Brainscan #24 and #25

admin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Putting one’s life on display is, in essence, quite a courageous act. Yet in this time of reality television, it is becoming more of a norm, infused with a sense of banality. Thank goodness for zines, where our need to know intimate details of strangers’ lives is a collaboration of intelligence between people who actually think about stuff, write with a purpose, and use their experiences to connect, grow, and reach out to their community.

Brainscan is an extremely personal zine. Its author, Alex Wrekk, is a zine superstar, and rightly so. Author of the popular how-to guide of zine-making, Stolen Sharpie Revolution, over fifteen years of zine-making under her belt, and the most intimate details of her life photocopied, stapled, and mailed around the world, this is a woman committed to taking her experiences in life and putting them on display in a way that is not for ratings or profit. Rather, she does it for the love of writing, creating, and sharing.

The most recent issues of Brainscan, #24 and #25, (which come as a set when ordered from Alex’s site Small World Buttons) are quite different from each other yet enjoyable in their own ways.

Brainscan #24 is a small collection of vignettes containing snippets from Wrekk’s life, such as her love for good beer and why her zine is called Brainscan. They are musings that give a good overview of Wrekk’s thoughts and attitudes without delving very deeply into any particular subject, making it a quick read and a nice sneak peak into someone else’s brain.

Brainscan #25, on the other hand, is much weightier, and concentrates on the story of Wrekk finding her way back to her true love, Paul, after being in an abusive marriage and growing exponentially as a person. Issue #21 of Brainscan is widely known throughout the zine community as it detailed the breakup of Wrekk’s marriage and is celebrated as a courageous story of overcoming abuse. This current issue touches on some of those subjects but is more of a celebration of finding the strength to love and being true to your heart.

The zine sometimes gets a bit painfully intimate to read, bordering on too much information, but it leaves you breathless with its honesty. It is constructed nicely, both visually and thematically, with flashbacks of Wrekk’s early relationship with Paul interspersed through a chronological telling of the dissolution of her marriage, and journey through learning to love herself and other people in new and radical ways.

Grammar and spell-check go out the window, on par with the zine making genre which rebels in both content and construction to mainstream publishing norms. Reading Brainscan is like you have gone into Wrekk’s house, sat on her bed, and read her diary, but she invites this intimacy, keeping no secrets. This style of writing is extremely feminist as it takes subjects women are told to keep hidden and be ashamed of and puts them out into the world, with a sense of acknowledgment and pride in personal growth, and the sharing of stories, in turn facilitating community dialogue.

Written by: Jyoti Roy, June 3rd 2010

Here Come the Vikings

admin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:40:00 +0000

By Astrid Williamson

One Little Indian

Astrid Williamson is a Scottish-born musician, who has been compared to Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac and lists among her influences the canon of American singer-songwriters, such as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Though I like where Williamson is coming from on her fourth solo album, Here Come the Vikings, and the album has some decent ideas for pop tunes, I have two major problems with this album: the songs aren’t well executed and don’t provide any surprises.

Here Come the Vikings is Williamson's first self-produced album. Each song on seems to have the kernel of a really good song in it, but this is overshadowed by major flaws of some kind that might have been worked out by letting the song stew a bit longer or getting some additional input. When listening to the album, the thing that stuck out the most was how often I thought about shortening this or that song or choosing different background instruments.

Williamson’s voice isn’t the greatest either. I appreciate that this is her real, unadulterated voice, but on tracks like “Storm,” it sounds reedy and uneven. She sounds better on more sultry numbers like “How You Take My Breath Away” where emotion might appropriately crack the voice. The best track on the record is “Slake,” which features spoken word and seems to only include a chorus as an afterthought.

Of course, all of this would be irrelevant if the songs were well-written and innovative. No one has ever accused Dylan of having a lovely voice, and few question his musical importance. But the songs on Here Come the Vikings just aren’t that great. Sometimes they start out good and then peter out or circle in on themselves. Other times they just annoy. They seem to rehash ideas we’ve seen before—the piano ballad, the more rockin’ song about sex, the breathy, slow number—but without enough surprises to make them worth another listen.

Maybe having a producer is not such a bad idea.

Written by: H. V. Cramond, September 11th 2009