The Sandusky Review is a paper artifact filled with stories and drawings. The second issue will be for sale starting this Friday, December 14, at Light + Glass Gallery in Jackson, Mississippi. The show, which also includes framed Polaroids and a few paintings, is called “Stereo.”
The first issue originally came with a Polaroid on the cover; those are long sold out, but we decided to do another printing of them and sell them at a reduced price. The second issue is just about finished, thanks to some expert research help from Sally. It’s called “Sleeping Aides and Razorblades,” and is basically a bucket of mashed potatoes, if the potatoes were punk rock, leaving home, making out, the Jitney 14, your favorite authors in high school, Miss Welty, and a certain Lucinda Williams song. It’s got two stories, a nifty flip-book style, fancy covers in the Xerographic style, and a clutch of illustrations of the Jitney/McDade’s on Fortification—both in its current form and the original model from 1931. Here’s a taste:
I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD WHEN THEY FOUND THE BODY OF MY SISTER in a rent-by-the-hour motel in Fairfield, Alabama. If you’re wondering how hard the cops try to find out who or what ended the life of a stripper with a heroin habit, let me give you a hint: Not much.If you’re wondering how much a elderly Baptist deacon and his trembling, mousy wife try to find out who or what ended the life of a daughter they could never seem to control, who always smoked Marlboro Reds, mumbled God Damn, busted curfew and laughed in their faces when they tried to ground her, let me give you a hint: Not much.
And here’s a bit from the first issue, a little splash of memoir called “1200 Baud.”
It’s 1990 and there’s a poster of Robert Johnson on the back of my bedroom door and one of Wolverine by Arthur Adams taped carefully to my closet, a dubbed cassette of Metallica’s . . . And Justice For All stuffed under the mattress of my bed, made earlier in the year by my best friend. His dad played guitar growing up and rock and roll, even metal, is allowed in his house. I’m fifteen and things are starting to change but I don’t know why and I’ve never heard a real punk song before and I just heard of Big Star—nestled deep in a Rolling Stone article about R.E.M., glittering like a ruby—and metal is all I think matters right now but that’ll shatter soon enough, like a cheap wine glass at the end of a terrible dinner party.The internet will do much of the smashing, along with college, and (bite your tongue, but you said it back then) grunge. But right now I’m astonished because I’m on a BBS and it’s not quite the internet yet but do you remember the first time you got an e-mail? It’s not JFK and maybe it’s not even when you got your driver’s license but looking back, did you even get it? I think I might have, sitting in my bedroom tapping away on my Commodore 64, wading around in the shallows of the new digital world.
The cartoons in the first issue were “False Metal,” “White Mage,” “Exodus 20:13,” “Dreams of Rarebit Myth,” “Modern Romance,” “Thirty,” and “Blowback.” There’s little notes on some of the cartoons that explain them a bit. The essays are “False Metal, Redux,” “Twelve Hundred Baud,” “Chevrolet Truth,” “Switchblade Sunday,” and “Crown of Thorns.” Here’s what one of the first issues with a Polaroid on it looked like:
Hope to see you Friday!
Man, I’m not going to make the show, I’m afraid, but definitely would like to reserve a copy of the new SR. Also, I’ve got the whole week of Chrimmus off, so lemme know when you’re going to be in Jackson, I plan to lurk there most of the time.
OK. I want to get one of these this time. No excuses, like, “You didn’t send any money or a SASE!” The money is in the mail, in crisp $1.00 bills and 6 quarters, 7 nickels, 3 dimes, and 47 pennies!