In her review of Alison Piepmeier's book Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, The American Prospect's Jessica Clark does some fan-girl reminiscing of her own. Like Piepmeier, Clark recalls her first encounter with feminism, which was facilitated in part by the proliferation of grrrl zines. While zines are closely related to the punk movement and its hardcore, tough-guy posturing, riot grrrls and DIY-feminists turned to the photocopied pages as a way of ripping apart pop culture and pasting it together again in collages and text that was at once both rebellious and celebratory. Piepmeier zeroes in on the physical process of creation as a way in which zines can be connected to earlier gendered forms of media:

[Piepmeier] connects them with what she identifies as earlier forms of feminist "participatory media": the scrapbooks kept by suffragettes to document and respond to sexist characterizations of their work; the pamphlets that transmitted contraband information about contraception and sexual health to women in the early 1900s; the mimeographed flyers that called women's libbers to consciousness and revolt. "Participatory media represent a way of engaging with unfriendly mass culture and transforming it — if not always on a broad scale, at least at the level of the local," she notes.

Zines are perhaps one of the most democratic forums for disseminating ideas and concepts. In contrast to glossy fashion mags, zines provide a rough-edged place in which to cut and paste, tear and build. The almost Dada-ist aesthetic of haphazard construction plays with and speaks to "feminine" arts and crafts while also partaking in the angry sneers of the punk/grunge/riot movements. While the material inside is fascinating, Clark rightly focuses on the unique form. She writes,

It's not just the content of these zines but their form, their look and feel, their "girl style," that make them noteworthy. Early-'90s grrrl zines made liberal use (and fun) of both contemporary and retro sexist images — apron-wearing housewives with vacuums, tattooed pinup girls, bikini models torn angrily from ads, ironically juxtaposed with princess and Hello Kitty cartoons — developing a distinctive visual vocabulary that set them apart from both earlier feminist newspapers and zines about other topics. Piepmeier describes them as "sculptural media," notable for the pleasure that their makers experience in constructing them and for the small thrill the recipient gets in opening up a hand-decorated envelope or finding a tiny, raging, perfect zine in a crammed independent bookstore.

But like print media in general, zines have been threatened by the rise of new media. Clark cites feminist blogs including Feministing and the women's writing community She Writes as progenitors of the energetic third-wave feminism found in zines. In a way, there's a certain sense to this: Zines evolved as a way to quickly and easily spread a message. Like blogs, they give anyone an opportunity to be the writer/editor of their own stories. And blogs make it even easier to borrow and steal material, taking images from one source, throwing them casually into another. They also provide the opportunity to reach a much larger, almost unlimited, audience.

Both Piepmeier and Clark are quick to point out that they don't believe zines are going away anytime soon. Despite the fact that the muddling and mixing of pop culture, retro reappropriation and punk symbolism has "mutated in the toxic sludge of commercial culture" and become as commercialized as anything else, Clark argues that there is hope for the zine yet. This debate is somewhat reminiscent of the whole Kindle vs. Book crisis that has been popping up in op-eds on and off for the past few years. Yet like books, zines have the something that blogs don't: Presence. Blogs may offer a large audience, but they're still somewhat distancing and intangible. And this may be purely anecdotal, but it seems that the prevailing trend in blogging is a kind of twee girlishness that bares little resemblance to the anger and energy of riot grrrl culture. Perhaps most importantly, blogs provide a certain polish that zines purposefully lack. Both forums may give an outlet for confessional outpourings, but there is a strange intimacy to be found in an object so carefully constructed and stapled, delivered from hand to hand. As much as I love blogs (and Kindles, and iPods) there is something to Piepmeier's argument for the fragility of the real thing. So if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy some glue sticks and glitter.

Girl Talk [The American Prospect]

Image via Steve Rhodes Flickr

"Every article of clothing is so loaded with signifiers, I don't know how you can help but make up stories about people and their desires based on what they wear," Hardy tells Guy Trebay for the New York Times. Hardy sees fashion as one of the many mediums through which she, as an artist, can twist and pervert our notions of power, gender, and class. For example: the photograph "Fashionfashion Money Look," shows a girl, sitting spread-eagle in her underwear, with menstrual blood soaking through, obscuring the dollar-sign pattern. (Unsurprisingly, this is not the piece the NYT chooses to focus on, but it is an interesting example of Hardy's blurring of fashion photography and art.)

Hardy's zine, FashionFashion, features hundreds of images like this one. Fashion is present, but not in the glossy, overpriced, shellacked-into-sameness way that we are accustomed to. Hardy's fashion stylings are much closer related to street style blogs, but with a particularly punk DIY spin that distinguishes it from any of the chicly perfect women featured on The Sartorialist or Garance Doré. In FashionFashion, Hardy dresses herself, and her sister, in thrifted and unlikely clothing:

An ice-blue satin dress with padded shoulders is turned inside out and worn as a skirt, the disturbingly sexual nude-colored pads inverted above the hip. A mesh tank striped in the colors of the Jamaican flag, paired with leopard tights and a raucously tropical man's blazer, is worn by the artist Ramdasha Bikceem, her gang-style chest tattoo proudly exposed. A matronly power suit is matched with an Homburg reminiscent of Williamsburg Hasidim and a sad wig that resembles silver tinsel.

