Punk Rock Science Fiction: Travis Fristoe and Aaron Cometbus Make the Case for Radon

I might have done a bit of a double take when I saw it on the shelf at Book Thug Nation. A book about Radon, written by Aaron Cometbus and Travis Fristoe? Yes, I thought: I will read this. And so I picked it up and devoured it not long afterwards, back-to-back with the latest issue of Cometbus. Did it hurt that the book’s look and feel evoked the 33 1/3 series? Probably not.

Continue Reading

Bay Area Über Alles

I just finished thumbing through Gimmie Something Better: A History of San Francisco Bay Area Punk Rock (Penguin).  The following things were thought up in my head: What’s interesting about this book,  it isn’ t about New York or LA, it’s about this weird scene that produced one band who sold more records than just about all the important bands from either of those places (Green Day), and gave us some of the most enduring artwork (Winston Smith,Flipper logo, Cometbus […]

Continue Reading

Burn Collector Returns

Over at The Rumpus, I discussed new zines by Aaron Cometbus and Aaron Lake Smith, and made mention of Tobias coining the term “post-Cometbus generation of punk rock memoirists“.  A good link between Cometbus and Lake Smith would be Al Burian and his phenomenal zine Burn Collector. Until today, after an e mail from a friend, I had no idea that Burian was still publishing Burn Collector, but a new issue is out on Microcosm, and it looks snazzy.

Continue Reading

A Kaddish for Jewish Zines

By Jason Diamond Gawker’s proclamation of the “Heeb Magazine Deathwatch” got me thinking again about “radical Jewish culture”, but this time in terms of it’s short life, possible death, and whether the tag really means anything other than getting donors to contribute to off-kilter non-profits. Of course, I find that there have been valiant attempts to get the old gears of Jewish thought turning again. From what I can gather, John Zorn coined the phrase with his marvelous Tzadik label, […]

Continue Reading