review by John W. Herbert
Titanic! The story of a ship and an iceberg and the ruinous gluttony of the British Empire!
Titanic! The story of the heroic German first officer who saved the day!
Titanic! The story of the obviously Jewish ship owner, who bet his fortune on the speed of his ship and almost paid with his life!
Titanic! In the original German with subtitles!
No, this isn’t James Cameron’s epic 1996 Titanic, it’s a 1943 German propaganda film of the same name.
Unlike Cameron’s film which puts fictional characters into the story while remaining true to historical facts, this version uses the basic story of iceberg meets ship to hang a propaganda-filled, greed-driven plot on.
Bruce Ismay and the other owners of Titanic and the White Star Line have hatched a plot where they will buy millions of shares of White Star stock before and during the voyage. Ismay will force Captain Smith to speed up and make the crossing in record time, and they’ll make a killing when the stock value goes up. An interesting idea to be sure, but it’s not the least bit factual. (And it doesn’t help that Ismay is portrayed as Jewish when he wasn’t.)
Newly arrived on Titanic is First Officer Peterson, newly transferred from Germany, and lucky for the passengers he did, because he seems to be the only competent officer on the ship. The heroic Peterson manages to dress down the Captain, reconcile with an old flame, launch lifeboats single-handedly, survive the sinking, rescue a child from the water and denounce the British Empire at a Parliamentary inquiry into the sinking. Not bad for an 85 minute film. At least he isn’t blonde.
Despite the questionable taste of the propaganda aspects of the film and its wild historical inaccuracies, Titanic does manage to hold its own as a film. Its lavish sets and costumes (many inaccurate, but nonetheless spectacular) can only make one wonder how a country paying for a war against the rest of the world could afford a production like this.
The sinking sequences are well done and exciting, and the special effects are fine for its time. (In fact some shots were nicked and used in 1959’s A Night To Remember.)
An interesting oddity, the 1943 version of Titanic is worth a look. And Titanic buffs should note the DVD contains an excellent collection of actual 1912 Titanic newsreel coverage.
The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat
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Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq, and the Future of the Dollar
by William R. Clark
review by E.B.Klassen
What drove Amerika into Iraq? William R. Clark, in his book Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq, and the future of the Dollar suggests (and makes a pretty solid case, too) that Amerikan criminality is based on the fear of losing its pre-eminent status as the world’s last remaining superpower. The problem is that the foundation of Amerika’s status is merely some awfully thin ice—ice made thinner by the fascists currently in office.
This is about more than oil—although oil is essential to Amerikan hegemony. Oil is bought and paid for in Amerikan dollars, and those Amerikan dollars are the world’s currency of last resort. If everything falls apart, the $US is supposed to remain standing, and the Federal Reserve said back in the early eighties that if all else fails, they will just keep printing dollars until everything is paid off—all Amerikan international debt, all debt denominated in Amerikan dollars.
Because right now Amerika is living in a massive debt bubble—China alone holds over $1.7 trillion in Federal debt instruments and could crash the whole system simply by converting the lot over to euros. The dollar has declined over the last four years—seen here in Canada as the rise in the Canadian dollar against the Amerikan, and the euro has strengthened. But worldwide we have far too much productive capability, and not enough ability to consume, and this overhang is starting to scare the crap out of the holders of real money.
The current system is (almost) holding together. Oil sales denominated in Amerikan dollars and held by Amerikan financial institutions have managed to support Amerikan consumption. But then Saddam Hussein gets snarly; under the oil for food program, he requests that payment no longer be made in the dollar of the Great Satan, but be denominated in euros. Turns out to be a great financial idea made for political reasons. By denominating in the euro, Iraq sees a couple of hundred million dollars extra—free money just for using the euro. And don’t think this isn’t noticed by the rest of the region; the Saudi’s know all about this, but have made their own separate peace with the Great Satan, and are funnelling their excess dollars back into the Amerikan economy (70% of Saudi Arabia’s petrodollar wealth is invested in the US). But for this and other crimes (like having Amerikan oil inconveniently under their country and making deals to sell it to Russia and European countries rather than the Amerikan ones), the Iranians pay a heavy price; they suffer the extension of Amerikan hegemony.
But Iran notices; they announce a new oil bourse (a stock exchange for securities trading) in 2002 to be up and running by 2005 that will offer an oil marker denominated in euros—just like the $US-denominated marker of West Texas crude. Funny how they are now in the crosshairs, isn’t it?
William Clark doesn’t claim that what currency petrodollars are denominated in is the sole reason behind the illegal invasion of Iraq; but he does make a strong case that this was a significant reason behind it. Some writers, most recently Gwynne Dyer, don’t buy it. A recent Dyer article basically says that this Amerikan administration is simply too stupid to pay attention to esoteric financial concerns, and makes a strong case for this view. But this administration’s partners, this cabal of the super-rich, this loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires that rely on the dominance of the Amerikan dollar, they notice. And they have both a confluence of desire and the world’s largest and best equipped mercenary force at their disposal. And what the hell, they’ve been using it for just this kind of bullshit since forever, so what’s one more country destroyed to serve their interests? The rest, we say, is history.
review by E.B.Klassen
What drove Amerika into Iraq? William R. Clark, in his book Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq, and the future of the Dollar suggests (and makes a pretty solid case, too) that Amerikan criminality is based on the fear of losing its pre-eminent status as the world’s last remaining superpower. The problem is that the foundation of Amerika’s status is merely some awfully thin ice—ice made thinner by the fascists currently in office.
This is about more than oil—although oil is essential to Amerikan hegemony. Oil is bought and paid for in Amerikan dollars, and those Amerikan dollars are the world’s currency of last resort. If everything falls apart, the $US is supposed to remain standing, and the Federal Reserve said back in the early eighties that if all else fails, they will just keep printing dollars until everything is paid off—all Amerikan international debt, all debt denominated in Amerikan dollars.
Because right now Amerika is living in a massive debt bubble—China alone holds over $1.7 trillion in Federal debt instruments and could crash the whole system simply by converting the lot over to euros. The dollar has declined over the last four years—seen here in Canada as the rise in the Canadian dollar against the Amerikan, and the euro has strengthened. But worldwide we have far too much productive capability, and not enough ability to consume, and this overhang is starting to scare the crap out of the holders of real money.
The current system is (almost) holding together. Oil sales denominated in Amerikan dollars and held by Amerikan financial institutions have managed to support Amerikan consumption. But then Saddam Hussein gets snarly; under the oil for food program, he requests that payment no longer be made in the dollar of the Great Satan, but be denominated in euros. Turns out to be a great financial idea made for political reasons. By denominating in the euro, Iraq sees a couple of hundred million dollars extra—free money just for using the euro. And don’t think this isn’t noticed by the rest of the region; the Saudi’s know all about this, but have made their own separate peace with the Great Satan, and are funnelling their excess dollars back into the Amerikan economy (70% of Saudi Arabia’s petrodollar wealth is invested in the US). But for this and other crimes (like having Amerikan oil inconveniently under their country and making deals to sell it to Russia and European countries rather than the Amerikan ones), the Iranians pay a heavy price; they suffer the extension of Amerikan hegemony.
But Iran notices; they announce a new oil bourse (a stock exchange for securities trading) in 2002 to be up and running by 2005 that will offer an oil marker denominated in euros—just like the $US-denominated marker of West Texas crude. Funny how they are now in the crosshairs, isn’t it?
William Clark doesn’t claim that what currency petrodollars are denominated in is the sole reason behind the illegal invasion of Iraq; but he does make a strong case that this was a significant reason behind it. Some writers, most recently Gwynne Dyer, don’t buy it. A recent Dyer article basically says that this Amerikan administration is simply too stupid to pay attention to esoteric financial concerns, and makes a strong case for this view. But this administration’s partners, this cabal of the super-rich, this loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires that rely on the dominance of the Amerikan dollar, they notice. And they have both a confluence of desire and the world’s largest and best equipped mercenary force at their disposal. And what the hell, they’ve been using it for just this kind of bullshit since forever, so what’s one more country destroyed to serve their interests? The rest, we say, is history.
Man With the Screaming Brain
review by John W. Herbert
B-movie king Bruce Campbell stars in (and co-wrote and directed) Man With the Screaming Brain. Campbell plays an American businessman who, along with his wife, is in Bulagria for a business meeting. He’s the typical "ugly American," loud, impatient an dimpolite. His marrige is on the rocks, and he doesn’t help matters by flirting with a mysterious gypsy woman. His wife helps even less by giving their cab driver an extra big tip. It turns out that the cab driver was engaged to the gypsy, resulting in all manner of murder and mayhem. Fortunately, the bodies end up in the hands of a mad Bulgarian scientist (Stacey Keach(?!)) who (with his Russian assistant played by Ted Raimi) has a knack for transplanting brains and resurrecting bodies.
Essentially, this is pretty silly stuff. It gives Bruce Campbell a chance to do his best Steve Martin impression, and his character ends up sharing his brain with his wife’s lover, the cab driver. Shot on location in Bulgaria, the film has pretty good production values for a film of with a limited budget.
There’s a good number of extras for a low budget movie. There’s some behind the scenes docs, but the best one is a short feature where Campbell and his writing partner chart the 20+ years it took to get this film made. This was worth the price of the DVD all by itself.
Nothing in the film is overly impressive, yet nothing is really embarrassing either. Well, maybe Ted Raimi’s version of Russian rapping. Thankfully, it’s short. Otherwise, it’s a solid and enjoyable, fun B-movie.
B-movie king Bruce Campbell stars in (and co-wrote and directed) Man With the Screaming Brain. Campbell plays an American businessman who, along with his wife, is in Bulagria for a business meeting. He’s the typical "ugly American," loud, impatient an dimpolite. His marrige is on the rocks, and he doesn’t help matters by flirting with a mysterious gypsy woman. His wife helps even less by giving their cab driver an extra big tip. It turns out that the cab driver was engaged to the gypsy, resulting in all manner of murder and mayhem. Fortunately, the bodies end up in the hands of a mad Bulgarian scientist (Stacey Keach(?!)) who (with his Russian assistant played by Ted Raimi) has a knack for transplanting brains and resurrecting bodies.
Essentially, this is pretty silly stuff. It gives Bruce Campbell a chance to do his best Steve Martin impression, and his character ends up sharing his brain with his wife’s lover, the cab driver. Shot on location in Bulgaria, the film has pretty good production values for a film of with a limited budget.
There’s a good number of extras for a low budget movie. There’s some behind the scenes docs, but the best one is a short feature where Campbell and his writing partner chart the 20+ years it took to get this film made. This was worth the price of the DVD all by itself.
Nothing in the film is overly impressive, yet nothing is really embarrassing either. Well, maybe Ted Raimi’s version of Russian rapping. Thankfully, it’s short. Otherwise, it’s a solid and enjoyable, fun B-movie.
Lost - Season One
review by John W. Herbert
Imagine being marooned on a desert island in a plane crash with forty-plus other people. The plane was off-course, no one knows where you are. You’re running out of food, water, supplies. Things look grim. Slowly you discover that some of the people on the island with you are not what they appear to be. Even worse, the same is true of the island. You are well and truly Lost.
Season One of Lost, now out on DVD, sets up what may be the beginning of a long-running tv show (or maybe not — more on that later). As our castaways try to survive, they learn that some sort of unseen monster prowls the island, and that others are on the island.
The show is basically a gimmick show, with two great gimmicks. The first gimmick is the dramatic structure of the show which is a terrific idea. While we follow the adventures of our stranded castaways, we also relive moments of their lives in flashbacks. Why were each of these people of that particular flight? The flashbacks are a great way of filling in the backstory of the characters. We, as the audience, learn so much about these characters, way more in fact than the rest of the islanders do, and we understand a character’s motivation for doing something, even when their comrades do not. A brilliant conceit and it makes for riveting television.
Number two, the island itself holds many secrets and mysteries. What about the hatch? What’s with the polar bears? Who are the others? What’s up with the invisible monster? Is the kid psychic or telekinetic? And this is the gimmick which may be the show’s downfall.
A show relying on a mystery or a gimmick to survive may collapse under the weight of its own backstory (witness The X-Files). If you’re not playing fair with your audience and revealing some of the mystery of the island, your audience will leave you, um, deserted.
This season’s Lost ratings are suffering. Could it be that the gimmick has worn off already? Only time will tell.
Imagine being marooned on a desert island in a plane crash with forty-plus other people. The plane was off-course, no one knows where you are. You’re running out of food, water, supplies. Things look grim. Slowly you discover that some of the people on the island with you are not what they appear to be. Even worse, the same is true of the island. You are well and truly Lost.
Season One of Lost, now out on DVD, sets up what may be the beginning of a long-running tv show (or maybe not — more on that later). As our castaways try to survive, they learn that some sort of unseen monster prowls the island, and that others are on the island.
The show is basically a gimmick show, with two great gimmicks. The first gimmick is the dramatic structure of the show which is a terrific idea. While we follow the adventures of our stranded castaways, we also relive moments of their lives in flashbacks. Why were each of these people of that particular flight? The flashbacks are a great way of filling in the backstory of the characters. We, as the audience, learn so much about these characters, way more in fact than the rest of the islanders do, and we understand a character’s motivation for doing something, even when their comrades do not. A brilliant conceit and it makes for riveting television.
