Pour yourself another shot of Jack Daniels and put the Music from the Godzilla Movies CD back on the stereo cause another issue of the zine where culture goes to die is born. No big features or interviews this time, but plenty to appreciate nonetheless. Steve squares off against himself in the great Lugois-Karloff Debate entitled “The Count Meets The Carpenter”. More Blaxploitation films are unearthed including the very odd sounding Black Like Me which Steve describes at length though he fails to mention that the film must have been based on the book by the same name – the true story, if I remember correctly, of a journalist who used make-up and tanning lamps so that people would think he was African-American and he could, as Steve explains about the movie, “understand the black experience in the racist south of the early 1960s.” Anyway, it’s the dialogue, the sense of a shared learning experience that makes the Sock so useful and useless. In Japan, they call us otaku, young people who spend their time acquiring useless information about pop culture as if such information has value as a commodity. (HN)
zine, #9, 24 pgs, Steve Richards, $2, 2037, Stainsbury Ave., Vancouver, BC, V5N 2M9