zinester, or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the making
For no good reason, I was thinking a lot today about zines. Back in the nineties, there was an upswelling of zine culture in the US that peaked mid-decade.
In my twenties, I published a zine called Fungus with my friend Justin. We were just out of school, living in Oakland/Berkeley, and we had a bunch of friends who made art: writers, musicians, photographers, painters.
The inspiration for our name was the discovery of the world’s largest living organism, a sub rosa mushroom that extended across state boundaries and whose individual outcroppings did not hint at the connections hidden beneath view. Our tagline was “Tabloid Lit for Working Class Spores.”
We published a grand total of two issues.
It was sweet.
Creating our first issue introduced me to industrial strength software. I wouldn’t have learned how to use Photoshop or QuarkXPress, if I hadn’t had a higher purpose I was striving towards: publishing the damned thing and getting it into our friends’ hands.
I still remember staying at the day job office till midnight printing hideously expensive (and ultimately unnecessary) color proofs. Meeting the animators at Colossal Pictures and pitching them on contributing unpublished comics for our second issue. The absolute joy the day Factsheet Five listed us in their index and mistook our Xeroxed work for offset printed. And loving the art people we knew had made.
I’m pretty sure I have the digital masters for Fungus #1 and #2 buried away somewhere. It’s not really important to me if I ever relocate them. What matters to me is that at a time when my friends and I wanted it, we had the means at hand to create something meaningful to us and to get it out into the world.
I believe that art is one of the highest order bits people bring to life. It’s transformative, for both the artist and the audience. It’s fundamentally participatory. It explicates the soul of the individual expressing it.
So in many ways it’s a beautiful thing to see the explosion of expression on the Web, ca. 2006. Seeing people use the technology we all have at hand now to share of themselves, to connect with other people. To make art.
No more Xeroxing hand stapled zines, and handing them out at shows and parties.
It’s better this way. Right?
Nick are discussing. 
Nick 8:42 pm on December 19, 2006 Permalink
I don’t know if it’s better this way or not, but this post has inspired me to revive my zine-I-was-gonna-do-back-in-school-but-never-did. We can talk about how easy web publishing is these days, but the publishing on the web doesn’t make it any easier to connect with people in your own town. Not everyone lives in a town worth connecting with, but I sure do.
Paul Kim 9:17 pm on December 19, 2006 Permalink
Hey Nick — you made my day. Good luck with the zine project. And of course, there’s a *lot* of in-person interaction fostered by the Web today. It’s just that I have fond memories of how the old school way resulted in tangible artifacts, and intense connections with like-minded people.