Number two, the island itself holds many secrets and mysteries. What about the hatch? What’s with the polar bears? Who are the others? What’s up with the invisible monster? Is the kid psychic or telekinetic? And this is the gimmick which may be the show’s downfall.
A show relying on a mystery or a gimmick to survive may collapse under the weight of its own backstory (witness The X-Files). If you’re not playing fair with your audience and revealing some of the mystery of the island, your audience will leave you, um, deserted.
This season’s Lost ratings are suffering. Could it be that the gimmick has worn off already? Only time will tell.
The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
by James Howard Kunstler
review by E.B.Klassen
The Long Emergency is James Kunstler’s hard-eyed view of the advent of the post-oil world—the world whose resource wars have finally come out in the open with the invasion of Iraq. Kunstler spends a lot of time on the history of oil in Amerika, and particularly the calculations of the Hubbard Peak. M. King Hubbert was the Amerikan geologist who devised the math used to calculate the life of oil fields. He later extended this to calculate the points of peak discovery and peak production in the US and later, the world. And, in case you hadn’t guessed, global oil production is due to peak right about...now. Actually, the best guess is between 2000 and 2008, so we’re likely past peak right now.
Kunstler then goes on to consider how much of modern global industrial society is fossil fuel based—and the answer,of course, is all of it. As peak production occurs quite late in the life of an oil field (followed by a precipitous decline in recovery), his thesis is that this is it, this is the nuclear weapon at the heart of the modern world that’s going to blow it all apart—and probably before the end of the century. Likely before the halfway point, in fact.
Even without factoring in global warming and emergent diseases, Kunstler figures we’re done. Once you add those two in to the mix, well, let’s just say that a massive die-back seems to be in the cards. And that 90 to 95 percent mortality rate may not be out of line.
The biggest problem is that all our possible replacements for oil are ultimately fossil fuel based; the alloys needed to build decent wind generators, for example, need a fossil fuel based economy to create them. And needs one to place the generators and use them. Ditto for solar cells, and pretty much everything else.
Kunstler sees the demise of the cities as being already underway—except in Europe, which has been unable to pursue suburbanization the way Amerika has. And Kunstler hates suburbia—having written two books already about it: The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere—he sees it as the worst idea to have ever come out of Amerika. And without cheap gas, suburbia is untenable.
Kunstler, being Amerikan, does occasionally collapse in to an unconscious Amerikan-centric and jingoistic world view. Understandable, but frustrating nonetheless. He wants to keep Amerika and Amerikans alive as much as possible—even though he doesn’t see just how that can possibly happen—and so he shies away from stating the clear conclusion of his book; that (as in Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up) the destruction of Amerika may not be the worst thing for the planet. The hellish thing is that so much of the rest of the planet is going to go with it.
review by E.B.Klassen
The Long Emergency is James Kunstler’s hard-eyed view of the advent of the post-oil world—the world whose resource wars have finally come out in the open with the invasion of Iraq. Kunstler spends a lot of time on the history of oil in Amerika, and particularly the calculations of the Hubbard Peak. M. King Hubbert was the Amerikan geologist who devised the math used to calculate the life of oil fields. He later extended this to calculate the points of peak discovery and peak production in the US and later, the world. And, in case you hadn’t guessed, global oil production is due to peak right about...now. Actually, the best guess is between 2000 and 2008, so we’re likely past peak right now.
Kunstler then goes on to consider how much of modern global industrial society is fossil fuel based—and the answer,of course, is all of it. As peak production occurs quite late in the life of an oil field (followed by a precipitous decline in recovery), his thesis is that this is it, this is the nuclear weapon at the heart of the modern world that’s going to blow it all apart—and probably before the end of the century. Likely before the halfway point, in fact.
Even without factoring in global warming and emergent diseases, Kunstler figures we’re done. Once you add those two in to the mix, well, let’s just say that a massive die-back seems to be in the cards. And that 90 to 95 percent mortality rate may not be out of line.
The biggest problem is that all our possible replacements for oil are ultimately fossil fuel based; the alloys needed to build decent wind generators, for example, need a fossil fuel based economy to create them. And needs one to place the generators and use them. Ditto for solar cells, and pretty much everything else.
Kunstler sees the demise of the cities as being already underway—except in Europe, which has been unable to pursue suburbanization the way Amerika has. And Kunstler hates suburbia—having written two books already about it: The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere—he sees it as the worst idea to have ever come out of Amerika. And without cheap gas, suburbia is untenable.
Kunstler, being Amerikan, does occasionally collapse in to an unconscious Amerikan-centric and jingoistic world view. Understandable, but frustrating nonetheless. He wants to keep Amerika and Amerikans alive as much as possible—even though he doesn’t see just how that can possibly happen—and so he shies away from stating the clear conclusion of his book; that (as in Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up) the destruction of Amerika may not be the worst thing for the planet. The hellish thing is that so much of the rest of the planet is going to go with it.
King Kong (1933)
review by John W. Herbert
It’s been years since I’ve seen the original King Kong, I gotta tell ya, this film rocks!
The new special edition DVD features the fully restored 1933 cut (not the 1938 "censored cut" which most casual viewers would be familiar with), and it looks gorgeous. It probably hasn’t looked or sounded this good since its original release.
And yes, the acting is a bit over the top, the dialogue a bit corny, and the special effects don’t hold a candle to what can be done today, but 70 years later, it still holds together remarkably well. The plot, as if you didn’t know, concerns a film-maker who’s heard rumors that some thing exists on a south sea island. He takes his camera crew and a young ingénue (Canada’s own Fay Wray) to the island and discovers the thing is Kong, a giant ape. He plans to use Wray’s character as bait to lure Kong into capture, and then showcase the ape in a traveling show and make millions. The plan goes wrong as Kong falls in love with the bait, and trying to find her, escapes in New York, causing mayhem and death.
The film is full of classic cinema images and moments. And being the 1933 version, many scenes of violence have been restored. Kong was vicious and brutal.
The special effects, for their time, are staggering. This was the Star Wars of 1933. No one had ever seen anything like this. The film-makers who trace their inspiration back to Willis O’Brien’s 18-ich tall Kong miniature are too numerous to mention, but some that are featured on the supplements are Peter Jackson, Ken Ralston, Bob Burns, Rick Baker, Ben Burtt, and Ray Harryhausen. And speaking of supplements, there’s an hour-long biography of Merion C. Cooper, who produced Kong, and a nearly three-hour documentary on the film itself. Considering that almost no behind the scenes material exists from the actual production itself and that hardly anyone involved is still alive, the documentary does a fine job showing how the film was made.
If you haven’t seen Kong in a while, and remember it as being hokey, well, yes, you’re right. But Kong still has the power to overcome all the pitfalls that a 70 year-old movie has for a 21st century audience. Yes, it’s cheesy, over-acted, hammy dialogue, with cheap sets, and crude special effects. It still works, and works brilliantly. Check it out. You owe it to yourself. And Kong.
It’s been years since I’ve seen the original King Kong, I gotta tell ya, this film rocks!
The new special edition DVD features the fully restored 1933 cut (not the 1938 "censored cut" which most casual viewers would be familiar with), and it looks gorgeous. It probably hasn’t looked or sounded this good since its original release.
And yes, the acting is a bit over the top, the dialogue a bit corny, and the special effects don’t hold a candle to what can be done today, but 70 years later, it still holds together remarkably well. The plot, as if you didn’t know, concerns a film-maker who’s heard rumors that some thing exists on a south sea island. He takes his camera crew and a young ingénue (Canada’s own Fay Wray) to the island and discovers the thing is Kong, a giant ape. He plans to use Wray’s character as bait to lure Kong into capture, and then showcase the ape in a traveling show and make millions. The plan goes wrong as Kong falls in love with the bait, and trying to find her, escapes in New York, causing mayhem and death.
The film is full of classic cinema images and moments. And being the 1933 version, many scenes of violence have been restored. Kong was vicious and brutal.
The special effects, for their time, are staggering. This was the Star Wars of 1933. No one had ever seen anything like this. The film-makers who trace their inspiration back to Willis O’Brien’s 18-ich tall Kong miniature are too numerous to mention, but some that are featured on the supplements are Peter Jackson, Ken Ralston, Bob Burns, Rick Baker, Ben Burtt, and Ray Harryhausen. And speaking of supplements, there’s an hour-long biography of Merion C. Cooper, who produced Kong, and a nearly three-hour documentary on the film itself. Considering that almost no behind the scenes material exists from the actual production itself and that hardly anyone involved is still alive, the documentary does a fine job showing how the film was made.
If you haven’t seen Kong in a while, and remember it as being hokey, well, yes, you’re right. But Kong still has the power to overcome all the pitfalls that a 70 year-old movie has for a 21st century audience. Yes, it’s cheesy, over-acted, hammy dialogue, with cheap sets, and crude special effects. It still works, and works brilliantly. Check it out. You owe it to yourself. And Kong.
It's the Crude, Dude
by Linda McQuaig
review by John W. Herbert
Linda McQuaig’s new book It’s the Crude, Dude highlights America preoccupation (no pun intended) with securing Middle East oil. It’s a well-written, shameful indictment of post-war American foreign policy.
But the real question is will anyone who reads it change their mind?
I call it the “Michael Moore syndrome.” I’ve read all of Moore’s books, and own all his movies (yes, even The Big One. And you’ve got to be a fan in order to sit through that one! But I digress.) So to me, Michael Moore is preaching to the choir. But what worries me is that Moore, and McQuaig with her book, is preaching only to the choir.
As much as I love them, did any right-winger come out of Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11 with their mind changed? I doubt it.
Mind you, it’s not like I’m going to read Ann Coulter and suddenly say, “My god, the leftist dogma dribble that I’ve been following my whole life is so utterly, utterly wrong!”
review by John W. Herbert
Linda McQuaig’s new book It’s the Crude, Dude highlights America preoccupation (no pun intended) with securing Middle East oil. It’s a well-written, shameful indictment of post-war American foreign policy.
But the real question is will anyone who reads it change their mind?
I call it the “Michael Moore syndrome.” I’ve read all of Moore’s books, and own all his movies (yes, even The Big One. And you’ve got to be a fan in order to sit through that one! But I digress.) So to me, Michael Moore is preaching to the choir. But what worries me is that Moore, and McQuaig with her book, is preaching only to the choir.
As much as I love them, did any right-winger come out of Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11 with their mind changed? I doubt it.
Mind you, it’s not like I’m going to read Ann Coulter and suddenly say, “My god, the leftist dogma dribble that I’ve been following my whole life is so utterly, utterly wrong!”
Imperial Ambitions-Conversations on the Post 9-11 World
by Noam Chomsky
review by E.B.Klassen
So I lay in bed this morning finishing the latest Noam Chomsky book: Imperial Ambitions-Conversations on the Post 9-11 World. This is another in the series of books based around Chomsky’s conversations with David Barsamian, where the conversation is transcribed, edited by Chomsky, footnotes are added, and the whole is then published. I’ve read a number of books by NC over the last couple of years (what, a dozen or more?) and this one has to be the most angry one I’ve read. Which, considering that NC persistently takes the most neutral-sounding tones when saying the most outrageous things about the Amerikan Empire, is really saying something.
"The United States is basically what’s called a "failed state." It has formal democratic institutions, but they barely function."(page 198). This is just one of the casual comments that NC tosses off that really is the result of an amazing rejection of the cultural conditioning and propaganda that an Amerikan citizen is subjected to. It is clear that Amerika is a failed democracy when you are not an Amerikan citizen—in fact, NC suggests that it might be nice if Amerika could achieve the democratic advancement of Brazil, or maybe Haiti, as both countries have managed to elect leaders who are clearly not members of the ruling elite (Aristide in Haiti, and Lula in Brazil). That outside/foreign observers where in place to monitor the last presidential elections speaks volumes for the sad state of Amerikan democracy.
That Amerikan democracy has failed so badly, even with the unprecedented commitment to free speech and right of assembly that Amerikans have, is astonishing. Chomsky attributes much of this failure to the development of propaganda under such people as Walter Lippmann (credited with the phrase "manufacturing consent") and Edward Bernays (who said that "the more intelligent members of the community can direct the population through "the engineering of consent," which he considered "the very essence of the democratic process").
"It’s interesting to look back at the 1920s, when the public relations industry really began. This was the period of Taylorism in industry, when workers were being trained to become robots and every single motion was controlled and regulated. Taylorism created highly efficient industry, with human beings being turned into automata. The Bolsheviks were very impressed with Taylorism, too, and tried to duplicate it, as did others throughout the world. But the thought-control experts soon realized that you could not only what was called "on-job control" but also "off-job control." It’s a fine phrase. Off-job control means turning people into robots in every part of their lives by inducing a "philosophy of futility," focusing people on "the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption." Let the people who are supposed to run the show do so without any interference from the mass of the population, who have no business in the public arena. And from that idea grew enormous industries, ranging from advertising to universities, all very consciously committed to the belief that you must control attitudes and opinions, because the people are otherwise just too dangerous.
