Junk Drawer

The new Junk Drawer zine for 2012 is called Junk Drawer Landscape. The Zines page at the top has a brief description. It is about the landscape, and how parts of it are like a vast junk drawer.
I thought about mapping it out somehow, but that would be tricky. I used google maps a lot for finding things, so I figured I could share some of those things by pinpointing them. Many you can’t see on the maps, because they’re in alleys, which are not shown. It’s too bad there’s not a google alley maps- that would be a junk drawer favorite.

From the Junk Drawer Landscape Zine, here are some of the spots:

This is the Sears “Keyosk.”
View Larger Map There’s also the weird thing next to it, which is partly obscured. By the parking lot entrance on the right is a former gate support.

Here is the old police station in Ravenswood:
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The Stars Motel is pretty well known, or at least the sign is, because that’s all that’s left.

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Other ghostly signs include old, faded “ghost signs.” This one is on the west side of the La Unica Food Mart building.

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Ghost signs are fairly well known among photographers and others, but ghost windows are even more widespread, yet have not achieved such recognition. These are windows that have been boarded up or bricked over. There are many around, and here are quite a few on one old commercial building on the north west corner of the street.

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There are quite a few spots right along this same street, as you’ll see in this hardware building. You can guess what the building used to be by its design. To the left and around the corner you can see more of the building.

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There’s a lot more to the junk drawer landscape, as appears in the zine. More will be added later. As for now, these will provide a good connection with the zine, for anyone wishing to explore some of these old leftover parts of the city.

It was a great time at the 2012 Chicago Zine Fest. The Junk Drawer table was on the eighth floor. People stopped by to check out the odds & ends, and submit descriptions of their own junk drawer items. These will eventually end up in compilation Junk Drawer zine. All are most appreciated!

Junk Drawer was back at the Milwaukee Zine Fest at the Polish Falcon’s Nest. There were great zinesters from Wisconsin, Chicago, and beyond. I shared a table with Nicole who was doing her first zine fest, with her zine called Pieces. There was the Zine Cafe which had nice vegan food, so there was no concern about going hungry. They even had Breakfast Cookies, and I like the idea of a cookie for breakfast. People stopped by the Junk Drawer table to guess the odds and ends, and a couple took a random object from the sharing junk drawer. It was a great time in the River West neighborhood.

These posts may be a little out of order.  But Junk Drawer was there at the 2011 Chicago Zine Fest.  The fest featured some of my favorite zinesters and writers.

I had a terrific time at the Madison Zinefest. It was part of the Wisconsin Book Festival, so it was a perfect weekend for bookish types, and zineish types. Several people shared stories of their own junk drawer items, and even did some drawings.
After the fest was zinester karaoke at Mother Fool’s Cafe. Outside the cafe was the Fly Away Zine Mobile, a traveling collection of zines. I first saw the Zine Mobile in Chicago. It inspired me to create an impromptu Junk Drawer Mobile in Madison, right next to the Zine Mobile. I look forward to taking Junk Drawer on the road again sometime, somewhere.

People had been talking for years about how Chicago had a great zine scene, but no real zine fest. Then finally some good people put one together, and it was huge. It was at Columbia College, and it was attended by many great zinesters. I tabled with Rachel Rey Rey. There was a zinester art show for the opening night, and I had a junk drawer photo in it. This was a fantastic first fest.

This was actually the first zine fest I participated in with Junk Drawer. It took place at the Polish Falcon’s Nest lodge, right around the corner from the Cream City Collective community space. Everything was nice and laid back, and we stayed for music, featuring the Kidults from Chicago. This fest also had the final appearance of Loop Distro. Here’s wishing you well, Billy the Bunny!

The Op Shop 3 was small, temporary community art space in Hyde Park, with an emphasis on the community part. There were art exhibits and performances, as well as dance lessons and dinners. One Saturday there was a thrift day, and it was a good spot for a Junk Drawer display. There was a Guess the Odds & Ends set-up, and people stopped by to look. There was an older crowd there, compared to the zine fests where I’d done this before, so I got some different sorts of interest. There was one vintage thingy that nobody has used in decades, and one lady recognized it right away, saying she’d had a bunch of them. A couple folks thought the junk drawer items were for sale, but I had to tell them sorry, they were just for display, and then they would go back into the junk drawer.

This was the Junk Drawer display at “The Science of Obscurity,” a science fair for writers presented by the Chicago Underground Library. There were actually two different drawers in the display. The top drawer contained several items from Junk Drawer zine #3, all very scientifically identified with numbers that matched up to those in the zine. The bottom drawer contained an assortment of random stuff, representing an unsorted junk drawer. There were more odds and ends on top of the desk, and people were invited guess what the objects were. It was pretty interactive, and that’s how a junk drawer really is. It’s something you can dig through and then find interesting stuff. The rest of the science fair featured a variety of great displays. There was even a judging, and every participant won a prize. This whole event seemed kind of like a junior high school science fair, which I had never done. But it was great because you got to think scientifically about your project, with a scientific procedure and hypothesis and all those sciencey methods.

The Op Shop 2 was a community art space was located inside a former Hollywood Video store in Hyde Park. It was there for two months, transforming the space into a center of art, music, performance, presentations, and more. There was a thrift store inside to help keep it funded. Junk Drawer was a part of the thrift area, presenting an ever changing junk drawer. People were invited to take an item they saw that interested them, and leave something in return. Most of what was in the drawer at the beginning was assorted leftover stuff from the video store: signs, store fixtures, etc. People left a variety of things, from toys to jewelry to business cards. It was a nice way to open up a junk drawer to the world.