Cobus
From Metapedia
Abstract
The primary objective of this essay is to define a niche-genre of contemporary print periodical. The second objective is to trace the genre's lineage to its WWII-era roots. The third objective is to review the socio-economic and historical conditions that propagated the genre and shaped its evolution (the principle focus of which is the founding of City Lights Press and the subsequent launch of Avant Garde magazine). The fourth and final objective is to argue that this genre, which presently borders extinction, continues to influence the editorial repertoire and design lexicon of the "stylepress," a related genre of contemporary print periodical that, despite advancements in digital publishing, forecasts increased profits in the decades to come.
Prefatory Statement
The following takes its lead from media scholars Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva. Their comprehensive analysis of 20th century magazine publishing, Magazines That Make History: Their Origins, Development, and Influence, celebrates "those publications that revolutionized the market -- some of them because they made a niche for themselves, and others because, even though they weren't the first in their sector, created a new style, offered innovations, and generated a phenomenon that continues to be relevant in today's journalism" (Angeletti and Oliva, 10).
Unlike Angeletti and Oliva, however, our analysis won't focus on "mainstream" publications such as Time, Der Speigel, or Vanity Fair, but low-circulation, post-fanzine "underground" periodicals such as Sleazenation, Ray Gun, and Law of Inertia -- defunct, independently produced persuader titles that remain relevant to print magazine publishing today. What follows is a brief overview of key events that gave rise to this latter genre. Starting with U.S. intervention in World War II, our analysis traces the genre's evolution, emphasizing the social and intellectual objectives of editors who pioneered it; as America's post-WWII magazine market is vast and variegated, I've paid special attention to the outsize influence Avant Garde magazine has had on the development of these obscure titles. Since the August 2007 inception of this project, five of ten targeted persuader titles -- Punk Planet, Law of Inertia, Index, Dirty Soup, and Sleazenation[1] -- have permanently ceased publishing.
I. Definitions
Concisely defining any genre of print periodical can be problematic, and our efforts to do so will dredge various terminologies to the surface. Broadly speaking, "underground print media" is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of arts, cultural, political, and/or personal-interest periodicals -- an expression variously interpreted according to socio-political or economic conditions of a given geographic locale. Regardless of provenance, though, the term reliably implies a range of stereotypes: home-made, saddle-stitched (stapled), fringe, countercultural, radical, revolutionary or avant-garde, all characteristics of samizdat ('self-publishing'), a Russian word drawing from Soviet-era Gosizdat, "authorized State publishing houses," and samizdatchik, "authors, agents, or publishers of unauthorized writing". So as not to blaspheme those who practiced samizdat amid life-or-death circumstances, we should first acknowledge the idiomatic origins of 20th century "underground" print media: subversive, often seditious tracts clandestinely produced in cellar spaces (more literally, domiciles) of the politically oppressed. For muzzled denizens of repressive and typically anti-capitalist nation-states, underground publishing proved an intellectual circulatory system designed to sustain ideological consciousness. In the Soviet Union, for example:
Aleksandr Ginzburg published a typewritten journal Sintaksis, but was arrested. In 1967 Iurii Galanskov attempted to revive the journal Feniks, one issue of which had already been published, but he was also arrested, sentenced to seven years deprivation of freedom, and, at the age of thirty-three, died in a corrective labor camp (Meerson-Aksenov, 1977; 23).
In light of Mr. Galanskov's fate, it seems presumptuous if not flagrantly absurd that the term "underground" should remain in vogue among American youth-marketing executives. But American merchantry have always taken cues from the cultural "fringe" -- a place inhabited by individuals who, as early as 1938, for example, produced "science-fiction fan-zines" (later truncated to "zines"), popular samizdat of the socially disaffected (i.e., communities of interest forged in the spirit of pre-Trekkie pop-geekdom) (Duncombe, 1997; 14). Like artworld influence of World War One (WWI) era Dadaists, whose prolific home-binderies bred a whole strain of culture-jamming viral media -- Situationists later proclaimed Society of the Spectacle a principal catalyst of the Paris uprisings, if not the more sweeping "May of '68" global zeitgeist itself -- we still feel the tidal pull of zinesterism in the mainstream, a vigorous undercurrent of cultural enterprise that, though aggressively sought, is more often sensed than seen in the popular trends (or, more usefully, social movements) it influences. Despite their historical impermanence, these decentralized, loosely fabricated networks of media production are vital to the marketing and brand-strategies of mainstream periodicals, those lavishly financed, anchoring nodal points of contemporary cultural commerce.
II. Contemporary Zines. What are they?
How do we define "zine," the immediate predecessor of our targeted genre, the "post-zine indy"?
"It can all be a bit misleading," says media historian Stephen Duncombe, author of Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. "Unlike mainstream 'niche market' periodicals, zines don't follow well-laid plans for market penetration or move purposefully in a defined direction courting profitable demographics" (Duncombe, 1997; 34).
"In zines," he says, "everyday oddballs are speaking plainly about themselves and our society with an honest sincerity, a revealing intimacy, and a healthy 'fuck you' to sanctioned authority -- for no money and no recognition, writing for an audience of like-minded misfits." (Ibid.) Their singular, unifying characteristic, he adds, is "the fringe," whether political, social, artistic, literary, or whatever.
For former zinester R____, founder of Law of Inertia (L.O.I.), that "fringe," the then-flourishing 1980's west coast punk scene, proved a formative part of his social and intellectual development. "I grew up in the Bay area, where there was a vibrant and large punk rock movement," he says (Author, 2007). "The beauty of punk rock is the gap it bridges between fans and musicians, how it erases the whole musician-as-rock-idol concept, which galvanizes people by encouraging them to engage causes and do what they believe in, instead of sitting on the sidelines" (Ibid). He later enrolled at Cornell University on the east coast where he found a familiar social niche flourishing around a periodical at neighboring Ithaca College. "Two students there had this zine called Muddle, and it was unlike anything I had ever seen" (Ibid). Despite the fact that it was printed on newsprint, it had a glossy cover, a perfect-bound spine, and was operated out of a dorm room. "They had advertising, distribution, everything," says R____. "It was cool because they didn't treat it as something serious. They had no social agenda. They just wanted to have fun with the medium and poke fun at the idiosyncrasies of the punk rock world, which, like any scene, has lots of strange characters and traditions. [Whereas zines] were things you made in your bedroom, people were seeing Muddle around the world, and that made a zine something professional -- something more than a zine, but not quite a traditional magazine" (Ibid).
