So I’ve organised this event for Friday 10th February, 6pm at Sticky Institute.
Here’s the blurb:
As part of their Festival Of The Photocopier, Sticky Institute has exclusive loan of a prototype for a revolutionary new piece of office equipment – and global management company Blatt & Chifford invite you to its first unveiling.
Thomas The Human Photocopier is at the forefront of biological image reproduction, operating using a specially-selected non-automaton transfer system. In a document copying marketplace that for decades has been saturated with soulless xerography machines, the Thommox mod. 8612-A answers the demand for quick and easy image duplication with a human touch. After years of studying how photocopiers are used in both the workplace and the home – specifically in the field of surreptitious office leisure activities, such as zine-making – Blatt & Chifford have now succeeded in genetically splicing a photocopying machine with a human boy.
With the mensch-machine now ready for public consumption, Sticky Institute in association with Blatt & Chifford invite you to this inaugural induction session. There will be a demonstration of the Thommox operating instore and instruction manuals for sale, as well as a chance to use the unique new model for yourself; it is therefore advised that you bring along documents you’d like to have copied and some spare change. Who knows, you may even get to chat with the device itself. The user manual for ‘TTHP’ will also be on sale for the first time.
Don’t miss this terrific opportunity to see a functioning Human Photocopier before anyone else. Please note that anyone attempting to sit on TTHP will be forcefully ejected. Any enquiries please contact: theblatchfordgallery at yahoo dot com dot au.
2011 As A Mixtape
Here we are then, here’s my 2011 end-of-the-year mixtape in just under the wire. I distrust people who write their top five end of year album lists and stuff at the end of November – I wouldn’t have heard a couple of these at that point, and I totally heart everything here. Plus we don’t live in a music press era tied so heavily to print deadlines any more, so it seems a bit silly still. Anyway.
You can listen to this mix here, if you want:
2011 As A Mixtape by Ttfb on Mixcloud
Or, if you were one of those people who likes downloading music, you could do that here. I mean, obviously I couldn’t possibly condone that sort of thing. But again, it’s here. That’s here, as I say.
So here’s what’s on it and, occasionally, why:
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Introduction
‘Friday’ is a great song. I am completely sincere about that. I’m not even willing to argue about it. Ark did a good job there, although admittedly their song for Jon Ronson was pants.
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Summer Camp – ‘Down’
Welcome To Condale is the only album that I’ve liked so much I’ve even wondered whether I might have a crush on it. Isn’t that ridiculous? I managed to gather together a fairly restrained review of it here, when I could just as easily have written a love letter. And I’ve never even seen a John Hughes film.
Also, my favourite music video of the year too. Well DONE to Condale, more like!!
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EMA – ‘Milkman’
In order to look a bit more self-possessed after that last outburst, I’d like to point out that I’ve not especially fallen for Past Life Martyred Saints yet, but maybe it needs time. I do adore this though, and who would have thought she’d have been better than The Vaselines at the whole covering Nirvana thing?
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Cornershop feat. Bubbley Kaur – ‘Supercomputed’
I’m sort of pleased that, when Cornershop released their beautiful single ‘Topknot’ back in 2004(!), there was no hint that they were considering making a whole album in collaboration with Bubbley Kaur, because frankly seven years is a long time to be impatient. I feel like I would have been emailing Wiiija HQ on a weekly basis pestering them to get on with it: “come on lads, stop faffing around with Rowetta! Let Jeffrey Lewis record himself! Put Judy Sucks A Lemon For Breakfast on hold if you have to!
It was worth the wait though – Cornershop & The Double ‘O’ Groove Of… is wonderful (you can stream it in full here to verify this) and I expect their batch of Australian gigs early in 2012 will be delightful.
Misty’s Big Adventure – ‘Atonement’
One of the best things to happen to me musically this year is Grandmaster Gareth’s decision to start a mixcloud page, but the Misty’s album was good too. Great, even – their strongest since The Black Hole I’d say, and that’s high praise. The track with Patrick Moore is great, but I have been looking forward to this particular track since seeing them perform it on tour sometime in early 2009, as one sole note of it has been stuck in my head ever since (“Atoooooooooooone” etc.) That rarely happens. Looking forward to The Family Abusement Centre next year too!
