Time Zones and State Lines

A beautifully layed out cut & pasted project by Alan of Fall of Autumn & Alex Wrekk of the zine Brainscan. Alan and Alex wrote this zine together after her cross country train excursion from Portland to Chicagoland to finally meet in person a fellow zine creator that had only been corresponded with from afar. I am glad they met and created this zine together. Time Zones & State Lines is compiled of four different stories from each writer taking the reader on a trip through the four seasons. Each story is told with so much vision that it leaves your lips feeling as if they've just been kissed or your stomach feeling as it's just been punched, even tho you realize you've just been laying in bed for the past 20 minutes reading, alone.

Zine collaboration of the personal/emo sort from the creators of Brainscan and Pressed Between the Pages. Each editor writes four short stories correlating to the different seasons. I may have to use emo multiple times in this review, as that is the best word to describe the brief, disjointed writings within. Emo. (MD)

What is the difference between cleverness and gimmickery? Cleverness is a necessary invention while gimmickery is the invention of a necessity. The difference between brier rabbit's tar baby and anything sold on QVC.

TIME ZONES & STATE LINES, a split zine between Alan Lastufka and Alex Wrekk, employs two rarely successful tricks of split zines. The first is the excessively common flip-zine-over-in-the-middle layout schema where each zinester works toward the upside down end of the other zinester's side. This is a sort of lazy collaborative technique that requires no interaction between the two sides. Each zine is independent of the other, aside from the fact that they are printed on opposite sides of the page.

This collaboration obstacle is further complicated by eight competing narratives cut into quarter page sections, each story linked by typography and graphic consistency. Each story is also thematically bound by the name of the season which serves as the backdrop metaphor of the piece.

These two layout devices, so dislocating in and of themselves, forge an integration of voice through cutnpaste dissonance. This zine is important because it exemplifies the full power and potential of the medium.

The writing is an odd mixture of straight story-telling, journal fragments, and the personal labyrinth of missing context confessions. Alan's writing, more conventionally narrative, sinks into the graphic design of his page with such a natural ease, a sure sign of his pate natural zinester sensibility. Alex's side has the warm familiarity of running into an old friend in the frozen food asile of a grocery store. Everything is distanced by time, erased by a sideways, wiley smile.

TIME ZONES & STATE LINES restored my excitement and faith in the cleverness of zines and the inventive reality of their humble creators.

living half-way across a continent from one another didn't keep these two zinesters from writing one of the best comp zines i've ever read. writing about love both lost and found, each takes their own approach and owns half of this creative project. with unique voices and lives, these two tremendous writers have given their audience something to read and re-read until the pages fall apart!

keywords/themes: love, breaking up, new names, travel, comp zine, seasons