
30 YEARS OF HOOFSIP
The Ethan Minsker Interview
by Jerry White Jr.
September 2024 / $1.50
When we made HOOFSIP, we got to meet and collaborate with a lot of cool and talented people. One of those folks was veteran zinester Ethan Minsker. In this chapter of our Hoofsip Retrospective, Jerry & Ethan dive deep into what the zine scene was like — then and now.
JERRY: Your history with zines goes way back. Do you remember how you came to know about Hoofsip?
ETHAN: I started with East Coast Exchange, and transitioned to Psycho Moto Zine. You would send your zines out to things like Flipside and Maximum RocknRoll, and you would get your fanzine reviewed. And then that way, you would find other fanzines, and you would physically put your zine in the mail. You would mail it out to people, and you would, in return, get a zine back from the other fanzine creator on the other side. So it was a physical media exchange of zines. You would stick other things in there, like stickers, it would end up being a whole package of stuff you get in the mail. I also remember trading VHS tapes. I would make these fanzine videos and Anything Boys Can Do. . . and you would send your public access show, 30 Minutes of Madness to me. I believe we started trading first, and then we started adding — each other would write a kind of essay and submit that to the other person’s zine. And that would be a way you would propagate and spread your artwork through the zine culture.
JERRY: I still have two of your VHS tapes. So the fact that you were doing zines and movies, that particularly would have attracted me, because we were doing movies and zines. But yeah, that tracks — I know we were submitting to Maximum RocknRoll and Flipside too, get the reviews, and do trades. As someone who’s not only got a long history with print medium zines, you still do them. Am I correct?
ETHAN: No, the pandemic cut my access to copy machines, because I was no longer in the offices for the broadcast channel I was working for. We were doing zines up until 2020, though. Forty floors with unsupervised copy machines. So yeah, now I’m focusing on art and films, but not the zine stuff anymore.
JERRY: 1997/98 is when I really first started noticing, and feeling, this pull toward the web and making a website instead of a zine. And then obviously, once the 2000s hit, everyone was just moving on to making their websites. What to you is valuable about print zines, fanzines, and comparing that to a website or blog?
ETHAN: I have a long history personally with fanzines starting back in ’88 and continuously doing a fanzine all the way till 2020. So if you look at the history, fanzines were predating the internet. It was a way that you could build a community. You could correspond with people through the mail. I would get letters from people all over the world. And through Maximum RocknRoll and Flipside too, I would post in there, my zine is free if you’re incarcerated. So I would get requests for fanzines from prisoners all through the US and overseas in Poland. And I remember those zines would travel through the prison system for years. I would continuously get letters from prisoners and people who were incarcerated, and that included John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer. He tried to get me to write about his artwork and stuff in prison. And also this guy in Poland who was a drug dealer who was in there writing me. And they would send articles like prison pro tips, like a fifi bag — how you take a sandwich bag and put Vaseline in it, cut a hole in your bed, and then you can have sex with a mattress. And apparently if you can heat up the bag, it’s even better.
So there was a whole thing in that time period when people would really respond. They would come across the zines. I would put them out in New York City and in Washington, some I would sell at CBGBs. And then once I got more access to free copy machines — because I started putting “if you have access to a copy machine, be a copy room bandit for us,” and “get back at the man if you’re a disgruntled employee by making free copies of my zines.” So I had people at Kinko’s and their regular office jobs and architects all sending me big piles of free zines, reprinting my zines. So in that time period, when you would put that out, people would write you and respond. And there was much more of a community centered around physical media. When I say physical media, I mean actually printed on paper with stuff in it, glue and tape.
Once the internet started happening, it was obviously easier for people to communicate and chat by putting zines online, whether that was like WordPress or somebody’s blog. I remember there was a thing called Scribe I used for a while, where you could put the PDF of your zine up so people could access it. But over the years, you would realize that there was less of a community because people just didn’t really respond the way they had. So even just recently, I did an art show and I had somebody come up to me being like, “Oh, you’re the guy who did that Psycho Moto Zine.” And I was like, yeah, it would have been really nice if somebody had ever let me know that you actually read the zines that I’ve been putting out for free in the neighborhood. And when I say free, my old employer used to have copy machines that were never supervised in an entire building in Times Square, so I would continuously print and probably put out maybe close to 50,000 to 100,000 copies of a zine during the course of a year. Full color and all the good stuff. But once COVID happened and I lost access to that, I really haven’t been doing zines as much. I still teach fanzine workshops and, every once in a while, I’ll make a piece of artwork for a zine that I put out.
