Long Arm Stapler
A podcast about zines.
Http://linktr.ee/LNGRMSTPLR
Long Arm Stapler
S8E7: Brown Recluse Zine Distro
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Hello and welcome back to Long Arm Stapler, a podcast about zines! This episode, I'm joined by Ari, a volunteer with Brown Recluse Zine Distro. BRZD is a zine distro for BIPOC by BIPOC; they are collectively run and community supported. We talk about what a zine distro is, what they do and why they're important, doing things in a more analog style, the zine community, and more!
Links mentioned:
https://freecaseynow.noblogs.org/
https://trueleappress.wordpress.com/
https://prairielanddefendants.com/
http://brownreclusezinedistro.com
https://www.instagram.com/brownreclusezinedistro
Find more of my work here:
http://linktr.ee/LNGRMSTPLR
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Logo by Miquela Davis: @ghostsb4breakfast
Intro/outro:
Who Likes to Party Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Hello and welcome back to Learn Stay for a podcast about Zines. I'm your host Vera. Today I have a very special guest. Um, it's Ari from Brown Records Zine Distro, which is a zine distro for BIPOC by BIPOC. They are collectively run and community supported. BRZD distributes political educational materials that uplift and center QD BIPOC engaged in autonomous forms of resistance against the violence of capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, and imperialism. They center black zine makers in their distro, offering black zine makers 100% of the cover price to distribute their work. Hello.
SPEAKER_01Hey, what's up? Thanks for having me here. I'm really excited.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm so I mean, we run into each other at Zinefest all the time. We've like traveled to Zine Fest together, but I don't know if we've ever like just shot the shit up.
SPEAKER_01I mean, we have, but like in like the five minutes before we have to table. I would like run to your table, I'm like, hey, I'm here. Yeah. Or you do it this vice versa. You come over and you're like, what's up? And I'm like, I have to set up. I only have like 10 minutes I slipped in. You know, I'm always like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So this will be a nice, like, in-depth, like it's like us before a zine fest, but like times a bunch.
SPEAKER_01And we're not like being like, oh my god, this whole huge event's happening in five minutes. So we have to like get as the most information out to each other in the smallest amount of time possible. The pressure, there's no pressure here today, which is right.
SPEAKER_00And we're probably not anxious and sweaty. Um we could be, that's fine. But there's the the pressure is off, like you said.
SPEAKER_01I drank a whole uh pot of coffee today already. Well, I have to I have a lot of tours to do today because it's my last day of spring break before school starts. So yeah, so I have a this is this is number one on my checklist of things to do today.
SPEAKER_00Hell yeah. Well, I hope that this is the most fun.
SPEAKER_01It is, it's going to be. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00So let's get into it.
SPEAKER_01What is a zine distro? Um, a zine distro is there's like a couple different kinds of zine distros, but let's just get the basics. So it's short for distribution or distributor, but it's not like a traditional book distributor, like or a magazine distributor. Like if you work in a bookstore, you like buy stuff wholesale to sell at your store. Um it's actually like a small curated store where people sell things for like the they're they're the actual store, you know, they're not like the wholesaler. Um so basically, one one type of way is people run it like as a small like mail order. It's like a hobby. It's not like a business. A lot of people think we're businesses. We're not businesses. Sometimes we have to be businesses because of the amount of money we take in, or you know, we don't want our taxes like being like like kind of enmeshed, our personal finances being enmeshed into the district finances. Um, but like most of the time people can get away with not having to do that. So basically, it's like an online store, mail order, uh, or a tabling project, and you table like at zine events or shows, you get zines from other people, um, and you you buy them usually wholesale and then you sell them at at like the cover price to people. It's a way for people to not have to like individually buy zines from a bunch of different people, they can just go to one place and get like a curated selection that they can pick from. That's one type of zine distro. The other type of zine distro is kind of like more like political education projects where like there's like a whole plethora of like online PDF libraries or just people putting out like kind of relevant current topic political theory and just talking about current events. Um, and you can find those PDFs online, and a lot of local people in local places around the world like will print those out and then they give them away for free or for the cost of donation at events as well, or like set up at like parks and stuff. I know like one one in Olympia like used to set up at the skate park, which I thought was really cool. They're like talking to all the young people there. But yeah, those are two different ways a zine distro can run. It can run like an online store, like something you sell, or it can run like basically a place to get free zines.
SPEAKER_00And I guess that also is kind of like the differentiation between distributor and distribute like distribution, because one is like I mean it's a very fine line, I feel, between the two words, but like distribution, I think would be the more you know online PDF, like kind of just having them readily available for other people to print out and stuff, or versus distributor, which is like kind of carrying the zines and like like mail order type stuff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there's like stuff online that's called like something distro, like Sprout Distro comes to mind where it's like you can go on there and you could get that's like a curated thing, not Sprout Distro is not the one making all those zines, but Sprout Distro hosts the website that like basically has all those zines available for printing for other people to like distribute or to print for themselves.
SPEAKER_00Why are zine distros imp well actually no? First, I want to know more about Brenn Rec Brown Recluse. Um and what is like the history of the distro?
