Zine Kulchur, Mystic Art, and Counterpublics

Some things I love that are underway

Today was both an exuberant and difficult day at work. Tonight I wasn’t sure what to do with the accumulated feelings about it so I started writing. Frequently, as a teacher, stark contrasts of connection, depletion, exhilaration, and frustration become, daily, more at home next to each other. Indeed, all over each other and in your face. A good day can have incredibly trying moments. And a bad day, on the surface, might even surprise you with a kind of weird fulfillment at the end of it. I’m not sure exactly what today was but it was a lot.

An excess requiring a counter-excess. Here we go.

Of course, this particular Monday there was the affective aftermath of the game everyone watched, all the drunken adults my students had to sit next to, perhaps babysit, and be kept awake by, and the escalating violences oceans away that others, like me, are monitoring and mourning, wondering why more people aren’t. There is the impending holiday of “love”, or at least love pigeonholed in a profitable, limited way, that causes so much anxiety and anticipation among young people. And there is the fact that school - at least the “academic,” room-sitting aspects of it — is grueling for everyone and the distractions we’ve grown habituated to and can’t look away from are also grueling. So many moods and affects to be upended by, carried away by, deregulated by, spun-out by.

Lately I’m choosing to take on more projects at work and at home that align with who I am in the best/deepest sense of the notion. At this point I have a pretty good idea of what I’m drawn to, positively challenged by, find joy in, and derive meaning, peace, and inspiration from. It’s a long list of sometimes difficult-to-commit-to things. The content is there, but practice and technique get rusty. I’m not always consistent, courageous, or wise in my preferences and devotions, and new vistas can also emerge unexpectedly, sometimes abrogating past ones.

But there is a sincere, hard-tested consistency in my making and searching that I cannot betray. If anything, I will try to clarify and refine them — strengthen them, too, in the face of inevitable resistances and challenges. Having written all this, though, it sounds overly simplistic, perhaps even trite. Maybe so, but there is no escaping the fact that there are deeply rooted aspects of ourselves that if we don’t protect and honor then we are doomed or at least broken. The same thing maybe.

One of the hardest parts of teaching, besides the emotional-mental toll of trying to connect with, oversee, assist, and guide a 100 plus under-served (in my recent school(s) at least) young people living in a society like ours, is that you’re constantly at risk of having to change who you are to meet impossible institutional expectations. This will also be, if anything, the all-too-hard part that could eventually make me part ways with the profession.

But in the meantime, I’m working to align — and also, subvert in a sense — and in my creative writing class now this is happening through making zines. And the students are into it, like they’ve never yet been into anything, even watching movies. Part of it, I think, is the joy I’m bringing to the project and the fact they are quite free in constructing with fingers, eyes, words, and mind anything their hearts lead them to. An artifact, a talisman, a gift, a Valentine, involving color, word, texture, design, and shape. All swept into form through office supplies and cheap art tools.

But also my joy isn’t just pedagogical, it’s the glee of someone whose making things along with them, not because anyone is telling me to or making me, but because making them is an expression of my weird/wild Who-ness, my elan vital: chapbooks, zines, and something a little more than a zine called Karavanserai. The dream is that they will see making things as a way to cultivate their own wild Who-ness.

Going through my archives recently, I realized I don’t have as many zines as I thought I might have. Never mind though, I have more than enough books, photos, and related ephemera to make up for it. But the zines and pamphlets I do have are passionate, offbeat, militant, chatty, and socially-conscious experiments in creating momentary eruptions of other ways of knowing and communing. I also found the hand-collaged, hand-glued templates for a zine I made in Las Vegas. So I printed up a new master copy I will soon make multiple copies of to send to friends for old times sake. Old spaces sake. And to keep the conversation going.

I’m not sure exactly when I acquired the AfroSurreal Manifesto by D. Scott Miller but I think it was a year or two after(?) I first met him and chatted with him on one of those memorable San Francisco Saturday nights when everything felt experimental and countercultural and seeded with anarchic possibilities. Perhaps it’s a City I misremember or romanticize, or it was the fact our meeting happened in archetypal North Beach at its most foggy and wraithlike.

