The OblivionSpin Occasionally

 Volume 1 Issue 4 featured 100 truths, one of the suggested fall activities, scattered throughout the zine. Due to copying, cutting, pasting and everything else, some are missing, obscured, faded or otherwise difficult to read.  Here's the full list.  100 truths 1. My name is met 2. It’s my initials 3. And a small play off my older sister being mel 4. Making sure my next legal name has the same initials was more important to me than anything else when choosing a name 5. I always assume most facts about myself are obvious 6. I have a difficult time conceptualizing that anyone would dislike me 7. (I am either conceited or oblivious) 8. I have an overwhelming fondness of marshmallows 9. Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch 10. Und der grosser Fehler, den ich gemacht hab’, war nicht in Deutschland zu studieren 11. I am convinced not submitting that scholarship application in 11th grade was what split my life onto this path 12. I think life is meaningless ...

 In 2012 I wrote a poem I never finished, titled Perhaps.  Oh, I made the start of a series of mini zines of it, I edited it, I reimagined, revisited and revised it- but I never truly finished it.  "Perhaps" started in a small square book I made- pocket sized, and was written by hand in a scrawl wherever inspiration struck me over the course of a spring month or so. If ever I stalled on what to write next, I just wrote the word "Perhaps" again and saw where it went from there.  It was one of those poems I considered to be my magnum opus- and I still hold some of the different versions (which never got the exposure to the world that they deserved) in high regard.  But this blog post is not about "Perhaps" it is not entitled "Perhaps" and I still have not given up on my to do list that "Perhaps" will have its moment.  This post is about "An Anachronism in the Making" That's more like it. In 2016 I was in my art and writing r...

cover from what would have been a minizine circa 2018 One of my small pleasures of the Oh Es Oh is that it is a reciprocal for all sorts of things I never did anything with.   No matter how much dust, how many sloppily folded rejection slips, no matter what misgivings or whatever else- there is a potential home for everything I have ever done in this zine. It's home to parts of projects I am still working on, along side ones long abandoned.  For issue 3 one of the things I tried to revisit to breathe some new and fresh life into was a short story I wrote late 2017 based off a journal entry from late 2016 which I had tried, and failed, to illustrate back in... 2018 (and 2019, if we're being honest).  I determined back then that I just could not get the words and the pictures to work. Something didn't click.  I was excited to include the short story in this issue because, well, I always liked it. On premise at the very least. And thematically, it fit quite well ca...

I am only finishing up the 3rd issue now, so I guess I cannot confidently say I have a "way" or "method" of making the zines yet. Hell, even starting a sentence with "usually" seems a little odd, because again, the zine is just starting to take its first wibbly wobbly steps. So let's go with a semi scientific classification and say that early experiments suggest-  the first thing I do when I start an issue is make a big dumb document for all the content. If not multiple documents within a folder.  I pick and choose and cut a lot before I even make my first print out. Then I make a print out and do some laying out by hand. Then I go back to the computer. Then I go back to the scissors and glue stick.  then it's a mystery. I end up with weird blank pages due to layouts, sometimes I can pull in more content or collab for a spread. But when you have just one stray blank page what do you do with it? no idea. I did this.  I just started typing double spa...

Issue 3 has erupted across my living room floor. Erupted. And this is my favorite thing about the Oh Es Oh so far, it simply erupts. It comes into being the same way I draw a circle on paper, off kilter near circles whisping around and around until a confident darker circle emerges.  Issue 3 wobbled into being with the idea of time.  Time. Time like grains of sand. Sand in a Sieve.  Beaches I've been to. Painful memories. Diary entries.  Late summer diary entries. One of each from the last 8 years- because the journal purge of 2012 (which I swore never to commit again) makes that the mark of making marks. But what day did I write an entry and not miss a year? Because I didn't start journaling "daily" again until 2015 and even then some days I draw or novel or blog or... August 22nd. And what happened on August 22, 2012? [Spoilers] A squirrel died.  Rodents. The passage of time. Memory Tourist part 8 was about cheese in a maze... Passage of time. Rust. Rodents ...

Volume 1 Issue 2 of the Oh es Oh features 2 special guests. The first of which is Soraya the Great, who lends his universal knowledge in a long chat and his art skills to the center spread of the zine. My printing set up being what it is (charmingly crappy), the original triptych "Stay Dope As Fuck" appears somewhat faded- here is the original artwork in full color. STG lives on instagram  @theexperimenthouse  and is moving in to their home on the web  theexperimenthouse.com