I made a podcast. It should probably be called the “umm… ahh…” Podcast, because it’s been a while since I’ve been on the radio, and these twenty-some minutes are mostly me remembering not to hate the sound of my voice and how to speak correctly.

But here it is. Audio recording: me reading some of my writing, talking about space anarchism futures, playing some ambient noise and loop tapes, and, umm, ahh, me talking some more.

Future podcasts, if there are any, will be better quality, linked to your standard podcast feed services, be better produced, and so on, and so forth. But there has to be a first one, so here it is.

POSZU Podcast #1

When you make zines, it is something you can never just quit forever. I’ve been feeling the itch again since Apopheniac Communiques, which I put together with help from friends last spring. Since that was created entirely with a public call for content put out on the internet and it worked out marvelously, I think I’ll do a similar thing again.

Contribute!

Here’s where you come in. Please send to me your poetry, your prose, your fiction and non-fiction, your research, your collated documents, your notes, your drawings, your paintings, your collages, your sound art, your music, and your video. If you send it to me, I will figure out how to use it.

The only qualifications are:

- It is awesome

- It is your original work (define “original” how you like, but let’s say it must at least qualify as fair-use under US definitions)

- That you’re willing to give me one-time publication rights to include it in a Creative Commons-Attribution-Share-Alike work (which will be assumed if you submit it).

- That you understand that if you submit your 80K novel draft or something equally long, I will most likely include it with some remixing of my own in order to make the zine physically possible. :)

That’s it. Please email submissions to adam@poszu.com.

This is the greatest part for me. I love being able to say to friends, acquaintances, and strangers: “I know you do awesome things. I would love for you to share some of them with me, so that I can share them with more people.” If it wasn’t for your submissions, there would be no zine. But because of your submissions, I get to make a zine. It’s a beautiful thing.

Format

I put together Apopheniac Communiques in classic zine-style, pasting it all together with print-outs and photocopies, but with this new zine it will probably be more electronic. The format will depend on the submissions that I receive, but I’m starting with the goal of making an electronic version to go along with the printed version.

This is why I included non-printable things on the list above, like sound recordings and video. Part of the challenge for me will be figuring out how to include diverse media. There will definitely be a black-and-white, ink (or toner) on paper version of this zine. I will have to figure out how to translate music and color images to this form. Will there be QR codes? Will a DVD come with it? Will there be a small circuit that plays lo-fi sound? WILL THERE BE HOLOGRAMS?!?! There will probably be an electronic version that will give me some options, but at this point, I have no idea how it will all work. But it will be awesome to figure it out. So send me whatever.

Other Details You May Care About

I don’t sell the copies of the finished zine for profit. If I collect money, it is only cover printing costs. Otherwise, I give them away free (last time, I gave them all away free, and just paid for the printing myself).

I tell you this to explain why I can’t pay your for your submissions, even though I feel that is an important goal for publishers to have. I will, however, provide you with copies of the zine. Additionally, I will provide you with print-ready files of the entire zine, which you may use yourself to reproduce it and sell it if you like, according to the Creative Commons-Attribution-Share-Alike license. The reason I like making zines is to make them. If I wanted to sell zines, I would do that, but I don’t, and so I won’t.

Other questions? Email me. And do spread this call around, if you wouldn’t mind. We got the perfect number of submissions last time, but secretly, I would like to see what I will do if I get a hundred submissions. Give me a challenge of amazing proportions!

Just a quick post to tip off the RSS: I’ve posted an online version of my Border Town project here:

http://www.poszu.com/projects/speciation

So you should go and check that out, and read more about it.

The zine I proposed to make, is made.

The title is “Apopheniac Communiques”. Along with seven fantastic contributors, I’ve put together 28 pages of art, poems, short stories, and commentary. It’s full of low-fi awesomeness, pasted together by hand in the “traditional” zine style. Is there a pattern? Is there a theme? That will be for the reader to decide, but suffice it to say, we’ve already put a call in to the proper authorities who deal with such miracles.

In keeping with the classic tradition, I’ll be offering copies in the “mail-art” format: for $2 in either fungible currency or un-cancelled postage, I’ll mail you your very own printed copy, on cream-colored paper, in beautiful 4.25″ x 7″ format.

Mail those monies here:

POSZU
4835 SE Sherman St.
Portland, OR 97215

AND… because it’s totally crazy, I’ll accept Bitcoins as payment. In fact, I’ll let you name your price if you choose to pay in BTC. Email me to get my public key and to give me your address.

The zine is licensed under Creative Commons (Attrib-Comm-Sharealike). And hey, if you just want to see what it looks like, even though it would never, ever compare to having a real life zine in your hands, here is a link to the full PDF.

I have this problem, where I read something about zines, and I get this urge. Like a deep, unholy desire.

There’s something about publishing a zine. It feeds some deep depraved need that I have in the base of the spinal cord, . Just to make something, and get it out there.

M and I were traveling the country for about a month (we stood in over half the states in the nation over the course of that time) and we abandoned almost all the zines I had left over from other vicious attacks of this pub-lust. So now I’m empty-handed, and rather than cured, I’m ready to start again.

I have loads of time, but I’m also very busy with writing projects both for on and off-web. So I’m going to try an impromptu experiment. There’s really no gimmick to it. It’s just a zine, built from anyone who reads this. I’m going to put out the call, and see what we get back. It will either work, or not.

That’s it, that’s the call. Calling you. It’s a zine, that’s all there is to it. Don’t know what a zine is? Google it. Never read one? Go to a punk record store or indie art store in unnamed-city-near-you, or ask nice and I might send you something.

