Zines on Toast tour comes to a close

I made it to New York! Tonight is the very last show of the Zines One Toast tour! The reading is at Blue Stockings books at 7 PM. Be there!

Then, let’s go have a beer to celebrate the awesome month of touring with my UK friends and see them off back to their tiny island next to Europe!

This month has been amazing. We have read zines to people in 19 cities and have visited 22 states! We have been awed by The Olympic National Park, The Redwoods, The Grand Canyon, Zion’s National Park, The Rocky Mountains, The Black Hills, The Crazy Horse Monument, The Badlands, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and even Las Vegas! We have had readings at zine libraries, infoshops, houses, zine fests, record stores, craft shops, books stores, art schools, universities, and even an outdoor monument! We have seen lots of animals: Deer, bear, mountain goat, squirrels, antelope, prairie dogs,  and countless dogs and cats at the houses of our fine hosts!

I’m sure this tour will spark many zines but until then you can check out my photos here.

I’ll write some more about the trip later. Until then, I’m hanging out in Brooklyn and headed home to Portland on the 1st. Apparently Paul has attempted to grow something resembling a beard. We’ll see if it is still on his face when he greets me at the airport….

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Zines On Toast, Portland Zine Symposium… Zines! zines! Zines!

So, It’s August and the end of this month brings a bunch of stuff to a close. Here’s some stuff about some things:

24 Hour Zine Challenge:

I made a 24 hour zine about all of the post boxes I have had. There are short stories about who I shared it with or things that happened including Paul’s stalker that worked at the postal outlet! It is Brainscan 25.5 and I’ll have them for trade only at the Portland Zine Symposium and on the Zines on Toast tour. Fellow zine symposium organizer, Derek, reviewed Brainscan 25.5 on his blog Overglued.

On of the contestants did some interviews at the event. You can check it out here and see what we had to say.

The Portland Zine Symposium is August 28-28! There are no full tables left BUT there are some half tables left. So, if you are in Portland you should register your table soon soon soon. I think we are pretty close to having a full workshop schedule but there are  few panels that could use some extra folks. I’d like to have a panel on Zine Ethics. If you or anyone you know would like to be on the panel let me know.

Zines on toast! We have finalized all our tour dates! Please come out and see us if we are in your area. I’d love to meet! Here are the finalized dates and locations!

26 Aug- Portland, Oregon (7PM Reading Frenzy-921 Southwest Oak Street)
28 Aug- Portland, Oregon (10-5 Portland Zine Symposium-PSU Stott Gym)

29 August- Portland, Oregon (11-4 Portland Zine Symposium-PSU Stott Gym)

31 AUG- Seattle, WA (Richard HUGO HOUSE 1634 11TH ave)

1 Sept- Olympia, WA (7PM Northern 321 4th Avenue)
4 Sept- San Francisco ,CA (San Francisco Zine Fest-County Fair building)
5 Sept- San Francisco ,CA (San Francisco Zine Fest-County Fair building)
7 Sept- Santa Cruz, CA (Sub Rosa 703 Pacific Avenue)
8 Sept- San Diego, CA (2754 sNOWDROP sT)
12 Sept- Salt Lake City, UT (rAUNCH RECORCDS 1119 E 2100 S)
14 Sept- Denver, CO (27 Social Center, 2727 W 27th Avenue)
16 Sept- Minneapolis, MN (Minneapolis Center for Book arts 1011 Washington Ave South)
17 Sept- Milwaukee, WI (Cream City Collectives 732 e Clarke St.)
18 Sept- Chicago, IL (Quimby’s Books 1854 West North Avenue)
20 Sept- Columbus, OH (Wholly Craft 3169 North High Street)
22 Sept- Asheville ,NC (Firestorm cafe and books 48 Commerce St.)
23 Sept- Chapel Hill, NC (Internationalist books, 405 W Franklin Street
24 Sept- Richmond, VA (Chop Suey Books 2913 West Cary Street)
26 Sept- Baltimore, MD (Atomic Books 3620 Falls Road)
27 Sept- Philadelphia, PA (Wooden Shoe 704 South St)
28 Sept- New York, NY (Barnard College Library 3009 Broadway enter campus at 117th st)
29 Sept- New York, NY (Blue Stockings Books 172 Allen St)

It’s been awhile…

Let’s see, what I have I been up to?

