Introducing my big blue suitcase

Five years ago when I moved across the country, I stuffed all of my zines into this big suitcase and there they have lived ever since. It’s powder blue, with a disgusting soiled fabric lined interior, except on the bottom where I once hot glued a bunch of electronics- back when I used it to house an instrument I built to make noise. I got it from the Salvation Army in Hadley MA.

Since moving to LA the suitcase lived mostly in my van, and then when my van died it lived in the warehouse at the lab I work at, and now it lives here at the bottom of my big sliding door closet underneath the shirts. I have a nice and tidy collection of art and photo books with actual spines, that live out in the living room arranged neatly by size in a little credenza, but the zines stay in the suitcase, in the closet. I think this is one of the things I find most endearing about zines, they’re something secret you stuff into drawers or under your bed, you have to dig for them. I go looking for one photo zine I know I own, and in the process of finding it I trawl through a decade of all the other fan, music, and art zines that have crossed my path. I hope to use this space to index, archive, and drill down into the kind of paper ephemera I’ve always found inseparable from art making writ large.