There’s more to life than Forrest Gump would have us believe, say the people behind a new underground magazine. They spoke to William Pretorius
MOST magazines would shudder at taking video nasties seriously, but there’s none of the usual moral gumpf to Mimizine’s assessment of Cannibal Holocaust, a gore fest from Italian director Ruggero Deodata. Instead, the film is described as “a hard-hitting attack on the dishonest and manipulative media”.
But Frank Bailey, Sean Shapiro and Dominic Lee aren’t gore fiends. In fact, their magazine includes articles on Blade Runner and director David Cronenberg, a review of Natural Born Killers that cuts though the hype, and an interview with cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling.
It’s just that they hate Forrest Gump and the idea of stupidity being politically correct. “Now we’re told that it doesn’t matter if you’re the intellectual inferior of a wombat,” they editorialise, “as long as you’re a nice person. Bullshit! Blatant stupidity is not an admirable trait.” The solution: read Mimizine and become an “overly informed, opiniated, intellectual bastard with a superiority complex!”
But seriously, they say, “we want to show other critical views … We’re not anti-escapist, pushing for social realism movies to be shown at breakfast. We love escapism, but we want to show people other things they could watch or read that aren’t that weird. There’s more to life than the Forrest Gump-style hype being forced down everyone’s throats.”
Shapiro, Bailey and Lee previously brought out the now- defunct fanzine Lolita 17. Says Shapiro: “Fanzines are good proving grounds, but bound to destroy themselves. They write about what they like in a very bad-boy attitude without an objective critical stance, sort of oooh, we love this, you should too.”
If Bailey and co are into anything, it’s computers and networking. That’s how they set up their interview with Sterling. “Unlike most celebrities in this country who are very rude to us, the major celebrities overseas, even the biggest, are willing to do interviews. You e-mail someone and they’re more likely to pay attention than if you wrote a letter. They all think `the computer’s my new toy, so let’s respond just because we can’. It works to our benefit.”
They don’t subscribe to any movement or ideology — except, one discovers, “new flesh”.
“It’s from David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome and basically means the evolutionary development of the human body. Evolution is speeding up in terms of new flesh ideology. Our children are different to us in a physical sense. They are more capable of using technology than we are. The fact that a person can tape his entire life and put it on a computer and exist literally through that means he’s got an existence beyond his own existence. That’s new flesh.
“And that’s what our magazine is, connecting with other nervous systems. Even just writing articles, it gets into someone’s brain and becomes part of their world view. Thoughts become a virus — they’re catchy. That’s the closest we have to a philosphy.”
To catch the virus, subscribe to Mimizine at PO Box 74151, Turffontein, 2149. Six issues cost R35. Issue three is on the way and includes an article on psycho- killer films. Says Lee: “We’re showing that Quentin Tarantino didn’t make up the psycho-killer genre. It extends as far back as the Thirties.” So now you know.