Ever the young entrepreneur (not yet 30, Rob, in addition to owning a record label whose bands have gone on to international renown, is a senior brand-strategist at myspace.com), he began producing his own zine; in less than 10 issues he secured enough funding for one low-volume commercial press run. The result was the birth of a new genre: neither zine nor standard commercial magazine, the first of 25 full-color issues were printed on satin-finished matte with a glossy cover. Less than three years from its staple-zine inception, it would find itself on shelves of chain bookstores worldwide and go on to receive buyout offers from Spin, a leading title of the Bob Guccione media conglomerate.
Founded as pamphlet-style, cut-and-paste "basement zines," post-zine indies are nationally distributed, 4-color, often perfect-bound magazines that, despite their humble zinesterist origins, cultivate readerships large enough to warrant substantial investments within the first 10 to 20 issues, or generate enough ad revenue to approach one of two of outcomes: mutation into a larger, more commercially viable publication (at which point it is generally perceived as having departed cultural-categorical "underground"), or, in the case of LOI, growth to a level of self-sustenance (or sustained operation at a slight financial loss). The genre comprises periodicals that, had they been produced prior to the advent of desktop publishing technologies of the early 1990's -- prior to the advent of, say, PhotoShop and Quark [FACT CHECK DATE THESE PROGRAMS WENT PUBLIC] -- would have been destined for a Xeroxed "basement zine" existence or a circuit on Madison Avenue in search of corporate investment subsidies.
LOIs second professional printing contained letters to the editor condemning its proclaimed "zine" heritage (its slogan, after all, was "Go Underground") because, as Duncombe argues, zines by definition "speak to and for an underground culture ... [and therefore] consider themselves an alternative to and strike against commercial culture and consumer capitalism" (Duncombe, 1997; 22). Thus, any form of commercial distribution would negate the very definition of a zine, and zinesters upbraided R____ for associating his periodical with their scene.
But R____'s hybridized zine-glossy, one could argue, had retained a kind of anti-capitalist sentiment. As Walter Benjamin argues in The Author as Producer, "rather than ask 'what is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?' I should like to ask, 'What is its position within them?'" Duncombe responds, "[for zines] it is exactly the position within the conditions of the production of culture that constitutes an essential component of their politics" (Ibid; 37). As LOI's earliest "staff" comprised only volunteers -- readers providing editorial consultation in exchange for subscriptions -- R____ was indeed "eroding boundaries between producer and consumer, [and therefore challenging] the dichotomy between active creator and passive spectator"(Ibid; 127).
As Benjamin had argued, progressive culture can "transcend the specialization in the process of production" by introducing consumers into the act of producing. But, again, once the product gains market-level (mainstream) traction, has it departed the cultural-categorical "underground"? In other words, by virtue of driving revenue (despite LOI 's lack of commercial profit), does mere engagement of commerce entail forfeiture of "underground" status as a periodical that nonetheless represents a "strike against commercial culture and consumer capitalism"? (Ibid; 22)
That question, we find, leads to the genre's conceptual roots in the first salvos of the contemporary culture wars, those rhetorical battles first waged on the pages of the The Partisan Review, where, in 1939, Clement Greenberg argued a dichotomy between art and kitsch, a dialectic conveniently analogous to our efforts to drawn a distinction between underground and mainstream media. Indeed, whereas post-zine indies enjoy neither the profit-margins of contemporary mainstream glossies, nor the negligible overhead of pamphlet-style basement zines that, in the post-digital age, could just as well morph into blogs, post-zine indies face extinction at the dawn of Web 2.0, making the question of their potential socio-cultural value a critical one.
III. American Underground Publishing Since WWII: A Brief Overview
Only totalitarian government transforms culture into a political means and thus makes the independent artist its enemy. -- (Meerson-Aksenov, 1977; 17).
Deliberation on the revolutionary purpose of art and literature was a staple of WWII-era Statist rhetoric: from Hitler's heroic-mythological Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung to the dunderheaded triumphalism of Stalinist-era Socialist Realism, to the entirely anti-tragic, un-nuanced American output of Charlie Chaplin and Preston Sturges, State ideologies became culturally manifest, forcing a renewed critical discourse on the purpose and value of creative expression***.
A seeming backlash against the political intensity of World-War-One-era Dadaists, the World-War-Two-era Bohemian avant-garde, writes Clement Greenberg, ushered in a revival of art for art's sake -- a supposedly anti-ideological rejoinder to the confusion and mayhem of violently conflicting weltanschauungen. Greenberg argues that the movement arose "in order to defend aesthetic standards from the decline of taste involved in consumer society" (Greenberg, 1939; 19). In "repudiation of revolutionary as well as bourgeois politics," they sought to live and make art beyond ideology -- indeed, beyond constructs of class -- only to find that that was itself an ideologically-determined aspiration (Ibid). Their efforts to transcend Gramsci's "war of position" entailed an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist sentiment that, absurdly, depended upon the largess of the very European bourgeoisie they claimed to revile.
In America, Fortune magazine editor Dwight Macdonald lamented the rising specter of Gresham's Law of Economics at play in culture (the theory that "bad money drives out the good"), because bad culture (kitsch) is more easily understood and thus in greater demand by the popular majority. Post-WWII wealth-dispersal policies such as the GI Bill -- the single largest federal redistribution of private capital since the Homestead Act of 1862 [2] -- spawned an enormous middle class, and therein an actualized democratization of the American political process, one in which a newly-monied rabble became a vote worth courting. "The eruption of the masses onto the political scene has broken down this compartmentation [of art for the aristocracy and kitsch for the masses], with disastrous cultural results," wrote MacDonald (MacDonald, 1962; 13).
When to this ease of consumption is added kitsch's ease of production of its standardized nature, its prolific growth is easy to understand. It threatens high culture by its sheer pervasiveness, its brutal, overwhelming quantity. The upper classes, who begin by using it to make money from the crude tastes of the masses and to dominate them politically, end by ending their own culture, attacked and even threatened with the instrument they have thoughtlessly employed. Like 19th-century capitalism, Mass Culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, task, and dissolving all cultural distinctions. It mixes and scrambles everything together, producing what might be called homogenized culture (Ibid).
Not unlike Hitler contrasting Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung with Entartete Kunst, MacDonald's notion of cultural homogenization as social malignancy -- a degenerative infection of the intellectual circulatory system needed to sustain the ideological consciousness of a rising superpower -- sought to maintain class stratification by institutionalizing discrepancies of ascribed cultural value. Those who authoritatively define culture, Greenberg knew, utilize cultural apparatuses as vehicles with which to advance their own socio-political agendas, or, more dangerously, as instruments of propaganda with which to dominate public discourse. Commingling art and kitsch, MacDonald argued, threatened class constructs by challenging the historically class-based privilege of media production (the primary means by which elite minorities regulate social environs of the popular majority). Political control, in other words,** is sustained by controlling shifts and levers of cultural production, those devices that inflect the public discourse by mediating the world around us.
Late 20th-century history, of course, sees MacDonald's argument fall prey to its own internal contradictions. Dick Hebdige, drawing from the writings of Stuart Hall, argued that youth raised amid global mashups of contemporary Mass Culture nonetheless made viable art, not only in the U.K. punk movement he studied in the late-1970's, but much earlier. The Beats, those working-class progeny of the early WWII-era -- the Kerouacs, Hunckes, Corsos and Cassidys -- possessed, surely to MacDonald's consternation, tastes "crude" enough to incite a generational mass exodus from McCarthyist strictures of early Cold War social conformity. Small-press literature such as Howl, On the Road and Tropic of Cancer compelled young Americans -- hippies of the coming era -- to challenge authority by stoking the generational uprising that, albeit historicized as an ideological miscarriage, inspired, if nothing else, the prospect of authentic grassroots (or, less anachronistically, proletariat) revolution.
Beat literature, cultural counterpart to 60s-era Leftist orthodoxy, didn't circulate via homebred viral media, but by means of a unique economic model of contemporary publishing. City Lights Press, established by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Mann in 1953, consolidated production, distribution, sales and marketing under one roof, promulgating literature long-stifled by an increasingly repressive milieu. Named after the Charlie Chaplin film of the same title,* City Lights was the first independent publisher of "anti-authoritarian politics and insurgent thinking"*. By circumventing conventional publishing outlets, Ferlinghetti was able to disseminate literature challenging McCarthyist-era conceptions of how we would come to define culture as a nation. Again, by authoritatively defining culture or challenging those who proclaim themselves culturally authoritative, a given group, in this case the Beats, utilize cultural apparatuses as vehicles with which to advance their own socio-political agenda.
III.A: Resistance Through Rituals (of Unamerican Activity)
Happy vicar I might have been / Two hundred years ago / To preach upon eternal doom / And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time / I missed that pleasant haven / For the hair has grown on my upper lip / And the clergy are all clean-shaven. - George Orwell
According to Hebdige, "if we take as our starting point the definition of culture used in 'Resistance Through Rituals', [culture is] 'that level at which social groups develop distinct patterns of life and give expressive form to their social and material . . . experience', and we can see that each subculture represents a different handling of the 'raw material of social ... existence'" (Hall & Jefferson, 1976; Hebdige, 1999). "Each subcultural 'instance'," he adds, "represents a 'solution' to a specific set of circumstances, to particular problems and contradictions" (Ibid).
If our subcultural instance is the emergence of low-volume, cooperative counterculturalist media production in the wake of WWII (along with the concomitant rise of City Lights Press -- the underground publishing house that became emblematic of the Beat movement itself), what exactly were the particular problems and contradictions this particular community of interest sought to resolve?
Answers lie in the Beats' interaction with the following they inspired: despite hippiedom's hagiolatry of early Beat icons, most 60s-era radicals had their predecessors pegged all wrong. Elder figures of the Beat movement had long been plagued by a sense of betrayal: the cultural logic of the early Cold War, Jack Kerouac felt, contradicted everything America's involvement in WWII had symbolized. His searing resentment of 60s-era counterculturalists, palpable in his inebriant campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, confounded young leftists. Shortly after his high school graduation, the young Kerouac, a consummate literary disciple of socialist ex-pat Henry Miller, had longed to join his "American brothers" in their militancy against fascist-communism (Maher, 2007). And he would have, had it not been for that one object of his most wretched loathing: uniforms (Ibid). So deeply seated was this bizarre contempt that he relinquished an Ivy League football scholarship and deserted the U.S. armed forces, opting instead to become a dish-hand in the Merchant Marines aboard the S.S. Dorchester, which, within days of his return to the mainland, was torpedoed by a German U-boat in icy waters off Greenland (Ibid). The writer had had friends among the deceased (Ibid). In his mind their lives had been sacrificed, however obliquely, for a greater good of nearly mythic consequence: America's secular realization of the "shining city on a hill" -- a constitutional democracy of such hard-fought, practiced perfection that, in the wake of the war-to-end-all-wars, what else would remain for artists but to retreat to the forested ridgelines of Big Sur, where, secluded in the raised crow's nest of an abandoned firetower, one would fill notebooks with dharma. With time and a little luck, one might even be embraced and celebrated by an appreciative nation, and, god-willing, receive invitations to play ping-pong nude with the leggy harem sequestered in Henry Miller's cabin by the sea.
"Before WWII had ended, there was a sense of anticipation that it would be followed by a golden age of the arts," said Norman Mailer in the 1985 TBS documentary What Happened to Kerouac? But Red Scare paranoia persisted in the American psyche of the early Cold War; despite Mailer's own success with The Naked and the Dead, there would be no golden age, such that the advent of City Lights and the (both literally and figuratively) peripatetic nature of the Beat movement proved an act of cultural justice and historical redemption. For Ferlinghetti's Hebdigean "group," then, this "raw material" was the vulgar mass-consumerism of Henry Miller's air-conditioned nightmare, which, instead of being expurgated by dharmic injunction of a fanciful "golden age", only persisted, culminating in private-sector hijackings of all mass-communications bandwidth -- a protracted, unmitigated corporatization of national radio, film, and television production. Like the dramatic portrayal of soldiers striving to raise a flag on Iwo Jima, American profiteers laid claim to yet another brave new commercial frontier, one nearly enveloping the whole of western media. (Footnote 1)
Denied the milieu to nourish their inner poet-monks, the Beats, fueled by fraternal lust of the historically disenfranchised, achieved resistance through ritual rites of passage: protracted, earth-shaking bouts of debauchery, freighthopping, and a disciplined, canonically-conscious output of rarefied expository psycho-babble. Embracing the scene at City Lights, of course, ran the risk of being labeled a communist sympathizer, reifying the perceived slight of an ungrateful nation. Again, each subcultural instance, Hebdige tells us, "represents a 'solution' to a specific set of circumstances, to particular problems and contradictions." Beat literature, like Soviet-era samizdat that afforded so many writers a trip to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, sought to resolve the particular problems and contradictions of American Cold War mass-consumerist lunacy:
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. Her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. (Ginsberg, 1956)
III.B. Howl of the Censor, Ire of Eros
According to Michael Meerson-Aksenov, historian of Russian underground literature, production of all samizdat follows a distinct pattern: social samizdat emerge in the wake of cultural samizdat, usually in order to safeguard it.