The internet kind of killed fanzines in a larger way for a long time because people found it much more easier to express themselves and get a cheaper, much more effective way of reaching large amounts of people. But what I found with that, at a certain point, unless you were the one really pushing your, like “check out what I put online, check out my blog,” that circle kept growing smaller and smaller because there was more content and less people wanted to spend time actually reading. So I still believe in the power of a fanzine. That putting out something physical and placing that out in some random places — you take a zine and you leave it somewhere like a coffee shop or a record store or in an ATM, on a bus, a train seat, some random person picks that up, and then they’re interjected into your creative circle. So I think as an artist and as a creator or a filmmaker, you’re always preaching and reaching out to your same circle of friends, and then hopefully they’re spreading the word to their circle. At a certain point, though, you’re limited by your reach because you’re not finding those outer circles of random happenstance, of the random connection. And a physical zine still has that magic.
JERRY: Yeah, some of the fun things I remember with our zine, in addition to trading via mail, was we would have a route. We sold our zine at Record Time, Off The Record, Thomas Video. It would be physically in stores. Some of these were like mom and pop shops or some of these were very modest chains. In and around Metro Detroit. So you had, like you were saying, this opportunity to reach people randomly. And I think the weird part of the internet is it has a hypothetical reach of millions of people, which sounds really attractive. But you’re not really going to reach a million people the vast majority of the time. With a print zine, you might reach thirty people, but they may actually give a shit. Those thirty people — like I’m talking to you thirty years later. But if it had just been a website, we wouldn’t be talking. I don’t think there would have been any way to — I mean, first of all, if we had been a website then, we would have been on GeoCities. It would be long gone now.
ETHAN: An artist I have worked with before, Clayton Patterson, he’s a Lower East Side archivist. He explained to me the importance of archiving your work in a physical media. And the reason you should do that is because any website that you can ever imagine — and that includes YouTube, that includes Amazon, or any place that you have — historically, they all go away. So all these places like Vine went away. Friendster went away. Myspace went away. All these places you think would have been historical archives at some point vanish. So with him, I remember I started really focusing on where I can archive my physical media. And by doing that, I know I have some zines that are in some institution in Buffalo. And then when I started teaching at FIT, they looked up my zines and found out that I was in this academic archive. So then they asked me to put all my zines in the FIT archive. So there’s this thing that’s lost, all digital media is never permanent. And you can see this because also how many films that were on DVD and VHS, that there’s no digital copy of. There’s tons. However much you think it’s all actually out there and accessible, I’m telling you as somebody who went to Kim’s Video and went to all of these underground film festivals and stuff, it’s not all out there. So physical media and fanzines and all of that stuff, it’s all very important to still have something physical.
Maybe it’s a Gen X-er thing, but there is a certain quality of the fanbase when it came to physical media and actually finding it. And the miracle of finding something that you’re into that is also outsider art, that is also lowbrow art, that is also punk rock and punk rock adjacent, it was connecting with like-minded individuals. And I think for the time period — and I’m saying 80s, mid-80s, 90s, early 2000s — this sort of thing has in many ways gone away. So there is still a place. People still do fanzines, but it’s much more obscure. And it’s a much more close-knit community. Maybe that’s not an accurate or fair term, because I do see these zine festivals, where you meet a whole group of people who are doing zines that you just didn’t know, because it’s a whole younger generation. So there are people who still do fanzines.
The Brooklyn Museum of Art just did a massive exhibition on zines. So it’s still in the popular mind. People are still doing it. But it seems like it’s a little bit looked at like more nostalgia, as opposed to something that is active art now, that it’s important as something that’s a strong medium of getting the word out and affecting other people’s minds. Maybe it’s a little bit just looked at as like a throwback, like a nostalgic throwback to an art that is less relevant. That’s not my impression, but I think that’s how the larger art community looks at it.
