workplace sabotage - book - 1997 - The Best of Temp Slave!

The Best of Temp Slave!
Jeff Kelly (ed.)
Garrett County Press
1997
161 pages

The Best of Temp Slave is an anthology of writings that were originally published in the well known Temp Slave zine.  The zine, which focused on labour issues pertaining to temporary contract work, was edited by Jeff Kelly, who also wrote much of its content (using the alias Keffo) and, by extension, the content of this anthology.  In addition to publishing his own writings, Kelly also published material by other frustrated temps, and other well known zine writers, including Pete Jordan (AKA Dishwasher Pete, editor of the zine Dishwasher and author of the book Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States), and Debbie Goad (who published the zine, Answer Me with her husband, Jim Goad) who had temp experience.  

The original zine ran, according to zinewiki, from 1993 into the early 2000s, although I cannot find a reference to the exact number of issues.  It had a peak circulation of 3000, which is quite high for a zine, and was notorious enough to be mentioned in numerous articles about temporary labour as well as in books like Naomi Klein’s No Logo.  Furthermore, Re/Search Publications head, V. Vale interviewed Keffo for volume two of his Re/Search Zines book, and the zine even inspired a Temp Slave musical that was performed in 2001.  Temp Slave was successful enough as a zine to have been a conditioning force upon a larger zine-making practice during the 1990s zine golden age.

Temp Slave was about work and the workplace, but it was not, however, a zine for Marxist critique of labour from the perspective of a temp worker.  Instead, it was a forum for temps to vent their derision for an exploitative and humiliating system of labour.  Many of the written pieces that appear in the book are humorous in their spiteful portrayals of office decor, staffing company personnel, management and permanent workers.  Sabotage is a persistent theme of the book and many of the articles give specific examples of workplace pranks and vulgar dialog spoken to freak out the permanent staff.

A number of the pieces also convey the angst of having skills that aren’t utilized by the basic work, of having talents that far exceed their job requirements.  In The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells, the author discusses an emergent (now emerged) white collar proletariat, for the information age, that does reception work and data entry.  These jobs are not entirely unskilled as they involve computer and information literacy as well as strong communication skills.  The Best of Temp Slave does include accounts of industrial work and other assorted positions (like the Shopping Mall Santa) but most of the stories pertain to office settings.  The Best of Temp Slave (along with a thematically similar - although not identical -  publication, Processed World) thus captures the frustration of a largely educated underclass who occupy the lowest positions of the office without much opportunity for advancement.  The temp is an outsider to the social world they work in, and their status as temp maintains that social and professional position.

Many of the authors in The Best of Temp Slave speak harshly of the staffing companies that keep their clients in a precarious crisis of low-wage officer work alternating with periods of unemployment.  While the authors are frustrated with these positions, where they’re treated as disposable, there is the potential that the heavy deferment to staffing agencies is causing a crisis.  A report about employment in Toronto last year determined that too many jobs are short contracts, the fluctuations in unemployment statistics likely relate to the availability of temp work from month to month, and Toronto has one of the highest unemployment rates out of large Canadian cities.  With fewer and fewer available permanent positions, the tides of temporary positions has become a serious issue.

So Temp Slave deals with serious issues regarding work, but in a humorous way that details all of the opportunities for payback and the few consequences that result under such circumstances.   Anyone conducting research on office sabotage should consult this book as its rife with examples, in fact, the book makes a carnival of the practice.  Furthermore, the book is full of satirical illustrations and comics that lampoon the temp experience and the office work setting.  Some are reminiscent of the kind of bulletin board humour that can be found in offices, but with a harsh... sometimes violent edge.

critical mass - zine - 2007 - Bipedal, By Pedal!: Experiences and Thoughts Around the Critical Mass Bicycle Movement!