"That social samizdat comes after literary samizdat is an extraordinarily important fact indicating above all the spiritual source of 'heterodox' or 'dissident thought'," he writes. "In general, culture does not touch on politics. It is only totalitarian government that transforms culture into a political means and thus makes the independent artist its enemy" (Meerson-Aksenov, 1977; 29-35).
Dissident literature, in other words, is spawned of ideological dissonance between publicly-sanctioned opinion and privately-held conviction. "As writers, authors of literary samizdat were far from political problems," Meerson-Aksenov continues. "Each was occupied with his professional matter -- the creation of an artistically convincing and truthful image of this world, the world in which he was formed, lived, and which he came to know and to feel deeply; finally, a world which came to speak in the author's words" (Ibid).
According to art historian Lawrence Weschler, 60s-era Czechoslovakian authors oppressed by militant Soviet Imperialism "would cast their trenchant critiques of the contemporary scene in their own country by purporting to examine events transpiring in lands (only seemingly) far distant" (Weschler, 203; pp. 57). Velvet Revolutionaries communicated via canonically-codified allegory with such frequency that it became their stylistic trademark.
The early Beats, of course, made no pretense of veiled allusion and metaphor: poems of Allen Ginsberg explicitly denounced McCarthyism, which, upon publication, drove culture wars to a fever-pitch of mutually-assured escalation.
Almost as if to reassert some measure of judicial authority, a court injunction put Eros out of business before the fifth issue hit newsstands. This time, however, the courts didn't grapple with the semantics of smut: Ginzburg was prosecuted for having mailed advertisements that accentuated the magazine's erotic content. The offending ads bore the proviso, "refund guaranteed if Eros fails to reach you because of U.S. Post Office censorship interference" (Ginzburg, 1962; 3).
After a brief trial in June, 1963, Ginzburg was convicted by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the conviction in 1964, and two years later the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision, also affirming the conviction, in Ginzburg v. United States, 383-U.S.-463 (March 21, 1966). "Although neither the magazine nor its advertising mailer were themselves obscene," read Chief Justice Earl Warren's adjudication, "the advertisement attempted to sell the book by characterizing it as obscene, which violates federal law" (U.S. Supreme Court Docket 42, Tuesday, December 7, 1965: Ginzburg v. United States, 383-U.S.-463).
Handed a 5-year sentence, Ginzburg was incarcerated in Allenwood Federal Penitentiary on February 17, 1972 (Ginzburg, 1962; pp.). He would serve only eight months of his sentence and return home to front-page, above-the-fold headlines flaunting "Deep Throat's" latest dish on the Watergate scandal.
III.C. Rebellion, Codified: The Launch of Avant Garde and the Rise of Avant-Garde Gothic
"During every generation at least one typeface represents—often accidentally—the zeitgeist." - R. G.
Out on bail for the Eros conviction and awaiting appeal, a process that took nearly a decade, Ginzburg began publishing Avant Garde in mid-1967 (Ginzburg, 1974). The opening page of the first issue offered a dedication set in Avant Garde Gothic font: "As most of the world's ills are traceable to old imperatives, old superstitions, and old fools, this magazine is exuberantly dedicated to the future" (Ginzburg, year; 1967)
"Avant Garde could not be termed obscene, but it was filled with creative imagery often caustically critical of American society and government, sexual themes, and (for the time) crude language," writes historian Stephen Heller (Heller, 1996; 16). Together with Eros art director Herb Lubalin, Ginzburg circumvented standard written narrative by challenging not only what we chose to read, but how.
"We've been conditioned to read the way Gutenberg set his type, and for 500 years, people have been reading widely-spaced words on horizontal lines," said Lubalin in a Cooper Union class on typography shortly after the magazine's launch (Editorial, Communications Arts Magazine, April 1999, pg. 158). "We read words, not characters, and pushing letters closer or tightening space between lines doesn't destroy legibility, it merely changes reading habits." To help Lubalin conceptualize a logo and typeface, Ginzburg sent him a lengthy editorial outline and recalls, "He came up with two beautiful logos, but they were all wrong for the publication I had in mind ... he kept associating the magazine with the nihilistic avant-garde school of art of the early 20th-century, but this magazine had nothing to do with that" (Heller, 1996; 17).
"Exasperated, Ginzburg had his wife Shoshana visit Lubalin at his studio to explain the concept of the magazine one lasttime. 'I asked him to picture a very modern, clean European airport with signs in stark black and white,' Shoshana recalls. 'Then I told him to imagine a jet taking off the runway into the future. I used my hand to describe an upward diagonal of the plane climbing skyward. I explained that the logos he had offered us for this project, so far, could have been on any magazine but that Avant Garde (adventuring into unknown territory) by its very name was something nobody had seen before. We needed something singular and entirely new' "(Ibid).
"Type cannot help but provoke associations," writes New Yorker contributor Alec Wilkinson, author of "Man of Letters: Matthew Carter's Life in Type Design" (Wilkinson, 2005; 56). "The absence of serifs suggests modernity; Gothic forms suggest religion or the law" (which, like Kerouac's dharma-laden prose, intimate higher governance of the zeitgeist, thereby equating a given text -- again, in this case, one typographically rendered in a Gothic font -- with moral righteousness).
"The design of most Dada publications during the early 1920's, for example, both intentionally and intuitively, disrupted professional design standards," writes art and design scholar Steven Heller, editor of Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century (Phinney, 1995; 860).
Dadaists redirected traditional reading patterns, from left to right and up and down to all around a page. They cobbled graphic design from the mainstream printing sources and wedded them to Futurist and Cubist pictorial theories of disruption and fragmentation. Standard typefaces were not just mere letterforms composed in neatly regimented columns; they were used as textures applied on a tabula rasa. Rejecting the sanctimonious separation of high and low art, Dada employed vernacular visuals, like show-card lettering and common newspaper advertisements, as one part of the art/anti-art aesthetic. Aesthetic quality was not a high ideal; rather Dada was intent on revealing through its messy printed manifestations that no remnant of the sanctified past would be tolerated in their new world order (Ibid).Prior to the advent of extremely user-friendly global data networks such as the Internet, it is entirely possible that Lubalin was ignorant of his own canonical signifiers, but most scholars would doubt it. "Type designers have always been backward looking," writes Wilkinson, as "experimental designs are unlikely to find a market" (Wilkinson, 2005; 61). Globally-renowned font designer Matthew Carter calls pure typographical invention a myth: "there is not much latitude in the manipulations a designer can perform on the individual letters," he says. "Only so much can be done to a 'd' before it ceases to look like a 'd'.
