gerry's Site

Below I've put links to scans of the best zines I did since the early 1990s. After about the mid naughties I realised I'd done enough and turned to more mainstream publishing, but I think by this stage my best work was well and truly behind me, as they say. Thus I turned to alcohol and despair, and died in the gutter soon afterwards. I, who once had the zine world at my feet was reduced to nothing, a pauper and unknown. Actually I was even a pauper and unknown when I was making the zines, but I became even poorer and less well known.

Anyway this archive covers about fifteen years of the glory days when I was at my heady zine-making peak. I do intend to do one more  zine: my late-life masterpeice. It will be called Report on Probability B in homage to a paraniod Brian Aldiss book. Watch out for it. 

Other zines I made, and of which I am still fond, cannot be archived here. These include a wax paper zine which allowed the reader to see through to pages other than the one she was reading (Solami Verandango, Ern Malley Press 1996). Another is a hommage to the New Romantics put out on latex-like flexible foam sheets. It always came open at the centrespread. Justine Lacey assisted me in producing it. Finally The Effacement Manuscripts (Ern Malley Press 2002) was a zine in which the physical zine held by the reader, or another in the limited print run, actaully featured in the story within. The zine described its own future trajectory as a physical object, so it does not seem right to scan it. The Effacement Manuscripts was dedicated to Canberra all-round performer David Branson, who was killed in a car accident just before it came out  (RIP).

I have not archived the vast quantity of atrocious shit I put out in the process of doing all this, since I want people to think of me as an OK guy. But I mention it anyway to flag the idea, argued for by myself and my sister Magda in "The DNA of DIY" (Photofile 81 (2008)) that DIY is an Hegelian learning curve involving healthy doses of error (tho i deliberately refrained from mentioning Hegel himself in the article. It is scanned here).

My suggestion is you read the zines before you read the notes to the zines, since these may contain traces of spoilers. The titles of the zines are links. 

 Me 2010, reflecting on the hours I spent salving over a hot photocopier making zines. I regret nothing! Well not that much anyway.Tho some of the crap I have written in my life - edgad! Better stop on this line of thinking or the current web page will turn into an emo site, and as you can see I'm not big on fringes.

Lives of the Saints (mid to later 1992, Aktion Surreal Publications)

This zine is an odd mix of religion-lost-recently, surrealism, and punky sci fi. I've scanned it and put it up because it is indeed odd, and because it says something about Canberra in the bittersweet winter of that year. It's also my first ever zine! A copy was donated to the National Library of Australia, I think by Sophie Bord of Aktion Surreal: check the record here.

Front Jugged Issue 1 (late 1992 early 1993, Aktion Surreal Publications).

Front Jugged was made on the photocopiers and computers at the ANU Student's Association. It was named after a poem by Ant Hayes. It ran to several issues. There is more information about the zine in section 4 of Critical History of Aktion Surreal. It is archived here because I contributed to all the issues and edited the first few.

Results of the Transmission Vocalisation Test (1994) Phoenix Research Foundation, Parkes/Canberra.

The "Results" zine is a Monograph partly funded by a band I was in 1992-1995, The Piltdown Frauds. 

Acme Zine (1996)

I was not in the Acme performance group nor did I help with their zine, but I had such fun with them I here archive their zine. RIP David Watt.    

NOT WORKING YET: Mentalism and Memory (excerpt). (1997)

Big call: because it is so prophetic, of all the zines archived here, this is the piece I am most proud of having written in my zine career . In it band names and other similar monikers for cultural activities proliferate until they clog up language. This is exactly what has happened, and the process is both accelerated and revealed by the internet. Look almost any word or phrase up on wikipeida or whatever. You will also find mention of various musical and other acts, most of which you’ve never heard.