Bipedal, By Pedal: Experiences and Thoughts Around the Critical Mass Bicycle Movement!
Joe Biel et. al.
Microcosm Publishing
2007
43 pages

Critical Mass is a monthly bicycle oriented event that occurs in most major North American and European cities, as well as in many mid-sized cities and at other locales around the world.  The event originated in mid-1990s San Francisco (although it has its origins in earlier events held in Mexico City, plus it takes some of its inspiration from cycling practices observed in urban China) by Chris Carlsson (editor of Processed World magazine, and more recently author of the book Nowtopia) and a group of cyclist friends.  The basic concept for the event is that cyclists congregate at an agreed-upon time and place to embark upon a meandering ride through the city streets, preferably during the evening peak traffic period.  The basic intention of the event is to assert that the bicycle has a place in a contemporary urban environment that has been designed (rather inefficiently) for the automobile.  Participants are free to bring whatever motivations they have to the ride, as it is leaderless, and no one is authorized to impose onto riders an adherence to a particular ideology or will.  Many riders participate in the mass because it has the potential to provide an opportunity to unbind aggressions, many riders participate because its a relatively fun and safe way to bike through the city.

Critical Mass is inevitably a contentious event, as many individuals presume that the urban road is strictly for motor vehicles. Therefore plenty of drivers think that cyclists have no business occupying part of it if it leads to their minor inconvenience.  Naturally, such an event, which most likely appears to be spontaneous to drivers, where cyclists ride en mass through the streets without a unifying goal or purpose, is incomprehensible and utterly transgressive.  Furthermore, the average critical mass is full of normal people who simply like cycling but the mass is essentially represented by its sloganeers who shout things like “we’re not blocking traffic, we are traffic,”  thus giving the event the sheen of political protest.  

Critical mass is NOT strictly a political protest organized around radical bicycle advocacy, (although it is that, among other things) but it does call up linkages to a number of interesting theories developed by radical thinkers.  Such theories include Hakim Bey’s concept of a temporary autonomous zone, a term which refers to a limited opening in space and time within which greater levels of freedom are enjoyed by its inhabitants.  The critical mass also touches upon the Situationist concept of psychogeography, under which individuals are cognisiant of the effects of different forms of the city upon the mind.  Furthermore, this CTheory article, Urban Meanderthals and the City of "Desire Lines" by Matthew Tiessen discusses the roving object (the author refers to an individual but his idea also works with a cycling horde) that slowly moves through the urban space forces others to take up alternate routes to reach destinations and therefore find new ways to engage with the city.

Joe Biel’s Bipedal, By Pedal is essentially a primer of the critical mass rides for people who are potential participants, or simply interested in what can be said abut the events.  Bipedal is a zine offered by the author as a companion to Chris Carlsson’s 2002 book Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration, which is probably the essential informational resource on the subject.  Carlesson’s book is a collection of reports, news items, and musings on the monthly bike ride, from a variety of sources.  Biel’s 43 page zine does not venture too far, conceptually, from Carlsson’s text, although Bipedal is mostly told from Biel’s own perspective, with additional writings from some of his zinester friends.  Like their motorized counterparts, bicycles are the technological centre for a number of interesting cultural forms, and the genre of bike zines is among them.

The structure of this zine is similar to Biel's, and collaborator Bill Brent’s, instructional text, Make a Zine!, in that Biel’s own thoughts are buttressed by some brief textual pieces written by friends.  As the founder of Microcosm Publishing, Biel is plugged into an underground of interesting writers and artists who can provide complementary texts to his own honest writings.  There are many bike/critical mass related graphics and illustrations, some of which (including the cover, I think) are by Matt Gauck and other friends, and some images are appropriated, also appearing in Carlsson’s book.  

Unfortunately, Critical Mass is not an event that can adequately be explained primarily from a single perspective.  The mass of each city has its own character, and that character can shift from month to month.  Issues that Biel discusses from the rides he’s been present on in Portland and San Francisco are not necessarily present at the rides in Toronto and Ottawa (where I have riden) and its likely that other cities critical mass rides may have their own issues that are altogether absent in the four cities already mentioned.  This is not to say that Biel’s thoughts are irrelevant but a reader should consider that his perspective is connected to places and times.  Overall Biel understands Critical Mass, as he expresses his understanding that the ride has no central goal even though he’s frustrated when people come to the event motivated to ride with a purpose different from his own.  I’m sure that, because of the ideologically divergent nature of the event, most riders have felt (and overcome) such frustration to some extent.

