I missed Canzine this year, due to being out of the country. Luckily, the independent art and writing (maga) zine Kiss Machine has nice quicktime documentation of their Secret Room, here, at the Inflatable Museum. People were invited to write their secrets on balloons and leave them behind, the tender silly things slowly jamming up the airspace over the course of the day. It's a typical Kiss Machine project: open and welcoming with just a peppering of genuine risk. "Come on and join us out here on the end of this limb!"

I really love Kiss Machine because lots of the writing is really good, and nearly all of it is unpretentious. Sometimes I'm faced with poems and stories I think are dreadful, but I never find it oppressive, I just read on. Everyone is mixed up together, veterans and greenhorns alike. I trust editors Emily Pohl-Weary and Paola Poletto to choose stuff on it's merit and not it's social clout. There is often something in there by Paul Hong, whose short fiction I find delightful, or Jon Sasaki who is still, somehow, slipping under the radar. There's lots of art reproduced, but a sane lid is kept on the DIY production values, and now that the infamous mattb is doing the design, it all falls into place very nicely indeed.

- sally mckay 12-19-2003 4:54 am

hey there. thanks sally-bo-bally! i'm not sure if people realize that when they click on the balloon images on the secret room page they can actually see slideshows of secrets. there are over 100 secrets viewable from that single page. view them! you'll get a sense what the room was like at the end of the day.
- kissmachine 12-20-2003 6:48 am





add a comment to this page:

Your post will be captioned "posted by anonymous,"
or you may enter a guest username below:


Line breaks work. HTML tags will be stripped.