The Ralph Steadman of illustrations evoking a the drug-saturated and otherwise seriously fucked up mind of Hunter S. Thompson has published a book of cat drawings. I bought it for Eric for our solstice gift exchange, because I'm that thoughtful. I may have enjoyed the book more than he did, but I would have never bought it for myself. He's welcome.
Sarah had me at the title of her 24-hour zine about her anxieties, and I'm probably going to emulate the concept in my next zine. I feel your pain, girl! Sarah's fears are wide-ranging: from pop culture (Kiefer Sutherland) to practical (data errors) to the sociopolitical (cultural miscommunication). While Kiefer Sutherland doesn't bother me, I do relate to a lot of Sarah's worries, and more essentially, that she has them at all and that they're central enough in her life to make a zine about them.
Do you really need me to say an anthology was uneven? Do I really need to say it? Unfortunately, I do. I loved some of the chapters and was less taken with others. You might chalk up the difference to writing quality and/or to my personal taste. I prefer the contributions that make their point by telling a story, rather than with a straight up essay.
A.j.'s call for contributions to her Six Categories zine went more or less like this:
In the beginning of the novel Microserfs, Douglas Coupland has each of his characters list their dream Jeopardy! categories, fields of expertise such as "Career anxieties," "Cats," "Psychotic loser friends," and "Macintosh products." I can’t remember much else from this nearly twenty-year old novel, but these character "introductions" remain stuck in a shadowy corner of my memory. I’ve mentally made lists of my ideal Jeopardy! boards, with categories like "The Simpsons, Seasons 1 to 8" and “Postage” and "Job Dissatisfaction."
It's your turn to list your six ideal Jeopardy! categories that showcase your unique knowledge, quirks, neuroses, talents, habits, whatever.
This is another book I wished I'd enjoyed more, as I did Griest's previous memoir Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana. After having explored cultures foreign to her own, Griest decides to spend a year in Mexico, examining the roots of half of her bloodline. The parts where she explores her Mexican and mixed race identities are compelling, but the reportage in most of the book is less so, at least for me.
Although I love Alvarez's novels, I found her book of essays to be a little meh. In fact, I stopped just before the halfway point. It might be zines' fault. I've read a lot of similar themed essays (about feeling half in one world and half in another, due to immigrant status, mixed race identity or the loss of one's native language) in dozens (hundreds?) of zines.
After graduating from college, Camille determined that her history and literature education had been incomplete and set about filling in the gaps by reading books and zines exclusively by women of color.
author photo, from her website
I'm reviewing Bad Mexican because I loved it, but my review might make you sad because the zine is no longer available. It's instant karma, though, because I'm bummed that Daniela's first zine, Soy Secretron is not in my greedy clutches.
It's funny how even though it's only from 2010, the zine feels old and old school. Daniela signs each copy, and mine at least has a little happy face illustration and handwritten annotations. There's a table of contents and a song recommended for each section. Daniela refers to her work as a "mini zine," but clearly it's a lot more substantial than she gives it credit for being. If you know Daniela, who is driven and ridiculously accomplished, it won't surprise you that her standards for her own work are absurdly high.
About that, funny story -- my Native American ancestors were enslaved by the white missionaries there and changed my family's name, so that's why my last name is Capistrano.
The book isn't as good as the microblog, but that would be nearly impossible. I appreciate that Hagan didn't merely reprint the celebrity children entries she posted online, but organized the book into logical, coherent and snarky sections.
This second set of conversations between RE/Search publisher V. Vale and zine creators is a deft continuation of the first one. He gets a decent variety of zinesters, young to middle-aged, female, male, queer, straight, working and middle class, and focus on mail art, politics, and the weird. He's not quite as good at finding a race balance or more personal perzine authors, but I think it's okay to cut him some slack.