Busdriver – ‘Man Baby’
Just found out this was released in 2010. I hate myself.
Brothers Hand Mirror – ‘p.s. to the moon’
I think this track is meant to make more sense after ‘Letter To The Sun’ in the EP of the same name which you can download here and read about here. Oscar made these drum beats himself, the clever bastard.
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Los Campesinos! – ‘Songs About Your Girlfriend’
I was slightly dumbfounded to read a few times since Hello Sadness came out that some people still consider Los Campesinos! as twee. Really? I know they still use the glockenspiel and everything, but what about the darkness and the epic songsweeps and the sexual politics and the grandiose hi-fi orchestration and the jealousy, oh the jealousy? I bet you still believe they’re all Welsh and everything.
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Bearsuit – ‘Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop’
I bet your favourite band doesn’t write about how sinister it must be to make Muppets for a living. Unless it’s also Bearsuit I suppose. Uhm. Buy The Phantom Forest already.
Ace Bushy Striptease – ‘Enter Soundman’
Best song title of the year? With ‘Nightmare Before Christmas Featuring Sonic Youth And Shellac And Lightening Bolt Again’ a close second, I suppose.
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Citizen Sex – ‘Chronic Of Narnia’
Considering I’ve lived here over two years now there’s comparatively very few Australian bands I’ve particularly got into. I really like Shallow, Church Of Hysteria and Colostomy Baguette?, but that’s only two or three people making music under different names. The last Australian album I really loved was Since I Left You and that’s a whole decade ago. Must remedy that. I’ve listened to this song a lot this year, if that counts, and now you can too:
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Martin Creed – ‘Thinking / Not Thinking (Work No. 1090)’
Martin Creed’s band really rock for an essentially minimalist group, right? His Mothers exhibition this year looked good too.
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Gruff Rhys – ‘Christopher Columbus’
I’ve maintained for a long time – since Love Kraft, in fact – that Super Furry Animals are not a band that benefit well from democracy. The more other band members have been allowed to sing lead vocals and write their own songs, their albums have got patchier, while Gruff’s side projects – even the one he tossed off in about an hour with Tony Da Gatorra – have consistently been wonderful. Hotel Shampoo is no exception – listen to it here if you want to pull me up on that – and the fact that there actually was a hotel made of shampoo to go with it makes it all the more marvellous.
Daniel Wakeford – ‘Everybody Likes A Rainbow, Everybody Loves The Rainbow’
I feel a bit like this collection of songs is worryingly ‘usual suspects’, not in the Keyser Soze sense of course, but just because a lot of these bands I’ve been listening to a long time anyway. Daniel Wakeford is one person, though, that I’ve only just found out about thanks to my good friend Lizzie at Carousel, and think is brilliant. Even though he has some problems with things like grammar, he lyrics are still really effective in articulating his enthusiasm for the things he writes about, be they falling in love or going to the cinema, or just looking at the sea. He’s got a great voice too, like Eddie Argos if he could actually sing. His album has rather generously been made available for free here.
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Chris T-T – ‘Waiting At The Window’
In a process that began with singing the song ‘Disobedience’ on one of his Christmas EPs and ended with a run at the Edinburgh Fringe, Chris T-T did rather well in adding to his various personas (political columnist, writer of novelty songs, man who photographs toilets) the role of children’s entertainer. This is what his album of A.A. Milne poems set to music sounds like, see:
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Incidentally, I remember playing the raindrop game in the car as a kid too, but didn’t have the imagination to give them names.
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The Lovely Eggs – ‘Don’t Look At Me, I Don’t Like It’
Those faceless people I was berating up at ‘Songs About Your Girlfriend’ need to get a load of this lot. Check out who’s in the video too! (Whether that’s more impressive than Gruff’s appearance in the ‘Allergies’ video I’m yet to decide.)
