#60 $3.95 (PO Box 170099 San Francisco, CA 94117)
by William Ham
It seems odd to review this – Factsheet 5, of course, is the White Pages of ‘zines, packed with generally objective quick takes on just about every offbeat, eccentric, psychotic, controversial, lecherous, goofy, puerile, irrational, childish, unhinged waste of wood pulp out there. But enough about us. FS5‘s value as a reference directory should be well-established by now, but what really makes issue #60 worth reading is the rant by Dan Kelly (Danger! and Chum ) and Jeff Koyen (the crank behind Crank) entitled “The Seven Deadly Zins” (that’s the best pun you bravos could come up with? Call me, guys). In two snipingly funny pages, they encapsulate what’s wrong with just about every publication reviewed in the pages that follow with Stealth-bombardier accuracy. (I’ll kindly refrain from reiterating most of their points so you’ll drop your four bucks on it, but I would like to second one of their more salient points for the benefit of “submissions encouraged” desktop publishers everywhere… No fucking poetry! I mean it! Learn to write complete sentences or take your miserable unscan-nable pretentious musings about the death of your cat and how it relates to the outcome of the Spanish Civil War and find a bunch of guitar-jerking cretins and put them to music and get your stupid little four-song demo written up in some handwritten, badly-xeroxed wankzine published by a 16-year old skatepunk who can’t even spell “rad” correctly! Ah, much better.) Anyway, the rest of FS5 is pretty reet as well, giving you a wide sampling of all the colors and flavors available in the small-press universe. The capsule descriptions herein are often more rewarding than actually spending your buck or two on the ‘zines themselves (although I’m sure a gift subscription to We Like Poo would be just the ticket for Mom’s stocking this year), but if you have any interests at all, there’s sure to be something in here to your liking. The CD reviews strike me as kinda unnecessary, but I’m not one to begrudge anyone’s need for free promos and advertisers who can actually pay for the space, so I’ll let it pass. Speaking of which, I really like the ad on page 97. Looks like a product everybody should invest in.