I have to tell you, part of the reason I’ve largely, maybe stupidly, avoided the journalism game myself since my j-school days (opting to edit instead) is that, well, I often just can’t help but joke when writing about the news. I don’t know what it is. Some say there’s something to the generation being cursed ironically, or ironically cursed...anyway, cursed with the gift (or curse) of irony. 

But you see the problem really is this––the celerity with which news is passed from one source to another just often gets my panties all wadded and tongue tied, and then thumbs are screwed and knuckles are bloodied while tromping through the internet, pecking away as I do with a couple of fingers.  It was easier back in the day when you had to actually make phone calls and/or god forbid interview someone in person, with a tape recorder, to get your story down.  If you doubt that such journalism makes for a better read I say if you haven’t yet please take a few minutes this morning and enjoy Jennifer Blowdryer’s first installment for Fanzine––the oral histories of people being 86’d. It's a hoot, but it's also for real. It just pays off to get the dirt straight from the horse's mouth.

But then before I get too Dan Rathery with the idioms, I’m writing this blog because I find it interesting that for the second time in about a week that a big hoax has played out in the media. And yes that's a vague term, the media, and does Rush Limbaugh deserve the same attention as the walleyed national cable news networks, spending hours with helicopter mounted cameras honed in on a wobbly silver balloon, one somewhat shaped like a 50’s style flying saucer and supposedly, for a few hours anyway, carried a six year old boy in it?  Of course we now know that that boy wasn’t really in the thing, that he was just the patsy for his parents' attention grabbing stunt, they perhaps having I suppose withdrawal symptoms from their time in the spotlight on the hit, child exploiting show Wife Swap. Too bad they might have to kick in jail.

Well anyway if you don’t know that news by now, go back to reading your book or take your usual beautiful hike or whatever healthy people do instead of obsessing over all day helicopter chase scenes (be they in pursuit of White Broncos or Silver Balloons).

But I guess what is exciting is the potential I’ve seen in a news story this morning, where one of the great mindsuck, blowhards of all time, Rush Limbaugh, got his comeuppance (and no it wasn’t that they found Vicodin on him again) as he went on about a story he believed was true––that President Obama’s college thesis had been unearthed and that it contained allusions to his hatred of democracy, the constitution, and his kingly ambitions.  Well it’s not the Lupercal, nor is it April 1st, but man you gotta hand it to the hoaxers who had Rush going for half his show on the topic.

Not that I expect any vetting from the Limbaugh crew, but come on? Really now? Still one can only wonder what will be the future of media hoaxes.  They can play out delightful, as in the Limbaugh case, annoying as in the balloon kid story, or in some cases quite disruptive––i.e. the rumor mills that can drive and manipulate the stock market and which certainly aided and abetted the torrential economic collapse last year, as perfectly solid companies were driven down with the rest of a ship loaded with a portion of tainted fruit. 

In a country without a generalized pension system, we are expected to individually save for our retirement, and it has become a given for many to trust their savings to 401ks and other similarly stock oriented retirement plans. I can’t help but feel like the grandpa griping about his piles when I get on this topic again and again (I mean I’d rather be writing about the Flaming Lips like Mark Gluth did so well for us earlier this month).

But then maybe this is what the blog should be about. I mean our blog (which for some reason I find painful to maintain...call it editorial gunshyness? dunno) did take over a section of what used to be a portion of the site that was a brief twitter-like system of blurbs and links to other news items, so there’s a feeling of obligation to at least look at the news in this spot on Fanzine.  Still can’t help but feel guilty sometimes for not doing actual on the ground reporting, and if we had the right funding, hell I would, but for now I guess the blog (and this just concerns the "blog" portion of Fanzine) will continue to toast up the news, and we'll editorialize as best we can...and um laugh....or cry....naaaah, laugh. 
 

_{-Casey McKinney}

I just wrote (and then accidentally didn't save...what a metaphor) a whole longish piece about credit and how a couple of my credit cards have jumped or will jump from around 12 to nearly 30% APR in the next month as Congress pats itself on the back today for passing a reform law yesterday, while in the meantime for the next 15 months––the real time it will take before that law is implemented according to a New York Times editorial and made more clear by Harry Moroz at The Huffington Post today––the credit card companies will gouge away at you harder than Frank Black can belt out a song.  So be careful, read the fine print in your next statements.  Then get out the scissors, cut extraneous cards up (which could be all of them, but keep the thumb, um…ha), and join a credit union to pay them off if you have to. Better yet, if you don't have a card don't get one until....well never, or at least wait untll the reforms are implemented and then just use one forever for gas or subway cards.

But what do I know. I've heard if you close down the wrong card your credit score can worsen because of it.

One I will keep even, as it rises, for emergencies, as we don't have healthcare still and have a baby on the way.
 