Actually, there are good constitutional sources for this view of the public. The founding of the country [Amerika] was based on the Madisonian principle that the people are just too dangerous: power has to be in the hands of what Madison called "the wealth of the nation," people who respect property and its rights and are willing to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," which has to be fragmented somehow." (pp. 21-22)
All of which lends support to my feeling that democracy is not only in deep trouble, but is an ongoing and unfinished revolution in world affairs. Thus my support for the right of Quebecois to decide on separation. Not that I support Quebec separatism (in fact I figure that the leaders of the BQ and PQ are evil and cynical opportunists using the above techniques for their own ends at the expense of the citizenry of Quebec). But I do support the right of people to decide on how they shall be ruled. Hell, Rome reserved the right to elect a tyrant for a set term of office(even though it usually went very badly when they did...).
This is one of the greatest crimes of the Bush II administration; not their disdain for democracy—that has been bog standard for Amerika for at least the last century. It’s that they’ve gone completely rogue, destroying the international structures that were actually working to reduce conflict worldwide, that were actually increasing self-determination in wildly diverse populations about the globe. Chile is slowly managing to bring sociopathic monster Augusto Pinochet to trial—hopefully before he dies and the point becomes moot. Hugo Chávez respects the reactionary courts in his country and does not prosecute the military officers who participated in the Amerikan-backed coup against his democratically elected government. Even South Africa, where the ANC managed to most amazing transition of power with a minimum of violence and recrimination.
One can’t even imagine such a shift of power in Amerika. Or respect for the law like in Chile and Venezuela. Amerika, and this is mentioned in Imperial Ambitions, is a nation that is extremely susceptible to fear. And pretty much every time it’s a fear of a group or population upon whose neck the Amerikan boot is pretty firmly placed. The destroyed, militarily insignificant Iraq, Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada. Each of these in turn has been seen (and sold) as a terrific threat to Amerika, a dagger pointed at its heart. And it has never been true, but the Amerikan public buys it—or at least enough to allow the jackboots of the Amerikan military to be planted on foreign soil.
So what to do, what to do. The answers are fairly simple—and fairly complex. But it all boils down to organize. Locally into small affinity groups, unions, discussion circles. Nationally into demanding our political parties begin respecting the democratic will of the people (a tricky balancing act, admittedly. Too nationalistic and the air raid sirens will be going off in Canada next). And internationally to continue organizing structures of law that will hold all imperial ambitions in check. So, you know, not really anything much has to be done....
originally published in Under the Ozone Hole #18
review by E.B.Klassen
So I lay in bed this morning finishing the latest Noam Chomsky book: Imperial Ambitions-Conversations on the Post 9-11 World. This is another in the series of books based around Chomsky’s conversations with David Barsamian, where the conversation is transcribed, edited by Chomsky, footnotes are added, and the whole is then published. I’ve read a number of books by NC over the last couple of years (what, a dozen or more?) and this one has to be the most angry one I’ve read. Which, considering that NC persistently takes the most neutral-sounding tones when saying the most outrageous things about the Amerikan Empire, is really saying something.
"The United States is basically what’s called a "failed state." It has formal democratic institutions, but they barely function."(page 198). This is just one of the casual comments that NC tosses off that really is the result of an amazing rejection of the cultural conditioning and propaganda that an Amerikan citizen is subjected to. It is clear that Amerika is a failed democracy when you are not an Amerikan citizen—in fact, NC suggests that it might be nice if Amerika could achieve the democratic advancement of Brazil, or maybe Haiti, as both countries have managed to elect leaders who are clearly not members of the ruling elite (Aristide in Haiti, and Lula in Brazil). That outside/foreign observers where in place to monitor the last presidential elections speaks volumes for the sad state of Amerikan democracy.
That Amerikan democracy has failed so badly, even with the unprecedented commitment to free speech and right of assembly that Amerikans have, is astonishing. Chomsky attributes much of this failure to the development of propaganda under such people as Walter Lippmann (credited with the phrase "manufacturing consent") and Edward Bernays (who said that "the more intelligent members of the community can direct the population through "the engineering of consent," which he considered "the very essence of the democratic process").
"It’s interesting to look back at the 1920s, when the public relations industry really began. This was the period of Taylorism in industry, when workers were being trained to become robots and every single motion was controlled and regulated. Taylorism created highly efficient industry, with human beings being turned into automata. The Bolsheviks were very impressed with Taylorism, too, and tried to duplicate it, as did others throughout the world. But the thought-control experts soon realized that you could not only what was called "on-job control" but also "off-job control." It’s a fine phrase. Off-job control means turning people into robots in every part of their lives by inducing a "philosophy of futility," focusing people on "the superficial things of life, like fashionable consumption." Let the people who are supposed to run the show do so without any interference from the mass of the population, who have no business in the public arena. And from that idea grew enormous industries, ranging from advertising to universities, all very consciously committed to the belief that you must control attitudes and opinions, because the people are otherwise just too dangerous.
Actually, there are good constitutional sources for this view of the public. The founding of the country [Amerika] was based on the Madisonian principle that the people are just too dangerous: power has to be in the hands of what Madison called "the wealth of the nation," people who respect property and its rights and are willing to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," which has to be fragmented somehow." (pp. 21-22)
All of which lends support to my feeling that democracy is not only in deep trouble, but is an ongoing and unfinished revolution in world affairs. Thus my support for the right of Quebecois to decide on separation. Not that I support Quebec separatism (in fact I figure that the leaders of the BQ and PQ are evil and cynical opportunists using the above techniques for their own ends at the expense of the citizenry of Quebec). But I do support the right of people to decide on how they shall be ruled. Hell, Rome reserved the right to elect a tyrant for a set term of office(even though it usually went very badly when they did...).
This is one of the greatest crimes of the Bush II administration; not their disdain for democracy—that has been bog standard for Amerika for at least the last century. It’s that they’ve gone completely rogue, destroying the international structures that were actually working to reduce conflict worldwide, that were actually increasing self-determination in wildly diverse populations about the globe. Chile is slowly managing to bring sociopathic monster Augusto Pinochet to trial—hopefully before he dies and the point becomes moot. Hugo Chávez respects the reactionary courts in his country and does not prosecute the military officers who participated in the Amerikan-backed coup against his democratically elected government. Even South Africa, where the ANC managed to most amazing transition of power with a minimum of violence and recrimination.
One can’t even imagine such a shift of power in Amerika. Or respect for the law like in Chile and Venezuela. Amerika, and this is mentioned in Imperial Ambitions, is a nation that is extremely susceptible to fear. And pretty much every time it’s a fear of a group or population upon whose neck the Amerikan boot is pretty firmly placed. The destroyed, militarily insignificant Iraq, Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada. Each of these in turn has been seen (and sold) as a terrific threat to Amerika, a dagger pointed at its heart. And it has never been true, but the Amerikan public buys it—or at least enough to allow the jackboots of the Amerikan military to be planted on foreign soil.
So what to do, what to do. The answers are fairly simple—and fairly complex. But it all boils down to organize. Locally into small affinity groups, unions, discussion circles. Nationally into demanding our political parties begin respecting the democratic will of the people (a tricky balancing act, admittedly. Too nationalistic and the air raid sirens will be going off in Canada next). And internationally to continue organizing structures of law that will hold all imperial ambitions in check. So, you know, not really anything much has to be done....
originally published in Under the Ozone Hole #18
Illium
by Dan Simmons
review by John W. Herbert
Suffice it to say, Dan Simmons does not write small science fiction books. His Hyperion Cantos surely rank as one of the best examples of galaxy building (as well as galaxy destruction and reconstruction) in the genre. Now he begins a new series as big and complex as his earlier masterwork.
As in Hyperion, in his new novel Ilium Simmons once again draws inspiration from classical literature, this time drawing on the works of Homer instead of Keats. Ilium opens with four storylines; the battle of Troy is being observed by human historians, plucked out of time by the Greek gods who have given them amazing technology to observe the battle undetected (Zeus, it seems, has read Homer, and wants to make sure the battle goes by the book); then there’s the all the political intrigue going on at the god’s home on Olympos (it seems not all of them are happy with Zeus’s rule); on Earth in the future, a small group of the last humans, living in luxury in a technological utopia after the departure, find someone who knows the secrets of the world they live in; and in the outer reaches of the solar system, machine intelligences are detecting strange quantum energy readings on the supposedly dead planets of Earth and Mars, and send an expedition to investigate, and if necessary eliminate the source of these strange readings.
Ilium is a joy. Simmons confidently weaves together his seemingly disparate storylines in unexpected ways, yet never losing focus or getting sidetracked. The story moves briskly, from the exciting action in the ancient city of Troy to comical byplay between Orphu and Mahnmut, two machine intelligences whose expedition to the inner planets is disrupted by a golden god in a flying chariot, as they discuss the relative merits of Shakespeare and Proust.
Simmons is a writer of exceptional talent , and Ilium is an exceptional work. Be warned that this is only the first half of the story; the story will be concluded in the forthcoming Olympos.
review by John W. Herbert
Suffice it to say, Dan Simmons does not write small science fiction books. His Hyperion Cantos surely rank as one of the best examples of galaxy building (as well as galaxy destruction and reconstruction) in the genre. Now he begins a new series as big and complex as his earlier masterwork.
As in Hyperion, in his new novel Ilium Simmons once again draws inspiration from classical literature, this time drawing on the works of Homer instead of Keats. Ilium opens with four storylines; the battle of Troy is being observed by human historians, plucked out of time by the Greek gods who have given them amazing technology to observe the battle undetected (Zeus, it seems, has read Homer, and wants to make sure the battle goes by the book); then there’s the all the political intrigue going on at the god’s home on Olympos (it seems not all of them are happy with Zeus’s rule); on Earth in the future, a small group of the last humans, living in luxury in a technological utopia after the departure, find someone who knows the secrets of the world they live in; and in the outer reaches of the solar system, machine intelligences are detecting strange quantum energy readings on the supposedly dead planets of Earth and Mars, and send an expedition to investigate, and if necessary eliminate the source of these strange readings.
Ilium is a joy. Simmons confidently weaves together his seemingly disparate storylines in unexpected ways, yet never losing focus or getting sidetracked. The story moves briskly, from the exciting action in the ancient city of Troy to comical byplay between Orphu and Mahnmut, two machine intelligences whose expedition to the inner planets is disrupted by a golden god in a flying chariot, as they discuss the relative merits of Shakespeare and Proust.
Simmons is a writer of exceptional talent , and Ilium is an exceptional work. Be warned that this is only the first half of the story; the story will be concluded in the forthcoming Olympos.
Demon Night
by J.Michael Straczynski
review by John W. Herbert
Recently re-issued by iBooks, the first novel by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, originally publish in 1988, might be described as "Stephen King Lite." And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The story takes place firmly in King country, a small town in Maine called Dredmouth Point where an ancient evil has been waiting, gathering its strength, while prodigal son Eric Matthews, whose family was killed in the town when he was a child, has returned to unlock the secret of his family’s death, and the strange and mysterious black outs he suffers.
Straczynski tells his story in solid, non-flashy prose. He gets straight into the story and drives it ahead quickly. Whereas King might have used 200 pages of back story and small town life to slowly develop the mood, Straczynski sets the creepy mood from the outset as Matthews slowly discovers what killed his family, what is slowly destroying the town, and his destiny.
No one will mistake Demon Night for a great work of art, but as a solid and capable first novel, it is another example of the excellent story-telling we’ve come to expect for the ubiquitous "jms."
Originally published in Neo-opsis magazine and reprinted in Under the Ozone Hole #18.
review by John W. Herbert
Recently re-issued by iBooks, the first novel by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, originally publish in 1988, might be described as "Stephen King Lite." And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The story takes place firmly in King country, a small town in Maine called Dredmouth Point where an ancient evil has been waiting, gathering its strength, while prodigal son Eric Matthews, whose family was killed in the town when he was a child, has returned to unlock the secret of his family’s death, and the strange and mysterious black outs he suffers.
Straczynski tells his story in solid, non-flashy prose. He gets straight into the story and drives it ahead quickly. Whereas King might have used 200 pages of back story and small town life to slowly develop the mood, Straczynski sets the creepy mood from the outset as Matthews slowly discovers what killed his family, what is slowly destroying the town, and his destiny.
No one will mistake Demon Night for a great work of art, but as a solid and capable first novel, it is another example of the excellent story-telling we’ve come to expect for the ubiquitous "jms."
Originally published in Neo-opsis magazine and reprinted in Under the Ozone Hole #18.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
review by John W. Herbert
During World War II, four British children are sent out to the country to spend the war under care of a reclusive relative. The children discover a gateway through a wardrobe into another world called Narnia. There, in a world of centaurs, griffens, and talking animals, the children appear to be the fulfillment of a prophecy that four humans will one day lead an army with the help of Aslan, a lion, to defeat the self-appointed queen of Narnia, a witch.
