London Zine Symposium 2007

Review from Last Hours

"Below are photos from the quite frankly incredible London Zine Symposium 2007. Hundreds (thousands?) of fanzines, and hundreds of eager zinesters trading, buying, eating and taking part in workshops. There was also an entertaining scavenger hunt, a zine quiz (which was too hard for everyone except me!), and a zine mapping project that half worked, and worthwhile only because it allowed a baby to draw on the walls. The venue this year, the London Horse Hospital, whilst not nearly as big as either The Square social centre (2006) or The Institute for Autonomy (2005) was still awesome, and it being such a sunny day the parks and Russell Square that are nearby were used to good effect. These photos basically just show the entertainment orgy that the event was."

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We also got reviewed by The Independent on Sunday!

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THE STAPLE-GUN PRESS - from The Independent on Sunday 29/04/07
by Luiza Sauma

"A crowd of young people is hanging around a doorway in Bloomsbury. Some are squatting on the hot pavement, interviewing each other with cheap dictaphones. Inside, green-haired teenagers flick through fanzines and munch on vegan cakes, zine editors and distributors earnestly converse with buyers, constantly re-arranging their stalls. “The scavenger hunt is starting now!” someone shouts above the hubbub. Welcome to the London Zine Symposium.

Every mover, shaker and plain believer in the UK’s staple-gun press has converged at the Horse Hospital - central London’s self- appointed “chamber of pop culture” - to swap zines, eat cake and make friends. I was a music fanzine editor in the Nineties, but never did I imagine that such a wealth of material was being produced by so many bedroom journalists.

There’s a zine for everything, it seems; from the traditional comics, radical politics and punk music, to self defence and menstruation. (Indeed, I spend a good 15 minutes flicking through the genuinely excellent Adventures in Menstruation.) Some, like the quarterly Last Hours, aren’t really zines at all, just magazines that function outside the sordid world of the mainstream media.

Symposium organiser Natalie works at a charity by day, and co- edits Last Hours by night. She’s a staunch advocate of the underground press, and quite rightly too. “With zines you know it’s independent and DIY,” she says, “as opposed to larger publications, where so much of it revolves around advertisement revenues and massive corporate involvement…” The symposium was inspired by a similar event in Portland, Oregon: “One of the problems with doing a zine is that it can sometimes be a bit insular… We thought it would be a really good way to try to bring people together, meet other zinesters and help strengthen that community.”

It’s not all about zines, though: there are self-defence and book-binding workshops, discussions, quizzes, mixtape swaps (yes, tapes do still exist) and even legal advice. Just when I thought indie had gone overground, here comes the London Zine Symposium to show me that the entrepreneurial spirit of DIY culture lives on. The kids, it seems, are all right."

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Here's my take on the photos, including the 'Zinesters Legal Aid' clinic I ran in the nearby park: not only was it a chance to feel the grassroots beneath our feet, but an opportunity to discuss MySpace's position on third-party money-making on their site, University 'ownership' of Student IP, and urge one zinester to go ahead with a zine critically appropriating throwaway comments from trashy rags like Heat.

BILETA 2007

These certainly are exciting times! After having my first article submission rejected by the Cambridge Student Law Review, I was enraptured to recently discover I’ve been successful in my first conference submission; having an abstract approved for presentation at BILETA 2007 (I guess a 50% success rate for an aspiring academic can’t be that bad?). Given this year’s title (Paper, Scissors, Stone: Business, Law and Politics – the E and M-Commerce Debate) and Sony’s recent announcement of yet another dedicated mobile-reader device for your eBooks (quite imaginatively named the Sony Reader) I thought it best to propose something on the future of mobile eBook-reader devices in the wake of countless predecessors, and our current DRM climate. The conference title itself, initially proved a conundrum somewhat difficult to comprehend. What did it all mean? Was it a game? Was business the ‘Paper’, law the ‘Scissors’, and politics the ‘Stone’? Would it therefore follow that business trumped politics, law trumped business, and politics blunts law? Or was it merely a twentieth title, for essentially, the same annual get-together? Given such heightened levels of ambiguity, I too, thought a little wordplay was in order, proffering ‘A Scissor-less, Paperless, Tome: Business, Law and Libraries – the eBook and Mobile-Reader Debate.’ Unsurprisingly, the paper was ultimately accepted for Stream 9 - ‘Tuning in wireless: M-Commerce: the next challenge?’ - aptly considering whether current legislation; user demands; and present business practice; effectively enable m-commerce in such devices to develop.

Announcing the impending release of the ‘Sony Reader’ on the US market at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Convention, April 2007 is set to re-open the eBook and mobile-reader debate once more, when Sony unleashes the next generation of portable, dedicated, reading-devices. Eager to rectify the shortcomings of its Japanese predecessor - the ‘Librié’ – the ‘Sony Reader’ purports to revolutionise the act of reading with electronic paper and eInk, its on-demand ‘CONNECT’ eBook store of 12,000 titles, an indefinite shelf-life for your title purchases, weaker Digital Rights Management (‘DRM’) (DRM = Technological Protection Measures + Standard Form Contracting), and increased interoperability with DRM-free text, Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF and it’s own proprietary BroadBand eBook format. In light of what could be heralded by librarians, academics, publishers and our tech-savvy public akin, as a step closer to realising the fullest potential of mobile reading-devices to enhance our reading experience - both in and outside of the library - it is submitted that the Sony Reader could, in reality, prove a futile business pursuit; another intellectual property quandary in the DRM debate; and the device itself - like so many before it - a scissor-less, paperless tome.

The ‘official’ abstract can be found here.

Anyone going to the conference with an alternative theory as to what ‘Scissors, Paper, Stone: Business, Law and Politics’ is really alluding to, should definitely say hi!

ttfn, xC

London Zine Symposium 2007

Along with the expiration of my National Express Student Travelcard I am pleased to announce the 2007 London Zine Symposium on Saturday April 21st: 12pm til 5:30 pm. Following the 2006 Symposium it will be held, once again, in the heart of literary Bloomsbury, at The Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London, WC1N 1HX (behind Russell Square tube station) Map.

Despite being unable to find an autonomous social centre (read: ‘squat’) for this year’s symposium, you will be pleased to hear that entry is still FREE (though not nearly as pleased as I was to hear that a.) We won’t have to clean up any stale beer from a previous night’s benefit; b.) We won’t have to go ‘skipping’ for tables: we’ve hired them instead; and c.) The likelihood of any radiators falling off walls is minimal).

CONFIRMED STALLS
Brass Buttons Distro
Fist In The Air Distro
Ripping Thrash
Sticks & Stones distro
Nail Bunny
Paper Tiger Comics
Armchair Comics
Active Distribution
Gasp Distro & Last Hours Zine
56a Infoshop
Morgenmuffel Zine & The Cowley Club Bookshop
The ‘Individual Zine’ Table: Come sell your wares!

Alongside all the zine/comic distros/stalls there will also be a fine selection of vegan cakes and fare to keep your blood-sugar-levels in check; a zine quiz; a scavenger hunt and game of ‘capture the flag’ (to help top-up our Vitamin D no doubt?); and a host of talks and discussion groups attuned to all walks of zine-making/DIY life. Fingers crossed none of them will degenerate into the staid ‘MySpace’ discussion we had last year; though I recently read in Constance Hale’s ‘Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age’ that whilst ‘eBook’ is a perfectly acceptable parlance for digitised books, we must refer to an electronic zine as an ‘e-zine’, as “this shorthand for an electronic fanzine is not yet recognizable enough to style it without a hyphen.” If anyone fancies this alternative topic of discussion, I’m usually found by the cakes.

See you there!? xC