So that's the brief version.  Read the Moroz piece, listen to the Pixies (both in links above) and have a nice day.

^{-Casey McKinney}

First read this from Jeff Penalty at Swindle Magazine.  Above I grabbed their nice pic by Adam Wallacavage.  It's a good article from an appropriate indie venue, focusing on Brendan Mullen's days as the man behind the Masque, a punk club in late 70s Hollywood. The L.A. Times also had a sweet piece by Flea of The Red Hot Chili Peppers.  I ramble below, but Mullen made a quick important impact on me, and also on The Fanzine.

I was born a little too late for the original days of punk. Still I grew up on 80s hardcore and the postpunk of SST bands like the Minutemen, Husker Du, Dinosaur Jr. and on...and on... and even though DIY was the thing late in high school it was quite later that I started making art & fiction fanzines (the first was in 2000; many friends I know have been making them for much longer and have always been an inspiration).

(Okay excuse the long backstory, it does lead to something). Back in 2001 I guess it was, I was contacted by a Canadian editor, Patrik Andersson, who was putting together a collection of independent magazines for a book called Inside Magazines which eventually came out in 2002. He somehow got ahold of the zines I’d done and featured two of them, Mall Punk and Animal Stories (and a third that never came out, titled appropriately Ghost Stories). How these zines that had print runs of only 500, that were each hand done, had gotten into this beautiful book alongside these bigger glossy magazines like Index, Purple and Visionaire, I have no idea.  But anyway, Patrik also allowed me a spot to do something else in the book. The idea I pitched was a history of Los Angeles based zines. Soon after the dig on the subject began I was told by author Benjamin Weissman, who did the amazing Snowflake zines for a while (about skiing, sex and art, with mostly L.A. and elsewhere Cali based contributors), that I had to get in touch with Brendan Mullen for this thing. This was seconded by Dennis Cooper (or the other way around, maybe Dennis suggested him first, I forget). Dennis himself was once the maestro of the important Little Caesar zine.

In any case I did contact Mullen, and I was soon very gracious for the tip. Newly back in Los Angeles, I wasn't sure where to even start with this stranger, this L.A. punk icon, this Fedora wearing Scotsman all in black, but in retrospect the time was so vivid; it’s rare that an afternoon spent with someone can teach so much.

Brendan Mullen schooled me, with the quickness (yes that's a Bad Brains ref) in one afternoon, on everything (that's an exaggeration but...) one could know about punk zines...well, Los Angeles based ones anyway. While I grew up a disheveled prep scool punk on Maximum Rock and Roll, got the Factsheet 5s every now and then and bought others zines sporadically, Brendan knew––had lived that is––the punk zine backstory (and could have even gone into the sci-fi fanzines too if I’d asked...we did talk some about the early horror mags). Well we gabbed over tacos in Silverlake and then he invited me to his house, then once again back over to let Dave Muller pick out zines from his incredible cache to draw for the article. I recall Mullen as a real gentleman, a wealth of info and the reason I always plead that any writer needs a shed somewhere to archive things (like Mullen had in his backyard)...and a humidifier (those zines and records can get musty).  His collection of memorabilia ought to be a museum. 

Recently, someone, a kid I guess wrote me an email asking about zines... blindly it seemed, out of the blue, wanted to know how to get ahold of some for a presentation.  I explained that I no longer made print zines.  But I tried to point her to places to look for them - local indie bookstore? or contact Printed Matter in New York?  I wrote her that a zine is basically just a homemade magazine, anyone could do it, even her, and said she should check out Trinie Dalton’s zines of the past few years, which have stood out to me as some of the best modern ones, and that was that. 

But I know it crossed my mind... that I shoulda said “there’s this guy in L.A., Brendan Mullen and you should...” but then hey I had no idea who this person was and what level of school they were talking about writing about.  I mean I think at thefanzine we are mostly an all ages kind of production, but we don’t censor ourselves either; in any case anyone who wants to know how to make a zine, well I can tell him or her that much at least. And it’s easier than ever now. You just need some regular 8 and 1/2 size paper, maybe Photoshop and a printer and scanner, though scissors a typewriter and a xerox machine will work just fine as they did for so long. Oh and an idea helps, even if that idea be as vague and personal as you can imagine.  A person can make 5 zines or 500 or more.

Still, what I'm trying to iterate here is what I learned from Brendan, that many zines started in that simple hand-stapled way in the punk days, and soon evolved into more professional magazines like Slash, Bomp and Nomagazine. They may not have been around long, but they sure had their impact in building the scenes they covered.

A few years after Andersson's book was published I was asked to submit my "magazines" (the aforementioned zines) to an international magazine fair in 2005, mainly because I had been in this book, and I owe what I wrote in the book to Brendan Mullen.  Even though he wasn’t the focus––Raymond Pettibon became the main interviewee––still Raymond and I talked about Brendan and his ideas throughout. 

