Ragtag grab-bag
QUEER ZINE FEST LONDON – Sat 8th Dec: First round of distros confirmed Queer Zine Fest London
Headsup zinesters! We’ve been pretty busy at QZFL HQ, and are proud to announce the first round of distros who’ll be tabling with us on Sat Dec 8th:
- Cinnamon Buns https://www.facebook.com/CinnamonBunsFanzine
- Riots Not Diets https://www.facebook.com/riotsnotdietsbrighton
- Pink Mince http://pinkmince.com
Saw the opening of this show last night and it is AMAZING. Also: free.
On the whole, I am not a confident man, especially about my looks or my body. This is slowly getting worse as I get older, and I move further away from an optimum version of my self-image that I never quite achieved, and is now beyond my reach for good. The background of that is typical, tedious, and not worth getting into, but the overall effect is that I generally hate seeing pictures of myself, as they tend to reinforce what I already think. I’m still curious to see them, though, because from time to time they turn out alright, and I get a glimpse of a version of myself that I don’t loathe quite so much. Once in a while, a bit of external perspective makes me think there may be some promise left after all.
Last month, I had a chance to meet up with a photographer/artist/restaurateur named Martin, or Male®, as he goes by on the internet, while he was in London. Martin had contributed some great photos to Pink Mince a while back. We’d never met in person before, and he wanted to photograph my tattoos. We got on well enough, so strolled around a bit one afternoon and caught a show at the Barbican the next day, during which he’d occasionally stop me for a few portraits. (If you know me well enough, you can identify the expression I make when I’m self-conscious but trying to look calm, cool, and collected regardless.)
It’s been startling to see the results as they’ve trickled onto his blog since then. While I still cringe a little at the site of myself, I don’t actually dislike the composite portrait that is built up throughout the set. A little older, scrawnier, greyer than I’d care to see, but there’s character there, and I tend to forget about that. It helps that Martin’s skilled with a camera, and has chosen moments well. But that considered view from someone else who is seeing me with fewer preconceptions is refreshing. Maybe I’m not such a wreck after all?
Ask me again when I’m tired or particularly frustrated and I may change my thoughts altogether, but at the moment I’ll cling to a bit of good vibes. I spend so much time in my own head, where the outlook is often rather bleak, that it’s a pleasant change of pace to look in from the outside. Thanks for the brief taste of self-esteem, Martin!
Portrait of a self-publisher
untitled by male ® | 2012
Mr Dan Rhatigan from PINK MINCE
much more of him and Stunning PINK MINCE coming soon on GUAZINE!
I get irrationally excited when two seemingly unrelated things actually have an intersection I didn’t know about:
Booji Boy is a character created in the early 1970s by American New Wave band Devo. The name is pronounced “Boogie Boy”—the strange spelling “Booji” resulted when the band was using letraset to produce captions for a film, and ran out of the letter “g”. When the “i” was added but before the “e,” Devo lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh reportedly remarked that the odd spelling “looked right.”
The leather bars kept pushing farther and farther uptown until they reached Twenty-First Street and Eleventh Avenue with the Eagle’s Nest. There all the men seemed older and bearded and muscular and over six feet tall. At five foot ten I’d never felt short before except in Amsterdam. Now I was a shorty in my own city. To get from the West Village up to the Spike and the Eagle, gay men had to go past three blocks of projects on Ninth Avenue starting at Sixteenth Street. Gangs who lived in the projects would attack single gay men. We started wearing whistles around our necks to summon other gay men to our defense — a fairly effective system. I thought back to the fifties when everyone was a sissy boy with straightened hair, cologne, and a baby blue cashmere sweater and penny loafers. Back then we would have been terrified of gangs. Not anymore. Now many of us were taking judo classes.
— from City Boy by Edmund White
I have already mentioned — on quite a few occasions — an eccentric typographical experiment called Sodachrome that my friend Ian Moore and I designed for our friend Rathna. Ian and I have always been very proud of Sodachrome, but as a set of fonts it’s a design that is cumbersome to work with, and certainly the kind of a display typeface where a little of it goes a long way. So even though the design was finished years ago, it has languished a bit for lack of the proper outlet, aside from occasional licenses we granted (with instructions for how to deal with the tricky fonts) along the way when people asked.
Well, I’m pleased to announce that Sodachrome has finally found the perfect place to live: The Photo-Lettering collection, from my esteemed pals at House Industries. I’ve been a big fan of the PLINC collection and service right from the start, having awaited the launch for years after hearing the idea of it discussed at a conference.
PLINC includes a lot of superb, exuberant typefaces, but what has always been more interesting to me is its model. Rather than just offering licenses for display fonts that may only have limited utility, PLINC uses a custom-built typesetting engine to offer downloadable headline settings of just a few words at a time, much like the original Photo-Lettering company did with its massive phototype library. It’s a fascinating idea, and part of what got them a nomination for the Designs of the Year at London’s Design Museum.
What PLINC really accomplishes is the ability to play with colour and transparency to reveal what Sodachrome’s design is about, and make it much easier to implement that typical layout software. So yay! A match made in heaven.
Continue reading “A home for Sodachrome — at House Industries”
WHOA. It’s astonishing that such a random old ad — spotted on Dionne Warlock — could tap into such a well of memory. It’s not mental memory, really: I can’t really recall anything about where or when I would have seen this ad. Maybe it was in that one random copy of GQ i bought when I was about 13 or 14, or a catalog we had around the house. It’s kind of an emotional memory, I guess. I just remember this feeling of being utterly fascinated by these handsome men, at a point when I was way too young to make any sense of that. I stared at this picture A LOT.
I had a particular fascination with the guy on the left, who Google reminds me was Jeff Aquilon, a dude who is apparently considered one of the first male supermodels. He’s certainly handsome, but in a way that doesn’t inspire the same vivid reaction it did back when I didn’t quite even know what attraction felt like. It’s so weird to be reminded, in a gut sort of way, what that was like.
Oh! But here’s another ad I similarly recall, with a different guy, from the same source:
I bet I kept these in a scrapbook at one point. I can’t really remember, but I’m sure I must have had something like that when I was a wee lad.
Update: Another! 1983? Sounds about right. These must have all come from the same magazine, and I must have had one from the same time, if not the same magazine. This is really all too vivid.
I was a little obsessed with this movie and book during my formative years, for reasons I couldn’t — or wouldn’t — quite figure out at the time. I learned about sex by reading some incredibly graphic Outsiders fanfic written by a girl in my class when we were 12, which tells you a lot about how many stories you hear about Catholic school have some basis in fact.
Similarly, I was secretly fixated on this cover for this book, by the same author:
