By Gavin Burrows
lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com
It's almost...ironic that I reviewed a zine about about mental health issues and then almost immediately didn't update for two days because of my own problems. Haha. Hilarious! (No wait, it's not.)
Um, so, this is a collection of pieces that Burrows has run on his blog, and despite liking what I read in the last issue of this zine, I've never actually gone to his blog to read anything. This is probably because Burrows' pieces are quite long and in-depth and take a while to digest and process. Thus I find it easier/better to read these things in paper form when I'm not being distracted by someone talking to me in another window or funny pictures of cats or something.
In this issue Burrows talks about zines, and reviews concerts, movies, and art shows. I enjoy Burrows' general writing style, which is most evidenced by the fact that I read all of his pieces about music I had almost no familiarity with. Music articles/interviews are probably the bits of zines I skip over with the most frequency, as I find that they generally require you to have knowledge of the artist to really get anything out of them. Here, however, Burrows has managed to weave information about the band/music, history of the genres, and descriptions of the bands that are considerably more informative than "band x meets artist y". So yeah, I enjoyed reading them even if I don't want to seek out what the bands actually sound like. That's what music writing should be like!
Though I must admit that the repeated references to Francis Bacon kind of flew over my head. I guess I should read more about him at some point.
Thanks for the kind words. No pictures of cats on my blog, though!
ReplyDeleteI'd reviewed a Francis Bacon exhibition slightly earlier on, so on the blog you could just link back to that if anyone wanted. I suppose that's one advantage of blogs, though I know what you mean about reading being easier in paper form. I do try to keep the word count down on the blog, but I'm not very good at it!
PS You sill in the UK?
Nope, I'm now back in Canada.
ReplyDeleteYou'll be missed! Hope the flight back was bearable and the job situation is a bit better for you over there. (At least you won't be endlessly explaining to English people that you're not actually a Yank!)
ReplyDelete