JERRY: I went to the first LA Zine Fest, I think it was in 2011, or 2012. I’ve been a few times. I tabled once. This year, I went to the Tucson Zine Fest. And I can say, yeah, the average age does seem a lot more like millennials and Gen Z, although there’s a bit of a mix. There’s a lot of feminist and queer zines — that seems to be a really active art that isn’t just what you’re saying, as far as nostalgia. But I do think that I’ve also observed that too, where it’s like. . .intentionally doing something that’s a little more difficult and archaic out of nostalgia. Whereas when we were doing zines in the 90s and 80s, that’s just because that was it. We didn’t have the money to make a magazine. So we did zines with copy machines.
One of the people that unfortunately I’m not going to be able to talk to for this retrospective, but she was a main contributor of our zine, was Molly Brodak who sadly passed away in 2020. She was local in Rochester, Michigan in the 90s. She started collaborating with us and contributing stuff to our zine. And then she did a bunch of her own zines and created a zine distro as well. When she was interviewed for 20 Years of Madness, there’s this line she says that just moves me so much. She was talking about the fact that we did music, and we did movies, and we did zines and she said, “I couldn’t believe these people were near me.” That discovery of local outsiders, when you’re an outsider too, and the way that that can validate you and give you a sense of place in the community, it’s so fucking important.
And I don’t think that we’re being just Gen X and saying, “Well, things are different now.” Because the reality is the internet is like a completely new paradigm for humanity after forever. Like since the Gutenberg press, we’ve had some version of making pamphlets on your own. So we have however many hundred years of something that could be argued to be a fancy. And then the internet, which changes the paradigm completely. So things really have fundamentally changed. And I’m glad that I can chat with my friends abroad easily and even free. I’ve gained that through the internet. But I know that I’ve lost a certain — I actually can’t even articulate how much I’ve lost. I don’t really know.
What do you think we’ve lost? But what do you think we’ve gained because of the internet?
ETHAN: There’s two sides to this thing. Once the internet not just existed, but became more functional that you could video chat with people — I’m recording this on a system in my home remotely chatting with Mr. Jerry White Jr. — there is this sort of. . .it’s like Lévi-Strauss and these sort of media experts have this thing of the large city versus the small town, the Gemeinschaft, this sort of theory of, what do you lose in a large city? Will you lose the personal connections? You miss this interaction, one-on-one with people. But I believe that there’s still a mixture of both of those things. Yes, you’re sort of thrown into this big massive pool of anonymity that you become just a number. But at the same time, it is a small village. You do find connections. You do make new friendships and collaborators. And those people don’t have to necessarily live next door to you or in your same town. So I do like aspects of this new world of technology.
I do street art and make films and all of those things. And somebody will email me or connect to me because they came across a piece of artwork or saw something. And it’s happened time and time again where someone in Australia or New Zealand or Denmark and all over the world because they came across something. And in fact, one of the films I did, Dolls of Lisbon, I handcrafted 100 of these fabric-made dolls. Artists from Ecuador had watched a video that I made about sketchbook battles where we would have people making art. They would sketch and then the crowd would judge who was the winner and loser. And it kept getting down to our narrow number until there was only two battling. And they really loved this thing in Ecuador and asked if they could copy it. And I said, of course, it’s a template. Copy it. And then we started exchanging emails. And then I told them about this project in Portugal where I was making these canvas dolls and that they were for artists to work on and send back. And then I would display it in Lisbon. I sent them $3 and they made an additional three more dolls. And they sent me back six dolls. And they became a part of that project. And then later, me and a bunch of guys from our art group went down to Ecuador and traveled with them to other cities making projects in the streets and films and fanzines. There was a whole — and it’s a fanzineteca or biblioteca fanzine. It’s like a fanzine library out of Ecuador that a bunch of these artists I work with. And it was this fanzine community in Ecuador that was doing this crazy, really advanced, beautiful artwork in Quito and in Bato. And it’s that thing of both the internet where we found each other’s group through these internet videos that I made that were posted on the Wooster Collective. And then we met in real life, in physical, real life. We went to Ecuador. They’d come to New York. And we still communicate and still collaborate together. So yes, we lose some stuff with the internet. We also gain a whole lot of other stuff.