That Lubalin's hybridized typeface—Avant Garde Gothic—resulted from pure coincidence, then, is likely bunk. Amid Walter Cronkite's "...and-that's-way-it-is" era of Father Knows Best and Doris Day films, a contemporary newspaper-headline typeface masquerading as vintage Dada agit-prop constitutes, like Debord's détournement, an act of symbolic resistance designed to maximize cognitive dissonance: "disturbances of the lowliest and most ephemeral of origins [that] eventually disrupt the order of the world" (Debord, 1995 reprint). Disordering symbolic lexicons of myriad institutions, a founding precept of culture jamming, demands a rethinking of ideogrammatically-conveyed concepts—the words, ideas and ideologies that not only communicate realities of the surrounding world, but co-constitute reality itself. As award-winning designer Carlos Segura puts it, "typography is beyond letters ... and it tells a story beyond the words—a canvas is created by the personality of the collection of words on the page" (Segura, year; pp. ). Indeed, typography tells a story beyond conventions of literacy. Who could argue, for example, that Matthew Carter, designer of existing typefaces for (among many others) The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, National Geographic, The Guardian, Wired, Business Week, Newsweek, Le Monde and all Microsoft Corporation font platforms, isn't, perhaps, the most widely read man in the world?
III.D. Outside Becomes Inside (Rebellion Codified, Dissent Commodified)
Lubalin's groundbreaking concepts -- the fusion of Dadaist and contemporary newspaper typography -- sparked a movement. "Graphic design and typography became the code of revolt," says Heller (Heller, 1995; 17). "Words were the building blocks of meaning, but graphic design (typography, layout, image) more than just framed ideas -- it telegraphed intent. Radical ideas had to appear vanguard to be vanguard. The sensory impact eccentric type composition made on the reader marked the end of conventionality" (Ibid).
"New Typography," writes Phinney, "a synthesis of this avant-garde movement, [also] provided new standards for quotidian advertising and publication design. Its leading practitioners, who thought of themselves as avant-garde, sought to alter conventional attitudes toward design yet remain viable (and employable) in the commercial realm" (Phinney, 1995; 8).
A Recurring Pattern
This, of course, is the sentiment to which post-zine indies pay homage by virtue of their existence. Production of alternatives to mainstream media is a perennial act that Ferlinghetti, Ginzburg and Lubalin -- by dint of luck, time, war and the weather -- had merely been the most recent practitioners. "Those of us working in the cultural field come, in many cases, from a cultural practice that is entirely about the ages of empires," writes critic Peter Sellars. "Everyone follows the man with the stick. Who runs the major museums and decides what you will or will not see? Who decides what you see on television? ... Can we, as artists, really take in hand the mechanism of production, and, more than that, the way we are talking to our citizens?" (Sellars, 2004, pp. 8; italics mine)
Or, further, the way we talk as citizens? Samizdat, underground media, independent desktop publishing -- whatever the name -- says "yes, we can." But cultural history says merely saying so is not enough. "Greek theater was a place where what was not allowed to be spoken in public was spoken through dance, through singing, through music and poetry" (Ibid). And so through typography, through photography, through advertising or the pressed medium of papyrus, ink and inspiration, publishers are purveyors of an ancient practice: a socially conscious, constantly evolving, infinitely protean
IV. Last of the Post-Zine Indies: Ray Gun
"Print... does not exist separate and apart from other contemporary media phenomena. Rather, I see print -- and the publishing industry, broadly construed -- as an integral part of the contemporary media ecology. Therefore, I want to suggest that without an adequate critical understanding of print -- by which I mean a fully historicized and relational understanding -- we have failed in our responsibilities as students of media." - Mathew G. Kirschenbaum, The Other End of Print: David Carson, Graphic Design, and the Aesthetics of Media.Most respectable magazine genealogies cite the 1984 launch of Emigre as contemporary design's rejoinder to Lubalin. But Emigre was launched by Dutch-born Rudy VanderLans of the San Francisco-based Emigre Type Foundry, one of the first major commercial design houses known for openly retrospective sensibilities, and perhaps the earliest champion of Apple-driven design (the first MacIntosh personal computers, contemporary design's undisputed post-digital tool of choice, hit the market on January 24, 1984). Like Lubalin, Emigre generously appropriated Dadaist type-composition; unlike Lubalin, though, their mission, albeit forward-looking, bore an acute historical cognizance. As we know from our interview with the founder of Law of Inertia, 80s-era desktop-publishing technology put publishing within easy reach of anyone inclined to print. For mainstream periodicals, it meant increased competition, which naturally spawned innovation. For publications (commercial or otherwise) seeking an edgy outsider status, the "rebel" mien of an early Cold War underground became a touchstone (indeed, the Beats have long-since been immortalized as the world's premiere post-WWII avatars of hip). That's why so many desktop publishers "dissented" by parroting the editorial tone of City Lights or mimicking the design concepts of Avant Garde. Despite the massive swelling of commercially anemic indie titles spawned of desktop publishing, one publication, Dave Carson's 1992 Ray Gun -- the first national title known for such excessive iconoclasm that even basic laws of legibility were ignored -- found success. Printing text backwards, "reversing out" cover portraits (and cover text) and allowing large chunks of high-quality narrative rock-journalism to simply run off of the page at random, Carson advanced a chaos-theory of modern design, a post-Reagan era abandon that flew in the face of standard production modalities. Like all talented artists, he possessed a strong historical sense of the medium itself; whereas advertising and mainstream commercial designers took cues from the forward ranks of the avant garde, Carson, an unwitting disciple of the latter, bypassed the conceptual vanishing point of contemporary design.
In the forward to a hardcover Ray Gun retrospective, Out of Control, writer William Gibson describes Carson's work as "the event horizon of futurity, as close as any windshield, its textures mapped in channel-zap and the sequential decay of images faxed and refaxed into illegibility ... brave new worlds abraded onto the concrete of the now... This is design pushing back against the onslaught of an unthinkable present" (Gibson, 1997; IV). According to scholar Mathew G. Kirschenbaum, "this aesthetic -- which is sometimes called a post-alphabetic aesthetic -- is one that appears precisely at the point of print media’s imperative to formalize a representation of its own putative demise. That is, an aesthetic intensely self-reflexive in its attempt to depict, and at some level iconify, the material conditions of print’s communicative exhaustion" (Kirschenbaum, 2005).
