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Canzine was a hustling, bustling spectacle of leaflets and buttons, counterculture and cut-up. Every year, indie publishers gather in a cramped hotel lobby to distribute their flimsily bound masterworks and cool-cool-wink-wink merchandise. Some of these creatives put a lot of effort into their side projects; others throw together a photocopied pamphlet in what appears to be 47 seconds before the show. It's all small time and it's all fascinating: what Canadians are working on, out of the limelight.

Upstairs, in a room filled with dead leaves and pine branches and semi-clean hippies, I read journal excerpts from young tree-planters up north. Everything smelled like pine. If the black fly heads embedded in your skin don't get you, I learned, then the trenchfoot from planting in knee deep mud will. Now I sorta don't like trees anymore. They are born in a massacre.

An older filmmaker tried to elaborate on the benefits of anti-corporate collage. He was interesting but his movie was just mash-ups from CNN news broadcasts.

A Korean artist was displaying a picture of a mermaid in a bathtub that looked exactly like a drawing I saw on the bottom of an ashtray, in a love motel in Danyang. I told her she had twin vision. Now I might be teaching English to her mom.

I bought a zine called "First Fucks". It made me laugh because first times are always a deflating letdown or an embarrassing travesty. This literature doesn't know anything about flickering candlelight or simultaneous orgasms; it's the basement, the parked car, the 'let's just get it done'. Honesty is the best policy.

One girl was selling series photos of heartbreak. Four images, one quotation, you figure out the story yourself. If your heart is broken over a dropped pineapple, smashed on the floor, you know it's time to stop listening to Bright Eyes.

I lost Carly and Corwin pretty early on. Corwin is tall but Carly blends in with the hipsters. At one point, I was talking to an aspiring illustrator who had a book with a wide-eyed puppy dog on the front. He was a rad guy, but then Carly came by and I said something about boiling her dog in hot broth and the artist was kinda pissed about that.

They drew a smiley face on my hand when I first came through the doors. The next day, I saw the half-scrubbed remnants of identical markings on people everywhere. In my classes, on the subway, buying a hot dog. I wondered: if everyone pressed our smileys together, would we transform into a gigantic, poorly-photocopied robot covered in tiny buttons?

I want to make a web comic now. It will be about Uncle Parsnip, the elderly defiler of ripe vegetables with nothing but promise in their starry young eyes (seeds? I still need to work out some details). Uncle Parsnip is the reason you get sad, deflated looking lemons in your Caesar salad. He is the one who turns your pantry into a garden of sorrow.

[Toronto] [Canzine] [independent publishing]

Posted by Chris at 12:18 PM >> Commentations (7)