zINERS at TINAs

Highlight of the TINA festival is, was, and always will be the Zine fair - a massive four-hour tradeathon, full of weird, wild, wonderful, often whacky, sometimes wanky, and frequently whackadaisical small-time publications by all manner of artistes. Some of the goods on offer this year:

- Ferocious foam-flecked fulminations by that Baron of Bile, Mr. David 'Metal City' Elliot.;

- A deliciously, heart-fibrullatingly, pulsatingly, pulmonatingly witty zine from Kath titled '26 Internet Dates';

- Gemanations galore! Here's one entry:

I had this beautiful moment with a leaf. You know how in Autumn the leaves go brown and then fall off the trees and you feel like being a K-Mart ad and running through them in a beanie and scarf and grabbing a pile and flinging them at your sister?...Anyway...I was walking down Bourke St when this leaf began to fall from way up above my head, revolving in tiny perfect circles like a crunchy brown ballerina, just spinning straight down toward me like it was being wound down a skinny pole. I stopped to watch it and smiled like a maniac and felt my heart grow bigger and squelch open and leak strawberry serotonin smoothie all over my lungs and ribs and out through my nostrils and navel and onto my toes. It came to rest on the ground right in front of my feet. I decided it was a good omen, and ceremoniously stepped on it and crunched it to bits, which might seem a little discordant with my leaf-loving ebullience, but it was more in recognition of my omen being only for me, and it needed to be sealed with a fate that was different to all the other leaves around it. Kind of like throwing someone's ashes to sea, or burning photos of your ex.

People say I'm easily impressed. That's ok. It's good to fall in love with a piece of dead foliage once in a while.

Great stuff.

- Green party propaganda. IE, some paper called Forest Voice which had articles by three Green politicians on the first three pages. "If you'll just listen to me, and look at the paper, you'll see that it's got a wide range of voices from many different people," said the hippy chick I got it off. Yeah, right.

- More Comic Nasties from Steve Carter - delicious, pornographic, and bizarre.

- My own zine, a five minute effort produced in the morning called Green Haired Hippies for John Howard. Amongst other things, it contains some commentary on the girl I saw on Saturday wearing a 'fuck all Liberals' T-shirt. No complaints received yet, though Sam, who was sitting at our table, said that a girl picked up the zine, glanced through it, scowled, and finally put it down, saying, 'what a bizarre person'. Anyway, they were quickly distributed - all twenty copies of them! If you really want a copy, I can get one through to you, too...

- A fresh copy of InZine, the local youth zine I write for. It is, of course, the Number One publication in the world, but apart from that, it's quite a good read.

So - were any readers at the zine fair? Anything to add to this list? Any personal favourites, comments, etc? Any complaints to hurl at me about my zine? Tell us all about it!