The point is I predicted this hyperinflation of band etc names in 1998 in “Suede and the use of referents post 1994," the main piece in the zine Mentalism and Memory. I like the dada hint that art causes verbal pollution. If creativity was more generalised and names less necessary to “promote” it, then perhaps this creativity could augment, and not also sabotage, language. Also go to myspace etc and type in any band name: most names, even quite obscure ones are shared by about 6 bands. There is a heavy metal “New Pornographers," a indy "New Pornographers" etc.You read first in Mentalism and Memory folks, in 1997, at least 10 years before the problem made itself felt in earnest.

We Must Destroy the Ghost Machine (1997) Ern Malley Press, Canberra.

Don't overestimate the originality of early band-orientated efforts like Sniffin' Glue when thinking about the history of zines. Alongside DIY funeral publications, some of the first ever zines were made by derelicts. I don't even mean squatters. I mean truly homeless people, bowed by the system to the point of being unable to cope. "Mental health issues" is the ephemism, and their zines are desparate acts of defiance. We Must Destroy the Ghost Machine is in homage to these weird folk and their strange little books. It appeared for a time on the site of the band The Suspect Mushrooms who were a great act w/ a guest theremin player. Read We Must Destroy the Ghost Machine at peril to your own sanity.

Just before all the hype about globalisation that backfired so badly on the ruling class in 1999 with the anti-WTO movement, we find Mark Latham's "first rate book" Civilising Global Capital. Of course it's all but forgotten now, rightly assigned to a circular file labelled "history." It says little more that  that we should take pay cuts to compete with other workers internationally, and soften the losses in various ways, for instance by consuming better technology and trading some of the pay cuts for minor reductions in social infrastructure.

It was predictive enough. That's the problem tho. It just towed and endorsed an economic line that was being enforced anyway. It didn't add anything new or have any new ideas. But at the time, the book was touted as a replacement for Marxism, and - I kid you not - argued to be superior to the Communist Manifesto on the basis that it is significantly longer.

Here's my shortened version. It was handed out at a seminar/book launch Latham held at the ANU, and in which I suggested capitalism tended to produce junk technology - planned obsolescence and industrial secrecy being reasons why. But for Latham it's only the point of purchase that is important, since it is here we offset the pay cuts. Too bad if the stuff is rubbish and the end result is mountains of landfill.   

A Recorded Alphabet (1999) Aslant a Brook, Sydney.

This is another homage, this time to graf art. I'm not a fan of hip hop BTW. Hip hop liberates the spoken word but usually for what? Pointless cross-referencing of TV shows,  gangster posturing, crap about expensive cars, girls who look like they have plastic tits or more "progressively" boring old surreal gibberish. I do like other elements of the associated subculture: the rap precursors (incl as late as NWA and Public Enemy), the dancing, to some extent the tags. But most of all I like the pieces. It's interesting the links between graf and avant-gard stuff: pity I didn't know about  Pinot-Gallizio's industrial painting at the time. Not sure if the Sydney graf art site referenced in A Recorded Alphabet is still online.

The Insights of the Big Brain (2000) Ern Malley Press.

Around this time I was into Cartesian Skepticism. Later we even did a brain in the vat night at the ANU Uni Bar (maybe 2002). Brains floating in a fishtank were wired up to Anthony Ives who played piano under their evil influence. Later writer Jonathan Lees smashed the tank, sending glass and encephalic matter across the floor. He could no longer bear to be controlled! Kate McNamara interestingly remarked that we tend to consider the disembodied subject to be male, and several of us, including a very drunk Anthony Hayes, tried to convince the audience they did not exist. Hayes and Brian Hinksperson later did an absurdist performance in an inflatable kid's bath. In short it was a great night out. This zine always reminds me of non-standard logician Gillian Russell who apparently read it to her friends when sho got back to Princeton. Thanks for spreading the word Gill.

Text loops (2000, Aslant a Brook)

Put to music by some punk bands and circulated around the public service Text loops is one of my more successful zines. Tho that's not saying much.

NOT WORKING YET: The Supersessionist International () done with Justine Lacey, Charlotte Regan, and  . The film review is mine. 

