Anybody remember the zine "Dishwasher?"

[RandomKoolzip]

Dishwasher Pete has a mission: Wash dishes in all 50 states. Issue No. 7 finds Pete at a cafe in Boulder, No. 8 at an Alaskan fish cannery, No. 9 at a seafood restaurant in New Hampshire, and No. 11 at restaurants in Montana, California and Ohio (No. 10 was a comics issue). The reason you'll like Pete is that he has a good attitude, and a sense of humor. "Why is there this assumption that dishwashers are at the bottom rung of some sort of career-climbing ladder?" he asks. Writing in a tight, neat scrawl (with no water marks), he lists dishwashing references he finds in novels, describes the wacky people he meets (including a group of priests he stumbled upon as they watched a porn video) and details the mundane ways he kills time. After reading Pete's adventures, I'm as convinced as ever that a clean plate is like a clean soul — you can see yourself in it. ($1 from P.O. Box 8213, Portland, OR 97207).

I used to read Pete's zine back in the 90's, when I was entering the food service universe myself. It really is/was a great way to understand the working-class mentality....This is a guy who just wanted to wash dishes for a living and write about his experiences. He didn't want to be an entrepeneur or a millionaire, he just wanted to operate in his own corner of the world and be left alone to write. Brilliant stuff, and often very poignant. I remember one article Pete wrote about seeing a Mexican guy he liked get fired for eating out of the bus tubs.


Here's a Wikipedia article on him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_Pete





I wonder if he's still putting out the zine? Haven't heard about Pete in several years.

[Zuni]

1. I love weird shit like that

that sounds like a zine that I'd really enjoy. One of my faves of all time is "Answer Me!" by the ex-Goads (they divorced). Shit was so offensive that I couldn't help but love it.

[RandomKoolzip]

2. Oh god, Answer Me! was insane.

Literally. Jim Goad later did time in prison for beating Debbie Goad.

Yes, it was hilarious....anyone getting offended by the damn thing was missing the point.

[Beware the Beast Man]

3. That's awesome.

Zines kind of lost some luster with the proliferation of the internet.

[RandomKoolzip]

4. Yeah...in some ways the internet's been kind of a bad thing...

There were a lot of very cool zines around in the early-mid-90's, before everyone had the internet, that suddenly disappeared around 1998 or so. I remember stuff like Hungry Maggot, Cometbus, Apegirl, etc. You can barely find stuff that's LITERATE in the zine underground anymore, and that's a shame.

[Beware the Beast Man]

5. Most of the zines I read were local music rags.

Then there were the larger ones, like MRR or Flipside. Those were required reading for any good punk kid in the 80's.

[RandomKoolzip]

6. Oh yeah...finding MRR was kinda like stumbling onto

and alternate universe. I had no idea there was such a network of hardcore bands until I found MRR. I was only 14 and this was like finding a room in your house you'd never entered before.

Then a year or two later, I discovered Forced Exposure, which was even more mind-blowing.

But those were both national; the local zine activity tended to be, IMO, overly parochial and inferior in style and ability....

Then there were those national zines that were popular that I couldn't stand, like Ben is Dead or Rollerderby, both of which were like "Sassy" for those who didn't want to be seen with such a glossy mag. Too much cattiness, too many fawning reviews of bands whose only exceptional quality is that they had cute guys in them, etc.

But while those two were becoming the in-zines, there were scads of zines bubbling under that took up the slack...