comic anthology launch

This looks awesome:

Here’s where it’s at:

Not the MCA zine fair

Yep, it’s totally nuts that the MCA zine fair booked out so quickly. Already there are moves to have an alternative of some sort, either on the day before or simultaneously, for those who missed out (including myself, and Take Care, and about a hundred other people, I assume.)

BUT there is another zine fair coming up soon! Or a zine tent, rather. At the Burbs Festival in Blacktown, which is happening as part of this year’s Youth Week. Now, I know very little about this other than the fact that Tim and I will be doing a Take Care table out there. But as you’ll no doubt agree, THAT ALONE is enough incentive to come along!

17th April, from 1pm

Blacktown Showground (Richmond Rd, Blacktown)

FREE….

So if you’re a local or live nearby, or are prepared to make the trek out west (or east, if you live further west than Blacktown, or course. Of course, for something to have worth it doesn’t necessarily have to be happening within a 5km radius of my flat in Enmore…) it would be well worth your effort to come and check out some zines. We’ve got some excellent stuff in stock at the moment, with more on the way.

Zine school

I am too old for this, but perhaps you are not…

Hello zine-face!

Maddy and I (Natalie) are currently looking for zinesters aged under 25 years, to participate in a project at Wollongong Youth Centre on the afternoon of Thursday, April 15th. Those involved will give a 5 minute presentation on their zine-making practice, ie. why and how they make zines, accompanied by 20 slides. The presentation doesn’t have to be [stuctured, educational, brilliant, relevant] but it should be fun and engaging. It’s an opportunity for you to talk about your zines, life, inspiration, all that stuff.

Alongside the presentations there will be one-on-one zine workshops and a zine library, but you don’t have to worry your stupid little head about any of that.

If you decide that you would like to be involved as an Associate
Professor at Zine School we can feed you and help with travel. We’d really love for you to be involved!! Email me for more information, any questions, blah blah. xxxxx ASAP!!!!

Finally, please pass this onto any zinesters who fit our criteria
(that is, they make zines and they are not yet 25 years of age).

Thankyou-thankyou -

Natalie/ Licky the Cream

licky.the.cream(at)gmail(dot)com

This poster is unofficial, so if someone asks pretend you never saw it:

When what used to excite you does not

I’ve been thinking a lot about zines lately. Running a distro, obviously, means that I get to read a lot more of them than one perhaps normally would. (Then again, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who pursue zines with a great deal more zeal than I ever have, or will, distro aside). Before I go any further, I should point out that I am a miserable person by disposition, and it doesn’t take much to inspire feelings of intense hopelessness and general existential grief in me. So, in thinking a lot about zines, as with everything, it doesn’t take me long to begin questioning their worth. What is the point, after all? As Ciara Xyerra pointed out shortly before closing down her distro (around the same time Tim & I opened Take Care), and as many others can’t have failed to notice, zines are for the most part incredibly mediocre, and as a medium they surely border on the anachronistic. I felt this strongly after my mixtape nostalgia of last week. No one sent me a tape, so I decided to make one myself, to give to T. I got out the boxy old tape deck my neighbours had left in the communal laundry (where everyone’s junk goes to die) and hooked it up to the amp. Of course, it didn’t work, because (and this has nothing to do with my being a woman, by the way, it’s rather a symptom of more general day to day uselessness) I’m fucking hopeless with in/out lines. Their logic just isn’t obvious to me. So I waited for T to get home and he straightened it all out. And I made a tape – a very good tape, I think. But nevertheless, while I made it I failed to achieve that once familiar sensation of tape compilation bliss: the joy of making a gift, of potlatch, of rediscovering the memories attached to every song in the mix. I lugged out the go-faster red typewriter and banged out the track list in red and black ink, made a collage for the cover and thought, what the fuck am I doing? It’s the year 2010. It’s the future, and here I am, still trying to capture a feeling of teenage, punk rock something that was already dated when I actually was a teenager. Frankly, it depressed me. All I managed to do was remind myself that every moment of my life I’m getting closer to being thirty years old, and I’m nostalgic as hell. Why did no one warn me of this? I’ve heard plenty of times that it can get lonely in your twenties, relinquishing teenage dreams, coming to terms with ‘reality’ and all that shit, but nostalgia? Fuck off.

