THOUGHT FOR TODAY

"There's something greater than you when there's a bunch of you assembled. That idea of a spirit moving through a group. It's not just a bunch of dudes playing guitar solos – something that can't be named happens. That's kind of the prize."

- David Parry from Arcade Fire, interviewed in The Guardian.

THE STICKS/ COLD PUMAS/ DRUM EYES (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES CONTINUED...)

Fri 27th Jan, Prince Albert

This was the one night I was able to make of the ‘Sea Monsters’ min-festival, “five nights of the most crucial Brighton bands”, laid on by the good folks of One Inch Badge Records.

I was alas unable to prise myself away from the sofa fast enough to catch the opening act Speak Galactic. (Though rumour has it that, despite their name, they are not actually fronted by Galactus.) But that still left three acts for your money...

From previous sightings The Sticks have been more numbersome, but were this time whittled down (geddit?) to a duo. This development did not seem to go down very well with The Sticks themselves, deriding one of their own numbers as “skinny” and finishing another with a loud raspberry. Perhaps this slimmer choice was less aesthetic than Hobson-like.

Far be it from me to claim to know more than the outfit themselves, but this self-criticism seemed strangely misplaced. For one thing, they were surely made to sound skinny - a pared-down drum kit as though only half-arrived through the installment purchase plan, straightforward guitar lines as if lifted from a play-in-a-day book. They are not called The Trunks for a reason, after all.

Their sound harkens back to the shimmering days of simple Sixties garage pop, as if played in black-and-white on a mono Dansette. But their take is so pared down that it veers towards the minimalist. Imagine an alternate universe where Steve Reich joined The Shadows...

Being something of a comics fan, I cannot help but compare musical lines to drawn lines. So I started picturing their music as drawn by a soft B pencil. (Don’t go confusing them with no H pencil!) The actual lines are defined and... well, stick-like, but they’re surrounded by resounding reverb like a pencil line’s edges turning to blur and fuzz. It sounds shimmering, warm and cold at the same time.

So, in short, this reduction in numbers had little negative effect on music quality. There may be one caveat to the story, however. As any artist knows, restrictions enable. But restriction can be contrary, one day it can turn on you and just restrict. The Sticks are one of those bands who are about their sound, the individual numbers exist just to demonstrate it. And it is indeed a great sound. But once you’ve got it, what then? Does it have the mileage to make the outfit long-lived? Soft B pencils blunt sooner than do H ones, after all...

This is them as a trio, at a different Brighton venue...



If I have less to say about Cold Pumas, that’s probably to do with me having less neat little analogies for their sound – in short, it’s not them, it’s me. The show blurb praised their “extended, mesmerising pulse”, which probably works better than anything I could come up with. Their tracks tended to pick up a head of steam and then make a bolt for it. Numbers didn’t advance from A to B in neat little diagrams but surged forward, took on lives of their own, merged into one another...oh wait, that’s what I said about Drum Eyes last time. Oh well, the point still stands.



Okay, back to Drum Eyes. This is the third time I’ve seen them now, and each time isn’t so much seeing them again as seeing them anew. Most bands are like films, you can go back for more but you’re just re-living the experience. This isn’t so much of a shift as was the leap between my first and second viewing - they still have the same two pounding drum kits, and Krautrock-like love of skewering riffs. But there’s still a definite sense of movement – a line-up shift produces a violin, a dub influence appears on some new tracks.

It all starts to remind me of a story from the old Liverpool punk scene. Punks would habitually paint band names or slogans on the back of their jackets. But Pete Wylie would only ever chalk his, insistent that the scene moved forward too quickly to get tied down anything else. Drum Eyes, I reckon, would appreciate that sentiment.

EXPOSED: VOYEURISM, SURVEILLANCE & THE CAMERA

(aka Is Blog Short For Backlog Part 3?)

Profuse apologies for the continued lateness of posting here, which was never what you might call timely to begin with! Things might stay laggardly for a little while longer as I wrestle with DIY culture of a more literal kind. Once the new flat is in a state closer to habitable-ness we should be back to regular-late rather than late-late...

