Recently, I’ve been in the process of getting a number of the interviews from my old zine Eventide online.  There are six so far, with more to come. (Hint: fans of bands with alumni of Swiz in their lineups will likely be very happy.) Going through the files, stored for over a decade on Zip discs — the storage medium of tomorrow! — I found a lot more as well: PageMaker 5 layouts; the columns that a number of us wrote; a […]

I went over to Academy Annex’s new location the other day. They’ve moved to a space not far from where I live — or, more precisely, even closer to where I live than they did before. And their location relative to WORD and Permanent Records means that, in theory, I can drop a lot of money on books and music in the span of less than ten blocks. Besides picking up Siltbreeze’s reissue of The Victor Dimisich Band’s discography — […]

I’m not going to lie: for all that the internet has made it easy to discover new bands, to order their music, and to figure out where they might be playing, there’s still a weird thrill that comes from discovering something in an unorthodox manner. Maybe that’s the influence of the weird, sideways way I came to a lot of punk and hardcore in my formative years — a seven inch dubbed to a Maxell tape here, an interesting-looking ad […]

“I am a zine maker, not a book writer, and this is a perfect bound zine as much as it is a book.” So writes Taryn Hipp in the opening pages of her new Heavy Hangs the Head. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to be referring to it as a book from here on in — though I’m also totally considering her comments about it being a kind of zine as denoting it as fair game for this […]

So, by all means, let’s talk DIY. The impulse to make a zine can come from a number of corners these days: to collaborate with someone else on a specific project; to release something different into the world; to act as a kind of proof of concept; to illustrate a specific concept or philosophy. The three zines covered this week take a panoply of approaches, from art to memoir. And, hey — one of them is pointing me in the […]

Spent part of the night listening to Irreparables‘ self-titled LP. The first lines I heard, over a ramshackle guitar line that loosely echoed Joy Division’s “Submission,” were “I wanna wanna wanna make a fanzine.” Appropriate, right? It didn’t hurt that much of this week’s column focuses on punk, or makes the DIY element of zinemaking particularly clear. I turned the record up and watched it spin.

A few months ago, I ended up sending some money to the Kickstarter campaign for Birdsong‘s fifth anniversary issue. I’d met Birdsong editor Tommy Pico a few years before; we both read at a 3-Minute Stories event, and I’d picked up a few issues of his zine here and there over the years that followed. As such, I found him to be an editor with a good eye for poetry, fiction, and visual art — and given that placing all of those elements […]