At times it is unsettling how many books, magazines and such that I have that I absolutely do not remember buying. Sometimes the media is something Mr OTC purchased that ended up in my various shelves and stacks, but this is not one of those times because CRY is definitely not something he would be interested in. He’s ex-military. He has very little interest in human carnage. While I have less and less interest in the visceral nature of violence, I suspect the hook was the synopses of accidental and lonely deaths rather than the violent and sexually disturbing collages that make up half the content in the ‘zine.
This is a provocation ‘zine, a descendant of very shocking provocative ‘zines that drew me in when I was much younger. Opinions will vary but the apex of provocation ‘zines was during the eighties and through the mid-nineties. Though a lot of provocation ‘zines are still a thing, the fact is that the early generation used images that were genuinely shocking. Late Boomers and Gen-Xers had a lot of fears – nuclear war, AIDS, the specter of shorter lifespans and worse economic fates than our parents experienced, the sudden rise of serial killers, among them – but we didn’t have the non-stop barrage of horribleness that has become common today. ‘Zines that showed us horrible images alongside horrible text, be it fiction or non-fiction, still had the power to shock.
The shock often came from a place of incompleteness. For instance, I had of course seen victims of the Holocaust in movies and knew there were CIA-funded wars happening in Central America. But I had never seen photos of bulldozers pushing emaciated corpses into pits or naked men being attacked by dogs while members of the SS garrison stood watching and laughing. I had not seen the broken and buried bodies from the El Mozote massacre. But ‘zine makers had access to such photos (and how some of them got their hands on some of the rarer photos is still a matter for discussion) and they shared how it is that even the most shocking violence is almost always far worse than we could imagine and that there is an ocean of cruelty, misery and horror we don’t know about. Provocational ‘zines were how I learned about the ways animals are treated in the food industry, and those pictures of torture I could barely imagine then haunt me to this day.
Such shock is useful to the reader. It was certainly helpful to me. It was part of becoming an adult, of raising the curtain and seeing what is really happening.
In the case of CRY, I don’t find much that is helpful, probably because I’ve reached the point to where I’ve seen every sort of atrocity outside of child pornography so it’s pretty hard to provoke me. However, it is important to remember that sometimes even provocative ‘zines are less a desire to punch the audience in the face than an attempt to communicate inner turmoil or to share links between social phenomena that few others can see.
The purpose of this ‘zine is unclear to me and that I don’t know who created it doesn’t help. Google “cry” and “‘zine” and let me know how it goes for you. I do know the ‘zine was released after 2015 because the first collage featured in the ‘zine contained stills from a video that became notorious in gore and criminal justice spheres online. In 2015, a fourteen-year-old girl in Rio Bravo, Guatemala was brutally beaten by a mob and then set on fire. Townsfolk believed she was involved in the murder of a taxi cab driver, but whether or not she was really involved is still open for debate. The two men she was with fled and left her behind to deal with the angry mob. The creator of this ‘zine opened with images of her, without any explanation, so clearly her story has some larger purpose grounding this ‘zine.
The Rio Bravo images are followed by a disturbing collage that incorporates human faces and spiders, which itself is followed by another collage, featured in black and white on one page and in color on the other. The images in this collage are from gonzo and humiliation porn, with images of snarling dogs, genital torture and, most disturbingly, the face (and only the face) of a little girl. The women in these images are vomiting, dressed as barn animals, covered in feces, and screaming. The title of the piece is “Smile for the Camera.” This brutality is followed by a two-page color collage of a woman’s face covered with what appears to be an aborted baby.
After the collages are four news-style stories about death. Minimal research of the names involved lead me to believe all these deaths were made up, which makes the meaning in them all the more important. The stories are about a father who accidentally ran over his daughter when she fell off the boat he was driving, a father and son who died drowning while on vacation, a nightcrawler who ended up recording his own death in a car accident, and a man whose suicide isn’t noticed for weeks.
Since the author created these sad stories, they aren’t just sad stories about unexpected death with a heavy emphasis on parents who wished they could have saved their children. Where I run aground is trying to marry the four stories with the collages that come before them. Is the theme the notion that parental love cannot stop atrocity, be it saving a child from drowning, from mob violence, or from being abused in extreme porn? If so, it’s sort of a tenuous link.
Outside of that shot in the dark, I am unsure what the creator was going for. And the hell of it is, maybe he or she had no greater goal than to present upsetting images and stories that show the futility of existence, or perhaps there is no greater idea behind the desire to shock or upset, a valid goal for reading such ‘zines. In the end I have no idea. Which is sort of fitting since I have no idea who made this ‘zine, where I got it, and why I bought it.
But also in the end, artistic endeavor has value in itself outside of the meaning people like me ferret out of it. That’s a hard pill for me to swallow because my life is dedicated to ferreting out meaning but however I look at it, CRY forced me to interact with the content, and that has a value to it as well.
Next week expect some Chris Mikul ‘zines to be discussed as I gather steam to tackle the very intense and wordy Q-Anon-ish ‘zine that I both dread and am strangely excited about reading. Wish me luck.