Dear reader,
For the past three years I’ve published, off and on, a zine called ‘The Antisocial’. ‘The
Antisocial’ mainly consisted of social/political commentary through essays and pictures. The way
I usually chose to describe the zine was simply as “a way to express the opinions of my friends
and I.” I feel that over the life of the zine I accomplished this goal, with varying degrees of
success. Lately, however, I’ve felt that ‘The Antisocial’ has outlived it’s usefulness. Over the
past six months, six of my friends have started their own zines. Having this many amazing zines
come out in quick succession is obviously very cool, but for me it is also terribly liberating. I no
longer feel the burden of having to provide a forum for the kids to express themselves as I have in
the past. I know that they can do it themselves. This frees me to do what I want, to concentrate
solely on expressing myself.
Lately though, ‘The Antisocial’ has not met my needs as far as self expression. The only
two substantial pieces which I personally contributed to the last ‘Antisocial’ (besides, of course,
for editing and layout) were an interview with Ian MacKaye and a collage called ‘The Uber
Woman Project’. I enjoyed both these pieces immensely, but found it hard to find myself in
either. The interview with Ian was about Ian’s voice, not my own, and he of course has been
making his voice heard since long before I was making zines. I was very proud of the ‘Uber
Woman Project’, but it was made completely from Media generated images, and was more an
objective view (well, not truly objective, but that’s another essay for another day...) of society and
culture than on my own personal feelings.
Considering that I no longer feel obligated to publish ‘The Antisocial’ and that ‘The
Antisocial’ no longer meets my needs, the only solution is to longer print ‘The Antisocial’. I
don’t necessarily mean that I never will again, but for the time being I have to do something else
instead. You hold that something else in your hands at this very minute. I wanted to make
something that was purely self expression, so I stripped away the illustrations and the ads and the
Marxist essays and everything else, and only kept what truly matters. This essence, this truth,
took the form of words... some would call it poetry. This zine was not hard to make, these are
poems which I’ve written because I’ve had no choice but to write them. Some were written
almost a year before I put these zine together, others were written in a mad frenzy only days ago,
but al would have been written whether or not I decided to do this zine. This zine was hard to
publish though. It’s a very hard thing to print up your most personal thoughts and give them to
strangers, and even worse, acquaintances. It’s easy to distribute a confrontational zine full of
rants, interviews, and comics, many of which you are not even personally responsible for. It’s
easy to hide behind layers of images, behind cynicism and sarcasm, behind dogma and rhetoric,
behind the ideal of giving everyone a chance to express their political views. It’s quite another
thing to stand naked.
peace,*
Ben Nadler
* I’ve only recently come to appreciate the term ‘peace’ as a salutation. One is always tempted to take the easy
way out and to place it in either a hippie or hip hop context, but taken by itself, ‘peace’ is truly a wonderful way
to end a communication. I can’t claim to love someone that I don’t know, nor do I feel the need to declare my
words sincere- I hope that all my writing is sincere. But to simply wish that you, whoever you may be, should find
peace, that you should find rest from this wearying world, that you should find escape from the violence of this
world... To end a communication in that way is really very lovely.
back