SPEAKER_01Um, so in 2013, my friend, uh, this was my friend from like MySpace, who I met um when I was on tour with a band, and I was tabling um my zines and like merch and stuff with the band. And we were at a fest called Latino Fest. It used to be like a Latino punk fest that happened like around the country. Um it would like go mainly between like Chicago and LA in the 2000s, uh in the 2000 early 2010s. Um, but we were at this the LA one and I met my friend there because like um she had recognized me from MySpace and saw me tabling my zines and was like, Hey, you're my zine friend from the internet. And I'm like, Yep, that's me. And she's like, There's a rapist here, we have to kick him out. And I'm like, where is he? Let's go. So he went and we told them off, and we're talking to the organizers. I don't remember what happened at the end, but we definitely shamed him and everyone heard, and you know, he he got called out by us. Um, but like that's fast forward to 2013. Um, I'd moved back home here to the Bay Area. I was living in San Francisco. Um, my friend stayed back in the Pacific Northwest, um, where we were living at the time. And um Nikki, her name was Nikki Gomez. Um, she lives in New Orleans now. But Nikki Gomez like reached out to me and was like, I want to start this distro called Brown Red Clues for like like black and brown folks because you know, every time we go to table at Zine Fest or we do like stuff, it's always like hello white people, and like it's really annoying, and we get a lot of microaggressions and people like treat us weird. So it was like Nikki, me, Osa from Shotgun Caesars, Mimi Yuen from Evolution, Evolution of a Race Riot, Anna Vaux from Fix My Head. Oh my god, there's so many people. I'm trying to think of everybody. There's so many people. I can name, I can name so many people, but basically Brun Rackluse started with like all these like pretty like seminal like black and brown zine makers from like the 90s and 2000s, and everyone got their zines together. Nikki sold them. I was like the little helper guy selling the zines with Nikki at Fests. We would all table together, like when we would go to a zine fest together, we would all like get we take up the whole row, you know? Like not just me and not just Brown Recluse, but like the whole like people that were like supporting it. There's like so many supporters from the beginning, um, and like volunteers or just people like helping out, which was really cool. Everyone was really excited to do it, like and there was like a lot of really cool energy in the beginning, and we did all these like we did like um like readings and stuff like that, and like there's Nikki went on tour with this like thing called POC Zine Project. Um and then Nikki wanted to move to New Orleans, so she gave the zine distro to a local volunteer, Eno. And um, I was still like tabling, like I would go to Olympia when they'd table, I'd go to Seattle, like I'd go all this stuff. Basically, our first tabling event. Oh, sorry to jump around, but I just my memory have to get my memory back. This is like 13 years ago. Um, our first tabling event was in 2013 at the Seattle Anarchist Book Fair. Me and Nikki had um developed like a workshop on the intersection between race and class and the punk scene called Bad Bitches. And we talked about like gender-marginalized people facing like a lot of misogyny, racism, and like transphobia. Um, and our workshop was like, I remember our workshop, it it was so packed. It was a really big room. It was like bigger than like the first floor of my house, you know. It was so packed, like people had to be turned away at the door. People were really excited to like, it was at the Vera project. Um, it's like the big room at the Vera Project, I think. I can rem I think so. Like I could be wrong, but I just remember tabling that people having to be turned away at the door, and then we got back to our table at the work after the workshop, and like 80% of the Z were gone right after the workshop. Like it was a really like people were dying to have something like this, especially in the Northwest when like I was an Apoc at the time, anarchist people of color, and you know, we would people would come from like Bellingham, Washington to like Portland just to meet up with other people. Like it w like the like there was a lot of like like it was a everyone's like, oh Northwest so white, northwest so white. I'm like, there's black and brown people there, but like politic when you like niche it down to like politicized, radical, like black and brown people, very small. So like we had to like really stick together and fight each other, especially in the punk scene and things like that back in the day. Um but yeah, it was like it's it was like this kind of like culmination of these worlds, like anarchist punk scene, like BIPOC scene sters of like the 90s and 2000s, and like feminist, like black and brown folks, and then like everyone in the northwest. It was like that that's kind of what Brown Recluse was like born out of. And it was a really it was just like a really cool time and place to be. Um, I felt like a lot of camaraderie and like just like I felt like I had like a really cool, like solid group of people to be around wherever I went, which is like something that we've always wanted to do and we try to do. It's a little harder now with like the pandemic and just like the internet really silos people now. Um, scenes were a way to combat that. So that was kind of the beginning of Brown Recluse. Nikki went to New Orleans, gave it to Rufino. I was still helping with that. Rufino came down here, we ran it together, but it was very casual. We got like three orders every six months online. You know, we mostly tabled in person, and that was like our big thing is just tabling Zine Fest. Um then 2020 hit, and I think like overnight, one month in like March or February, we sold out of like 90% of our stuff. Um, and since then it's become like a whole different beast, which I don't really know how to like put into words. Like I I I feel like I run a project that is like so much bigger than what I I've been used to. I'll you know, this is my third zine distro. Like I've been running zine distro since 1999. Um, I'm used to you know, just being like a little niche corner of the internet, not like this thing that I think a lot of people put a really big like importance on us when we're just like two scrappy kids still in like an extra room in our house, you know, just packing packages watching Real Housewives.
SPEAKER_00That's like that's wild that it kind of like picked up right at like the start of the pandemic. Like, because I don't know, in my head it's always been this like huge robust thing.
SPEAKER_01Um that's a relatively new thing.
SPEAKER_00That's cool. That's cool to tell.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. In the history of it. But I that's I can see why, like people were looking for like something to define like that current time, you know, with black uprisings in the United States, like a lot of people were seeking like liberatory education. Um people were looking to support non-white voices and center them. Um, and also everyone was like isolated and having to stay inside due to like all the shelter in place happening. Uh, everyone got like an extra $300 a week on unemployment, you know. There's a lot of factors that made it like, okay, that makes sense that people want more stuff to read, they're stuck inside, and they have a little bit more money. And somehow we got caught in that wave of stuff, and that's cool. You know, I I don't I r I liked it, but is it sustainable for me as a one of two people that run this thing with like a handful of volunteers? No, it's this is a hobby, you know, and it's hard to sustain when people are thinking of you as a business.
SPEAKER_00That's that's fair, like yeah, I guess like because I think when I thought in my head, you've always been this big thing, not necessarily a business, but I think it's because I see you at Fests and like I've seen you at Fests for so long. But like running mail order as a hobby, like it's I think it's really important for people to remember that it is a hobby and it's not like your kind of one, like you've got so many other things going on in your life, you know.
