Here, again, with a light prelude to a series I hope to kick off in about a week, a multi-part exploration of the rollout of AI into user-facing products—a process I’m referring to as “the big, dumb gold rush.”
This is a prelude only in that it’s an ode to one form of old school social interaction, sans digital mediation. In the second half of May, I was able to attend back to back festivals (in a mask!—so many people I know just got or are just about to get covid)—first Spokane Zine Fest and then, a week later, the first ever Punk Palouse fest in Moscow, ID. At both, I had a chance to hawk my new zine, “Fry Sauce,” which you can get a taste of at the end of this post, alongside other zines and art I’ve made over the past few years.
If you’re thinking, “what’s a zine fest?” you can check read some thoughts about zines above. Spokane’s fest has grown over its few years’ existence, but is still cute as can be. People are excited to share their work, often very personal, and to engage with other artists. While I won’t go so far as to romanticize tabling (I know firsthand that it can be numbing and exhausting to repeat a surface level interaction for a whole day’s event, whether discussing art or organizing), there is something wholesome and invigorating about a room filled with people who share a common interest. I also happen to find it wholesome and invigorating to crowd and shove and sweat in a room where people yell at you through a microphone, and Punk Palouse delivered two nights and sixteen bands worth of that form of communion.
“Community” is one of those words that’s been drained by the cynical forces of various institutions, or perhaps it was too vague to be useful all along. Is a community a group of people who like at least one of the same things? Are people guided toward the same social media content by an algorithm meaningfully connected to one another in the way that people are who gather into the same room for the same reason? I don’t know, really. I do know that online spaces are valuable, particularly for those of us who can’t always find our people nearby or safely be ourselves in public. I also know that there is something important for our well-being that thrives in the unpredictability of the meat world of flesh and blood and eye contact.
Going to events like this (when I can tolerate the level of risk) also reminds me of the heartbreak so many of us disabled/chronically ill/immunocompromised people have endured, watching the world leave us behind when risk mitigation is so very possible.
Anyway, it’s never too late to start masking in public again!
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Anyway-anyway, I want to share selections from my beautiful zine haul with you, dear readers. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to make something of your own.
I got roasted by my sibling because the first thing I bought at Spokane Zine Fest was a VHS copy of Orange County. Sorry that I love Jack Black, ok, and it is kind of a rare find! Not very many people saw this movie, let alone bought it on VHS and then saved it for twenty years, ok!? But calm down, the rest of what I bought was actual handmade art by the people who made it.
Smarty-Pants Pick: “Between Borders and Empires: Dis/Identification of Racialized & Gendered Subjects in Tell Me How It Ends and Body of Empire” by Josie Cohen-Rodriguez, a dear friend and otherwise admired queer scholar. Her purpose in this piece was to “explore how creative nonfiction functions as a vital genre for subversive memory work, rejecting nationalist narratives of identity formation & subjectivities…” in the form of a blended analysis of Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli (which I picked up casually while fishing with the writer; I liked it so much I accidentally read a third of in one sitting, on a log) and Body of Empire by Mariko Nagai, (which I haven’t yet read). I loved the connections she made across cultures and borders, connecting the stories of immigrant youth detained at the U.S. Mexico border (Luiselli) and those of Japanese sex workers throughout history and empire (Nagai), but what I loved most was seeing an academic essay made so accessible in a zine format.
Perfect Simplicity Pick(s): “Mushroom Cap Morphology” by Mara Gervais, is a little, simple zine of beautiful risograph printing, with one purpose—to reproduce the unique shapes of our fungal friends. I love mushrooms, and love them more in neon pink. “Jump Off Joe” by Audrey Huff I picked up because I recognized the place name in a vague way from many drives across Washington state. It’s a simple, beautifully illustrated homage to small moments in well-worn places.
Collaborative Picks: “Found: A Zine of Reimagined Memories” (found-ed and wrangled together by my friend Lotus) is a game of telephone or exquisite corpse or both, taking inspiration from a collection of found photographs. I was happy to be one of the first round of writers to respond to a photo of our choosing, and then our work was passed on to visual artists for interpretation, without seeing the original found image. In the final product, all three pieces are juxtaposed together. Upon reading it in full, I think that playing versions of Telephone actually seems like an important metaphor/practice in the age of algorithm bubbles and plummeting critical thinking ability. “Wet Knuckle,” which I picked up from its dear editor at Punk Palouse, is a perfectly charming, hot, and weird little numbered edition (!) of a debut erotica zine out of my area. Oddly, but maybe not surprisingly, I found the un-filled Mad-Lib to be the most arousing entry. Go figure?
Perzine Picks: (“Perzine” is short for “personal zine” and refers to self-made works that focus on personal observations and experiences. It’s a broad label, and I don’t know if it’s what these creators would label their zines, but it’s what I’m labeling them as here.) “Light Years” by Alex Connors. Watch for that name—they’re a brilliant writer and I loved the combination of personal storytelling and lo-fi photography in this blend of poetry and prose. Finally, I got to pick up issue #9 of Shoes Fanzine, “At The Table: Bookseller Stories,” from Nate, down from B.C. for punk fest. A funny, quietly radical, slice-of-life look into the world of a pop-up bookseller in Vancouver’s Grandview Park. An honest, simple telling of street life from the perspective of a grown-up punk.