Bipedal, By Pedal! (which won an award for Best English Language zine at the 2007 Expozine event) covers the basics of the critical mass ride, and serves as an informative introduction to the monthly event.  Biel addresses issues that anyone should know are routine aspects of the ride, including aggressive participants and conflicts with authorities and municipal politicians.  Furthermore, while Biel provides an overview of the event, his writer friends supply opinions that demonstrate the variety of attitudes and motivations people may bring to it, with documentary filmmaker (and CM co-founder) Ted White advocating for the ride to be a spectacular celebration of urban cycling, while Scott Larkin (author of the zine, Go By Bicycle) laments the event’s lack of political force.  The zine conveys, in textual form, the short-lived tensions and community of the rides that come into being for a few hours at the end of every month.

zines - zine - 2008 - My Time Annihilator: A Brief History of 1930s Science Fiction Fanzines

My Time Annihilator: A Brief History of 1930’s Science Fiction Fanzines
Christopher Todd
2008

My Time Annihilator is a zine I procured for a dollar from Microcosm Publishing distro.  This zine takes as its focus the phenomena of science fiction fanzines that were published by proto-nerds of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.  These publications were perhaps one of the more immediate ancestors to the practice of zine production of the 1980s and 90s (with radical pamphlets, avant-garde art journals, and the underground press as more distant predecessors in either time or in practice).  
According to the author, Christopher Todd, the science-fiction fanzine emerged as a kind of distributed message post to enable communication between sci-fi fans about their favorite genre of literature when few fellow fans existed in their immediate environs.  

The writing in My Time Annihilator, like the writing in most zines, is far less formal and much more personal than most other forms of published material.  Christopher Todd’s opinions about his subject matter are casually expressed through the zine, letting the reader know that even though he considers sci-fi fanzines to be interesting as a broad topic, he found that the particular content of each publication was boring.  Furthermore, the zine describes Todd’s experience of conducting research into the fanzines, where he gained access to an archive of fanzines held at Temple University in Philidelphia through the using a found student ID.  Todd also gives his opinion on zines in general, and despite his efforts as a zine producer, he primarily sees the amateur publications as disposable and unworthy of widespread attention.

Todd’s zine focuses on three aspects of the fanzines, their content, formats and methods of production.  Of these aspects, content is specifically science-fiction related, which Todd describes in broad generalizations.  According to the author,  fanzines were made up of book and event reviews, letters and responses, and criticism of other fanzines.  Todd claimed to find many zines difficult to read as they developed their own linguistic forms and sets of inside jokes, thus bringing up issues of cultural capital as Todd relates these language issues to analogues found in the jargon deployed in many modern punk zines.  Todd also briefly describes methods of printing production in a pre-xerox era (1930s-1950s), including the spirit duplicator and the more popular mimeograph technologies.  Most interesting was Todd’s discussion of formatting ideas that have been lost in current self-publishing practice, such as the fanzine printed on a single postcard.

Books about zines, such as Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture do mention the science-fiction predecessor to the zine phenomena.  With that being said, Christopher Todd’s short zine about the early fanzines is the most attention that I have seen given, in print, to that material.  Todd also includes in his zine an appendix featuring a number of covers of old fanzines, and some examples of text, to give the reader some idea of the materials he discusses.  Some of his examples look as though they could be contemporary zines rather than 1930s artifacts.

punk, zines - book - 2005 - On Subbing: The First Four Years

On Subbing: The First Four Years
Dave Roche
Microcosm Publishing
2005
128 pages

    Dave Roche is a zinester who writes in a very plain, straightforward style, about his personal experiences.  Recently he has released a zine titled About My Disappearance, that describes his experience of developing Crohn’s disease and coming to terms with it.  On Subbing: The First Four Years, is a compilation of Roche’s On Subbing zine which describe the day-to-day experiences of his work as a substitute Education Assistant.  

