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Vice Blog

NEW YORK - TIME TO STOP IT RIGHT NOW

Speaking of libraries and reading things, zines, it's time to take back the night. You are being raped up the ass, and you don't even know it. Probably you think you're holding some kind of tea-light vigil on the steps of the printed media mausoleum with this new collage-art movement, but you're wrong. It used to be that zines contained some kind of information, even if it was just a lousy list of reasons why you hate Hunt's ketchup, or the 4 AM dossier of nothing ever happening at the local Denny's, or how to dye wool with beets and yarrow root you harvested from a fucking urban garden, or fucking anything that gave a hint that you knew how to read, at least a little. But now all we're getting sent are these wastes of a small slice of forest. They don't have titles, captions, credits, or even a single word. We don't even care anymore if they look interesting or "good" (this one doesn't)--people are clearly sub-macaroni-brain stupid these days, so circulating advocacy material for the illiterate doesn't help anyone. We know we often feature zines that're less texty than picturey but we're calling a full-stop moratorium on attention to this practice. Cripes, at least include a hieroglyph…something, anything. Please.

Why?