“It takes a lot to find 10 pictures
of velocipedes,” says Michael Neault, manager of the Dryden Theatre and the man
behind Snore and Guzzle Publishing. “Do you know what a velocipede is? It’s
those bikes with the big front tire and the small back tire. If you break it
down to the Latin it just means ‘fast walker.'”
On the cover of Neault’s most recent
publication, volume three of a zine called Or-Else,
a little frog riding a tiny velocipede is letterpressed in purple. “It was kind
of amazing to find a frog riding a velocipede in an old etching,” he says. “I
didn’t go out and do it on a computer or anything.”
Neault makes magazines. There’s the
annual Or-Else. (Since Neault just
moved to Rochester, we’ve only seen number 3.) And there are others: like the Electronic Word Preservation Guild, a
chapbook full of bizarre, funny, touching emails reprinted with a winking
voyeurism, and an essay, “The Philosophy of a Loop of String,” Neault wrote and
printed along with pictures of string figures.
These delicate paper missives have a
handmade, vintage look to them. (“Did you get the one that had like a library
card in the back?” he asks. We did. “Not all of them have that. I ran out of
library cards.”) The black-and-white pages have simple, generously white
layouts salted with quirky, fastidious illustrations from other decades, most
often the 1920s.
Or-Else no. 3 includes short stories, poems, cartoons, musician interviews, and little
found items of interest or humor, as well as Neault’s regular “Society” column:
a rambling, esoteric tribute to friends and acquaintances. For example: “When
Biffy’s husband had his bachelor party, he met up with another fellow at a
diner and they shared one milkshake and that was it. Leslie met a boy who’s
‘real nice.'”
“There’s a paper out in Fair Haven,
New York,” Neault says. “It’s a village weekly. There was an article in it
every week by some old lady. She would just talk about people she saw on the
road, like, ‘I saw Bobby Smith riding down the street on a lawn mower.’ That
would be the entire paragraph. I basically copy her style.”
The other writing is, overall, very
good, without the hit-or-miss quality of many grassroots literary pubs. Though
Neault grew up in Syracuse and now lives in Rochester, not many of the other
writers are local. Neault has gathered an “ensemble” of writers, culled from
the flow of people he’s met over the years. They all seem to share at least
part of his style, which is characterized by a sort of academic interest in
people’s quirks and pop-culture curiosities. But the publications aren’t twee
or self-indulgent. There’s imagination on every page.
Making a magazine by hand is a lot of
work. It can get expensive. And sometimes the only people who love it are the
same people who contributed. Neault admits he’s tired and money is tight, but
he seems to have a bit of a habit. He’s been making magazines since high
school, and started distributing them in college. And now this zine-light city
is reaping the benefits.
The last issue of Or-Else sold for $3 a copy. Neault only
has four copies left. “They were available at Lakeshore but they sold out,” he
says. “That’s not saying too much. I only had eight copies there.”
For
information you can email Neault at mneault@kino-eye.org.
— Erica Curtis
Time
for a change
The
momentum is gathering.
With
the working name of the 21st Century
African American Leadership Council, an informal organization of concerned
citizens is holding a second meeting to gather solutions to a gamut of problems
that hinge on race relations in Rochester. The meeting is billed as a follow-up
to a similar forum on December 7 that raised the concerns (see “Hurt and anger
in the neighborhoods,” City Newspaper,
December 15-21).
City
Councilman Adam McFadden — who is not directly involved in the group but
spoke at the first forum — thinks the timing is right.
“I
thought it was a good start,” he says. “I would say that people can look
forward to a group that is still willing to address issues that impact not only
the minority community but the working class and poor community. I think people
need to know there is somebody consistently out there addressing those issues
and if we don’t have someone doing that, we’re going to lose ground.”
Eventually,
McFadden says, the group may form splinter committees to address specific
topics like economic development or justice. But, for now, the focus is on
creating a basic organizational structure and developing a unified voice.
“Right
now I think it’s time for new leadership to step up and do that,” he says.
That
will be among the topics when the group meets Sunday, December 26, at St.
Luke’s Tabernacle Community Church, 1261 Dewey Avenue, at 6:30 p.m.
Cold
and hungry in the US
Just
in time for the holidays comes a reminder that many have little to celebrate.
The
US Conference of Mayors last week released the results of a study that reveals hunger and homelessness are increasing in
the nation’s cities. The study — conducted in a cross-section of 27 US
cities (Rochester is not included) — found that 96 percent reported increases
in the number of requests for emergency food assistance, and 70 percent
registered a rise in requests for emergency shelter.
Some
of the increased need for food is fueled by families, who requested an average
of 13 percent more emergency food assistance than the year before. Seventeen
percent of those family requests have gone unmet, as have about 20 percent of
requests overall. These applicants don’t meet stereotypes, either; nearly 60
percent are families and more than a third of the adult applicants hold down at
least one job.
Every
single city reported families who relied on emergency handouts as a long-term
food source.
The
stats on homelessness are equally dim. Families are a growing component of the
homeless population in most of the survey cities, seeking emergency shelter
nearly 10 percent more than last year. Fifty-six percent of participating
cities say these families may be forced apart to receive shelter. And even then
the resources to shelter everyone may not be there. More than 80 percent of the
cities say they’ve had to turn away homeless families simply because they were
lacking the means to house them.
The
outlook for next year isn’t much better. More than 80 percent of the cities
surveyed said they expect requests for emergency food and shelter to go up in
2005, and families are expected to be a growing part of the population making
those requests.
Energy,
amplified
In
our story on RG&E’s Voice Your
Choice campaign (“Your next big gamble,” City Newspaper, December 15-21), we wrote that the New York State
Public Service Commission did not pull together a list of the rates offered by
competing electricity providers for comparison. In fact, the PSC compiled a
chart that includes estimated monthly bills (based on the use of 500 kwh per
month) for RG&E and some of the other electricity companies offering
service in this area. You can find the chart at:
www.askpsc.com/publications/?view=default&action=viewPublication&id=1156.
This article appears in Dec 22-28, 2004.