Based of the classic book by C.S.Lewis, Narnia is not a bad movie, but as I was watching it I kept thinking to myself Lord of the Rings did this better. Indeed, The Lord of the Rings has set a very high standard when it comes to fantasy films, and perhaps comparing anything to the wondrous magic of LotR is unfair.
There’s nothing inherently bad in Narnia. The production is uniformly excellent, and the special effects are marvelous. The intergration of CGI characters into live-action elements is perfectly done.
But for me the film never grabbed me.
There’s also been some talk about the "Christian" aspects of Narnia. Aslan’s death and resurrection parallel Christ’s, and I believe that C.S. Lewis was deliberately evoking Christianity in his story. That said, I didn’t find that this aspect overwhelmed the story. Clearly, it’s there if you want to read that into it, but death and resurrection are so much a part of fantasy and science fiction films (Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi for starters), never mind other myths and religions, that it does not overpower the movie.
Look, this isn’t a bad movie. Pay your money, you’ll like it. Will you care about it the next day? That’s another question.
originally published in Under the Ozone Hole #18
During World War II, four British children are sent out to the country to spend the war under care of a reclusive relative. The children discover a gateway through a wardrobe into another world called Narnia. There, in a world of centaurs, griffens, and talking animals, the children appear to be the fulfillment of a prophecy that four humans will one day lead an army with the help of Aslan, a lion, to defeat the self-appointed queen of Narnia, a witch.
Based of the classic book by C.S.Lewis, Narnia is not a bad movie, but as I was watching it I kept thinking to myself Lord of the Rings did this better. Indeed, The Lord of the Rings has set a very high standard when it comes to fantasy films, and perhaps comparing anything to the wondrous magic of LotR is unfair.
There’s nothing inherently bad in Narnia. The production is uniformly excellent, and the special effects are marvelous. The intergration of CGI characters into live-action elements is perfectly done.
But for me the film never grabbed me.
There’s also been some talk about the "Christian" aspects of Narnia. Aslan’s death and resurrection parallel Christ’s, and I believe that C.S. Lewis was deliberately evoking Christianity in his story. That said, I didn’t find that this aspect overwhelmed the story. Clearly, it’s there if you want to read that into it, but death and resurrection are so much a part of fantasy and science fiction films (Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi for starters), never mind other myths and religions, that it does not overpower the movie.
Look, this isn’t a bad movie. Pay your money, you’ll like it. Will you care about it the next day? That’s another question.
originally published in Under the Ozone Hole #18
Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw
by Will Ferguson
review by John W. Herbert
Will Ferguson is a very funny guy.
Wait, scratch that. I assume he’s a funny guy — I really don’t know Will Ferguson from Adam.
Okay, scratch that, too. I know Adam and he is a funny guy. And so is Will Ferguson (I assume).
But they aren’t the same guy.
Or are they?
Now that I think about it, I’ve never seen them both in the same place. In fact, I’ve never seen Will Ferguson anywhere. Could it be that they really are the same guy? Have I inadvertantly stumbled on the biggest conspiracy since Stephen Harper’s brain was stolen by aliens?
Sorry. Let me start again.
Will Ferguson may be a very funny guy. But without question, he is a very funny writer. It’s not by accident that he’s won the Leacock Medal for Humour. (Then again, it might well have been an accident. But no one’s admitting anything.)
Which brings me in a surprisingly roundabout way to his recent book Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw, a time-jumbled travelogue across Canada. He starts at a poetry slam here in Victoria, and meanders from West to East, ending in L’anse Aux Meadows, the home of the first Norse settlement in North America. On the way, he retraces his youth in the high North, looks for polar bears near Churchill, tries to find the meaning of Canada with his brother, tries to find the meaning of Quebec with another brother, and even attempts to find the meanings in that strange variation of english that is spoken in Newfoundland.
Ferguson is always funny. (Anyone who rates a book about Canadian Prime Ministers called Bastards and Boneheads gets an ‘A’ in my book.) And this book is warm and witty embrace of Canadiana, a wonderfully written journey exploring the backwaters and backstreets.
A great read.
originally published in Under the Ozone Hole #18
review by John W. Herbert
Will Ferguson is a very funny guy.
Wait, scratch that. I assume he’s a funny guy — I really don’t know Will Ferguson from Adam.
Okay, scratch that, too. I know Adam and he is a funny guy. And so is Will Ferguson (I assume).
But they aren’t the same guy.
Or are they?
Now that I think about it, I’ve never seen them both in the same place. In fact, I’ve never seen Will Ferguson anywhere. Could it be that they really are the same guy? Have I inadvertantly stumbled on the biggest conspiracy since Stephen Harper’s brain was stolen by aliens?
Sorry. Let me start again.
Will Ferguson may be a very funny guy. But without question, he is a very funny writer. It’s not by accident that he’s won the Leacock Medal for Humour. (Then again, it might well have been an accident. But no one’s admitting anything.)
Which brings me in a surprisingly roundabout way to his recent book Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw, a time-jumbled travelogue across Canada. He starts at a poetry slam here in Victoria, and meanders from West to East, ending in L’anse Aux Meadows, the home of the first Norse settlement in North America. On the way, he retraces his youth in the high North, looks for polar bears near Churchill, tries to find the meaning of Canada with his brother, tries to find the meaning of Quebec with another brother, and even attempts to find the meanings in that strange variation of english that is spoken in Newfoundland.
Ferguson is always funny. (Anyone who rates a book about Canadian Prime Ministers called Bastards and Boneheads gets an ‘A’ in my book.) And this book is warm and witty embrace of Canadiana, a wonderfully written journey exploring the backwaters and backstreets.
A great read.
originally published in Under the Ozone Hole #18
Alien Apocalypse
review by John W. Herbert
In the not too distant future, insectoid aliens have landed on earth and have destroyed much of humanity. The few humans who survived are forced to work in slave lumber camps. It seems that the aliens like to eat wood, preferably when it’s chopped down and cut into 2x4s. And when they’re not biting people’s heads off.
In Oregon, the last human spaceship finally returns to earth after 80 years in space (relativistically speaking). Two of its crewmembers are played by B-movie king Bruce Campbell and Renee (Xena) O’Conner. Together, they must convince their fellow humans to throw off the yoke of slavery, to gather together and fight as one for freedom, to blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda. You get the idea.
This is cheese with a capital mozzarella. Shot on a low-budget in Bulgaria, this film has the prerequisites to qualify has a b-movie: cheap sets, cheap costumes, badly dubbed foreign actors, and cheap fx. On the other hand, Campbell and cast are almost able to carry it off. It works as a film. Not as a great film, but then it’s not supposed to be.
The aliens are a good combination of puppets and CGI, the Bulgarian locations are gorgeous. The script is not-overly serious, but never falls into total camp either, trying to keep a nice balance.
This is certainly worth a look if you want a fun, no thinking required flick to rent. And it’s got giant insect aliens biting people’s heads off! How could you go wrong renting this?
originally published in Under the Ozone Hole #18
In the not too distant future, insectoid aliens have landed on earth and have destroyed much of humanity. The few humans who survived are forced to work in slave lumber camps. It seems that the aliens like to eat wood, preferably when it’s chopped down and cut into 2x4s. And when they’re not biting people’s heads off.
In Oregon, the last human spaceship finally returns to earth after 80 years in space (relativistically speaking). Two of its crewmembers are played by B-movie king Bruce Campbell and Renee (Xena) O’Conner. Together, they must convince their fellow humans to throw off the yoke of slavery, to gather together and fight as one for freedom, to blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda. You get the idea.
This is cheese with a capital mozzarella. Shot on a low-budget in Bulgaria, this film has the prerequisites to qualify has a b-movie: cheap sets, cheap costumes, badly dubbed foreign actors, and cheap fx. On the other hand, Campbell and cast are almost able to carry it off. It works as a film. Not as a great film, but then it’s not supposed to be.
The aliens are a good combination of puppets and CGI, the Bulgarian locations are gorgeous. The script is not-overly serious, but never falls into total camp either, trying to keep a nice balance.
This is certainly worth a look if you want a fun, no thinking required flick to rent. And it’s got giant insect aliens biting people’s heads off! How could you go wrong renting this?
originally published in Under the Ozone Hole #18
The Trials and Tribulations of Fanzine Publishing
A transcription of a panel from V-Con 30, held in Vancouver, October 2005.
Your panelists (l. - r.):
Andrew C. Murdoch: nominated for an Aurora Award for his zine ZX, also editor of Covert Communications from Zeta Corbi;
John W. Herbert: winner of four Aurora Awards (with co-editor Karl Johanson) for editing Under the Ozone Hole;
Steve Forty: Long-time editor of BCSFAZine and twice nominated for an Aurora Award.
Garth Spencer: Winner of a Casper award for editing The Maple Leaf Rag, current editor of BCFSAZine and this year's winner of the Best Fanzine Aurora for The Royal Swiss Navy Gazette.
S40: We have quite a crowd.
The Audience: I feel awful. Come on, there’s got to be more people than this!
JWH: And when you leave to go to the Harry Potter panel…
S40: Well, it’s 10:00 AM. Most fanzine-type fans are not really 10:00 AM fans.
ACM: This is true.
S40: Including me, I almost got lost.
GS: I have opinions about some of the scheduling. I thought it was just my imagination but at this convention, they did it again. They put a “How to Survive Your First Convention” panel on Friday at 5:00 PM before most everyone, especially neos, have arrived.
S40: In my opinion something like that is fine on Friday, but you should repeat it sometime on Saturday.
ACM: I have to accept some of the blame for the scheduling, because when I was asked to be on the panel, I said if it was sometime in the morning because I work that afternoon.
S40: You! It was originally 1:00! I was so happy!
ACM: Sorry!
JWH: Damn you to hell.
S40: Anyway, do we want to start now? I’m supposedly moderator, I think.
ACM (to new audience member who just arrived): You are staying here, right? You’re not going to the Harry Potter panel?
JWH: You can be up here if you want.
ACM: Feel free to move forward!
S40: I’m a former editor of BCSFAzine and these are some issues that I edited. Gestetner ink does hold up. This is many years old.
JWH: That’s sweet.
GS: Nobody denies that.
S40: That’s a three-colour Gestetner cover… how many people did those? I had the infamous BCSFAzine Gestetners and actually they were mine, mostly. And the electric stencil cutters.
Okay, we’re going to start. This is the Trials and Tribulations of Fanzine Publishing. This is Andrew Murdoch, John Herbert and Garth Spencer. And I’m Steve Forty. We’ve all put out fanzines and so on. And I’ll give everyone a minute or two to introduce themselves.
ACM: I’m Andrew Murdoch. I publish Covert Communications from Zeta Corbi. Although not recently since I’ve had a child. I first got into fanzine publishing on my own because of this schmuck and his partner in crime {{Editor’s Note: Andrew is referring to Karl Johanson, now editor of Neo-opsis magazine.}} who published Under the Ozone Hole, and I said to myself, “Hey, that’s kind of cool!” My first fanzine was nominated for an Aurora Award and lost to John and his partner in crime. A proud tradition which I have upheld.
JWH: I’m John Herbert. I’ve published fanzines, did some Star Trek club zines and some other zines, and then me and my partner in crime Karl Johanson published Under the Ozone Hole in the 1990s and we were nominated for five Auroras in row, and won four, beating Andrew once. I haven’t done much lately, except that this year, I restarted Under the Ozone Hole.
GS: I’m Garth Spencer. I used to be famous for a newszine that tried to cover Canadian fandom for Canadian fans. Maple Leaf Rag, as it was then called, followed a number of such attempts and was succeeded by a few aborted attempts that petered out. Now I’ve been editing BCSFAzine in a format not unlike Steve’s. I produce this on a monthly basis. I try to provide a variety of things outside of just stuff to do with the club – regional news, national news, fan news, writers’ market news – anything that might interest or amuse people or might even be useful. And late at night when the darkness falls and the moon rises, I try to get out the latest issue of my personal zine, which is now titled The Royal Swiss Navy Gazette. It has in the past had other silly titles, like The World According to Garth or Sercon Popcult Litcrit Fanmag. This is what happens when you have too much time on your hands. As we’ll get into later, it’s been harder and harder to get these out with the increase in copying costs mailing costs. Interestingly, this happened about the same time as the Internet became available.
S40: My name is Steve Forty. I did BCSFAzine for a number of years. It was nominated for a couple of Auroras – actually, the first time when I edited it, and the second time it was half with me and half with R. Graeme Cameron editing. {{Editor’s Note: Graeme Cameron was to be a panelist on the panel but was unable to attend due to a bizarre gardening accident.}} We lost. It’s very hard to do a fanzine like BCSFAzine every month and compete with someone who does one or two a year. And we tended to lose to those! I’m also an Elron award winner. We put out, with Jim Welch and Mark Olberg, Not the BCSFAzine 100, and Still Not the BCSFAzine 100. And it’s not named after L. Ron Hubbard, and it has nothing to do with –
GS: It’s a V-Con institution, award for worst contribution –
S40: Disservice, the word is. Disservice to science fiction. I guess now we should get into the trials and tribulations of publishing. Now the Internet is one form of it –
GS: Is it a trial and tribulation, or is it a solution?
