You are a writer, and one day you wake up with an epiphany. “Society [or “culture” or “the world” or “your mom” or whatever] is a toilet,” you exclaim before even removing your satin sleeping cap and matching eye mask. “What it needs now more than ever is a cherry bomb to expose the fetid sewage it carefully conceals.” You do not know necessarily why this should be so, but you know that you have all the skills and resources with which to bring about that outcome. You resolve to set aside all of your present, half-finished projects. You, dear writer, are going to write a Dangerous Work.
I can say without having to make any hard inquiries that most writers worthy of the term have had this very epiphany. And I can say with about the same certainly that 99.8 or so percent of those writers have not gotten beyond that thought. This is no slight against their convictions; on the contrary, it confirms their maturity. Too bad I was in the remaining 0.2 percent.
In life I was not much of a cherry-bomber, but I’d often aspired to be one. My own vision was one in which the supply of literal toilets was far and away dwarfed by the number of metaphorical toilets that demanded total disruption. For much of my adolescence I struggled with arriving at the form my particular explosive would take. I knew that it must convey the uneasy paring of petulance and devastation; something to confound the cultural custodians beyond reason. Then in the waning days of my senior year at college it came to me: a zine.
The genesis of Biopsy is one I’ve told and retold to listeners willing and unwilling, and it probably doesn’t need much repeating. (Everyone seems to find the interview I gave to Vice in 2012 at one point or another anyway.) But it seems fruitful, at least for want of any better posting ideas, to come to terms with my more sordid ambitions for the venture.
A single justification was about as coherent as you’d expect from someone who was less than a year into legal drinking age. And frankly it didn’t get much clearer from issue to issue as the dilemma of having to fill pages was a constant strain on my faculties for Big Concepts. With such scant resources, Biopsy was left to adopt a spirit; spirits being less tangible than concepts, and certainly less marketable. What ideas I had going into it feel now more like hunches or reflexes. They came from punk, from the 18th and 19th century essayistic tradition, and from the 20th century avant-garde, and the most uninviting fringes of ‘90s alt culture. Each issue was like a work of intellectual cubism done blindfolded. Even that sounds overly generous, but it was also the best theoretical grounding for pursuing any idea that came to my head.
Biopsy ideas had two categories: glorified late-2000s blog posts (I “endorsed” Mike Gravel in the first issue for some reason) and deranged, decadent monologues. I’d thought I’d managed a sophisticated balancing act by which I would lure readers with the former and overload their consciences, whichever way, with the latter. With no business sense whatever I’d hoped to distribute it enough to make it a curious found object. I had foresworn editor’s letters, which I hate even now, throwing my reader headlong into my personal maelstrom.
As with every ambitious young person I’d hoped it would go against the prevailing mood of the moment. That mood, from 2008 to 2013, was marked predominantly by optimism. The previous decade had felt like America’s absolute nadir, and there was an eagerness to crawl out of it with some dignity. True, there was discontent; the economic collapse wrought Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party Movement, both had wrought Jon Stewart’s Rally for Sanity or whatever it was. But these were not taken seriously, at least not by Serious People like myself.
Even with all that apprehension it was still a very, very tiny era of good-feeling; I’d wanted to piss all over it. I guess this is to confuse the original metaphor but nevertheless! I would be the ruiner of the party, and I’d hoped to find a healthy legion of party-ruiners, preferably about my age and a bit younger. Biopsy would be the scourge of guidance counselors, academic deans, and youth pastors. If all went according to plan, my family would disown me and senators would condemn me. Chris Christie would collapse into paroxysms of a vaguely erotic tinge on live TV, all due to my comically overripe, badly proofread prose. The effect would be so shattering that copies would be destroyed in public. The zine would be a symbol of moral derangement and cultural upheaval. I would be driven into exile in the most gothic and theatrical fashion. I could be living in endlessly autumnal solitude in Wildwood, never on the boardwalk without my enshrouding black velvet cloak—a walking symbol of moral decrepitude to all I pass, a figure of legend to everyone else. Would’ve been sick.
Of course that vivid fantasy remained just that, and for sensible enough reasons. First and most obviously is that which the smarter 99.8 percent of scribblers have already discovered: dangerous works aren’t written, they’re discovered. Even as most writers can never be toilet-disrupters, some through no fault of their own become snakes sliding through the pipes. This should have been foremost in my mind given that I’d discovered my own toilet snake within a few years of starting the zine.