Carson's own hardcover book, The End of Print, is, outside of critical media scholarship in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan, one the earliest visual treatises to, as Kirschenbaum puts it, "dramatize that aspect of the relationship between print and electronic textualities driven by the need of the former to assimilate and contain the ruptures of the latter" (Ibid).
"Even a cursory glance through the pages of Ray Gun or Emigre leaves little doubt that Carson, VanderLans and Licko [of Emigre], and the many designers associated with them either by style or by patronage are engaged in as rigorous and profound an investigation of alphabetic consciousness in the face of radical technological upheaval as, say, the growing circle of critics and writers who have devoted themselves to interactive fiction," he adds (Ibid). "This other end of print, the end of print manifested in the discourses and practices of graphic design -- "abraded onto the concrete of the now" -- therefore furnishes us with limit cases of what Jerome McGann has called the "textual condition."
And so from early Dadaist typography to Lubalin's subversion of standardized reading habits, Carson, a former surfer and basement zinester, may have been the first designer to, as William Carlos Williams would phrase it, "advance the century a few inches." Like the Jim Morrison lyrics that drove pop-critics and scholars alike into bitter debate, Carson cultivated not only a sizable contingent of unquestioning apostles, but an equally committed chorus of critics. Condemned as the contemporary magazine world "master of non-communication" by revered Italian master designer Massimo Vignelli, Carson, with a single phrase, turned the invective back on itself. "You cannot not communicate," he famously replied.
His insouciance, of course, attracted copious ad revenue, and those who attempted to emulate the formula seemed destined only to fail.
"That was the thing about Carson," says R___, "he was the best designer and the worst designer, and the fact that you couldn't tell betrayed a kind of genius." The true litmus test, of course, was readership: Ray Gun is alleged to have had a press-run of 60,000 within its first year of circulation, and the kind of subscriber base indie publishers only dreamt of. Slapdash as his style was -- brash, messy, a drunken disregard all manner of convention -- it always stood apart from the knock-offs. "So many young independent publishers assumed they could mimic Carson, but they couldn't," says R____. "That was the thing: not just anyone could do it!" It required skill, intuition, an encyclopedic knowledge and disciplined mastery of new-media software, and a strong historical sense of the craft itself. His gossip-world reputation as the magazine industry's enfant-terrible only made it all the more inspiring -- or infuriating, depending upon which side of the magazine rack you stood.
According to magazine publisher and advertising executive David Renard, only three strains of print periodical would possess the essential criteria for safe passage across the digital divide.
V. Boutique Publishing: Rise of the Sylepress, Decline of the Post-Zine Indies
Author of The Last Magazine, Renard is also founder of MU Inc/Net Circulation, the largest distribution network for high-end boutique fashion, art, photography and design magazines. As such, his arguments convey an extreme bias in favor of luxury-goods periodicals, but they possess a nonetheless compelling logic. "Newsstands crowded with titles conceal the industry's inexorable decline," he reports in his 2006 essay, The Last Magazine (in Print). "Signaled by shrinking revenue, consumer usage, and consumer spending, especially in today's youth culture ... [consumer demand in] the American and European market for printed periodicals will decrease by 15 percent through 2016" (Renard, 200, pp).
By 2030, he argues, only 10 percent of the paper-based magazine industry will exist. The extinction of perilously under-resourced post-zine indies is predictable enough: lacking revenue to compete with periodicals and/or Web sites with major advertising clientele, and often produced with nothing more than a basic "skeleton-crew" operation, only the copiously subsidized -- Adbusters, for example -- can even speculate on long-term print-based sustainability. (Needless to say, when but a single fouled article can invite lawsuits, those on a shoe-string budget are necessarily restricted to an editorial prudence of such intensity as to asphyxiate creative freedom, which, in turn, only promises to bore even the most loyal of readers.) On the other hand, three specific categories of print periodical are likely to survive the changing market.
1. Print-based trade periodicals that boast ultra-specific consumer demographics -- usually possessing a circulation of less than 100,000 readers -- may be likely to continue their print-based existence. Yachting Magazine, for example, a publication of yachting and vintage yacht restoration, is virtually indispensable to a microscopically narrow demographic of the exceedingly affluent. Faced with routine high-seas Internet blackouts, internationally roving mid-sized craft sailors find hard-copy data invaluable, and it has been argued that yacht ownership, let alone restoration, veritably necessitates a subscription.
2. Well-established "prestige" mainstays -- Vogue, Vanity Fair, W, Harper's Bazaar, Harper's, Time, The New Yorker -- have several factors ensuring a reasonably secure future in print. They enjoy large dedicated readerships for whom, age 30 and up, life before the Internet is a somewhat nostalgic recollection, an era when, as business writer Marc Gunther describes it, people instinctively felt "a deeper affinity to the [periodical] that land[ed] on their doorstep than to a Web site that's one click away from everything else on the Internet." Another factor, of course, is that which has kept a few of these periodicals in circulation for nearly a century: a precisely honed editorial formula and the rarefied expertise to maintain it. [Despite skepticism of "citizen-journalism" -- that is, the unkempt, unregulated (indeed, unregulable) aggregation of independent online bloggers -- journalistic standards will likely improve, not decline, with prevailing dynamics of the blogoshpere. As such, the highest quality of editors are likely to find themselves in greater demand, such that viable content can be sifted from oceans of digital dross. (As legendary Grove/Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin announced one night in a bar near Columbia University, "that might forever be the problem with the Internet: vaster than any ocean, but two inches deep")(personal verbal communication, 2006). Again, contrary to fear of diminishing journalistic standards, the blogosphere comprises many attributes of the perfect market, wherein the mere existence of a paid online subscriber-base -- dailykos.com, for example -- is itself deserving of accolades.] As such, a kind of blogoshpheric-journalistic "street cred" will prove the rule, and citizen journalists who burn readers on the facts will lose those readers. As such, the prestige mainstays have a depth of journalistic expertise with which most any startup periodical is hard-pressed to compete.
