Tuesday 27 April 2010

I'm part of a German exhibition

A couple of months ago I sent my old zines around the world to a half dozen places that archive or welcome zines for display. One of these places is having an exhibition including them, so if you happen to be in germany on the 8th may pop in to d21. I'll be at the band room in North Yorkshire, my favourite venue in the whole of the North East (& yes, I think that does include the inestimable star & shadow).
Symposium Thanks for Sharing! by D21 Kunstraum. yay! my bothy zine visible at the D21 'thanks for sharing' exhibition! It made it!
Opening Thanks for Sharing! by D21 Kunstraum.

Monday 19 April 2010

My bits at DIY Aye 2010

So, 1st May, Star & Shadow Cinema in newcastle, one of the best events I've ever been part of. Here's my personal commitments this year:

Free Zine for each participant
- my latest zine is given free to each person coming through the door (until they run out!)

10 - 11am 'DIY breakfast'
- bring your own breakfast! eat it! Or there's a shop round the corner, or maybe you can make something out of the very cheap and skipped food which will be available on the bar counter at the start of the day? Bearing in mind there's no food license at the cinema, this will be 'interesting', maybe involving camp stoves in the back lanes. It is literally a 'do it yourself' deal.

11am onwards 'Zine stall'
- amongst the bookstalls, record stall, free shop and games table, I will have a zine stall with free zines and some pay-to-buy zines. There is still time to send me a bundle of your zines on sale or return.

12noon onwards 'Free Shop'
- including 24 strawberry plants from my allotment, ready for planting & cropping this year. Bring your unwanted junk to give away!

12.30-1.30 'North East Zine Conflab'
- basically just chatting about zines with other local folk. I might structure this around a couple of questions we each answer, or get us all to do a page for a collaborative zine or summat, let me know what you think. A rare chance to meet other local zinesters! (List of confirmed people to follow).

1.30-2.30 Kids Area
- not a creche, but a more child-friendly corner of the cinema than it is normally. I'll do a stint here, maybe playing with toys, maybe drawing or doing mazes, who knows!

2.30- 3pm '30 minute zine challenge!'
- One big table, lots of eager hands filled with pens and scissors, and one big stopclock. There is a race to make a zine, modelled on the 24 minute comic idea but with 6 minutes extra for faff & fussing about with glue n stuff.

'Freedom' with every coffee!
- A hundred or so years ago, in a far off radical cafe, they used to give away radical wobbly papers with hot drinks. To remember this, I'll give away this 100-year-old anarchist newspaper with your star n shadow hot drinks.

3 bundles of freedom in the post: I love getting mail.

Displays

1. Your Passports are Ready!
- in Autumn, I took deliberately bad photos of people, intended to be unuseable according to the official UK passport photo rules (shadows on face, wearing dark glasses etc..). I will finally have them ready for collection during DIY Aye, in time to not use for a summer holiday.

2. DIY film-making without using a projector or film camera!
- ha! sounds grand, doesn't it, perhaps some techie free software digital gubbins. But no, it's just a series of split-frame still photos from the number 12 bus on its way from Arthurs Hill to the Star & Shadow.

3. What to do with my rhubarb?
- No matter how little I care for it, water, weed or feed it, every year my rhubarb comes back brimming with life and vigour. I don't know what to do with it, no sooner do I crop it than it produces another 5 meals-worth of growth. So I will offer up my weekly rhubarb harvest and ask for tips on what the hell to do with it.

Friday 9 April 2010

Zine Trail at Washington Arts Centre

In 40 minutes time it is the 10th of April, a marvellous day for local music, the Cluny the Cumberland the Star & Shadow & apparently some bonkers event in Blyth. I will spend most of the day in Washington, a nowhere place really, but with an arts centre that puts on interesting stuff. Leonie's organised an impressive small press event & I'm contributing a zine trail.

Out of convenient laziness, I haven't made the trail specific to the building in the way that I did for the Star & shadow one, but this does mean it could be reusable in the future if ever I haven't time to make a new trail!

It's very simple, small, entirely child-friendly, & reflects my day's interest in local dialect words (although I didn't make these totally authentic or local to Washington).


& according to the P.R.E.S.S. blog above:

"Mike Duckett created a wonderful zine trail that lead visitors around the arts centre and allowed them to build up a zine based around local dialect."So there you go.