... so, on that note, let’s focus on a photography exhibition at the Tate Modern that finished in October. Some have commented that I treat exhibitions as texts, focus on the wood not the trees, the show rather than the artwork it contains. To which I reply that exhibitions do not arrive assembled, they have curators who cannot help but have angles and agendas. There is nothing inherently sinister about this, in fact it’s pretty much inevitable, but agendas are always better made overt. Don’t pretend not to be biased, admit how you are biased

This time, however, we’re looking at something with an explicit and specified agenda. It’s almost like an illustrated essay laid out in the form of wall-space. Combined with the time-lag in looking at it, this will result in a commentary which fixes on the through-line to almost complete exclusion of the individual artworks, simply because that’s what remained stuck in my mind these months later. So if almost complete treelessness bothers you, look away now.

Inherent Voyeurs?

So what is this agenda? To quote curator Sandra S Phillips “Exposed asks whether such invasiveness is inherent to the medium itself.” Or, as contributing photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki confesses, “I may be a voyeur because I am a photographer.”

Proceedings kick off with Jacob Riis’ reportage snapshots of New York tenement poverty from the end of the Nineteenth Century, with labels asking us to note the inherent voyeurism. It does feel a little disingenuous not to even consider the photographer’s intent, which was to expose not the lives of the poor so much as the condition of poverty. That individual, in their own threadbare clothes, at their specific downtown address, is there only to represent a general situation.

Moreover, at the time the technology of photography would have gone along with this reforming zeal. These were not studied oils of great men, but quick snapshots of a situation which could and should be made to change. Technology was both illuminating their poverty and offering a chance to escape it – a medium of the moment for a world in flux. Talking about these photos without acknowledging that is like suggesting Eisenstein made ‘Battleship Potemkin’ because he was interested in the history of shipping.

However, it’s equally true that the unique feature of photography is that there must always be a particular. Painting or drawing can be wholly symbolic, such as Constructivist images of the universal man, or even entirely abstract and still be saying something about the world. Photography must always present a piece of the world, to quote Phillips “capturing a split second of real life.”

As cameras became more ubiquitous, as we handled them more often, this sense of the particular is probably the conception of them which we absorbed. They became less an all-seeing eye, framing and capturing slices of the real, and more representing the self as an atomised citizen - not interacting with the scene but observing it. We have almost become cameras ourselves. This is quite notable at public events such as gigs or demos, where some spend as much time looking through a viewing frame as they do participating. It’s inherent to the concept of the voyeur that they are just observing.

 Making It Real

And of course as the private and unrecorded recedes to smaller and smaller zones, those unlit corners become more fetishised. Concealment suggests that the private is somehow inherently interesting, an idea at its nadir in the risible movie ’Sliver’. Everyone in an apartment block has their actions captured on a wall of secret monitors, and of course everyone is fighting or fucking, no-one flossing their teeth or idly watching TV while picking lint from their belly button.

The show claims “we can now see anything, virtually.” Yet is there not something self-fulfilling about this notion that everything is now on show? We’re made to assume that these days everything, or at least everything interesting, is automatically found by the camera’s frame.

Moreover, the camera’s visibility ray is almost held to have almost magic powers. Recently shortchanged in a supermarket, I complained to the manager. I was told that the assistant couldn’t possibly have palmed my money, as they were under constant CCTV scrutiny. I asked if that footage had been checked. Impatiently, as if speaking to an imbecile, she explained – no, the footage was never checked, there simply was too much of it and too little time. But the point was that the footage was there.

It is not that everything nowadays is recorded. The point is that the recording is no longer something secondary but confused with the incident itself, with anything unrecorded held as never happening. The act of observing no longer merely changes what it observes, instead it is held to instigate it.

This distinction is also used to enforce the doublethink we live through. While its established the police will film demonstrators from start to end of their route, on several occasions even following them afterwards, it was made illegal for people to film them. (One law the ConDems, for all their trumping about civil liberties, are notably not repealing.) Similarly, billboards went up recently in my area, asking us to shop anyone we saw looking at CCTV cameras as they would almost certainly be terrorists.

 As Bruno Bettleheim wrote in ’The Informed Heart’, “Among the worst mistakes a prisoner could make was to watch another prisoner’s mistreatment.... For example, if an SS man was killing off a prisoner and other prisoners dared to look... he would instantly go after them too. But only seconds later the same SS would call the same prisoners’ attention to what lay in store for anyone who dared to disobey, drawing their attention to the killing as a warning example. This was no contradiction, it was simply an impressive lesson that said: you may notice only what we wish you to notice, but you invite death if you notice things of your own volition.”

