Brain Damage + Spangle Archives:

god willing, i will be a country mouse in a big city college soon. and in the application for said college, i told them i made zines. i wrote something along the lines of, 'a teenage girls bedroom is sacred ground. there, she cuts and pastes a life for herself from magazine scraps, from all the things she loves and it's as real and true as if she'd made it from scratch.' and this still rings so true for me. in retelling my adolescenece, i am also retelling the histories of brain damage zine, the archives.

i read my first zines on said shag carpeted bedroom floor, eighth grade, holding two of them close to the chest. (both from kcs premier zine expo) criss crossed applesauce, i read them page by page. one on women, and anti aging industries. classic, and too much for me, at the ripe old age of thirteen. this was a well worn subject for me by then, i was bored to death of feminism in general, and zine culture had a lot to do with bringing me into the fold again. in future zines, i would see a version of it without all the rough edges sanded off, one i could relate too. and then of course, there was one that described all these gross movies from before my time in graphic detail. which was much more in line with middle school abbie's sensibilities.

i made them too, as promised. first, ones with summaries of all my favorite exploitation movies in my words, as i'd seen them on the big screen. i had a taste for blood and guts and viscera at the time, one i still stand with as a rule. to less of a logical extreme than i used to, and with more of a turn to practical effects made with love.