frandroid

warriorsavant was just talking about the difficulty of cashing a cheque in Paris. Which reminded me to pay rent (!), which almost became difficult because after doing a massive clean-up on my office to have guests sleep in it, I misplaced my chequebook. Worse come to worst, I could have taken a cheque from another one, but I like to keep my cheques in order. Finally found the thing.

Many of our coöp's systems are fairly antiquated, but they do take automatic card payments for rent, or you can even go to the office and pay with a banking card, I think. But I love manually writing cheques. Just like I like sending money in the mail. Yes! When I started my zine distro 25 years ago*, PayPal was in its formative stages and not yet in use everywhere, so I bought zines the way everyone else did, by sending money in the mail. You don't send coins, or if you do, you tape them to a piece of cardboard so that they don't rattle in the enveloppe and also can't be felt by greedy postal workers. These days, when I have transactions with zinesters I haven't dealt with before, especially if they have a web store (e.g. Etsy), I don't get weird and just use PayPal. But for some of my old peeps, I stick dollars in an enveloppe, properly camouflage its contents, and off it goes. And zinesters are so happy to get paper mail, too, as much as I am to send it. I've never lost a cent sending money through the mail, though I have lost a few dollars here and there from Canadian customers not securing their loonies or toonies in their enveloppes, back when my customers were also sending in money for their orders.

One time I was sending over US$100 to Cometbus and unbeknownst to me, the goddamn enveloppe fell out of my coat pocket on the street before I could put it in a mailbox. I told Aaron who thought there was no chance it hell it would get there, but lo and behold, two weeks later, he wrote back to tell me the money had made it! Yay for this part of Toronto the Good, eh.

I'm also a cash person in real life, even though the local credit unions are making it harder and harder to retrieve money from their machines beyond office hours, probably due to homeless people taking over their booth? There's really been a shift in the last year. Since the pandemic most cashiers have stopped pretending that someone might pay in cash, and at every transaction I have to announce that I'm paying cash to avoid having the cashier input the transaction in the terminal needlessly. When they're new at this job it sometimes doesn't register, they enter the transaction anyway, and then I hand them cash, at which point it clicks.

(Like, I'm not a troglodyte, I have two credit cards and two banking cards from different institutions, and I will sometimes use them when the amount is large or my efforts at withdrawing money were foiled by these reluctant credit unions. My bank (an account I have due to having worked for such an institution) has ATMs all across the city but I'm in a kind of dead zone, walking-distance wise, in relation to the stores I shop at.)

*: My zine distro is 25 years old this month! It's an auspicious number, but it mostly makes me realize that I'm getting Old. Which bums me out. Not for Being Older, per se, but because it brings me closer to the end, even if it's another 50 years away. I don't want to spend the last 25 years of it waiting for death, like I see in my MIL's retirement home. I better get walking.

By sheer happenstance, while looking u^p some other Night Beats material, I stumbled upon the extra chapter of Cascade that had been sent to mailing list subscribers. I totally understand why the chapter was taken out of the book, but——that one est venu me chercher dans les tripes. Very satisfying, can I turn it into a promo zine?

What Are You Reading?

Mobile Phone Security for Activists and Agitators by Håkan Geijer

I came across Håkan on my local anarchist Mastodon instance. He's about to lay out the French translation of another of their pamphlets and I was given a link to his site to check originals. I'm a techy who often thinks about mobile phone security so I thought I'd read what's in there. I'm halfway through so far. The advice is really good. I knew about 80% of the stuff but there are subtle details provided that I found quite observant, and other things that I just didn't know about, so it's solid and well-documented. I think the second half is more dedicated to strategies rather than facts about mobile tech, so we'll see how that turns out.


What Are You Eating?

Funny you should ask! I hadn't really gelled with my most recent team at work and due to remote stuff, I didn't get a going-away lunch, so F and I simply went out to eat at Revelstoke Café, a new to Toronto vegan pub that has its homebase in Peterborough. We had some tasty mushroom barbecue wings, a decent if pricey poutine, and a bland though nutritious "après-ski burrito" with really good taters (the name combination should have been a warning). At Carlton & Ontario, east of Sherbourne. I'd go again. No patio.

