Alan, that's fascinating about the EVO; wasn't the Hitchcock family responsible for the Milbrook estate where Tim Leary holed up? I'd read anything you wrote about the EVO; I devoured Abe Peck's book back in the day.
The thing about newsstands is...as you know...they're mobbed up. A cash business with no real way to confirm sales. In the 90s, I once had a project die because I didn't have the requisite $10k in a paper bag for "the guys at the airport." (I'll let you puzzle out who that was.) I assume they are still mobbed up today.
I would assume that the EVO's printer was the same outfit that printed porno...?
There was a period, say 1980-95, where you had a tremendous diversity in print culture, with some of the standards of print. RE/Search, AMOK Books, Factsheet Five with its endless zines -- these were all harbingers of a better world that never came. They were replaced by the world wide web, which not only showed its signal difficulties from the very beginning (anonymity leading to misinfo and bad actors; the decoupling of content from payment, which inevitably leads to first the impoverishment of creators, and then of the ecosystem as a whole), but the web also subjugated any sense of design to the needs of HTML. So things became vastly uglier as well.
There was a period where, even if you were geographically far from a newsstand, you could easily engage with a lot of pretty out-there stuff, but--as with RE/Search--it was expertly curated, edited and packaged. A golden era, I think.
Really excited for this series!
You’ll like it! I have a lot to share.
Alan, that's fascinating about the EVO; wasn't the Hitchcock family responsible for the Milbrook estate where Tim Leary holed up? I'd read anything you wrote about the EVO; I devoured Abe Peck's book back in the day.
The thing about newsstands is...as you know...they're mobbed up. A cash business with no real way to confirm sales. In the 90s, I once had a project die because I didn't have the requisite $10k in a paper bag for "the guys at the airport." (I'll let you puzzle out who that was.) I assume they are still mobbed up today.
I would assume that the EVO's printer was the same outfit that printed porno...?
Walter Bowart! I remember he wrote a very interesting book on mind control.
Walter Bowart! I remember he wrote a very interesting book on mind control.
There was a period, say 1980-95, where you had a tremendous diversity in print culture, with some of the standards of print. RE/Search, AMOK Books, Factsheet Five with its endless zines -- these were all harbingers of a better world that never came. They were replaced by the world wide web, which not only showed its signal difficulties from the very beginning (anonymity leading to misinfo and bad actors; the decoupling of content from payment, which inevitably leads to first the impoverishment of creators, and then of the ecosystem as a whole), but the web also subjugated any sense of design to the needs of HTML. So things became vastly uglier as well.
There was a period where, even if you were geographically far from a newsstand, you could easily engage with a lot of pretty out-there stuff, but--as with RE/Search--it was expertly curated, edited and packaged. A golden era, I think.
Jeff I still have the fourth dispatch and look at it every once in a while.