< zines:personal >
DREAM WHIP No. 13
($4.00 from Bill / PO Box 53832 / Lubbock, TX / 79453 USA)
Review by Randy Osborne
So much magic awaits in the pages of this fat, rubber-banded, handwritten object of hand-size art that I don’t know where or how to start, except with words such as the following, from one of many pages the corners of which I folded over as I read
Dream Whip on an airplane to San Francisco. I was enthralled.
During part of his world tour, our author is in Lithuania “when some local school kids troop into the bar. Without saying a word, the bartender brings out a plate of after-school snacks. A few minutes later, another little kid walks through the door and takes a seat at the bar. He’s the bartender’s son, I think, and the bartender brings him a bowl of hot soup and a glass of milk. And suddenly, I know what I’d wish for, if someone were going around granting wishes. I’d wish I could always be a foreigner, because when you’re foreign, you see the world as it really is: strange and sad and beautiful, like a barroom full of little kids eating after-school snacks on a grey day in November.”
In Chicago, where he lived for a while, he makes burritos and hands them out to poor people (Food Not Bombs!). He finds adventure in witnessing such spectacles as the demolition of housing projects, “and it’s sort of obscene to see them like this, all these private spaces, these bedrooms and bathrooms, laid open to every snoop riding his bike down Lake Street. Who’d have guessed that they’d rip open these scary old projects and this is what they’d find inside? Who’d have guessed that these buildings would bloom just before they fell?”
With an eye for architecture and for nature’s malevolent motives (a body of water is “homicidal,” the wind is “wanted for murder”), he most of all bears an understanding of the ineffable, the borderline-eerie, that zone psychologists call the liminal or in-between. By this I don’t mean exactly the realm of ghosts he went hoping to see in the abandoned state penitentiary in West Virginia (“ghost hunting, like bowling, is a group activity,” but he saw none). I mean his understanding of what can pass invisibly between people, or between a person and a place, like a breath. Take this moment in a Los Angeles coffee shop, another of so many pieces worth quoting at length. “The one girl is telling the other how she’s been killing herself sending out demo tapes, and how she stayed up half the night sticking address labels on envelopes. Then she calls a name – Tim or Kate or Madison – and smiles as they pick up their latte. She smiles like she knows how it is, that cup of coffee after staying up all night, or spending four days on the train; after deciding to run away or stay put. A cup of coffee, and then everything that comes after it. The consequences. The second thoughts. The giddiness that can’t last. She smiles like she knows how it is.”
The intricate sketches by our author of places he’s been and people he has seen (“Train to London. This guy noticed me drawing him and moved”) bespeak his careful understanding and big-hearted, inevitably sad regard for life. Just one more. Having packed up and left Chicago, “I get back to Texas and I can’t sleep. I lie awake with my light on, listening to the house creak and the air conditioner switch on and off. Downstairs, my parents are getting old, and upstairs, I am too. The girl from Seattle sent a letter with her zine. She said she’d read one of my zines and that she’d recognized something in it, the same restlessness that makes her restless, too. So she wrote, just like I’ve done a million times before. What else can you do? You play P.O. Box numbers the way other people play lottery numbers – hoping for a payoff, but knowing all along the odds are against you.”
This is gold.
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