SPEAKER_01Like it is the distro is really important, but it's also like not your not lifeblood, but like kind of yeah, it's my like it's my outlet for fun, but it's like putting it's putting my politics into like a really fun project. Um but at the same time I do have a job. Um, I care for many animals that are sick and old. Um and I go to school full-time. Like I'm really busy and like I, you know, I have I have a partner and I have like like just a lot of things going on. Um I have a my family I'm from here, so my family's here. I have a lot of fam familiar obligations. Um but yeah, like it's it's fun, like you know, and I want to keep it fun. I that's why I always have my little disclaimer at the end of the email being like, please keep it's it's really polite, but it basically boils down to please keep this fun for us. We're not a business, we're doing this because we like care about it.
SPEAKER_00It's a passion project. Yeah, please don't have the word.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, please don't burn us out by asking us too much. But also like, please be okay if we say no, you know.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It's important to have like those boundaries, I feel.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that's why I've been doing it for 13 years, you know. That's why we can do it, because we have like we have pretty like not rigid, but we have pretty like solid boundaries around like what we can do and what what's like too much. And like also we ask for things too. It's like, oh, you want us to come to like halfway across the country? Okay, well, do you have money for a plane ticket for us? Do you have this? Like, I make like I make six hundred dollars a month. Like, I'm just gonna be real right now. I make six hundred dollars a month. Like, people are like, hey, come to this like random fest somewhere. Not random, but you know, it's important to them. But it's like I'm like, I would love to go. I would love to be somewhere I've never been before, but I don't think I have the budget for that personally, you know. It kind of my personal finances like keep me here, you know, and we can't really spend the distro finances on travel and stuff. That's a that's a gamble because we have to be able to break it all, you know, make it all back and be able to pay everybody that we bought scenes from and be able to pay um like all of our overheads.
SPEAKER_00Y'all did a a big fundraiser too, right? Recently.
SPEAKER_01Um we're doing a fundraiser right now. Uh basically for the past two years, I wrote a grant um to the state of California, the California Arts Council. They donated or they they gave us a grant of like 25k for two years, which is great. Um, we were able to open up a printing press with that. Um rent we rented like photocopiers and were able to offer like free printing for black scene makers, which is something that we started in 2020, um uh with like our with like Irrelevant Press, Unity, um and I can't remember the third one, but that's another local like rhizography studio in Oakland. But they were able to like help us print stuff, and then we ended up like getting my brother found a rhizograph. My brother's like a weird audiophile where he's like collects a lot of vinyl and buys speakers, and he he goes through like rural um estate sales to look for speakers and hi-fi equipment stuff, and he had found a rhizograph at like this random estate sale modesto and told me about it, and I immediately like gave him money for it because it was so cheap. It was like a couple hundred dollars. And we had random this was like, yeah, someone had randomly fundraised for us, and I had woken up like a couple days before with like a couple hundred like maybe like five hundred, six hundred dollars in the PayPal, because this was back in the in like in 2020, 2021, I think, when people were just I would just wake up and get a couple hundred dollars in a in the PayPal. We gave most of that money away, like we gave most of that money away to like mutual aid folks and stuff like that. We were supporting a lot of folks, which was really cool. Um, but I had been like, well, this is a way to like sustain us in a long term, so and we're like we've paid everyone for the month for like the mutual aid fund, might as well get this Risa Graph. And I got it, and with that, and like all this with that, we kind of were scaling up a little bit more with grants and stuff like that. And we had gotten this grant, we've done the free printing, we printed over like 10,000 zines. We got like a a group of like maybe 15 to 20 volunteers to help us like every month just fold and staple and send stuff out. Um, and we got like we got like international submissions too from all over the world, and a lot of them we were able to distribute too. So we'd be like, hey, here's 20 copies for yourself, and then we'll also carry your zine in our distro. Um, and we'll just send you all the money. We're not taking a cut. So it was really cool to be able to fund that for people some most of the people, like I think like 65% of them had never been able to publish their zine, like black zine makers. So we were able to give a lot of people the chance of that, or it was just people that like didn't have the cash or and like also like I think 90% of them didn't live by like a copy shop or anything like that. They couldn't find printing in their area to be able to reproduce their zine. Um, so we were able to give a lot of people a chance with doing that. Um but that grant ended in October. Um, and so we had to give all the equipment back, we had to move out of the space. Um, and now we're just fundraising for our over our like general overhead costs. Um, we had a fundraiser on Sunday that was a combination fundraiser for us, Oakland Print Shop and Reprographics Print Room, which is a rhizography studio in the long haul info shop. Oakland Print Shop is like uh like small collective of like zine makers and like propagandists here in Oakland. They do like just posters and you've probably they do like zines and like other fun little monthlies and stuff like that. It's more, it's like more like people's personal projects are run out of there. Reprographics does like print cafes and does free and does printing for folks and stuff like that. Um, but and they also can they also do classes too. So if you've ever wanted to use a Risograph um in Berkeley at the long haul at RepoGraphics, there's like a monthly um tutorial like workshop that you can take. Um so that was a really good fundraiser. We raised a lot of money. A lot of people showed up. Um, a lot of people tabled because that was another thing too. It's like people were tabling and like half of the stuff on their half of the funds on like the sales on their from their tables were were going through the three print shops. So that was really successful. We're in the middle of a GoFundMe right now. I think we're halfway there, like maybe like $5,000 out of $10,000 we're raising right now. But that's gonna just be our overhead for the rest of the year. Um since like people have been like going back to work and stuff like this in the pandemic, like we have like sales have gone down. Like it's not like 2020 anymore. You know, people work, the cost of living has gone more, people are getting squeezed more and more in various ways of repression and you know, things like that. But so we do and we rely on like I d I'll I'll talk about our funding in a minute, but like you know, we rely on the sliding scale to like pay our overhead, and it hasn't been a lot lately, so we are trying to just secure that money to keep the project going for the rest of the year.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so you all when people buy zines from the distro, you do a sliding scale um to make it more accessible, and then also but the sliding scale for uh white people and institutions is like a higher bracket.