If Nothing Else the Sky

By Dave Roche
PO Box 221041
Chicago, IL 60622
sites.google.com/site/ifnothingelsethesky/home

Okay, so I have a confession. Before I stayed at Dave Roche's house during the ALA conference in Chicago I'd never read any of his zines. Sure, I knew who he was, I knew what On Subbing (his book about being a substitute teacher) looked like, I might even have read the back cover when my brother distroed it, but I'd never (knowingly) read anything he'd actually written.

But after meeting him, talking to him, and hearing him read excerpts from his zines I realized I really wanted to read his zines, and was excited to start his newest one, about his travels in SE Asia and Australia.

I really like travelling (I'm sleeping on my friend's floor in Kentucky right now!), and I spent a bunch of time living and travelling in Australia and SE Asia a few years ago, so I was excited to read about Dave's experiences. Though while there is definitely the appeal of "I've been there!" and "I slept at that place!", the true appeal of this zine is Dave's writing style: humourous, informative, and a little bit self-deprecating.

Dave worries that he might be getting too old for the punk rock sleeping on strangers' couches style of living and travelling. At what point does he stop being that cool zinester guy, and starts being that weird old guy with a beard? (Clearly the answer is "never!".) Dave also has to deal with realizing how incredibly privileged and rich (at least comparatively) he is in SE Asia, mandis and squat toilets, getting bitten by a penguin in Australia. Dave goes on tour with a punk band, stays with an anarchist robotics scientist, tries to explain why he isn't married yet, and has lots of other adventures. There's a lot of content here, and I can't describe every story, but there are a number of excerpts on his website and you should check them out!

 If Nothing Else the Sky is huge for a zine. It's almost a hundred pages (perfect bound), mostly text, and will take a while to read,  but thanks to Dave's DIY-punk ethics/terrible business sense, you can order it for just $5. If you liked Dave's earlier books, enjoy travel stories, or just like reading zines by funny/kinda weird people, it's definitely worth checking out.

Westside Angst 10

By Ianto Ware (this zine is like eight years old, so who knows if that email address works)

Huh, it's been a while since I've reviewed a perzine. So many comics! I went back to the UK to visit my parents at Xmas, and one of the things I did while there was look through a bunch of boxes of stuff I'd left with them. One of them contained the remnants of all of these comics that my friend Jen had sent me a few years ago. Clearly that would not do! I have to review everything! So I put them in my bag to bring back to Canada, and a fair number of the reviews over the last few months have been of those comics.

But this (despite being old) isn't one! No, I picked this up at the Roberts Street Social Centre because I thought the way it was bound with a giant metal clip, and designed with multiple layers of different cardstock for the cover made it look really neat. Weirdly, I ended up reviewing another zine earlier this year that was also by Ware and from what seems to be about the same time as this one.

This zine is designated the quarter-life crisis issue, and is split into two main themes. One is about gender and sexuality, and how being a straight white male is deemed "normal" in our society. It says some interesting things about media's portrayal of gender, and raises some ideas that I've thought of before.

The other section is the quarter-life crisis bit, and is about Ware being upset with his job (which he doesn't like), wanting a better job and career (despite also not wanting a job or a career), and how society pushes us towards certain ideas of what counts as "success". Ware doesn't want to buy into the system and have a career, but at the same time he doesn't feel like he's left with many other options. He'd rather spend his time working on his PhD, but to pay for that he needs to work, and his attempts to get a grant to pay for university have so far failed. (I had a realization that the amount of aid money most students want is pretty small, and even the debt many graduate with is basically nothing compared to how much rich people earn. Just another reason to dislike our economic system I guess.)

I think I've approached many of the same ideas that Ware has, but at the same time I found this zine a little...complainy? Bitter? I mean, I'm sure that I've felt/thought/said many of the same things, but I don't know if I want to read about them. Maybe the most important thing this zine made me think about was my own thoughts and actions. Positive thinking!

Sentenced Zine

I got emailed about this a while ago and it looks kind of neat.

From: http://sentencedzine.wordpress.com/

"The next edition, to be launched April 2013, will feature artists from across Australia, each artist illustrating one of the sentences from the game. While Darwin is the home of the zine, with an exhibition set to be at Darwin Visual Arts Association for 2013, it will also travel to either Sydney or Melbourne for a second exhibition. With each yearly release of the zine, it will travel to different locations in Australia, broadening audiences as well as networking between contemporary art spaces across Australia. The zine is also a platform to represent emerging artists, providing an opportunity to be part of a yearly group show.

To become involved in Sentenced as an artist, art space or interested party, contact Coco and David at sentencedzine@gmail.com."