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Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 291 Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture Verso Press, 1997 By Stephen Duncombe What is a zine? Zines are noncommercial, nonprofessional, smallcirculation magazines that their creators produce, publish and distribute by themselves. In Notes from UndergroundStephen Duncombe outlines the long history of alternative presses in the United States and how zines as a distinct medium were born in the 1930s. It was then that fans of science fiction, often through the clubs they founded, began producing what they called "fanzines" as a way of sharing science fiction stories and critical commentary and of communicating with one another. Forty years later, in the mid-70s, the other defining influence on modern-day zines began as fans of punk rock music, ignored by and critical of the mainstream music press, started printing fanzines about their music and cultural scene. In the early 1980s the two currents, joined by smaller streams of publications created by fans of other cultural genres, disgruntled selfpublishers , and the remnants of printed political dissent from the sixties and seventies, were brought together and cross-fertilized through listings and reviews in network zines like Factsheet Five. As the "fan" was by and large dropped off the "zine," and theit numbers increased, a whole culture of zines developed. In an era marked by rapid capitalization of cotporate media, zines are independent and localized, coming out of cities, suburbs and small towns, often pieced together on kitchen tables and reproduced with office equipment when the boss isn't looking. According to Duncombe, zines celebrate the everyperson in a world of celebrity, losers in a society that rewards the best and brightest. Rejecting the corporate dream of an atomized population broken down into discrete and insttumental target markets, zine writers form networks and communities around diverse identities and intetests. Employed within the grim new economy of service, temporary and 'flexible' work, they redefine work, setting out their creative labor doing zines against the protest of the drudgery of working for another's profit. (2) Defining themselves against a society based on consumption, zinestets privilege the ethic of do-it-yourself: make your own culture and stop consuming that which is made for you. Refusing to believe those who 292 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies assure us that the laws of the market are synonymous with the laws of nature, the zine community is busy creating a culture whose value isn't calculated as profit and loss, but is assembled in the margins, using criteria like control, connection and authenticity. The author of this book seems almost reluctant to uncover the mysterious underworld of zines to what will most likely be the professional academic. This is not surprising. Witness to a powerful explosion of cultural dissent as he researched and wrote his study, the first half of the book sustains a blissful fantasy of underground culture as vanguard of worldwide revolution. It is in the second half of the book that he realizes and theorizes as to why the world above this idyllic underground is moving in the opposite direction and why underground, unofficial culture poses no threat whatsoever to the world above. Quite the opposite: "alternative " culture is being celebrated in the mainstream media and academia and being used to create new styles and profits for the commercial culture industry. In the United States there are zines centered around such topics as science fiction, music, sports, television and film of course, but there are others like the gay safe-sex Diseased Pariah News to Past Deadline, which reprints nineteenth-century newspaper articles. Meanwhik and Beer Frame print satirical reviews of banal products. A young woman in the WhatleyBrown Review simply puts out drawings, poems, thoughts and ideas about herself while the mental meanderings of the residents of an old-age home are recorded in Dupkx P^et. In the Hispanic world, zines also make important contributions to the formation of unofficial, local, underground cultures. In Spain, for example, Pinta y colorea has a special Madrid edition of its zine. In its brief editorial the creators state: Quizás piensas que estas historias te van a enseñar algo sobre esta pu...

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