I Made a Poetry Zine

My library's printing service is called princh (like the Grinch), which is very entertaining to me personally, but it's also very smooth and beautiful to use. You tap the special little screen attached to the photocopier, you check a preview of your image, and then you slam on the plus button and get yourself ten glorious copies. Perfect technology.

This is how I completed my new zine, a small poetry pamphlet with three poems inside, and some collage and illustration. I'll be honest with you, I only really like the last poem - but this was a challenge I set myself, to make a quick zine in one day, and I did it. So it doesn't matter too much how good the poems are, they just needed to exist. And one out of three ain't bad!

I read somewhere online, the other day, right after I had started crafting my zine, that it was zine month, but I can't find any evidence of that now, and I don't remember where I saw it. It just has to be zine year, zine life, zine minute in my heart, I guess. Somebody said this... it was real.

It's been some time since I've made a zine, so it's really nice to do it again and see that familiar, satisfying, grey photocopy texture. I used random words pulled from the newspaper (the Metro), to title each poem, which was a fun little prompt exercise, and the combination of newspaper cuttings, a few printed words, and of course, drawings... worked really nicely.

I have these transparent plastic sticky notes that I used to overlay some drawings on top of other elements, and that turned out to have a really nice layering effect. You can see the edges of these notes in some places, so they cast interesting little shadows of light texture.

Yeah. I like my zine. And I believe I should make more.

Dadposting

My dad died when I was still little, so while I do remember him, it's in a very limited way. There are, though, quite a few interesting pictures of him to look at.

On the tube.

He had a famous big leather jacket that he wore a lot, and, always, long hair dangling down in one pin-straight swoop. He also had a thing for bandanas, and Harley-Davidson merchandise. Father and I would wear matching Harley-Davidson bandanas together on occasion when I was a baby. Supreme fun.

Of course, many of these pictures involve me. After all, I was a charming little child at the time. Who can resist a new photo featuring the dazzling, cherubic infant? 

I love the insane, bug-eyed expression that newborns get sometimes. They are gorgeous little aliens. We have to help them. They need milk. I love this photo. Out-of-focus, barely living baby just taking it as it comes, and this man, head on a trenchcoat. Just new baby stuff.

In this one, I like my expressionless look. That's a baby taking it in, and not knowing what 'it' is. A beautiful lack of comprehension, contrasted with that knowing smile. "I have the baby", my dad is thinking, perhaps evilly.

And finally, here are some solo dad pictures. A pose with a cool bike (note the bandana - fandom membership confirmed!), and an underexpoxed kitchen shot.

If there was one thing that was definitely true about my dad, and that I am not making up, it was that he loved to be by the milk.

Les Misérables: A Beautiful Big Tome

Les Misérables is insane. I started reading it in March of last year on my 3DS, via 100 Classic Books Collection, and because this software organises its books into very tiny pages, it is almost eighteen thousand pages long there. Yowch!

I had to admit defeat after one-too-many late nights staring at the still bright screen, and switched to a regular, normal epub situation on my phone, which put the pagecount at a far more reasonable (and more reflective of reality) 1659 pages. Phew! 

Gavroche, by Emile Antoine Bayard.

It's a long book - I think the longest single book I've read to date - and so you really begin to live in 19th Century Paris across all of these tasty pages. So much time is spent with Cosette and Jean Valjean and weird little Marius that they start to feel like my own desperate family, and so finishing it was monumentally sad.

The book paints a thick, complex portrait of its setting, and what I really love about Victor Hugo's style, beyond his sort of gothic, dirty despair and biblical intensity, is that his books include interconnected networks of essays slotted between story chapters. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame did this too, but that book was tempered by being short, and so he kept to his musings to just a few topics, like the street layouts of Paris and the strange horror of the advent of the printing press. 

"This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite. Man is the second."

These interludes which concern themselves with relevant history and the infrastructure of human life allow Hugo's books this very direct commentary. Yes, he's working in all his nasty themes, as an author must, but he's also looking the reader in the eye and saying, "hey... how about that sewer efficiency?"

Jean Valjean's emergence from the sewer, by John R. Neill.

You might think it's going to be boring, and yes, I think sometimes it is - a lot of this stuff is pretty dense and requires a certain amount of context to really stay present with while reading - but the lattice of passionate treatises on all these little topics of humanity and the details of the vast overarching infrastructures which shape the lives of the book's characters provide a unique, strong sense of place. 