Imperfectly Real

One plus point of this exhibition is that it tangles head-on the fabricated image. The manipulability of the image has risen alongside its ubiquity. Once we said “the camera never lies”, now we have made Photoshop a verb.

One feature of this is the presence of the photographer. In Riis’ tenement poverty shots he is always absent,  “the Unseen Photographer”, part of the convention that we are looking at pure reportage, the untrammelled truth. Yet he starts to appear more and more as the years go by. Helmut Newton photographs himself (in a mirror) in the action of photographing a nude model, even capturing a bored-looking onlooker in the frame (who turns out to be his wife). Like an Eighteenth Century portrait set against an Expressionist psychodrama, the artist goes from the unseen eye to the focus of his own work. Perhaps we’ll end up with two-way cameras, set up to auto-capture whoever pressed their button. Or perhaps filming will become so ubiquitous the question will simply stop arising.

But it’s actually when the photographer’s presence is implicit or ambiguous that you most take notice. In two pictures by Lee Freidlander, we see a stumpy hand behind someone’s back, then a shadow of a head falling on another. I immediately lost all interest in the ostensible subject as I tried to work out angles and proportions, in case these indistinct stubs belonged to the photographer.

...which leads onto a trick of the trade which endures. For all our supposed suss about the manipulability of images, we are still in many ways suckers for imperfect images. Anything blurred or de-centered, our brains cannot help but associate with rushed or even surreptitious photography – which we label as ‘real’ and urgent. The show gives us several examples of how shots were deliberately staged to look that way, to simulate precisely that reaction, and we are unsurprised to hear of this. But there’s something in the imperfect image which still suckers us.

It’s similar to the juddery, hand-held camera look perfected by multiplex movies such as ’Monsters’ or ’Cloverfield.’ Or the way roughly recorded punk tracks are supposed to be more ‘honest’ than polished pop numbers. Distressed fonts, ready-frayed clothes... our modern lives seem full of these totems. Perhaps, in an age where the word “icon” became divorced from its original religious context to spread everywhere, the image is now too perfectible - and we rush to the illusion of its opposite, demanding designer imperfections.

To answer the show’s question, technology is never politically neutral and there is always a complex inter-relationship between it and it’s society. Our culture has undoubtedly become more visual to the point where blocks of text now look almost inherently old-fashioned, so it is no surprising that photography has become more totemic to it. Yet voyeurism is really little more than an eroticisation of alienation; concluding himself unable to become involved in events, the voyeur decides he might as well make the most of this by enjoying it. To that degree, this show is actively onto something. Yet there is nothing inherently voyeuristic to photography, any more than there is anything inherently cerebral to writing. The medium is not always the message.

To be fair, the show is not so simple-minded as to suggest there’s a single answer to its question. Though it leans towards an affirmative and has clear post-modern sympathies, it also discloses evidence for the other side. Two counter-examples remain in my mind. Every day for a month Vito Acconci randomly selected a stranger in a crowd, and followed them with his lens. The next day, there would be someone else. Yet also on show is Nick Ut’s famous picture of Kim Phuc, the naked Vietnamese child fleeing a napalm attack. We’re told that after taking the snap, Ut took the child to hospital, and since then the two have remained friends. Photography doesn’t mean participation. But it doesn’t rule it out...

This show did happen. It has been recorded.

Coming soon! More backlog...

RONALD SEARLE, GRAPHIC MASTER (aka IS BLOG SHORT FOR BACKLOG, PART 2?)

I may be playing catch-up here a little while longer. (Do feel free to duck out!) Please note this state of affairs won’t last forever, and will shortly be followed up by even older stuff.

This time we’re taking a look back at the Ronald Searle exhibition that ran at the London Cartoon Museum from March to July last year. My soundbite description of Searle would be that he was the Stones to Giles’ Beatles. Though the two were contemporaries, had similar styles and even worked some of the same gigs, there is something darker and edgier about Searle.

This is perhaps epitomised by his line, which is itself associated with the way he’d draw characters’ legs – jutting black swooshes cutting angularly across the frame, at once awkward and elegant. That agitated, blotchy line, spluttering with as much energy as dodgy electrical wiring, charges Searle’s world into a frenzied, jagged place, filled with figures you can’t imagine at rest. That line would make Searle the missing link between George Grosz and Ralph Steadman – except for the fact that he’s not missing at all, he’s right here in front of us.