The first five people to request it in the comments will receive 5 questions from me. (These questions came via ioklopon)


1. Who is your favorite pirate (real or fictional) of all time?

I think Blackbeard's depiction in Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides is my favourite.


2. What's your favorite recipe to make?

Ohh, interesting question. There's a vegan belgian carbonnade that I make which is quite tasty, made with seitan and brown belgian beer. It's a bit of work so I don't make it too often. A more regular occurrence is this dish, Aloo Tama Bodi, which we discovered at a Nepalese restaurant ages ago. It's a creamy curry with potatoes, bamboo shoots and black eyed peas. Also recently I've started making my own seitan/okara sausages, and I'm trying different flavourings every time. It's a fun recipe to work on.


3. If you could have one dish ready-made that you could eat whenever you want with zero effort and zero expense, what would it be?

There used to be this falafel place in Vancouver named Desert Falafel. I think it was run by Israelis. Anyway, white people and definitely not Arabs, which is rare. This is where I had my first falafel and it remained the best falafel I ever had for years. At some point they moved to Commercial drive and became Oasis Falafel. They also made a latke pita, and if you wanted to be extra special, you could get the falatke pita, which had 2 falafel balls and half a latke patty. It was amazing. I miss it. The best falafel I've had in recent years is from Falafel Yoni in Montréal, also run by Israelis. But really, I'm a sucker for falafel (with a side of crispy fries and a can of cola) and could eat it very often. I actually did eat it all the time when I first moved to Toronto, as I was living close to Sara's Falafel on Bloor, and there a dirt cheap place that made a lemony falafel close to work, and there was Akram's (Syrian) with his tiny and uniquely flavoured falafels in Kensington Market. I ate so much falafel that year that I had to take a months-long falafel break at some point, because I was getting sick of it.

There are at least 5 falafel shops within walking distance of my place but none are top notch, so I don't indulge too much. Maybe I will next summer. I'm realizing that I should be having way more falafel than I'm currently having. Falafel shops that don't sell French fries are stupid, even if they sell awesome garlic potatoes.


4. If you had a 10-minute segment on national TV to cover any topic you wanted, what would it be?

It would be on the Kurdish liberation struggle. I find that most mainstream reporting on the issue is superficial. I know 10 minutes isn't that long to get into it, but that would be my thing. Or I would get into it with radical lefties who oppose arming Ukraine...


5. What's your favorite hockey moment?

It's funny because my parents weren't into hockey at all, but in 1984, 1985 or 1986 they put me in front of the TV at the start of the playoffs and I was hooked. There was this intense Nordiques/Habs rivalry and it was the most ridiculous thing ever. Back then we had divisional playoffs and both the Habs and the Nordiques were in the Adams division, as well as the perpetually bad Hartford Whalers, the Boston Bruins and the Buffalo Sabres. I think that first year the Nordiques beat the Whalers, and again a year later, but they didn't go further. But I recall watching these series intently. Then I recall watching the Stanley Cup finals in 1986, Habs versus Calgary Flames, and even though I "hated" the Habs I could only admire this team that included many French Canadians, including le casseau.

After that follow a long drought at the bottom of the standings for the Nordiques, resulting in first picks Joe Sakic, Owen Nolan, Mats Sundin and Eric Lindros, so I had to fall back on watching Mario Lemieux carry the Penguins on his shoulders and win two cups in 1991 and 1992.

Then in 1993, with their young star players (though maybe Sundin had been traded to Toronto for Wendel Clark already at that point? I don't think so but can't be bothered to check) and the returns from the blockbuster deal that sent Eric Lindros to Philly, the Nordiques were competitive again, and qualified for the playoffs. Their first round opponent was the Habs.

The first two games were won by the Nordiques, good victories, so everything seemed to go well. Then the third game came, started, and the Nordiques were on fire, completely obliterating the Habs. They were everywhere on the ice. Then at some point Owen Nolan fired one of his famous slapshots but missed the net, and his shot smashed the glass pane behind the net, and everything fell apart. It took something like 10 minutes for the ice to be cleared of broken glass and a new pane to be installed. That break took all the wind out of the wings of the Nordiques. When play resumed, the Habs finally got their act together and eventually swept the rest of the series, 4 wins in a row. They then got a lucky break when Mario Lemieux's hand was broken by a Rangers player, so the Rangers could beat the Penguins. Then the Islanders beat the Rangers, but the Islanders were also the only team that hadn't won its regular season series against the Habs that year, and they once again couldn't beat them in the playoffs, so the Habs ended up playing Wayne Gretzky and his LA Kings in the final. They won the cup by playing the trap, ensuring that hockey would be boring for the next 15 years to come.