S40: I think you’ll find there are two forms of fanzine fans. The biggest thing is the fanzine fans of old want the hard copy. They want something like that, and just printing it off in your printer is just not the same thing.
ACM: I think with regards to that, The Internet has taken over a niche that fanzines used to fill in that they used to serve as public forums through the letter columns and that sort of thing. So the Internet being so much more immediate, there’s no more community within a fanzine to the extent that that was the grapevine through which news passed. Now, the main trial is to come up with an article or solicit articles that are that much more interesting to put in your fanzine.
JWH: Exactly. When we were doing Under the Ozone Hole in the 90s, we had a few pages of news, and Garth’s Maple Leaf Rag was a news fanzine, but with the Internet, the function of being a news source has really gone from fanzines. Obviously, a club zine would have club news in it, but in terms of more generalized science fiction news or national fan news, that’s probably best served by the Internet these days.
S40: I used to have a couple of columns. One was called About the Authors by The Authors. I’d phone an author and ask him to do something on another author. And I actually had things lifted from BCSFAzine by things like SF Chronicle because I would phone all the local authors and put the news in there.
The Audience: One thing the Internet doesn’t have a corner on, if you want to phone another author, or review a movie –
S40: But even the old hardcopy fanzine you have today, you use the Internet to get the articles, so there’s really not that much difference. And if you have a fabulous set-up with a fabulous computer, you can have a fancy wonderful multi-colour cover which you really can’t do very easily on the printed copy unless you have lots of bucks.
GS: I think that the Internet has not entirely replaced the functions that used to be performed by fanzines in the mimeograph era, and the reason is that for some reasons a lot of the participatory functions and fandom-oriented functions that you see in a lot of one-man entirely voluntary publications simply haven’t been picked up. Maybe I’m not subscribing to the right newsgroups or listservs, but when I look for web pages, I find things ones that expressly professional, like SF Canada, for SF writers in Canada, or Made in Canada, whose web master is focused on films and media and writers and anything except fandom. It does make a concession by listing conventions and that’s it. The concept that there is news by, for and about science fiction fans, or there’s a community out there that might have an interest in connecting, that seems to have gone by the board. Or it’s served in different ways and I’m not seeing where it’s being served.
S40: I’d kind of like to get off that, we’re going beyond the topic. The topic is more the trial and tribulations of publishing, which would be getting your articles, troubles you’ve had actually producing the thing.
GS: We have a different take on this, Steve and I. We’ve had a different take on what needs and interests people have, just in BCSFA, and how to meet them. I’ve been flailing around trying to find the things that people would be interested in participating in, or the things they’d be interested in seeing. And I still don’t know after five or six years. Steve has been very good during his term had soliciting participation.
S40: I found that if you get a little bit of cider, if you knew what you were doing at conventions, I never had any trouble getting artwork.
ACM: I had to solicit by buying a beer for fanzine artists at Torcon.
S40: You get to know these people. Part of the thing for me was that I was always lucky that way. If you look through old BCSFAzines, this was in the days before we had much in the way of computers – when I first started doing it, I finally got my Atari Amiga 2 halfway through my editorship of about 35 issues. My biggest problem is that I am a terrible typist. The last thing I need to do is to take someone’s stuff and re-type, because there’d be ten times as many typos. So I’d just take it, photo-reduce it at your local Kinko’s or whatever, and all the pages inside the zine – you could tell I was younger then, because I was able to read them without glasses – and I’d photo-reduce it, so you have an 8 ½ by 11 sheet folded over, so you’d have lots of pages and lots of information. But it was very hard for me to re-type it, so rather than do that you’d find all different typefaces, all different styles because I just trusted my people that contributed. And I was very lucky that way, with people like Al Betz, who won an Aurora for his Ask Mr. Science column. And I’d get a letter from Harry Warner, Jr., and every fanzine editor knows you got to have a Harry Warner, Jr. letter in the olden days. And I got them, and I thought I could re-type them, or I could put in and you could see all the letters wandering and so on.. He had certain keys where the words would go like [a curvy line]. It was part of the charm, so instead of re-typing all this stuff, I would just run it as is. There was a lot of stuff in there with very few illustrations in the middle. It was just article after article.
ACM: Especially for CCFZC, I’ve been using my computer solely so layout contributions have not been too much of a problem. I’ve been quite blessed with quite a bit or artwork from Brad Foster and I forget who it was sent me a huge amount of fillos by a fan artist who passed away recently. Rostler, William Rotsler. So artwork I haven’t had a problem with fortunately, it’s been articles and getting actually writing done. I’ve been told I can write, but it takes me a long time to do it between writer’s block and 1 17 month-old running around the house.
{{Editor’s Note: At this point, a person entered asking where Boardroom A was. There followed a long discussion concerning the location of Boardroom A. With a 3-to-1 vote (Andrew dissenting), it was eventually decided that Boardroom A must be next to Boardroom B. }}
ACM: So I’ve been very lucky in the artwork department, but most of the verbiage I’ve had to create myself. That’s pretty tough when you’re trying to fill an entire zine which is why mine comes out so infrequently.
JWH: That’s the tough part, filling up the pages with words. Fortunately I have a government job so I have plenty of time to type. It also depends on what kind of zine you’re doing. With a perzine, your own personal zine, you realize that the ultimate responsibility to fill those pages lies with you. If you’re doing a club zine, you’re somewhat at the whim of what the club decides to put in, and if they put out a lot of effort and get you a lot of stuff, then that’s terrific. It cuts down your work immensely. But sometimes you have to harass people to contribute things.
ACM: I remember you were a master at harassing us.
JWH: A master harasser.
S40: I was lucky when I was doing BCSFAzine because we had FRED, which is the weekly drinking thing. And I did cover that was infamous, we didn’t know if it would go across the border. You see a naked Leela on top the Time Lord lying on the floor and his scarf wrapped around the TARDIS. And it says, “Again, Doctor! Again!”
GS: Let’s do the time warp again!
S40: Fosfax wrote to me and asked if they could trade with me. I’d never heard of them before, but they’re quite a famous fanzine with all these famous authors, and they wrote to me to ask me if they could get this issue. Someone had seen it.
GS: Then Timothy Lane took over as editor.
S40: I took the time that if someone commented on something in the zine, I made sure that the person who wrote it saw it. I brought the fanzine to them, I opened the page and I said, “Look at this.” That’s how I got people like Sidney Trim and so to keep contributing, you keep working the people. It sounds cruel, but it works. You take the time and effort, and you get a lot more out of it. I never had trouble getting articles, except one or two in the early days. As far as a clubzine, it sort of was and sort of wasn’t because it was what I could find. The club really didn’t contribute except for upcoming events, which was one of my columns anyway.
GS: I found over and over again that a minority of people will continually get into something participatory for publication on paper. And a majority of people will accept it. Whether they appreciate or whether they have a problem with it, only a minority will tell you. And that’s just the deal. Since the mimeograph era, I’ve found that costs have risen. It’s been a lot easier to do things purely on the Internet. I’m aware of at least one web site, efanzines.com, which is where fanzines are archived in electronic format. I could have produced a long list of what are current zines that I don’t have in paper format. Fanzines are always changing; they change address or title. They’ll always sound goofy. I have in the past produced fanzines with titles like Scuttlebutt, The Maple Leaf Rag, The Perfect Paper, The Filthy Rag, Black Marxist Lesbian Quarterly, Sercon Popcult Litcrit Fanmag, The World According to Garth, and most recently The Royal Swiss Navy Gazette. That’s typical. When I first got into fandom, I heard of a club called The Elves’, Gnomes’ and Little Mens’ Science Fiction Chowder and Marching Society. It’s hard to catalogue things like that. At the Worldcon in Glasgow, some people got together and whipped up a one-shot – a fanzine that’s only going to exist for one issue – on the spur of the moment, very quickly and spontaneously, and it was called The Pork Authority. And I realized that different people have different funny bones, different live nerves. It’s really hard to predict where you’re going to hit them, what’s going to arouse their enthusiasm. And I think that no matter what media you’ve got, what the price structures are, that’s the major quandary.
S40: I think all of us here have been involved in paper fanzines. Part of the Trials and Tribulations of fanzine editing is actually printing it. Now something like {{holds up an old BCSFAZine}} would take about four hours to actually print, because I had the gestenter, the electo-stencil cutter, time seven sheets which would be 14 electro-stencils, plus if you did the colour cover, you had extra ones. And you had ink everywhere. And you’d have a group upstairs. Because it was a clubzine I got get a group of people to do collation and have a big party. And we had a treasurer for a while who wouldn’t give the address labels. So later at FRED, we’d put the stamps on and the labels, because you can’t put the stamps on without the labels.
Audience: How big a run did you do?
S40: Between 100 and 200. This was when we used to have 100 members, a little over 100 members, And the you’d have trades. It added up to a fair bit of time. It was a lot of work to do that, but it was a work of joy for me for the longest time, then it go to be onerous in the end when you’ve got 28 pages every month. ‘Cause that what that is, 28 pages. But I enjoyed it and I’m proud of it.
ACM: For my current zine, I use computer layout which makes life tremendously easy. You can have a fairly polished looking page. That helps quite a bit. In the early days, I did my zine on an Apple Iic because that was the only computer I had at the time. I used software that could not make a margin along the side so I stapled my zine at the top. Which I got plenty of comments on, having an 8 ½ by 11 fanzine stapled at the top.
JWH: It was unique.
ACM: It was. If nothing else, I got known for that. How it was stapled! No one remembers anything I wrote, but it was staple really cool!
JWH: Never read it, but I liked the staples!
ACM: So these days layout is not so much of a problem for me personally. The main problem is afterwards and that’s the expense of printing it. Photocopying has gotten ridiculously expensive lately. And postage has gone up in Canada every year for the past three.
S40: Can I recommend going to some place like Staples Superstore for printing?
ACM: That’s where I do go, but even there the prices have gone up a cent a page in the last year. Layout has gotten easier but everyone has their own fleet of gestentners in the basement anymore. Reproduction is getting costly.
{{Editor’s Note: Transcribing this a year later, the Editor can only shake his head in wonder at how he let that straight line get away unscathed.}}
S40: I did have them but they all went to CascadiaCon. They were given to Seattle people. They came up in a big van, and these people in white coats came and instead of kidnapping me, they took all the gestentners and electro-stencil cutters.
ACM: What happened to them?
S40: They wanted to show all the new fans how the old fans used to print. So I started to get them running and a whole pile of people took pictures of me and a gestentner at CascadiaCon.
JWH: The first zine I was involved was a one-shot we did called The Electric Gang Bang Pork Chop. So there must be something about pork and spontaneous one-shots. {{Editor’s Note: The Editor would like to point out that no pork products were harmed in the creation of The Electric Gang Bang Pork Chop.}}
GS: There was a creative character in Edmonton who came up with something with no pork in it called You Can’t Get to Heaven on Roller Skates Infrequently.
JWH: We should just do a panel on zine names.
GS: Yeah!
S40: There you go!
GS: The problem I have is: a) finding out where all the members are because I’ve had this continual struggle over the last year just establishing who is a current BCSFA member, who’s expired, who’s moved and where did they move to, and it took an extremely long time simply to meet up same time same place with the treasurer and the vice-president—
S40: They have electricity today!
GS: The other problem I have is getting people to understand what I was saying quite clearly in plain English on paper where the words stayed still and you could re-read them. It’s amazing how English is broken down semantically so that you can read the same sentence four ways depending on the state of mind someone is in at that time of the month {{Editor’s Note: I’m sure Garth is referring to “rent day.”}}, or what country they’re in, or what language or speech community they originally come from. It’s very amazing. Within one club.
S40: When I had to do it, originally most people would rejoin at a certain time, so I’d get 13 sheets and type all the names on all the labels, and I’d run 13 sheets, of labels. But then they decided that they don’t all want to renew in May and that made it a lot harder. Most people did renew in May for the longest time at V-Con.
JWH: I was going to say that when I started I did some gestetner work, too. Bernie Klassen had one so we were doing a lot of work with that, but I came in just as that was fading out and computers were coming in The latest issue was done using Pagemaker 7.
S40: You cheated!
JWH: It’s the only way to go! The only way to go! Printing costs are horrible, but what I do is use Pagemaker which very easily exports to pdf and email a lot of copies out to people.
GS: I have a problem. When I was first editing BCSFAZine and using pdf, when I exported to pdf strange things would happen to illustrations, especially on the cover. First, for several issues one half on one side of the cover illustration, just the illustration, would disappear. Just blank white space. And then it was ¾ of the cover illustration would disappear and you would get to see one quarter of it in the upper left hand quadrant. That was when I gave up on Pagemaker. I still to this day do not know what the glitch was. Now over the past year or so, I’ve been struggling with machines, different programs, different conversion strategies. I finally gave up. I’ve been doing this in Word.
S40: You notice what you guys are missing? What’s different about BCSFAZine that’s different from all the rest? No colour. You guys are in black and white. I used to like the fact that you could get blues and reds and browns. Yeah, you can get it on the email version—
ACM: My last issue did have a colour cover—
S40: It’s very rare. It’s sad to see that sometimes— well, you can’t afford to print it in colour. I was going to keep one gestetner with colour ink in case I ever print something I can throw a little colour on it just for fun, but it was too easy to put them on the fun and see them go.