(It’s often the stuff which looks the easiest to do which is the hardest. Though ratty-looking, perhaps even passing for dashed-off, that  spluttering line was entirely cultivated. Early works here are executed with Sunday-best brush strokes, as smooth and sinuous as you could wish for.)

Searle’s other great divergence point to Giles is that he never settled. While Giles got a steady gig at the Express and stuck to it, Searle walked away from his successful St. Trinians brand. His subsequent work was as itinerant as the travel-reportage drawings which make up so much of this exhibition. In that way he’s like the pop star who soon grew jaded of serving up hits, cartooning’s Scott Walker. A career-spanning exhibition thereby comes across as both necessary and desirable. With Giles those Express compendiums, lining up neatly on the library shelf, make an exhibition superfluous. With Searle we need this big chunk of physical space to capture the span of his work.

The show starts with the reportage drawings Searle made while imprisoned in Japan during the War, sketched secretly on random bits of paper. An apparent accident of framing puts his first St. Trinians cartoon on the same panel as these, but then you read he actually drew this whilst still a prisoner.

Some have speculated that these experiences fed into Searle’s dark undertone, just as JG Ballard’s powered his fiction. But Ballard was a child at the time, and his resultant experience ambiguous – as much an escape from table manners as an ordeal. To argue something similar of Searle may be stretching a point. Was he driven to that drawing by the conditions in the camps, or was he merely dreaming of starting his drawing career as soon as he got out?

The exhibition comments that Bateman always drew situations rather than characters. The point of those “the man who...” isn’t the man, but the context his faux pas appears in - society predominates. Like Giles, Searle is all about the characters. Even when he draws a crowd scene, every face is individualised enough to walk away and start their own series. Searle was at heart a caricaturist...

 ...which can be a drawback with some of the reportage drawings. It’s notable that the American scenes tend to be more successful, more wild and more grotesque. Did Searle see America as somewhere more foreign? Or with a European’s eye, somewhere less ‘real’ in the sense of less cultured?

The London Cartoon Centre should be congratulated for staging this show so well. But in a sane and just world Tate Britain would never be shutting up about Searle...

Post-script!: For any that can make it there, the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hannover is showing this exhibition until 30 January 2011.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

This one didn’t work out as planned really. I intended some brief capsule reviews of the films of 2010 I hadn’t covered until now. In the world of my mind this post also covers ’A Prophet’, ‘Shutter Island’, ‘The Ghost’, ‘The Illusionist’, ‘Winter’s Bone’ and ‘Gods and Men’... good films all. But instead I seem to have expended my energy writing about ’The Social Network’...

This film’s tagline should really be “dotcom startups are the new rock’n’roll.” It’s the familiar tale of how a band of outsiders use their dysfunctional drive to score a hit and screw the suits. Groupies arrive, partying ensues, “pads” get “trashed” and all the rest of it. And of course the rub... the desired result, success, turns out to be the very thing which splits the band up. (An inevitability underlined by the flashback structure.)

The singer can’t tell the girl he likes that he likes her, so has to write a song instead – his social ineptitude a spur to his creativity. Except these aren’t the Sixties any more so instead he codes a social networking site, with nice clear-cut relationship status display and befriending button.

That code actually makes for the one big difference. Rock biopics never, ever use musical notation – any more than they have scenes of axe heroes sitting at home with chord books and diligent but throbbing fingers. But here, very early on the algorythm that underpins Facebook is scrawled across a window. It works more like Harry Potter’s magic, it can be paraded precisely because we don’t get it, it’s importance rising in proportion to its incomprehensibility. Rock ‘n’ roll is gutsy, instinctual. This is clever stuff!

The Seventies were the era of anti-heroes. But here we have an anti-villain. You’re semi-aware than Zuckerberg’s sardonic persona is a symptom of his Aspergerish inability to empathise, bearing the same relationship as puss does to a wound. But mostly you just thrill to his snarky putdowns.

Through the twin lawsuit structure, Zuckerberg is given his perfect double foil. The Winklevoss twins, strutting athleticism, Harvard personified, invite Zuckerberg to hear their business proposal. As they walk off together, they tower over him like Orcs. When Zuckerberg plays them, its revenge of the nerds and the death of old money rolled into one. It’s like if Black Adder could win over privilege for once. Now social networks are on-line and borderless, their old social connections are a devalued currency.

