In the summer of 2012, undergraduate student at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City, Yulan Grant, had the idea to make a zine. Her theme: a visual history of baby hairs, a technique of gel-sculpting the wispy hairs at one’s hairline, popular in Black and Latino culture. Given her studies in graphic design, she had no issue with the visuals, but needed writing. For this, she contacted her close friends and schoolmates at the affiliated Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, Brandon Owens and Justin Allen. Brandon wrote two haiku on the topic, and Justin, a piece of prose poetry. Before the end of the summer the zine was finished, copies printed. By fall, it had been included into traveling zine archive the POCZine Project.
Soon their zine, simply titled Baby Hair, would be traveling the country with the works of numerous other people of color that decided to bypass the publishing industry in favor of complete artistic freedom. But not before they were offered a gig by aspiring curator Johnny Sagan.
Early meetings with Sagan, under the curatorial name Snowy Wilderness, left both Grant and Allen in bewilderment. Tasks were listed off at a rapid pace and seemed both promising and abstract. The gig: Sagan, curating a series of art shows in collaboration with Brooklyn-based gallery Superchief at Lower East Side bar and gallery space Culturefix, had gotten a hold of a copy of Baby Hair and wanted Grant and Allen to produce in house zines to accompany the gallery shows. Their first project, a zine for House of Ladosha’s show THE WHOLE HOUSE EATS.
Amos Mac and Rocco Katastrophe, the founders and editors of the Brooklyn based trans male culture magazine Original Plumbing, have big plans for 2013 – and I’m not talking about the flashy 2.0 edition of their “Original” snapback that they’re selling online right now (see picture to the left by Amos with model Neon Ladosha). The duo has just launched a crowd-funding campaign to revive and extend the magazine’s website, which they’ve turned into a regularly updated web zine and online community platform for trans male culture over the past two years. With the growing amount of blogs posts and articles by great contributors or video projects such as the “Talk About It” campaign the site has now reached a point where according to its makers it not only needs a new coat of paint, but has to be rebuild and restructured from scratch + needs new editors to maintain it. Furthermore, Amos and Rocco are planning to extend the website into a platform that is able to represent the trans* community in its entirety, which would make it even more important than it already is. The relaunch is scheduled for April.
If you want to support this ambitious make-over project please donate generously via Indiegogo and you will be rewarded with great thank you gifts such as one-month free access to queer/trans* related video portals, collectable stickers of pop icons, the sold-out 1st edition of OP, handmade shirts & bags, a personal dance lesson by Jessica 6 choreographer Georgia Maxine Sanford or a private dinner with the OP makers. And if all of this doesn’t convince you, I’m pretty sure this official campaign video will:
Zine culture has been a little underrepresented on this blog in the last few months, but this doesn’t mean we haven’t kept our eyes and ears open for exciting publications from around the world. Here’s what we’ve found. To keep us updated about new online and print magazines and interesting zine projects feel free to contact us via contact@catch-fire.com!
Artist Felipe Bracelis has many talents, whether he designs digital origami out of porn pictures, models for kinky fanzines or curates exhibitions under his YESSR label in his hometown Santiago de Chile and in other places. Just recently he exported his curator skills to Canada, where he hosted YESSR4 “Flesh Garden” in collaboration with La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa. He’s currently working on pieces for a new solo show at the Acuadrado Gallery in Santiago, which will open in November 2012. For Catch Fire, Felipe has written a little introduction to his YESSR photo magazine, of which he has already published four issues and is dedicated to the motive of nude male amateur models in nature. Alongside with the text, you’ll also have the chance to take a look at some pictures of the fifth issue, which will be released in August.
I missed to do a proper write-up about the first issue of the San Francisco based Das Einhorn when I got it, but I hope I can make it up to editor Paul Bookstaber (former The Sword blogger) and his team by announcing that the second issue of the local slut culture guide for the indie type of gay guys and their friends is now officially available through http://daseinhorn.com. I haven’t ordered #2 yet, but the preview on the website reads as kinky and entertaining as the “The Pity Sex Issue”, and with a modest prize of 6 bucks you just can’t really go wrong – especially after the printed version of BUTT has shut down.
Amongst the contributors of the “Second Issue issue” of Das Einhorn are local Bay Area heroes such as Alexis Blair Penney and street artist Jeremy Novy, and I’m also really looking forward to another piece of writing by L.A. based blogger and Slick It Up designer David Mason (“House of Vader”), whose refreshly non-pc essay about the multiple facets of steroids in the first issue I really enjoyed. For more info check out the zine’s website or Facebook page.
Artist Zackary Drucker is currently finishing an experimental short movie project in collaboration with film maker Rhys Ernst and has now brought it to Kickstarter got raise money for the remaining production and post-production expenses. “She Gone Rogue” will premiere at the first Los Angeles biennial at the Hammer Museum and was shot at locations in Berlin, New York City, Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert and Crystal Lake, Pennsylvania, featuring appearances by legendary queer performers such as Holly Woodlawn, Vaginal Davis (who will also both be part of the Camp/Anti-Camp event in Berlin later this month) and Flawless Sabrina. Here comes the very entertaining trailer to this very promising looking project. You can donate here.