Two years later, the Nordiques were sold to Colorado and then promptly won the cup (after acquiring Patrick Roy from the Habs, something that would have been amazing had that happened in Québec City, since Roy was from there), making me boycott hockey for the next 15 years.

Chris Kreider broke Carey Price's wrist in the 2014 playoffs and I'm getting somewhat sick of Rangers players winning series that way...


Bonus questions, also from ioklopon, from an earlier post!


6. Quel est ton livre préféré (qui est écrit en français)?

Oh wow. Way to call me out, I don't think I have anything good to report. :P J'ai pas mal arrêté de lire en français à l'âge adulte parce que les livres sur l'anarchisme que j'étais capable de trouver étaient en anglais, en ensuite j'ai déménagé à Vancouver et ça a continué comme ça. Quand j'étais adolescent j'ai lu Ça de Stephen King en français, d'une traite, je pense que ça m'a pris 22 heures, et c'était une drôle d'expérience de lecture, être complètement immergé dans l'histoire comme ça. Comme la fois à l'automne 2000 où j'ai lu l’hexalogie de Dune d'un coup. Mais ça c'était en anglais. Mais les deux fois, j'avais l'impression d'être gelé (high) tellement j'étais dans l'histoire. Un peu plus jeune, j'aimais la série Les Inactifs de Denis Côté, de la science fiction dystopique pour adolescents avec un personnage principal qui était pas mal un calque de Mario Lemieux. :) Mon auteur Québécois favori est Mordechai Richler mais il écrivait évidemment en anglais. (Les souverainistes haïraient cette idée que cet anglo pourrait être l'auteur Québécois favori d'un francophone.... :P )


7. What is one thing I should do the next time I'm in Quebec?

If you mean the province, I would say attend the yearly Montréal Anarchist Bookfair, it's an amazing event, the booksellers are awesome, many of the visitors are hot as hell in a punk way, and it's queer/trans as fuck. There are also awesome workshops on various topics relating to anarchism, and a dance party of some sort. It's usually held in May but was held in August this year, probably due to the pandemic. I'm going to bet that it'll come back to its May slot. Don't wait 10 years to visit--the original organizers have moved on and the new crew has less energy than before, though they're still putting on an amazing fair. Cindy Milstein helps organize from all the way over in SF, which gives you an idea of the change. (She's an amazing person to be getting help from though.)

If you mean Québec City, obviously visiting the old town is a must. You visit the old town, check out the shops, and then when you've had enough, you walk down l'escalier casse-cou to la rue Champlain and the Old Port. There you can visit the Musée de la Civilization (!!!), a decent popular museum. Some of their exhibits are great, some are shit, but it's a cool building. They have one or two good permanent exhibits about Québec culture. Otherwise you can visit the antiques shops or visit the maritime museum; I haven't been to the latter in 25 years but I recall it was nice. Then when the sun comes down, you get on the ferry to Lévis just so you can catch views of the old city from the St-Lawrence. You don't get off at Lévis; you just get back on the same ticket you boarded on. Another thing you can do from the old port is walk along the linear park along the St-Charles river, which used to be a concrete canal that has been renaturalized. It's impressive.

Then you go back uptown to rue Saint-Jean or rue Saint-Louis, inside or outside the old city, to one of the amazing bars like Le Drague or Le Temps Partiel. I can't recall if you're veg or not but it has a great meat-oriented restaurant scene and it really sucks for vegans, though it's getting a bit better on that side.

On the other side of Old Québec, uptown, at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, one can see Jean-Paul Riopelle's L'Hommage à Rosa Luxemburg. It's a 40-foot long spray-painted, goose-stenciled triptych. I'm biased because he's my favourite painter, but it's awesome. (Apparently there's construction on a new Riopelle pavilion so I'd check availability first before attempting to visit.)