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Half Man Half Biscuit – ‘Left Lyrics In The Practice Room’
What can I say, they’re a reliable lot, and as such 90 Bisodol (Crimond) is worth your attention. I had to be told who Mart Poom was though.
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Yelle – ‘S’eteint Le Soleil’
There weren’t quite any songs with the same smack-in-the-face quality as ‘Je Veux Te Voir’ or the same emotive magnetism as ‘Tristesse/Joie’, but Yelle’s Safari Disco Club was still génial, as they say in articles about French singers.
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People Like Us– ‘Ever’
Obviously bloody-minded PLU completists will know that this track was on last year’s This Is Light Music album, but still, it’s a beautiful and bombastic moment in this year’s sublime Welcome Abroad LP so I’m sticking it in. How it’s supposed to work in a plunderphonic concept album about the eruption of Mount Eyjafjallajokull I’m not sure, but it does. It surely takes a collage queen to make Spectoral pop music sound even more intense without losing its melodic elegance or punch; it’s like she’s taken the wall of sound and stuck in an ATM that shoots out flowers.
Here’s the whole album, anyway:
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PJ Harvey – ‘Written On The Forehead’
Let England Shake seems to have divided the (vaster than I realised) cloud of people around me that enjoy the work of PJ Harvey. Half seemed to think it was a disappointment, while some seemed to think it was quite good. I didn’t meet anyone for whom it was suddenly their favourite Polly album, like myself. Dorian Lynskey wrote a better piece about this album than I could (and Sweeping The Nation too), but I will say these three things: 1. This album makes me think Peej would make a great curator; 2. Easily the best sample of the year, and; 3. I believe this album to be the first worthy winner of the Mercury since Dizzee. Or, err, herself.
Keith Top Of The Pops & His Minor UK Indie All-Star Celebrity Backing Band – ‘Two Of The Beatles Are Dead’
I must admit that I do get a tingle of pride listening to this song, as I sort of helped create via this album (still available, kids!) but it’s a bit like saying the apple that fell on Newton’s head should be proud of working out the law of universal gravitation. If Newton drank plenty of snakebite and remembered Cud. Or something. Anyway, Fuck You I’m Keith Top Of The Pops is an album I’ve been anticipating excitedly ever since I heard that Mr The Pops was dragging anyone vaguely musical on stage with him at gigs and that some of them happened to be in, say, Art Brut, or Carter USM, or David Deviant & His Spirit Wife. The album to me sounds a bit like a more heartfelt and/or sarcastic version of Brakes’ Give Blood, except this track which sounds like it’s lifted from Brixton Windmill: The Musical.
Ergo Phizmiz – ‘Fast Lane To Jupiter’
Another busy year for Mr Phizmiz, then. Touring his opera based on The Third Policeman, wishing happy birthday to Beyonce, finding amazing instructional typewriter records in a bin, and deciding on a whim to release a load of disco EPs. Like the one this comes from, which features, as you will have heard, this guy.
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And oh yeah happy new year and that.
Zine review: The Nursing Comic
As I said a couple of posts ago, a lot of the zine reviews I do now will be going straight to Sticky’s new blog, but I thought I’d re-publish my first one for the site here as well. I mean, why not. There’s also a lovely review of this zine from Lillie Laceby over there too.
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The Nursing Comic, by Anonymous
Price: $10
Contact: thenursingcomic@gmail.com
There’s a number of reasons why I love The Nursing Comic. And here are some of them:
1. It’s not drawn especially well
I know that’s a weird thing to start off with, but there’s something about the naivety, or rather the lack of evident illustrative skill, that makes me warm to this zine. That’s not to say the drawing is repulsive or anything (well arguably the bits where medical complaints like ‘vomiting’ and ‘blood in faeces’ are being portrayed are a bit, but you get what I mean), it’s just there are some panels where I can’t really even tell what’s going on, and yet it doesn’t feel like much of a problem. Yes, I do know that the level of technical prowess displayed by a comic artist is no barometer for how ‘authentic’ it is, and I don’t subscribe to the idea that a lack of it automatically means there is more ‘heart’. After all, detailed and intricate graphic novels can look sincere and beautiful, while hastily-scribbled comics can look like they just don’t give a toss. But there’s no real feeling of ‘will this do?’ with The Nursing Comic, especially as it’s bound so well, and talks about heavy issues with such frankness. In other words, there’s an inherent sense of self-worth in this zine that isn’t arrogance. I hope this doesn’t sound patronising, but it feels like the (perhaps wisely anonymous, considering patient confidentiality rules) author is drawing to the best of her abilities, because she knows that telling people what being a nurse is actually like – in a medium that, for these purposes, has arguably more impact than just writing – is important.
