Tis my first post since the commencement of the Portland Zine Symposium. I had such a great weekend!

I was stitching up the last of my zines and baking some cookies on Friday night, and I was calling everyone I knew just to let them know how excited I was to be finally going to a Portland Zine Symposium. I’ve read about this event for years now.

I met a lot of really great people, traded a lot of zines, won a raffle, and ate WAY TOO MUCH vegan sweets. I ran into the girls with Femeninite, and John Isaacson too, both of whom some friends and I received workshops from at the SF Zine Fest in 2007. My friend Riley was also there, and we traded zines!

Here are some pictures from the event:

The Brite Street Press table

The Raoul Vaneigem Postcard series by Brite Street Press

The OFFICIAL BRITE STREET PRESS toy cash register

My neighbors table & her cute teeth

Portland ZIne Symposium 2008

I can’t wait to go and table again next year. Thanks for stopping by and picking up some zines from my table! If you live in Portland and want to collaborate on mail art or zines together, let me know!

The 8th Annual Portland Zine Symposium is quickly approaching!

This will be my first year going AND tabling at the zine symposium. I’m super happy and excited already!

I don’t even have 1 of the 3 zines I’m working on complete yet, but I’m working my ass off (not really) when I can find time. I don’t know why I even said that if it was a lie. Bah!

I’ll be tabling for the amateur Brite Street Press, as well as for the remains of Bako Zines. I’ll have some issues of Gutterflower and some of Unless Indicated… and possibly the Bako Zines Cookzine if that’s out in time. As for myself, I have a 1/4 page photo-zine in the works, along with a small personal zine and a 7″ DIY queer porn zine. I’m still taking submissions for that last one, so if you’ve got em… email stories or photos or drawings to britestreet@hotmail.com.

I hope to meet a lot of new folks at this event. I’ll have lots of vegan baked goods at my table as well.

This will be a blast!

The show came really unexpectedly… I was reading bulletins on Vivalavinyl.org, and I came across one saying that La Quiete was doing a West Coast Tour with Phoenix Bodies. I saw that they were playing in Portland, and suddenly got super excited. This was only about a week before the show.

La Quiete is from Italy. They have a few records out, a few 7″s… one of them which is a split with The Pine. It was though The Pine and this record that I became familiar with this band.

I did an interview with La Quiete almost 4 years ago, and it was to be published in a zine I was working on, but never completed. The interview is still in my e-mail box, so I’m posting it here if anyone wants to read it.

The show was so great, so amazing. I’ve only seen a few shows since I’ve been back in Portland, but they seem to be pretty sporadic and none of them have been as good as this. It was also my first basement show in a while. It was super crowded and hot and steamy, which added to the fun and excitement.

Here are some pictures, followed by the interview.
Visit their page online at www.laquiete.org and/or www.myspace.com/laquiete

10/17/04
Interview with Rocco from La Quiete

Louie: Greetings! Could you tell me who is in your band and what instruments they play? Give us a little introduction, a little bit about how your band came about. Was your band founded on any major political belief or anything like that?

Rocco: Hello there. La Quiete is Rocco (guitar), Cebio (guitar), Boris (vocals), Fulvio (vocals), Angelino (bass) and Michele (drums). We are from Italy, from 3 different areas… it’s kinda hard to meet each other to practice or just to hang out together. La Quiete started out in 2000 with a totally different line-up. We had a lot of changes in our line-up during the past years, but now I guess we are perfect… all these changes were not because of problems within members of the band, but just because someone was not be able to go on with the band due to work, studies and stuff. Yeah, we are way related to political ideals, and almost every song we wrote deal with political issues, even if sometimes it doesn’t look so. We were used to spread flyers with our lyrics at shows, and played only in squats and stuff… right now we are playing wherever we can, but sometimes it happens that we play in front of people who don’t give a shit about anything. I mean, they don’t give a shit even about music. Sometimes I just ask myself what I should do and what we should do about this as a band. People just don’t care.

L: How would you compare the hardcore scene in Europe or Italy to what you have seen of America’s hardcore scene. Are there any major differences that stand out to you?

