On Sunday, the LA Zine Fest was having a whole-day celebration at The Last Bookstore in downtown LA, followed by an after-party presented by LA Records. If you think that books and publications are dead in this digital and internet age, the numerous zinemakers were there to let you know that you are totally wrong.
‘We’re just trying to encourage people to take a look at the fact that print is still alive and it's fun to sit down and make something with your hands’ declared Rhea Tepplim, one of the festival's organizers to Blog Downtown a few days ago. I was ready to take a look, but what is a zine exactly? ‘A noncommercial, homemade publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter.’ Cool, I got interested and decided to go downtown and attend one of the several discussion panels happening during the afternoon, probably the most popular one, featuring Henry Rollins and V. Vale of Re/Search Publications.
I didn’t know much of this world of self-publications and ‘prints-are-not-dead’ alt-culture, and I even knew less about V. Vale, whom Henry Rollins, wearing a Devo t-shirt, introduced as a true intellectual and an old friend he had known half of his life.
‘Fanzines were a way for bands to communicate with each other when there were no fax and no internet’, said Rollins who was aware he sounded like an old guy trying to explain some prehistoric ages to this iPhone-iPad generation. He continued saying Zines were essential, an important phase of the early days, and were photocopied to death back then.
During an hour and half, Rollins interviewed San Francisco writer and editor V. Vale, a pioneer in the zine world who started the punk zine ‘Search and Destroy’ in the 70s and then created RE/Search Publishing. The conversation between the two men was actually very interesting and touched many subjects, from Vale being the founding member and keyboardist of the rock band Blue Cheer (credited as being pioneers of heavy metal) in the 60s, to Vale being part of the Haight-Ashbury alt-scene before the hippies, before everyone even knew about the summer of love.
Vale turned to punk a few years later, and started to publish fanzine with the help of Beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg who wrote him a $100 check. He wanted to be the primary source of this movement, with adventurous artwork and edgy interviews, and was worried that the mainstream media would eventually take over, as they already had for the hippie movement. He did not want the same thing to happen to the punk movement. In these days, the San Francisco scene was small, and he said he had no problem approaching bands for interviews, but, can you imagine it? It was the time when the K7 had just been invented.
During 11 years, he published ‘Search and Destroy’, and Rollins insisted on the fact that the role of the zine was progressively changing, that Vale was becoming a journalist, revealing stuff that was not exposed in mainstream media, such as police violence at punk shows.
The two men then engaged in a long conversation about ‘how to think out of the box’, ‘how to get real information’, since we are ‘poorly served by the current media’. And it seems that this is the goal both men have pursued all their lives, two true rebels who have never lost their curiosity and attraction for subversive ideas. Rollins admitted he even revolted against the punk movement he found too fundamentalist and too restrictive.
Vale, who later founded his company RE/Search Publications, wanted to bring this alt-culture to people, publishing in his new project, pieces even more challenging than the ones in ‘Search and Destroy’.
‘Curiosity is you’, he said, advising us to always be ‘dissatisfied with our level of knowledge’.
Vale explained he published and contributed to many books on the subjects of pranks in the 80s, and he also talked about his friendship with William S. Burroughs who gave him content. With pranks, he was interested by exposing any subversive subjects, from weird art about serial killers, to modern primitive (who engaged in all kinds of body modification), to any underground and obscure subject.
For him, ‘high culture’ should not be the only one which deserves attention, and absolutely everything should be documented; this is the point, the documentation, he said to be obsessed by it, ‘if it wasn't recorded it did not happen’, he said at one point.
During the conversation, they also talked about the surrealist movement (that Vale loves), the truly rebellious artists, the essential role of disruption in society, and their disappointment that there is now an emphasis ‘on style and not on mind’ in the punk movement.
They also declared their admiration for Julian Assange, Anonymous, the new social media who helped the Egyptian revolution, and the recent Occupy movement. Vale even said he wanted to make an Occupy book gathering all the signs and slogans made by the Occupy people, as subversive culture has to be concentrated to be effective, claiming that these people were brave and that there is nothing like ‘physicality to force social change’. ‘But they are not sure of the future of the movement, or what will be the next social revolution. 'Aren’t you angry that the Occupy movement is not gathering 2 million people?’ said Rollins at this point.
If both recognize the role of social media, they are men who go on the field (Rollins is a globe trotter who said to have landed in every country Bush had told him not to go), and both advocate going out there, instead of staying behind a computer.
But things are changing, they admitted that it is more and more difficult to be eager to go out there, as everything is now accessible from a computer. For example, something as weird as a man whose arms are covered with swastika tattoos and calling himself ManWoman, was only accessible through Vale’s publications. It is not the case anymore, as you can google him and instantaneously get his pictures (true, I have tried!). It is now difficult to define the role of fanzines in this digital world, where 'everything' is known.
If both men are reserved about technology, they are definitively using it and find it useful to build networks, but they are fast at warning us against it, comparing it to ‘a pacifier’, ‘a different kind of porn’, ‘junk food’, and declaring that nothing will ever replace talking to someone in the same room to know the person.
Mind control came back several times in the conversation and Vale even talked about something really interesting, architecture and control, like the lack of public places, that would be large enough for people to gather and agitate!
The rest of the conversation focused on the need for more curiosity, ‘You have to work at it!’ said Vale, and on the need for more anger, ‘Anger and curiosity are two motivations’ they said, and ‘society repress anger!’
As true punks, the two guys were preaching their anti-authority, black humor and let’s-stay-afraid-of governments-not-of people philosophy.
‘I don’t buy the BS that you get more conservative when you get older’ said Vale after affirming his faith in youth. But both admitted that the young generation will have to create its own jobs, and invent its future, to survive in this country which, according to Rollins, has become the ‘most complex video game’
Their conversation was inspiring in the sense that these 50-something rebels-in-the-soul have managed to keep a true will to make sense of the world without any outside controlling process, a true curiosity for the counter-culture kept out from the mainstream.
So if I got their message right, fight back against the mainstream of subversion, be always skeptical, catch your own self and have the integrity to stand up for it! But above everything, stay curious and angry people!
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