I got a space phone! Ok, not a space phone but it is an HTC Incredible and it is, incredible. I like to say that it is made of Unicorn horns and rainbows. It can do all sorts of neat stuff and it takes amazing photos for a camera phone.

My friend Steve from Rum Lad zine came through town with his band and then took a 3 day Greyhound trip back to Portland when dour was over! Oh, the dirty dog. Oh the stories he has told.  He’s been here a week and is going to be staying with us until the zine symposium and after that we leave on our zine tour. I set him up at what used to be my shipping table and he has spent the days drawing as I have been catching up on button orders. It has been nice to have an officemate. We can complain and/or laugh about e-mails and whatnot. We have been joking that we are in the Brain-Lad office! This is what I see when I look over from my desk:

Steve is so metal that he can't stop making horns with his hand!

Sometimes when I look over I see this:

OJ has been stealing Steve's chair a lot.

Steve, Paul, Marc and  I have started a zine band! We are called the Copy Scams and we hope to play at least one show. We have the skeletons of 3 songs and lyrics for 1.5. The last time I sang in public was with Paul at the Powell’s reading and before that was when I was in a band 10 years ago. This should be… interesting.

I think I made about 3,000 buttons in the past week and still got up to the Riverhouse twice to see my mom and swim! The weather has finally been warm enough. My friend Tiphanie was in town for the last trip and we took the neighbor’s inflatable boat as far as we could walk up stream and went down the river. It was super fun!

I’ve also been putting a lot of time into organizing the Portland Zine Symposium. We are having 2 meeting a week now. Let me know if you are going to be in town because we need lots of volunteers! We also need workshop leaders and people who want to put panels together. Please check out the site if you want to help out.

Another thing that is symposium related is the 24 Hour Zine Challenge! The Portland Zine Symposium and the IPRC are hosting a 24 hour zine event at the IPRC! This is a fund raiser for the Portland Zine Symposium and we are asking people to sponsor zine creators in their endeavor to create a zine in 24 hours! I will be hosting the event as the IPRC staff member but I am also a participant! I would love love love it if you would sponsor me. You only have to pay up if I finish the zine in 24 hours, And, as my mother who is sponsoring me said, It’s a pretty good bet that I will. If you donate $20 to the Portland Zine Symposium by sponsoring me you will receive a copy of my zine! So, if you want a copy of this exclusive limited print run Alex Wrekk zine AND you would like to help support the Portland Zine Symposium GO HERE.

Another project I’m working on is  the Zines On Toast tour! We have most of our dates confirmed, a poster almost done and press release almost ready to go out! I’ll be posting dates soon. We are starting the tour right after the Symposium and heading north then south then east. Stay tuned!

So, on Friday my sister, Paul and I went to see the Swingin Utters. It was one of those “old Time’s sake” sort of things but somehow by the end of it I had been elbowed in the head by a skinhead and had blood pouring down my face. out of 18 years of going to show these are the three injuries I have incurred: 1) my nose broken at a Swinging Utters show around 98 or 99. 2) a sprained ankle at a Bouncing Souls show that my sister had also asked me to go to for “Old time’s sake” 3) A split forehead from this recent Swinging Utters show.

From this I have learned three things, I won’t be going to any more shows that my sister wants to go to, The Swinging Utters are dangerous for me, and I’m getting old. I figure after 18 years of shows and dancing in pits that if that’s all I had hurt then I’m ahead of the curve.

Facial scars build character right? Actually everyone who has seen it thinks it's pretty cool. I'm sure it will fade, but it's wicked!

