Zines, pronounced ZEENS
Mar. 3rd, 2021 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteRight around the end of the 1980's was when I first discovered zines -- or 'zines, if you like apostrophes. Aside from being a year when I was the right age to find them fascinating, 1989 was also a year with a proliferation of copy shops in the city, where you could take in a bundle of scrapbooked pages covered in paint and hair and held together with staples and tape, and with a little know-how you could run them through a machine that created a tiny stack of copies - just enough to distribute to all the local weirdos you knew who took an interest, plus a few for your friends - and for a total cost that you might even recoup by selling each copy for just a couple of bucks.
(This was a magical pre-smartphone time, when young people still felt like seeing something printed on paper made it more official and important, rather than just inconveniently static and non-portable. I have fond memories of the zines I encountered, and my friends and I even made a few. I think I even have one paper copy sitting around here somewhere in a box...)
Anyway, this comes to mind because this month a Hollywood movie called "Moxie" came out that revolves around a teenage girl finding her mom's zine collection and getting inspired to make her own, which then creates a bit of a revolution at her school. (The movie is based on a book with a similar plot.) The revolution is of the "smash the patriarchy" kind, concerned with protesting the way the boys at the school and their enabling adult parents in the community are obsessed with the boys' football team and prioritize it over other things.
As a thoroughly middle-aged man, I have a messy relationship with the idea of "smashing the patriarchy". Suffice to say it ended up being more complicated than I thought it was in the 90's. But regardless, I really like the idea of an ink-and-paper self-published manifesto causing an uproar in an era when so much of teenage thinking and drama has been consumed into the ether. As long as there's still a physical place where young people can congregate unchaperoned - even if it is reduced to a bathroom stall - there's a place for physical works of art like zines to be planted, and lurk, festering with dangerous ideas.
In fact, I think I like this especially because of my own Gen-X attitude. Yeah -- I'm not going to say it's just a personal trait of mine. I'm going to say it's a trait shared by the entire generation I identify with now: A deep, rebellious discomfort, with the co-opting of culture by corporate entities.
In my teenage years it was cable networks, movie studios, magazine publishers - especially those in the fashion industry - and above all, major music labels and record companies. They scrutinized whatever we created for ourselves and made mutant copies of it with price tags attached, and when that wasn't profitable enough - which was almost all the time - they spun culture out of thin air and aggressively pitched it to us as something our peers were already into. (Everyone called it the music industry, without a trace of irony, as if the words "music" and "industry" were actually supposed to fit together in a sane civilization...)
Of course, nowadays, the corporate entities are mostly internet-based, and the co-opting is now online, and so insidious that it's practically built in. Now Facebook shreds your culture - your connections with community and family - into digital confetti and sells it back to you with ads inserted. Google shuffles the information you seek around like cards in a deck, with the order determined partly by which vendor paid them the highest ransom. You now rent your access to music! An artist makes music, a company takes a recording, and the company rents it to you!! Even though the music is in digital form and your device can hold a million songs!! LUDICROUS.
But a zine... It's on paper. What you put on the source, gets copied onto the target, with perhaps a bit of monochrome fuzz to give it character. You could put poetry there. A drawing. A defaced copy of a corporate logo. A picture of a celebrity with a skull scratched over his forehead. All the swear words you want. Nudity. Edgy political opinions. Scandalous rumors. Whatever's on your mind. And here's the best part: It doesn't live "in the cloud" on a server, where a company can snoop into it and censor it and categorize it. It lives on the paper, in your hands, and only there. Its very inertness is the best part.
You know, a lot of us Gen-Xers had really high hopes for the internet, and its decentralized, censorship-averse design. But corporations moved in and paved over almost all of that. And true to form, that makes us furious. Smash the patriarchy? Sure, wherever you find it. But keep your eye on where your money's going, and maybe smash some of that apparatus too, yeah? In fact, I can't help thinking that railing against "the patriarchy" is actually one of the lesser rebellions we could channel our valuable, vital modern angst into, because that rebellion seems to have been mutated and diluted into a relative of identity politics* in this decade. How much of that is being goosed by the culture industry?
I mean, this film, "Moxie", and the book: The inspiration is a collection of zines from the 90's. As I remember zines from the 90's, they were also full of nihilism, anarchy, graphic poetry, non-sequitur culture jamming, anti-capitalism manifestos, and unmarketable, un-glamarous, unrestrained fury, and were just as likely to say “blow up the school and kill yourself” as they were to say “smash the patriarchy”.
There's a motto to put on a movie billboard, right? BLOW UP THE SCHOOL AND KILL YOURSELF. Whoops, that won't sell any tickets. "Smash the patriarchy" definitely will, but not that. Post that on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube and watch yourself get banned. Try and get it printed on a mail-order T-shirt and watch it get censored into oblivion and your credit-card transaction reversed. One of my friends was a college radio DJ in the 90's and he said that very phrase on the air, with regularity. Try that now and watch yourself get booted off the campus.
Better print it on a zine instead!
( * P.S., after this country's leftist culture spent the last 20 years charging headfirst into identity politics, I find it kind of amusing that the same culture is now championing "intersectionality," as if the idea that people are formed by overlapping and conflicting cultural identities is something rebellious they just invented. But I'm not going to laugh, because that might embarrass those people out of their course correction. I'm glad things can open up and be a bit more complicated on the left now. )
(This was a magical pre-smartphone time, when young people still felt like seeing something printed on paper made it more official and important, rather than just inconveniently static and non-portable. I have fond memories of the zines I encountered, and my friends and I even made a few. I think I even have one paper copy sitting around here somewhere in a box...)
