China Martens - Future Generation.

The Future Generation

by China Martens 2017

This edition PM Press 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for the purpose of review.

All rights retained by the original artists and authors.

Cover & book design by Scott Sugiuchi, revised by Jonathan Rowland Future Generation logo (previous page) designed by Clover, age 10

ISBN: 978-1-62963-450-0

LCCN: 2017942908

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PM Press

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Oakland, CA 94623

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Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.

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by Ariel Gore

Before Hip Mama and Mutha Magazine and Rad Dad, before you could Google nursing after nipple piercing or gender fluid parenting, before celebrity mom rags made childrearing look glam and easy while they hid all their nannies labor, I pushed a secondhand stroller down Haight Street in San Francisco.

Breeder! some punk yelled at us from across the street. I looked down at my plain cotton spit-up covered clothes from the Goodwill. Its yuppie scum like you who are fucking up this city! the guy went on.

But the yuppie scum at my daughters new daycare didnt want to have anything to do with me, either. They looked down their nose-job noses at me with a mixture of pity and concern.

Maia started to fuss in her stroller, so I pulled her out, sat down on the curb, and lifted my shirt to let her nurse. A bike messenger almost got hit by a Muni bus craning his neck to stare at us.

How could it be that the simple acts of getting knocked up and having a baby had alienated me from every single subculture I had ever heard of?

Maia fell asleep sweetly in my arms there on the curb, and I lifted her back into her stroller, careful not to wake her. I pushed on through the light summer drizzle, made my way up to the anarchist bookstore, a little closet of a shop. I pawed through the zinesEcoPussy and Wizard Man or some such. I sighed. My pussy wasnt feeling very ecological these days and I was pretty sure I couldnt get into wizardry. I started to turn away, but suddenly the punk from across the street was standing right in front of us. Why dont you go to Barnes and Noble, breeder?

I turned back toward the zine shelf so as not to let him see the tears well up in my eyes (I was 20 years old and it was still easy to hurt my feelings). But just as I turned, from the bottom of the rows of anarchist, hippie, feminist, and punk publications, a little Xeroxed something glowed up at me, a quote from Emma Goldman: We, who pay dearly for every breath of pure, fresh air must guard against the tendency to fetter the future. Japanese electronica burst from speakers unseen and cartoon stars floated from the homemade zine and filled the tiny store.

I grabbed issue #1 of The Future Generation, quickly convinced the guy behind the old-fashioned register to let me pay the $2 in food stamps, then locked eyes with the mean unpunk punk and snarled: Fuck off.

Its a powerful thing, to find a little Xeroxed island home in a sea of alienation. Since the first issue of The Future Generation came out in 1990, the zine world has exploded. From Mamalicious to Mad Lovin Mama, indie parenting mags have a whole shelf to themselves now. Alternative mothering websites abound. Even mainstream corporate publishers have gotten into the action, hoping to sell a few hip maternity outfits and touting a baby as the new must-have accessory. Were a demographic now, I guess. But in a mass-market economy, what is genuine quietly prevails. Each new issue of The Future Generation glows up from the shelf promising the political and philosophical resources to sustain you, the voices of the moms like you and unlike you, and the stream-of-consciousness truths only China has the ovaries to tell. In these pages, the shitty days are never glossed over and the spiritual highs never toned down for the sake of coolness. Kodak moments turn psychedelic and the impossibility of our mama-mission is put into its proper radical context. When China lays it down, it stays down. For more than 16 years, The Future Generation has pushed me along my path as a mom with gentle chiding and solid support.

In issue #9 China says, I want to be the female Bukowski, the female Burroughs, instead Im just the female. But Ill bet Bukowski and Burroughs are rolling around in their graves, wishing they could have been the male China Doll Martens.

So, welcome to The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others. Please stow your baggage in the overhead compartment. Youve been invited on an adventure starring one lionhearted superhero mama and her wickedly independent and spirited girl-child. Cartoon stars should be floating up from the page right about now, and do not be alarmed if Japanese electronica bursts from speakers unseen. Prepare for takeoff.

Cartoon by Clover

by China Martens

The first issue of The Future Generation came out in April 1990, soon after my daughter turned two years old, but I had been working on the idea for a while. I wanted to start a zine as a resource network for parents in the subculture to share information and help each other out. I was in new territory and felt like a total minority. Most punks werent parents and most parents werent punks. I knew from all my best experiences in the anarcho-punk scene that we needed to work together to support each other to create change. So much had seemed possible to me back then!

I grew up moving around each year like an army brat and then came of age in the suburbs of Washington DC (Prince Georges County). Mine was the classic tale of a misfit kid. I spent my teenage years being depressed and alienated, although those feelings had probably started even before that.

When I left home in 1984 (at 18), I rapidly discovered how much was going on. The subculture held the ticket to being yourself, the information to liberate yourself. There was always a place to stay, food to eat, protests to take place in. Taking part in direct actions in DC during the Reagan Era, seeing the autonomous squatted realms of Berlin and NYC, warehouse living in San Francisco, going on the Peace March, taking road trips across AmericaI spent three years widening my horizonsin art, culture, possibility, social constructionin every way. There were so many little different groups of people in the underground. And there was a history of counterculture, there was a whole lineage of revolution.

This was the world I was prepared to live in for the rest of my life. If there was a housing crisis, a class issue, a food problem, a gender/sex question, an emotional dysfunctionwe took it on as a group. Wrote a zine about it, shared information to the alternatives, and created structures to build a better and new way of doing things and protested that which we felt was wrong. Want to be free, come panhandle with me.

But after the birth of my daughter, right before my twenty-second birthday in 1988, I could no longer keep up. I wanted to live as radically as ever, but the support I needed as a parent was not there. I found myself slipping back to an impoverished and controlled state. There was a vacuum in the subculture where issues about children simply didnt exist while The State was fully preparedwith its social workers, public indoctrination, and other mechanismsto take over. More a freak than ever, I was unwilling and unable to navigate in the mainstream just as much as I was unsupported by the individualism in my own tribe. People in the scene were not really unfriendly to me. On the contrary, I have had many lovely experiences. But few knew what to do with a child and fewer still had one of their own. It is a lot of work to raise a child. There are a lot of places where you make life decisions and a lot of ways in which you are impacted in a physical way, that a child-free person could have easily jumped over those same hurdles