When the url "thefanzine.com" came up as available (in 2004 I think), I grabbed it up and thought well, that’s about the equivalent of Index, Paper, or Interview, as far as it being an open-ended vague tile.  I later asked the CMYK organizers if it could, as a website, be the magazine introduced at the fest. And they went for it. Yeah to me, to call it The Fanzine was the blandest name for something that really is a fanzine, and therefore had the most potential to be anything.

I don’t know how this will all evolve, with the site, but I feel extremely grateful for all the absolutely amazing work people have put into it thus far––Mike and Danny, the longtime contributors, the sometimes, the off and on interns, Ben Strong and Ben Bush, Emilie Jackson's great work with Kevin Killian's book, and yeah even with all the good sometimes I have to say it drives me nuts doing this, switching from one head to the next in the editing process... to the point I want to throw up my arms cuss and quit... you know most zines have a pretty short lived lifespan...but with the web it seems it could feasibly go on forever.

Still it takes resources to function.  And thus there is always that loaded concept of selling out. But hell, if we can, when we do get our act together, we will have ads eventually.  We could right now, but we just want to do it right when we do it.  Oh how Ian MacKaye can haunt your thoughts.  He’s the angel on the shoulder that says don’t do it.  But you have to survive somehow.  The writing profession is tougher than ever. So if someone can figure out a business model for us sans ads, write us. Otherwise...

Anyway that was all probably way off track, but just wanted to shout out and say thanks to Brendan Mullen and that our thoughts are with his family...and thanks to Brad Lapin for posting the news, I hadn't seen it until tonight.

If someone wants to write a real story about Brendan, we’d gladly want to hear it and maybe want to publish it as a piece?....

Rest In Peace,
Casey

Hey special thanks to Kaya Oakes for a great time last Sunday at Skylight Books and thanks to everyone who was able to make it there. The show was kicked off by a lively, charismatic  performance by Old Lumps. Charlene Yi, in the center is a musician and comedian who appears in Knocked Up, and was full of quips and microphone duct-taping throughout the show. After leading off with three solid originals, the Lumpsters followed with a cover of "The Greatest Love of All" and a finale of "Beast of Burden" inviting Kaya Oakes up from the audience for a very special one woman dance party.

On tour for her book on independent culture, Slanted and Enchanted, Kaya read a selection from it about humans impersonating robots in order to sell handmade postcards at the San Francisco Renegade Craft Fair. Generously, sharing the spotlight on her book tour Kaya welcomed The Fanzine and other bastions of independent media to join for a discussion.

From left to right: Kaya, moderator Justin Gage of the Aquarium Drunkard music blog and host of a weekly XM radio show of the same name, Courtney Knopf of Everloving Records, Daniel House of CZ Records and, um, me.

Justin and audience members asked an array of engaging questions, including Charles, one of the Skylight Staff, who asked about race and indie rock, commenting on New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones's piece on race and indie rock, which criticizes indie rock for distancing itself from the African American influence in American music. Charles attributed this as the cause of much of what he found a little boring about indie rock.

Carl Wilson, author of the awesome 33 1/3 book about Celine Dion, has an equally compelling rebuttal to Frere-Jones that's also worth reading. His Celine Dion book is an examination of taste and class and a totally great read on a lot of levels and he brings a lot of those ideas to bear in his response.

Another recent piece of music writing that came up in the discussion was this piece from the New York Times about indie rock finding its way into the hands of these young scions of Beverly Hills. Kaya and I exchanged several hand-wringing emails about it a few months back, unsure exactly what mixture of good and bad it represented. It seems encouraging that these young folks are interested in listening to and creating the odder extremes of music instead of plastic surgery but it also paints a sort of haunting picture. In an era in which the economics of making music are so bleak will only the wealthy and well-connected be able to create and distribute music?

But doomsday theories are a dime a dozen. I'm not sure why, considering the sometimes bleak news of magazine and newspaper closures, but I find myself oddly optimistic about the future of independent media. I'm not sure whether its intuition, naivete or some odd thoughts about how 'The Long Tail' theory might actually be kinder to smaller media sources than big ones but I think the future won't be too terrible for fans and advocates of independent news, music, art and literatue.

It was a treat to meet the other panelists and to hear their thoughts. Thanks again to Kaya Oakes and Skylight for the opportunity for all of us to think and talk about one of life's greatest pleasures, music. -Ben Bush

If this don’t beat all.  How can we trust the future?  Think about it, you become Major League Baseball’s all time leading hitter for aeons, and in your golden years, pondering what comes next, as a hopeful precaution against interminable mortality, you figure you might want a shot of life for aeons more to come. So you sign up with a company that - after death of course - will freeze either your whole body or head (Ted chose just the head - why he didn’t want to throw in those guns that we mortals call arms, I’ll never know...go figure) in anticipation of future technologies of revival..