I’m going to see if Paul made fire on the grill to cook food yet. Grilled tofu, corn on the cob and various grilled veggies are in the future!

Bike rides, zine tours, International Zine Month, Smallpressapalooza, and door to door meat salesmen

So, when I last posted I was nursing my only slightly sore body from my trip back from the Riverhouse. The next day my sister called to see if I wanted to go on a bike ride up to Smith and Bybee lakes In North Portland. On the way to Web’s house I saw this weird failblog worth sign.

I can't even imagine what they were trying to explain with this sign.

It’s a crappy cell phone picture but I still find it amusing. The rest of the photos are also crappy cell phone photos. We rode up north to the very tip of the North Portland Peninsula to Kelly Point. It’s where the Columbia and Willamette Rivers meet. It looks something like this:

There was also this tree that was 3/4 chewed by a beaver. It was wondering how it even stayed up!

We got lost finding out way to Proper Eats in St. John’s. I always feel so good after eating there and combine that with our bike ride I felt awesome! By the time I got home I had ridden a little over 20 miles. 90 miles in a a few days was great to get my winter sluggishness out of my system…. except now the rain is back. We had almost two weeks of false spring.

Paul and I are getting used to his graveyard shift at Voodoo Doughnuts which is making me feel like a crazy cat lady when I start talking and even singing to the cats when we are alone in the house.

Have I mentioned that I’m going on a zine tour this summer with some of my friends from the UK? 3 0f the lovely folks from Last Hours and other ziney projects, Steve Larder from Rum Lad zine and Isy from Moregenmuffel. We were trying to figure out what to call the zine tour and Paul came up with Zines on Toast! Which is a take on Beans on Toast, pretty much a staple of English food. I thought they wouldn’t go for our stupid pun for a zime tour name, but I guess they liked it! That puts us one step closer! More details to come!

I just filled out the paper work to include July 2011 in the Chase’s book of holidays. it is already listed for 2010! So, I guess this means I need to do more work on the International Zine Month site.

Other than that, Paul and I have been practicing for my reading at Powell’s for Smallpressapalooza on March 15. I just finished up with a bunch of big button orders and started cleaning my office. I just opened my last box of Stolen Sharpie Revolution of the 2,000 I had. looks like I’ll have to contact AK Press to send me some more copies.  Oh, and some dude just knocked on my door asking if we were carnivores. I think he was selling door to door meat. weird.

Oh, and someone did a bit of editing on my Wikipedia page. Since I can’t really do any of it myself feel free to add relevant things like me being nominated for an Utne award and also my failed first Wiki page was the reason zinewiki was started.

Mini zine tour dates

Alex Wrekk’s Eastern North America Mini tour thing…

Hello! Greeting from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. I have been here for a week for the Anchor Archive’s Zine Residency Program (http://www.robertsstreet.org). That means I get to live in a shed in their backyard and make zines for two weeks. This also means I should have the zine I have been working on for the past 5 years done and ready for all the events coming up! Anyway, here’s my mini tour shcedule:

19-October-Halifax- 7pm at the Anchor Archive Workshop on teaching zine workshops

24- October-Halifax- 12-5 Halifax Zine Fest St. David’s Church Hall, 1537 Brunswick Street, Halifax. I’ll be teaching a workshop about distribution at 3:30

31-October- Toronto- HALLOWZINE! Zine Reading 2-4PM Toronoto Toronto Zine Library: 2nd floor of the Tranzac Club 292 Brunswick Ave. I’ll be reading with some super awesome zine kids. He’s the line up: ALEX WREKK (Stolen Sharpie Revolution, Brainscan Zine) JEFF MILLER (Ghost Pine Fanzine, Negative Capability) TERI VLASSOPOULOS (Melt the Snow, The Second Part, Cement. Flour. Saints) CHRIS LANDRY (Kissoff Zine) AMBER FORRESTER (Culture Slut, Fight Boredom) MARANDA ELIZABETH(Telegram M’am, Little Acorns, Edith) SUZANNE SUTHERLAND(My Bad) http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=190533701872

1-November- Toronto Canzine-1pm – 7pm The Gladstone Hotel 1214 Queen St. West I’ll be tabling at this event. Wow, a zine fest where I’m not teaching a workshop, exciting! Then I take a leisurely trip to New York City to visit friends and drop some of my zines off around town before heading south.