And these are JUST the selected favorites! I love zine people; they want to trade and talk and support art and it’s all just so cute and important.
At my table, I was heartened by how many short interactions I was able to have because of the prominent Palestine-focused zines on my table. I was able to raise a much larger donation than I can swing on my own for PCRF and distribute some information at the same time.
Now, a little “Fry Sauce” excerpt:
“As a descendant of Eastern Washington and North Idaho families, who grew up in Spokane and remains nearby, fry sauce is in my blood.
I set out to write a long essay about fry sauce, the condiment that might be the Inland Northwest’s most impactful contribution to the culinary world, about a year ago. There’s been a sticky note in my workspace all that time, crowded out by photos, timelines and deadlines for my ‘real’ work on settler colonialism in the American West. It reads “FRY SAUCE: a unique regional flavor”. When I scrawled that out, I already had more in mind than a humble sauce of few ingredients.
Fry sauce (also called, in my Idaho family, just “dip”) began to feel like a stand-in for the entire culture that, to me, always felt normal (until it didn’t). It took me a long time, a lot of travel and connections with strangers, to realize that the region I grew up in simply does not exist in the popular American imagination.
“You live in Washington D.C.?” No. Washington state. “Oh, Seattle!” No, think more like, Idaho. “Oh…ok. Why?”
“Is Idaho even a real place?” people asked in New York.
I don’t know that these people want to hear me wax poetic or angry about this place, the only topic on which I really consider myself an expert. It’s not rainy, it’s actually high desert in my favorite places. But they don’t picture shrub-steppe and prairie plowed into wheat, or pine forests at the edge of the Rockies, or trout fishing, or huckleberries, or fry sauce.
They don’t picture a grungy, post-industrial mid-size city in the throes of semi-permanent identity crisis, fighting to remain electorally “purple,” and they certainly don’t imagine the passion with which people here rep their favorite Zip’s location.
It just, frankly, doesn’t seem like an important place, so they don’t imagine it at all.
Meanwhile we, on the inside, think it’s pretty nice. For some, it’s “affordable” (for now), “a great place to raise kids.” For others, it’s proximity to “nature,” the last vestiges of a dream of “pristine wilderness.” Increasingly, it’s a place to shelter from the ravages of climate catastrophe, to bet on a future without coastal flooding, with access to water and other resources.
Those of us who consider this place our own fret about growth and change, whether our worries come in the form of urban gentrification or rural life crowded out by the pervasive specter of the Californian transplant. We tend to fret less, I think, about the ground we’re already on, about the flavor of a culture that tastes normal to us.
I believe that to weather this moment of ideological division, regional growth, and political upheaval, we need to think deeply about who we are as a people. The problem with Americans, and perhaps especially Westerners, is that we are a “people” comprised of stubborn individualists.
So maybe it’s easier to talk about the past, the present, and our possible futures through the lens of something we agree on. Something we’ve created and promoted and enjoyed together despite our other divisions. Something like fry sauce.”
While writing this zine, I ran a survey to rank all of the Zip’s Drive In locations in the Inland Northwest. I am still processing and visualizing those results, and they will be posted soon on my website for all the unhinged locals dying to know the outcome in more granular detail. The first run are almost all gone and I have a stack waiting to mail to my paid subscribers (send me your address if you haven’t!). I had a great time at zine fest telling people who gravitated to the cover art, “It’s about fry sauce, but it’s also about the legacy of organizing against white Christian nationalism in our region.”
One of my well-meaning friends read it and urged me to submit it and try to get it published somewhere more visible than a zine. I am flattered that they found the work important, but part of me relish-es (yes, that is an ingredient in some fry sauces), the randomness of distribution. Where will these end up? Who will borrow and stumble across the 60 copies out there in the world?
I’m reading James Bridle’s Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence and they have this to say about the value of randomness in our searches for information and connection:
“The first search engines were hand-curated lists of interesting places, essentially random accumulations of site and tools ordered only by the passions and peccadilloes of those who assembled them. While Google still searches the web with automated random walks, its results are ordered by deeply partisan algorithms, with the top results sold off to the highest bidder. Google has almost a 90 per cent share of the world’s web searches, yet indexes only a tiny fraction of the visible web. Most searchers never look beyond the first page of results. There is little room for randomness in exploring the vast amount of information actually available to us…So many of our tools are designed to reduce randomness in a similar fashion: from algorithmic recommendation systems to dating apps, from GPS navigation to weather forecasting. Each of these technologies—with the best of intentions—attempts to draw clear lines throuh a complex environment and provides us with a route to our desires free from obstructions, diversions and the vagaries of chance and unforeseen encounters.”
Anyway, more on that in the coming weeks. For now, going analog and wandering table to table, browsing for ideas, feels good. Maybe start collecting people’s email addresses? Sending mail? <3