Unscene Berlin

I am in a hallway in a turn-of-the-century community centre with high ceilings; the patchy walls are decked with fairy lights, protest posters peel from the yellowing walls.   Every inch of the scuffed floors is filled with the shuffling feet of a rainbow crowd.  Dogs weave through a crowd of black and white Rastas, hippies with pastel dreads and randoms with out-grown, razor-cut hair do's. Fresh-faced white activists & weary black men cross paths and chat.   All around them, people are smiling & swaying in droves... People squeezing their way down the hall slow as they pass by a group of Africans propping up a bar, in the middle of the hall. Passers-by are dragged in by the exhibitionist banter.  The air is peppered with giddy outbursts of hilarity.  A nother exchange of stories and ideas ignites.  Hip hop and reggae throbs out of a spacious room, at one end of the hall.   At the other end, clean-shaven hardtek fans in militant gea...

What ever happened to the drama in our lives? In the quest to become the individual directors of its content, we've given up our roles as its muses.  More time spent photographing, producing and presenting ourselves online has equaled less time spent in front of the lens or in search of fresh material. So it's great to see that the unashamed theatrics of simply being can still be found in a medium where all but self-expression have been removed. In zine-land, there's no chance to edit, second-guess or overproduce the content we come up with.  This is where the zine gets its addictive, artistic appeal from. "How to Become a Sea Creature in a Call Center" & other zines... Zine culture as we know it had its countercultural boom in the 1970s & 1980s punk scene, with label-band Crass leading the charge.  In the 1990s, the zine diversified, with grrrl bands like Suckdog and ravers mingling with the hardcore punk zine crowd. The zine even surviv...