Popaganda #1 zine
A very cool, very polished yet good and trashy zine. As stated in the editorial, this first issue is ‘a compte rendu of our tastes,’ and a glimpse into the contributors’ world follows as promised. The common thread here is a desire to retain the memory of the attitudes and airs of the early-to-mid sixties, the impression being that that was about the last time Civilization worked smoothly. But wait… it’s not all nostalgia here. Alongside straightforward looks back at sixties soundtracks, screen idols and such, there are bits of history and insight which place it firmly within the perspective of today. Guy Fixx’s ‘Whatever happened to Cool Radio?’ puts its finger on an almost-lost unifying cultural medium which is sorely missing in today’s ever-fragmenting world. Editrix Françoise Faithfull sincerely wrestles with ideology and action in ‘I Took A Wrong Left Turn’ and points out pertinently that ‘we are not only victims but also perpetrators of an unjust society.’ And Jamie Salomon’s comics commentary, Flipped Out Phil’s mod culture musings, and Éric Thériault and Sophie Cossette ‘s groovy graphics, Popaganda provides with an unexpectedly diverse (and definitely slick) winter read. (louis) ($3 + $1 post., Box 41, Place duParc, Montreal Que. H2W 2M9)

Mutations, The Posters of Billy Mavreas
Mavreas’ drawings are worlds of their own. He creates languages of symbols and layers of references between them, balancing it all into one complete object either elegantly simple or hallucinatingly complex.
Sometimes the sequence of levels which unfold to you as you stare into a drawing of his actually seem to be timed. I’ve never experienced anything like that before. For example, the poster for the Normal event at first is a cacophony of curves, lines, symbols— then, one by one, you notice hands all over the poster. By the end of it, you realize that the whole thing is covered with hands, inviting you in, leading you around the poster & its hidden text messages.
I’d love to see this technique refined for text to the point where he controls exactly when you read which part of a story’s text. This would no less than add a new dimension to writing itself, a control of continuity not unlike that which a movie director has. As it is, finally seeing all of a Billy drawing is already like finishing a story. That element is what makes going through this poster book much more of a reading experience than it would usually be.
The format of the book is somewhat stiff and conventional, however, and doesn’t quite complement the unconventional aspect of its contents. Someone told me (and I agreed) that they expected stuff falling out of the book, fold-out pages, a couple of full-size posters, or just anything unexpected. After all, these posters were usually surprising to notice when you first saw them on the street. Alas, the innovation remains in the contents of this book and not in its form. It seems like a conventional and unobtrusive style was used for the aim of letting the posters be their own documents. If you were at the events the posters were for, then on their own they have a documentary quality. If you weren’t there, though, the book provides no clues to the posters’ context, either as objects on the streets or as a part of the events (although Billy’s notes on each show at the end help a little.)
Since I have seen most of the posters before and been to many of the events, I had a strange but very entertaining time having random memories come up while flipping through this. It’s funny how a poster you get so used to passing on the street can slowly disappear under new posters, then reappear years later and suddenly bring back all these memories. At another level, it’s nice to see the progression of Billy’s style from his early posters to his latest ones. By the end I was starving for some of his original art, however, and hopefully a collection of his plentiful, incredible non-poster work will be next. (louis)
($8+post. conundrum press, 266 Fairmount W., Montreal Que.)

