Naomi Batya – Fanzine Hemorrhage

Typically I keep to a couple of core rules here at Fanzine Hemorrhage, the primary one being that every zine discussed here is one that I myself presently own. That means “no PDFs”, though I admit that we’d be able to have some excellent (one-way) fanzine conversations if I bent my rules for access into my “PDF collection”. It also usually means no copies or xeroxes of fanzines. I have bent this rule twice already, however, for Brain Damage #1 and Back Door Man #4. So let’s bend it again for October 1981’s Revolutionary Wanker #2 from San Francisco, a crisp xerox sent directly to me by editor Naomi Batya, who was a hell of a “good sport” after all my shucking and jiving on this site when I discussed my original copy of her Revolutionary Wanker #1.

There’s an opening triumphant disclaimer that the zine is now publishing independently of Creep, and that this is likely for the better. Joan Moan contrasts the negativity of punk with the positive vibrations emanating from the Rastafari world, informed by her trip to Jamaica. She certainly wasn’t the only one disillusioned with mean-spirited punk rockers who go on to big-up on Jah. Alter “Ego” Cronkite – these names, jesus – seems to have taken his own trip around the country to see what various punk scenes are like in LA, DC, NY and even Rochester, and they each came up severely lacking compared with Shangri-La San Francisco. “If you still want to be a punk, stay in San Francisco”. Anyone else think LA and DC were starving for good punk bands in late 1981?

Tony Kinman from Rank & File is interviewed and naturally gives voice to what it’s like being in a country band, vs. being in The Dils as he’d been two years agone. The band’s approach in 1981 is to play country music within the punk club circuit, and rightly see themselves as the only ones doing as such. Good interview. I’d always assumed those guys were really prickly, but not with the kind young women at Revolutionary Wanker they weren’t. And his favorite SF band is Flipper, as I’d hope mine would have been at the time.

Z’ev does come off initially as exceptionally prickly in his chat with “Will Ling” and “Tobe Lead”, but settles down a bit and eventually takes some major swipes at his electronic & proto-industrial music brethren. You kinda learn to love the guy by the end – isn’t that nice? Each time there’s an interview, it’s then followed by adornments of many stripes – song lyrics, clip art, short musings and the occasional advertisement. In fact there’s an ad I’d never seen for the Market Street Cinema, which I only know as a legendary porn palace, showing off a killer Au Pairs / ESG / B-Team show that’s coming to town on October 2nd. There’s also a praise-drenched review of a new club called Club Generic in the Tenderloin at 236 Leavenworth that sounds like a truly wild space during an exceptionally creative time. These are the sort of events they’d have: here, here and here.

There’s also an intro to filmmaker Marc Huestis, who was then just getting rolling. So yeah – not exactly a generic table of contents, and already a big leap from the issue that had come out just a few months before this one. I’ve got xeroxes of the others, and you can mark your calendars as I’ll be diving into those sometime within the next several years, count on it!

I hadn’t known this free 1981 San Francisco xerox zine existed until alerted to it by the good folk at San Francisco’s Groove Merchant, who seems to get his hands on just about anything and everything interesting these days. What’s more, now that I’ve procured my own copy of Revolutionary Wanker #1, I come to find that it’s a “Creep Production”, backed by the one and only “Mickey Creep” of Creep. How about that?? The editors listed on the so-called masthead are Naomi Batya and Robin Lande, about whom I can turn up very little on the internet, unless this is the same Naomi Batya who wrote a Hebrew folk tune at age 14 and grew up in Mendocino County, just north of SF? The dates for a San Francisco punk rock rebellion line up well!

This arrives at just the right epoch to document the uncomfortable gelling of hardcore punk and SF’s strange post-punk underground, the latter epitomized by Toiling Midgets and Flipper, and celebrated with relish in the Who Cares Anyway book. The Wounds, who played the 1981 Eastern Front fest in Berkeley’s Aquatic Park – the place that became my daily skip-work-early running route during the five years I worked in nearby Emeryville – with the aforementioned, are interviewed here. So are 7 Seconds. They were from Reno, and were basically children at this point, with no vinyl out yet and more shows in SF than in their hometown. They’d soon put out the Skins, Brains & Guts EP, with all-timers like “Racism Sucks” and “I Hate Sports”. Neither interview is particularly illuminating, and it stands to reason that the amount of intellectual effort expended toward Revolutionary Wanker #1 was measured by the monetary reward expected from it, which was quite little, given its price of $0.00.

To wit, “Joan Moan” writes a piece about poseurs, and how they’re “destroying the ‘scene’ from inside-out”. This essay is thankfully leavened by a nice unexplained “Flipper Rules Fools” piece of graffiti next to it. Naomi Batya – who, given this evidence, couldn’t have been the one to write that Hebrew folk tune, provides a poem called “Most People”, that ends with this stanza:

Most people I meet have fucking no brain
No wonder they consider me fucking insane
Believing what they’re taught that it’s wrong to use their head
Most people I meet they might as well be dead.

Holy shit! Drop the fucking mic, Naomi. The address listed for this one, presumably where Naomi wrote these words, is 41 29th Street in the Mission District, about two miles from where I’m sitting right now. I know this house. Here’s what it looks like today. This debut issue ends with an interview with “two anarchists in the Haight”, who’ve asked to remain anonymous. I guess there was a group at one point who called themselves Mindless Thugs who embarked upon a terror campaign against Haight Street merchants, in response to being called “mindless thugs” in the first place by local media. Or something like that. I really can’t understand the coded insider language of 1981 anarchists, to be fair. And I really don’t get the connection to Creep magazine at all for this thing.

So, do I now need to own the other three issues of Revolutionary Wanker that came out after this? Is Ronald Reagan going to start World War III??? Of course I do. This is subcultural gold.

(BREAKING: multiple sets of all four issues of Revolutionary Wanker are for sale right here, directly from the source)