JWH: We did a couple of colour covers for Ozone Hole in the ’90s and —
S40: Oh, I remember that!
JWH: —they looked great but the cost was, oh god, it instantly doubled the cost.
GS: One of the things that we represent, some of us with graying hair, is that we’ve seen several changes in media and that means we’ve learnt crafts several times over. I’ve used spirit duplicators, ditto machines. I’ve seen hectograph. You’ve used mimeograph.
S40: Yeah. I’ve also used inkjet printers and all that. Did you ever do anything like I did? I had collectors that liked BCSFAZine and wanted “The” BCFSAZine so every now and then just to get even with them, I’d throw in different sheets of coloured paper. You’d have a random colour so you couldn’t get all the BCFSAZines identical, I even did one with two different covers once.
ACM: I remember an Under the Ozone Hole that had every issue customized—
JWH: No, it only had eight different covers.
GS: That’s been done several times. In the earliest years—
ACM: I remember the personalized letter columns—
JWH: Go away!
S40: The worst thing I ever did was –and next time I will think very carefully if I ever get involved with that— we did a hoax ad for BCSFAZine. I got together around V-Con 8 with a lady from Edmonton and a person from Calgary and we came with addresses that were not viable. In Calgary it was like “Something SW” and there was no such place. In Edmonton, it was a burnt-down sports arena, and in Vancouver it was the Hotel Devonshire’s parking lot. After they had ripped the hotel down. And so I came up with a title called Jape’s Books, a new chain of bookstore. And I announced this new chain of bookstores and it came out in these other fanzines, and I, not carefully thinking this out, I ran this ad for Jape’s and a number of people went down to this fancy, early opening of Jape’s Books and I forgot that the BCSFA meeting was at my house the next day. Ooooo, they were not happy. They fell for it hook, line and sinker. But I thought they would pick up on the word “Jape.”
GS: You never know what joke people will notice. Or get. Or where the comprehension fails. That’s the problem with any hoax, any satire, and it’s not specific to fanzines.
S40: How many people went to that? Ken, do you remember?
Ken Wong (who had wandered into the wrong room): No, not me!
S40: You were one of the ones complaining and so was David George and a number of other people. You went by at another time and noticed where it was. Every now and then people will do a hoax like the Not the BCSFAZine 100 and Still Not the BCSFAZine 100. Gerald Boyko was supposed to do the 100th issue of BCSFAZine. By the time issue 104 came out, we did Not the BCSFAZine 100 and sent it out to all the BCSFA members, and just after we did Still Not the BCSFAZine 100, just after BCSFAZine 108 came out, then the real BCSFAZine 100 came out.
ACM: Better late than never.
S40: How about you guys and deadlines?
ACM: Well, I’m pretty much wide-open. Always have been. I knew pretty much right from the outset that setting a regular schedule would almost would either kill me or result in a terrible zine since I was providing most of the writing. Since it’s inception there have been gaps of months and in the most recent case, two years between issues simply out of necessity. It’s pretty much a hobby. Some people have been wonderful at keeping deadlines,
S40: BCSFAZine’s been excellent.
ACM: BCSFAZine’s been excellent, but it’s a clubzine though, so that helps.
S40: No, not really. I was still up at 2:00 in the morning wondering “where the hell’s that article”and I had to print that morning because that was the final deadline.
ACM: My zine is officially listed with the National Library of Canada as being “irregular.”
JWH: Well, I try to keep a roughly quarterly schedule with Ozone Hole and I’ve done pretty well except for that nine year gap. But going back to deadlines and clubs, that was the one thing that was a problem when I was doing the club zine. When I’m doing Ozone Hole, it’s just me. I all can do is get mad at myself and I’m not going to do that. With a club zine, it’s good in one sense because you’ve got a lot of people contributing things, but it’s bad in another sense because that deadline’s coming and your on the phone and pulling your hair and screaming at people “You promised me an article! I need it! I have three blank pages waiting for it!”
S40: I must admit that I was lucky there. I always had too much stuff.
GS: I very hard-nosed about deadlines. I can afford to be because a) I produce BCSFAZine on somebody else’s dime, and thereby hangs a few tales I won’t tell, and b) I get somebody else to the actual production of the physical zine. Having a computer to work with solves a lot of my problems enormously. I find it really easy to use boilerplate. I also get other people to do significant chunks of the zine. Sometimes it’s embarrassingly obvious how I slap the thing together.
S40: Here’s another thought. Have any of you gotten anyone really mad at you, almost enemies? I was asking for artwork. And this one person submitted a whole pile of artwork. I said that I disliked dragons intensely and that I would very rarely run them. She sent me pages of dragons. And I ran one of hers, and then I think I ran a second one. But they were all very similar and I didn’t want to run a bunch of them. And she got really really mad at me!
GS: You could have done a one-shot called What a Drag.
S40: You’d get artwork that really wasn’t what you wanted and they would get really mad if you didn’t run it.
ACM: Not so much from what I didn’t run, but I’m very surprised that John didn’t deck me in Winnipeg. I ran an editorial in defense of one friend at the expense of another, and I realize now that I realize now in older wiser times that that was pretty much a mistake. At the time I thought I was doing the right thing and I got the nastiest letter from him as the result.
JWH: But you’ve learned well, Grasshopper.
ACM: So that’s the only instance in my case where I’ve really ticked someone off.
JWH: Yeah, I’ve ticked a few people off.
S40: I don’t want names!
JWH: I’m not giving any! When you’re doing a clubzine like Garth is doing now, especially when it’s on someone else’s dime, there is that struggle between what you want to do as the editor and what the club wants done and perhaps what certain people in the club want done, and that gets into the whole club politics thing spilling over into the zine. That’s why I just gave up on clubzines. I like making a zine and I’m just going to do my own zine.
S40: You mean the club actually interfered? My club never said anything to me.
JWH: Well, it was a rare thing, it didn’t happen all the time. But it happened enough times—
ACM: It got political—
S40: I just realized that the artist that I had rouble with was a club officer—
JWH: Exactly.
GS: Have you noticed that the level of interference with people’s behavior or their rational thinking from not looking at their assumptions? If people want to do their own thing their own way and they enjoy their own hobby activity, that’s one thing. But everyone wants somebody else to something their own way, that’s when you get politics.
S40: Yeah.
ACM: Yeah.
JWH: Yep.
GS: And it took me a long time to realize how much of this bullshit is going on. The other thing that I’m facing most of the time now is people not communicating in terms that I can recognize. I don’t know and I’ve never known what people would want to enjoy in a clubzine. So I’ve pretty much been left to my own devices doing my own thing at other people’s expense. I’m saying that now “on record.”
S40: Another thing to consider. Have you put things in that you thought were totally in bad taste? I already mentioned the Doctor Who cover that I didn’t think would cross the border. The other thing was when they had a meeting at my place and David Stewart didn’t lock the bathroom door and someone burst in the door and took a picture of him sitting on the toilet. I ran that as a cover on BCSFAZine.
ACM: (almost dies laughing)
JWH: I would’ve run that!
S40: But I’m trying to get you guys to say did you ever put out something that you thought was well, maybe that wasn’t such a smart idea? Come on, you must have!
JWH: Only you, Steve.
GS: I can be fairly snide in my editorial columns sometimes. I think that I am self-critical and people can see it but in the editorial and letter columns I can have a very sardonic and somewhat stuffy tone that I think is going to grate with some people. Maybe I’m putting people off and not realizing it.
S40: Maybe what you need is more of a light-hearted tone.
GS: I am being light-hearted. People just don’t quite get my rather Victorian default mode.
S40: What I would try and do is get a couple of people like “Ask Mr. Science.” I’m not particularly funny, but these people are, so I tries to get them to do the funny bits. And that’s another trial and tribulation – what do you want to put into a fanzine?
ACM: When I started my second fanzine, I thought of something that Dale Speirs said which is “have a focus for your zine.” And looking back, my first zine didn’t really have much of one except that I was a fan. So I decided that I wanted to write about science fiction and fandom. So that gives you something you can go for, something you can strive for, and at the same time if you’ve got thoughts percolating in your head that have nothing to do with science fiction and fandom, there’s been a long tradition of that in science fiction fanzines – you’re always going to be wrestling with yourself, does this fit in? What are people going to think about this? I ran an article in my zine following September 11 and it had not terribly much to do with science fiction or fandom except that it referenced myself and my life it’s been the single most commented-on article that I’ve ever written. So it’s where do you draw the line? How much do you put in what form?
JWH: That’s a good approach, to have a focus for your zine. I should try that sometime. I don’t want to limit myself to what I put in the zine. So I don’t have a focused approach to what the zine is going to be about. I try to make sure that everything is well-written and of quality. Let’s put it that way. So I prefer more the quality of a piece as opposed to the specifics of the subject matter. So it goes all over the place. In the latest one I’ve got an article about kayaking I wrote, and an article about The Who, and someone submitted an article about the woman up in the Interior who on Valentine’s Day her car went in the river and she saved herself by eating chocolates until the rescue crew came. She was strapped in her car under water.
GS: The key to underwater survival: bring chocolates.
S40: For me focus – what I tried to do was, being a clubzine, was to think about what fans wanted. Well, they like to eat, so there was a fan food column I’d try to get. They liked humour so I tried to get Mr. Science. I tired to get someone to do movie reviews, I tried to get someone to do book reviews. And then I had an artist do the front cover and the back cover.
GS: Advertising. I’d forgotten that we had advertising. Was that paid advertising?
S40: We got 10% discounts.
GS: When I inherited BCSFAZine, I inherited a bunch of regular ads, I started adding advertisements for writer’s workshops or for my Royal Swiss Navy or The Western Fandom Illuminati. I try to be as general and unfocused in the zine as possible. I try to include things like market news or recently published works by Canadian writers or the evil influence of Danish cultural imperialism on Canadian fandom. I think that I’m going to get some letters of comment eventually.
S40: What about letters of comment?
ACM: Letters of comment are essential.
S40: No, I mean do you get lots?
ACM: I got quite a few from The Usual Bunch of People. By that I mean Lloyd Penney, and Harry Warner Jr., and a lot of people that I traded fanzines with down in the States.
GS: I always though that Lloyd was the Canadian love child of Harry Warner and –
S40: We’ve got about five minutes left, so we should start wrapping this up, unless someone wants to ask a question. Does anyone want to ask a question?
The Audience:
S40: I guess we should wrap up. Thanks for coming!
originally published in Under the Ozone Hole #18
Your panelists (l. - r.):
Andrew C. Murdoch: nominated for an Aurora Award for his zine ZX, also editor of Covert Communications from Zeta Corbi;
John W. Herbert: winner of four Aurora Awards (with co-editor Karl Johanson) for editing Under the Ozone Hole;
Steve Forty: Long-time editor of BCSFAZine and twice nominated for an Aurora Award.
Garth Spencer: Winner of a Casper award for editing The Maple Leaf Rag, current editor of BCFSAZine and this year's winner of the Best Fanzine Aurora for The Royal Swiss Navy Gazette.
S40: We have quite a crowd.
The Audience: I feel awful. Come on, there’s got to be more people than this!
JWH: And when you leave to go to the Harry Potter panel…
S40: Well, it’s 10:00 AM. Most fanzine-type fans are not really 10:00 AM fans.
ACM: This is true.
S40: Including me, I almost got lost.
GS: I have opinions about some of the scheduling. I thought it was just my imagination but at this convention, they did it again. They put a “How to Survive Your First Convention” panel on Friday at 5:00 PM before most everyone, especially neos, have arrived.
S40: In my opinion something like that is fine on Friday, but you should repeat it sometime on Saturday.
ACM: I have to accept some of the blame for the scheduling, because when I was asked to be on the panel, I said if it was sometime in the morning because I work that afternoon.
S40: You! It was originally 1:00! I was so happy!
ACM: Sorry!
JWH: Damn you to hell.
S40: Anyway, do we want to start now? I’m supposedly moderator, I think.
ACM (to new audience member who just arrived): You are staying here, right? You’re not going to the Harry Potter panel?
JWH: You can be up here if you want.
ACM: Feel free to move forward!
S40: I’m a former editor of BCSFAzine and these are some issues that I edited. Gestetner ink does hold up. This is many years old.
JWH: That’s sweet.
GS: Nobody denies that.
S40: That’s a three-colour Gestetner cover… how many people did those? I had the infamous BCSFAzine Gestetners and actually they were mine, mostly. And the electric stencil cutters.
Okay, we’re going to start. This is the Trials and Tribulations of Fanzine Publishing. This is Andrew Murdoch, John Herbert and Garth Spencer. And I’m Steve Forty. We’ve all put out fanzines and so on. And I’ll give everyone a minute or two to introduce themselves.
