Lost & Found: Holland

Closed Caption Zines — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:17:27 +0000

It’s not long since we were posting about the first two issues of Lost & Found, which related Tom and Laura’s adventures as they roamed through Croatia and Chicago respectively. This time they’ve headed for the Netherlands to do a spot of house-sitting for a friend. Part comic, part scrapbook, the zine is filled with fun anecdotes and drawings which make you want to hop on a bike and head for the Miffy museum pretty much right away.

makedo-and-mend.blogspot.co.uk

Les Carnets de Rastapopoulos

Closed Caption Zines — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:06:06 +0000

Growing up, Robert Gauvinov had a fairly impressive roster of penpals. As a teenager longing for mail, he sent his address to a Communist youth magazine, hopeful that at least one person would write back. Little did he realise that with so few magazines available, Robert’s offer would eagerly seized upon by hundreds of young people who had seen the ad. The resulting correspondence was the start of many friendships, giving him a firsthand insight into what it meant to grow up during the Cold War. This issue of the zine is about digging out all those letters, and recalling the people who wrote them, their various, idiosyncratic handwriting, and trying to trace what happened to them afterwards.

“Slowly I began remembering names of people and small towns around the world that occupied my memory at one point in time. . . Teens from around the globe who exchanged with me their dreams, fears, and details of their typical mundane daily lives.”

Gaudy Verse

Closed Caption Zines — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:15:37 +0000

Last week we released our new zine, Gaudy Verse. This is a collection of poems I’ve been working on over the past few years, about very important matters like the pleasure of piling gherkins between three slabs of bread. (A topic that’s especially close to my heart after yesterday when I built myself the mother of all triple-deckers. Hungover)

Anyway, “poems” is too strong a word — this is just verse. I have a soft spot for volumes of 1920s doggerel with maudlin cover art, so I guess this is my contribution to that genre.

It’s a little different to our other zines, it’s a lot more. . . miscellaneous. . . and there’s no football this time.

And I’ve only spotted one glaring typo so far.

Gaudy Verse is for sale on our Etsy page, but if you’d like to trade that would be great too. You can email me on orla_foster [@] hotmail.co.uk

Gag Me With A. . . Issue #7

Closed Caption Zines — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 10:24:29 +0000

You always know when a new Gag Me With A. . . has landed. You only have to look at the envelope. Making zines is second nature to Deirdree Prudence, and she has the kitsch aesthetic nailed, complete with glitter and inky typewritten text. Also, partner-in-crime Steven Purkey joins her on editorial duties this time round. They recently set up Sunflower Gray Productions together, and lately it seems a week doesn’t pass without some pink-stapled mini masterpiece steaming off the press. You should also check out their Pocket Readers series, a set of zine narratives about the likes of Ian Curtis and Sylvia Plath. Did I mention that all of this printed splendour is completely free? Get in touch with Deirdree if you’re interested in picking up a copy.

gagmewitha.blogspot.co.uk

This Is Not A Serious Music Publication

Closed Caption Zines — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:10:10 +0000

Do you find the effort to keep up with music exhausting? Not in a sighing parent, elaborately weary kind of way — just the slow realisation that even if you devoted every waking moment to the pursuit of new bands, reading up on blogs and going to see every show that came to your town, you’d still be lagging way behind. This Is Not A Serious Music Publication is a collaboration between friends Sammy and Sarah which lightly shrugs off any pressure to swim with the tide, preferring instead to concentrate on the bands which make them happiest. This refreshing approach is made all the nicer by the fact that both girls like to draw, and devote a large portion of the zine to comic strips. Each of the written features is accompanied by their own artwork and reflections on matters such as hip-hop, vanishing female outfits and Blur. Plenty of Blur.

sammyborras.blogspot.co.uk

sarahfogg.co.uk

Turbulence

Closed Caption Zines — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 08:42:28 +0000

I haven’t reviewed all that many poetry zines on here — it can be difficult to parcel together a neat little write-up when the content is so varied. Poetry anthologies spill over with different personalities. Turbulence is a good read though, and worth seeking out. Based in Hull, the magazine features an impressive number of contributors from more countries than you’ve had hot dinners. A couple that caught my eye were Andrew Pidoux’s ‘The Charity Shop At Night’ and also a mournful ode by Michael O’Brien, lost in regret over a vegan macaroni and cheese he just ate, when he could have been feasting on sushi instead. In the time it has taken me to fully absorb and digest this issue, however, a new one has sprung up in its place. Visit their site to order a copy, or to submit your own work.

turbulencepoetry.blogspot.co.uk

Abandoned Property of Ulster

Closed Caption Zines — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 08:02:13 +0000