The Stylepress, of course, tempts that leap of faith, and for two primary reasons. First, because it possesses the best attributes of our two prior print categories: a well defined, narrow yet exceptionally affluent demographic, and the kind of investor subsidies to match recruitment standards of the prestige mainstays. Second: the genre's conception at the height of the dot.com era. As we've discussed, the historical context in which a new genre is conceived influences the length and direction of its commercial trajectory. The 1990's, an era of surging commerce and seismic shifts in the realm of new media technologies, allowed design-driven magazines such as Ray Gun, Visionaire and McSweeney's, to blur boundaries between textually discrete narratives of news, high art and design. Indeed, whereas City Lights Press and countless Little Magazines of the 1950's ushered in the era New Journalism -- a hybridization of news reporting and stylized prose -- the exorbitantly financed Stylepress has similarly ushered in a new genre of magazine: the quasi-digital post-magazine. Why print the text on paper, why put it on the Internet, when the physical object, digitally-enhanced or otherwise, can be the text?
One final factor, of course, veritably secures its future: computer screens are flat. The advent of boutique publishing offers of range of print concepts limited only by the imagination.
A Note on e-Paper's (Ir)relevance
"Environmental factors, ranging from oil price hikes in the wake of 911 to the long-overdue response to deforestation and climate change, are all contributing to a constellation of events forcing industry leaders to rethink the medium that defined their trade for half a millenium," writes Renard, who dedicates an entire chapter of his essay, for example, to the advent of e-paper (Renard, 200, pp). Whereas fans of popular fiction resist curling up on the couch to read novels from a laptop, the materials of which screens are made constitute the only obstacle preventing a technological new-media flood of Biblical proportions. The reason is simple: paper reflects light; computer screens project light, straining the eyes. Paper is a lighter, more portable medium of terrific physical dexterity and durability. Despite its relatively low cost, however, environmental factors have caused a spike in paper prices, and a growing population of college graduates who don't recall life before the Internet are increasingly less likely to purchase print-based products. By the year 2015, argues Renard, the e-Paper industry is expected to exceed $30B (Ibid).
As such, an improved digital reader that does not project light may be the last piece of the new-media puzzle. Once in place it could topple paper from the paragon of book and magazine publishing. Already, companies like Polymer Vision are preparing display technologies designed to mimic ordinary ink on paper. "Unlike a conventional flat-panel display, which uses a backlight to illuminate its pixels, electronic paper reflects light like ordinary paper and is capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing electricity" (Ibid). Some e-Paper prototypes have the flexibility and light weight of newsprint, and their legibility requires only reflected ambient light. Indeed, a single sheet could be rolled or crumpled into your pocket, ready to download anything from news-articles to novels the instant you're ready to read. But e-Paper, like all new technologies, has its Achilles heel: it does not offer good color reproduction, severely undermining its performance in the arts and fashion newsstand. As such, visually-driven print periodicals are afforded some extra time to compete on the news-stand, but nothing more. Once e-Paper has become a staple of the news-media magazine and book market, the technology supporting it will attract further investment, improving its capacity for color reproduction.
In the post-e-Paper magazine industry of, say, 2030, what's to say the Stylepress will endure? Again, history counters with its own dialectic: despite e-Paper's digital sophistication, history tells us, it cannot be the death knell for all print media. When people assumed scored films (talkies) heralded the death of theater, film and theater found a way to co-exist, albeit within a newly reconfigured marketplace. Plays were adapted to film and vice-versa, and performers on either side of the screen found increased employability. When Betamax home movie machines arrived on the market, it surely meant the death of cinema. We now know this would not be the case: film-makers rose to the challenge by innovating films of greater audial and visual sophistication, making the big-screen cinematic experience something newly distinct from home viewing, and cinema flops could stem financial hemorrhaging by going "straight to VHS or DVD." New media technologies repeatedly challenge the commercial viability of their predecessors, but rarely do they banish them from the marketplace, an historical fact that attests to the commercial promise of the Stylepress. Whereas text-heavy periodicals such as Newsweek or the Economist will transition to e-Paper without skipping a beat, Visionaire's content is messaged by the medium it's made of: A sheet of e-Paper wrapped in a hand-made, limited-edition Louis Vuitton slipcase, for instance, wouldn't have quite the same effect.
The power of print is physical presence: In the high-tech world of boutique printing, physical formatting possibilities are endless, such that San Francisco-base McSweeney's magazine once produced an issue (press run 20,000), which included a wooden exterior cover replete with sliding drawers containing complimentary comb and toothbrush. Such boutique print-publishing concepts exploit the primary formatting discrepancy between print and digital media: the former boasts limitless formatting options, excellent color reproduction, textured construction materials, which makes for a periodical that has a dynamic, multi-dimensional physical presence. Digital media content is but visually, not actually, multi-dimensional. The screen is always flat. As The New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan announced in a series of lectures at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in July of 2006, "digital media is out of sight out of mind; print media always remains right where you left it. When you return home it's still there on the table insisting upon its own presence, reminding you of those articles you'd intended to read before bed."
For these reasons, the Stylepress -- indeed, most any media that is visually-driven -- will persist and possibly increase in market value. Ironically, V, Visionaire's more conventional sister title, boasts ties to the underground.
V was launched in September 1999 as the younger sibling publication to the limited-edition quarterly Visionaire. If Visionaire is a couture book, V is ready-to-wear. ... V is a place where uptown meets downtown, celebrities mingle with total unknowns, high art converses with the underground.
V. CONCLUSION: Plus ca Change
The answer: no. The social value of the post-zine indie at the dawn web 2.0 is, like its predecessor, the influence it bears, and will continue to bear, on The Stylepress. As such, its brief existence as a genre represents the creativity and innovation of a given community of interest at a given point in history. It also, as we see from its influence on the Stylepress, constitutes the introduction of competition to the marketplace. Nothing more.
Cultural historians Joseph Heath ad Andrew Potter, co-author's of Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, argue that, from hippie-era campaigns to "buy unAmerican" vehicles such as the Volkswagen Beetle to recent anti-Globalization campaigns against commerce -- a.k.a. campaigns against "the system," whether defined by the ubiquity of McDonald's and Starbuck's or the labor standards of most American textile buyers -- the very concept of countercultural media is a peculiar mythology of western civilization that is not only counterproductive, but creates and perpetuates the very consumerism its "radical" publishers oppose. For those who might challenge such an assertion, look no further than the fortunes divided among City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, authors William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg (who respectively held contractually binding brand-marketing endorsements and advertisement cameos for both Nike and the Gap). More recently, founding Ray Gun manager, Marvin Jarrett, remains the founding publisher of the commercially successful Nylon.
