A while ago, I had the opportunity to do a radio show for indie college station, KUOI FM 89.3. I had to choose a name for my show... and I ended up naming my first show "elaborate burn" partly in ode to the electronic group Future Sound of London and also as a nod to a brilliant modern writer, Al Burian. Follow our protagonist as he works for Kinko's copies, travels on a "hell bus" and personifies existential punk rock wanderer. This is, without a doubt, one of the BEST products to result from the "zine" fad of the 90's. Written on an ancient 1980's Macintosh and photocopied with punk rock skill this contains some of the best and most meaningful writing I've seen in years. This is, in my opinion, a modern classic, a "new classic" as they say. When I got my show approved, in a moment of stinging irony, I was given the burn in that the Media Director spelled my show wrong resulting in the name "Elaborate BARN!" I got a harsh Burn. I then had to yell at the Media Director to please change it. Another interesting fun fact: when I read from this book on the air, people were dumb enough to think I was reading MY STORY. Wow, profoundly stupid. No, I was reading from this book and please purchase it if you find it interesting. I even said I was reading from a book and people still didn't get it. College drunkards. Anyway, PLEASE pick this up for a read it's simply awesome. Al Burian also plays in the band Milemarker. And Hammerhead is a real rock group that actually does in fact have an album called "Into the Vortex." If you like this you might like: Jack Kerouac Douglas Adams Kurt Vonnegut

Burn Collector: Collected Stories from One Through Nine

Burian, Al

Literature & Fiction

Buddy System

Opening with a telling quote from punk band Black Flag ("Drink black coffee/drink black coffee/drink black coffee/and stare at the wall"), Things Are Meaning Less is a tough, funny, heartbreaking look at young, disillusioned American life. You might know Al from his zines Burn Collector and Natural Disasters or from the band Milemarker or his so-true-it-kicks-your-face-off column in Punk Planet. This, however, is Al's collection of comics published in the late '90s by designer and fellow zinester Ian Lyman. From Portland to Providence, Al patrols his world with a dark, stoic humor. He's a Saul Bellow-ian everyman, up against the wall, suffering the blows, looking for love and loving the metal. Like Al's latest issue of Burn Collector, the comic-heavy #14, the drawing here is simple but it's the kind of simple that doesn't come with beginner's luck. The stuff here is the result of years of fighting and trouble-making, of mistakes made and a life scratched out among the sticks and stones. As says Al, "These are things drawn on napkins in airports, xeroxed illicitly during work." So goes the work and world of Al Burian.

Things Are Meaning Less (Burn Collector)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Microcosm Publishing

A compilation of the first nine issues of the author’s sporadically published and widely acclaimed personal zine, this volume reflects the do-it-yourself attitude of the 1990s punk music scene and includes humorous anecdotes, philosophical musings, and nuanced descriptions of odd locales and curious characters, all of which were taken mostly from outside of the punk milieu. This new release of a cult classic shows the far reaching influence of self-publishing with contemporary popular indie culture and bridges the gap between sub-culture and the world at large.

Burn Collector: Collected Stories from One through Nine

Essays & Correspondence

PM Press

War seems to have frazzled the punks. That's an unusual turn of events considering punk is the subculture that gave us the phrases"let's have a war," "let's start a war," "war on 45," "my war," "wargasm," "war all the time," and so on. "Rock n' roll is war," said the band Frodus; but you know, it really isn't. "Rock n' roll is just rock n' roll," assessed AC/DC, somewhat more accurately, and, while not necessarily noise pollution, it is, in the estimation of the Archers of Loaf, "too bad that the music doesn't matter." Rock remains rock, war remains war, and, despite everything being subjective and meaning something else entirely from what it appears to under the tenets of post-modernity and end-of-historicism, the fact remains that having a lot of dead people is a terrible, terrible thing and having a lot of people voluntarily self-inducing hearing loss is a less terrible thing. Yes? We are all in agreement here?Al Burian is the author of the zine Burn Collector. From 2000 to 2007 he was a columnist for various music magazines and DIY publications, including Punk Planet, HeartattaCk, and the Skeleton. NO APOCALYPSE presents the best of these writings, collected in book form for the first time.

No Apocalypse: Punk, Politics, and the Great American Weirdness (Punx)

Arts & Photography

Music

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