My wife is the oldest of four kids. Her parents were once asked at a birthing class if they had any advice for the rookies.
My father-in-law stood up and addressed the group:
“Look, you’re going to want to throw it out the window… and that’s okay! The important thing is that you don’t.”
Then he sat back down.
After all these years, it’s still the greatest parenting advice I’ve ever heard.
(I thought the advice and this zine spoke to each other.)
A quarantine zine.
Inspired by Malaka Gharib’s zines and Warren Craghead’s drawings for his daughter’s lunches, I’ve been making these tiny little zines for my son Owen’s lunch out of a single sheet of paper. (See more of them below.)
It’s a really simple and old technique. Nothing fancy. Tons of people use it. I first learned about it years and years ago from the great book, Whatcha Mean, What’s A Zine?
Here’s my version in a short video:
Here’s a diagram from Keri Smith’s wandering zines:
And here are some of the results (see more on my Instagram):
Here’s a photo of Owen and I holding up the one-page zines we made while hanging out at the Lone Star Zine Fest:
Happy zine-making!!
Filed under: zines
I accepted this challenge from Malaka Gharib (author of I Was Their American Dream) on Twitter:
december 31st challenge
make an 8-page zine about your decade
don’t spend more than 20 minutes on it
(I may have taken more than 20 minutes.)
Related reading: Give yourself a decade
If you pop over to Keri Smith’s website for her book The Wander Society, you’ll find printable PDFs of “The Wander Society Pocket Library,” handy little pocket zines you can print out and stick in your pocket before you go sauntering around.
The essays:
They’re all worth reading, but my favorite, no surprise, is HDT’s “Walking” (1862):
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.
It’s chased nicely by Morley, who says, “I can be as solitary in a city street as ever Thoreau was in Walden.” (1920, from Travels in Philadelphia.)
“The Art of Idleness” (1926) is excerpted from the recently reissued The Gentle Art of Tramping.
Virginia Woolf, by the way, was a fan of Thoreau, and wrote this about him in 1917, on his 100th birthday:
Few people, it is safe to say, take such an interest in themselves as Thoreau took in himself; for if we are gifted with an intense egoism we do our best to suffocate it in order to live on decent terms with our neighbours. We are not sufficiently sure of ourselves to break completely with the established order. This was Thoreau’s adventure; his books are the record of that experiment and its results. He did everything he could to intensify his own understanding of himself, to foster whatever was peculiar, to isolate himself from contact with any force that might interfere with his immensely valuable gift of personality. It was his sacred duty, not to himself alone but to the world; and a man is scarcely an egoist who is an egoist on so grand a scale. When we read “Walden,” the record of his two years in the woods, we have a sense of beholding life through a very powerful magnifying glass.
Filed under: walking
“I just learned ‘Imagine’ on the piano,” tweeted @acupoftea yesterday, “and I would like to officially rescind any energy I’ve spent being impressed with people who can play ‘Imagine’ on the piano.” I chuckled, and then she followed up with, “If you want to demystify pop music, learn, like, four chords and just play them in a different order & rhythm each time.”
That immediately made me think of the famous zine graphic above, included in the book Oh So Pretty: Punk in Print 1976-1980. Toby Mott explains:
[It’s] an illustration from a fanzine called Sideburn #1, which was a drawing made by Tony Moon just to fill the space. It’s a drawing of three guitar chords and it says, ‘now form a band’. That fanzine is extremely rare, but the drawing is often quoted by lots of musicians as the impetus to do something, and it’s seen as a key message of punk,” says Toby. “You didn’t need to have been to music school or be particularly proficient or skilled. It was much more about the energy and drive to do something. It’s a rallying call to the troops.
Nice to know the story behind a drawing that always puzzled me. Why are the markings on the frets and not in between them? And why A-E-G? What songs can you even play with those chords? (Answer: AC/DC’s “TNT” and T-Rex’s “Bang A Gong.”)
The 5-year-old and I made a zine of our trip to Cleveland with grandpa’s newspapers (and other assorted print items).
Back at home, we made copies for the grandparents:
It rained all morning yesterday, so I took the 5-year-old into the garage with me, made him a blank booklet, gave him a stack of NYTimes magazines, and let him go. Here’s what he made (with a little glue help from papa):
A few hours later, we headed over to Staple. We bumped into Katia Lara, who praised I Hurt (she’d just seen it on my Instagram!) and let us check out her skull:
Then we checked out the screenprinting station:
And a lecture on zines by Maria Heg, who co-heads Zine Fest Houston. This slide of zinester Martin Luther got a big laugh from O:
And Heg actually made a one-page zine live for the audience:
Now I’m gonna leave a copy of Whatcha Mean, What’s A Zine? lying around for him to find, and maybe we’ll hit the APL zine rack soon…
Filed under: zines
This morning I browsed the Austin Public Library’s fantastic zine collection (highlights: Nathaniel Russell’s Fliers and Jillian Barthold’s Scenes From Big Bend) and this afternoon the 5-year-old and I made a zine using Bruno Munari’s Plus and Minus transparencies that I picked up in Milan last year and lines from the APL’s events flier. Pretty fun day.
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