Anyway, this comes to mind because this month a Hollywood movie called "Moxie" came out that revolves around a teenage girl finding her mom's zine collection and getting inspired to make her own, which then creates a bit of a revolution at her school. (The movie is based on a book with a similar plot.) The revolution is of the "smash the patriarchy" kind, concerned with protesting the way the boys at the school and their enabling adult parents in the community are obsessed with the boys' football team and prioritize it over other things.As a thoroughly middle-aged man, I have a messy relationship with the idea of "smashing the patriarchy". Suffice to say it ended up being more complicated than I thought it was in the 90's. But regardless, I really like the idea of an ink-and-paper self-published manifesto causing an uproar in an era when so much of teenage thinking and drama has been consumed into the ether. As long as there's still a physical place where young people can congregate unchaperoned - even if it is reduced to a bathroom stall - there's a place for physical works of art like zines to be planted, and lurk, festering with dangerous ideas.
In fact, I think I like this especially because of my own Gen-X attitude. Yeah -- I'm not going to say it's just a personal trait of mine. I'm going to say it's a trait shared by the entire generation I identify with now: A deep, rebellious discomfort, with the co-opting of culture by corporate entities.
In my teenage years it was cable networks, movie studios, magazine publishers - especially those in the fashion industry - and above all, major music labels and record companies. They scrutinized whatever we created for ourselves and made mutant copies of it with price tags attached, and when that wasn't profitable enough - which was almost all the time - they spun culture out of thin air and aggressively pitched it to us as something our peers were already into. (Everyone called it the music industry, without a trace of irony, as if the words "music" and "industry" were actually supposed to fit together in a sane civilization...)
Of course, nowadays, the corporate entities are mostly internet-based, and the co-opting is now online, and so insidious that it's practically built in. Now Facebook shreds your culture - your connections with community and family - into digital confetti and sells it back to you with ads inserted. Google shuffles the information you seek around like cards in a deck, with the order determined partly by which vendor paid them the highest ransom. You now rent your access to music! An artist makes music, a company takes a recording, and the company rents it to you!! Even though the music is in digital form and your device can hold a million songs!! LUDICROUS.
But a zine... It's on paper. What you put on the source, gets copied onto the target, with perhaps a bit of monochrome fuzz to give it character. You could put poetry there. A drawing. A defaced copy of a corporate logo. A picture of a celebrity with a skull scratched over his forehead. All the swear words you want. Nudity. Edgy political opinions. Scandalous rumors. Whatever's on your mind. And here's the best part: It doesn't live "in the cloud" on a server, where a company can snoop into it and censor it and categorize it. It lives on the paper, in your hands, and only there. Its very inertness is the best part.
You know, a lot of us Gen-Xers had really high hopes for the internet, and its decentralized, censorship-averse design. But corporations moved in and paved over almost all of that. And true to form, that makes us furious. Smash the patriarchy? Sure, wherever you find it. But keep your eye on where your money's going, and maybe smash some of that apparatus too, yeah? In fact, I can't help thinking that railing against "the patriarchy" is actually one of the lesser rebellions we could channel our valuable, vital modern angst into, because that rebellion seems to have been mutated and diluted into a relative of identity politics* in this decade. How much of that is being goosed by the culture industry?
I mean, this film, "Moxie", and the book: The inspiration is a collection of zines from the 90's. As I remember zines from the 90's, they were also full of nihilism, anarchy, graphic poetry, non-sequitur culture jamming, anti-capitalism manifestos, and unmarketable, un-glamarous, unrestrained fury, and were just as likely to say “blow up the school and kill yourself” as they were to say “smash the patriarchy”.
There's a motto to put on a movie billboard, right? BLOW UP THE SCHOOL AND KILL YOURSELF. Whoops, that won't sell any tickets. "Smash the patriarchy" definitely will, but not that. Post that on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube and watch yourself get banned. Try and get it printed on a mail-order T-shirt and watch it get censored into oblivion and your credit-card transaction reversed. One of my friends was a college radio DJ in the 90's and he said that very phrase on the air, with regularity. Try that now and watch yourself get booted off the campus.
Better print it on a zine instead!
( * P.S., after this country's leftist culture spent the last 20 years charging headfirst into identity politics, I find it kind of amusing that the same culture is now championing "intersectionality," as if the idea that people are formed by overlapping and conflicting cultural identities is something rebellious they just invented. But I'm not going to laugh, because that might embarrass those people out of their course correction. I'm glad things can open up and be a bit more complicated on the left now. )
no subject
Date: 2021-04-08 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-17 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-17 05:38 am (UTC)Is not it natural and healthy?
no subject
Date: 2021-05-17 06:23 am (UTC)My mother was very clear with her ideas around my house growing up, that taking an interest in politics was a sucker's game. She grew up in Berkeley, and was in her mid-20's at the end of the 1960's when things got out of hand. She's always held very liberal ideas but I think the chaos of that time made her very skeptical of political action, lobbying, resistance, et cetera.
I grew up feeling the same way, but things changed. My ideas took the biggest beating when I moved to Oakland ten years ago, and found myself in the middle of protests and riots and rallies almost by accident.
Turns out you need to pay at least enough attention to know when to raise a stink and stop them from passing nasty laws. If you miss that part, all you can do is raise a stink when they come around trying to enforce the laws. And that's really a lot more painful...
no subject
Date: 2021-05-17 03:05 pm (UTC)Wow, that's interesting. We over there were idealizing all this. But here I encounter a lot of people pretty much negative towards the hippies movement.