Although the Times focuses on her fashion shots, Hardy is also famous for her video art. In 2005, she collaborated with Wynne Greenwood on ''New Report," which showed the two dressed as television newscasters, reporting for the fictional station WKRH. Hardy played "Henry Iragary" (last name taken from psychoanalytic theorist Luce Iragary). They interviewed a friend about her depression, reported on bra burnings and other feminist happenings, and lip-synced along with daytime television. Hardy's work is often funny and witty, but decidedly feminist in tone. This make sense, considering her education. Hardy has a BA in Women's Studies from Smith College, and she recently received her MFA from Bard College. She is a self-described "lesbian feminist with punk sensibilities," and thus at home with the "rampant multiplicities of identity."

Recently, Hardy began working as a stylist with fashion photographer Steven Klein. "I was on the set playing fake-it-till-you-make-it," she said. "I had no idea who Steven Klein was. I didn't even know Armani." Hardy admits that "you wouldn't really say I have any kind of background in fashion," yet she has worked with bands like Le Tigre and Fisherspooner, and even completed a collaboration with the designers JF & Son on a collection titled "My Favorite Things." Her addiction to thrift shopping has paid off in a big way. Pages from her zine are currently on display at Reena Spaulings Fine Art gallery in Chinatown, and last year an exhibition of her work was on view at the Tate Modern. With the recent spate of criticisms that have been leveled at the fashion industry, Hardy's recent success makes a lot of sense. Although there is a good deal of feminist theory hidden in her layers of vintage oddities, there is also a sense of pure excitement. Fashion is fun, funny, and witty. Her photographs are a lot more interesting than the endless stream of models jumping in front of a neutral background, wearing a look straight off the runway. She picks clothing not for their labels, but for their strangeness - "I'm interested in the weirdest things," she says. And it shows.

Playing Dress Up For Keeps [New York Times]
Reena Spaulings Fine Art [Official Site]
Exhibition Detail: K8 Hardy [ArtSlant]

I was heavily influenced in my desire to can by two factors. One: The Butt'ry Shelf Cookbook. This curiosity, still widely available on the internet, was written in the mid-20th century by a New England eccentric and centered around her family's year as seen through the well-stocked "butt'ry" where she and her relatives industriously filled the shelves with homemade liqueurs, ripening fruitcakes, an ever-increasing store of foodstuffs and, of course, all the homemade jams and preserves a country housewife's heart could desire. It is not surprising that the book, already nostalgic at the time of publication, was illustrated by the author's neighbor Tasha Tudor. It's also not shocking that it was a major influence on my mid-childhood years (tweens didn't exist in the 1980s.) It was under its auspices that I attempted to "cure" meats in the playhouse in our back yard, have a taffy pull by myself, and churn butter in my dollhouse's 4" churn.

It will come as no great shock to regular readers of this space that these efforts met with sincere approbation by my grandfather, the family patriarch and eccentric, whose fear of a vague apocalyptic phenomenon known only as "The Bad Times" had led him to install an enormous deep freeze, build a makeshift compound, and melt and bury various metals under the house. "When the Bad Times come, they'll be eating each other," he'd say darkly, then go to a yard sale and buy another dozen pressure cookers. (Money bonfires also figured in the prognostications.) Some attributed his death to disappointment that none of this ever came to pass; had he but waited a few years...

Naturally, canning and preserving played no small role in our Bad Times Survival Guide. As such, my enthusiastic attempts at jam-making and pickling were encouraged. I didn't know what I was doing; I didn't really think about botulism or sterilizing or mold or recipes. All I knew was that we had to preserve as much as possible. I'd aid my grandfather in preparing the endless jars of nearly-inedible plum jam he distilled from the tree in the yard, or throw some herbs and vegetables in a can, add some salt water, and call it a day. (One particularly memorable jam involved pine needles.) Most of what I made molded before we could enjoy the fruits of my housewifery - despite the mysterious preponderance of pressure cookers, we never processed anything - but I was undaunted.

As I got older, I got keen on the notion of homemade jam as a gift. By 12 or so, I'd read up on procedure and had come to understand the two most important things about canning: 1) It's really, really expensive and 2) It's an enormous, horrible ordeal. Far from making practical use of the overflow of home-grown produce and ensuring a few vitamins through the long winter, for most of us, canning and preserving is an exercise in self-indulgent excess. If you buy farmer's market fruit, even the "damaged" varietal - and what's the point otherwise - it's exorbitant, and that's without even talking about the ready supply of ball jars you'll need. Once you've got your canner, your wide-mouth funnel, your selection of ladles, you're set for life (and those sales of the belongings of a dead old woman by her not-interested-in-canning boomer children are a boon in this regard) you're set, but it's an outlay. Then comes the actual process: whether it's stirring a kettle of jam in the summer heat or minding an insolent kettle of apple butter in the fall or just the sticky, messy ordeal of covering stuff with syrup or processing pickles, it's kind of nightmarish. (And the kitchen cleanup is second to none in its scope and difficulty.) The satisfaction of having that smug row of jewel-hued jars is, yes, almost worth it. But after the process, I find I am greedy: I don't want to give away my expensive, beautiful, labor-intensive preserves; I want to hoard them. If I can bring myself to give some away, I secretly want to ask for the jar back. Just last week I had to suppress a scream of wounded fury when I saw my boyfriend had opened a jar of rhubarb-and-onion relish (I specialize in the kind of thing no one actually wants to eat) to accompany a turkey burger. I guess this is a small taste of the pain of old-timey household drudgery: not just the labor, but the pain of seeing your laboriously-scrubbed floors muddied or hand-washed clothing soiled and the knowledge that you'll have to do it all over again, ad infinitum. In this regard, it really is a taste of the past.