6-7 November Richmond Zine Fest (Richmond, Virginia) Friday 7-11Gallery 5 at 200 West Marshall Street Saturday 11-5

was going to try to hit up the Milwaukee Zine Fest on the way home but I have tickets to see The Pixies the same day back in Oregon and they are playing Doolittle in its entirety, which was my first Pixie’s Album. After that I go into holiday mode plus gearing up for the 2010 Portland Zine Symposium! Stay tuned for dates! Other stuff:

Paul us at home picking up my slack and making custom buttons and packing zines and copies of Stolen Sharpie Revolution for my Etsy shop: http://brainscan.etsy.com I’ll have my new zine/s up as soon as I get home as well as fresh roasted coffee.

We are looking for a new zine friendly housemate in Portland. Let me know if you know anyone looking for a place.

nottingham… the ‘h’ isn’t really pronouced…

In Brighton somone asked me if I had been corrected on how to say Nottingham without the hard ‘h’ because I was saying it properly. I thought it was funny. In my head it was just like those cities in the eastern US that have lots of extra words that aren’t pronounced. works for me.

I’m in Nottingham staying with Lizzy from Marching Stars zine distro. Robb and I are sleeping on her dorm room floor. Yesterday we took the train up from Brigton. Lizzy refered to it as a long trip…3 hours is hardly a long trip for me. Three hours gets you from my house to Seattle but only in good traffic!

I was here as part of her plan to stoke the fires of the University women’s network zine and get people excited about writing zines and writing for their magazine. Steve from Rum Lad came too. he’s super taleneted. Robb told him he could be the next Christy |Road… and I don’t think that’s too far off.  I forgot that he lived her and that we are livejournal friends! We all geeked out about zines infront of about 7 or 8 confused but intriqued people, I read some stuff from my zines, sold some stuff, then we went to the pub in the student union.

I missed a Real Ale festival by a day! but there were some interesting brews on tap. Steve and I gave eachother geography lessons of our countires in my notebook and he showed me how to order ale here. It has something to do with cocking your eyebrow and tilting your head to the side to get the attention of the person behind the bar. I have not perfected it yet. One of Lizzy’s friends is an American Studies major… which seems a bit odd to me. She was interested in American things like the theory of the Southern Sweet Tea vs. Northern non sweetened ice tea somehow corresponding to the Mason-Dixon line.

Lizzy and her friends have invited me out clubbling tonight. This normally doesn’t appeal to me but I may go. Robb found out from Steve that Capitalist Casualties are playing here tonight and he is excited to go to that. That’s not really my style of music but would be more of my scene than the dance club. I’m still undecided.

I’m waiting for Lizzy to get back from a lecture and then we are headed to town to some vegetarian restaurant. I have been eating some sort of vegan pate like Tartex out of a tube on crackers, almonds, and raisins  for the past day. real food will be good.

Tomorrow morning we are off to Leeds for a zine reading. I’m not sure what to expect… or even who I am meeting as we haven’t met. Never stopped me before.

I found some flickr images of the awesome folks I have met. This is Wes, he bought me a cider after the zine fair and came from |Glastonbury to Brighton to read with us. This is Edd, half of our fantastic host/ess couple in London and really awesome people who do the bulk of the work for the London Ziune Symposium. I’m headed to France with him on Tuesday. This is Andrew from Corndog distro and Beat motel zine.

Oh, the English kids seem to think American accents sound Irish for some reason. I don’t really get it though. Ok Lizzy is back and we are going to head out soon.