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so the way that our distro works is we buy zines from zine makers or we have them on consignment. Um, sometimes we're not trying to do the consignment anymore, but we a lot of the the free printing was basically all consigned to zines. Um, but basically, like the cost of the zines that you see in the distro for the most part are what we pay for them. That's a whole like it's a wholesale price. We offer that to black, indigenous, and people of color individuals who are like, I want to buy a zine for myself or my friend. Um, if people want to buy zines for like to teach a workshop or to put them in a library or like a like a college or like you know, for an event or something like that, or for their nonprofit to like teach all their like employees about something, like we ask you to pay at least five dollars more. The sliding scale goes from like five dollars to like five hundred, you know, and there's like a self-assessment chart on the website. The sliding scale is its own like standalone item in the store. It's the first thing, it's the first item on every single sales page. Um, there's a chart on there. Um we just ask people to just chip in because that's like what you see on the basically what you see on the website is what we pay. We don't take we don't see any of that money. Um and like so everything else, if if to pay our web fees, to pay our space rent, to pay paper, um, cell phone, all that kind of stuff, it's we rely on the slating scale. If we don't have that slating scale, then we can't pay those expenses, hence why we're fundraising right now. Um, we're just trying to get like all of our expenses covered for the year. But yeah, we it's like it's not like we're asking everyone to pay $100. Like if you don't have it, you don't have it. That's why we're just like, just put $5 more. Um, some zine makers saw that we have a sighting scale and they've implemented their own just because they know that like there's like that that like they they they're like my my zines are for intra-community use only, you know. But like if someone does want to buy it, they can pay more, like if they're an institution or if they're a white person, like and they ask of that, and I'm like, that's fair, honestly. Like something, some knowledge is not meant to like be shared outside of your community, or if it is like you have to like understand the weight of that or be compensated for it fairly. Um, I've seen a lot of other projects and distros have sliding scale now, which is cool. Um, but they always like um they always like credit it back to us, but I'm just like, I don't know, like I learned about sliding scale being like an anarchist punk, like taking door money at shows, you know. I didn't invent it.
SPEAKER_00You didn't invent the sliding scale.
SPEAKER_01No, please don't credit me for it. Please don't credit Brown Reckless for that. Like it's we're just punks, we're just doing what we do.
SPEAKER_00So, in a similar vein to like fundraising, and you've kind of touched on a couple of these things, but like what are some I guess challenges that a distro might face?
SPEAKER_01Um right now. The sliding scales, I think, is still a little hard for people to understand. Sometimes you have to chase people down for it. I'm not above that. Excuse me, sorry. Um, yeah, I'm not above that because I know the people that we carry, they put a lot of work into that shit. And I don't want to like discredit, like, I don't want to like cheapen their work, you know. I want to get I want to get them their money. Um, and also have give them an outlet, us, for distributing their stuff. Because some people are like, I can't be bothered with selling my stuff, it's too stressful. I don't have that kind of time. And I'm like, we'll do it for you, don't worry, you know. Well, for a lot of people, we're like their only way of like selling things. They don't have that, they don't have that structure, they don't have that setup in their life, you know. Um, and a lot of times like tabling's really stressful for people. Tabling's a really stressful thing. Like, I don't know how I've been doing it for so long. I've kind of just developed like a really like ironclad like mentality around it. And I I like it, it's not like I hate it, but I can see white people, it's like this is anxiety inducing, and I don't want to do this anymore. It's like ruining my mental health. Like, I'm like, I get it, I'll do it for you. I'll bear the cross. Um, but like, yeah, like I think that's like one thing. Another thing is like a lot of zines are like electronic these days. And it's really hard to get physical zines from people. It's so hard. Blood from a stone. Um, I get it, like the infrastructure doesn't exist anymore. Like the infrastructure I grew up with does not exist anymore. Um, I used to just be able to go to school and on my lunch break at school, I would just go to the library and I just print all my zines, and then I'd go to the punk show on the weekends at like ABC and O Rio and like New York City and like trade zines with like random crusties outside. You know, that I don't think that's a thing anymore. I think now people exchange like Instagram handles or something. Um like I grew up in a very different time than people, like now. I and I I know I see that, like, because I think people assume I'm like, oh, you're like just around my age. I'm like, no, I'm like 40 years old. I've been doing this since like 1999. Um, that's when I started like making zines. Um, and like I would just like go to the coffee shop. The coffee shop was local and it was 24 hours, and I could just go there late at night, like after I was done like doing my homework and after dinner and like just go over there and print my zines and go or print stuff and then go home and like cut and paste it together. You know, I don't know how to make a zine on the computer. I can edit it if you need me to, but I I don't know how to like put one together. I I make everything by hand. Um and a lot of the stuff, a lot of like the graphics and stuff online to Burn Reckless, we like outsource that to people who have that kind of talent. Like we don't. Um but I think yeah, like there is a divide between us and like a lot of newer people where like there's a technological divide where like we don't we we're still doing paper, you know, and so it's hard to get paper. It's it's hard to get tangible submissions, it's hard to get tangible zines, um, it's hard to get sliding scale. Um a lot of the sometimes it's like it's hard to travel for tabling, it's tiring. We're getting older, you know. Like a weekend like that will take me out. Like I'll come home on a Monday and I'll sleep all day. I'm just so tired from like being out talking to everybody. Um, I like it. I like meeting new people. I'm really like I'm a very social person, but I take I noticed as I'm getting older, it takes a longer time for me to like reset after that. Um and I think that and like just being personally consistent enough to like have volunteers and stuff, I think that's like another thing. Um, I have so much going on in my life, and so does like the other person that works with me, Fino. Like, we we can we can do we can um we can commit to time, but it's like few and few now these days, especially with how our lives are going. Um mail order is easy, stocking's easy, selling's easy, all that stuff's easy. Printing's a little hard sometimes. The one-eighth zine is really hard. Printing the one-eighth zine is super hard. Um, because you have to cut it and then you have to fold it a lot. Whereas like we like a zine, we love a half-size zine, we love a quarter size zine where you just cut it or you fold it and you staple it. That's great. Um making an origami with a zine, that's a lot of time. That's a lot of time, especially when you're time consuming. Yeah, it's really time consuming. I that's like the hardest thing. I feel like that's always our hardest thing. We love the zines that come in those formats. We love the content, we think the content's really important, but a lot of the times we can't keep up with the demand.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's because I think the most time-consuming part of zines for me is also like the folding of the one eight. Like the folding and move to move to a quarter.