Anyway, I was thinking about zines, thinking things that I’m sure a thousand other people have thought about zines; thinking, is it right for someone my age to still be quite so involved in this? Shouldn’t I be doing something a bit more, I don’t know, challenging? Are zines – as good as they sometimes get – really as imaginative or important as the conversations that happen, for instance, in parts of the blogosphere? Aren’t zines just a gentle practice ground for people to develop a way with words before moving on to genuinely amazing things? And, if so, have I taken full advantage of that practice ground, or have I remained there, for safety, for comfort, for fear of raising my voice among the grownups and really fucking pushing myself to be ‘big and broad’ as Emma Goldman put it? And have I started a zine distro so that I can further immerse myself in this coddled little world, where I will never be challenged, or have to challenge myself, to think in ways that frighten me? A phrase floats through my mind, once glimpsed after following some hyperlinks to a webpage now forgotten: ‘Had intelligence, but not the confidence to use it’.

So, I warned you that I’m prone to bouts of misery, and I can think of many ways to argue the importance of zines, but these thoughts stand, nonetheless. But today – and you knew this was coming, didn’t you? That I was just playing the devil’s advocate – I received a zine that reminded me that I probably shouldn’t trust my thoughts, because, mostly, they’re completely wrong.

The zine was from Amanda, from Tiny Paper Hearts. It’s called Sutures, and you probably read it and registered its immense worth two weeks ago, but I am relentlessly (I wish I could say deliberately) behind the times. But maybe you should read it again, or get a copy if you haven’t already.

Sutures begins with an introduction to a letter that Amanda’s mother wrote while pregnant, in which she attempted to explain to the unborn Amanda what had been going on for the 9 months before her birth. It describes Amanda’s parents’ flight from Lebanon to escape the civil war which had just escalated, with shelling near the family’s apartment in East Beirut, and the increasingly real danger for foreigners of being taken hostage (Amanda’s father’s English, and she mentions that for her 18^th birthday he gave her a copy of Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling, which, coincidentally, I read when I was about the same age). Amanda’s parents cross the Green Line to get to England so that Amanda can be born a British citizen. Later they move to Australia, to Perth first and then to various places across the continent. Amanda inherits the red hair and pale complexion of her father’s family, one among many barriers between her and her Lebanese heritage.

The zine’s written as Amanda’s mother reveals that she’ll be returning to Lebanon to live permanently for the first time since the 80s. This leads Amanda to talk to both of her parents about their memories of Lebanon. She uses the metaphor of ‘disruption and suture’ – the dialectical movement between feelings of loss and connection – to describe her relationship with the past and her family’s history. But I was most taken with the term she uses (borrowed from The La La Theory #6) to describe feeling nostalgia over something one has never actually experienced: the Portuguese word saudade. Basically this is the precise feeling I’ve been researching for my master’s paper. I’ve come across it in numerous forms, as a number of words with subtle differences: there’s hauntology, of course, which has been discussed a lot in underground music criticism over the past decade (hey, shut up, I said I was behind the times), which I think is something similar – that nostalgia for the future that never happened. Then there’s uchronia, which, borrowed from sci-fi criticism, has been used to describe the ‘no-when’ which is a counterpart to the ‘no-place’ of utopia in the recording of oral histories. In Allesandro Portelli’s essay Uchronic Dreams: Working Class Memory & Possible Worlds uchronia is used to describe the tendency among people who fought against (and were persecuted by) the fascists in Italy before and during WW2 to recall events as they should have been (from their perspective as socialists etc) rather than as they actually were. Of course, ‘uchronic’ sits very closely to the neologism ‘dyschronic’ that I’ve seen used to describe the music of The Caretaker, with its themes of memory loss and that ‘the time is out of joint’ and so on.

Sutures is permeated with this feeling, as Amanda gradually unravels some of the enormously complex and fraught history of Lebanon, and her own complex family history in relation to it. It really is a great zine, a faith restoring zine. That may be a lame way to end this but hey, I’m unpractised.

So, now that I’m temporarily cured of my hopelessness, here’s the track list of that tape I made. Despite my newly restored interest in what used to excite me, it might be the last tape I make, because that tape deck, which I waited so long to materialise in my life, gave up the ghost shortly after the tape was completed. So it’s finally completely true: digital is easier than analogue, even for someone who resisted it as strongly as I. But don’t worry, I’m going to keep making zines, for as long as there are photocopiers to abuse. This got long, didn’t it? Now, who wants to help me build a space ship out of hot glue and cardboard?

As promised

I’m sick and good for nothing. Here are those zines I mentioned. They were all purchased from Vampire Sushi, a small but quality UK-based zine distro that I highly recommend. It’s not often I get to read zines from the UK. I got:

not one,

not two,

but two and a half issues of Tukru’s excellent personal zine, Your Pretty Face is Going Straight to Hell. She continuously apologises for being ‘mopey’, but hell, what are zines good for if not indulging a bit of mopeyness? Anyway, while Tukru’s zine are very personal, in an unedited diary type of way, they’re never overwrought or melodramatic. The angst is all positioned in the everyday things – work, family, ‘relationships’ – that tend to grind at us in similar ways. Which is why they’re so good, even when the things she describes are private and heartbreaking. It occurs to me that finding relief in other people’s misery is pretty shit, really, but like I say, I’m sick and can’t make it sound un-shit at the moment.