"Monastic communities are to the great social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the impoverishment of the country."

Much of it is going directly over my head - most prominently the book's moments of pure French (I don't know how other translations read, but Isabel Hapgood left quite a few passages of untranslated French in there - girl, I can't read that!) - but nevertheless, the great tapestry of Victor Hugo's Big Thoughts has become a familiar delight. It's like having your grandpa just go off on a topic for thirty minutes every so often. You're nodding. You're saying, "yes gramps". You don't necessarily totally get it, but you come to love the grampa lectures. That's Victor Hugo. He just needs to do that.

Fantine in Love, by Gustave Brion.

I love, generally, the sense of dark Victorian allegory that Hugo brings to life so beautifully here. The incredible suffering and tragedy of it all. The allusions to an unstoppable, frightening and mysterious God. It's no wonder that Christian iconography has such a solid place in horror. Christianity via Hugo is this beautiful, mystifying, celestial yet shadowy thing. It is the ultimate refutation of all the hideous injustices faced by the poor and oppressed, yet of course, those poor and oppressed must humble themselves before God to such an extent that it is starkly clear to a modern reader how religious values are, at their very core, a driving force for the persecution and punishment of the downtrodden.

"Who knows whether man is not a recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment."

Les Misérables is also, at times, a very funny book. The way Marius picks Jean Valjean's handkerchief up from the street and views it as an object of worship because he believes it belongs to Cosette is pretty great. Marius is a bonafide freak in that chapter. He's a repulsive little man completely captured by his own lust. So he stalks them in the least subtle and most crazed way imaginable, causing Jean Valjean to move house to avoid him. What follows is a wonderful despair spiral from Marius that took me from the zone of laughter to the zone of pain.

"Despair, also, has its ecstasy. Marius had reached this point."

No Marius don't go to the barricade you're so sexy aha... 
Engraving by Gustave Brion / Yon & Perrichon

This novel is about so many things, but I find its claims concerning the godliness and the searing, blissful intensity of marriage a very interesting one.

"When two mouths, rendered sacred by love, approach to create, it is impossible that there should not be, above that ineffable kiss, a quivering throughout the immense mystery of stars."

It's not the most prominent aspect of the story, but the vigour and passion with which it closes in on this glittering reverance for the young married couple is almost too much to bear. Patriarchal legend Jean Valjean can die in his own sort of pained bliss knowing that he has finally passed Cosette on to Marius and therefore fulfilled his vow to Fantine. He has been redeemed in a most excellent way, but not a complete one. He will always be the prisoner - as life in itself is a prison. He remains in the eternal prison of having once been a convict, as it were. So death then, is a sort of freedom, and in a deeply sorrowful, loving way, Jean Valjean is over, and the revolutionary future is here. Aww.

Cosette & Marius, by Emile Antoine Bayard

"If you only knew, father, I have had a sorrow, there was a robin redbreast which had made her nest in a hole in the wall, and a horrible cat ate her. My poor, pretty, little robin red-breast which used to put her head out of her window and look at me! I cried over it. I should have liked to kill the cat. But now nobody cries any more. Everybody laughs, everybody is happy."

 

Napoleon Blowing Bubbles, by anonymous (1813).

Four tricorne hats out of five. 

★★★★☆  

Birds: My Latest Passion

It's kind of crazy and insane just how many animals are out there. There are so many of them. Who even are they? What are they thinking? Would they even know what to do if I walked into the room?

Roseate Spoonbill, from John Latham's A General History of Birds (1824). 

I've been learning about bird species recently. My grandma liked birds, and once I bought this birdspotting guide in her presence, and she was beyond delighted. I don't think I have ever in my life gained someone's approval more strongly than in that moment. So I sort of thought I should study flashcards and really learn all the British bird types.

My beautiful bird book.

Some of my favourites include:

Redstart 

Now this is a bold character. This is the sports car of birds. High contrast. Love it.

Tufted Duck

Look man, you gotta be tufted. I would be tufted if I could be, but legally it's not possible.

Pied Wagtail

I just think this little snowball is so cute. I love that long tail and that tiny body, the beautiful white and black pattern. An adorable creature.

***

There are endless variations of little (and big!) birds, and just knowing more of their names is really helping me to develop an appreciation for all of the many varieties and patterns and colours. Starlings are so spiky and have an understated green iridescence. Black-headed gulls look like they're wearing a deku mask. Little Auks look like very cute little aliens.

