FANZINE

The fanzine, the most democratic of forms and obsession of my teen years, paradoxically always felt like an unattainable DIY dream to me. I had the access to underground music, xerox machines, bad ideas (my version of content), and collage instincts to make it a reality, but there’s a certain amount of spitting in the eye of the devil involved. Who was my audience, after all? And in a way, that is perhaps the opposite question of the one I should’ve asked. The fanzine, as a cultural object, is a tribute to the phenomena that makes its creators wild. Any excess of enthusiasm that leaks off the pages and infects its reader with derivative fandom––maybe even after spending years on the shelf, unread and irrelevant––is just a bonus. The initial impulse to commemorate holy shit you have to check this out kinds of things is the rockets, the main event, and not whether or not anyone ever feels the same. After spending the last 15 years overcoming the insecurity of not being punk enough (now you know what teenage girls worry about), I have the good fortune to edit The Fanzine. Cue the dazzling lights of heaven.

Ethan Minsker, probably one of the self-same zinesters I envied as a girl, produced this video about the inception and evolution of his own fanzine, Psycho Moto (ex-East Coast Exchange). History lesson, heritage, Herodotus.

Fanzine from Ethan H. Minsker on Vimeo.