R: First of all, we have never been in the U.S. Our favourite bands of all time come from the U.S. but I would say that several things have changed in the last years. Speaking of the D.I.Y. scene, it was actually impossible 4 or 5 years ago just to get in contact with U.S. labels to do trades and stuff. We Europeans bought and still buy tons of U.S. records but U.S. people didn’t do the same with us in the past. Maybe just becasue they didn’t know any decent European bands (and there were billions of shitty bands) but, I mean, I don’t think that U.S. people were truly interested in the European scene. Right now thanks to the internet everything is different and everyone is able to find/listen to anything without problems.

L: I saw a video of La Quiete playing at the Summerslam Festival this last summer. There were a lot of people and everyone looked like they were having a great time… are most shows in Europe pretty good as far as turnout and that type of thing? Are people in Europe supportive of the bands and the scene in your area?

R: Yeah, our show at Summerslam was definitely our best show ever. Sometimes I still look at the pictures someone took and the video footage.. .just incredible. It was for us one of those things you dream of when you are 14 or 15. Playing in front of a lot of people who are going crazy and care about you and your music and everyone having fun… actually we were surrounded with our friends from every part of the world (Phonenix Bodies from Indiana, the crazy UK folks, the German screamo crew, the guys from Raein and all of our friends from italy, the Swedish people) so… it was just a party but the best party of our life. We looked at each other during the show saying “what the hell is happening here?!”.

Yeah, I think European people are pretty supportive about local bands, but maybe they are more supportive with those bands that play some genre. I mean, people who likes screamo support bands into screamo but don’t give a shit about indie bands and viceversa. Which is not bad… but you know… we don’t have the same scene we had 4 or 5 years ago. During 98 or 99 in Italy we had a wonderful scene where everyone bought everyone else’s records just because they where D.I.Y. and not caring about trends/genre/shit.

L: You guys have put out a ton of records, and the latest I keep hearing about is this new 10″… is everyone satisfied with how everything came together? How do you feel it stands compared to past releases?

R: Our 10″ tooked a lot of time to come out and this was only our fault… as I said before we had some line-up changes in the past months. Our old bassist left the band to become a full time sculptor. We started recording it in December 2003 but finished it only in spring time… it was a really hard period for all of us. I recorded all the bass lines because we didn’t have a new bassist yet. In the while we called Angelino and Fulvio to join the band; we thought that having new people in the band could give us more energy and strength to go on. Right now I am satisfied with the cd but I don’t like how it sounds. We recorded on digital support with lotsa guitar overdubs that make it sound different from how we actually play live. I like the split with The Pine and with KC Milian better. Anyway, I like the artwork a lot, which was done by some friends of ours from Seattle. Check their works, they rule! (www.nihiloeste.com – SUPPORT!!).

L: So when you guys aren’t playing a show, touring, writing, recording or putting out records… what is it that you like to do in your free time? Is there any activity between each of you outside of the band?

R: Me and Michele study politics, Boris studies psychology, Fulvio studies strange things about computers, Cebio build houses, Angelino just graduated in communication but turned to be a designer. Talking about free time… I play in another band called The Death of Anna Karina; Michele plays drums in another band called Raein. Cebio is almost a pro-skater, Fulvio goes on with computers, Angelino gets anything he can at media-stores, supermarket, and computer shops. I guess Boris is going to be an artist too. We hang out together as much as we can, but we live in three different cities so it’s very hard sometimes.

L: What are your future plans as far as touring or record releases? We need our fix!

R: We are going to record a split 10″/cd with Louise Cyphre and then we will have a collection cd with all our songs out from the 7″s and compilations… if I manage to graduate before summer, we could tour Europe or the U.S. Who knows? I fucking need to graduate. What a nerd.

L: Thank you for taking the time to do this with me. Do you have any last words that you would like to leave us with??

R: Thanx a lot for supporting us and for you interest. Lotsa love to our friends The Pine and Korn. Please feel free to contact us at tothelaquiete@libero.it or through our site www.laquiete.org. Stay crust.