ACM: I’m Andrew Murdoch. I publish Covert Communications from Zeta Corbi. Although not recently since I’ve had a child. I first got into fanzine publishing on my own because of this schmuck and his partner in crime {{Editor’s Note: Andrew is referring to Karl Johanson, now editor of Neo-opsis magazine.}} who published Under the Ozone Hole, and I said to myself, “Hey, that’s kind of cool!” My first fanzine was nominated for an Aurora Award and lost to John and his partner in crime. A proud tradition which I have upheld.
JWH: I’m John Herbert. I’ve published fanzines, did some Star Trek club zines and some other zines, and then me and my partner in crime Karl Johanson published Under the Ozone Hole in the 1990s and we were nominated for five Auroras in row, and won four, beating Andrew once. I haven’t done much lately, except that this year, I restarted Under the Ozone Hole.
GS: I’m Garth Spencer. I used to be famous for a newszine that tried to cover Canadian fandom for Canadian fans. Maple Leaf Rag, as it was then called, followed a number of such attempts and was succeeded by a few aborted attempts that petered out. Now I’ve been editing BCSFAzine in a format not unlike Steve’s. I produce this on a monthly basis. I try to provide a variety of things outside of just stuff to do with the club – regional news, national news, fan news, writers’ market news – anything that might interest or amuse people or might even be useful. And late at night when the darkness falls and the moon rises, I try to get out the latest issue of my personal zine, which is now titled The Royal Swiss Navy Gazette. It has in the past had other silly titles, like The World According to Garth or Sercon Popcult Litcrit Fanmag. This is what happens when you have too much time on your hands. As we’ll get into later, it’s been harder and harder to get these out with the increase in copying costs mailing costs. Interestingly, this happened about the same time as the Internet became available.
S40: My name is Steve Forty. I did BCSFAzine for a number of years. It was nominated for a couple of Auroras – actually, the first time when I edited it, and the second time it was half with me and half with R. Graeme Cameron editing. {{Editor’s Note: Graeme Cameron was to be a panelist on the panel but was unable to attend due to a bizarre gardening accident.}} We lost. It’s very hard to do a fanzine like BCSFAzine every month and compete with someone who does one or two a year. And we tended to lose to those! I’m also an Elron award winner. We put out, with Jim Welch and Mark Olberg, Not the BCSFAzine 100, and Still Not the BCSFAzine 100. And it’s not named after L. Ron Hubbard, and it has nothing to do with –
GS: It’s a V-Con institution, award for worst contribution –
S40: Disservice, the word is. Disservice to science fiction. I guess now we should get into the trials and tribulations of publishing. Now the Internet is one form of it –
GS: Is it a trial and tribulation, or is it a solution?
S40: I think you’ll find there are two forms of fanzine fans. The biggest thing is the fanzine fans of old want the hard copy. They want something like that, and just printing it off in your printer is just not the same thing.
ACM: I think with regards to that, The Internet has taken over a niche that fanzines used to fill in that they used to serve as public forums through the letter columns and that sort of thing. So the Internet being so much more immediate, there’s no more community within a fanzine to the extent that that was the grapevine through which news passed. Now, the main trial is to come up with an article or solicit articles that are that much more interesting to put in your fanzine.
JWH: Exactly. When we were doing Under the Ozone Hole in the 90s, we had a few pages of news, and Garth’s Maple Leaf Rag was a news fanzine, but with the Internet, the function of being a news source has really gone from fanzines. Obviously, a club zine would have club news in it, but in terms of more generalized science fiction news or national fan news, that’s probably best served by the Internet these days.
S40: I used to have a couple of columns. One was called About the Authors by The Authors. I’d phone an author and ask him to do something on another author. And I actually had things lifted from BCSFAzine by things like SF Chronicle because I would phone all the local authors and put the news in there.
The Audience: One thing the Internet doesn’t have a corner on, if you want to phone another author, or review a movie –
S40: But even the old hardcopy fanzine you have today, you use the Internet to get the articles, so there’s really not that much difference. And if you have a fabulous set-up with a fabulous computer, you can have a fancy wonderful multi-colour cover which you really can’t do very easily on the printed copy unless you have lots of bucks.
GS: I think that the Internet has not entirely replaced the functions that used to be performed by fanzines in the mimeograph era, and the reason is that for some reasons a lot of the participatory functions and fandom-oriented functions that you see in a lot of one-man entirely voluntary publications simply haven’t been picked up. Maybe I’m not subscribing to the right newsgroups or listservs, but when I look for web pages, I find things ones that expressly professional, like SF Canada, for SF writers in Canada, or Made in Canada, whose web master is focused on films and media and writers and anything except fandom. It does make a concession by listing conventions and that’s it. The concept that there is news by, for and about science fiction fans, or there’s a community out there that might have an interest in connecting, that seems to have gone by the board. Or it’s served in different ways and I’m not seeing where it’s being served.
S40: I’d kind of like to get off that, we’re going beyond the topic. The topic is more the trial and tribulations of publishing, which would be getting your articles, troubles you’ve had actually producing the thing.
GS: We have a different take on this, Steve and I. We’ve had a different take on what needs and interests people have, just in BCSFA, and how to meet them. I’ve been flailing around trying to find the things that people would be interested in participating in, or the things they’d be interested in seeing. And I still don’t know after five or six years. Steve has been very good during his term had soliciting participation.
S40: I found that if you get a little bit of cider, if you knew what you were doing at conventions, I never had any trouble getting artwork.
ACM: I had to solicit by buying a beer for fanzine artists at Torcon.
S40: You get to know these people. Part of the thing for me was that I was always lucky that way. If you look through old BCSFAzines, this was in the days before we had much in the way of computers – when I first started doing it, I finally got my Atari Amiga 2 halfway through my editorship of about 35 issues. My biggest problem is that I am a terrible typist. The last thing I need to do is to take someone’s stuff and re-type, because there’d be ten times as many typos. So I’d just take it, photo-reduce it at your local Kinko’s or whatever, and all the pages inside the zine – you could tell I was younger then, because I was able to read them without glasses – and I’d photo-reduce it, so you have an 8 ½ by 11 sheet folded over, so you’d have lots of pages and lots of information. But it was very hard for me to re-type it, so rather than do that you’d find all different typefaces, all different styles because I just trusted my people that contributed. And I was very lucky that way, with people like Al Betz, who won an Aurora for his Ask Mr. Science column. And I’d get a letter from Harry Warner, Jr., and every fanzine editor knows you got to have a Harry Warner, Jr. letter in the olden days. And I got them, and I thought I could re-type them, or I could put in and you could see all the letters wandering and so on.. He had certain keys where the words would go like [a curvy line]. It was part of the charm, so instead of re-typing all this stuff, I would just run it as is. There was a lot of stuff in there with very few illustrations in the middle. It was just article after article.
ACM: Especially for CCFZC, I’ve been using my computer solely so layout contributions have not been too much of a problem. I’ve been quite blessed with quite a bit or artwork from Brad Foster and I forget who it was sent me a huge amount of fillos by a fan artist who passed away recently. Rostler, William Rotsler. So artwork I haven’t had a problem with fortunately, it’s been articles and getting actually writing done. I’ve been told I can write, but it takes me a long time to do it between writer’s block and 1 17 month-old running around the house.
{{Editor’s Note: At this point, a person entered asking where Boardroom A was. There followed a long discussion concerning the location of Boardroom A. With a 3-to-1 vote (Andrew dissenting), it was eventually decided that Boardroom A must be next to Boardroom B. }}
ACM: So I’ve been very lucky in the artwork department, but most of the verbiage I’ve had to create myself. That’s pretty tough when you’re trying to fill an entire zine which is why mine comes out so infrequently.
JWH: That’s the tough part, filling up the pages with words. Fortunately I have a government job so I have plenty of time to type. It also depends on what kind of zine you’re doing. With a perzine, your own personal zine, you realize that the ultimate responsibility to fill those pages lies with you. If you’re doing a club zine, you’re somewhat at the whim of what the club decides to put in, and if they put out a lot of effort and get you a lot of stuff, then that’s terrific. It cuts down your work immensely. But sometimes you have to harass people to contribute things.
ACM: I remember you were a master at harassing us.
JWH: A master harasser.
S40: I was lucky when I was doing BCSFAzine because we had FRED, which is the weekly drinking thing. And I did cover that was infamous, we didn’t know if it would go across the border. You see a naked Leela on top the Time Lord lying on the floor and his scarf wrapped around the TARDIS. And it says, “Again, Doctor! Again!”
GS: Let’s do the time warp again!
S40: Fosfax wrote to me and asked if they could trade with me. I’d never heard of them before, but they’re quite a famous fanzine with all these famous authors, and they wrote to me to ask me if they could get this issue. Someone had seen it.
GS: Then Timothy Lane took over as editor.
S40: I took the time that if someone commented on something in the zine, I made sure that the person who wrote it saw it. I brought the fanzine to them, I opened the page and I said, “Look at this.” That’s how I got people like Sidney Trim and so to keep contributing, you keep working the people. It sounds cruel, but it works. You take the time and effort, and you get a lot more out of it. I never had trouble getting articles, except one or two in the early days. As far as a clubzine, it sort of was and sort of wasn’t because it was what I could find. The club really didn’t contribute except for upcoming events, which was one of my columns anyway.
GS: I found over and over again that a minority of people will continually get into something participatory for publication on paper. And a majority of people will accept it. Whether they appreciate or whether they have a problem with it, only a minority will tell you. And that’s just the deal. Since the mimeograph era, I’ve found that costs have risen. It’s been a lot easier to do things purely on the Internet. I’m aware of at least one web site, efanzines.com, which is where fanzines are archived in electronic format. I could have produced a long list of what are current zines that I don’t have in paper format. Fanzines are always changing; they change address or title. They’ll always sound goofy. I have in the past produced fanzines with titles like Scuttlebutt, The Maple Leaf Rag, The Perfect Paper, The Filthy Rag, Black Marxist Lesbian Quarterly, Sercon Popcult Litcrit Fanmag, The World According to Garth, and most recently The Royal Swiss Navy Gazette. That’s typical. When I first got into fandom, I heard of a club called The Elves’, Gnomes’ and Little Mens’ Science Fiction Chowder and Marching Society. It’s hard to catalogue things like that. At the Worldcon in Glasgow, some people got together and whipped up a one-shot – a fanzine that’s only going to exist for one issue – on the spur of the moment, very quickly and spontaneously, and it was called The Pork Authority. And I realized that different people have different funny bones, different live nerves. It’s really hard to predict where you’re going to hit them, what’s going to arouse their enthusiasm. And I think that no matter what media you’ve got, what the price structures are, that’s the major quandary.
S40: I think all of us here have been involved in paper fanzines. Part of the Trials and Tribulations of fanzine editing is actually printing it. Now something like {{holds up an old BCSFAZine}} would take about four hours to actually print, because I had the gestenter, the electo-stencil cutter, time seven sheets which would be 14 electro-stencils, plus if you did the colour cover, you had extra ones. And you had ink everywhere. And you’d have a group upstairs. Because it was a clubzine I got get a group of people to do collation and have a big party. And we had a treasurer for a while who wouldn’t give the address labels. So later at FRED, we’d put the stamps on and the labels, because you can’t put the stamps on without the labels.
Audience: How big a run did you do?
S40: Between 100 and 200. This was when we used to have 100 members, a little over 100 members, And the you’d have trades. It added up to a fair bit of time. It was a lot of work to do that, but it was a work of joy for me for the longest time, then it go to be onerous in the end when you’ve got 28 pages every month. ‘Cause that what that is, 28 pages. But I enjoyed it and I’m proud of it.
ACM: For my current zine, I use computer layout which makes life tremendously easy. You can have a fairly polished looking page. That helps quite a bit. In the early days, I did my zine on an Apple Iic because that was the only computer I had at the time. I used software that could not make a margin along the side so I stapled my zine at the top. Which I got plenty of comments on, having an 8 ½ by 11 fanzine stapled at the top.
JWH: It was unique.
ACM: It was. If nothing else, I got known for that. How it was stapled! No one remembers anything I wrote, but it was staple really cool!
JWH: Never read it, but I liked the staples!
ACM: So these days layout is not so much of a problem for me personally. The main problem is afterwards and that’s the expense of printing it. Photocopying has gotten ridiculously expensive lately. And postage has gone up in Canada every year for the past three.
S40: Can I recommend going to some place like Staples Superstore for printing?
ACM: That’s where I do go, but even there the prices have gone up a cent a page in the last year. Layout has gotten easier but everyone has their own fleet of gestentners in the basement anymore. Reproduction is getting costly.
{{Editor’s Note: Transcribing this a year later, the Editor can only shake his head in wonder at how he let that straight line get away unscathed.}}
S40: I did have them but they all went to CascadiaCon. They were given to Seattle people. They came up in a big van, and these people in white coats came and instead of kidnapping me, they took all the gestentners and electro-stencil cutters.
ACM: What happened to them?
S40: They wanted to show all the new fans how the old fans used to print. So I started to get them running and a whole pile of people took pictures of me and a gestentner at CascadiaCon.