For even more Drucker you should get yourself the first issue of Translady Fanzine, a collaboration with photographer, performer and and co-founder of Original Plumbing magazineAmos Mac, which was published in an edition of 1.000 copies last year and is still available on the zine’s website and in a couple of bookshops in Europe and the US.
We Who Feel Differentlyis a beautifully designed internet project by Bogota born/ New York City based artist Carlos Motta, who has interviewed fifty queer thinkers, activists and artists from Colombia, Norway, South Korea and the United States about the history and current status of queer politics in their countries. All interviews can be streamed on the site in their original language and were also transcribed and translated into English. While they all reflect different views and approaches on topics such as sexual equality, social assimilation, gender politics, HIV/AIDS and queer arts, the project’s aim is to return to the idea of a “queer subjects” in a political sense, as Motta points out: “We Who Feel Differently attempts to reclaim a queer ‘We’ that values difference over sameness, a ‘We’ that resists assimilation, and a ‘We’ that embraces difference as a critical opportunity to construct a socially just world”. As a second step, Motta brings together the main questions and topics of the interviews in five thematic reflections, which were also released as a book with the same title last year and can be fully downloaded on the artist’s website. He also has edited the online magazine We Who Feel Differently Journal, which further investigates queer topics. The first one focusing on marriage was published in spring 2011 and can be downloaded on the website as well, I hope it wasn’t the last one.
You find more background information on WWFD by Motta himself this little video portrait of the artist by Brooklyn based filmmaker and visual artist Anna Barsan, who portrayed him for the queer online documentary project Signified (which gets its own post here very soon).
Headmaster, a biannual art magazine, was born last year out of a successful Kickstarter project and is based in Providence, Rhode Island. The zine’s nice concept is to give queer artists “homework assignments” to work on, the results are published in the latest issue. The projects of the 10 very different artists involved in the second issue released this July range from gorgeous paintings of Genet characters by artist Steve Locke to cute black-and-white under-the-shower pictures by German photographer Thomas Weidenhaupt, as well as pictures of a three-dimensional (and very fancy) “biography” of leather pioneer Jim Kane by fiber artist Steven Frost, a beautiful shooting of a hunky guy in a knit rugby uniform designed by artist Joseph Segal and the second episode of an ongoing story by my blogging colleaque and erotic writer Johnny Murdoc. Check it out, the 20$ are a good investment.
JIMMY is a beautifully designed and lovingly edited zine from Los Angeles, with the aim to “preserve and promote that special brand of gayness we do here in LA” – which means that fans of muscles and sun tanned bodies will be rather discappointed by this. Instead, the zine cultivates a certain indie chique I really like and focusses on the less highlighted sides of the gay live in the city. I only have the first issue entitled “Male Intimacy” so far, but find it really promising with stuff like an interview with indie band The Soft Pack‘s drummer Brian Hill, a gorgeous photo series of a cute guy called Jimbo (who does educational music for children), a couple of essays and short stories, and much more. The second issue entitled “The Greenwood” is out now, you should check out the zine’s website or its tumblr for a little preview. To buy JIMMY you have to invest 7$, a subscription with four issues is 24¢. You can order it online or get it in a whole bunch of book shops all around the world (you find a list on the website).
In a Western world where ‘gay culture’ seemingly melds into the candy floss of everyday pop music and is repackaged as a commodity of camp and fierceness, Chicago IRL is a refreshing take on the creativity of young queers. And it is a freshness that shouldn’t be geographically bound to the Windy City.
Christopher Schulz is the inventor and maker of Pinups magazine. “Seth”, his book with fictional drawings of Canadian actor Seth Rogen, whom Schulz describes as his “ideal Pinups model” in this nice interview with Future Shipwreck, was released in February. In another interview with New York Press he explained the project like this: “I wanted the book to be something entirely different [than Pinups]. By drawing again, I kind of returned to a past love from which I’d been far removed over the years… So, when I decided to give it a go with drawing, I really embraced and enjoyed working with raw materials again. It was liberating in many ways. I wanted this book to embody these feelings: I had it printed on this rough paper and I hand wrote, in pencil, the copyright info on the front and back pages. But, of course, I had it digitally scanned and reproduced for the final product”. You can buy a copy of “Seth” on the on the Pinups website. And if you have a little spare time I also recommend Schulz’s fabulously weird porn collages on his “Mopping is Stealing” tumblr.
hairline, popular in Black and Latino culture. Given her studies in graphic design, she had no issue with the visuals, but needed writing. For this, she contacted her close friends and schoolmates at the affiliated Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, Brandon Owens and Justin Allen. Brandon wrote two haiku on the topic, and Justin, a piece of prose poetry. Before the end of the summer the zine was finished, copies printed. By fall, it had been included into traveling zine archive the POCZine Project.
gotten a hold of a copy of Baby Hair and wanted Grant and Allen to produce in house zines to accompany the gallery shows. Their first project, a zine for House of Ladosha’s show THE WHOLE HOUSE EATS.
