ZinePete

In his giant reminiscence of the Brighton gig-going culture he partook in as a youth, Gavin “Gav” Burrows articulates a ponder I have regarding the zine revival of late.

Isn’t all this squat-like something of a simulation? ‘Squat’ has become a ‘look’ not an activity, like the look of cassette tapes becoming a style icon once we stopped using them for listening to.

Hmm…

Mr D’Log has been experimenting:

My rough sketch of a ‘Kindle zine aesthetic’, trying to blend the old-school pritt-stick/photocopier look with crisp pixel-art fonts.

Interesting. I’m assuming the text is actual searchable text generated by the Kindle and not simple bitmapped graphics. The latter would make it no different to a PDF magazine which is dead boring, which is why I assume the former.

A couple of articles in the Guardian caught my eye this last week as part of my job of knowing about the Internet and stuff.

Found on Twitter

Everyone’s a critic now by Neal Gabler.

The point isn’t that the traditional critics are always wrong and these populists are right, or even that these comments are overwhelmingly negative or invariably take on the critical consensus. More often than not, they aren’t and they don’t. The point is that authority has migrated from critics to ordinary folks, and there is nothing – not collusion or singleness of purpose or torrents of publicity – that the traditional critics can do about it. They have seen their monopoly usurped by what amounts to a vast technological word-of-mouth of hundreds of millions of people.

Why the BBC’s old guard called time on the Wibbly Wobbly Web by John Naughton.

What always struck me about its senior executives – in both the commercial and public sector – was how smug and self-satisfied they seemed. In a way, this was understandable: they were masters of a particular universe, rulers of a medium that dominated the information ecosystem, dictated the political agenda, and determined the daily habits of a large chunk of the population. At that time, the most powerful apparatchiks in the BBC and ITV were the schedulers – the planners who designed ways of holding the attention of a mass audience. Their craft included tricks like not scheduling some things against stronger competitors; making sure that one had a follow-on that would keep audiences from switching channels over the 9pm watershed; winning the ratings war over the Christmas period and so on. Watching them at work, one realised that effectively they were playing chess – and that the pawns in their arcane games were the viewers.

Embedded in the corporate DNA of push media like broadcast television is the assumption that viewers are, if not exactly idiots, then passive consumers. The deal is that they receive gratefully what we, the broadcasters, decide to create. The couch potato is thus the paradigmatic product of broadcast television. So you can see why television executives were so puzzled by the web, and particularly by the rise in user-generated content like blogs or YouTube videos: to them, the idea of such content is an oxymoron, like “military intelligence”. Viewers aren’t creative, and even if they were, there’s no way anyone would let them publish their crap.

It doesn’t take much to see this as all about power. They had it, it’s moving away from them so they’re trying to roll things back, either by denigrating and dismissing the new holders of the power or actually rolling things back. You see it happening in all industries affected by the Internet, which is most of them. It’s sad but inevitable. We can only hope not too much damage is done to the important things during the transition.

Made up by me just now. Bathe in my cleverness.

But it’s too easy to just see this in terms of monolithic organisations like the BBC or the monolithic egos of professional critics. I think it’s a thing that applies to anyone who sets themselves up as a gatekeeper or expert in a field, and that means anyone who’s produced a media space or object, be it a television channel, a newspaper, gallery show, a music zine, a club night or, yes, a blog.

I was thinking about this when in the Ikon Gallery bookshop looking at all the Art magazines on sale. Not the ones that were Art – the ones about Art. In the age of the Internet, what is the point of a small-circulation publication that inevitably won’t make any money? If these contents are important why wouldn’t you want them to be seen by as many people as possible? Why lock them away?

My boisterous Internet side says this is because the contents can’t stand up on their own. Strip away the artificial scarcity of a magazine, the walls separating it from the ETEWAF of the Internet and the emperor is shown to be nekkid.

But my realist side knows this happens online too. There isn’t a “big soup” into which people stick spoons in and randomly get stuff. The ‘net is sorted into manageable lumps and those methods of sorting create barriers just as impenetrable as an old-media object.

It’s amusing how humans can take a radically open environment and clog it up with barriers. Language seems to be the big one. Countless geeks who promote the openness and freedom of the ‘net and shout about transparency and information wanting to be free will happily retreat into cliquish speakeasies where newcomers are instructed to keep quiet and learn the lingo else feel the wrath of the old timers.

Similarly zine culture has a tendency towards creating as many rules as it purports to break down. Don’t use DTP, be left-wing, write headings by hand, send an SAE with your order, all manner of rules and regulations that, while often well intentioned and positive, do create barriers to creation and consumption.

There’s probably a quote somewhere along the lines of “be careful who you criticize lest you become them yourself” and it strikes me as something that can be applied to all human activities. The student activist becomes the authoritarian home secretary, the cultural warrior becomes the cultural gatekeeper, the child becomes the parent.

And it’s not necessarily a problem. It’s just worth reminding ourselves when we talk about creating an “alternative” to the mainstream that the alternative we’re building is only different in scale. Its fundamental effects will still be to create a monument to elitism.