2. It’s occasionally funny without being ridiculous
Most people I know see hospitals more often on television than in real life, but I can’t think of any TV shows where the portrayal of a hospital’s daily running is given the right balance of ‘funny’ and ‘sad’. (Except Getting On. That’s brilliant.) If you’re into things likeGreen Wing or Scrubs, and for some bonkers reason took them as documentaries, you’d think that hospital was a place where a naked man on a motorbike might suddenly ride down the corridors, or your surgeon will turn into Grover from Sesame Street. Their comedy, perhaps understandably, occurs largely from the sacrifice of believability; yet, at the same time, actual documentaries on the subject range from either constantly, harrowingly gloomy, or showing everyone looking incredibly bored. I know this is a place where disease and death occur everyday, and that anyone considering going into medicine needs to know it’ll be stupendously stressful, but it seems risky to show hospitals as a place of work where there’s absolutely no potential to have a laugh – we need more doctors and nurses to want to be there!
Although The Nursing Comic isn’t hilarious, it at least balances amusing comments and imagery (e.g. pointing out that the two most famous people in the world that have anisocoria are David Bowie and Crazy Frog) with expressions of tedium (daydreaming about sexing a hot intern just to get through the day) and horror (hearing one of your co-workers got stuck under a urine-soaked corpse for half an hour).
3. It doesn’t feel like the graphic novelisation of Greys Anatomy (thank Christ)
In other words, it feels ‘real’. Despite what I’ve said in point 2, I think it is vital that nurses are honest about how tough their job is. I like that The Nursing Comic is forthright but doesn’t read as if it’s over-exaggerated, or asking for the reader’s pity – it just states how things are. It depicts effectively the problems sleeping, the exhaustion, the problem patients, the favourite patients that die, the delirium, the hectic time schedule that means you’ll find half-finished lunches behind the toilet cistern because a member of staff had to multi-task eating and shitting simultaneously. A lot of these things might seem obvious to anyone sensible, but considering nurses are probably the most underpaid and under-valued workers in the world – particularly in Victoria – it’s obviously something that still needs pointing out.
And, ultimately, nurses are people who on a daily basis care for us, so it seems decent and polite to spend a bit of time caring about them, surely? Therefore, the reason I love this zine the most is because it convinces me to care about the person writing it. That’s a good sign of any comic book character of course, but for what is essentially a crudely-drawn diary going on about how exhausting the author’s chosen career is, that’s actually fairly remarkable.
I think it works because, whenever anything happens in this zine, it feels achingly and overwhelmingly human. When talk of balancing a love life with a career in nursing comes up, it doesn’t feel like a soap opera or badly-drafted amateur ER script detached from reality; it feels like a reminder that the person writing/drawing it has the same needs as you do. When colleagues are criticised for bigoted remarks, it doesn’t seem like aimless potshots; rather, it feels simply like disappointment at prejudice in a workplace meant to care for all (plus the lack of energy, after a day of sorting out blood transfusions, to argue about it). And, when the author leaves her boyfriend and her dog to work as a nurse in Central America at the end, all I can think is that I really, really want to know how she’s getting on.
Tonight on QI
My new zine Tonight On QI: ‘A is for Alphabet’ is now available, either instore at Sticky or on their mail department thing.
Although it’s based on QI, it’s essentially my version of Uxbridge English Dictionary with more swearing. (Cartoon Stephen Fry calls Cartoon Alan Davies things like “titbox”, “dozy dick” and “bumbiscuit”.)