SPEAKER_01I I did a I did a workshop at the at the Alameda Library about a quarter sizine, and I have a quarter sizing. Um, when I table the distro, I have a quarter sizing tutorial. I'm trying to popularize it again.
SPEAKER_00Bring it back.
SPEAKER_01I'll bring bring it back, please.
SPEAKER_00That's the size I started with was quarter size.
SPEAKER_01That's the best size. Yeah. It's the most economical.
unknownOh.
SPEAKER_01You print on every page. You print on every page.
SPEAKER_00That's true.
SPEAKER_01And if you're doing a 1-8 scene, which means eight pages, it's the same as a quarter size scene. You you just have to do a cut in the middle. I think it's the staple. I think it's the stapling that gets to people. Because it it's like, it's like, I think those were made out of a, they're like, I'm I don't think they're invalid, but I think those were made out of a desire or like a a need of like, hey, I don't have a stapler. As we were talking on the long-arm stapler podcast.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was like, couldn't relate.
SPEAKER_01Um but yeah, like over a minute I was like distrowing these like Daiso like flip mini staplers that were basically like a long-arm stapler that you just they turn into a long long-arm stapler by you just flipping the the stapler sideways to 90 degrees, and then you can you can staple on the spine of any zine. This is from Daiso, yeah, but you can get them at Japanese um like stationary stores. It's a size 10 stapler. Like that's the size of the staple, the size 10.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01And it just flips. Um but yeah, I bought like a whole rack of them at DISO one time, and I was having them on the table just because I was like, I need to I need to make stapling more accessible.
SPEAKER_00Hell yeah. Um, I wanted to touch on something that you mentioned, which is like the technological divide between like newer, I guess, you know, newer zensters and like people who have been doing it for much longer or people who just are more tech averse, I guess. Like yeah, what are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_01Um I just I just have my way I know of doing stuff. Um, and sometimes I like dabble in tech, you know. I know how to use Ableton. You know, I I can, you know, I I can use Photoshop, but do I want to? No. It hurts my eyes. I like using my hands. I I I haven't got I got all this hand strength from like folding zines all day. Like, no, they're really I'm not trying to brag. Just the reality of it. It's like I might as well use it. Use it or lose it, you know? True. Um, yeah, like I just like it. I like I like photocopying. I don't know why. It's just it's just a very uh it's a very like meditative practice for me. I like cutting stuff up and gluing it. Um like I have a paper planner and I'm like one of those weird Hobanichi people that plans my life out with like markers and stuff. Um but yeah, like I I don't know, like I like writing people letters. Um I like having a I like getting mail. Just nice. It's slower. I think that's the thing. It's just like I everyone wants stuff really fast. I'm I don't want stuff fast. I want stuff slow. I want to wait around. I just I like I I have a slow I feel like my mind's a little slower than other other people in that way. And I could see myself when I was doing a lot of stuff like that and trying to catch up, it was just like stressing me out. And like I can learn that stuff if I wanted to, but it it didn't feel it didn't feel the same to me. And I know it's like accessibility stuff too, like I want to be respectful of that, and everyone has their own way of doing stuff. That's great. Like I I want to respect that and like do it though, do it whatever way you can. Like, whatever way you can do it. But for me, per my personal decision, and that's like not on anybody, it's like not telling other people what to do. But for me, I'm just like I'm my mind works better when I'm like working on something that I can touch. Um, that I can cut. I I'm better at moving a margin of a paper and like and gluing it on than I am taking a mouse and moving like a text box over. Like I I can see it because I know what it look I know where I know where to go on the paper. Um, I don't know what the margin's gonna look like on the computer unless I go in a dialogue box and I set the settings. You know, like that's another extra it's just the extra step for me that I don't like. Too many steps, too many, too many places to remember things. And I for me, I'm just like I'd rather just move the paper and make sure that everything's in this correct and like you know, do a test, print, a photocopy, and make sure like everything turns out okay, that's everything's legible, all that kind of stuff. Because I could just move it around on the paper, or like I could just reprint it if like the image or the text isn't like good enough, like it isn't legible. Um, but yeah, like I'm just used to that. I'm I'm also like, I don't know, like the way that tech surveillance is happening, like AI scouring the internet for like all of just stealing people's labor, stealing people's intellectual property, like all this other stuff going on. Like, I would rather keep my stuff offline. I'd rather keep my stuff on paper, I'd rather keep my stuff printed on an untraceable, you know, machine. Because that's the other thing too, is like a lot of these like newer machines, you have to buy a subscription for the ink, and then like it prints a certain like dot like a like a matrix of an identifier of the exact machine on there and like a in a really microscopic way of the ink, where to the naked eye you can't see that, but if like someone was looking deep enough, they could see it and they could identify the machine, the serial number of it, what kind of machine it is, you know, it's just more evidence in the paper trail of things. I don't know. I think about stuff like that a lot. I don't know if it makes me a wing nut or not, but we are like, you know, it doesn't because just last month, I don't know if you guys know about the prairie land um defenders. It was a bunch of people who were protesting an um ice facility in Texas. One of them, Des, um, got sentenced to prison because he he had zines in his trunk. And they were trying to get him on the content of the zines. And the zines are just zines that you can find online. It's not like he was making them himself. They're just like what we talked about at the beginning of this conversation. The freeze, like the free zines you can get online. A lot of like, and that they try to like when government repression happens, that's a lot of the times. This is not the first time this happened in the Northwest during like the grand jury out there. Um, when people's houses were getting raided, a lot of evidence that was to be taken with zines and books. Um and like computers, things like that. It was just like I don't know. I just think about I I think about that a lot. That's just something that crosses my mind and in in the realm of the things that we're doing. Well, what could happen in this in this current political climate? It's just, you know, with things like that. And then it's not even current, because like this was happening a long time ago too. Like this was happening in 2012, and it happens every couple of years. Like political repression happens, and a lot of the things that get prosecuted are zines.
