$2.00
A zine about the seasons. Each side of this split zine contains four stories, one for each season: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. The stories are wrapped in unique layout where the pages are separated into quadrants. You have to follow the quadrant all the way through the zine to complete the story, as you follow Alex and Alan through the calendar year. Alex took a train trip to the midwest with a busted ankle and hobbled around Alan's house as they typed words, rubbed on letters, littered the floor cutting paper, got their fingers all glue sticky, and slaved over a beautiful old analog copier.
Review from lovebunnie press:
TIME ZONES & STATE LINES
What is the difference between cleverness and gimmickery? Cleverness is a necessary invention while gimmickery is the invention of a necessity. The difference between brier rabbit's tar baby and anything sold on QVC.
TIME ZONES & STATE LINES, a split zine between Alan Lastufka and Alex Wrekk, employs two rarely successful trick of split zines. The first is the excessively common flip-zine-over-in-the-middle layout schema where each zinester works toward the upside down end of the other zinester's side. This is a sort of lazy collaborative technique that requires no interaction between the two sides. Each zine is independent of the other, aside from the fact that they are printed on opposite sides of the page.
This collaboration obstacle is further complicated by eight competing narratives cut into quarter page sections, each story linked by typography and graphic consistency. Each story is also thematically bound by the name of the season which serves as the backdrop metaphor of the piece.
These two layout devices, so dislocating in and of themselves, forge an integration of voice through cutnpaste dissonance. This zine is important because it exemplifies the full power and potential of the medium.
The writing is an odd mixture of straight story-telling, journal fragments, and the personal labyrinth of missing context confessions. Alan's writing, more conventionally narrative, sink into the graphic design of his page with such a natural ease, a sure sign of his pate natural zinester sensibility. Alex's side has the warm familiarity of running into an old friend in the frozen food asile of a grocery store. Everything is distanced by time, erased by a sideways, wiley smile.
TIME ZONES & STATE LINES restored my excitement and faith in the cleverness of zines and the inventive reality of their humble creators. (R.JXP)
Review from broken pencil magazine:
This split zine epitomizes the essence of "zine" for me--both visually and content-wise. Wrekk and Lastufka have each introduced and written exactly half of this zine, both writing seasonally based stories of love and proximity. Each person has dissected their stories into little cut-up blurts, arrayed over heavily collaged backdrops. Now that silk-screened covers and ultra-clean design seem to be so common amongst zine makers, the busy, loose style of this zine makes me nostalgic. The sparseness of the story details makes the frustration of these characters palpable, and it's amplified through all the nervous night-time car conversations and waiting these people do. There's an innocence to all this intensity, when you're an outside reader bearing witness. While I get a bit annoyed at all the awkwardness, Timeszones just as readily charms me into reflecting on those loves I've had who've always been just a little out of reach. (Sarah Pinder)
reviewed in BP 36