Further, Earl Norris, author of the seminal, snarling 90's-era anti-corporate invective A Nation of Salesmen, contends that in an age when marketing and advertising penetrate even the most obscure cultural niche or the most exclusive community of interest, a salesman is firmly ensconced between each individual and every culture experience they seek. Whereas publications like Adbusters and countless other "Anti-Capitalist" publications advocate a non-capitalist utopia, they, like WWII's Bohemian avant garde who sought to live and create art beyond constructs of class, are nonetheless driven by an ideologically charged endeavor that, upon closer inspection, doesn't adversely impact capitalism, but, by challenging it, perpetuates it.
By this logic, "the underground" (a.k.a. the counterculture; the anti-establishment) is an economically relative term at best, an enigmatic pop-cultural mythology of the late-capitalist era at worst. Any item produced and exchanged for monetary gain or non-profit, real-cost offset of overhead -- regardless of whether or not its production involves the consumer -- represents a form of capitalism. Even if profit is not the publisher's primary motive -- as per the earliest issues of Law of Inertia and every issue of Adbusters -- the mere presence of these products in the marketplace persuades consumers to bypass periodicals they otherwise might purchase, subsequently pressuring larger titles to adapt to the dynamics of a rapidly changing market. As such, Law of Inertia and Adbusters -- all underground media: all zines, all post-zine indies -- introduce competition to the marketplace, which, of course, is the principal purpose of capitalism.
If, as Duncombe argues, "underground" literature "speaks to and for an underground culture ... [and therefore] considers itself an alternative to and strike against commercial culture and consumer capitalism," his definition of "underground" literature necessarily excludes any that perpetuate capitalism. As we've noted, however, the mere existence of both zines and post-zine indies persuade would-be mainstream magazine consumers to bypass major national titles in favor of something new and unheard of. Therefore, there is no "underground" status to forfeit by engaging the market. Indeed, beyond the crass sloganeering of youth-marketing executives, there is no contemporary "underground" media. Indeed, there is no underground.
However, the obscure, hard-to-find, "off the cultural radar" periodical does afford consumers unlimited diversity within the marketplace, which, as per Adbusters, can serve as experimental micro-models of (perhaps) more ethically-conscious forms of commerce and production. While their efforts will not remove Shorris's proverbial salesman from our cultural-consumerist purview, by inadvertently becoming the salesman, post-Cold War self-publishers -- indeed, all curators of contemporary culture -- allow us, the consumer, to decide for ourselves the terms upon which and with whom we choose to do the business that affords our collective intellectual nourishment and economic well-being. Duncombe's "underground" literature, both zines and their post-zine progeny, afford us the option to choose our own salesman, which, if nothing else, is a welcome change from the era of pre-desktop-publishing when such decisions were made behind closed doors of the corporate boardroom (lair of the quintessential dead white profiteer -- a.k.a. the repressed, hyper-rational "organization man" that haunted the Air-Conditioned Nightmare of Henry Miller's post-WWII America).
Post-Cold War "underground print media" -- whatever we might prefer to think that term means -- perpetuates capitalism. As such we embrace it, lest our Habermasian public sphere of the contemporary marketplace be drab as the Gulag barracks where Solzhenitsyn only dreamt of circulating his insights.
Angeletti, Norberto and Oliva, Alberto, 2004. Magazines That Make History: Their Origins, Development, and Influence. Gainesville, Fl: University Press of Florida.
Meerson-Aksenov, Michael. "The Dissident Movement and Samizdat." In The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian "Samizdat"-An Anthology, edited by Michael Meerson-Aksenov, Boris Shragin, and Nickolas Lupinin, pp. 19-43. Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977.
Duncombe, Stephen 1997. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. London and New York: Verso.
Author: August 14, 2007. Tape-recorded interview with founder of Law of Inertia, .
Greenberg, Clement, 1939. "Avant-garde and Kitsch" excerpted from The Partisan Review, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume Perceptions and. Judgments 1939-1944. Swansea, U.K.: The University of Southern Wales.
MacDonald, Dwight. "Mass Cult and Midcult," in Against the American Grain. New York: Random House, 1962. (pp. 3-75. 13).
Hebdige, Dick 1999. "The Function of Subculture," from The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During, Second Edition. New York: Routledge. (pp. 441-50).
Ginsberg, Allen. "America." From Howl and Other Poems. San Fransisco, CA: City Lights Books. 1956, 1959. 9-20.
Golinger, Eva, September 28, 2007. A Revolution is Just Below the Surface: An Interview With Noam Chomsky. Aired on Venezuelan and Latin American television as part of the promotion for the III International Book Fair in Venezuela, whose 2007 theme was: "United States: Is Revolution Possible?" -- referenced on Dec. 12, 2007
Maher, Paul 2007. Kerouac: His Life and Work. London: Taylor Trade Publishing.
Renard, David. The Last Magazine. (New York: Universe/Rizzoli Press, 2006).
Weschler, Lawrence 2005. Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences. San Francisco: McSweeney's Publishing.
REFERENCES
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. (New York: Zone Books, 1994; reprint).
Heath, Joseph; Potter, Andrew. Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
Norris, Earl. "A Nation of Salesmen," from Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age. Salvos From the Baffler, (eds) Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997).
FOOTNOTES
- FOOTNOTE.1: Although Chaplin's politics seem tame by modern standards, in the 1940s the filmaker's views -- in conjunction with his influence, fame, and status in the United States as a resident foreigner -- were seen by many as communistic).
- FOOTNOTE.2: Third World Traveler magazine: Excerpt Media Control, by Noam Chomsky, published by Seven Stories Press (2002).
"TWT: Should the concessions be in the hands of the people to decide?
CHOMSKY: I think they should, yes, in fact in a technical sense they are, even in the United States. Take the airwaves again, that's public property. Corporations have no right to it, It's given to them as a gift by the taxpayer and the taxpayer doesn't know it. The culture has reached the point where the people assume that's the natural order of things. It's not, it's a major gift from the public. In fact if you look at the history of telecommunications, radio and television, it's quite interesting. Radio came along in the 1920s and in most of the world, it just became public. The United States is an interesting case, it's almost the only major case in which radio was privatized. And there was a struggle about it. The labor unions, the educational institutions, the churches, they wanted it to be public, the corporations wanted it to be privatized. There was a big battle, and the United States is very much a business-run society, and uniquely, business won, and it was privatized. When television came along, in most of the world it was public, without question. In the United states it wasn't even an issue, it was just private because the business-dominated culture by then had achieved a level of dominance so that people didn't think of what was obvious, that this was public space that we're giving away to them."
- Footnote.3: Paraphrased from tape-recorded interviews with I. Svenonius of Weird War, by author. Originally published in WYWS #26, December 2003. (Excerpts also reprinted in Index magazine, October-November 2005; publisher: Peter Halley).
