Girls Rock Power Hour

We’ll be hanging out with a bunch of zines at the Girls Rock Jacksonville Power Hour! So come see us at Brew, June 15th and 22nd.  Click here for more information about Girls Rock Jacksonville.

Scam Zine

Since the early ’90s Erick Lyle (formerly know as Iggy Scam) has published Scam zine and played in tons of great bands, including The Horrible Odds, Onion Flavored Rings, and Black Rainbow. In recent years he has parlayed Scam and his many other DIY zine projects into a bona fide writing career of sorts – including the book On The Lower Frequencies, and his newest, Streetopia: Using Art to Build Community, Fight Displacement and Reclaim Public Space.  He recently talked at the University of West Florida.  We’re beyond thrilled to have some of his early zines in our collection at the JPL Zine Library.

Here’s a small excerpt from Erick Lyle’s interview with Arwen Curry of Maximum Rock and Roll, from 2009’s print media themed issue.

Do you remember the first time you saw something that was like a zine or a pamphlet, a noncommercial, underground piece of writing? What did it look like to you at the time?

I thought from a pretty young age that I would become a writer. I enjoyed writing in school even really early on. Like when I was seven or eight, I was always writing stories, but there was a period in my early teens when I was running away from home a lot, having a lot of trouble with parents, and randomly living on the streets here and there. I started to fail out of school, which hadn’t been a problem before, and I started to think that I’d messed up my life in some way where I wasn’t going to be able to become a writer anymore—because I wasn’t going to finish school, and, that I would need to go to college to “become a writer.” But then somehow I happened upon a Hunter S. Thompson book that I cheerfully shoplifted from the mall, and I was reading this lunatic tale of crime and drugs and stuff, and realized, “Oh, OK, I actually already am a writer. This is awesome.”

That was before I was a punk rocker. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I was into punk rock and seeing zines. There weren’t a lot of zines coming out of South Florida, but finding a Maximum Rocknroll actually was a pretty big deal, and we found it in a chain store, so that’s something to consider—that sometimes in a small town you gotta find the punk rock in a chain store. This was probably 1988, and me and my best friend Buddha thought that we were among the last remaining punks on earth because there were no other punks in South Florida, and all the bands that we liked, like Black Flag, the Descendents, Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, they had just broken up right before we got into punk.

We had seen the 7 Seconds, but somehow something was missing, so when we found this Maximum Rocknroll, we were like, “Whoa! This magazine is full of demo tapes; there’s a whole world out there,” so that was a pretty big deal. But the first zine I saw that really influenced me was a couple years later, probably in 1990, when I left my parents’ house for good and ended up at the Ft. Lauderdale Punk House. My roommate Chuck Loose was making a zine called Get Loose, and it was all about scamming, dumpster diving, bumming around town, graffiti, and stuff, and I was like, “Hmm, OK, this is cool. I can do this.”

Punks, Punx, and Punxxx

You can’t live in two places at once, but the recent punk-related gems of catalog additions are a solid jog down memory lane for anyone involved in hardcore punk in the mid-2000’s. They are here on the shelf at Jacksonville’s Downtown Library with little vouching for them these days but the fact that they still exist. So here’s a heads up on the paper product in case you missed the boat this first time around, with a nod to a few digitized reincarnations.

Slug and Lettuce.

Bust out your magnifying glasses for this classic! Editor/writer/publisher Christine Boarts Larson makes sure this FREE publication in jammed back with as much great stuff as possible, hence the wee text size. Don’t let adjusting your glasses stop you though! Spring of 2012 marks it’s 25th year, so you know something great is happening here. (That’s 1987 for the math challenged.) Twenty five years of focusing on the general DIY / anarcho-punk themes of anti-authoritarian politics, vegetarian/vegan action, radical parenting, gardening, DIY culture.   You can even check out a ton of the the columns online at the recently created http://www.slugandlettuce.net.  The website also serves as an archive for a lot of great band photography Chris has done over the years. That archive has a lot of the art from the issues as well – Jeremy Clark’s artwork is amazing.  The site also contains some new content, two different podcast series; on Eco-punk and Permaculture.