NOT WORKING YET: One more Empty boast. A fanzine done for a band I was in with Hermione Cramp called "We Have No Angst."

Good name huh? we played a couple of shows, our best ones was at a nightclub in the Valley converted from a disused church. They were the days.

Left Brain/Right Brain. (2007) Done with Fawnia Mountford. Farewell to zines, at least for a long while.   

Fawnia Mountford and I decided to make a surrealist zine in 2007, Left Brain/Right Brain. What the hell was I doing being involved in this folly? I had renounced both zines and surrealism. Do our anti-hero’s habits die that hard?

Here I can only speak for myself. I think the left brain/right brain stuff is overly simple. The idea is that the right brain is responsible for the preconscious, the left, for more precise logical thinking. In reality the brain is more complex than this, and different areas can give us the same mental function. Indeed, the zine includes a dig about how the idea is an anatomy lesson from the disreputable sources that also inform us about the goings on of movie and TV actors. So in the zine Left Brain/Right Brain, left and right brain is just an image for precise logical thinking and the preconscious respectively.

For me, the zine then uses the image to move beyond surrealism. It advocates logical thought selectively handling what the preconscious provides as premises. Perhaps not explicitly, but you will note the zine has a Hegelian feel, using cut up techniques to “negate the difference” as it were between left and right.  Peter Wollen (1989 article) has doumented the Hegelial assumptions of the avant-garde. Along Hegelian lines, the surrealists should have been able to think of the different "halves" of the brain as complementary.

For instance, now following Hegel's historicism, the preconscious could provide premises for use by the logical mind. Tho we do not have to agree with Hegel this leads to God, thinking in this way would be to consciously partake in a historical process hoping to push back the boundaries of rationality. (But, especially given the industrial-scale degradation arising out of the later 20th century one might not succeed...). "Sur-realism" was supposed to be a "higher" realism in just this sense. Unfortunately, as the Situationists argued, the actual Surrealists concentrated almost solely on the preconscious half of the equation.

Admittedly I'm not sure the zine is clear enough about this, but I felt the need to archive it as an attempt at these kinda ideas. As for Left Brain/Right Brain as a zine, well I can claim in my defense that it was never published. Archived here only, it meets whatever future it has as an e-zine. In 2011 the e-zine and blog is, as far as I am concerned, a more promising format. I can easily send a piece, illustrated in colour, to a friend I have in Berlin. As Canberra photographer Fiona Edge once said to me, the net has pretty much killed the paper zine.

Left Brain/Right Brain almost had no future at all. It was with some of my DIY stuff destroyed in the Brisbane floods. (The floods did not actually enter the queenslander where I have lived late 2005 -early 2012, “The Batcave,” although that house is on the Brisbane river. We did get pretty water-logged).

So much for my curatorial/archiving skills. You can find similar water damage on Maria Petriella’s photos used in my critical overview of Aktion Surreal. Unforgivable in both cases. But I’ve resigned myself to the fact, that, though the lot has fallen on me to document some thoughtful momments in Aussie DIY counterculture, my life is shambolic.

Not sure what Fawnia will think, or how she will react to this introduction. She was more attached to surrealism than me. We did do this graphic in which you find something of the same dialectic. She also made one of her famous swamp dolls in the likeness of me (known to my daughter as "Little Daddy"). OK that’s enough. This blurb is already like three times as long as the zine itself. Jesus H fucking Christ I crap on. Stop it! Stop it! arghhhhhhhhhhh   

Notes

Aktion Surreal Publications: in Canberra of the time the group Aktion Surreal (1991-1994) was known for perfomances and lively nights, but it also had a prolific publishing arm.

Ern Malley Press: mainly Anthony Hayes and myself. Hayes put out some great zines such as thermodynamically-titled Friction as a Social Process (1993).

Aslant a Brook: mainly Charlotte Regan and myself, most of it done from out of her flat in Mortdale. We used to use photocopiers at the Hurstville dole office, pretending the zines were resumes for cold canvassing.