Alright! For the Activity of IZM Day 3 I ordered a zine from Doris Press.
Yesterday the task was to re-read your favorite zines. It seem easy enough, right? I spent the day at the shop pressing buttons and came home and made some food. The Paul and I started going through boxes of old zines. I just kept thinking about a line I wrote for a Copy Scams song:
“My favorite zines are by my friends
and I’ve got room for more of them”
My favorite zines have always been by my friends, or people who became my friends through penpals and travels. So many connections as I dug through boxes stopping to think about the connections to each person. Some I haven’t seen in year, but the feeling was visceral. I could recall exactly how I felt when I retrieved a zine from my mail box of cracked the cover while sitting on the bus.
I’m missing a lot of the “popular” zines. I lost my zine collection in my divorce, but I complained about it publicly enough so that a version of my zine collection was sent back to me. It was missing old issues of Cometbus, Doris, Burn Collector, etc. But that’s ok. I still had Lunchroom, Paul’s zine that I got from him at a show in 1997, and Maybrick’s Diary and all sorts of mid-90s zines from Salt lake City. Plus, I got back a lot of the zines from my personal penpals. Some of them I lost touch with like nicole from Voice of One from Hamilton, Ontario and Tim from Hello Nothing from Winter Springs, Florida who had the same birthday as me. I wonder where they are?
I took this photo on my table this morning after we sat around reading zines and listening to records last night. I love zines and rereading my favorites reminds me why!
International Zine Month Day 5: teach yourself a new skill
So, I feel pretty confident in a lot of the zine skills I have. However, I did buy a table top photocopier that arrived last week. I’m finishing up a huge button order and I haven’t let myself play with my new toy yet. I hope to get that order wrapped up today so I can see what it’s got in the way of making some fun photocopier art!
Alex Wrekk 