SPEAKER_00Which is terrifying to think about, like, as especially with like the kind of content that y'all carry and a lot of people that I know like you know, are making. Like just anything that could be anything that could be seen as like that, quote unquote, like subversive. It's subversive, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So they're trying to like the prairie land thing was like Antifa, Antifa, Antifa. And I'm like, Antifa isn't like a political party, it's like a tactic. You know, it's like it's like not an ideology, it's not a party, it's like a tactic, like black bloc. But the thing is that the government, you know, prosecutors and stuff, they always want to create it into like a specific terrorist cell or whatever. Um, I'm not scared. I'll tell you guys that much. I'm not scared, but I do try to be careful. That's just the thing. It's just like I try to be careful and I try to be mindful. Um, and that's a lot of the times we print a lot of the stuff we print is stuff about being careful and being mindful. It's about informing yourself of like the current level of surveillance or just things in media like and technology that are around us these days. How many cameras, flock, how like ring cameras, Teslas, like we're surveilled all the time now. Phones, it's like I don't know, it's just it's it's it's really common now, and that doesn't have to be that common or it and it does all doesn't have to feed into like a police state either. But that's what it is, these are all technological arms of a police state. Um sorry to get it so serious, but this is that's why I like zines, because like ooh, they're it's like uh it's like just tangible text. It's off of a server.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, if you really want it to be. I like you said earlier, like you know, you want to be mindful of like people needing it for accessibility, but I do think people are becoming dependent not using it for accessibility, but just because it's like convenient, but like making things like one of the things I love so much about zines is that you generally make them with your hands, like they are tangible. You can you can feel the the paper weight, you can like physically glue things down, you can cut things like that feels so special to create. With your own two hands.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And like, you know, another thing too about accessibility, like my favorite thing was a zine distro in Olympia, that all the zines that people made, tangible and accessible, they made a zine distro that was just an audio zine distro called Resonance. And so people would read the zines. Like they would get, they would get like people in community to just be like, I'll read the zine. And this is like, and it's not, it wasn't money. It was like, you know, it's like the first, it's like the second kind of zine distro I was talking about, not the one that's like an online store. That it was like born out of that, where like people could just listen to like it was basically like audiobooks of zines. But it was cool. Like we can be really creative with technology and accessibility. Um, we just have to be mindful of what tools we're using and what what what those tools are feeding into. That's all. And like we have to be mindful of the content we create and where we put that content because sometimes and we don't have control over this. That's another thing too. It's like we only have so much control, but just be mind it's like there's a difference between mindfulness and control, obviously. And we don't, you know, like we just have to be like, okay, if I put it here, will it be okay? Well, is this a is this a good place to put this, you know? If it's not, maybe we'll find something else to do. And we have to be creative about how we get stuff out there. And I think that's the most important thing these days, is we have to it's like everyone says, like, be like water. I don't know if you've heard that, like, be water. Um, I and I always like take that into heart when I'm doing things. I'm like, okay, well, this isn't work anymore. We just have to be by water, we have to find the path of least resistance and go that way in terms of being accessible, being mindful, being effective. Political education is like really important to me. Like without zines, like growing up, zines were really important to me because I learned a lot that I didn't I was like I was isolated a lot growing up because I moved around a lot. Um, English is not my first language. Um, a lot of milestones young people meet. I did not meet those like at the time that people did. Um, just because of my language barrier and also just because of I didn't really have like a solid like a solid place to live for most of my childhood. Um, zines really helped me because I could always find people that didn't live where I lived, but I can always be in contact with them, or I can always find out what's going on with them, or they I was always being able, they were always there for me to like find new things or just new ideas. Um, and they were really helpful a lot of the times when I'd move to a new place because through a zine, I'd find out what the local scene was like, and I'd like can show up to things like food not bombs and like cook or like a punk show at a youth center or something like that, and just like see the local zine distro there and pick up more stuff and talk to more people. Um, it was a way for me to be able to like find community even though like I wasn't in places for very long.
SPEAKER_00Hell yeah. That's you know, zine community is like such a special special thing.
SPEAKER_01It really is. Like, I still have friends from when I first started, like my first pen pals. I'm still friends with them.
SPEAKER_00I love that.
SPEAKER_01I know. That's like my family, you know. I'm like, I'm never gonna like not be your friend. Like, that's my longest friend. I think you've had some of my old friends on this podcast too.
SPEAKER_00Probably.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, like I'm like, oh like I'm like, I started talking to that person a really long time ago. They've known me since I was like, they've seen me in all stages of my life, which is really special. Like, I really I really cherish that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think I talk about this a lot, but like zines are like time capsules for all the different versions of ourselves, you know, and having zine friends for so long, it's like they've seen so many different facets of like who you have been and who you can be and who you are right now.
SPEAKER_01Oh, definitely, yeah. And that's like a really beautiful thing. I love having that type of like longevity with people. It's like cool. Um, it feels like I I'm you know, like I never feel alone. Even though I was telling you earlier today, I'm like, I don't leave my house. I I don't feel alone.
SPEAKER_00Because you've got zines and zine people, and zine people, yeah. I guess going back to like Braun Recluse as a concept, like what do you think the most special thing about the distro is to you?
