What I like about these zines and the way they fuse together at the hip in this splitzine issue is that both zines separate and together refuse to give up the somewhat facetious and yet completely serious search for a better life, a better world. Yorke is the antagonist – he does stupid things, he talks a lot, he’s probably a poor dancer, he runs for positions he knows he won’t win and loves to read what people write about him on the bathroom wall. Meanwhile, Gord is laid back, he’s a reflection in the mirror, a deadpan light flash on the highway of life. Where am I going? he wants to know as if the question applies to everything and everyone. A similar sensibility is to be found in another one of their collaborative efforts: 1997’s Honey, Things Are Gonna Be Just Great At The Commune. Also highly recommended, there’s a sense that Commune laid the idealistic, idiotic groundwork for what has become a catalogue of minor disappointments and major convictions. All the facetious jokery and thinly veiled sarcasm isn’t supposed to hide that there’s something at stake in these works, something that has to do with rebuilding our lives, picking up the shattered pieces of the communal ideal and gluing them back together so that this time they’ll last. (HN)
zine, #8, Chris Yorke/Gordon Isnor, $2, PO Box 87, Five Islands, Colchester County, NS, B0M 1K0