Also, Tukru hand colours her covers, which is excellent.

Fanzine Ynfyntyn consists for the most part of a fairly long and amusing story about ‘Mr C’, one of the author’s school English teachers. I have to admit that I felt a bit sorry for Mr C, as bonkers as he clearly was.

A Music Paper contains little comics that lampoon ‘indie’ music lovers, from the experience of being an ‘indie’ music lover. On the whole, I thought that this comic spoke much truth about the pretentiousness that sometimes accompanies an overzealous attachment and commitment to discovering and uncovering new music. Though the division between the ‘music loving’ men and the ‘radio listening’ women annoyed me a little. It’s probably just part of the joke stereotyping, but some jokes wear thin (I say, flipping the fifth record in a row to side B, checking that I’m still a woman. When people who don’t know us very well come to mine and my boyfriend’s house, they generally assume that all the records belong to him. Is it just competitiveness, petulance,  that makes me want to correct them? I think not).

Rum Lad is written and drawn by Steve Larder, and an excellent draw-er he is. I mean, he’s one of those people who can actually draw a picture of someone and make it look like a picture of them, not just some random, generic person. I think that Vampire Sushi described this as a ‘graphic zine’, in the sense of a graphic novel, which is a good way to put it. If you can imagine the layout of, say, a Harvey Pekar comic – not necessarily panels, just a mix of text and drawings – that’s Rum Lad. It contains an interview with Marv of Gadgie, a zine from Steve’s hometown in Lincolnshire, an account of the Mulheim zine fair, and a particularly great, short day-in-the-life type comic to finish. This zine’s so well done, and has already accompanied me on numerous train/bus trips (note dog-eared cover).

Ok. That’s enough advertising for zines you can get from Vampire Sushi. What about that notable Sydney based zine distro, Take Care? Well, I just uploaded a bunch of new stuff to the site. I haven’t done all of the descriptions yet, but they’re all worth checking out. Here are a few of my recent favourites.

Culture Slut‘s made by Amber in Montreal, and this full colour issue has just been added to the Take Care site. I’m not normally much of a fan of colour photocopying. It tends to highlight imperfections – like bad fitting room lighting – rather than obliterate them in the pleasing, graphic manner of a black and white copy. But this really works. It reminds me a little of probably the only thing I can stand about Sonic Youth these days – their album artwork (Amber mentions being a fan of SY in another of her zines, if you’re wondering where the hell that reference came from). Culture Slut #18 is a collection of polaroids, which of course have that special hazy, candy cane glow, like the cover of Sister or Daydream Nation. Yes, daydream: that’s the right word to describe this zine. It’s like participating in someone elses day-dream, colourful but wistful, and as if it happened another world away.

Actually, this has been on the site for a while, but it’s still very much worth mentioning. The latest issue of Doris is the final in the famed ‘encyclopeadia’ series of the zine, where Cindy would dedicate each issue to a few letters of the alphabet. As she says in this issue, she would mostly just write whatever she wanted and then make up an letter-appropriate heading later. So like I say, this is the final – uvwxyz – issue in the encyclopeadia, and I’m curious to see where Cindy will head next with her writing. Cindy also runs a distro – called riot grrr – which I will order from as soon as I have some money to spare, because it looks like she has some awesome stuff.

Perhaps it’s only because it features the down pipe on the factory next door to the one that, until very recently, my dad lived in, and because it’s made by Tim, whose photos get progressively better with each roll he takes, but I love this zine.

When Ivana first stocked her zines at Black Rose Lou very excitedly told everyone about this new awesome zine maker in town. Feels Like Friday is still awesome, and we’re very pleased to have the latest two issues for Take Care. Issue 12 is about politics and feminism, full of breathless urgency to be a part of the world and to make a world worth living in.

Oh, I’m so ill.

Before I go, here’s one last zine that you can’t get from Take Care.  Sunil wrote this before leaving Sydney indefinitely. You might be able to pick up a copy from Black Rose if you’re in Sydney, if not, contact me and I’ll try to get you one. This zine is a sort of  farewell and fuck off to a place you can only hate so much because it was/is actually important to you. And it sort of responds to some of the things Anwyn, Lou and I wrote in Walk so Differently, so it’s special to me for that reason.

Now, off to blow my nose, profusely.