Zine Revue 13
This is the second double issue of the zine revue, which was necessary to cover how much stuff I got at the latest iteration of Glasgow Zine Fair. Glasgow Zine Library, which runs the fair every year and also maintains an archive, activity space and reading room in Glasgow's southside, is still raising money to renovate its shelving and storage areas, to make more zines accessible, so support them if you can! They're very close to the goal.
Title: Ad Astra Per Croydon
Author: Tom Murphy
Category: Writing
A really funny niche alt history zine about an aborted attempt at a spaceport in a suburb of London. I am kind of anti-spaceflight-hype and find thinking about the possibility that it will become kind of banal in the future more interesting, in the same way airplanes did over a century. This zine's clever use of archival materials combined with dry humor offers a lot to mentally chew on for that topic.
Title: Frozen Peas
Author: Folly Problem
Category: Comics
As one of the reviews in this compilation says, many would "struggle to come up with more to say" about frozen peas, but these selections, illustrated and lifted from online grocery store reviews, reveal that the almost aggressively ordinary context of an online grocery store site offers a venue for the strongest, most particular feeling peas can inspire.
Title: People at Work
Author: Jake Parappa Hainey
Category: Work
A short collage zine that evokes a kind of sinister inverse of the cutesy working animals type children's books... Would you report this dog for internal theft? Would you snitch on Lowly Worm trying to unionize? It is kind of sinister that one of the first things we teach kids is... job-having.
Title: 1 Hour in the Computer Room
Author: Clara Belaire
Category: Technology
A slice of the mid-00s in the form of what videos the author looked up on YouTube when they were allowed on the family computer at a specific time every day. Of course I had to get this one! Even though I spent more of my limited time trying to unsuccessfully work my way up to a glamorous life in Neopets, it took me back to a time, in general, when culture took a lot more scavenging, revisiting, and general obsession.
Title: How to Live on Mars
Author: Lokesh W-Das
Category: Technology
A pocket-sized guide to the concerns associated with trying to live on Mars... Food, water, oxygen, energy, and, of course, entertainment! The last category being present surprised me because it shows a bit more optimism and sensitivity to the idea of a good life than most existing visions of life on other planets.
Title: A Phenomenon of Commons
Author: Of Source! Press
Category: Politics
I admit, I am a #tightbastard when it comes to certain things and this zine exceeded my personal sense of "how much I'm willing to spend on something at a zine fair". But the topic is laser-focused to my interests and it's a very wonderfully-constructed edition. I really liked how it expanded commons/commoning from a specific set of qualities or rules about how to do something to an existing phenomenon that is pervasively being done around us all the time, just less likely to be acknowledged by official/capitalist culture. I also liked that it conceptualized community as voluntary and based on interest when it comes to commoning; I usually end up feeling that the weirdly-scoldy social media posts about how you need to Participate in Community(tm) even if you find it unpleasant/alienating to mostly be conformist in function/concerns.
Buuuut because I am a huge nerd about these things I would have liked a bit more depth on the specific ways the Internet functions and doesn't function as a commons A) because we are in an era of rapid enclosure online that even I, as someone who is unusually tapped into this shit is finding kind of shocking and B) going to a zine fair makes me remember how much I hate it that so many ppl's online presence is just commercial platforms like Instagram. I also don't really need repeated hedging that commoning doesn't do away with or exclude money altogether... I think you still need to be able to make a critique (as Max Haiven does in Art After Money) of money as an alienating abstraction that contributes to the spread of capitalism into more spheres of life. Like ok, not tomorrow... but we gotta kick this eventually, right?
That all said, I did overall like this zine and find it thought-provoking, and it provides a big list of references to explore (yay!) which were mostly unfamiliar to me. I will definitely be keeping up with this press' subsequent publications.