Dreamy vs Sucks

By Bernard Boulevard and Gordon Gordon
Chow Chow Productions
PO Box 20204
Seattle, WA
98102
USA

I really didn't know what this zine was going to be about, the cover is just vague enough not to be pornographic but I wasn't really sure what the insides would hold.

The zine is short (one double sided page folded down to quarter size), and once we open it up we have the two words of the title broken down and discussed. Well, the concept of "dreamy" isn't discussed so much as made fun of. The crucial part of this side can be summed up with "Dreamy people are boring". There's an interesting idea there, that people who are deemed "dreamy" because they are attractive but unachievable (due to their celebrity). It becomes safe to express your attraction to them because you have no chance of rejection. However, the zine goes on to insult people that are dreamy, which I think might be missing the point. Surely people don't describe themselves as being dreamy do they?

The "sucks" side discusses why the word has come to gain negative connotations despite being involved with lots of awesome things. The zine equates the negative use of the word "sucks" with the way "gay" is used as an insult. The idea is that stright men would never suck on anything (or one particular thing specifically), and use the word as a way to demean people that actually do suck things.

It reminded me of the MC in a burlesque night I used to go to in Vancouver. He said basically the same things (ie. sucking is awesome), and that we should instead use a different word to experess our dislike of something. He was pushing for the use of the word "puke" (because who likes vomit?), but it doesn't seem to have caught on. Yet.

The only downside is that I think the zine is written in way that is kind of...not juvenile, but not journalistic either. Despite this it did make me think about the two words in question, so I guess it succeeded on that point.

(This review was originally published on 365 Zines a Year.)