A5, 32 pages, $1.50. Possibly stuck out ‘for the Christmas market’.
Swine time
Here’s a few more recent reviews I’ve done for Three Thousand – some zines, a couple of records and one art show. Firstly though I should point out that the above image is of me, Kelly Jayne Storey and Conal Thwaite, as photographed by Horror Sleaze Trash, fondling a pig’s head at the launch of Death Of A Scenester #4. I was honoured to have an article in that very ‘zournal’, which you can purchase / find stockists for here.
Anyway. Here’s what I’ve been reading / seeing / hearing:
Holly Leonardson – Homemade Tattoo Flash, a zine with a few tiny tattoo ideas. Think I’d get the pie and the soda myself. Available here.
Project Bridget – Veganistan, a collection of vegan recipe ideas from the Middle East which look ludicrously delicious. Buy here.
Mavis McKenzie – The Life & Times of Mavis McKenzie #42, which I’m concerned isn’t actually written by an arthritic octogenarian, but it’s nice to dream. She’d come out of zine retirement specifically for Sticky‘s Feed The Animals fundraiser, which was nice. Available here.
Vanessa Berry – Disposable Camera: The Melbourne Issue, also known as ‘The Puffer Fish’. What the zine queen did on her 24th or 25th visit to Melbourne. Available here.
Jess Lucas – Guru, a painting exhibition at Mr Kitly that claims to lightly mock, but probably just highly celebrates, self-styled self-help figures like Oprah.
Isle Adore – ‘Lazy’ b/w ‘Anytime’ 7″. I wonder if this band’s name is some sort of pun (like Isle Of Lucy) that I don’t quite get. Anyway, you can listen to the A-side of this record here.
Rat vs. Possum – Let Music & Bodies Unite, an album you can just listen to here anyway.
Also, on Collapse Board, I reviewed the new Smiths reissues box set…with forty other people.
I should probably point out that from now on all my ‘extra-curricular’ zine reviews will be going on Sticky’s new blog, which is launching next week, but I’ll still be using this blog for…whatever it is I do otherwise.
Album review: Summer Camp – ‘Welcome To Condale’
Summer Camp – Welcome To Condale (Apricot Recording Company / Moshi Moshi). Available here.
When LCD Soundsystem put down hipsters for their “borrowed nostalgia for an unremembered Eighties” in ‘Losing My Edge’, they obviously felt the past is a foreign country that young people should avoid visiting. But when Elizabeth Sankey sings about relationship woes in ‘1988’ – set in a period where it’s hard to imagine she was even pushed out of the womb yet – it’s so affecting it’d be churlish to complain.
Sankey and cohort Jeremy Warmsley, who together make up Summer Camp, have created a fictional Californian town perpetually stuck 25 years ago, a place in which all their songs’ characters can yearn, weep, hang out, break hearts and grow old too quickly. Welcome To Condale is an album heavily influenced by onscreen depictions of North American suburbia – be it John Hughes films, found home movies or Sweet Valley High – and at its centre are two fictional leading ladies, one a lovesick teenager, the other a fading Hollywood starlet. This means that the band can focus on tales of both unrequited adolescent romance and decaying glamour, two themes they write about especially well (and to melodies catchier than flu you caught off Beyonce).
Indeed, ‘I Want You’ expresses teenage longing just as effectively as, say, ‘Baby Love’ or ‘Be Mine!’, albeit in a more sinister way: “If I could I’d kiss your lips so hard your entire face would bruise / Write your name in blood on every wall, it would make the evening news.” Meanwhile, tracks like ‘Nobody Knows You’ and ‘Done Forever’ are so seeped in regret and melancholy it makes Sankey sound old beyond her years, and not because the songs are set in a different decade.
