Teenage Revolution
I’ve got good news and bad news, set it up as you see fit: Here Title Place is dead. Teenage Revolution marks the occasion in this interesting autopsy of sorts. After publishing for four years and 16 or so issues, the underground paper of a suburban Toronto high school has graduated a student and indie publishing guru. What you get here is advice on indie publishing (especially in a high school context), which is solid, if sometimes obvious to people already into DIY. But you also get reprints from as far back as 1995 spanning the whole history for good measure. How strange is it to read five-year old high school quarrels and obsessions? But really, how much stranger is it than reading current ones when you don’t know the people involved anyway? If that old saying about forgetting the past makes us doomed to relive it has any credence at all, this is perhaps just the sort of activity every zine should undertake in some form or another as it goes along. So, in the October 1997 issue, we were already awash in Walmarts and Starbucks, and when our zinester asks “is this our future? Will Toronto and Mississauga get taken over by superstores with phony atmospheres?” he probably didn’t really need to wait 2 years for an answer. But it’s actually quite interesting to read the crispness of the rant when it was fresh, not yet digested, and not yet shit out the other end too. (HC)
zine, 32 pgs, $1.50 (ppd), 3149 Windwood Drive, Mississauga, ON L5N 2K4