Stupor #6 zine
This is by far the best zine I could find in New York last time I
was there. It doesn’t get more raw and real than this: Steve Hughes gets most of these very true stories from interviewing people in bars in Detroit. It reads like having a friend tell you crazy stories they can’t believe they never told you before (after which you’ll always look at them differently.) It’s what the Mirror’s Rant Line should be and never is. The loose theme this issue is accidents.
(louis) Excerpts (© 1997 Steve Hughes):
Male: We were drunk and fucking around on the couch. I heard the gun go off. Bam! And I knew the bitch shot me but I couldn’t feel it. I just got this weird, fucked up feeling in my chest and I think that was my heart trying to keep the blood from getting too far. It didn’t hurt, really. But at the hospital they shot me up with some good, really good stuff, and cut the bullet out of me. When I woke up, it hurt bad, and I almost couldn’t breathe. But I had to, you know. But each breath stuck in me like a burr. My girlfriend got took to central lock-up, but I told the cops I didn’t want to press charges. I told them it was an accident, then I told them it was my fault. After a week or something, they let her out and that’s when we decided to get married. I don’t know what made me think that would work.
Female: I was dancing in a tittie bar. There was this guy we called the gasman. He would pay up to two hundred dollars a pop for a girl to get down on her hands and knees and fart in his face. He paid me just as much to take him in the back room and insult him. Which wasn’t very hard to do since he’s such a weird fucker although he looks really very straight and probably has a fancy-ass job at GM and a house in Birmingham. One time he offered one of the girls a thousand bucks if she’d come home with him and take a shit on his dinner table. I asked him if he’d do a take-out for five hundred. But he wasn’t interested. Ask any girl and Michigan Ave or the eight mile bars. They’ve all heard of the gasman.
Male: We started smoking crack as a joke but liked it so much we decided to stay. We’d go to this house on the east side of Detroit, and we weren’t the only ones there from Grosse Pointe. My wife kept telling me things, pulling at my arm. I don’t remember. What she wanted was everything. I was flying, like a comet. I kept saying, I go burning across the sky. Man, it was great. My wife kept bugging me. After a while I told her I wished she was dead. She left on her own, without me saying a thing and she still won’t talk to me. I ended up in rehab in Ohio. I lost my job at Chrysler because of it.
Male: I’m a cop. I’ve seen pretty much every kind of fuck-up accident imaginable. I’ve seen a ten-year old boy with his head smashed through the front of a soda machine. He got thrown from the back of a pick-up, and his face broke through the plastic that says Coke; the fluorescent bulbs popped, and blood dribbled down the chute where the sodas drop out. Once I saw a mess of body parts. They were hacked up and garbage bagged, the shit buzzed with flies and reeked like a rotten chicken. Her husband did it. It wasn’t exactly an accident and it wasn’t luck, but it was an accident that the farmer stumbled onto the smell. He then puked in a drainage ditch, and the smell got worse. I responded to the 911. I figured the bags would be full of some dead puppies, because we find a lot of those. But it was parts of some lady. What a mess. Mostly, though, my work is dull.

($1+post. Box 02253, Detroit, MI 48202)

Notes From Oblivion zine
I got this in the mail with a very obviously hastily and painfully scrawled-out note. Jay Harber is in a lot of pain, nearly all the time. He has an illness which is hard to define, but a part of it is called Environmental Illness (or Multiple Chemical Sensitivities). He reacts seriously to many things no one usually reacts to. Barely existent fumes in a household hit him like a deep smog, neurologically so that he feels like he’s overwhelmed with fumes, but there is no coughing or physical effects. This neurological aspect makes it very, very difficult for doctors to understand. “All of this happened because of herbicides (mainly lawn chemical) exposures,” he writes, “plus drugs I was persuaded to take by doctors that did damage to my eyes and nervous system.”
To feel intense pain and weirdness most of the time and never have ways of describing it is the frustrating situation Jay is faced with every day. His ordeals with doctors have always been desperate affairs: “I need you to realize that a lot of strange things that we don’t understand can happen in this world, especially where something as complex as the nervous system is involved, and that no one would imagine or invent a problem like this… If no one in this world had ever experienced pain before, and you suddenly experienced pain, there would be no way for you to describe it that would make the slightest bit of sense to anyone… Often I’ll have to spend weeks fighting against and trying to detach myself from this state just to get one single paragraph written.
“The worst effects are by far in the eyes. I get incredible pain, eye pressure, and tightening of the eye muscles from even tiny amounts of light, and then the effects instantly spread outward from the eyes, throughout the entire body… it really is like a sort of electrocution.”
He has tried for ten years to meet with all kinds of doctors, seeking out the most open-minded and caring among them, usually to no avail:
“A problem that I’ve been noticing is that people with broad, sweeping left political/ social agendas are actually callous when it comes to dealing with an individual in trouble. A socialist I sent tapes to in Philadelphia got impatient and then angry when I kept talking about this nightmare I’m stuck in, since he knew the “answer”: socialized medicine. We’re not going to get socialized medicine anytime soon, but this wasn’t his problem. The problem for me doesn’t even have anything to do with “access” to health care—its the whole screwed-up mindset of all the members of the medical system. I hear the phrase ‘slipping through the cracks’ a lot. It’s all part of this liberal myth I’m becoming more and more aware of, that you leave everything to the government, and if they don’t solve all problems, you don’t do anything yourself but get self-righteously indignant that the government isn’t doing what it should.”
“I believe it’s worth it for someone to commit himself or herself to this, and do everything possible to try to help save my life, though no one else has ever believed this up until now. My life has value.”
Jay would appreciate any tapes of your zines you can send him, as he cannot read very much for very long. Also, if you know anyone who might be able to help him, please tell them about his situation and ask if they could help. (louis)
(free for SASE or audiotape, Jay Harber, 626 Paddock Lane, Libertyville IL 60048-3733)

