SLICE HARVESTER HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

I would like to take an opportunity to highlight some cool stuff my friends made and I am doing it under the auspices of a "Holiday Gift Guide" even though writing those words makes me want to puke and half this stuff probably won't even get to you or your loved ones by Christmas. Whatever, get over it and give people their presents in January. Who fucking cares?

2014 Paquita Calendar ($12)
This is one of my favorite things that happens every year! Caroline is my best friend and a wonderful artist and she prints these calendars on her RISO machine each year and they are absolutely stunning. This year's calendar is no exception. If you like rad drawings of ambiguously gendered nature freaks riding motorcycles and swimming in the ocean and doing eachother's tarot and shit, this is the calendar for you. Seriously this shit is so beautiful and Caroline's commitment to creating affordable fine art for regular lowlives like us is super admirable. ALSO: buy the other stuff on the Pegacorn Press Webstore because ALL OF IT IS GREAT.


Nevada by Imogen Binnie ($17.95)
I bought Nevada because Imogen is an MRR columnist and also a friend of many of my friends and I was feeling like supporting a "fellow punk author." I didn't know what to expect and then it just ripped my head right open. Imogen has this ability to mix totally casual/vernacular language with intensely heavy subject matter in a way that feels like you're being talked to by the coolest person you'll ever meet. She is one of like, maybe five writers that I would hand over Slice Harvester to if she asked because I think we are on the same ~wavelength~. Look for our posthumous "Collected Emails of Colin Atrophy Hagendorf and Imogen Binnie" in like 200 years when we're both dead.

All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry ($9.99)
This book knocked me on my ass too! I don't remember why I bought it, but afterwards I realized that Sarah was the same person that had released my friend/mentor (frientor?) Mimi Nguyen's last zine PUNK (which she wrote collaboratively with this awesome lady Golnar who I don't actually know but who is in a sick hardcore band and we are friends with all the same people). All Our Pretty Songs is about a lot of my favorite stuff: mystical teens, drugs, punk. HEAVILY reminded me of Oranges Are the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, which is one of my top five books EVER, probably. Look out for an interview with Sarah about pizza, being punk, etc. to appear here on Slice Harvester some time in the next 500 years.

Mother's News Subscription ($25)
I don't really know how to talk about Mother's News because it doesn't really make much sense and so I won't try to explain it too hard. Mother's News is a newspaper. It comes out every month and is mainly the work of this super tall weirdo Jacob Berendes but also involves a lot of collaborators. It is the only place I have ever paid to advertise Slice Harvester and that advertisement resulted in some dude sending me his low budget Christian horror film. I think if I had to make a list of reasons why I am not ashamed to be a human it wouldn't be a very long list and Mother's News would be somewhere at the top. Seriously if you get someone you love a gift subscription to MN it will make their life tangibly better.

Maximum Rocknroll Int'l Punk Comp + Subsciption ($59)
Look MRR was really important for me to get into punk and then to realize that punk is super fallible and totally susceptible to the pitfalls of the square world. It was kind of a shitty bro-zone for a while, though "luckily" for me I was a fifteen year old boy when I got into it so I didn't really notice. Anyway, at some point a series of super rad women took the reigns of the magazine and now it is so fucking cool again! There is an active attempt to focus on punk being made by queers, women, people of color, those residing in "The Global South," etc. You can just get the subscription for $45, but if you throw down an extra $14 you get this 2xLP comp of 32 bands from 14 countries! What?! I am so stoked. Only band I've heard on here is Nuclear Spring, who are totally sweet anarcho punk from Brooklyn. Get into it.


My friend Jes Skolnik helped put out this comp tape with Sean who runs Accidental Guest. You can stream the whole thing on Rookie, but just drop the $6 for the tape and help support Rachael's Women's Center. If you don't have a tape deck, you can pay-as-you-will download from the Accidental Guest bandcamp page. Standout tracks (for me) from Good Throb, Stillsuit, Split Feet, Perfect Pussy, Household. But everything on here is fucking great. Jes is super cool and a huge inspiration for me in terms of "staying rad" because they always seem to be working on the most awesome shit. Keep up the good work, comrade!