My major complaint is that I rarely have somebody transitioning from looking at a zine and then writing me saying, oh, I picked up your zine here. “I came across this and like, good work. Keep going.” Or like, can I collaborate with you? It used to happen all the time when it was pre-internet. You would have a lot more people write you letters. I had a big window display on Avenue B here in New York that said Psycho Moto Zine. And people would knock on the door, be like, I read your zine. So there’s this — for all the stuff we gain and all the stuff we lose, it’s sort of a wash.
We’re never going to go back. So there’s no reason to really cry about it. All you have to do is figure out how you can move forward. And the way to move forward is keep creating.
This is a good example. I made this as a little sort of thing, it says “Stool Pigeon.” It’s just artwork of pigeons that I did in my sketchbook. And then I printed out a one page of this and made multiples. And then when I would walk around in the galleries, sometimes you would see these galleries in New York where they have an office that’s unattended. And I would take the zine and throw it on their desk. And then somebody contacted me from one of the galleries because I left a zine on their desk. And they invited me to do this group show. So there is this magic of something physical. It’s still magic today. You never know when you might be – that one contact, or that one thing you tried — might lead to another thing.
JERRY: I have a number of things that have been going on the 30 Minutes of Madness blog, but like you said, it goes away. And the closest we have to something that’s not for profit archiving is archive.org, which I’m utilizing too. But there is no guarantee that that’s going to always exist. As I’m sure you know, they’re constantly being sued. So many companies want them gone. And yet, they’re the only decent resource for old websites and public domain media, but they’re still not physical. I guess they have a physical branch in San Francisco. But yeah, anyway, all that to say: I feel like I’m not quite doing this justice if I don’t, at some point, put some of this into print.
ETHAN: I hear you. I worked at Paramount and they just got rid of all the MTV News archive. So the Internet Archive, I guess, is trying to save a bunch of the old MTV News stuff, which is crazy, because when I worked at MTV, we would constantly have to send their archive of MTV News full clips for show reels and up fronts and things like that. So it just seems like somebody at MTV was like, let’s save a buck if we get rid of all this old content. You need that content! They’re not thinking about what they might need in a year or five years to get the next quarterly report. That just happened last week to Cartoon Network. Twenty-six-year-old website gone, taken off.
JERRY: And like you were saying, people might feel like, well, YouTube, that’s Google — so it’ll be around. Look, the minute YouTube’s operating costs are not worth it, Google’s not a fucking charity. They’re not going to say, well, we need to keep this for humanity. Only if someone else sweeps in, but who’s going to have the money for the trillions of fucking petabytes or whatever. So yeah, I definitely agree. And it’s scary though, too, because physical media, whether it’s VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, they’re not making those players anymore. I guess Blu-ray and UHD is still happening. But eventually, they’ll stop making those, I suspect. So at least with print, you don’t require another player. It makes me wonder if I need to take my movies and turn them into flip books. Maybe that’s the only way to future-proof them. But even physical archiving eventually runs up against some real hiccups like weather, climate, physical storage conditions and all of that. Entropy.
I agree with what you said about how the internet can facilitate in-person collaborations. It doesn’t always do that, but it certainly can. My takeaway, when I look back at Hoofsip, for me the zine itself, the actual content, is not really the most important takeaway. What I really think about, the experience of it, that I valued most, were the late nights where we were at Kinko’s, or at Denny’s, or somewhere, out all night, and just with scissors and tape, and working on shit together, making each other laugh, fucking around on copying machines. That connection, that in-person, physical connection. And the people we reached with it, even if it was just a few. Like you, I’ve collaborated since then, and I’ve emailed something off. And that has its own intellectual stimulation, but it does not compare with making actual memories in-person with people. And so that’s the other thing that I want to try to bring more into my life when I can. And I know you do a lot of that. You do a lot of artwork with tactile media, in-person. And I just think that’s great, because the best we can do still won’t probably save everything, but at least those experiences, they happened.