I very much welcome your comments on this.

I’ve uploaded the first ZinePete zine. Once the proof comes through, and assuming it’s all okay, I’ll make it available to buy. Couple of weeks.

I mentioned I’m planning on using services like MagCloud to print and distribute my zines this year. There’s something interesting about PoD services like this which I’ll probably get to later on but for now here’s a doc from MagCloud which, once you strip away the PR puff, has some interesting observations from their perspective.

via Powazek who’s the tattooed bloke at the computer.

The lovely Ed Pinsent has added some more cover scans to his UK Small Press Galleries, this time concentrating on mini-comics.

In the introductory blog post Ed says:

These are mostly A6 and A7 size; A6 is half of A5, A7 is half as much again. An A7 comic could easily be created by printing an A4 sheet on both sides and folding into 9 rectangles. Even more clever would be to create a 16pp booklet from that process; it’s just a question of how you do the pasteup and trimming.

The mini-comics have always been my favourite part of my zine collection. An A4 zine is quite boring as an object but these little things that can only really be hand-made are wonderful gems. And with a cost-per-unit of next to nothing they fit the “anyone can do a zine” model perfectly.

There were many good things that came out of the UK small press scene in the 80s and 90s but mini-comics were probably the best.

I don’t like to fall into the “New Year, New You” cliche but a number of things I’ve been involved with have come to a natural end and I’ve found myself reflecting on what they meant. In doing so, and the fruits of those reflections will hopefully emerge elsewhere, I thought a lot about what I do and why. And part of that was a desire to revisit zines.

As I often say when talking about my work, I did zines in the 1990s, publishing my own but also reviewing and distributing other people’s. This experience laid the foundation for all that I know about personal media and distributed communities and I’ve written about it before.

Recently there’s been a bit of a zine revival around these parts with a whole new generation rediscovering the joy of the photocopied pamphlet and learning about the revolutions it enabled back in the 80s and 90s. I’ve enjoyed seeing this from both a nostalgic point of view and to see the aesthetic choices they’re making with the shifts in technology, but it also leaves me a little uneasy.

Back then we made zines because we had to. Sniffin’ Glue was born more of frustration with the mainstream music press not covering the punk scene than a reaction to it (though the latter was certainly there). You published because it was the only way you could connect and share experiences with other people like you. It’s no wonder the Internet killed the zine scene – it solved the problem perfectly in one fell swoop.

The problem is zines weren’t just essential. They were cool. They had an edgy, insider, ahead of the curve feel about them. If you liked a band that was only being covered in zines that made you cooler than the people who just read the NME. People would reject zines that were made with computers because typewriters were more authentic, handwritten even better. Desktop Publishing was just wrong.

And so when the essentiality of zines vanished with the Internet all that was left was the cool aesthetic. Oh, and the people who used to important in the old days bemoaning how the Internet isn’t as authentic as a few pieces of paper with toner burnt on them.

Don’t get me wrong, I love those people and I love what they do. I just think something important has been missed, and that’s what I want to explore this year with ZinePete.

This project is going to have a number of facets.

I’m going to be publishing things. I’m going to call them “zines” but they probably won’t be photocopied pamphlets. I’ll mostly be using print-on-demand services like MagCloud and Lulu to get my stuff out there because it’s easier that way. I will probably break out the long-armed stapler and make some publications myself and I’m very intrigued by what Kathryn does with her binding, but it won’t be the primary method. The main thing is I’ll be putting out a lot of bound objects this year.

I’m going to be collecting things. I’ve been thinking a lot about zines and weblogs as receptacles for stuff, be they thoughts, ideas, links, pictures, reviews, whatever. I want to think about that a lot more. Collecting will mostly be done photographically to begin with but it’ll probably get more physical (I’ve been collecting found bits of metal from the streets of Digbeth this last year, for example.)

I’m going to be reminiscing. I have a 20 year history of dicking about with zines and blogs. It’s about time I wrote some of it down properly and figure out what it meant.

I’m going to do some manifesto-ing. One of the things I wrote down in my notes was “reclaiming zines from the retro-zombies”. With the caveat that I am a bit of a retro-zombie and it’s nothing personal, this is the big point of this project. I think zines are important and can teach us things about personal media. In order to do that we need to uncouple them from the nostalgia that surrounds them.

I’m going to be doing a lot of thinking about my practice. This is not just about making some neat zines, or about figuring out what zines mean in 2011. It’s about what I am and what I do. I glibly declared myself to be an Artist last year because I realised you don’t need permission to do so – you just can’t expect people to take you seriously. But in doing so I’ve been forced to think about why I do the things I do, be they take photos, blog, open shops… Zines and zine-esque blogs have been the continuity in my life so by understanding them should help me understand what I do and why I do it.

Of course, the best laid plans never come to fruition and it’s all about the journey, not the destination. I fully intend to do all of the above but if something else crops up and I have to apply my brain to something other than zines then that’s no biggy. It’s just a framework, after all. A receptacle for thoughts. Kinda like a zine, really.