Life Hints
DIY Ethics

As hard corps members of the indie zine (pronounced leim) community. We know a bit about DIY. Like when we go to Home Depot, we follow ladies around and help them make cabinets. And we make awesome stenciled t-shirts that are tight enough to show our frumpy (we don’t care) titties and half-assed beer bellies. We tip homeless people. We have a garden, a laminator (for bookmarks and coasters), broken and retied shoelaces and belts made of old 45s. However, most importantly, we print this magazine (we toyed with calling it a mega’zine' for awhile) on mashed up trees and design it on an Apple.

In dealing with all the cool non-rockstars, indie filmmakers and punkaesthete artists that we interview, we’ve learned a thing (or 40,000!) about DIY ethics. For example, The Middlemen is an important and influencial jazz-punk band from San Pedro, NOT someone you want to deal with when you’re trying to sell your publication/record/foreign coin ear cuffs. I like to think about where DIY ethics have taken an awesome band like Jane’s Addiction: from tranny hookers, to junky sand sculptors, to the hottest thing in rock and roll!

If you don’t know what DIY stands for, this is the article for you. To get it out of the way, it means do it yourself. Now, a lot of kids with pillow cases for shirts and homemade upside-down cross tattoos will tell you they know all about DIY ethics. They do because they live it. They get up in the morning, skip the shower and just start the day off doing it [them]selves. Unfortunately for those of us with name brand tattoos, who purchase our shirts, there’s a lack of information out there to educate us how to live the life. There’s been no definitive guide for how to live within the principles of underground youth punk culture. If you’re a worrier this might not stop you from fretting altogether, but we’ve created a Guide to DIY Ethics.

1) Be white or hispanic and wear tight black jeans. If you’re black you’ll have to wear a fedora or be really big and REALLY friendly. DIY Jews are probably square in the daytime. And for how smart they are, Asians don’t really seem to be able to do much by themselves.

2) Send your friends letters and packages full of crap: Band Aids, lint, a local grocery circular, broken Tic Tac containers, whatever. Just make sure it’s totally useless.