What Would Your Teenaged Self Think of You?
On the end of selling out
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Recently a friend gave me a book called Burn Collector, reprinting the first nine issues of a zine of that title, by Al Burian. I opened it with casual interest — this wasn’t anything I’d read or known about back in the 90s, when it first came out — but it caught me emotionally off-guard: It was a book that almost hurt to read, the way it hurts to read the journal you kept when you were 17, something that reminds you of who you used to be, and who you thought you would become. I’ve never thought of myself as the product of a particular generation, let alone of the subculture of zines, but reading Burn Collector made me aware that I am, I totally am, in the same way that visiting your hometown reminds you of where you come from — the accent you lost, the faith you outgrew, the crush you never got over — and of what you’ve left behind.
Do I need to explain what zines were? They still exist, but their golden age was circa 1980s–90s, the eve of the internet. They were like blogs, except printed on paper and stapled, and cost like two dollars. I never had a zine; I published a minicomic, which was like a zine, except with cartoons instead of words. (A cartoon was like a meme, except done with pen and talent.) You’d buy them at independent bookstores, comic book shops, or record stores, and if you really liked one maybe you’d write the author a letter — on paper, sent via U.S. Postal Service — and a week or two later you’d actually get a note back. You might begin a correspondence this way, even a friendship. It was like radioing messages back and forth between star systems, a tenuously connected galaxy of isolated civilizations scattered among the heartless vacuum of mainstream culture.
I should also perhaps explain that, inasmuch as generational cohorts have any distinctive characteristics, one of my own, Generation X’s, was alienation from popular culture. Since we were demographically negligible, no one much bothered pandering to us. So as far as we were concerned, corporate entertainment — network sitcoms, Hollywood movies, Top 40 radio — was to be ignored, disdained, or derided as mass-produced, lowest-common-denominator crap for boring consumers, for Normals — what the kids now call “basic.” (My reaction, still, when young people are outraged that, e.g…