Yet the film also covers the lawsuit of Eduado Saverin, the schoolfriend who funds Facebook’s launch only to get ripped off, the wronged party out for retribution. Measured legally or morally, his case is the stronger. But there’s not even a token attempt to make this pallid good guy into the protagonist. The film belongs to Zuckerberg as much as Facebook itself. (In no small part due to Jesse Eisenberg’s compelling performance.) Saverin’s lawsuit is there to tell us something about Zuckerberg, it’s there to point at something else. Zuckerberg’s only contextualisation comes through having his own devil, Napster’s Sean Parker, who goads him into greater acts of smug egoism and juvenile pranks.

The underlying assumption is that being the smartest guy in the room and the most socially maladjusted are intrinsically connected. Like the market, Zuckerberg’s obsessive ruthlessness might not be defensible, but...don’t you know?.. progress is predicated upon it. You’re aware you should be repelled but are somehow fascinated by the achievements of a self-centered prick... this truly is the film of our age.

MY LIFE AS DESCRIBED TO ME BY OTHER PEOPLE (2)

"This neighbourhood looks to be pretty good, 
I think I'll take this one."
- Jeffrey Lewis, 'Artland'

The second in a (hopefully) finite series whose title should really finish "...by the same person."  Finally in the new flat, ending one momentous task and... uh... replacing it by another (elbow bumping against unpacked boxes as I type). For the following month or so, normal service should not be assumed...

“THAT’S IT – YOU CAN GO!” – RIP CAPTAIN BEEFHEART

 At some point back in the early Eighties, my juvenile self was idly watching the tepid ‘Pop Quiz’. To my total surprise, they suddenly announced a Captain Beefheart video. Copied below, this was the title track from his final album ‘Ice Cream For Crow.’ Having heard of him by reputation, I started watching properly... and was soon transfixed.

I had no hold on it whatsoever. I didn’t know whether I was watching musical pioneers or a gang of crazies who had been unaccountably handed a record contract. (Come to think of it, it would be no use asking me that question now.) But it was the start of what I would quite literally describe as a love affair.

Many describe the man as a maverick, a John the Baptist whose Jesus never showed up, to be respected more than listened to. But for me he was always central. His work did so much to define the way I saw music – trampling genre distinctions, simultaneously rootsy and experimental, recklessly innovative and above all infectiously fun!  “I play music”, he commented. “Too many work it.”

Sadly, the man died yesterday aged 69. The obituary cliché “there will never be another like him” can finally be put to a genuine use. To lose both Beefheart and Ari Up within three months is no less than tragic...

This isn’t a bad primer guide to his music.

FOUR EYES WAXES ON THE ZINE SCENE...

During last Saturday’s Zine Fair at Brighton’s Cowley Club, Lorna Stephenson (who I don’t think I’d met before) asked if I’d answer some e-mailed questions for a college project of hers. I replied, and asked if I could repost my answers here...

”Your name/ artist name/ no name depending on how you'd like to be referred to.”

Gavin Burrows. Sometimes 4 Eyes. Or even The Artist Formerly Known As Gav, when I was taking the piss out of Prince.

”The name of your zine/comic. ”

Mostly, I write a comic called ’The Plot Thickens’, though I also worked on a collaborative comic called ’Rocket Science’ and had something else produced under the title ’All Flee!’ I also write a blog about comics, films, music, politics and anything else that comes into my head - at lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com. (Are blogs related to zines? Maybe that will be one of the later questions.) My comics "presence" (as I believe the PR men call it) is pretty pitiful, really, but some stuff is up at www.buzzcomic.com.

”How would you describe your work?”

Satirical stuff, usually a twist on popular culture or subculture of some kind. I love that point where satire and absurdism overlap. I often compare my humour to ’The Simpsons’, as a reference point most people have heard of. But unlike ’The Simpsons’ I don't use the same characters every time. I would probably save a whole lot of time and effort if I did.

”How long have you been involved in producing zines/comics, how often do you produce one?”

This is the point where I sound old! First started writing to (mostly) comics fanzines over 25 years ago. Then a little later I produced my first comic, an anthology of various people's stuff. I gave it the appendage "the dyslexia of post-literacy." I can't remember why, now. I did it because I'd seen other people doing it and figured, why not me?