Conopio Family Relief Fund ($??)
Now that I'm a grownup and I basically buy everything I want for myself, I usually ask my family to give money to other folks in lieu of getting me a gift. Last year I had them all donate to the Ali Forney Center because they got totally wrecked in the hurricane. This year I'll be asking them to give a couple bucks to my friend Robert's mom so she can help rebuild her village in the Philippines that was just destroyed in the Typhoon. I am so wary of foreign aid organizations, but this is a rare opportunity to give money right to my friend's mom, who is there using the money directly to give aid to actual people instead of lining the pockets of some international nonprofit bureaucracy.  Anyway, you know I always talk about being punk means having eachother's backs so maybe just give Robert's family a couple bucks to rebuild their houses okay?

OKAY THAT'S IT FOR THE GIFT GUIDE, ASSHOLES. You can also always buy yourself or a loved one a full set of Slice Harvester Fanzines, but that will definitely not get to you by Christmas because I'm TERRIBLE at keeping up with my mailorder.

I should've posted this letter from Jeffrey Lewis a long time ago.

This letter I got from Jeff Lewis is the best email I've ever received and was the entire letters section of the final issue of Slice Harvester Quarterly. Seriously, it is so good, and it was really exciting to get a fan letter from him because I am a big fan of his and have been for years!
Okay, 

Well I'm slowly savoring Slice Harvester zine # 6, because that's the East Village issue and that's the not only the neighborhood I grew up in but is now the neighborhood I once again inhabit, so I was really looking forward to reading this issue, essentially saving it for special occasions and only reading a few reviews from it every day or two.  So I'm not even done with the issue, but there's a few  things I must comment on, at length (sorry).  Not complaints, just long-winded commentary!
 
1) Iggy's, on 1st Ave between 12th and 13th.  This place IS my childhood pizzeria, although it has gone thru many changes since those days 3 decades years ago.  It used to be Rosemary's, and in my mind is still Rosemary's - According to my own family legend, Rosemary (I assumed that was her name) and the rest of the people who worked there used to call me "The Calzone Kid" or even "The Calzone Baby" because I was such a fan of their ham & cheese calzones, even at a very young age.  This was also the very first place I ever saw a video game.  It was Pac Man, and I was very compelled by it because the arcade shell/frame/whatever you call it had images on it of the bad guy robots from The Black Hole, which had nothing to do with the disappointly dinky content of the game... they also had a "Breakout" arcade game there for some time in the early 80s (that was the precursor to Arkanoid) and at some points a pinball machine, and I think this was the pinball machine that involved the devil and literally gave me nightmares as a kid because it had a built-in "devil" voice that would say scary things like "I got you!"  All through the years, into my young adulthood, even when the place was in it's "Five Roses" name phase, this remained the ONLY place I would ever eat a calzone, especially after a couple of horrible calzone experiences elsewhere.  The calzones at Rosemary's/Five Roses were so superior to all other calzones, it was like a whole different food.  Holy cow, they were absolutely amazing.  Now that this place is called Iggy's, there is part of me that is absolutely overjoyed it still exists at all as a pizza shop and has not turned into a Starbucks (yet), but the fact that Iggy's does not make calzones is a personal tragedy to me.  Those calzones I guess are gone forever.  However, Iggy's currently has the best eggplant slice in the neighborhood by far, in my opinion.   I was glad you gave them a 7-slice pizza rating, just for old times sake, in fact I think this may be your highest-rated pizza slice for the entire East Village, nice for me to see that my old childhood pizzeria is holding up so well against all newcomers.