They are all so great. I love them. 

My Hole

When I picked up this painting with the middle torn out of it (I'd used it for a collage), I thought, oh yes, that's the perfect thing for my next scans. That hole is for my face, obviously. 

I've been really enjoying painting lately. I have huge tubes of white and black paint, and a stack of thick paper, so I've just been working my way through it, and I love the familiar, loose feel of the paint. I like to get it super watery, so the lines will fade and there'll be a nice constrast between the super black, solid lines and the more diluted greys.

Not so much on this page though, because this was one of those pages for using up the last of the paint dregs on my palette. When I'm done with painting for the day, I almost always have a reasonable amount of paint sitting there, and so I use as much of it as possible on a new piece of paper. I just cover it and try to paint over it later, or re-use it for some other thing.

And, as you can see, I used this one for something. Other than as a frame for my face. But that's two uses right there!

Now I'll probably slice it up into little pieces for another collage. Very handy. Please look now upon one of my paintings:

Nice. 

Babes in Toyland (1961) is a Misguided Spectacle

Babes in Toyland (1961) is a strange film in some very 1960s ways. I came across the wider Babes in Toyland cinematic universe, or rather, the Babes in Toyland sequence of three movies all thirty years apart, via the somewhat charming but basically dull 1990s version, which features a young, puppy-ish Keanu Reeves, and a very small Drew Barrymore.

Cuties.

I would ultimately conclude that that instalment was the best of the three, but recently I watched the other two, accidentally starting with this extremely saturated 1961 venture.

The visuals here are a spectacle, and the movie knows it. For much of it, we're focused on a beautifully coordinated ensemble of dancers in eye-wateringly bright costumes. You can feel how close in time this thing is to West Side Story from the similarity in dance aesthetic - but West Side Story is a thrilling movie with arresting music and clever little lyrics. This movie is not that. The twirl of a green petticoat, the Top Cat style set, and the precise shock of synchronised movement is what this movie has to offer. And it's not quite enough.

It massively relies on its visuals, and they are, to this day, fantastic. But what this movie lacks is coherence, and good songwriting.

At one point, Mary, our protagonist, sings a short song about not being able to calculate her accounts. It utilises some fun effects - she has some colourful shadow-selves to accompany her - but it's still kind of low-energy and lacklustre. This was a prime opportunity for goofy, hammy performance, but instead it's subdued.

My favourite musical number, and the only one that really excited me while watching, is the one sung by a gang of sinister trees to a group of children wandering in the woods.

The trees look gorgeous, they flap their little tree mouths, and they sing about how the children shouldn't have come here...

Sadly, it's not a very good song. None of the songs in this movie are. Which is not really ideal for a musical. It's also pretty devoid of character, aside from potentially the villain, Barnaby, who is a Gargamel type guy, and later, the toymaker. His cartoon villianry is enough to make Barnaby one of the most fleshed-out personalities in Toyland, and yet he's not very interesting either. If you've ever seen an episode of Wacky Races or The Smurfs, you already know about this guy.

The toymaker, though, is played by Ed Wynn, who I know from the wonderful Twilight Zone episode, 'One For the Angels'. Here, he's not playing such a dazzling role as in the T Zone, but he brings a bright light to the movie as the goofy toy man. His presence is a breath of fresh air so tasty that it feels like being awakened from a long slumber. And he's literally just doing his baseline wide-eyed goofy character. But he's just so good. This man is an expert at being the goofster in a movie. And I love him for that.

Babes in Toyland is a stilted, Hanna-Barbera-esque live action Disney movie at a time when Disney were making tons of these vague family-oriented movies. It doesn't have that magic quality that makes a good, juicy movie, but it does have some interesting elements of spectacle that serve as a valuable look at film history. The technicolour is screaming here, but the muddled, dull scenario leaves much to be desired.

One goose out of five. 

★☆☆☆☆  

The See-Through Journal

More than a year ago, I was sent this beautiful little vellum-paper journal. I used a few pages at the beginning of 2025, and then left it in a drawer for a while. The look and feel of it is really satisfying, but I was at a bit of a loss for how to effectively use it, given that there is no escape from the ghosting of images across pages.

