"YOU'RE ALL SELL-OUTS BUT ME!"


Talk about your swirling pits of despair, there is really nothing more depressing in this new century than a modern Zine Conference. Yeah, they might possibly have amounted to something interesting in the mid-90's...MAYBE, but any promise they might once have festered has atrophied to nothing more than a room of whining malcontents attempting to impose their junior league politics on each other. Vindictive, yup. Useless, you betcha.

So it was with this in mind that my wife and I celebrated the first annual San Francisco Zine Symposium a couple of months back. Like so much else in our lives, the concept and execution was hashed out DURING the event, which only occurred because our pals Larry Harmon of Genetic Disorder, Todd Taylor from Razorcake and Jeff Fox of Barracuda were in town for some car show in the vast nether-regions of non-yokel reality: Antioch, CA. As they would be staying with us, we chose the next morning for a quick brunch, which hours later became:

    PANCAKES, BLOODY MARYS AND SAUSAGE: THE 1ST ANNUAL SF ZINE SYMPOSIUM

Essentially the whole day became the usual bitchfest about Desert Moon's policy of ripping off magazine publishers, and the methods Sunny and Jeff Fox took to get paid. As well as a side-bar about how we all miss Tom Lupoff from DMoon. Also discussed were the finer points of bloody mary-making (the use of beef jerky was touched upon at length), the fallacies and bullshiteries of the recent PDX Zine Conference and the latest in a long string of "Darby Stories." Tales of the great Darby from Ben Is Dead. We had many stories, each more vodka-induced and semi-interesting than the last.

We then piled into the rental and drove to the Billetproof car show, where I ran into man-about-town and zine contributor Jeff Heerman, with two dashing babes astride him. We spoke of was and when and counted the gingham and tattoos. After our excursion to Hell, CA (a.k.a. Antioch), we stopped by the lovely abode of Ms. Andi Zeisler from Bitch, for a quick beer visit. It was great to see her again. Apparently Bitch is doing quite well, thank you. More power to them.

I suggest these events appear more frequently, and in much the same setting. I'm sure they'd be more fun, and for my money this was by a mile the best zine thing I'd ever attended. Much less drunken sex and uptight nazis posing as enlightened PC intelligentsia.



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