 

 

Equalizing X Distort

Another no frills and no space wasted, pedal to the hardcore punk, zine.  Named after the classic Gauze LP you probably only own a bootleg of, the Equalizing Distort  zine is an extension of a radio show these four Canadian chaps put together.  Lots of interviews with bands and record reviews.   The issue we have at JPL is from 2006, but these Toronto locals have been busy since then. They operate a great website of the same name here.  It chronicles playlists from the show (complete with plenty of MP3’s!!) and information on the zine and local shows.   They also have archived some of the older issues here.

So come check them out soon! And until then, you have plenty of new websites to explore if hanging at a computer is your thing.

Zine Machine at Gregory Drive Elementary!

Thanks to art teacher Ed Saulk and media specialist Jack Betancourt, we got to spend nearly a full school day at Gregory Drive Elementary teaching six sessions of Zine Machine classes to 3rd – 5th graders.   The all day Arts Festival event they put on was amazing and we were very glad to be a part of it.

Some classes got inspired by Chris Van Dusen’s “If I Built a Car” before designing a car of their own, while other classes reviewed the elements of superheroes and villains before designing one of their own.  They even had our “Read Zines” poster up in the media center!

The material the kids created will be used for the next 5 issues of Zine Machine, available next month in the Main Library’s Children’s Department.   The library at Gregory Drive was also very excited about cataloging the new issues for it’s students to check out.   The kids were also very enthusiastic about coming to the public library and checking out the zine they contributed too.  Everyone wins!

Joe Berg Seminar

Thanks again to the students of Jacksonville’s Joe Berg Society for being so interested in the Zine Collection!  Hopefully now we’ve got another 80 rad teens stoked on the collection and the library.  They had really good questions and checked out some of my favorite zines.

For more information on our new favorite group of high school students, go here.

Donations!

Call me biased, but librarians are awesome – whether it’s a public library or university.   I ran into my friend Mr. Ross Martin at a show in Deleon Springs last week.  He works as a librarian at Seminole State College.   Apparently he was jumping the gun on some spring cleaning, and low and behold he had a giant plastic tub of zines to donation to our collection.   It was amazing.

His donation has a lot of older punk zines in it that will really help fill out our collection.  A lot of them are specific to Florida as well.  Thanks so much again Ross!

Video Zine Review #1

Welcome to Video Zine Review #1

This first episode features reviews of Publick Occurances #12, Beyond the Porch #1 and Burn Brandon #14.

It also has an introduction about what zines are, and important information about the Jacksonville Public Library.  That’s probably stuff you already know since you are visiting the Zine Collection blog, but just in case!  This premiere is a bit longer than future episodes will be for that reason.  Following episodes will be 100% zine, 100% of the time.  Enjoy!

Katie Monnin talking about the Graphic Novel Workshop on WJXT

WJXT’s Morning Show did a segment last Saturday with Katie Monnin, who was promoting her book “Teaching Graphic Novels” and her upcoming class for parents and kids at the Main Library.   Watch the news segment here.

Get more details about the class in our original post here.  The class is Saturday, January 15 from 3-4pm, and you must register to attend!

Graphic Novel Workshop for parents and kids at the Main Library – Jan 15th at 3pm

Graphic novels and zines go together like chocolate and marshmallows, not all the time, but when they do – it’s awesome.  Especially when it’s involves kids, and the opportunity to get some guidance for you child creating his or her own graphic novel.

On January 15th you and your child have the opportunity to learn why reading graphic novels are “really” reading!

Katie Monnin, one of the most enthusiastic speakers I’ve ever heard (seriously!!), is coming to the Main Library.  She’s published two successful books about the literary merits of graphic novels, how to use them in the classroom, and why they rock!   As a parent, you get to come learn the who-what-when-why of you and your children reading graphic novels together, and your kids get to come and participate in a graphic novel creation activity.

Parents, sign up today for by calling the Main Library’s Children’s Department at 630-2417.

Successful Zine Release Partyin’

 

Saturday’s Zine Release party was great!  Contributors to the zine got a personal copy, and other kids checked out copies of the new issue.   Everyone did a short autobiographical comic, and got to help paint some more covers of last month’s Zine Machine.  We had some new faces at the program, and they were pretty excited to hear about their comics being part of the library zine.

A few of the new issues are still available for checkout!  They are in the Main Library’s Children’s Department.  In the graphic section, right by That’s So Raven and Transformers.