It's sort of hard to see the full effect of the transparency with my own eyes versus the all-seeing beam of the scanner. Of course, when you press the journal down onto the scanner bed, those pages are as close to each other as they can be, whereas when I take a casual look, those pages are fluttering away from each other.

My first real attempt to use the transparency was more of an attempt to cover it up - chunky newspaper collage all over the page. This obscured the next page, but I wasn't amazed by the way it looked on the other side.

I also tried paint, and I do, as always, really like the texture - especially, this soft, watery grey. But I think my favourite medium to use in here so far is the humble pencil.

Pencil markings just look so great in here. Very clear and dark and rich. These lines really appear to pop-up from each page whenever you can see some sort of muddied colour or texture in some part-obscured layer beneath.

I then figured out a collage variation I really liked - a more sparse style of collage that doesn't seek to fill up the whole page, but to provide a little sprinkling of accent colours. I really like this page of yellow, orange, and black and white halftones.

This journal really seems to call out for mixed media, but I think I'm going to try going for all-pencil pages for a while and see how the layering looks. Or maybe I'll use paint and pencil, and nothing else. We'll see.

Baby Mode

I was once, like all of you, a baby. It's true! And when I was a baby (and in fact, for many years after that), there was a hilarious joke about this gorilla being my mother. A good gag. 

That's her!

As you can see, she is a very beautiful gorilla. Sadly, I look nothing like her. I look more like this baby:

Me (the baby), and my dad (the man).

It's strange and wonderful to think that I was once a little wriggling blonde orb. I mean, who would've though that this very baby would go on to one day read Les Misérables?! Unthinkable...

I think human beings should be born with the solidified ability to run already built in. I know we need to be expelled rapidly because of our big, stupid heads full of brain, but surely the legs could be ready to go? Surely the legs could be operational at that stage? It takes another nine to eighteen months on average after a baby leaves the womb for those legs to be walkable. That's really wrong I think. We need to fix this.

If I had it my way, babies would be walking around from day one, and that way they would get their best start in life. Walking leads to intellectual pursuits. Walking, then thinking, then reading, then essay-writing. This is the correct order. And then, once they have written their very first dissertation, a baby may enjoy an episode of Bluey for the first time.

And then, only the strongest and cleverest babies can cuddle with a troll. That's the way it should be. 

She's scared!

The Phones of One Missed Call

One Missed Call is an awkward movie. Released in 2003, it came on the tail of the Japanese horror wave that gave us 1998's Ring and 2002's Ju-On: The Grudge - by then, the market had been saturated. 2001's Pulse added a weirder, more tech-y option, 2002's Dark Water gave us a wet one, and 2002's The Eye gave us a very good Chinese addition to the canon of wider Asian horror. But we needed more. We needed an evil phone movie.

After all, phones were the new big thing. These snazzy little objects were more high-tech than ever. You could play games on them - like Paris Hilton's Diamond Quest.

Hell yes. Now that's gaming.

 

Incidentally, if you're interested in exploring some of this era of mobile gaming, you can check out Kahvi break for a really nice collection of Java games, and J2ME Loader if you want to play some of them on Android.

One Missed Call is about this glorious era of phones. But after the film's initial exposition, after the audience fully understands that yes, a vengeful ghost is doing kills by meticulously going down its victims' contacts lists, we sort of abandon the phones.

You'd expect this movie to be phone heavy, but it's not, not really. It devolves into a run-of-the-mill sleuthing session, and the mystery itself leaves a lot to be desired. Who is the nasty ghost in question? A child who is evil. Why is she killing through the phone? I don't know.

It's that damn Cardcaptor Sakura. It's a bad influence.

The film loses itself to dullness. When it's doing phone stuff, it's at its most interesting. When it's not doing phone stuff, I'm bored. I particularly like the whole conceit of receiving a phone call which divines a future event. It makes it a less straightforward ghost story and more of a divine, mystical event that bends time and space. And that element is present in some form in many of the best Asian horror stories. A world-breaking mysticism that is terrifying precisely because there can be no answer other than that the world is not what it seems. Mmmm... delicious.

My other favourite element of this movie is that when its characters are receiving a haunted phone call, they hear a unique, spooky ringtone. That's honestly very funny and good. You'll know when you get a ghost type phone call. The scary chimes will play.

Overall, this movie is a letdown, but I still love this aesthetic world, and all these lovely phones. There are two sequels to this film - I might have to watch them.

One haunted flip-phone out of five. 

★☆☆☆☆