Can I sneakily avoid answering the second part of the question? I haven't actually produced a new comic for about two years!!!, though I have kept the blog updated during that time. Blame time pressures, day jobs etc! Also the upsurge in the number of zine events have in a weird way impeded my productivity! The weekends are the time I have to create new stuff, and lately so many of them have been taken up by attending some event or other. It'll probably flip to the other extreme - I'll finally produce the next issue and there won't be anywhere to flog it any more!

Actually I don't think it’s a problem if your comic or zine is infrequent so long as it's not a continued story, or you haven't been telling all and sundry it's going to have a strict monthly schedule. It's a bit like going to the gym, people start out saying they'll go twice a week, find they can't keep it up and stop altogether. You're better off figuring out the level that's best for you.

”What's your favourite zine that's not your own and why?”

I do read zines but more often comics. Paul Rainey's magnum opus ’There's No Time Like The Present’ has just concluded, that was good. I’m looking forward to reading it all through, when I get the chance.

”What do you think zines can do that mainstream press can't?”

Two things. First is accessibility, you can do a zine whereas you can't do mainstream press. And you can do your zine on whatever interests you. Mostly people don't make zines on what Katie Price is up to, because that subject's adequately covered by the mass media. (Perhaps even over-adequately.)

Second is the zine scene, the combined effect of all those zines, but I see that's a question asked later on.

We live in an age of mass-production where all the stuff that's supposed to express our individuality is actually just crap bought off the shelf. Like clothing... That shirt that's "so you'", there's tens of thousands of others exactly like it. So having something hand-made like a zine, that a small group or maybe one person made because they wanted to, that makes for a refreshing contrast, a little token that suggests at a different world. I like it when people decorate and personalise their zines. The guy at the stall next to me today had a comic with an empty speech balloon on the cover. When someone bought one, he'd fill in the balloon with something specially for them.

”Why do you produce your zine?”

I honestly can't not do it. It's simultaneously a grand folly and a bad habit, like a cross between the roof of the Sistine Chapel and biting your fingernails.

”Would you say there is a zine subculture, and if so, what's it like?”

There's a whole bunch of zine cultures (the comics scene, the punk zine scene, the travelogue zine, the special interest zine and more). What works best is when they intersect, and unintended consequences ensue.

I find my comics sell better at zine events than comics ones, because they tend to attract a more open-minded crowd - and not just people who want to complete their collection of Image titles and have no interest in anything else. That's been happening more lately, partly just down to individuals. Paul Stapleton, who organised things today, is a comic artist and musician. Edd Baldry, one of the organisers of the London Zine Symposium, produces comic strips, but also used to do a punk fanzine, and gets involved in political activity. 

Sometimes, though, it works the opposite way. It can become very egocentric, like everyone just wants to defend their bit of turf. Someone will come up with some ill-considered piece of invective, like "every punk band formed after 1990 is a mindless copycat of the original, and true punks should boycott their gigs." Then someone else will come along and say "no, it's the old punk bands who were around before 1995 who all sold out and thereby stopped the revolution happening, they should all be boycotted." And the inevitable pointless slagging match ensues between two meaningless extremes. You know the old Fugazi song? "Everyone's talking about their home town scenes/ And hurting people's feelings in their magazines/ And you want to know what it all means?/ It's NOTHING!"

Everyone has the right to their opinion. But anyone who thinks that only their opinion counts is simply a jerk.

”What process do you go through to produce your zine?”

I just do it really! With the comics I normally write quite a full script, with all the dialogue and everything broken down into panels. Though I've done it different ways... so many people had asked me if I wrote the script after the art was drawn, that one time I purposefully did it that way!

I like that collaborative aspect. The artwork comes back and, even if the artist's mostly kept to the script, it's never really the way I imagined it. They've normally added some dimension to it that I'd never thought of.

Lately though, I've had a shortage of artists to work with. Everyone's just so busy! I'm trying to get round that by drawing more stuff myself. The main disadvantage to this is that I can't actually draw. But then why let something like that stop you?

”Would you mind expanding on how there has been a growth in the number of zine events recently: Since when has their been this increase in popularity been happening (due to the internet, even?)? What impact has the internet had on the scene?”

Let's take those two in one. When people look into a scene from outside, there's a natural tendency to try and see the imprint of the outside culture upon it, preferably some big cultural shift like the internet. After all, what's going on inside is a closed book to them! But the ebbs and flows of scenes are largely due to inner, totally micro reasons. The simple explanation is it's been like a spate of parties. Someone throws a party, someone else goes, has fun and figures they should throw their own party. The thing snowballs from there.

