stained paper archive, #1 April, 1993; 8pp.; 1792 Byng
       Road, Windsor, Ontario N8W 3C8 Canada. $1. 

       Found Street, #2 Spring, 1993; 16pp.; 14492 Ontario Cir.
       Westminster CA 92683. $2. 





Recently two new zines have come out that nicely demonstrate a 
favorite theme of mine: the ease with which someone without 
official credentials can become an active participant in the world of
experioddica.  Indeed, the editor of one, Gustave Morin, is only
twenty, and first learned of poetries beyond the merely textual just a
year-and-a-half ago.  Now, having made a dozen or so contacts
through the mail, as well as a few in person, he has published his
first issue of stained paper archive, and with it brought himself
up to the level of-- well, Me! 

The word, "stained," with its suggestions of both taintedness and 
stained-glass windows, nicely fits Morin's zine, which is both
inexpensively thrown-together and chapel-serious in its devotion 
to Art--if you can conceive of a chapel with a sense of humor.  
Production-wise it is interesting, as it is made of sheets folded 
in half and stapled together--not, as expected, along their folded, 
but along their open, edges.  The resulting pages are thus doubly-
thick, which gives them not only extra opaqueness, but a feel of
substance, of archive-level durability.  At the same time, the staples,
the use of xeroxing for printing, the size and lack of exact
uniformity of the pages, and their being open at the top and bottom,
adds an appealing content-before-packaging vigor to the zine. 

One of the issue's three pieces by Morin, a few lines of nearprose
about a "man/ with hair/ in the palm/ of his hand" that the
protagonist "cannot pull (his) eyes away from," is somewhat weak,
but saved, I think, by its title: "two freaks" (my italics).  His
other two contributions are collages.  In one a man is shown using a
pole to try to put some kind of indecipherably-inscribed plaque into
an enormous mouse-trap where cheese would ordinarily go.  The other,
whose title is "virus," depicts a number of a's crossing a gap
from one enlarged cross-section of skin tissue (or the like) into
another.  Language as means of snaring the monstrously unknown
(God, say), and as ultimate, infectious utterance of human cells. . . . 
So run my first thoughts toward "solutions." 


The issue's other pieces are, like Morin's, deceptively simple- 
seeming.  One, by Greg Evason, features the image of a fork
without its handle--but, isolated (and black), it takes on eerie
tooth-resonances (sharp black teeth going up, blunt white ones
descending), and hints of archaeology, with its emphasis on bone-
fragments.  It also suggests something of the power of Motherwell's
imagery.  Sharing the page with the fork is the near-word, "nife." 

Evason is also represented by a full-page text rendered nearly
illegible by over-printing--except at the bottom where the words, 
"gonna die," fall free to indicate the only unobscurable certainty any
life can contain.  A fascinating Klee-like "Y bird" by Daniel f.
Bradley and an amusing if slight poem by jwcurry about light bulb
shards complete the issue's contents. 

Tomoyasu, an LA visual artist who's been involved in experioddica 
for only two years or so, began publishing broadsides, and his full-
scale zine, Found Street, last year.  This hasn't gotten him fame,
but it is a form, however marginal, of cultural exposure, and
that is something no serious would-be artist can afford to disdain. 

One thing I particularly like about Tomoyasu's second issue of
Found Street is that it contains work by people I'm unfamiliar with.
One such, the minimalist Brooks Roddan, is represented by two pieces.
One consists of the bar code, price and other commercial data dot-
matrixed onto the record jacket of a recording of a Bach standard 
("the Goldberg Variations") by Glenn Gould.  Its title says it all:
"The Genius of Glenn Gould."  Roddan's other piece is even
simpler; indeed, it could not be more simple, for it is just an 
upright black rectangle.  But, from its title, "Rebellion," we know
that the rectangle is also an I, isolated from the many but squarely,
resolutely, and broad-shoulderedly committed to itscause. 

Tomoyasu himself contributes a fine full-color cover drawing called
"End Art," in which a Shahnesque man is shown running out of a
mixture of music-score and verbal text with a grandfather-
clock/coffin under one arm.  Elsewhere in the issue is a typical
Tomoyasu illuscriptation consisting of the words "Jesus Door" and 
the image of an upside-down headless doll.  There are many other 
intriguing works in this issue of Found Street, including a droll 
pair of cartoon faces (or awkward mittens, or cow udders, or who-
knows-what) by well-known mail artist, Ray Johnson; the two faces 
or whatever are identical except that one is labeled, "Ray Johnson,"
the other "Jasper Johns." 

I would consider Found Street state-of-the-art experioddica,
and stained paper archive inferior to it only in quantity of 
contributors.  Neither required much money to publish; both 
accomplished things of cultural value outside the interests of
pricier magazines.  Both make me proud to be a part of the
nearly penniless but thriving and open world of experioddica.