Not Your Routine Zine Scene - P.A.W. Print

What do you do when you're an underground artist in a town with no real underground scene to speak of? Simple-- create your own scene. At least that's what Wilmington-based artist/writer/musician Casey Grabowski has been doing. In addition to playing bass with the Bill Riccio Five and producing his 40-page quarterly zine Tric, Grabowski is one of the architects of the second annual Philly Zine Fest which took place during the second weekend in July.

The Zine Fest kicked off on Friday, July 9 with an intimate art show at the Church of Divine Energy (CODE), an independent art space at 48th Street and Woodland Avenue. It continued on Saturday afternoon with an all-ages show at The Fire. showcasing bands and containing zinesters. The Fest culminated on Sunday at The Rotunda at 40th and Walnut Streets, where almost 70 independent publishers, zine writers and artists gathered to display their wares and conduct workshops.


Justin Duerr. photo, J. Lloyd

The show on Friday was low-key, and offered ample opportunity to get to know some members of the local creative community. Performance artists and musicians entertained on CODE's stage while writers and artists displayed their work. Justin Duerr, creative force behind the band Northern Liberties, distributed copies of his zine, Decades of Confusion Feed the Insect. Justin's zine is a combination of poetry and creative prose and stunning hand-drawn artwork. Issues 36 to 38 actually fold out into two-foot by three-foot posters of finely detailed ink drawings. The posters are done in stark black and white with no middle tones, and project the macabre spiritual scenes that characterize Duerr's work. Duerr explained, "To get the deep black coloring and the detail, I used a razor blade to slice the tip of a sharpie to as fine a point as possible." The resulting freehand drawings are darkly powerful.


	Casey Grabowski. photo, J. Lloyd

In the very back of the back room of CODE on Friday night was Grabowski, inviting guests to help themselves to a giant pile of zines from his personal collection, which where haphazardly spread across a broad counter top. Grabowski explained that he accumulated the immense pile during his years of writing zine reviews in Tric. Though not the cut-and-paste zine of yesteryear, Tric is definitely homegrown and embraces the DIY culture of the zinester. While its focus is the underground music scene, it's really an open-forum publication that incorporates fiction, poetry, original artwork, photography, and whatever other interesting tidbits Grabowski comes across as he assembles the free quarterly. As I hunted through the counter top for lost treasure, Grabowski explained that he's been printing 3,500 copies of Tric. He says he distributes them himself by car from New England all the way to Baltimore. "Its a good excuse to get out of town and take a weekend trip," Grabowski says with a shrug.


Andrea Hallowell. photo, J. Lloyd

He explained that the idea for a zine festival came to him two years ago when he was looking for like-minded artists in the Wilmington area. He first tried to organize an event at the University of Delaware where he had taken a few classes, but his pitch was met with apathy. "The people at Delaware had no idea what I was talking about," he reminisced. That's when he came into contact with Andrea Hallowell, the second mastermind behind Philly Zine Fest. Grabowski had been floating the idea on internet message boards like livejournal.com. Hallowell was running the Philly-based zine distributor Five Minute Romance at the time and picked up the idea and ran with it.

Grabowski says, "Basically, I was the idea guy and Andrea pulled it all together." This involved securing a space and getting the word out to the zine community. The 2003 fest was a one-day affair at the Rotunda. While it drew zinesters from across the country, Hallowell explained, "It was much smaller than this year's Zine Fest because only about three quarters of the people who registered actually showed up the first year."


	The Rotunda. photo, www.foundationarts.com

This year, there was almost perfect attendance, and the main event on Sunday actually spilled out of the Rotunda into the surrounding courtyard. There were display tables and workshops both inside and outside. None of the artists attending batted an eye at the improvisation, which was in the spirit of the DIY art movement being celebrated.

Making the rounds of the almost 70 exhibitors brought me to the tables of countless interesting artists. From a display of the zine Fanorama, which is written primarily by and for prison inmates, I drifted to a display of the South Carolina-based graffitti zine Permanent Ink. Anarchist collective and publisher AK Press had a nice set up, too. Of particular interest was a table displaying the work of Philly's Underground Literary Alliance (ULA) manned by its founder Karl "King" Wenclas.The ULA encompasses a group of independently

ULA founder Karl "King" Wenclas. photo, J. Lloyd

published writers and self-made street poets who have pitted themselves against what they claim is an impotent and self-serving commercial publishing industry. Together, Wenclas and his rowdy band have been grabbing headlines in publications like the Village Voice and the New York Times as they make trips to New York to make some noise at subdued readings by writers who Wenclas claims contribute to the elitism of mainstream American publishing. ULA's targets have included wealthy Manhattan-based novelists such as Rick Moody who was awarded a $35,000 Guggenheim award that was supposed to be need-based, and Jonathan Franzen who received a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant that was designated to help a struggling artist pay living expenses. At the Zine Fest, Wenclas was distributing his own Zine Beat, which is a personal journal chronicling, among other things, his move from Detroit to Philly. His display also promoted issues of the ULA's literary zine Slushpile, which contains some excellent fiction including excerpts from veteran zinester Mike Jackman and passages from Wild Bill Blackolive's underground novel The Texas Gang.

All in all, the Philly Zine Fest was a great success. If you had any conception that the zine scene has been an endangered species since its high water mark in the mainstream consciousness during the mid-90's, July's event at the Rotunda was evidence to the contrary. It brought together indy distributors and zines of all stripes-- from cut-and-paste, late-night-at-Kinko's creations to desktop-published glossies to hand-stitched art books. For old heads and new comers alike, it was an education, a chance to share, an art show and a swap meet. But most of all, it was proof that the American zine scene remains a positive forum for some of our best writers and artists. For more information on Philly Zine Fest, visit http://geocities.com/phillyzinefest.

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