[Incidentally, after playing the nostalgic backside off Welcome To Condale I decided to go back and listen to Warmsley's solo album The Art Of Fiction, and the contrast is quite staggering. While the songs on both are melodically and melancholically narrative-based, The Art Of Fiction feels like a set of dusty photographs, whereas Welcome To Condale feels like a moment in time doomed to skip and repeat itself forever, like the car outside the church in that episode of Doctor Who. Or, to put it another way, The Art Of Fiction sounds like it's emanating out of a haunted jewellery box, while Welcome To Condale sounds like it's being sung by ghosts stuck inside an early edition of Dream Phone (not sonically, of course - the band and Steve Mackay have done an amazing production job.)]
Simon Reynolds in his recent book Retromania pointed out that the Eighties revival has now been going on longer than the 1980s themselves. As long as it produces albums like Welcome To Condale – i.e. albums that don’t suffer from the law of diminishing returns / sound as good if not better than most LPs from the time they’re fetishising – then as far as I’m concerned it can keep going as long as it wants.
Zine review: Panacea For Loneliness #2
Panacea for Loneliness #2, A. Panda, $0.50, PO Box 392 Newtown NSW 2042 / site here
[Image pilfered from their Etsy site.]
I quite enjoyed Panacea for Loneliness #2, as it discusses different movies (and specific moments from them) with enthusiasm and unabashed emotional attachment. It explains why the films mentioned mean something to the person talking about them, PLUS it makes them sound exciting, which is usually the best thing you can do in these sort of list zines. For instance, when I hear that the film Reform School Girls has “one of the final scenes where [the main character] kicks through a bus windscreen (whilst it’s both moving and on fire) and rides it, once again in only her underwear, into a signal tower”, I think, yeah, I guess that movie does sound pretty good.
There’s one part that slightly rankles with me though. I am not really much of a film person, in that I’ve watched barely any of the films that everybody goes on about, and I thought that this zine is one that could be enjoyed just as much by someone who has seen all these movies as someone who hasn’t. You know, it could either be a collection of recommendations for good stuff to watch, or a zine to have fun recalling that time when that girl in that film kicked that moving bus on fire. But there’s one title mentioned here that I’ve actually seen, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and at the start of the explanation as to why it’s been chosen, it says this: “I know a lot of people don’t like this film and especially don’t like jim carrey in it and chances are you don’t either.”
Er…WRONG! I love that film! I think Jim Carrey’s great in it! How am I supposed to respond to that then? I know that the writer then goes on to praise the film and Carrey’s performance, but still, there’s a kind of tone here that is wary of looking uncool by choosing a mainstream film, and not even a dumb trashy one at that. It kind of suggests that the zine should probably be for people who are film snobs, or at least people who feel that there are ‘guilty pleasures’ in cinema, and that’s an attitude I don’t agree with.
Zine review: Alone, Together In Conversation And Thought
Alone, Together: In Conversation And Thought, Various, edited by Alanna Lorenzon & Edward Gould, Free! http://www.alonetogetherinconversationandthought.com
I know you’ve read that this is billed as a zine review – hi! – but please indulge me a moment in talking a bit about visual art. Because on my trips to Sticky I pass by Platform, the gallery space that consists of the glass cabinets situated along Degraves Subway, so it’s a place I associate with the zine mothership. And, although I think Platform is a great space, and deeply admire how Melbourne can have contemporary art in a subway that doesn’t immediately get smashed up and pissed on by delinquents every month, it has unfortunately recently showcased some of the worst public art I have ever seen. Although I think the argument “a three-year-old could do that” when applied to painting is flimsy and ignorant, the recent ‘naïve art’ installation by Merryn Lloyd and Renee Cosgrave mostly looked less like an attempt at regaining child-like brushstrokes, and more like an excuse to do sod all work. Likewise, September’s main piece by Kristin McIver was a piss-poor text art installation that likely nabbed all its ideas from Heide’s recent retrospective of Melbourne-based concrete poetry. While it undoubtedly looked slick and professional, it also had its wit and warmth surgically removed in the process.
