LOSS LEADERS #1
White poplar seeds falling like ashes or maybe they are ashes. The last mimeograph machine; typewriter repair advice; a poll; Night Committee news; Katsu sandwich recipe.
Assumption #1
Making sense gradually and cumulatively is a kind of pleasure.
Box 301 West West Granum — 001
The last mimeograph machine—heading northeast across Washington on the 395 in the back of a pick-up truck, away from the last elementary school in the United States to finally spend the money on a Xerox photocopier to print their spelling tests and one through ten times tables—is shaking loose. Someone did a bad job anchoring those two bungee cords. Didn’t check the tension. Then an hour ago when Sid swerved into the left lane to avoid that blown-out semi-truck tire just past Kennewick, the cable wrapped around the purple ink-stained drum slipped free, leaving just the one loop around the crank. Now the last mimeograph machine scrapes along the truck bed, yo-yoing further on each highway curve, tracing a widening orbit that’s getting dangerously near the tailgate as Sid rolls ten miles over the speed limit towards Spokane.
…
Issue #1 Onboarding
The proper way to do this would be to set up on a countertop at an all night copy shop, one with coin-operated photocopiers that take nickels and dimes. Type the pages on a Sears Achiever or one of the university library Macintosh Performas that there’s never a line up for. Mix fonts. Cut the text up with scissors and Exacto knives then photocopy them onto overhead projector transparencies. Cut those up again and collage them into single page layouts. Keep feeding nickels into the machine. Every re-copy breaks the black up into more and more mottled grey. 1
I’m not cutting and pasting a zine on transparency plastic in a copy shop at 1 AM though, and those Performas were probably recycled twenty years ago. I’m making a zine with a commercial SaaS publication platform on a laptop at my kitchen table. So treat a divider line as a page break, and treat anything under an H3 heading (e.g. Issue #1 Onboarding) as a discrete piece, independent of the others.
Here’s a divider line:
Night Committee Record #3
Night Committee released Heaven, our second album, in 2013. Then I moved to Okotoks, Nicola joined the band, I had two kids, a global pandemic shut the world down, I published The Crash Palace mid-pandemic (I’ll tell you how that went another time), Night Comm went three calendar years without performing live, Lorrie left the band, and we finally started playing again as a power trio this past September.
A few Sundays ago Lorrie carted the Arch Audio Mobile Rig down to the Night Comm rehearsal space and we did a test recording of a new tune. Early results are that the bed tracks sound good in the room, which has got a nice high ceiling that makes for the right kind of booms and clatters and kerrangs. Which means we’ve got a plan to start gradually putting together our third full length album, one Sunday afternoon at a time. I’ll keep you updated as it goes along.
Mid-Issue Poll2
Recipe: Katsu sandwich
Ingredients:
Leftover chicken or pork Katsu
Sourdough bread
Lettuce
Tomato
Mayonnaise
Sesame oil
Soy sauce
Honey
Instructions:
When you’re 13 years old spend a week in August at a lakeshore summer camp surrounded by pine trees. Sleep in a bunk bed in a drafty cabin with seven other 13 year olds you’ve never met. Do chores: wash dishes, set tables, dig a latrine. Sing Leaving on a Jet Plane around a camp fire. Spray insect repellant onto your ankles and wince when the chemical stings the bites you’ve already been scratching. Stand under the mess hall porch and smell an incoming rain storm. Take pictures of your new friends with a 36 exposure disposable Fujimax camera you bought at a drugstore. Wonder if you’ll ever see anyone again each time you roll the reel.
Inherit a toaster oven.
Imagine a cast of fairies and angels, ranging from small dainty elves the size of hamsters responsible for cultivating forest mushrooms and looking after voles, to vast cosmic abstractions occupied with interstellar nebulae formation. Publish a forty thousand panel web comic following the adventures of a plucky teen hero who rescues a fairy from a mouse trap and is subsequently drawn into a vast intra-angelic power struggle for control of the rotation of the sun. Bring home the laniard from your first comic fandom convention booth and the receipt for your table rental.
Go to a dollar store looking for balloons for a child’s birthday party. Buy a bottle of sesame oil instead. When you arrive at the party without the balloons, don’t explain why.
Buy a second toaster oven at an estate sale.
Clean out a drawer and find a plastic wallet of summer camp photographs. Feel pangs. Remember that a particular kid sitting on the dock smiling at the camera was from a place called Acme, Alberta. Drive there on a whim. Drive slowly around the town taking pictures of buildings with your phone, which is now also a camera.
On the drive back from Acme stop at the first restaurant that sells pork or chicken katsu. Trade the comic convention laniard for a serving. Seal it in Tupperware and take it home.
Cut two inch thick slices from the widest middle of the sourdough loaf.
In one toaster oven broil the katsu. In the other toast the bread.
Whisk the sesame oil, mayonnaise, honey and soy sauce in a Pyrex bowl and spread on both sides of the toast.
Add the lettuce, tomato, and katsu. Cut in half.
Eat hot, immediately.
Share Loss Leaders
If you liked this issue, share it with someone else who’ll like it too. Issue #2 will be out next. Thank you.
There was a train of thought here that ended up giving me that mimeograph machine. I’ve already renamed Sid a few times. If we’re going to invest in the truck driver enough to name them it ought be a complete name, ideally single syllable first name, snappy double syllable surname. But I’ve got nothing right now and don’t want to spend time on it. I’ve got to proofread this thing a couple of times still and then put together the Instagram and Facebook blurbs, so ‘Sid’ no last name will probably ship with the issue. Character names are a final draft problem. (Now imagine how different the global sexual imagination of the last twenty five years would have been had Viggo Mortensen been playing a hobbit with wooden feet.)
The Substack poll widget has a 35 character limit on each option, only supports five options per poll, and doesn’t allow any formatting. So you can’t properly italicize an album title like Hysteria, or have “Idina Menzel, in character as Elsa, sings Depeche Mode at karaoke” as a poll option. We will learn to deal with and thrive within these constraints.