From Here to Eternity and Zining
I just watched FHtE for the first time. Cool antiestablishment flick.
Actually it’s pro-establishment, anti-jerk. It’s about workers versus
fakers, soldiers versus officers, real people versus those who are
joiners or dialed in.
As every pursuit in the world becomes professionalized it seems like
there’s less room for real people. Everyone has to play an angle, kiss
up somewhere, fake somewhere.
The professionalization is the problem because in its modern sense
it’s also *specialization*. Fracturing or fragmenting off with its own
interests from the rest of the world, culture, society. Everyone has
a lobby group and has to put on a good face for their group, to help
their pro cause. (Librarians, too.)
But in so doing you actually work AGAINST the actual trade you’re doing.
That’s why FHtE has the classic theme: Prewitt quit the bugle corg because
he was a bugler. Another guy got the #1 bugle spot because he wasn’t.
He got reamed by the other soldiers coz he was a soldier; so were they
but they’d fallen for the illusion that they wanted out, wanted money,
to party. Even the blues songs they sang showed their lie: as soon as
they got out, they wanted back in. But a guy who was just a soldier
and wouldn’t play any other game, they couldn’t stand. So,
if you refuse to hurt what you love in professionalizing modernism,
you have to die, be ruined, etc. Because those who are organizing
what they love are thinking of themselves first. They treat it as a
racket and kill the thing they love.
This seems to fit in with zining and be an inspiration for it.
All other publishing and media have become professionalized
rackets…only lies and the two-faced need apply. Zining supports
real culture, real literature.
Think if it weren’t for zines and their potential what a bind we’d be in.
We’d be stuck with Harpers and Utne and those posers and players.
