Bleeding Heart #8 ($1, Amanda Shank, 9111 Jordan Rd, Fairplay, MD 21733)
A very personal zine, put together in a cut and paste style. The zine is all about Amanda, with the recurring issue of her OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) flavouring every single piece in the magazine. The format, full sized pages, and the layout (cut and paste with cute images inserted), reminds me of Mecaroni and Fleas, but something much more contemplative and open with the editor’s wounds. While there are touches of music during the magazine (the Soundtrack for this Issue, the music reviews), they do not act as entryways into Amanda’s souls as much as space fillers that actually do the opposite: hold us back from knowing anything further about Amanda. While at times she is very open and strong in her convictions: “Excuse Meâ€, in which she dissects a feminist poster as assuming that all of womenkind’s problems arise from a lack of empowerment, and the seven major sins in lines of questioning about her vegetarian, these are momentary windows into trying to figure out what Amanda is feeling, and seem more as reactionary than voluntary. While there is a lot of white space separating both the text and the accompanying pictures, it is placed in the magazine as a sort of boarder – a deafening form of white noise that immediately puts the reader back to where they started, trying desperately to glean any information about this Amanda person. We learn about Amanda’s OCD, but we learn what it makes her do, and what she is forced to do because of it. No voluntary events take place in this zine – all the events detailed in the pieces forced Amanda into a course of action, and we are left with one tired, sick girl.