20 years ago, while driving to see a matinee of Converge in Philly, my college friend told me about this book that came out two years earlier: Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, a collection of profiles of iconic punk and indie rock bands in the lead-up to the release of Nevermind. Though not my “golden book” as Wilde would say of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, it was one that I’d read many times, and refuse to part with to this day. It has its flaws. Azerrad’s reportage involves a lot of legend-printing, for one, and and the revolutionary mythology that forms the book’s thematic core has since been demolished by alt-rock survivors like Jon Fine in his excellent memoir Your Band Sucks. There’s little of its core conclusions about punk as a social force that I hadn’t arrived at on my own. Its value, then, is in its crystallization of those conclusions as being worthy of ongoing thought well beyond the bounds of “popular” culture. Even if the “revolution” of alt-rock never took place, a more substantial one may be possible using these same precepts. This is done entirely in spite of Azerrad. I didn’t think he was making a polemical point and I’m not sure he thought so either. I took his ideas and ran with them, to an extent that any punk of a certain age would likely look on what I’ve written about straight-edge, Henry Rollins, Darby Crash, and Coalesce in utter bafflement at best. But that is a matter for another time, perhaps another book.
Absent that wisdom, my instincts lead me instead to deposit the product of my diabolical fixations where they could have no effect whatsoever: American Apparels in Brooklyn, feminist bookstores in Lower Manhattan, zine fests in Midtown billiard halls, and other hipster enclaves of the Portlandia decade. I remember one of the few reviews it got was mostly about how the reviewer didn’t actually read the issue. I’d sent copies to an online editor at Vice who told me in the most coldly dismissive cadence (I’d called to follow up) that she “had no opinion.” I think she’s gone on to become some kind of wellness consultant or something.
That would still hardly matter without the appropriate audience, who totally existed in some far off place. Based on my current reading of the room they were getting all their moral corruption from SpongeBob. In their present maturity they’ve moved onto other things.
Security against any resurgence comes less from the zine’s well-established faults and more from its under-appreciated merits. Some of the things I wrote about—the transgressive embrace of conservatism in issue one; the rise of sex negativity in issue three—have already come to pass. Its humor, in addition to being unreservedly macabre, went beyond the easily reproducible irony-posting of today. And even that has fallen in favor of alternating fits of severity and smugness. But least fashionable of all is its lack of self-consciousness. Blame it on the innocence of youth, the hazards of self-imposed cultural isolation, or just being too busy to think things through; little credence was given toward the instinct to look over our shoulder for crouching antagonists or to preempt them with posturing jeers rather than let the work speak for itself. This is terribly prevalent today as to be habitual, especially on my own side: “These PURITANS on the ‘progressive’ left can’t handle this new cool thing [up to and including pickleball and snuff films, presumably]. Not like YOU, the true trailblazing AVANT-GARDE psychoNAUTS.” If the primary venial sin of the digital era is being perceived, the primary mortal sin is being perceived as cringe. There was, and remains, plenty to cringe at in Biopsy, and I committed it to print.
I think it’s no unhealthy thing to let your early accomplishments live rent-free in your head. More so if those accomplishments have difficult-to-conceal flaws. You may spend as much time as you wish thinking of how you’d do them over, but ultimately you leave the regret for never having done it rather than for having done it badly. Sometimes people do suggest that I put out another issue, because maybe the culture really has caught up with it in some small way. It’s a nice thought, but one I don’t find much reason to act on. It would simply not be the same. It would feel dishonest and, like most things already in existence, try-hard. Its potential is pretty much fulfilled, and it contributed as much as it could to my own, which has, I guess, evolved some.
A while back, a friend of mine felt compelled to praise my work as comparable to Romantic essayist Charles Lamb. (Quite a shift from another friend’s description of Biopsy as “literary grindcore.”) I couldn’t deny it; this very essay is proof enough. Still, I take the compliment more generally to mean that I’ve earned my style and kept true to my humor. Culture is a volatile thing, and trying to stay relevant is more madness-inducing than any zine screed. My jealousy over my humor resists all vibe shifts. To betray it is tantamount to walking to the nearest empty mausoleum; or, as the embittered millennials zoomers might say, to going coffincore.