Yeah ok, but careful what you plan for. The future could be bliss or an idiocracy. As the great Sufi once said: 'Nothing is real, everything is permitted.' 

And so it goes. Some employees of a certain cryogenic center permitted themselves to play a little baseball with Ted Williams' head.  'Course they had to first dislodge the stiff, frozen, chunk of ganglia and bones from a can of tuna before getting any split finger action in the lab.

Man...

Jeez...


Happy Halloween a wee early,
-Casey McKinney & art by Danny Jock

_{P.S. now that a month has been spent on Michael Jackson's body, what company do we guess he entrusted his remains to the future?  Hopefully not these people. What's next?  Bowling with Disney?  Just shoot your ashes out of a big fisted cannon, like Hunter S, Thompson had willed.  Gonzo had a class plan. Otherwise we see little imagination ya know, some of these people.}

<sub>'And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful
Wife
And you may ask yourself-well...how did I get here?'

-Talking Heads</sub>


Well the lyrics get darker from there, with the existential questioning, and I’m not going there.  Am pretty darn happy, being where I am, but yes, a little scared too. Still I figure it’s time to make up some excuse for the lack of blogging lately. 

Well there have been a lot of changes.  If all goes well, Robin and I will have our first kid in February.  Being superstitious to some degree, I think it best not to count any chickens before they are hatched, but we are positive that all will go well and we’ll be on a new road of experiences both exciting and unfathomable. And any superstition I have arises from the fact that, well, I’ve just seen firsthand in my immediate family how fragile life can be, with my sister suffering a terrible accident at age 3 (at the time I was 6 months old), drowning in a pool for long enough to cause brain damage so that she had left only very minor motor functions and no speech ability for the rest of her life.  She died 6 years ago at age 33 from respiratory failure related to her lifelong condition.

So anyway, blogging everyday, well, sometimes I just can’t.  I have to think about things in a private way. And that’s all I’ll say about that. It's hard to divide the public from the private when blogging (sometimes you couldn't give a hoot about the ten art openings happening in one night, or something off the wall Glen Beck said).  So much immediacy is demanded that it’s hard to clear the personal from the table and then sift through politics or pop culture and emerge with a sound opinion, one worth reading amidst all the other millions of toasters and tastemakers out in the blogosphere. But we’ll be on it again soon, with some nice Danny Jock images to back us up.

Otherwise, as far as Fanzine, there is some particular news to report.  Part of the (virtual at times) office that I handle has now officially moved back home to Atlanta, GA.  And so first off we should give out the new address for mailings.  Send us CDs, books, DVDs, letters, ten ton anvils (no, actually don't need any anvils please) etc, to:


The Fanzine
P.O. Box 5839
Atlanta, GA  31107


Can write c/o Casey McKinney if you like, though not necessary.  But that’s the blog for now, more soon, back to editing on a new piece from Thom Donovan on The Mobile Archive that’s on the way from Fanzine.  Check that soon before their panel discussion on October 6th. And look for more stuff from Atlanta I swear soon; there's still a tad more settling to do, but events listings and so on are on the way.
 

Thanks for all the help lately, especially to my grandmother, Jacquelyn, and the rest of my familiy - mom, dad and stepdad, and I hope that some heavy loads can lighten for all soon. 

And J. even though the Braves are done, the rain's stopped short of a bigger catastrophe and there's a perfect, just perfect, nip to the air.

-Casey

<sub>*Oh and btw, just so you knows we ain't flauntin', flexin' or what-haves, we just financed the kind of car you get the tax credit for, not the "large automobile" of Byrne's 80's lyrics. And the house is a cute, but modest 2/1.

**Oh and bonus good day, for getting a note back from Rick Moody who wrote one of my favorite all time books (Purple America among others).  Apparently that "Naked Goth Girls" song - well guess I must of half consciously nailed it with the comparisons - the Brechtian, Kurt Weill, Mack the Knife build-up waltz thing going on, well it'aint denied, let's just say. Thanks Mr. Moody.  I'd be more of a sycophant, but I'm afraid it would dilute my true (and growing) admiration for that Wingdale Community Singers album you got coming forth. Congrats.

***As you may notice, we are coming out of the closet as a family operation.  I can only hope that once the kid (or kid(s) comes that we can look as cute in pics as Genesis P-Orridge and family did circa Psychic TV 1990(?). Though I probably won't grow a Jedi lock hairdo.  It just won't do (I fathom, whatever fathoming means.) Can't find a good pic of this, so prob sounds insane until I do.</sub>