Rumours About Shelly Duvall

Rumours About Shelly Duvall

12 pages, digest size, $? by J & M, no contact info but available thru E.T. Zine Distro
This is one strange zine all right. First of all, they spell her name wrong but halfway through change it to the correct spelling. All kinds of deranged rumours about Shelley Duvall, like she never ashes her cigarettes, but immediately after that the authors insist they have met her and she ashes her cigarettes an appropriate amount. There's alleged accounts of her cruelty - she took a family member of her husband, stripped her naked, covered her in honey and left her for a day and night in the garden for insects to bite her to death. The rumours come thick and fast: Shelley's favourite food is cotton candy, and she once shot her landlord over a dispute about heating troubles. There's two blank pages with the heading encouraging the reader to write some of their own rumours about Shelley Duvall then pass the zine onto a friend (if even one person followed through with this I would be amazed.). Personally, I don't know anything about Shelley Duvall. My guess is she is related to Robert Duvall (.. minutes later >>> no she isn't - I just Googled that question. Although her father is called Robert, he's not an actor.) The zine is produced with an old manual typewriter and much of the text is all over the place. The authors went to a lot of effort moving the paper around in the typewriter to make the text roll and slide around the page. It seems to be an attempt to portray themselves as deranged or even eccentric, or some kind of new breed of stalkers, but alas it seems that the authors are quite sane, just trying to make something very strange and intriguing. It doesn't hit me as a legitimately 'eccentric' creation.

There is one funny part in this though:

RUMOUR: Shelley Duvall speaks in binary while cooking breakfast.

A WRITTEN ACCOUNT OF SHELLEY DUVALL MAKING BREAKFAST:
100110111001001000110100011010111101100100011011011000
101101110100110001001110100111001011010111000011001100
1001001110101101 1001101001011010011010010010110100010010010 10

The zine ends with two pages of record reviews by Shelley Duvall (aka J&M). In a review of a John & Yoko album she confesses to being an "art fag" and winds it up with her admission that she still thinks Lennon sucked and was glad he got blasted. She also reviews a V/A compilation of paranormal sound recordings from Germany, and a couple of other obscure releases.

So, who is J & M and why did they pick Shelley Duvall?

One other noteworthy thing about this zine is it's bound with sewing thread, so J &M obviously have access to a sewing machine. It's a pretty cool way to bind a zine. But the zine fails and is not a keeper. If you want it just say so in the comments and it's yours.