The 25th Annual San Francisco Zine Fest on Sunday afternoon was a blast from the past in more ways than one.
First of all, it was being held at the 1892 Hibernia Bank building at Jones and McAllister...
...which was recently renovated as an event space after sitting vacant for decades.
Secondly, the free admission event was requiring all vendors and attendees to wear masks...
...which engendered immediate PTSD in those who were transported back to the bad old days of COVID's onset in 2020.
Security at the door, who were handing out snug black masks, explained that it was for the benefit of vendors who lived with disabilities and immunosuppression, but it felt strange and uncomfortable.
Though zine culture seems like vintage pre-internet, its current creators represent a physical corrective to our increasingly corporate, digital world.
In a side room I stumbled across one of the serious legends of alternative culture, V. Vale. I had no idea who the gentleman was until returning home and reading his bio
at the RE/SEARCH website: "Possibly the ONLY surviving 70s punk publisher who never quit, V. Vale’s RE/Search continues to provide ‘Against-the-Status-Quo’ publications that stimulate the imagination and optimistic skepticism. Vale has been doing counterculture publishing since 1977, when he founded the Punk tabloid, Search & Destroy, San Francisco’s first. It was published at City Lights Bookstore, where V. Vale worked, and was funded by $100 each from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Then in 1980, V. Vale launched RE/SEARCH, which is best known for its impact on the total world of underground culture."
Also attending was another legendary publisher, Larry-Bob Roberts, who started the
Holy Titclamps queer punk zine in Minnesota in 1989 and continued publishing it in San Francisco until 2003.
