Trash City very nearly followed in the finest traditions of fanzines everywhere this issue, by Being Late. The main reason for this was the holiday I took in September, though actually I had allowed for it – what I hadn’t allowed for was that when I came back I realised that most of the stuff I’d written beforehand was unusable…

Another problem was the Linnea article, mostly because I was faced with the task of watching eight or so of her films over the course of a weekend, which left me with a rather jaundiced view of her. I nearly junked the whole idea but decided to leave it, so you can see how my opinion of her deteriorates through the article…

Then there was the week spent sitting in the Scala, when they had one of those weeks where I HAD to go six nights out of seven… Not to mention the new toy I bought – an Atari ST computer, theoretically to help with TC, but there are more fun things to do than read through desk-top publishing manuals… I’m still trying to get the balance right between time spent writing and time spent putting it all together – yet again, it was out with the axe as I end up with too much text.

On the plus side, Steve came up with the long-awaited comics piece. The cynics among you might say it was more than mere coincidence that after waiting six months for it, I got the first draft less than a week after an ‘interesting’ photograph of him was taken…

A few words on the debacle of last issue, when two pages from a draft copy slithered into the finished version, leaving a lot of people wondering why I thoght Dario Argento directed ‘Demons’. Fortunately, that one was caught before the second edition was sent out, though if there’s one thing worse than stapling ‘zines, it’s unstapling them to change a page… Some people wondered about my sanity, saying they wouldn’t have noticed the minor error; the crux isn’t whether YOU knew or not – I knew, and that was enough to make the hassle worthwhile. Plus, I couldn’t have stood getting twenty letters pointing out the error…

‘Bad Taste’ opened in the cinema, with much gloating in the genre about how stupid the BBFC had been to let it through uncut. A little counter-productive – I feel we ought to applaud them for realising the nature of the film and encourage them to do so more often. Better to have the people with the scissors on our side!

TC4 will be our first anniversary. I’ll have to put my thinking cap on and see what I can come up with to commemorate the occasion; a competition of some sort perhaps? A colour cover? Depends what the TC piggy-bank holds – don’t expect TOO much…

“It is better to burn out than to rust.”