8. How did you get into zines?

I think I had heard of and maybe even seen a couple zines before, but when I moved to Vancouver in late 1998, one of my favourite haunts was the Spartacus Bookstore, a volunteer-run anarchist bookstore. They had a small zine section, of which I bought a few. Above that was the magazine section, which was sporting the final issue of Factsheet 5, the zine-reviewing bible of the 1990s golden age of zine publishing. They were getting so many zines to review that they limited themselves to only review great zines since they could spare neither ink nor paper for the bad ones. So in this issue there was probably a few hundred glowing zine reviews from around the world (though mostly the U.S.). I ordered a bunch of zines and I was like "wow, this is so awesome". I had been part of electronic/online underground scenes since the early 1990s, was a subscriber to the first ISP in Québec City within its first few months of operations, was part of the very first wave of people getting on the web, had moved to Vancouver due to my contact with some of these scenes, but this paper-based scene was still extremely attractive to me. I wanted everyone to read the zines I was getting but I obviously couldn't just buy tons of zines and just give them away willy-nilly. Then I discovered that people were running zine distros, i.e. sold zines at fairs and sometimes had online zine stores, so I decided I would do that, and the rest is history.


9. What your favorite thing thing you made/did with code/computer skills?

Back in the early 1990s I ran two BBSes, one after the other. I really enjoyed that time. There was very little coding involved but a fair bit of modding, which would be the textmode equivalent of web design/systems administration today. I was an ANSI artist so that was kind of my thing. More recently I just thoroughly enjoyed working for thestar.com because it's the biggest paper in the country and among its largest liberal/progressive media organizations, but I don't have particularly salient accomplishments there.

One of my early low-skill programming projects was Stationary Groove... An acquaintance had manually surveyed passengers at every subway station in the city to see what music they were playing, and wanted to produce an interactive map showing that. I ripped off the transit company's own code from its site, and also built a barebones Rails app to handle all of the song tracking to put them in a DB, and then used all of this to generate this map. There was very little skill involved but my acquaintance was a good PR person, and got a front-page story on the Star (before I worked there) out of it.

I also used to hand code all of my HTML (and there was no CSS back then). My two biggest publications were Operation Rescue, an ANSI art reviewing site that published reviews of monthly art packs for a number of years (I took the name from the Bad Religion song of the same name, not knowing it was the name of a pro-life group they were critiquing!!), and later on I also hand-coded my zine distro's site. If I had properly learned backend programming back then I would probably be somewhat wealthy now, it was a great time to get into that stuff.

So huh, that's a lot of me here!

Haven't read books this week. I finished reading an old issue of Broken Pencil, the zine and indie culture review magazine. In it there was an interview with a Turkish group that's been making and distributing zines for years. Sounded pretty exciting, and despite not reading Turkish, I thought I'd check some out. So I check the listed Instagram accounts, nothing. I googled their names: I only found secondary references. Looks like they just wiped their web presence, or their accounts were banned. Mind you, the article I was reading was just from last year, not five years ago. I hope nothing happened to them.

I'm not getting ahead of these reviews... One per week!

First zine: Important Life Lessons I Have learned From the Plants I've Tried to Grow, by Katie Haegele, 2015, quarter-page-ish, 16 pages. (zine not for sale anymore)

It's pretty straightforward plant advice, along with plant drawings, that you can transfer to life, or rather people. It could be pithy but it actually works. A couple examples:

"A weed is just a plant you didn't want in your fussy fucking garden"

"Any tiny bit of green on an ugly, frizzled old plant means it's still alive. Don't give up on it yet"

The sum of these aphorisms might help you take better care of your plants or your friends, whichever you have a more clumsy thumb with.


Second zine... Well, I received a distro submission in the mail. I think I have not received one of those in 8 years? At least 5. When I had a website I always wrote that I wasn't taking submissions, because most submissions were frankly crap. Good writers are often not great at promoting themselves: you have to seek them out and find them yourself. Whereas the attention-seekers that have nothing to say are the ones that find you. So I opened the envelope and the cover seemed playful enough. But then it's all hand-written, it's not good hand-writing, and the guy is just a young man ranting at the world with clichés you've heard before. No need to name it, he'll eventually notice he doesn't get attention, and stop. Or he'll keep at it and become better. It's a rare zinester who's bad at it that keeps going at it for more than a few issues, especially these days.