Define your own level of participation. This is what we need:

Writing. (WRITING! LOTS OF IT!) Any length. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, sass, whatever. Another language? Why the hell not?
Photos that will look good rendered into shitty black and white toner printing.
Art that will look good given same.
Stamps
Other input
Whatever else
A Title

Easy. You can whip any one piece of that out in about half an hour. So you have no reason not to play along. Tell your friends.

Here are the only rules:

#: I’m not going to do it until I can get enough material for a reasonable 20 pages and it will be a maximum of 40 pages long. If for one reason or another either of these two constraints (demands!) aren’t met, we’ll discuss what to do.

&: I also will have a bit of editorial sway (my design sense is much more head-bashingly direct modernism rather than zine-ish Maximum Rock & Roll), though it will be way, way open to coercion by the revolutionary zine committee (i.e. opt-in email list).

@: Oh, and the product will never be seen on the Internet, unless the RZC can convince me why it should (it’s a zine, not a damn Tumblr).

%: And lastly, because there are too many rules already, it will be some sort of Creative Commons, and you’ll own your own shit forever and ever.

If you’re in it, you’ll get hard copies.

The goal is to get this printed in less than a month. If you want to be in it, let me know by a week from now. If you want something else, let me know that too.

This is the only other piece of pertinent info at this time:

adam@poszu.com

Everything goes there. Fire away, suckas. Don’t disappoint.

ps. There will be more of an explanation about my hiatus with my official return from hiatus, which should be here some time next week. This is just a bit of craziness that leaked into my self imposed silence. So, I will say that I’m sorry for posting, rather than being sorry for not posting.

[Here is a copy of update #7 on our tube project, from Kickstarter. We're at 42% funding, so help us kick it all the way to 100%! 16 days to go...]

Stasis being not so much a state of non-motion, as a static balance between two forces.

Which itself is not exactly true to describe the project, because it is growing. But it is also falling down.

The tower portion, which was going up the stairs, collapsed after suffering damage from a heavy fabric portion falling through it.

And in the meantime, we’ve also been adding a new section.

The rate of the structure is still positive, however. But with the gradual decay of the paper and glue, it feels that we’ve fallen back to a first order level of growth, as opposed to the hyperbolic growth of the manic days before the opening. We’re not keeping as insane hours, and the tube dreams have subsided. (Though not completely, because last night an army of midwestern people attacked the tubes in my dreams. Nothing against the midwest. Your guess is as good as mine.)

All of this is excellent of course, because there are certain architectural elements to this project. Not architecture in the fictional way, of grand ideas and horizon-spanning city planning, but in the real way that architecture exists. The vicissitudes of operating budgets and time delays, the reality of entropy and collapse next door to new ground breaking. The real weight of corner stones.

You know how in artists’ renditions of planned buildings, how the neighboring buildings look? They look like blank squares, or crudely shaded spaces. They are minimized, to keep from distracting from the object of intent. Even though eventually, the building will be forced to take its place in a real city block filled with decay, stains, cellphone towers, and derelict cars.

Well, with the tubes, there are no blank squares. There are only more tubes. The tubes are not meant to stand out from anything except themselves.

Here’s what we have for you today:

The tower, during-collapse,

and after-collapse

The new section from above,

and on ground level

a visitor in the tubes

the density, otherwise known as “the thickening”

and some other views, now obstructed

Alright guys, I don’t ask you for much.

What am I talking about? I ask you guys to listen to my rants all the time. It’s ME that owes YOU. But I’m asking anyway. I’m cashing in on all of those Internet friendships.

You may remember my little tube project? Crazy tubes? Fish-eye pics? Ramblings about the super-ego?

Well, now we’re pushing it to the next level.

This little installation, above? 500 tubes. Now we have a former department store turned art space in Salem that is going to let us put in 5000 tubes.

This is the new project.

The main expense, by far, is the tubes. We’ve got a Kickstarter to help out, and we need $650. Not too bad, to get a room filled with tubes, right? Right.

There are also some pretty wicked rewards. Some of them, may or may not be filled with candy.

So I think you should help. I think your friends should help. I think you’re follower list, your friends feed, and your AIM buddy list should help. All we need are some micro-payments, and our tubes could be your reality.

So thanks in advance. And if you are too lazy to click on the link to the project page, let me re-create our proposal for you here.

The tubes are:

Anti-:
Anarchistic Artistic Augmented Autonomous Balanced Chaotic Collective Distributed Echoed Evolving Experiential Independent Individualistic Instant Interpretative Lateral Liberal Ludic Multiplistic Multivocal Networked Rhizomatic Self-governing Shared Specific Spontaneous Unbiased Work.

Pro-:
Anti-Social Authoritarian Binary Bureaucratic Censoring Centralized Controlled Dendric Disgusting Dualistic Incorporated Invasive Libidinal Mobbed Obligatory Ordered Owned Programmed Pollutant Schematic Segmented Shrieking Sorted Stratified Structured Unified Universal Vertical Violent Product.

Our infection will belong to you.

The installation will open June 2, for one month, at
Project Space
150 Liberty Street
Salem, Oregon

Here are the things we need:
Hot glue
fabric
poly-fill
A one-way truck trip
5000 tubes

The Salem Art Association, a non-profit, is giving us $250. With $650, we could cover the rest of the expenses (the tubes are by far the biggest expense, at $800).

YOU can help. And then the tubes are yours.

Please treat things as you would like them to be treated.