SPEAKER_01I think honestly, the free printing for black sea makers. I think it was cool. Uh, I wish I wasn't poor because I would fund it myself. Like, I would literally put all my money into that. Um, like that's a maybe that's a dream in the future that we just bring it back. We're taking a little lull right now, but that's always something that like I think is really special at the distro that we're able to like have that offering. Um giving people 100% of the price for their zines. I think that's cool. Giving people a platform for their stuff, they don't have to sell themselves. I think that's really cool. Because I used to like before I had a distro, I used to have to sell my zines myself through mail order. That was hard. I didn't like it. I was a teen but I was a teenager with no car, you know. Um, but like getting to the post office, you know, sending it out. I I see how hard, you know, that that's hard. But like I think also the mutual aid aspect of it was really cool. We've helped people buy cars, we've paid their rent, we've paid medical care. Um, we've helped people not get evicted, paid for medicine. Um, we've really helped people throughout the years stay alive, which is the most important thing. Um just to re for people that don't know, uh, we take the profits every month. And then we also take there's a certain group of zines on our website that we sell for like a dollar, uh the cost of copy plus like a dollar. Um, and all that money goes into a mutual aid fund. Every month we redistribute that. Back in the day, we were paying like people's rent for the month, you know. We were paying groceries, medicine, medical bills, car, car payments, things like that. Um, it goes to black, queer, and trans folks only. Um, but I think I I love that. I love that part. I love sending people money. I love it, just it just makes me really happy to be like, okay, this person doesn't have to worry about this one thing this month. That's off their head of all the bullshit that's like that piles on us in this society, especially black, queer, and trans people, like that's one thing that's off their mind. Um, I wish we had enough money to do that every month, but I feel like five years ago was like a fever dream, you know. That I want that world, I there's been such like a reactionary backlash to like a lot of liberatory practices that were happening um through systemic means, but also like ideological stuff between people as well, um, which is really sad. And it I really mourn for that a lot, and I have a little grief towards that. Um, but that's something that I think is really special that we did. Um, I wish we could do it more. It it just depends on people like being more generous when they give us money or they buy stuff from us. Um, and I know people are generous, I don't take that for granted because sometimes people are like, here's a 20 for two zines. And I'm like, Are you sure? They're like, just take it. And I'm like, my god, thank you. Bless. Um but yeah, the mutual aid fund, free printing, basically everything we could offer for you for black people for free. That was the most special part of the distro. Like, um, I think all the volunteers showing up uh a couple years, like I think two years ago during Palestinian uprising stuff, we had like 20 people furiously folding every because of the surge of all that stuff and like the need of zines. Um and we just basically just like a bunch of people just hunkered down, just folded and stapled and printed for like three weeks straight. And then like people would come in, like someone that I hadn't seen in years was like, I'm here to pick up a box. And I'm like, oh my god, here, nice to see you. Thanks for coming. You know, so that's cool. It brought people together. I wish more I wish people would have that like a little bit more of that energy every day. Yeah, cool, it'd be cool.
SPEAKER_00If you're listening, please have that energy. Please, please get it back up. Um so I guess I have uh a question from a listener for you. And it's how do you store and organize the distro? Because you've got so many zines.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, so we only carry like five to ten copies of each zine. I know people probably think we're like a huge thing. No, we're two bookshelves. The bookshelves are barely full. Um, but yeah, we we carry like five to ten copies of each zine. Um, not a lot. Um so we have that. We have two bookshelves. We have like this two by eight shelf with a table on it, um, and that has all our shipping supplies and like you know, like like the all the tape and packaging and the scale and stuff with and put in like stamps and stuff and paper, shipping labels. Um Yeah, but it's just it's just two it's two little uh shelves. And when we go table, we just put them in like uh copy boxes of all the paper that we've used. We just put them in there in a Hulkin and cart them down the street. Hulkin was the best thing I got for my birthday a couple years ago, because I literally put the whole distro in there and I could just go anywhere. It's heavy, but I could pull it on a wheels, which is great. Um The zines we print, so we we still do free printing, but we only have a risograph, so like we can only do like one to two page zines these days in single color, so a lot of them are just info zines, and it's it's not the amount that we were doing before, and it's it's what we can afford now. We can just afford to like print like some free table stuff, and that's it. Um, but we do have those scenes in a filing cabinet, and that's it. It's just a filing cabinet and two bookshelves and a computer, that's it. Nothing crazy.
SPEAKER_00Okay, that yeah, because I feel like your tables at Fest are always popping off, so I just had this assumption that it was like piles and piles and piles of zines.
SPEAKER_01No, the free stuff we have in like its own rack um on the wall. It's like, you know, like when you like you live in a house and like a lot of people have mail and it's like those magazine racks that like bolt into the wall. We have the free stuff on there, and then the back stuff of the free stuff we just have in another copy box on the floor. Um, and we restock the wall from that when we after we do orders. It's it's not big. I think I think hopefully that this podcast episode demystifies that we're a big business with a lot of stuff. We're literally two bookshelves in a spare room and like a Risa graph and like a filing cabinet, like and just two little guys, and two little guys folding, watching real housewives. It's nothing, it's nothing big. It's nothing big.
SPEAKER_00It certainly has demystified this for me. Um no problem.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because I think people see like the Instagram, they're like, oh my god, a big huge thing. I'm like, no, it's just it's just us. It's just us.
SPEAKER_00Um, is there anything else you want to talk about or that you have coming up that you want to plug?
