Zine Reviews

I have read one or two issues of Samuel Condon’s “Honest” in the past, and they’ve all been super depressing. They’re basically a dude capturing and sharing the sad moments in his life via pictures and words. This issue is aiming for that same kinda vibe once again, except this time Samuel comes off as a total weirdo creep. It’s about a girl he was seeing. He only refers to her as "sweetie" and "princess". The girl went to Thailand on a photography trip without him. She was sick upon her return and seemingly wanted him to leave her alone. When she got better she tried to avoid him, but he kept pestering her and eventually she had to get her dad to forcibly ask him to stop stalking her.

Oh what the fuck, I just finished reviewing this guy's last zine and then I pick up the next one from the pile and it's the same fuckhead for round 2! Jesus christ. But hey, I can be professional about this. Below the line will be the words of a mind unsullied with the last zine's mediocrity. My mind is a clean slate and I will be objective.

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Young zine-writing fellow has a chip on his shoulder about main-stream Australia's attitude towards everything. Needless to say, everyone else is a moron and this guy is like the Omega Man of being a regular dude with good manners et al.

If you like stream-of-consciousness rambling about petty issues to do with people not minding their p's and q's and on top of that, you like squinting and struggling with badly formatted text then have I ever got a treat for you. This zine. I don't want it and I will send it to you. Surely everyone needs to read the words of some guy they don't know complaining about the low-hanging fruit of social problems in Australia like racist bogans and construction workers yelling at girls (does this even happen??).

Now I'm going to hunt around for a picture of this guy (could be a girl, I guess) just so I can put a pasty little face to these shitty words. Actually, maybe it is a girl now I think about it. Doesn't matter really because my contempt is gender-blind.

'Small Victories' is a confused political zine from New Zealand (I think).

It starts and ends with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows quotes (which in the words of the author, "you oughtta read") before lazily meandering through some anecdotal accounts dealing with Big Issues.

First off, we have a paragraph about some fellow throwing a tomoto at an embassy before police predictably got involved and didn't arrest the man but seemingly spoke to him (?) and our heroes surrounded the constabulatory and argued with them before one man sang and no one else joined in and then they all let the cop car's tyres down before running off with a smug feeling of victory over the extrajudicial liberation of some air from a rubber prison. I don't know what to think about that one.

Next we have the story of mob justice after a police officer was acquitted of rape twice after a jury according to law decided by a jury of his peers and then on the very next page we've got a few words about how outrageous it was that someone else was prosecuted for belonging to a terrorist organisation. Seems like people just wanna get outraged and can't decide whether they like people being put on trial or whether they don't.

And so it goes on for a few pages with some cutesy cut-out pictures thrown in for a bit of light relief.

I like the little guy and all but what we have here is typical low-brow anarchist zine chit-chat with a bit of Harry Potter fanfiction thrown in so as you fuck world trade and die for someone else's oil profits, you can also imagine that you're Ron Weasley fighting against the Death Eaters and hunting for Horcruxes to kill Voldemort aka GEORGE W. BU$H.

Read it here: http://zinelibrary.info/files/small%20victories.pdf

Death of a Scenester is a zournal that collects together various writers contributing to a shared topic. For issue 2 it's Boys. It's quite a meaty zine, nearly 80s pages long, and it took me a while to read this as I only felt comfortable reading it at home. I mean... it's called 'Boys' and it has a picture of a boy's face on it. In this modern pedophile-conscious society I just didn't really want co-workers or strangers to see me reading it as it could cause potential confusion. Even just with reading it at home I got some strange looks from my partner.

Anyway!

Moving on!

There are a variety of stories within these covers. Some have a pretty loose approach to the theme of 'boys' but weren't any the worse for it. Some, I have to confess, didn't seem to me to be about boys in the slightest. I could've done without the poetry, but hey - that's just me. I didn't really get the Lady Primrose Girly Girl thing, especially as it seemed to be part 6 of an ongoing series. Also, Freak by Anne Witherall looks like a series of random extracts from a larger novel, so I have to admit that I only skimread it. Joke or not, I'm just not interested in reading the middle parts of a novel.

Anyway, those are only minor niggles, the bulk of the contributions are excellent. My favourites were Miles the Monkey, Hoop, the opening memoir about the Pet Shop Boys, the pieces by Eddy Burger and Matt Ford and The Last Gasps of Boyhood. I think the idea of a zournal works best when the articles/stories are either relatively short or broken up into easily read sections. I tended to lose interest whenever a longer piece came along, and I guess there's always that risk when it comes to putting in a long piece. If you read a short piece and you don't like it you tend to still read all of it because it's short. If it's a long piece and the reader doesn't like it then the reader doesn't really give it the same chance because they stop reading before they get to the end. Just an observation.

My favourite stories were the ones where people wrote openly about their childhoods. I think there's a lot potential for further zines along those lines. This zournal is definitely worth checking out, the scope of variety in it ensures that everyone will find in it something that tickles their fancy.