JWH: The first zine I was involved was a one-shot we did called The Electric Gang Bang Pork Chop. So there must be something about pork and spontaneous one-shots. {{Editor’s Note: The Editor would like to point out that no pork products were harmed in the creation of The Electric Gang Bang Pork Chop.}}
GS: There was a creative character in Edmonton who came up with something with no pork in it called You Can’t Get to Heaven on Roller Skates Infrequently.
JWH: We should just do a panel on zine names.
GS: Yeah!
S40: There you go!
GS: The problem I have is: a) finding out where all the members are because I’ve had this continual struggle over the last year just establishing who is a current BCSFA member, who’s expired, who’s moved and where did they move to, and it took an extremely long time simply to meet up same time same place with the treasurer and the vice-president—
S40: They have electricity today!
GS: The other problem I have is getting people to understand what I was saying quite clearly in plain English on paper where the words stayed still and you could re-read them. It’s amazing how English is broken down semantically so that you can read the same sentence four ways depending on the state of mind someone is in at that time of the month {{Editor’s Note: I’m sure Garth is referring to “rent day.”}}, or what country they’re in, or what language or speech community they originally come from. It’s very amazing. Within one club.
S40: When I had to do it, originally most people would rejoin at a certain time, so I’d get 13 sheets and type all the names on all the labels, and I’d run 13 sheets, of labels. But then they decided that they don’t all want to renew in May and that made it a lot harder. Most people did renew in May for the longest time at V-Con.
JWH: I was going to say that when I started I did some gestetner work, too. Bernie Klassen had one so we were doing a lot of work with that, but I came in just as that was fading out and computers were coming in The latest issue was done using Pagemaker 7.
S40: You cheated!
JWH: It’s the only way to go! The only way to go! Printing costs are horrible, but what I do is use Pagemaker which very easily exports to pdf and email a lot of copies out to people.
GS: I have a problem. When I was first editing BCSFAZine and using pdf, when I exported to pdf strange things would happen to illustrations, especially on the cover. First, for several issues one half on one side of the cover illustration, just the illustration, would disappear. Just blank white space. And then it was ¾ of the cover illustration would disappear and you would get to see one quarter of it in the upper left hand quadrant. That was when I gave up on Pagemaker. I still to this day do not know what the glitch was. Now over the past year or so, I’ve been struggling with machines, different programs, different conversion strategies. I finally gave up. I’ve been doing this in Word.
S40: You notice what you guys are missing? What’s different about BCSFAZine that’s different from all the rest? No colour. You guys are in black and white. I used to like the fact that you could get blues and reds and browns. Yeah, you can get it on the email version—
ACM: My last issue did have a colour cover—
S40: It’s very rare. It’s sad to see that sometimes— well, you can’t afford to print it in colour. I was going to keep one gestetner with colour ink in case I ever print something I can throw a little colour on it just for fun, but it was too easy to put them on the fun and see them go.
JWH: We did a couple of colour covers for Ozone Hole in the ’90s and —
S40: Oh, I remember that!
JWH: —they looked great but the cost was, oh god, it instantly doubled the cost.
GS: One of the things that we represent, some of us with graying hair, is that we’ve seen several changes in media and that means we’ve learnt crafts several times over. I’ve used spirit duplicators, ditto machines. I’ve seen hectograph. You’ve used mimeograph.
S40: Yeah. I’ve also used inkjet printers and all that. Did you ever do anything like I did? I had collectors that liked BCSFAZine and wanted “The” BCFSAZine so every now and then just to get even with them, I’d throw in different sheets of coloured paper. You’d have a random colour so you couldn’t get all the BCFSAZines identical, I even did one with two different covers once.
ACM: I remember an Under the Ozone Hole that had every issue customized—
JWH: No, it only had eight different covers.
GS: That’s been done several times. In the earliest years—
ACM: I remember the personalized letter columns—
JWH: Go away!
S40: The worst thing I ever did was –and next time I will think very carefully if I ever get involved with that— we did a hoax ad for BCSFAZine. I got together around V-Con 8 with a lady from Edmonton and a person from Calgary and we came with addresses that were not viable. In Calgary it was like “Something SW” and there was no such place. In Edmonton, it was a burnt-down sports arena, and in Vancouver it was the Hotel Devonshire’s parking lot. After they had ripped the hotel down. And so I came up with a title called Jape’s Books, a new chain of bookstore. And I announced this new chain of bookstores and it came out in these other fanzines, and I, not carefully thinking this out, I ran this ad for Jape’s and a number of people went down to this fancy, early opening of Jape’s Books and I forgot that the BCSFA meeting was at my house the next day. Ooooo, they were not happy. They fell for it hook, line and sinker. But I thought they would pick up on the word “Jape.”
GS: You never know what joke people will notice. Or get. Or where the comprehension fails. That’s the problem with any hoax, any satire, and it’s not specific to fanzines.
S40: How many people went to that? Ken, do you remember?
Ken Wong (who had wandered into the wrong room): No, not me!
S40: You were one of the ones complaining and so was David George and a number of other people. You went by at another time and noticed where it was. Every now and then people will do a hoax like the Not the BCSFAZine 100 and Still Not the BCSFAZine 100. Gerald Boyko was supposed to do the 100th issue of BCSFAZine. By the time issue 104 came out, we did Not the BCSFAZine 100 and sent it out to all the BCSFA members, and just after we did Still Not the BCSFAZine 100, just after BCSFAZine 108 came out, then the real BCSFAZine 100 came out.
ACM: Better late than never.
S40: How about you guys and deadlines?
ACM: Well, I’m pretty much wide-open. Always have been. I knew pretty much right from the outset that setting a regular schedule would almost would either kill me or result in a terrible zine since I was providing most of the writing. Since it’s inception there have been gaps of months and in the most recent case, two years between issues simply out of necessity. It’s pretty much a hobby. Some people have been wonderful at keeping deadlines,
S40: BCSFAZine’s been excellent.
ACM: BCSFAZine’s been excellent, but it’s a clubzine though, so that helps.
S40: No, not really. I was still up at 2:00 in the morning wondering “where the hell’s that article”and I had to print that morning because that was the final deadline.
ACM: My zine is officially listed with the National Library of Canada as being “irregular.”
JWH: Well, I try to keep a roughly quarterly schedule with Ozone Hole and I’ve done pretty well except for that nine year gap. But going back to deadlines and clubs, that was the one thing that was a problem when I was doing the club zine. When I’m doing Ozone Hole, it’s just me. I all can do is get mad at myself and I’m not going to do that. With a club zine, it’s good in one sense because you’ve got a lot of people contributing things, but it’s bad in another sense because that deadline’s coming and your on the phone and pulling your hair and screaming at people “You promised me an article! I need it! I have three blank pages waiting for it!”
S40: I must admit that I was lucky there. I always had too much stuff.
GS: I very hard-nosed about deadlines. I can afford to be because a) I produce BCSFAZine on somebody else’s dime, and thereby hangs a few tales I won’t tell, and b) I get somebody else to the actual production of the physical zine. Having a computer to work with solves a lot of my problems enormously. I find it really easy to use boilerplate. I also get other people to do significant chunks of the zine. Sometimes it’s embarrassingly obvious how I slap the thing together.
S40: Here’s another thought. Have any of you gotten anyone really mad at you, almost enemies? I was asking for artwork. And this one person submitted a whole pile of artwork. I said that I disliked dragons intensely and that I would very rarely run them. She sent me pages of dragons. And I ran one of hers, and then I think I ran a second one. But they were all very similar and I didn’t want to run a bunch of them. And she got really really mad at me!
GS: You could have done a one-shot called What a Drag.
S40: You’d get artwork that really wasn’t what you wanted and they would get really mad if you didn’t run it.
ACM: Not so much from what I didn’t run, but I’m very surprised that John didn’t deck me in Winnipeg. I ran an editorial in defense of one friend at the expense of another, and I realize now that I realize now in older wiser times that that was pretty much a mistake. At the time I thought I was doing the right thing and I got the nastiest letter from him as the result.
JWH: But you’ve learned well, Grasshopper.
ACM: So that’s the only instance in my case where I’ve really ticked someone off.
JWH: Yeah, I’ve ticked a few people off.
S40: I don’t want names!
JWH: I’m not giving any! When you’re doing a clubzine like Garth is doing now, especially when it’s on someone else’s dime, there is that struggle between what you want to do as the editor and what the club wants done and perhaps what certain people in the club want done, and that gets into the whole club politics thing spilling over into the zine. That’s why I just gave up on clubzines. I like making a zine and I’m just going to do my own zine.
S40: You mean the club actually interfered? My club never said anything to me.
JWH: Well, it was a rare thing, it didn’t happen all the time. But it happened enough times—
ACM: It got political—
S40: I just realized that the artist that I had rouble with was a club officer—
JWH: Exactly.
GS: Have you noticed that the level of interference with people’s behavior or their rational thinking from not looking at their assumptions? If people want to do their own thing their own way and they enjoy their own hobby activity, that’s one thing. But everyone wants somebody else to something their own way, that’s when you get politics.
S40: Yeah.
ACM: Yeah.
JWH: Yep.
GS: And it took me a long time to realize how much of this bullshit is going on. The other thing that I’m facing most of the time now is people not communicating in terms that I can recognize. I don’t know and I’ve never known what people would want to enjoy in a clubzine. So I’ve pretty much been left to my own devices doing my own thing at other people’s expense. I’m saying that now “on record.”
S40: Another thing to consider. Have you put things in that you thought were totally in bad taste? I already mentioned the Doctor Who cover that I didn’t think would cross the border. The other thing was when they had a meeting at my place and David Stewart didn’t lock the bathroom door and someone burst in the door and took a picture of him sitting on the toilet. I ran that as a cover on BCSFAZine.
ACM: (almost dies laughing)
JWH: I would’ve run that!
S40: But I’m trying to get you guys to say did you ever put out something that you thought was well, maybe that wasn’t such a smart idea? Come on, you must have!
JWH: Only you, Steve.
GS: I can be fairly snide in my editorial columns sometimes. I think that I am self-critical and people can see it but in the editorial and letter columns I can have a very sardonic and somewhat stuffy tone that I think is going to grate with some people. Maybe I’m putting people off and not realizing it.
S40: Maybe what you need is more of a light-hearted tone.
GS: I am being light-hearted. People just don’t quite get my rather Victorian default mode.
S40: What I would try and do is get a couple of people like “Ask Mr. Science.” I’m not particularly funny, but these people are, so I tries to get them to do the funny bits. And that’s another trial and tribulation – what do you want to put into a fanzine?
ACM: When I started my second fanzine, I thought of something that Dale Speirs said which is “have a focus for your zine.” And looking back, my first zine didn’t really have much of one except that I was a fan. So I decided that I wanted to write about science fiction and fandom. So that gives you something you can go for, something you can strive for, and at the same time if you’ve got thoughts percolating in your head that have nothing to do with science fiction and fandom, there’s been a long tradition of that in science fiction fanzines – you’re always going to be wrestling with yourself, does this fit in? What are people going to think about this? I ran an article in my zine following September 11 and it had not terribly much to do with science fiction or fandom except that it referenced myself and my life it’s been the single most commented-on article that I’ve ever written. So it’s where do you draw the line? How much do you put in what form?
JWH: That’s a good approach, to have a focus for your zine. I should try that sometime. I don’t want to limit myself to what I put in the zine. So I don’t have a focused approach to what the zine is going to be about. I try to make sure that everything is well-written and of quality. Let’s put it that way. So I prefer more the quality of a piece as opposed to the specifics of the subject matter. So it goes all over the place. In the latest one I’ve got an article about kayaking I wrote, and an article about The Who, and someone submitted an article about the woman up in the Interior who on Valentine’s Day her car went in the river and she saved herself by eating chocolates until the rescue crew came. She was strapped in her car under water.
GS: The key to underwater survival: bring chocolates.
S40: For me focus – what I tried to do was, being a clubzine, was to think about what fans wanted. Well, they like to eat, so there was a fan food column I’d try to get. They liked humour so I tried to get Mr. Science. I tired to get someone to do movie reviews, I tried to get someone to do book reviews. And then I had an artist do the front cover and the back cover.
GS: Advertising. I’d forgotten that we had advertising. Was that paid advertising?
S40: We got 10% discounts.
GS: When I inherited BCSFAZine, I inherited a bunch of regular ads, I started adding advertisements for writer’s workshops or for my Royal Swiss Navy or The Western Fandom Illuminati. I try to be as general and unfocused in the zine as possible. I try to include things like market news or recently published works by Canadian writers or the evil influence of Danish cultural imperialism on Canadian fandom. I think that I’m going to get some letters of comment eventually.
S40: What about letters of comment?
ACM: Letters of comment are essential.
S40: No, I mean do you get lots?
ACM: I got quite a few from The Usual Bunch of People. By that I mean Lloyd Penney, and Harry Warner Jr., and a lot of people that I traded fanzines with down in the States.
GS: I always though that Lloyd was the Canadian love child of Harry Warner and –
S40: We’ve got about five minutes left, so we should start wrapping this up, unless someone wants to ask a question. Does anyone want to ask a question?
The Audience:
S40: I guess we should wrap up. Thanks for coming!
originally published in Under the Ozone Hole #18
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