Tales that begin with the commonplace and quickly move into strange and unexpected places. A trip in the car. A doctor’s office. Three people in an apartment drinking beer. But in the midst of all this conventionality, the strange “march of exploration.” A telephone rings. A trip to the bus station. A walk through the sewers. “The phone rings. ‘Hello.’ ‘Hi Jeff.’ Loud music in the background. ‘This isn’t Jeff. You got the wrong number.’ ‘Okay, thanks.’ Click.” Common enough, but then the phone keeps ringing. A telephone relationship develops between someone whose name isn’t Jeff and someone whose name isn’t Sonya. Then there’s the “Meditations (on aquarium fish)”, not so very strange, until you bring in the “upright/Hoover vacuum cleaner/unplugged yet freely zooming down the hall” or the “fat Volkswagen Beetle doing eighty- five on sharp Alpine turns/with no brakes.” Quirky stories, quirky poems. Cara Heitmann’s B&W photos are mesmerizing. The elements have a familiar quality to them (12 shots of a naked woman in a bathtub), but they converge to produce something absolutely frightening. It’s the same throughout SC. The stuff seems about to be cliche, and as you go along reading you think there’s no way you can be convinced, but somehow, in the end, you are. I don’t know who Schrodinger is or just what his cat has to do with anything, but who cares. Just so long as they keep the great words and pictures coming.
lit mag / 44 pages / Main Creators: Jonathan Blackburn, Mark Kolody, Craig Saila, Paul / “Ducky” Tenk (editors) / $5, 4 for $20 / 3-816 Ossington Ave., Toronto, ON, M6G 3V1