2) Concerning "Famous Joe's" pizza at 7 Carmine St (Bleecker & Ave of the Americas) - this is a tricky one.  I could be remembering things wrong, but I think this is an IMPOSTER place.  Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.  There WAS a "Joe's" pizza on the CORNER of Bleecker St., just a few storefronts down, and in days of yore it really was an excellent, top notch NYC street slice pizza joint, it was like the Slice Harvester ideal, and I always held it in very high regard.  At some point, perhaps within the past ten years, a competitor opened up just a few storefronts away, calling itself "Famous Joe's" and capitalizing on the well-deserved respect of the real Joe's, suckering in people who had heard that they should be looking for a great pizzeria on the block called Joe's - but this "Famous Joe's" was an imposter, and not as good as the real place on the corner.  Now, the original place on the corner has closed, replaced by some absolute nightmare yuppie desert-snack boutique or some such gentrification, and all that remains of Joe's is this imposter place "Famous Joe's" which is NOT in fact the actually famous one.  This "Famous Joe's" still probably serves the best slice of pizza for a few blocks around, but it is not to my mind a really exceptional slice, and definitely not as good as the original Joe's.  Am I having a paranoid fantasy?  
ALSO - anytime I'm on that corner, I can't resist walking into Bleecker Street Records JUST TO SEE THE CAT.  They have two cats, both grey, one of which is the fattest cat you have ever seen in your life, and the other one is even TWICE THE SIZE OF THE FIRST ONE.  So even if you walk in and only see the lesser cat, you'd still say "that's a huge fat cat, I'm glad I came in and saw him," but if you were lucky enough to see the bigger one you'd be taken aback at the size of that fat fuck.  It's a tourist attraction that I ALWAYS take visiting friends to see if they are in NYC. 

3) 2 Bros Pizza on St. Mark's Place - I'm really glad that we're on the same page with this one, I am a big fan of this $1 slice although I know you are often against the $1 slice phenomenon, this place has a really good slice for a buck and I was worried you were not going to see it that way when you finally arrived there.  I actually eat more of this $1 slice than any other pizza nowadays - I get at least one of these slices EVERY time I walk up St. Mark's Place - you can't afford NOT to!  BUT your review left out an important factor - there are actually TWO 2 Bros Pizza places here on St Mark's Place, and they are easy to confuse with each other because they are right next door to each other.  It's very strange, I know, but it's an important distinction.  They have different storefronts, different interiors, different employees, and most importantly different ovens - it is literally two different places, and should be judged separately.  In my experience, the one which is further west is way better than the other one.  You wouldn't think this could be the case, but it is.  Every time I recommend that people eat the $1 slice on St. Mark's Place I have to be very careful to specify they only eat from the 2 Bros which is two steps further west.  You need to go back and review which ever one it was that you missed, and specify which is which.

That's all for now!  keep up the great work!
Jeffrey

 Isn't that wonderfully thorough? Jeff is on tour in Europe right now or I would post about upcoming shows or something. If you ever get a chance to see him play, do it! The dude is a genius and a gem.

SLICE HARVESTER #6 out this Sunday!


Hi! I have spent the past two days at the photocopy store making Slice Harvester back issues and also making a brand new NEW ISSUE! It is three dollars and will be available for the first time ever at the BROOKLYN ZINE FEST, where I will be tabling at a table next to my best friend Caroline's awesome publishing venture Pegacorn Press.


The Zine Fest is going on at Public Assembly in Williamsburg which is at 70 N 6th St, which is where Galapagos used to be. It is from 11am to 6pm. I will be there for probably almost all of that time just chilling the fuck out and being weird and awkward to you because I do not do well in Social Situations! It will be awesome. You can buy a zine from me in person for Real American Dollars (or I guess you could paypal me money on your smart phone right while I am standing there if you are weird and want to buy zines on a credit card) and then I can hand it to you and make stilted small talk and then you can remark to your companion as you walk away, "boy, he is a lot more charming in print."

Oh, also there will be a raffle at the zine fest and I contributed a raffle prize to it which is: every issue of Slice Harvester so far plus the promise that I will mail you the final issue when it comes out this summer, as well as a gift certificate awarding the bearer a Pizza Dinner for Two at my favorite pizza place, Pizza Suprema on 31st St and 8th Ave.

OK BYE SEE YOU SUNDAY!