ETHAN: There was a great thing when you were doing zines. You would do these fanzine parties where you would invite your friends over. You’d maybe buy a little bit of beer, get some pizza. And when the copies came in from Kinko’s, I remember I had friends who were illegally copying for me at Kinko’s. And it was so great because they would send boxes delivered. I wouldn’t even have to go to Kinko’s, I would just give them the master. They would carry it into work and copy as they wanted and then a delivery would drop them off at my door. Then you would collate, put the zine together. Each person would have a page. Here’s page one, here’s page two, here’s page three. And you would pass them down. And then it would get to the end. And your last friend on the end would have the saddle stapler and it would make a perfect staple right in the middle of the zine. And then you would have it folded and then put in a pile. So I really enjoyed those fanzine parties where you would have your friends hanging around to collate the zines and staple them together.
Sometimes I would trade and barter. So once I started bartending like, oh, here’s a free drink / Here’s a hundred dollars on a copy card at this local copy shop. There are artists that I work with today that I know from those experience of those local copy shops where I would go in so much with my zines and make those copies where they’d be like, oh, this is really cool what you’re making. Tell me about it. Oh, I make this zine. Oh, I’m an artist too. Oh, you make art? Okay, you’re an artist who works at the copy place. Let me see your work. Oh, I like this. I’ll put it in the next issue. Well, I’m gonna give you some free copies then. I literally just did a project this summer where a friend of mine who used to come to all the art shows and he’s a big collaborator of mine. Now with somebody I knew who also worked in a copy store who would give me a lot of free copies and help supported the zine. So there’s a whole thing of just like actually being in there and doing it physical. It’s not just the printing and stapling parties, where you’re having your friends come at the end, but also those late nights where you’re figuring out the layout and the stories.
I really liked that physical part of the process. It’s always about the process of when you’re actually making something is the most enjoyable time. And then the spreading it out into the world and having it out there I also enjoy. I liked sneaking into places and sticking zines inside of like a Village Voice or you’d have these boxes out on the street where you could get free copies of like a newspaper. And I would throw a couple inside of there or walk into a gallery, like going into the Whitney Museum of Art and walking down, they have like a staircase like that is unsupervised. And I’d always hide a couple copies of zines there wondering if the staff would come by and either take it or throw it out, or like somebody else walking down the steps would pick it up.
If I go show a film, I always have something that’s physical that I’m handing out. Maybe a little piece of art or, you know, fanzines also taught me this thing of multiples. I do a lot of my art practice where I learn how to make many, many multiples of one thing. So whether it’s like, you know, these little things that I do currently for Art-o-Mat which are small papier-mâché pieces of art. And on the back has a little bio of me and my website and then they put those in converted cigarette machines that are sent all over the country and then people write to me on Instagram when they come across them. That is a throwback to when I was doing zines and the idea of reaching a larger audience and making affordable, sometimes free artwork, that is accessible to the person of any kind of budget level and building a fan base that would then carry on to your next project. So I still carry on a lot of those things I learned from doing fanzines back in the day. I always think that somebody needs to make like a documentary called “Zined,” where it’s like all of these zine makers and crazy stories. But yeah, I gave up on that a while ago.
JERRY: I worked at Kinko’s starting at 19 and yeah, I can speak to a lot of those types of experiences. I ended up working at their corporate office for a while. I would sometimes go into the corporate headquarters after hours and make free shit. But actually working for Kinko’s made making zines harder when I no longer worked at Kinko’s.
ETHAN: Right.
JERRY: I was so used to, not just the free copies and free color copies, but free computer time, free scanners. And after that, it was like, well, I can’t afford to pay for this.
ETHAN: Yeah, too expensive.
JERRY: Yeah, and just after years of being used to doing it for free. I would love to see some kind of, I don’t know if I’m the one to make it, but I would love to see a movie or period piece TV series centered on a Kinko’s. It was like, in my opinion, one of the best off-the-street jobs you could get as a teenager without any experience. You could work at a fast food restaurant or you could work at a Kinko’s and actually learn some skills and then also have access to computers with early internet access. I’m very thankful for my experience there.
. . .
Thank you Ethan! Check out Ethan Minsker’s creations via the links below. And if you see/read/watch something that affects you, be sure to write him and let him know!
www.ethanminsker.com . @ethanminsker on IG
Read the other interviews in the Hoofsip Restrospective Series!
Dan Augustine | Joe Hornacek | Mike Pipper | Jesus Rivera
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