Avoid the margin, we’re the mainstream
They’re playing a trick on us all.
When we go low in our zines, or do obscene raunch craziness,
we are part of the business mainstream.
—As seen by them that runs things, as seen thru the trained formula
eye. Predictable. We get popped right into a pigeonhole. They’ve made a
nice little place for us. Weirdo newstands, ‘geewhiz’ expose’s in the media,
and the mails. And the band plays on. No change.
Gulp, burp, the bulldozer plows on, cash-register ringing.
But! If we publish things that speak the plain truth about whatever as
clean and lean as possible and never give anyone an easy excuse to
pigeonhole us, we kick their butts. People would read us instead of
them. Their minds would unkink. We’d hit the real cultural mainstream by
leap-frogging around the fakers and pigeonholers. All real art movements
beat fake ones. So aim high.
The bosses are wrong. The masses are like us. The real mainstream is
pissed and wants the tasty true stuff. Not the fad fluff. Real people
don’t have time to waste. Especially in hard times, under stress.
The working world has more real readers than any university: people
reading to make sense of life, not to get a grade. Shakespeare was
very popular in the 1800’s prairy days. So was Homer. There was
trash at hand then, but when the going gets tuff, people don’t want
anything to do with trash. Why else is readership down nowadays?
We’re losing it. And zinesters have been playing into the hands of
the bad guys for too long.
The fake mainstream is a rigged-up mediascape where
the bosses slice things up and put everything in its lousy mislabelled
place and the newstand sends the 90% unsold copies back every month.
They’re losers! Thieves! They’re wrong! Especially about the mainstream!
We are the mainstream. We just need to get the nerve to be adults not
children about it. You play it their way you will lose, Dan Rather gets to
stay on top. He’s not playing for funsies, he’s playing for keepsies.
He’ll turn us into lemmings if we let him.
(One way to test if you’re onto something is whether your advertisers
are trend-followers, fadsters….or if they’re real craftsmen with strong
roots, heritage and links to what’s best about the past. You get their
nod, you know you’re onto something. They put their $ where their
mouth is coz they waste nothing.)
(Another test is if your readership is diverse, contradictory by
*their* standards. That’s a clue you’re starting to leapfrog them and
to tap into something bigger than them.)