There probably has been a shift in the wider culture, though, with niche marketing, broadcasting being replaced by narrowcasting and all the rest of it. Perhaps that's how comics and zines became cool instead of nerdy. It used to be that, for example, you never saw women in comic shops. But there was a high number of women behind the stalls at the Cowley Zine Fair, maybe not half of the stallholders but getting on for it. (You may have kept more of an eye on this than me.)

There's no doubt the internet has given things a fillip. I used to print off a paper zine of my thoughts and musings, then carry piles of them to social events. It was unwieldy, expensive and like casting seeds - you only had so many and some would doubtless fall on stony ground. Migrating to a blog site cut out most of those obstacles overnight. (In fact it became too easy and I concentrated on that at the expense of the comics, but never mind that!)

However, with comics there's something appealing about a physical object - the comic itself is an art object, like a painting or sculpture. The package is part of the experience. With music it doesn't matter much if you listen to it on a CD or stream an MP3. With a comic it feels right to hold it in your hands.  I'm not against on-line comics but think they should make use of the uniqueness of the medium they're in, not just host a load of pages originally designed for print.

”Would you describe the self-pub zine and comic scene as being well known about or still very underground?”

Dunno. It's like asking a fish what the pond looks like from outside. I only know it from the inside.

”What would you say to someone who is thinking of starting their own?”

Now is probably the easiest time to do it! Low-run printing and copying is achievable like never before, there's the net through which to meet people, shops and distros. There's on-line and book guides, but the best way to start is to just start. Don't wait for genius to strike. You'll figure out what you want to do and how it works for you as you go along.

The one big downside, however, is the corporatisation of the high street. Brighton was once stacked with independent bookshops, now (with one remaining exception) there's just book supermarkets. But then again it's that desultory, clone-town backdrop against which your zine will glimmer like a glimmering thing...

AXEING THE EDUCATION MAINTENANCE ALLOWANCE – THE CRUELLEST CUT YET!

Yet another action against education cuts – that may not sound like news any more. But today's is specifically over the Education Maintenance Allowance, and I’m wondering how many people will find that a new term.

Now you, me and anybody with a functioning brain cell is against the ConDems tripling tuition fees to pay off their banker cronies. (Particularly when they’re cutting education budgets at the same time, effectively making students pay more for less.) But the total scrapping of the EMA has seen less press attention. It’s a classic example of the cultural bias of the media, populated as it is by middle class types fixated upon career paths.

Yet, from scanning banners on those same news clips and from other anecdotal evidence, the EMAs been at least as big a deal to the demonstrators. Many of the more regular schoolkids won’t have imagined ever going to Uni in the first place, but were reliant on the EMA as an alternative to flipping burgers. A paltry sum, tapered but maxed at £30 a week, it enabled kids from less privileged backgrounds to attend college or sixth form. Though barely enough to cover transport and subsistence expenses, it was still enough to make education an option.

Lecturer Sally Hunt has commented ”withdrawing the EMA will hit some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society.” Or, as one kid commented to the BBC, “we’re from the slums of London. Take away our EMA and what’s to stop us becoming drug dealers?” The facts back him up more firmly than any smooth-talking spin doctor. A recent NUS poll suggested that almost two thirds would have to quit college if the grant goes. Actually, make that when...

The frequently uttered ConDem claim that stoked-up tuition fees won’t discourage poor students, already absurd, is thereby made a total non-starter. If kids can’t afford to attend Further Education, how in the world will they ever get to Higher Education?

This grant is being abolished by a Cabinet of millionaires who would spend over £30 on lunch without thinking about it. Its negative effects aren’t some unfortunate side-effect of some “tough set of decisions” that had to be made, they’re the very point of the axeing. It’s a blatant act of class war against the poor, presided over by a Bullingdon toff who only wants to see oiks when they’re serving him his frappuccino. The subliminal narrative is that the working classes are only suited to servitude.

But the sheer size and scale of the protests, often self-organised by young people with no previous political experience, give us a different narrative. It’s no surprise to see them clamped and attacked by uniformed goons. It’s no surprise to see any act of resistance portrayed as mindless hooliganism. These actions aren’t just heartening to see. They embryonically suggest at a world beyond our lords and masters...

CHARLIE SAYS...

"The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt."
 - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1