The reason I mention this is that one of the better pieces exhibited in recent months also had a free zine to go with it. ‘Alone, Together: In Conversation And Thought’ was a kind of social experiment that invited people to sit in the vitrine of Degraves Subway and – without it becoming a therapy session – discuss loneliness with the artists. While the sight of people talking behind glass, in a piece that crossed relational aesthetics with market research, invoked a number of issues – such as voyeurism, artificial social constructs and whether it would be possible to squeeze a café in there – the zine deals exclusively with the topic on hand: is the rise of online connectivity making us lonelier?
Perhaps oddly for a zine wanting to explore the desperation of the isolated individual, it’s somehow more affecting when it’s discussed with a degree of academic objectivity. The pieces by Edward Gould (explaining studies suggesting Facebook makes everyone except you look contented), Alanna Lorenzon (on the lack of correlation between company and solitude) and Lucy Bergland (on the “particular sharpness or softness we feel at the edge of ourselves and the beginning of our surroundings”) are never dry or needlessly jargon-filled and work best at provoking thought on the subject. And while it’s great that the zine has varied content – from essays to photography to poetry to fiction – it’s largely the creative writing that unfortunately makes this whole project look like an indulgent exercise in navel-gazing.
Don’t get me wrong, some of it is good – Kirsty Hulm’s short story about two friends is sweet, for instance – and I detest the instant cries of ‘emo’ from some readers of perzines, as if exposing any sort of negative downbeat emotion is a weakness that needs a stick to beat it with. But like anything there is good writing about isolation, depression and disconnection, and then there’s…not. For instance, if you look at ‘Adventures In Depression’ by Hyperbole & A Half, it is at turns funny, heartbreaking, desperate and redemptive. But this zine’s piece by Erin Kelly about being a teenager sat in your room listening to Coldplay and feeling sorry for yourself seems a bit too obvious and self-pitying. I couldn’t help but think: “yes, I know. I’ve been fifteen too. You don’t need to tell me what it’s like.” Also, Katherine Riley’s piece on ghosts is an attempt to describe certain feelings of spiritual interference that comes out too wishy-washy to either take seriously or enjoy much.
Whether the outcome will sway more towards the analytical or the sentimental will transpire when the artwork’s results are displayed in Platform during May 2012. Before then, my main conclusion is: more zines with your artwork please, Platformers.
Be Lucky!: An assortment of odd Australian advertisements 1965 – 1972, Homebrew Books, $3 (from Sticky.)
Be Lucky! was one of the more unusual contributions to Sticky’s Feed The Animals fundraiser, I reckon. Most of the zines were by well-established zine-makers doing the sort of thing we know they do so ace-ly, but this one came out of leftfield a bit. The collection of old adverts (apparently all found while researching through old magazines) are pretty amusing, in a ‘oh weren’t people silly in the past’ kind of way, and some of the wording made me chuckle (the Jesus Superstar Message Shirt that had “FOR CHRIST’S SAKE” emblazoned across it, for instance, or the keyring described as “not a metal tag but a god invoked with the MYSTIC POWER OF BUDDHA.”)
There’s only one very slight thing that I’d like to question, though, and that’s the use of the word ‘odd’. Yes, a lot of the advertised products are quite strange, or the sort of gimmicky things you used to get at the back of comic books – x-ray specs, lucky pendants, hypno-magnetisers – but some of it is crap that still gets pedaled nowadays in a similar way, like muscle-building programs and ‘lonely girls waiting for your call’. Plus there’s one advert for underwear. Underwear! Pretty sure that shops still sell that.
Still, if there’s any copies of this left – only 25 copies in the world, remember! – you should get it. They might not all be odd adverts, but they’re definitely interesting artifacts. Plus I really want a pair of Sinbad’s Bell Bottoms and some No Hands Binoculars now.
Happy birthday to You
A couple of weeks ago the free weekly Melbourne-based zine You reached issue #520, meaning that it had been operating for ten years. To celebrate, the zine’s masked creator Luke held a birthday event where he invited people to write letters for forthcoming issues. Here is my contribution, which was available last week.
You (the zine) is available worldwide, but you (the reader) can get it for one cent on Sticky’s mail order. You (the reader) can also buy an anthology of the first five years of You (the zine) there too.
