I promised you some photos of my IZM Zine so here they are!
Also, I posted the zine on my Etsy shop so you can buy it here.
In case you have an awesomely bitchin zine of your own and want to trade, do contact me! I love me some trades and zinesters kick ass.
About the IZM Zine:
32 pages
Size A6 (1/4 page)
Black and white
Text-heavy (handwritten and typewritten)
Little to no computer used in the making of the zine
Amazine indeed!
Peace, love and zineroots revisited
International Zine Month 2018 recap:
My goal for this month was to make a zine. That I did. And I couldn’t be more thrilled!
The zine is 32 pages long and features some of the elements I used to add in my pre-motherhood zines – text-heavy, handwritten and typewritten material, simple drawings and graphics, creepy backgrounds, and simple (and rather sloppy attempts at) collages.
Some of the missing elements are cartoons, low-grade poetry, and a clear and uniform theme, unless you count IZM as the running theme since all of the pieces were written in July. Also, the cover is in black and white whereas most of my other zines have a color cover. But I like it like that.
The only thing that NEVER changed is the feeling I get with zine-production. I detailed that feeling in my zine and also in many of my previous posts. Looking through my archives at any zine-related posts, you may find words such as elated, transcendent, inspired, amazing, amazing, amazing, incredible, fucking awesome, kickass, ownage, epic, boss, rad, rules everything, and LOVE. Lots and lots of LOVE!
This morning, as I put the finishing touches on it, I took a step back and looked at the mess on my dining room table – stripes and bits of paper scattered everywhere, a Sharpie, a pen, a typewriter, a glue-stick with the cap off to the side, a pair of scissors on top of everything, a pile of paper, a stack of completed zine pages and a stack of half-completed ones.
I threw my head back and laughed out loud.
“I fucking love this!!!” I said within my fit of giggles.
So yes. IZM rules everything and I fucking LOVE it!
But now that it’s August 1st, I have to get back to the business at hand, mainly reading an obscene amount of Stephen King and taking care of my daughter. And tomorrow is Jerusalem Pride, so I’m going there after work and hang out with the beautiful bunch of sweet and wonderful people draped in rainbow flags and Israel flags. And the ultra-orthodox haters can fuck off and lose their tuques in fucking Baghdad for all I care.
I hope you all had as wonderful IZM as I had. And if you did and you managed to produce a zine or a few zines, drop me a line because I’d love to trade.
Pictures of zine will come later. Stay tuned!
Peace, love and aching fingers.
Zine-production, oh how I missed thee!!!!!!
The tap-tapping sounds of the typewriter, the smell of the glue, the stripes of cut paper falling all around, the sticky fingers, the zine coming together with total punk rock DIY perfection… Motherfucking A! What a feeling!
Today was Writing Thursday, but instead of sitting down to continue my random musings on my husband’s laptop, I decided to take advantage of my free morning to start my IZM 2018 zine layout.
There were a few things standing in my way and I tried to get them out of there as fast as I could.
After doing all this shit and setting up my workspace, I only sat down by my typewriter at 10:20. I pulled my beautiful machine, my pretty shiny red Rosie, aka Rose Madder, out of her box, slipped in an A6 size paper, set the margin and started making a whole bunch of noise.
As I was working, I was delirious with joy, laughing occasionally, flashing back to a time in my life where I had all the time in the world to make a whole bunch of paper art magic. And here I was now, back with my typewriter, my scissors, my glue stick, my papers, my backgrounds, all neatly set up.
I was still madly typing away, with the tips of my fingers slowly developing bruises, when the clock struck 11.
With angry Amon Amarth playing in the background and the DIY rush flowing through my veins, I stood up fast, nearly toppling my chair, pointed at the clock and screamed:
“FUCK YOU, CLOCK!! FUCK YOU!”
I had no more than 30 minutes left to revel in zine production before I had to start getting ready to go to work.
Of course, I lost track of time and of course, I missed my bus. But nothing could destroy my mood this morning. I can’t wait for my next free morning (which I’m planning for Sunday) for my fingers to get bruised up some more!
Peace, love and zinester at heart!
Other than filling pages and pages with endless piles of words, laying out a zine used to be one of my favorite pastimes before I became a mother. This is the most creative part of zine-production, requires little to no concentration, and can be done with loud-ass music playing.
I also used to travel a lot back then (it’s actually one of the things that I’m glad I’m not doing as much anymore because, I mean, airports. Am I right?). And whatever country I went to, I always made sure to visit places to satisfy my inner freak – metal fests, metal concerts, alternative clothing stores, metal bars, piercings/tattoos shops… These places always had the neatest flyers lying around. I collected a whole bunch and used them as backgrounds for any zine I made.
International Zine Month 2018 zine is soon to be laid out and I am in dire need of said flyers. But now that I am not traveling, and such freak locations and events are hard to find, I need to resort to the wonderful world wide web and search “metal flyers” or “punk rock flyers” to be used as backgrounds for my current zine.
I came across the most twisted and vile creations ever.
AND I FUCKING LOVE IT!
The logos and names of the bands written in font that nobody can read surrounded by skulls and skeletons, piles of decapitated corpses, zombies buried up to their hips in rivers of rotting flesh, blood gushing everywhere, not to mention the Goat of Mendes making its obligatory cameo appearance – this is the stuff that my perfect zine backgrounds are made of.
