Call it Collateral Damage, call it Scourge, call it Interference, it doesn’t matter what you call it, Hamish is making violence with paper. Two of his recent endeavors, the Collateral Damage Marilyn Monroe issue and the Scourge Summer Sex issue give us the ultimate Cont. on next page Cont. from previous page post-content apocalypse, conflictual cut-ups where pictures lord over text like slave over master. So what does Hamish say in these zines? Largely nothing. What prose there is cannot or is not intended to compete. The giant size, laughing, smiling, pouting Marilyns in Collateral Damage, and the bevy of splayed out porn babes in Scourge leave us wordless, stunned by the visceral horror of flesh. But Hamish isn’t making porn. Like the world of sexual avarice they represent, these collages are more frightening than prurient. In Collateral Damage mirror slivers of Marilyn battle for attention. “Somebody say wet dream?” asks a solitary, cryptic sentence. In Scourge a woman’s skirted legs provocatively protrude onto the page as various co-opted headlines argue with each other; “Prostitution”, one says, “but for a really good cause”, another posits, “Love and Romance at your fingertips!” insists the final headline. A dollar sign looms in the corner. With all the intentionality of a prostitute spreading deadly disease Hamish argues for nothing more or less than the absolute unadulterated primacy of the image. Sex, these zines announce, is nothing other than the effigy of sex. No surprise that the writing here ~ as in so many other zines ~ is almost redundant.
zine main creator: Hamish publisher: Glareburn $ 1 plus postage c/o Hamish, 40 Cavell Ave. #6, Etobicoke, ON M8V 1 P2