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Weblog | I don't like the word blog, it's ugly. Anyway, new content happens here. (Swedish dito)

About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

Archives | Things written here since... well, 2001. Some of it is good, some is utter shait.

Books | Books read, not books written. So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.

Photo | I like my camera and it likes me.

Links | Outwards, away, flee.

e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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2002-02-19

There is a jellyfish swimming around in there, the head, poking brain cells back and forth at a tremendous slow pace. The fish is about this big — typing with one hand to show you this — and as such it also blocks much of the traffic. This is just as horrible as it sounds. I’m too tired to sacrifice what is left of my wits in order to read fiction and most non-fiction is also way outside my current limits.

However, there are some things I could read despite my state of mental decay. One of them is Blue Note Records by Richard Cook. (Of course it is a sort of biography about the record company, what did you expect? World records held by Richard Simmons?) It’s interesting, as the author seems to be pretty well aware of the record company’s strength and weaknesses.

(I don’t recommend it though, even if I like it. Unwanted recommendations tend to be as inviting as the “Hot! Hot! Hot!”-signs in Las Vegas)

There is a magazine in Sweden — which I won’t mention by name in protest — that calls itself fanzine. This is wrong on so many levels. For the first, it is suffering from the Wired-ad syndrome. You know what I mean? That the articles disappear among all the ads and that even the content-listing is divided by this. Everything is in four-colour print and on a glossy paper. Tell me, is this a fanzine?

Obviously, there can be only one answer to this question and that is a firm no. Several of them live on this magazine, so it can’t even be called a semiprozine. A fanzine is not a name for the genre “we’ll write about everything we want to write about,” something they seem to believe. A fanzine is something else, copied on a regular xerox-machine and written just for the enjoyment of it without any thoughts of professionalism.

According to me, one shouldn’t even have to pay at all for fanzines but that might just be me. If they cost money, they should be fairly periodical as one issue a week or so.