And yet - or perhaps because of - the blatantly farcical nature of modern urban canning, it's becoming a thing. Like quilting, embroidery and all manner of DIY, canning's now the purview of the young, with more than half of enthusiasts, according to UPI, under 40. The "Recession" argument's obvious: we want to feel connection and security and the illusion of self-sufficiency. Maybe the general fuckwittery of the system has motivated a subconscious desire to live outside the grid - or at least cleave to the competence of another era. It makes sense in the scheme of eating locally and seasonally and there's also the little matter of avoiding corn syrup, a near-impossibility with anything mass-produced (and really, the good stuff's as pricey as doing it at home, albeit less of a headache.) As a result, we are seeing a rash of dubiously-spiced homemade jams in marketplaces and boutiques across the land. I succumbed to one amateur canner's "experiment" last week: peach jam with tarragon, for $10. I lived to regret it. But even so, I wondered that she was able to part with it: the sense of achievement, and the security of that store, is, for many of us, comforting in a way money never can be. And anyway, come the Bad Times, only gold will be worth anything.

Canning Not Just For Grandma Anymore [UPI]

In this sneak peek at Levine's film, self-described "craft mafias" across the country talk about the importance of DIY in their lives - as an outlet for adult creativity, a reclamation of lost arts, a vehicle for radical action - and the dramatic growth of the movement.

Handmade Nation

Handmade Nation Trailer [YouTube]

Handmade Nation: Stop Animated Opening Title Sequence [YouTube]

Film: Handmade Nation [Mother Jones]
Crafty Comeback With Indie Edge [Washington Times]

Related: Slate Ladyblog Slaps The "Feminist Fantasy" Of Etsy

H.P. has introduced a new web service called MagCloud, which allows users to upload their own magazines and order prints, for 20 cents a page. So far, MagCloud has published over 300 magazines, on topics ranging from Mormon painters to food photography. Although large printing presses can produce many more pages at a much lower price, MagCloud makes it cost-effective for independent publishers to print as many (or as few) copies as they need. "We're not talking about replacing the Vanity Fairs of the world. But it's a nifty idea for a vanity press that reminds me of the underground zines we had in the '60s and '70s," said journalism professor Samir Husni. [NY Times]

Reports the Times:

Lighted by sparkling chandeliers, the hall is 100 feet by 25 feet, with a soaring 22-foot-high coffered ceiling in gilt and lacquer. The walls are embellished with gilt cherubs, roses, feathers, foliage and birds. Enormous and richly hued paintings in elaborate jeweled frames depict romantic, mythological and biblical scenes.

58-year-old Dr. Anthony Walter of Houston was a successful orthopedic surgeon before recuperation from illness turned him onto art. Since, hand-painting, gilding, inlaying and carving his palatial home (which takes elements from the Vatican, Versailles and St. Paul's) has become his full-time job, "a tribute to his wife, Susan... meant to teach others how to achieve God’s salvation through marital love. It is also his take on Christianity."

Walter's goal was not merely to portray the Bible in a clearly understandable way, but to "say with my decorative art... that morality is accepting the consequences of your actions, which no one is willing to do these days,” which is why the paintings have themes like charity and repentance. The tableaux of his wife are somewhat less traditional, described as portraying Walter "in a toga or courtly garb reaching passionately for her or bowing before her." Susan, a retired lawyer, for her part, says “'I get a little embarrassed sometimes...But it certainly makes me feel special.'”

The project alternately strikes one as a touching tribute, an impressive display of discipline, and a testament to great hubris, the latter impression enforced by grandiose statements like, "I am a huge threat (to modern art museums) because what I have done renders everything they have junk...I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant but the reaction of people who come in here tells me the power of it.” It's tempting to wonder if part of the reaction is merely stupefaction at the scale and grandeur of the project. Of course, Taj Mahal-style tributes are always about both giver and muse, so it's probably unfair to criticize the undertaking on that ground. What's interesting is that like Laura or Beatrice, his wife seems to have had no choice in becoming part of a grandiose moral allegory or the embodiment of "good." That's probably in keeping with the traditional role of a muse, but it's still somewhat disconcerting to see it acted out so literally in this day in age - a tribute to classical art, indeed. Or a testament to the dangers of early retirement.

At Houston Surgeon’s Home, An Ode To His Wife And To God [New York Times]