We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Joshua of Basic Paper Airplane (and numerous other projects) has a broad scope, as behooves a zine-writer. We’ll take it one step further. Joshua is sort of like the small-press world equivalent of a Renaissance Man.

Formerly the head of a tiny publishing house called SSO Press which released artist’s books, broadsides, zines and chabooks, Joshua now focuses on working with arts collective Use Your Words, running a zine distro and publishing Basic Paper Airplane. His zines have covered everything from genealogy to film to simplicity to cops to the media to the ghosts of Snohomish county to Kindles to the Postal System (deep breath)…and beyond. It’s amazing. It’s inspiring.

Martin Millar is the literary equivalent of Ralph Steadman. In a word: gonzo. His newest is the re-release of 1989’s sleek Ruby and the Stone Age Diet, published by Soft Skull Press and containing exactly 160 pages of typically madhat Millar, whom you might remember from Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation, the 1987 cult classic about shady characters in Brixton.

Millar himself issued the following bulletin on his blog, regarding the re-release: I’m pleased this book is now back in print. Unlike certain other books among my backlist, which tend to make me bury my face in my hands, wailing Did I really write this?, I’ve always liked Ruby and the Stone Age Diet.

Right! Yes. If that’s not an endorsement, we’re not sure what is. Oh. Maybe this: the plot of Ruby features demons, electric guitars, Incan spirits and werewolves. And also Neil Gaiman is a fan. Yeah!

How can you not suppress a chuckle when faced with Art Vandelay, a multipurpose art showcase named after George Costanza’s alter-ego on Seinfeld? Giggles aside, the cleverly-named project offers a mine of fresh talent that’s worth trolling through.

Along with monographs, artist’s books and magazines, Art Vandelay offers a series of well-selected (and reasonably priced) prints by Anna Giertz, Anthony Burrill, Colin Henderson, Alex Bec and more. If you’re looking to fill some blank walls or decorate a clubhouse, this is your spot.

You can often get a fair idea of what a book is like by glancing at the Library of Congress categorizations on the copyright page. In I Remember, a book by the late great artist Joe Brainard, these categories include:

*Childhood and youth
*United States—social life and customs 1945-1970
*Authors
*Biography
*Memory

I Remember isn’t a book in any recognizable sense of the word, though it does come printed on pages and bound with a matte cover. It is composed entirely of sentences that begin with the words “I remember” and form, within those constraints, an appreciable narrative. Excerpt:

I remember “Any little kid could do that”

I remember the first time I saw myself in a full-length mirror in Bermuda shorts. I never wore them again.

And so on. Those familiar with Brainard’s work will dig the obtuse (but personal) entry into his thought processes. Those unfamiliar with Brainard’s work will dig it for what it is: a sweet, gnomic account of days long gone.

The appeal of zines, mini-monographs and small books is hard to explain. There’s something about the intimacy and concreteness of a handheld object that can’t be replicated by art that hangs on the wall or books that roll off the presses in editions of ten thousand. Anyone who’s traded zines through the mail or gotten his fingers fuzzy with cut-n-paste grime knows the feeling.

A worthy addition to the medium comes in the form of Mike Paré’s Thought Forms, a limited-edition book released by San Francisco-based independent publisher Seems. Combining geometric abstraction with graphite drawings and portraits, the small book combines elements of the exquisite and the special with, well, the affordable. Described as “explorations of youthful transcendence and bliss through music, meditation, gurus, be-ins and skateboarding,” the book is certainly something to treasure.

UK-based illustrator Robert Hunter has an eye for gorgeous color and playful subjects: bespectacled men in ski sweaters and onesies, pianos that morph into trees, kids riding giraffes, scuba divers lunging eagerly for shark fins. His work has appeared in the Guardian and TIME, among many others, and he’s also put out two self-published books printed by Doveton Press. If only we could commission a bedroom-wall mural…

The declaration that occurs to me whenever I pop in to the Lower East Side bookstore Bluestockings is always the same: ZINES LIVE!

Along with Nieves and a handful of indie bookstores scattered across the country, Bluestockings is one of the few outposts dedicated to circulating the little xerox-machine magazines and keeping zine culture alive.

There are attractions other than zines at Bluestockings, including regular events and author readings, shelves of well-curated volumes (sample sections: “Global Justice”, “Activist Strategies”, “Size Acceptance”), a café with tasty coffee and plenty of space to kick back and flip through the latest issue of Radical Teacher magazine.

In other words, Bluestockings is exactly the oasis that I dreamed about as a teenager. Better late than never, right?

The descriptor “outsider”– as in “outsider art” or “outsider music”–is a loaded adjective. Whatever you think it means (and even if that’s “nothing”), we can all agree that it points to some indefinable quality of strangeness in a work. Any definition beyond that gets thorny.

Safe to say, then, that Brandon Scott Gorrell is working in the vein of the outsider artist. His full-length book of poetry, during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present is a thoroughly confounding collection of pieces with titles like “gmail” and “today i empathized with the top of a tower”. It is either extremely easy to understand or extremely befuddling; I’m still not sure which. Published by Muumuu House, Gorrell’s work feels like the kind of poetry that very few people will like but those few people will like it immensely. Faint praise? No, just praise with an advanced warning.