    An Education Assistant helps teachers manage students who have special needs.  As a substitute EA, Roche works temporarily at schools all over his area, helping students with various disabilities and challenges.  Such challenges can range from issues with aggression, to severe autism. Roche appears to enjoy the work and he often notes how the students respond favorably to him.  The teachers seem to give Dave more trouble than his students do, and at one point Roche says something to the effect that it was the other adults who were the real problem in his profession.  Roche's book is primarily about work, about existing on the edge of a career and an institution, but also about finding rewards in the work being done on that edge. 

    One interesting subtext to On Subbing is Dave Roche’s punk lifestyle.  He is vegan, straight-edge, plays in a band, shoplifts (in a couple of scenes), and at least once in the book he hitchhikes between cities.  Often Dave recalls when students make fun of his nerdy appearance, however he also is lucky enough to occasionally bond with some of the kids over his punk interests.  He is not pushy about his veganism and sometimes his students show an interest in his diet and lifestyle without his prodding.  Sometimes his students are impressed in the fact that he knows about music and mentions that his band has a show.  At the end of the book, in the afterword, Dave describes himself as an alternative/anarchist teacher and it appears from his text that he has had a lot of success in working with students through his 'alternative' methods.

    On Subbing is formatted as a diary, with text recalling his experiences divided into discreet entries appearing under headings that include dates and the name of the school he was working at.  Roche has a very ‘matter-of-fact’ style of writing, and he describes the things he experiences and sometimes his emotional responses to those things in very plain language.  This is not to say that his writing is not good, and I for one very much appreciate the tone he sets through his unadorned language.  Enough zine-writing out there is already condescendingly self-righteous or self-indulgently whiny.  In very simple terms Roche conveys the human experience of working with children who are on the margins of the education system, and in doing so, also outlines the details of a profession that is on those same margins.

Also, On Subbing includes a number of funny black and white illustrations, depicting particularly funny EA situations, by a selection of underground cartoonists. 

zines - book - 2001 - Zines

Zines
Liz Farrelly
Booth-Clibborn Editions
2001
265 pages

    Hiya!  I borrowed Zines, edited by Liz Farrley, from the Toronto Zine Library.

Two books about zines have already been profiled on this blog, Make a Zine!: When Words and Graphics Collide by Joe Biel and Bill Brent, and Stolen Sharpie Revolution by Alex Wrekk.  Liz Farrelly’s Zines takes a different approach, from that of the previous authors, to the subject of self-publishing. The first two books profiled have been how-to guides for potential zinesters. Zines on the other hand prominently displays the final results of the zine-making process.  Liz Farrelly worked as design editor for Booth-Clibborn Editions, a British publisher of books about fine art, design, and visual culture.  In addition to her design work, Farrelly has written or edited a number of books and articles about design, and she also contributes occasionally to the design-focused Eye blog. In the book Zines, Farrelly takes the designer approach to her subject matter, which she treats as a form of visual culture rather than as a kind of literature or craft activity.

Zines is a visual book.  It draws from a worldly selection of zines, some of which are well known and all of which are graphically interesting, and puts them on display.  I am not familiar with most of the zines represented in the book, so I do not know if any of the images are altered from their original setting.  Many of the images in Zines are coloured, while most zines are photocopy productions in black and white.  Perhaps Zines gives black and white images a coloured background, perhaps Farrelly et. al. selected zines with more colourful imagery for their book.  Out of the two zines that Farrelly featured that I am familiar with, the clip-art zine Craphound and the Canadian urban-exploration zine Infiltration, the images are in their original black and white.  

Each page of Zines feature images, taken from handmade publications, that are unaccompanied by any relevant information.  Instead of clouding the page with details, each new featured zine contains an index number, formatted as 01z, for example, which refers back to an entry in a guide near the front of the book.  Each entry includes a publication cover and a short profile of the source zine.  This guide is the only text in the book, it provides details about format, title, location and year of publication, and it also includes a brief statement about why the zine featured in the book.  There is very little information about the materials, and while the inside cover of the book says that Zines is a “vivid yet analytical account of DIY publishing,” that statement is untrue.  The book is a vivid representation of the innovative visual work that has appeared in zines over the past twenty years, but it is not analytic.  It is instead a stream of disparate images, united in theme only by an underlying DIY ethos, without any information or statements regarding artist intention or image context (to name only two possible research concerns).

