Mind Maps

I've been reading about the 1848 revolutions and trying to decide if I'm going to Siberia or not. I sat at the cafe at Monument and the barista told me there was no charge for the coffee, for no particular reason. So that was nice, and I wrote a thankyou note on the cardboard bit of the cup and left it on the counter when her back was turned. So I can't show you that, but I can show you notes about 1848 and Caracalla the evil emperor, from a talk I went to tonight.

And WILL I go to Siberia? On my own, I don't know, but if I could persuade some friends to be at stops along the way...

It's my life.

Laura at Washington on 10th April,
and a zombie gingerbread man.

This pic is not from making a zine, just my daily scrapbook diary.

I am truly obsessive.

A blackbird fledgling was stuck on the ground in our yard for a day or two. Its mum kept visiting it, and this thoughtless brothersister here kept coming too, showing off how heshe had learnt how to fly and cheeping, thus calling attention for the sake of the local cats. Present locations unknown, but spring is FINE this year.

The paper jam collective are doing a music compilation combined with a comics anthology, in which people (like me, perhaps like you) draw 2 pages inspired by a local band's song. My first attempt was a kind of critical response to the casual terrorist's song "anarchists make better lovers" which is our guilty pleasure but which has some dubious lyrics. However, I have changed my mind about this now, and so this draft comic below is spare, loose, hanging (page 2 of 2):

I posted zines off to the USA today, & made sure the packaging was good-looking.

DIY cubed

A select group of us made postcards out of cut up stuff & chatted. A half dozen things set off thru the post.Mike at the cinema makes guitars out of planks of wood (DIY 1). Roger was asked to take it back to the west end on his bike (DIY 2) but had no bag, so he made this contraption out of bits of cardboard & string from behind the bar (DIY cubed).


When this postcard (below) arrived, however, almost all the text had been somehow rubbed off in the post. Compare what arrived (left) with a copy of what was sent (right).
So the only text remaining was this, on Hadrian's shoulder:
Which is a shame, because the beauty was in the detail, below, all from a free London paper to record a passage through the metropolis's streets and their history:
So think on the ideas that are lost in the post:

Mail Art this Saturday

Here's one of my new york postcards which made it okay thru the post to a friend:

Hi, this Saturday's creative-crafty session will definitely take place at the Star & Shadow (I had to cancel the last one), so if you fancy coming down for a cup of coffee and a play with scissors and glue and pens I will see you there!

The plan this week is to do mail art. This can be as simple as drawing a stick man on the back of an envelope you're going to post, to a full on masterpiece painted around the address label.

You need to bring:

- an address to send your mail art to! (remember that old friend...)
- any tools to help you (paints, stamps, wax, anything I might not have brought)

I will bring:

- postcards & addresses
- crayons, paint, pens etc..
- a few pre-stamped packages I need to send to America, which will be the focus of my decoration

Let me know if you might be there!
Mike

I'm part of a German exhibition

A couple of months ago I sent my old zines around the world to a half dozen places that archive or welcome zines for display. One of these places is having an exhibition including them, so if you happen to be in germany on the 8th may pop in to d21. I'll be at the band room in North Yorkshire, my favourite venue in the whole of the North East (& yes, I think that does include the inestimable star & shadow).
yay! my bothy zine visible at the D21 'thanks for sharing' exhibition! It made it!

My bits at DIY Aye 2010

So, 1st May, Star & Shadow Cinema in newcastle, one of the best events I've ever been part of. Here's my personal commitments this year:

Free Zine for each participant
- my latest zine is given free to each person coming through the door (until they run out!)

10 - 11am 'DIY breakfast'
- bring your own breakfast! eat it! Or there's a shop round the corner, or maybe you can make something out of the very cheap and skipped food which will be available on the bar counter at the start of the day? Bearing in mind there's no food license at the cinema, this will be 'interesting', maybe involving camp stoves in the back lanes. It is literally a 'do it yourself' deal.

11am onwards 'Zine stall'
- amongst the bookstalls, record stall, free shop and games table, I will have a zine stall with free zines and some pay-to-buy zines. There is still time to send me a bundle of your zines on sale or return.

12noon onwards 'Free Shop'
- including 24 strawberry plants from my allotment, ready for planting & cropping this year. Bring your unwanted junk to give away!

12.30-1.30 'North East Zine Conflab'
- basically just chatting about zines with other local folk. I might structure this around a couple of questions we each answer, or get us all to do a page for a collaborative zine or summat, let me know what you think. A rare chance to meet other local zinesters! (List of confirmed people to follow).

1.30-2.30 Kids Area
- not a creche, but a more child-friendly corner of the cinema than it is normally. I'll do a stint here, maybe playing with toys, maybe drawing or doing mazes, who knows!

2.30- 3pm '30 minute zine challenge!'
- One big table, lots of eager hands filled with pens and scissors, and one big stopclock. There is a race to make a zine, modelled on the 24 minute comic idea but with 6 minutes extra for faff & fussing about with glue n stuff.

'Freedom' with every coffee!
- A hundred or so years ago, in a far off radical cafe, they used to give away radical wobbly papers with hot drinks. To remember this, I'll give away this 100-year-old anarchist newspaper with your star n shadow hot drinks.

3 bundles of freedom in the post: I love getting mail.

Displays

1. Your Passports are Ready!
- in Autumn, I took deliberately bad photos of people, intended to be unuseable according to the official UK passport photo rules (shadows on face, wearing dark glasses etc..). I will finally have them ready for collection during DIY Aye, in time to not use for a summer holiday.

2. DIY film-making without using a projector or film camera!
- ha! sounds grand, doesn't it, perhaps some techie free software digital gubbins. But no, it's just a series of split-frame still photos from the number 12 bus on its way from Arthurs Hill to the Star & Shadow.

3. What to do with my rhubarb?
- No matter how little I care for it, water, weed or feed it, every year my rhubarb comes back brimming with life and vigour. I don't know what to do with it, no sooner do I crop it than it produces another 5 meals-worth of growth. So I will offer up my weekly rhubarb harvest and ask for tips on what the hell to do with it.

Zine Trail at Washington Arts Centre

In 40 minutes time it is the 10th of April, a marvellous day for local music, the Cluny the Cumberland the Star & Shadow & apparently some bonkers event in Blyth. I will spend most of the day in Washington, a nowhere place really, but with an arts centre that puts on interesting stuff. Leonie's organised an impressive small press event & I'm contributing a zine trail.

Out of convenient laziness, I haven't made the trail specific to the building in the way that I did for the Star & shadow one, but this does mean it could be reusable in the future if ever I haven't time to make a new trail!

It's very simple, small, entirely child-friendly, & reflects my day's interest in local dialect words (although I didn't make these totally authentic or local to Washington).


& according to the P.R.E.S.S. blog above:

"Mike Duckett created a wonderful zine trail that lead visitors around the arts centre and allowed them to build up a zine based around local dialect."So there you go.