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| Fig.01.213) Me, the Apple with J Mascis |
During this time... The voices of many telephones murmur as proles manage what business is appointed to them by distant masters. There are never short answers in the stacks. History is a tightly wound coil around a small golden chair sitting beneath an even smaller umbrella but short answers require clownishly large shoes. Not springing from the loam of a hallowed vale, the narratives within these aisles are constructed from the straw and twine of whatever is easiest, most expedient or convenient to lay hands on. All of it is being piled higher and higher at the urging of untidy fools, until it finally falls down. Now, here we are. As in the United States, most clandestine, independent or alternative publication actions in Montreal and Toronto ceased by 1973.
So the short answer could be, we aren't Canadian... The Canadian social and political realities of the 60's and 70's were particularly contentious. The country was sorting through its Anglo and Franco divisions at a time as it was also trying out an entirely different kind of relationship with people of the First Nations. From this Canada pinned together a uniquely open response to waves of Asian immigrants fleeing the political and cultural upheavals happening in many countries around the Pacific Rim. Many in the United States were trading down their optimism for an intentionally constructed, shared social framework of neoliberal economic theories that had come out of the 1970's, favoring precarity, callousness and the math of obstruction. As the optimism went, these theories, once coupled with Reagan era conservatism as envisioned by it's moral majority worked to dispel any remaining urges the average American might have for awareness or empowerment. Even as I'm waking up on this couch, dying of thirst, fear continues to evolve.
In Chicago, too many bastards are already sitting at the small table with the short chairs, sloshing in the politics that always spill from the typist's purse. In this city, the Reader decides to amplify the experiences of the people who were trapped inside the crosswalk. In Chicago, there are already four daily newspapers, so the Reader can choose to ignore the type of news the others are already wet with. Much like the Village Voice or Boston After Dark, they focus on the texture of the lives being lived in their city and they make a distribution model that favors being given away at the bars and record shops rather than being purchased from a newsstand.
Most simply, at the beginning of October 1971, the Chicago Reader starts. It's the beginning of an unseasonably hot weekend, and a small group of college friends from Northfield, Minnesota publish the newspaper's first issue, all 12 messy pages of it. At a time when the production of zines, broadsides and magazines are plentiful to the point of indulgence, the Reader manages something rare. It's published by and for Baby Boomers whose crisis of becoming fully realized adults means increasing their cultural consumption. Many of them rely on its listings for jobs and other services but it's really the Reader's coverage of the cultural scene, it's preggers with rock music, tasty movies, and has all the other bright poppy arts stuff that the city's other dailys can’t understand or won't consider newsworthy and this blasts them into a relevant new head-space.
In 1980, in the first issue of Subterranean Pop Fanzine, David Pavitt writes, “We need diverse, regionalized, localized approaches to all forms of art, music, and politics…the most intense music, the most original ideas are coming out of scenes you don’t even know exist. Tomorrow’s pop is being realized today on small decentralized record labels that are interested in taking risks, not making money." In this Sub Pop, provides a blue print for exploiting the vitality and independence of regionalism's decentralized culture hubs. From the 2014 anthology, Sub Pop USA: The Subterraneanan Pop Music Anthology, 1980 1988, "Driven by the power of independent thinking, the Sub Pop zine’s particular field of interest was artists from the Midwest and Northwest. Punk and new wave fans in major cities were puzzled, surprised that there were enough bands in those regions to devote a column, let alone an entire fanzine. Even more puzzling was the exclusion of artists like the Clash, Gang of Four, Blondie, or PIL, solely because of their major label associations. Early issues featured impassioned rallying cries for local action that make more sense than ever today, alongside early published artwork by Linda Barry, Charles Burns, and Jad Fair." By the end of the 1980's, the slow and painful acceptance of high and low as an immutable prison becomes an inverted embraceably sexy totem that noted writer and critic, Dave Hickey will ride straight to the gates of the new millennium. Meanwhile, back in Chicago...
When this drawing was completed, I was on the short red sofa in the heart of the Butchershop, where I ran Dogmatic, in Real Time with the windows open. It was beer o'clock in Canada and I was thirsty too. This simple drawing is in one of the hard bound sketch books that I bought from Utrecht when I was a student. Its subject is me, a self portrait but I'm standing behind J Mascis, who is wearing his favorite Alex Ross inspired Superman T-shirt. The two of us are exchanging thought balloons. Secretly, I hoped that in some distant future, long after shuffling off this mortal coil, this drawing would be found and it might become the cover for a collection of Douglas Coupland's short stories. I feel ashamed for having dragged these artists into my morbid fantasy but, c'est la vie.
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