Or maybe it was just a night that could have happened anywhere when a lot of pleasures, mysteries, and discoveries all uniquely colluded in ways that now strike me as nostalgic. I know I met him in North Beach, with a mysterious friend of mine, at an art show in a dim, crowded, aromatic warehouse-type space. Everything smelling of cheap wine, candles, wool, and cloves, along with that bracing perfume of slowly-dissipating fog that wends its way into underlinings of coats and tightly-knotted scarves. Most of the night my friend and I had been bouncing around several loud and dim bars and hills on our bicycles before we found the art show. In that warm and musty art-warehouse, Miller and I spoke about the Situationists and rap music and zines and mystical art — at least this is what I remember. I recall an immediate rapport and a shared appreciation based on art-theorists we both got comfort and inspiration from. The night, in my memory, didn’t end as I was expecting, but with pleasant surprises that kept the conversation ramifying throughout the night and beyond. And then, some undefined amount of time later, I had his Manifesto which I’m using now as an exemplar for my students and for myself with my zine and chapbook experiments. Technically it’s probably more of a pamphlet or a chapbook than a zine, but it springs from the same source. Perhaps I can convince a student to write their own manifesto, an activity I had some success with while teaching college.

Speaking of manifestos, as I’m working on a communal magazine project called Karavanserai with several friends in my Sufi spiritual circles, I also want to make a serialized zine of my own work. I told my students this too. They were like: Go for it!

And will be called Companion Moon — an offshoot and tributary and expansion of this online space. Each issue will be addressed to an Unknown Friend and written like a letter to a distant, unnamed, evasive interlocutor. That could be you, or that could be me in the past or future. Or just some amalgamation of loves and friends and mentors.

The first issue will be a fanzine in honor of a very favorite band reuniting this year after almost 17 years on hiatus: Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Do you know them? They are also integral to my poetic mythology of San Francisco/Oakland art worlds and counterpublics; I think I saw them live three times and was at what, we were told at the time, was their very last show at The Independent in San Francisco where I embraced Nils, the lead singer, after the show, congratulating him on a mind-melting, heart-soaring performance.

Each of their CDs includes literature and zine-like inserts that relate a fascinating counter-history and poetic archaeology of their influences, alliances, and conceptual aims and antics. Musically, one can say, as their Bandcamp page suggests they are “avant-prog metal” or circus-metal or industrial-carnival-primitive metal. Or something as noncategorizable. Seeing them live, especially on two occasions, were all-consuming. eclipsing aesthetic-cathartic experiences I will never forget and am still learning from as I remember them. Indeed, I plan on seeing them again in a few months and perhaps my fanzine will be done by then! What a gift to believe it will be.

When I start making the fanzine, I suspect it will have less to do with their music, itself, which I love, but with all the many allusions, resonances, and research points their work brings up, including:

The Futurists

Anarcho-primitivism

Norman O. Brown

Apocalypses and Epiphanies

Eco-poetics

Museum theory

Kenneth Patchen

Muriel Ruckeyser

But then, all of this is so imprinted into their music that it will mostly be about them, their music and performances and the joy and wonder they have brought me and other devoted fans.

All of which to say is that these various experiments and flowerings, inside and mostly outside the classroom, and working with different devotions and communities are how I’m staying true to what are the most life-affirming, deepest parts of myself I’m aware of.

Which is a self that was stitched together by art and mysticism and the signs of the natural world and the efforts of small groups of individuals — artists, mystics, activists, ecologists — to conceive of the God-given mystery of being as the foundation for collective enchantment and ongoing goodness. May it be so, and more, despite what we know and keep witnessing and keep giving up on. I will be excited to update more on zine and art experiments as they manifest. And tomorrow is Tuesday, and we will make more things.