You might already be familiar with The Vacuum, a free arts publication printed in Belfast. Each issue tackles a different topic in depth — whether it’s Waste, Media, Wisdom or Satan. But Abandoned Property of Ulster takes the formula down another path. A spin-off issue, this is a deadpan catalogue of all kinds of different buildings in Northern Ireland, only with various madcap anecdotes bundled upon them. I like the intentionally grandiose Contributers page, with its biographies of fusty Victorian-styled academics the writers dreamed up; mutton-chopped veal-eaters in the mould of Ruskin. Except these lads dropped out of film studies and switched to architecture before taking up a noble vocation in blogging. I’ll be in Belfast around Hallowe’en and feel like this would make a great Ghost tour — if anybody with a top hat, silver-tipped cane and paid-up membership to their local amateur dramatics society happens to be reading this.

thevacuum.org.uk

Lost & Found

Closed Caption Zines — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 09:22:17 +0000

Sticking with the travel theme, this weekend the letterbox clattered open with a particularly lovely pair of zines from Thomas Goodwin and Laura Millward. Both illustrators, the pair are in the habit of keeping holiday journals when they go to new places, and the result is Lost & Found — a series of comics detailing their adventures. All the ingredients for a good trip are right here: Weezer singalongs in the car, hot chocolate sauce, balcony views stretching out into the ocean. In Dubrovnik, Laura samples vegetarian cuisine — free gift, oddly, a stone with a smiley face painted onto it — while in Chicago, they dabble with heftier options; Tom falling victim to a Chicago sandwich so intense that “the bread can’t maintain its strength because of the beef juice”. Laura mentions on her blog that they’re considering a Holland chapter next. As souvenirs go, this puts your sombrero and your straw donkey to shame!

etsy.com/shop/makedoshop

6,800 Miles Or 1,000,000 Kilometers

Closed Caption Zines — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 10:44:22 +0000

Back during the summer we received a crisp new copy of Jon’s travel zine I Went to China. I Wrote Things Down. By an error of judgement, I started reading it in the middle of moving house, which meant that somewhere along the way the pair of us got separated and the zine is now back in Birkenhead enjoying a glass of wine with my parents while I sit alone in a Sheffield box room. Luckily for me another volume swiftly followed, this time documenting a month-long road trip around America. Driven by curiosity and an abiding weakness for Mexican food, Jon and his girlfriend Misty conquer 16 states, encountering a real platter of strange and uniquely American (Roswell, Stonehenge II!) landmarks as they go. Naturally, there’s the glitz of casinos, wigwam motels, and the opportunity to sample a “Gut Pak”. The only real disappointment is the realisation that the Californian waves are colder than they should be: “This couldn’t be the same water the Beach Boys were singing about in all those songs?”

From what I can tell, Jon’s also pretty keen on trades, so if you’d like to swap zines you can reach him on jonwfoster [at] hotmail [dot] com

The Inventory

Closed Caption Zines — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 08:24:50 +0000

Abandon Normal Devices is an annual arts festival celebrating digital culture and the ways in which people engage with a rapidly changing technological environment. The festival alternates between Liverpool and Manchester, and is always filled with pretty groundbreaking work, so we were really pleased to receive a micro-commission this time around.

In keeping with this year’s theme – Success — we decided to create a fanzine-style publication which contrasted the traditional awestruck, home-made, low-circulation zine with content pilfered from the online profiles of artists involved in the festival. Titled The Inventory, the zine was meant as a glimpse at the changing role of the internet as a tool to promote and publicise an individual’s career.

We wanted to question how the role of artist — and to some extent, anybody who uses social media platforms — had evolved, using Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 work The Medium Is The Massage: An Inventory of Effects as our starting point. Considering the ways in which the internet creates a prism through which a person’s character and career can be viewed, it seemed appropriate to look to McLuhan’s work with its emphasis on the method of communication over the actual material being communicated.

Alongside this, we included tips from brash online marketing consultancies, which analysed how best to “extend your influence” online — right down to the length of characters needed for a successful tweet.

We handed out copies of the finished zine at as many of the festival sites as we could get to, which was a good way of making sure we got to see a lot of the work on show. Particular highlights included Wafaa Bilal’s Meme Junkyard — a huge inflatable Techno Viking head, sustained purely on #technoviking tweets, and Border Bumping, which reworked national boundaries according to where mobile phone networks placed them. Skype karaoke at the Salutation pub was another of many enjoyable moments.

There are still a couple of copies of The Inventory left, so if you’d like one, feel free to drop us a line on closedcaption@live.co.uk