One of them also had “Death Metal till Death” written on it and I pulled my evil laugh with glee.
When I just started listening to metal, this was one of the aspects of the music that appealed to me and that really pulled me in – the gore, the insane amounts of grotesque imagery infesting the lyrics and the artwork of any respective metal band. Why did it appeal to me? Fuck if I know, and damned if I care.
We’re metalheads. We love our music loud and violent. And Satan help you if it’s not swarming with maggots.
I believe zines deserve to be just as wholesomely bloody.
Peace, love and visions of gore and death
I just read some of the really old posts I wrote (like from 2005) and I thought “Hmm, maybe I should write something like that again.” And then I remembered, I’m not 22, I’m not living with my parents, I’m not single, I’m not a student, I’m no longer a pothead, I don’t live in Canada, I’m not a journalist, and I’m not childless. I’m a completely different person and whatever words I put down on paper will be lightyears away from the ones I did all those years ago.”
I do have fun with the zine I’m making for International Zine Month, though. And that’s good. Again, the stuff I wrote so far is by no means brilliant, but the mere fact of creating and zine-producing is totally exciting as it’s always been.
Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if I had discovered zines earlier. Back when I lived in Canada, I could have attended some zine fests, which I never get a chance to do now that I live halfway across the planet (the Boston Zine Fest in 2015 notwithstanding).
What would I have called my zine? At 12, probably something Michael Jackson related. At 16, something Marilyn Manson related. At 18, undoubtedly something riot grrrl related. At 22, more like something weed related, as Buddah was at the center of my universe back then. In fact, I remember an assignment I had to do for my computer applications class was a newsletter I designed with a bunch of made-up articles about Mary Jane. I called it The Daily H (hence the logo I put on all my zines reading “Daily H Publications”).
A newsletter about drugs called the Daily H could be misinterpreted as a newsletter about heroin. But no. I used the letter H to stand for my name, as Hadass is also a plant and the newsletter was about a plant. The tagline of the newletter was “Get your daily dose of vitamin H!” Have some weed, and have some hadass while you’re at it.
Journalism school was fun, so I bet I could have totally dug being a zinester back then. Maybe smoke a doobie right before, to make the writing sound like the ramblings of a stone-cold stoner.
Reading my old diaries and high school agendas today is fun. But I bet a stoner’s zine would have been hilarious.
Peace, love and H is for High
International Zine Month 2018. Fuck yeah.
So being a mother, I barely have five minutes to spare for anything at all. But five minutes is all it takes for me to write one page of a quarter-page size zine. So here are (is) my plans (plan) for International Zine Month 2018:
That’s it. Just that. If I can do that in 31 consecutive days, I will be one super fucking happy zinester. I’ll spend about five minutes of each day to write/draw/collaging one page about whatever. If I keep at it for the full 31 days, I will have a nice full-length zine by the end of July. And that will be rad!
Also, I’m totally up for zine trades if anybody’s interested. IZM is totally the time for sharing zine love. So hit me up!
Peace, love and cutie booty, just because.
This is like the fifth blog post I’ve been trying to write. The other four drafts have all ended up in the trash section of my admin page. For some reason, my writing has turned stale and my level of inspiration is so low, I’m tasting dirt. Another piece of paper gets ripped out of the typewriter, crumpled and tossed.
Anyway, I read a few of my posts from a few years ago (because they’re always so much better than the recent ones) and came across a post I wrote when I first signed up to the 24-Hour Zine Thing challenge. It was my very first time and I was excited at the prospect of staying up all day and all night and doing nothing besides working on a zine.
Since then, I have participated in this challenge three times and produced three motherfucking AMAZING issues of my zine.
But since 2016, I’ve done shitall. Throughout July, as International Zine Month was in full swing, I tried doing something zine-related. I came across posts from other zinesters who were taking part in it and also reread my older posts from my past experiences with IZM. I couldn’t believe how inspired, creative and driven I was, and how I’m the exact opposite of it these days. Even if I manage to create a zine or something here and there, I still don’t feel that enormous sense of accomplishment I felt in the past. Inspiration is still super difficult to come by, and my writing still sucks ass.
There is no way I could participate in the 24-Hour Zine Thing ever again. I know that. But as I was reading that old post I thought “Why not do it anyway? Not in the conventional no-sleep-no-shower kind of way, but in increments. Keep the spontaneous no-prior-planning aspect of it, but take the necessary “breaks” that come with the territory of taking care of a toddler.”
But then I think, how is that any different from making a regular zine? The point of a 24-hour zine is to make it in the space of 24 consecutive hours, start to finish. As it stands, the only way I could make a 24-hour zine is by leaving my baby in my husband’s care, temporarily move to a remote location, with no reception or internet connection, and switch off the maternal part of my brain that is on constant worry-mode.
No way that is happening.
Inspiration is still miles away. I am absolutely disgusted by how stale and moldy my writing has become. And the only thing that could potentially turn any miserable spark of inspiration I have left into an all-consuming blaze (i.e. the 24-Hour Zine Thing) is desperately out of reach.
Fuck this. If I can’t write, I might as well read. Thank Goddess for my constant flow of books.
Peace, love and this is what the end of words feels like.