Alberta Uber Alles

Finally, another zine which ties the social/ environmental shit of today with the declining national identity. It also isn’t afraid to point out that our inability to improve our situation is because all levels of Canadian government are Amer- icanizing as fast as they can (inadvertently or not). This is a story that can be told in every country of the world today—the American Way, All The Way, at the expense of whatever went on before.
Canadians used to be most proud of being Canadian because we had all the resources and people with which to be the most self-sufficient country in the world– and we used that advantage just to be good, nice people. Now, since Free Trade, the Americans or anyone else with more money can take whatever they want from Canada and sell it back to us for their profit. In exchange, we get to be assholes to other people, too. Some freedom.
This zine addresses this all in a viciously sarcastic tone, but although sarcastic criticism can sink a boat, it doesn’t necessarily send a new one off to sea. An excerpt:
The Alberta Advantage: When Alberta welfare pays $394 a month for a single person, and use of food banks has doubled since 1993, that can only mean one thing: cold, hungry people ready to accept whatever shit wage you’re offering!
Alberta’s first settlers included a huge contingent from the United States. In fact, these Americans, like a hardy cancer virus, were an elite force of specially trained invaders ordered to, via the province of Alberta, destroy Canada from within, replacing anything Canadian with American equivalents. Politicians were turned into accountants, and getting sick became a criminal offense, often punishable by death. Now, 100 years after this clandestine invasion, well, who gives a fuck, man, the X-Files are starting!
Criticism: Yes, Alberta is getting more and more like America, but this is not a secret agenda on the part of Albertan businessmen and politicians. This is happening on its own in most if not all countries today. Businessmen and politicians look at the trade laws and the global economy and deduce, on their own, that this, this, and this should be done if they want to do their job well. The problem is, these things which the laws encourage, which really are the best way to do their job, are VERY AMERICAN-LIKE things.
Businessmen have a better chance of listening to us if we try to show them that they’re screwing us by accident instead of on purpose. They’re a bunch of neurotic old men,
and accusing them of doing all this harm to our country on their own is just giving them too much credit. It would be more useful to remind them that as Canadians we were and still are fully capable of coming up with our own economic, trade and social policies, rather than jump at ‘globalization inevitability’ or whatever everybody else is doing, just because everybody else is doing it. This is our government’s current policy, and it’s childish and silly.
“The Fascist Gun in the West” is one of the more well-thought out pieces here. In it, the author points out the increasing similiarities between the world-wide reach of Market-ism and the planned world-wide reach of the Nazis:
‘The belief that all human values are
reducable to market forces is as absurd as any of the master-race gibberish in Mein Kampf.’ In a world with as many varied ways of living as there are now, any one system which claims to accomodate all humans everywhere and have no single racial origin should be examined very carefully.
Now I’ve never been to Calgary, but I know a lot of people from there. In general, it sounds like they don’t really like it but it’s home, you know? Judging from this zine, though, I don’t know if I’d really want to live there. A final excerpt:
“The City-State of Calgary- sort of a Sparta for yuppies. Famous for ‘The Greatest Outdoor Drunkfest on Earth.’ Hungover cowboys are cheered on by hordes of anemic white-collar office drones who think bread and milk come from a mysterious sequence of computer commands at a Safeway office. This is a town so obnoxious, it’s often called ‘The Toronto of the Prairies.’” (louis) ($1.50, Wolverine Milk Press, Box A 8702-96 Ave. Edmonton AB T6C 2B2)

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