Zines is notable among zine books for taking a different approach to its subject matter.  Most books I have seen discuss zines as a subcultural practice or as a kind of writing.  Images from 89 different zines are represented in this book, often in full page displays.  Some ‘zines’ included are actually handmade books, and Farrelly will often display these books as objects.  The representation of the varying levels of the source material may serve to connect the images, in the reader's imagination,  to their original format.  The images displayed are decontextualized, and while in this book the images appear as an array of drawings, collage, and low-fi photographs, originally each image was likely set into a thematic system of publication content.  To display the zine as an object, alongside its decontextualized visual content, may remind the readers of Zines of what the images came from. 

vagabondia - book - 2009 - Dwelling Portably: 1990-1999

Dwelling Portably: 1990-1999
Bert and Holly Davis
Microcosm Publishing
2009
164 pages


This book is one of three volumes that anthologize the Message Post/Dwelling Portably print newsletter.  MP/DP is a handmade publication full of practical lifestyle tips for people who ‘dwell portably’, or in otherwords, live without a house.  The publication has run since 1980, and continues to be published by the Davises for the benefit of a loose community of proactively homeless people.  This post pertains to the second volume which contains all of the issues of the newsletter published between February 1990 and ending in November 1999.  

The book contains no introduction, or afterword, or table of contents.  The book is simply the content of the newsletters, as they originally appeared (presumably), with an index at the back to help the reader find needed tips.  All of the text is written in courier typeface and all of the images are hand-drawn diagrams or illustrations.  Each newsletter appears exactly like it would have, with a unique heading, subscription/contact information, and a publication date.  The individual newsletters vary in length, from 2 to 10 pages.  The editors of the newsletter are Bert and Holly Davis, presumably a couple who live an ascetic lifestyle.  Much of the content is submitted by others who live similar lifestyles and wish to share their tips, with occasional tips or responses to submissions written by Bert and/or Holly Davis.  Some items are taken from camping magazines or other related publications.

Dwelling Portably is interesting for a number of reasons.  The publication points to a community of people who desire homelessness and share tips on how to thrive without a house or many of the amenities offered by post-industrial consumer society.  Bert and Holly, I think, live in a yurt, while many of their submissions come from people who live in cars or busses, in small tents with bicycles, in tree-shelters, or any number of variations.  Also many of the entries contain practical information about tools, cooking, bedding, insulation, transportation, and re-purposing found materials for this kind of lifestyle.  Many other entries deal with things like how to discourage potential assailants, how to deal with police who do not understand such lifestyles, etc.  The entries I, personally found to be most interesting, were those that contained detailed descriptions for how such lives are lived.  Many submitters described renovated old buses or vans for living (which recalls Dishwasher Pete’s description of his renovated van) some travelled on bicycle with a small tent with them and one man described life while travelling on horseback.  These entries were not necessarily meant as lifestyle tips but perhaps rather as indications of possibility.

Some messages are very short and are requests for information on how to live a certain lifestyle that relates to the theme of ‘dwelling portably’.  Someone may write stating that they would like information on how to live on a boat, or how to ride the rails successfully (see Ted Conover, Rolling Nowhere) for example.  The inclusion of such requests suggests that the Message Post/Dwelling Portably newsletter is a chief point of connection between the people who live this way.  

One interesting implication of Dwelling Portably is that the publication presents an alternative form of survivalism to the more apocalyptic second-amendment obsessed ultra-right wing milieu that the term usually applies to.  When attitudes are expressed, Dwelling Portably is upbeat about light living, and otherwise the newsletter simply wants to provide some helpful tips.  The publication is by and for people who already live survivalist lifestyles, and it does not need to declare that it is necessary to know this stuff in order to weather an impending Armageddon.  The people who ‘dwell portably’ and contribute to the newsletter approach their lifestyle with more of a 1960s ‘drop-out’ attitude.  They aren’t preparing for war or catastrophic scarcity, they have chosen such a lifestyle because it suits them.  

