Film Review: Bros Before
Bros Before is deliberately rooted in a 2020s punk, liberated-ish, white-ish trans culture. You can tell that everyone involved both has love for and is willing to gleefully prod with their arrows pointed inward.
issue 96
Review: Bad Apples
Bad Apples describes itself as an audiovisual zine, but it feels more like a street-level, sensory experience of Philly in crisis, as witnessed by Kara Khan and Matt Williams in the wake of George Floyd and the 2020 BLM protests.
Review: Swollening
The vulnerability in Swollening is best described as teeth being pulled, leaving you “jaw detached and tooth emptied.”
Review: MANIFEST (zine) #7
This water-themed issue of MANIFEST (zine) makes way for text and art contributions from a number of “friends and fellow creative spirits” who all lived near the Connecticut shoreline.
Review: Dumb-Show
Fawn Parker ridicules the academy and unchecked privilege. She also takes more than a few shots at poisonous celebrities along the way. The result is a truly glorious mash up of the academia of a novel like Lucky Jim and the medieval sand trap from the film The Duel.
Review: Notes
The form and name of the zine come from the out-of-the-box app Notes, available on Apple devices. It thoroughly assumes the clinical, sanitized trappings of Apple paraphernalia, with white glossy paper and rounded corners, like a manual found tucked inside a freshly-opened iPhone box.
Shut Up and Vibe: Racer Trash’s Movie Joyride
The Racer Trash film collective is dead, but its tire tracks remain streaked across the fringes of cinema.
Review: Behind the Zines: A Zine About Zines #13
The latest issue in this rewarding compilation mega/meta-zine offers several contributions that detail histories and origin stories of other zines.
Review: Hyperbolic Trajectories
Outer space, as both a place and a concept, holds a great deal of significance for each of the artists in this anthology. Characters reflect on lost possibilities; moments of intimacy or insecurity, including Soviet space dog Laika.
Review: Len & Cub: A Queer History
The result of painstaking research stretching through New Brunswick, Maine, Quebec, and Vermont, this early century chronicle of queer Canadians is a labour of love.
Review: XOX Converse
At some point we have all worn some Chucks. Especially zinesters. Nicole Gruszecki’s XOX Converse zine takes you through their life in Converse, from their first pair to their latest.
Review: SCRIED FUNDAMENTS
Bent by the crystal ball we’re peering into as much as by the off-kilter discourse of the person who’s speaking, MLA Chernoff’s SCRIED FUNDAMENTS is is attention-grabbing, clever and regularly baffling.