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.

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

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.

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.

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?

EDIT, 9/7/09

The zines listed below are available again. I’ll update this list as I make trips to the photocopier.

* Fairytales in the supermarket

* By the time you’re twenty-five

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.

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.

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!

Here are some amazing zines I received from the amazing Lucy Cheung a while ago but have been too lazy and stupid to post.

They’re beautifully crafted and the drawings are amazing (mmm, I seem to be having an adjective crisis today. But they are amazing!), invoking the pagan/ancient/otherworldly weird images she collects on her blog.

The one above is a miniaturised reproduction of a sketchbook full of what look like shy, incomplete monsters or creatures from another world. The world of Lucy’s head, I suppose. Gush. Anyway, like I said, I got these quite a while ago and don’t know if they’re still available, but you should definitely check out Lucy’s blog(s).

It’s been a good week for zine mail. Fergus has completed another Fergus and as usual it’s alphabetisedly great, and available for a small ritual offering: P O Box 132, Bentley WA 6982, Australia.

I must also tell you about this new (well, new to me, but I’m a bit slow) weekly zine from the creator of D90 (see elsewhere on this blog for a picture of that fine zine).  According to the author, dilettantes & heartless manipulators is an “anti-review”: “I listen to music & write about whatever else is going through my head. Wanky, huh?”.  To obtain copies you may send one 55c (Australian) stamp per however many issues you wish to receive to: Spurzine, P O Box 41, Flinders Lane P O, Melbourne, VIC 8009, Australia. (Sydney folk, there were a few copies at Black Rose last time I looked).

And I’d just like to mention that both the author of this zine and myself have touched Michael Gira (consensually, that is, and not at the same time).

There was a time when I really did love books – loved the sight and smell and feel of them…Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection…For casual reading – in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch – there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girls Own Paper.

George Orwell Bookshop Memories

There were many Girls (and Boys) Own books and the like at this years Taree Rotary Club Easter Book Fair, but I cast them aside in favour of this,

an eerily prescient publication from 1968 which showcases what the discerning and tasteful new home owner might make of one of Melbourne or Sydney’s dilapidated old terraces houses.

Like many of my favourite things it is simultaneously hilarious and depressing, as opposed to this

 which is just hilarious.

While admittedly I haven’t read any of it yet (but I might do in a little while, in the bath), I am particularly intrigued by the heading of this chapter. I can only assume that the author proves once and for all that policemen are from outer-space. Why haven’t we heard about this before? Obviously this book has been suppressed due to the many true things it reveals. Which is why the only place I’ve ever seen it is at the 2009 Taree Rotary Club Easter Book Fair.

And how do I know it tells the truth? Because there’s photographic evidence, dammit.

Irrefutable photographic evidence. Not of outer-space policemen, but of UFOs, at least. And some of the photographs were taken by a man claiming to be a doctor, which of course lends them even greater authenticity.

As you’re probably aware, UFOs travel along power lines and interfer with the electrical supply that enters our houses. Principally they do this through the television, kettle and toaster. In this manner they are able to control your mind, your tea and your toast, and through them all other aspects of human society.

They also like landing in fields, in this case in Queensland, though there’s evidence of this happening all around the world. As Bill Bailey has pointed out, one way to solve the mystery of crop circles would be to create wheat that has the properties of Velcro, although that would mean that the spaceships would have to have the corresponding Velcro, which is a bit of a long shot.

The book also contains a helpful identification chart, just in case you spot a flying saucer that is disconcertingly non-saucer shaped: the tricky buggers! As you can see, UFOs come in many varieties and may appear as spades, baseball bats, the sun, the moon, rotary blades, NASA rockets, pills, beanies and a whole array of worryingly familiar shapes!

So be vigilant, stay alert! The truth, or something approximating it, is out there.