Dwelling Portably: 1990-1999 is the middle of three volumes of collected newsletters.  I suspect that the other two are similar in format, although I am curious about the practical matters of publishing the newsletter itself and I hope that one of the other books contains such information.  Bert and Holly speak about their own circumstances occasionally, although usually in response to an idea another writer had, or to address a practical issue such as bathing or waste disposal.  They move occasionally and the inside of the book’s back cover contains an email address from which a reader may receive their mailing address.  I would like to know how they manage publishing a newsletter themselves while they move, and sending it to a readership who may, in part at least, do the same. 

zines - books - 2008 - Make A Zine!: When Words and Graphics Collide

Make a Zine: When Words and Graphics Collide
Bill Brent and Joe Biel et. al.
Microcosm Publishing
2008
160 pages

Hi everybody!  I purchased Make a Zine: When Words and Graphics Collide from Pandemonium, a book and record store around the Keele and Dundas West intersection in the Junction neighborhood of Toronto.

The Make a Zine Co-authors are Bill Brent, who is the former editor of the Black Sheets zine, and Joe Biel, founder of Microcosm Publishing and zine distribution (as well as author of a number of zines on a variety of topics).  Combined, the pair have a comprehensive knowledge of zine publishing and the zine community.  Make a Zine is, like Alex Wrekk’s Stolen Sharpie Revolution, a how-to guide to making zines and entering the zine subculture.

Make a Zine is divided into chapters, most of which are practical guides for some aspect of zine production, although a number of them transcend the precise task of zine-making. The second chapter, for example, titled Organization, is simply tips on keeping a neat workspace.  The third chapter, Layout and Type, and many that follow, are about the specific tasks involved in zine production proper.  The authors give in depth advice on how to produce a zine that approximates the appearance of a newsstand magazine.   The authors advise, for example, to pullout eye-catching quotes, and to lay out the text with two columns to a page which are standard techniques of magazine formatting.  It is tempting to interpret this advice as a criteria for what Biel may look for in a zine that he may consider for his Microcosm distribution, however I know that Biel’s catalogue is actually quite varied in the materials it offers.  

Biel and Brent’s advice is directed towards making zines as readable as possible.  Their advice is practical, and good for a zinester who wants to produce legible literature.  Many zinesters take up zine-making with readability as a secondary concern, and are more interested in playing with layout and eschewing the standard formatting of magazines.  I personally find Stolen Sharpie Revolution to be more interesting with regards to layout concerns, because while Wrekk gives advice that is similar to what appears in Make a Zine,  Stolen Sharpie Revolution is formatted according to its author’s own idiosyncratic style.  Their advice for other aspects of publishing, such as ‘sales’, ‘copyright concerns’ and the section about compensation for contributors, however, would have broad value within the zine community and potential adherents.

The two main authors also solicit advice from comrades who have specialized knowledge in a particular area that is relevant to zine-making.  Fly, a prominent zine comic artist, wrote the chapter titled DIY Comix, while zinester Katie Haegele wrote a piece advocating the use of Creative Commons licencing agreements, and Paul T. Olson advises readers about libel (the book primes zinesters in all relevant legal concerns).  The final piece of text in the book is by Stephen Duncombe, a zine scholar who wrote Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture.  Duncombe’s brief essay laments the co-option of underground zine culture by major corporations who want to infuse some subcultural authenticity into their advertising.  These pieces by other authors add some variety to the book and help it to become an example of the collaborative, community-minded orientation of zine publishing that Biel has tried to create.  Biel and Brent’s text is actually a book of many voices, and its most interesting aspect, to me, is when its discussion how zine-making also often means participating in a community of zine producers.

Make a Zine! is also filled with a large number of cute illustrations from a number of artists in a variety of styles(credits are listed before the table of contents, with a personal introduction from one of the authors).  These images also contribute to the book’s community orientation.  The variety of illustrations turns Make a Zine into a narrow survey of zine graphics without distorting its status as a how-to guide.  The book ends with a number of appendices that list a number of zine resources, including the Toronto Zine Library and local comic shop, The Beguiling.  These listings provide potential zinesters in many urban areas with the tools to familiarize themselves with zine culture.  These listings are up-to-date as of 2008 and indicate that, despite the rise of the internet, zines still thrive as a craft.