So Canzine was virtual this year, and it was reasonably set up (other than a horribly inaccessible site which was a pain to browse, though quite creative), so while I did not sell a lot of zines, I bought a lot.

This week I have received my enveloppe with about $200 worth of zines in it. It. Is. A. Lot. Of. Zines.

Will I read them all? Who knows!

I skipped virtual Expozine because it was a stupid setup. The Anarchist Bookfair had a setup that was not convenient to me either so I skipped that too.

I was going to make a resolution to read 6 more Kurdish books again this year, but I think I'm actually going to resolve to read 1 zine per week instead. I'm 5 weeks late, but I guess I should start...

I took a picture of a zine cover. Edited it in my phone's default photo-editing app (Android Gallery). Went to the new Great Worm site in my mobile browser. Uploaded the picture to the zine's profile. The site automagickally created thumbnails and various sized versions. I saved, and it ALL WENT LIVE INSTANTLY.

There isn't anything groundbreaking about this technology. Except that I BUILT THIS MESELF. And it's going to save me MILLIONS OF YEARS OF MY LIFE. Because that's how long I'll be selling zines for, bitches.

I have waited (and procrastinated for) 14 years to be able to do this. This sleeper has awaken, big time. I am back to having a live zine distro website. I'm going to be slaying this. Whoop whoop.

So, the US Postal Service has increased cross-border postal rates even more than Canada Post has in recent years. The large flat rate envelope, a mainstay of Americans sending zines my way, has gone from $13 to 20$ in one year. Meanwhile fucking Amazon has a sweat deal with Canada Post, which means that they probably pay less than anyone else for premium service. The delivery times on Amazon items is frighteningly fast... The Canada dollar is dropping, making American zines more expensive.

Anywé, this means that I will be selling a lot more Canadian zines to Canadians in the near future. I have nothing against Canadian zines (!), but there's just such a smaller scene here, it's easier to find American zinesters with a certain following that have been going at it for a long time and that Know What They're Doing. This is going to force me to dig out and promote a lot more Canadian content. The Toronto Public Library bugs me once a year to sell them Canadian content, and I never return their calls because I don't have anything they don't have already. Maybe I'll soon return their calls!

Thank you USPS and Canada Post for sucking big time, you're making me do what I should have been doing a lot more of in the first place. :P

(aka post-expozine post, or expozine post-mortem, etc.)

So it's 4am and I have to get up at 7:30 to return the rental car, or else risk incurring a parking ticket at 8am. But I'm wired up and I can't sleep. Late coffee, driving for 6 hours straight and an awesome weekend all weigh on my mind. Then I realized that I was hungry. So now I'm eating Firoza's crazy spicy chora nu batata kale gaajar.

I had a wicked time at Expozine, first hanging out with my table neighbour Élizabeth Robert (nochesdepoesia), an awesome publisher and translator. She's a wild poetry lover and promoter. From her I bought my first Sheri-D Wilson book, Goddess: Gone Fishing for a Map of the Universe. Seriously, do not stop; run and buy this book. I almost never buy poetry, and I bought this after reading one page. This is more spoken-word put to print than classical verse, but man. Really excited.

I also bought Sherwin Tjia's pick-your-own-plot book (damn you SJG! unleash thy copyrites!), where you are a cat. I will read it eventually and report back on it. Then I bought David Turgeon (Eerie)'s first novel, Les Bases Secrètes, as well as a bloody $40 Muse Récursive megabook. Ugh my wallet.

Élizabeth told me a fair bit about Barbancourt, a Haitian rum that's just recently been unbanned in Canada. She even went to pick up a bottle for me at the SAQ.

I got to check out the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore for the first time, but since it took us 20 minutes to find parking around there, we got in before it 5 minutes before closing. Still managed to snag a Seth and a Joe Sacco, though. (Almost bought Guy Delisle's Jérusalem, but it seems rather naïve. Has anyone with a clue about Palestine read it?)

I also met tons of zinesters and friends, old friends from my days at Food Not Bombs in Québec City in particular. Bought some interesting-looking zines, although I didn't really fall in love with anything.

Then as usual, my carpool finished the fair having dinner at Patati Patata, and then we had some good fun on the drive home.

Like someone said, Expozine is like Christmas for us. It was so good for me. Wee! So happy.