The value of things, especially art, is a concept which troubles me a lot. Why is any thing, even a non-creative thing, important? Because we make them important, anything that is valued is only valued because someone said it was so. This is something which bothers me and I'm sure it bothers other artists too, because obviously we all want someone to look at something we made and say "this is good, this is something people want to see," but sometimes it seems like people's choices are really arbitrary.

But how do you move your work from your desk, to someone else's bookshelf, wall, whatever? You do it yourself.



Maybe you are very smart and already know what this is. Or maybe you are still very smart, but also don't know what this is, and that's okay too. This is a zine, and I know you might think "oh, like magazine" except it actually came from shortening "fanzine" but that's a different topic (history) and not very many zines have to do with being fans any more.

Rather, they have to do with things like politics and art and environmental issues. Some of them are about local music scenes, so I guess I lied about the fan thing. But this is still a different topic, the real point is a zine is a self-published piece of art. This is the second one I've printed, and right now I only have five copies. My first one ran 21 copies which I gave out to various people over the course of a couple of weeks. It wasn't that good, it wasn't horrible, but it wasn't amazing either. Neither is this one, but it's better. The actual creation of the original pages took about three weeks, because I made more than I wanted to include, so I could throw away the bits that were just "pretty good". I won't show you what's in it, you have to ask me very nicely in person and I will give you your very own.

If you feel disappointed that I used something I'd been working on for a while, instead of making something totally new just for Creative Being, then don't worry because so do I, and I'll probably just do something else this week anyway.