SPEAKER_01We're tabling Santa Rosa's Eine Fest. Oh, yeah, May 2nd. May 2nd in Santa Rosa. I'll see you. Land of Snoopy. Yes. I love Snoopy. I love Snoopy. Anything for Snoopy. Um, and then what else? We're doing a fundraiser. If you go to brownrecliceindistro.com, um, there's a link right on the splash page, the homepage says please fund us. Please donate. Um, so we can can we can uh continue existing till the end of the year. Um what else? I think that's it. We're yeah, oh if you have a mask required scene event you would like us to table at mask required, please, because we're disabled and we love not catching COVID or other illnesses. Um please email us info at brandmarklesia distro.com. We would love to table. Um, we want to find more common community um with folks. Um, we get a lot of invites to come to places, but a lot of the accessibility stuff doesn't align with our needs. So we have to say no to a lot of people. Um we would love to say yes more, but I think that takes a lot of people finding out about us. Um I'd love to shout out like the things I was talking about today. Uh freedes.net, f R-E-E-D-E-S.net is the website for Des who is facing um prison for um zines and is being criminalized for zines. A today, April 4th is actually the day of solidarity with all the Prairie Land defendants. Um, as we're doing this, I know that like right now it's like uh a little a little late. This will probably come out later, but um there's a just just if you want to type in like Prairie Land Defendant Defendants, there's a big website for them. Um so but also Des has um their own page, yeah, um freedes.net. Um and then there's like info to write to them um and the guidelines for writing to them um and ways to donate and get involved to um help get all these people out. Because they people should be allowed to um have noise demos outside of ice detention centers. They should be allowed to do more, but obviously we don't live in that time like that right now, so extra help is needed to help people feel supported and help people that the reality of getting repression, more people will do things if they feel that there's a social safety net to them in case for them in case something happens. And it's up to us as individuals in communities of all of like who are in solidarity or affected by this to be able to be that social safety net for people. It's our duty. Um, I'd also like to shout out to Casey, um, free casey now.noblogs.org. Um, Casey is another distroist who um just got sentenced to 20 years. Um they're they're in um they're incarcerated on the East Coast. They're from here, actually, they're from the Bay. Um they got popped here in the bay. Um so they are being transferred right now to FCI Allenwood. Um I don't know if it's an immediate placement, but they uh they're seeking they're diabetic, so they are fundraising for for commissary funds so they can get food. Um, you know, you could send them. They just they were moved, so that means they had to get rid of all their things. Every time you're moved and when you're federally incarcerated, they throw away all your shit and you have to start over again at your new place. So they probab they definitely need things um to start their life over again at the facility they're incarcerated at currently. Um they have an Instagram page, free casey now. Um and on the no blogs that I just um plugged, they have a link to their zine distro. Um it's truly press.wordpress.com. They were uh they were a zine to prison distro um based in the Bay Area, and they did a lot of um support for prisoners who who needed zines, who like wanted to have like free, they provided free zines to people, um, and also like would be on calls with people and supporting them uh in case they needed, and they would do what they could to like help people on the inside. They were doing a lot of really cool work, um, but now they're incarcerated themselves. So um those are two people to like, those are two zine people right now who are being like politically we're facing political repression and incarceration that I think is like really important to support. I'd rather plug that than plug the next time I'm at a scene fest. But yeah, um, those are some people that we should be thinking about and uh doing what we can to support them in this really hard time that they're facing.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Yeah, I'll post all of those links, um yours and the other two that you mentioned in the show notes as well.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_00I appreciate it. Yeah. Um that's all the questions I have. Um, this has been an absolute delight. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01This is this is a lot, this is um very fun. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was really great to have more than a rushed five minutes to talk with you.
SPEAKER_01Um I know now you now you really see how my brain ticks.
SPEAKER_00I feel we did drive up to Portland Zine Symposium one time, and I feel like that was like I think about that this morning. That was like a thousand years ago.
SPEAKER_01That's ancient. Was I even doing the distro or was I doing Max from Rock and Roll?
SPEAKER_00I think you're doing the distro.
SPEAKER_01I was doing the distro, okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's all a blur to me. But I rem I remember that because I remember the um I remember the gas station we stopped at uh by East Side Arts Alliance, and I always think of us there before we started our big trip.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, back my old car that could actually handle such road trips.
SPEAKER_01I know. Now I fly to Portland. That was my first zine, supposed, or my first zine fest.
SPEAKER_00Same. The one that you like you first ever attended?
SPEAKER_01No, no, like uh a long time ago, like 2003. Um I'd been going I've been going to Portland Zine Fest since 2003. Um when I lived in when I lived in California before I moved there. I lived there for like 10 years, and then I moved back home. But that's what got me to want to live there. That like I made a lot of friends there. Um, and I was having a really hard time down here. Um, and I had to get away from a really dangerous situation. So my friends up in Portland were like, free room and board. We just want you safe. And I'm like, thank you. So I owe it to my zine friends for um for saving my life. That's the reason I'm like here. I'm like, I don't think I would have been here today if it wasn't for them. So I owe them a lot for that.
SPEAKER_00That's very sweet.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I know. But yeah, so that was our time. I feel like, yeah, so we did, we did talk. I've I I barely remember that all I remember is the gas station. I remember the trip kind of. I was tired.
SPEAKER_00I was slamming so many energy drinks. You were, you had too many.
SPEAKER_01I think I wasn't on that level yet. I was saving my energy for table week.
SPEAKER_00I was not. I was like, I have to get through this drive. Um, but yeah, Portland Zinc Symposium was the first fest I ever attended back in like 2011, I think. So it holds a very special place in my heart as well.
SPEAKER_01It's fun, I love it. It's uh I look forward to it every year.
SPEAKER_00Same. Um cool. Well, I so thank you again for doing this. I also want to thank um everyone who supports the podcast podcast podcast monthly on Kofi, um which is a dollar a month, um, and after fees that's like 60 cents a month. So that really adds up and helps um subsidize the cost of hosting and production. And if you have been enjoying the podcast or if you found a new zine maker or distro that you like from the podcast, um please consider supporting it for a dollar. Um there's a link in the show notes. And yeah, stay tuned. There's a couple more episodes this season. Um, if you're interested in talking to me about your zines or zine fest or zine distro, etc., um, there's a link in my link tree to fill out a form. If you know a zine star who'd be interested in chatting with me, send them my way. I love to yap about zines, um, as evidenced by having a podcast for almost 10 years. Um, so yeah, that's everything. Um, thank you again, Ari. Everyone, please check out Brown Recluse um at a fest near you, a masks required fest near you, um, and online. And yeah.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me. Yes, it's brownrecluseendistro.com. Pretty easy to remember.
SPEAKER_00All right, everyone, thanks for listening.
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