Posts Tagged ‘zines’

The Emperor’s New Nose

Sunday, March 24th, 2013


INDIVIDUAL:
IS agent Mark Romero-Davis //
GROUP SIZE: including my parents? //
NATURE OF GROUP: History Revisionists, Body Modifiers, the Vain, the Self-Loathing, the Easily-Manipulated, those who are somewhat interested in noses //
INCIDENCE OF SOCIOMETRY: The Emperor’s New Nose //

The following is a probable excerpt of Chairman Mao’s diary from vindicatingmao.com

“…..a comrade servant came into my bedchamber, and offered me a glass of Ensure. I exhaled heavily and slowly sat up, feeling weaker than I ever have before. I leaned forward and opened my mouth, ready to receive the beverage as the comrade lifted the glass to me. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass, and my gaze immediately fell upon my nose. If it were not for that blasted Ren Mei Rong, who when we were only children, likened my nose to the nose of George Washington. I wish I could forget this comment. But it has stuck with me through the decades. I even sent him and his family to a labor camp after I became chairman, but the memory of this insult remained with me. A grand symbol of Capitalism sits in the middle of my face! I mustered the strength to knock the glass of Ensure from the servant’s hands, spilling it on the royal red bedsheets. I had the comrade servant executed for spilling on me. If only I had undergone a procedure to alter my nose. I had the opportunity all my life and yet did nothing to put the nose hatred to rest. This, is my only regret in life…”

~ Chairman Mao – September 8, 1976

I was initially interested in exploring some aspect of revisionist history after hearing a report about a lesser-known dictator. The picture painted of the man was hardly representative of the “true” history. This then led me to think about plastic surgery and body modification and how people change their appearance for various reasons, but never change other aspects of their life (their terrible personalities, addictions, extreme bias, etc). I then started writing this fictitious narrative weaving the two ideas together that Chairman Mao did in fact hate his own nose and wanted to have it altered though never found the time (this is how my easily-distracted brain works).

Then came a website with The Nose Vote, ‘zine with carnival mask, thesis exhibit to confused and/or bemused Communication Designers and display at iSFair 2O12!

Winner of the Nose Vote: Groucho Marx! Although he was not on the ballot between candidates Castro, Engles Lenin, Trotsky (dark horse) Ghandi, and Karl Marx there were a number of write-in votes (4) that pushed him past Trotsky in the running (poor guy can’t ever win). ~ Agent Mark Romero-Davis



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ThIS report was on display and a final Nose Vote were conducted at iSFair 2O12. The Chairman Mao masks were the #1 hottest item at the fair.

10 Hottest Prophefits!

Sunday, March 17th, 2013


INDIVIDUAL:
Agent Nima*
GROUP SIZE: Approximately 2.1 Billion
NATURE OF GROUP: Muslims (through the Shias and more-so Sufis could probably care less.) 
INCIDENCE OF SOCIOMETRY: Malcontent #4 – 10 Hottest Prophefits!

*Name IS slightly altered to protect the wantonly reckless.

In 2010, while working in my day-job and agent cover as an art and design academic, I served in an advisory and contributor capacity on Malcontent – a ‘zine authored and détourned together by IS agent Nima – operating in his cover as a design student.

(Below) A previous project by Nima – which resulting in him being conferred IS agent status. The Typography course assignment was to create large scale environmental graphics and photoshop them onto pictures of billboards. Nima wrote Ahhh Snap! on the outside of my 2nd story office window in post-its. (Note: he had to scale the awning of the campus police station to do so and write the message backwards for correct legibility on the inside of my office). I gave him an A+ (though it was marked down to a C- for being turned in 7 weeks late…)

Malcontent #4 The Prophets & Profits Issue was the culmination of a 16 week four issue spree. Fresh off of #3 The Animal Totems Issue – agent Nima was interested in continuing to explore the dialectic between the physical and metaphysical. He came into my office with thIS pitch for issue #4:

“I want to depict Muhammad.”


For context – here is a brief history of the “Depiction of Muhammad” controversy in the 21rst century:

It is debatable whether Islam prohibits the depiction of Muhammad. The Qur’an doesn’t forbid depictions of Mohammed (Allah was concerned with less petty things at the time) but there are Haddith – supplemental teachings – which expressly prohibit depiction of the Prophet. There is a general prohibition in orthodox monotheisms, including Islam’s prequels Christianity and Judaism, of worshipping “graven images” as a substitute for God. Sunni Islam pretty much toes-the-line on this but Shia Islam (which includes the Sufis who could care less because they’re too busy dancing and chanting) doesn’t seem to mind a respectful image of Muhammad. No one likes denigration of the Prophet in any form. It’s worth noting here that Agent Nima – a first generation Persian-American – would likely ascribe to Shia Islam if he didn’t instead pledge allegiance to good old ‘Merican Fight-Club n’ The Joker style Post-Modern Ontological Anarchy.

The recent cycle of controversy around depictions of Muhammad, crass muslim baiting with retaliatory fire-bombing, started in 2005 when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten began publishing culturally crude but satirically clever political cartoons depicting, among other themes, a borderline racist caricature of Muhammed with a lit bomb for a turban. Ostensibly Jyllands-Posten was making a statement on the self-censorship of media regarding criticism of violence in Islam but more likely they were throwing wood on the smoldering fire of Scandinavian anti-immigrant racism as a way to either editorially sympathize or more likely just to sell newspapers and consequently more full-page furniture outlet adds. The cartoons were reprinted in over 50 publications resulting in a downward spiral protest from Muslims around the world descending from diplomatic and legal challenges to street riots leading to over 200 violent deaths and attacks on Danish and European embassies in Muslim countries.

The ‘Merican sophomoric practically stick-figure cartoon South Park tackled the issue of censorship with their own spin on depictions of Muhammed in the 2010 episode 200, a complex narrative weaving together many pre-existing plots culminating in Tom Cruise spearheading a celebrity class-action lawsuit against the town of South Park that he will only withdraw if the children produce Muhammad. The children do produce Muhammed bit he is kidnapped by the Ginger Separatist Group of fair-haired children prior to being delivered to Cruz. Depictions on Muhammad had a tradition on South Park going back to 2001. He is part of a gout of prophets, including a cocaine snorting Buddha, referred to as Super Best Friends and even cameos in a group shot of the shows credits. Despite the depiction and treatment of Muhammad being largely respectful (especially for South Park standards) and a sub-plot in their vehement take-down of their arch nemesis Tom Cruz, Comedy Central and show creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone were besieged with multiple and humorless death threats.

In 2011 the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo picked up the mantle with an issue guest edited by a charicaturized Muhammad. Their offices were firebombed and reduced to rubble on the issue release date.

In 2012 B-team fraudster and Coptic Christian Nakoula Basseley Nakoula youtube released 15 minutes of a budgetless D-movie titled Innocence of Muslims which depicted Muhammad as a pedophile and simpleton – just in time for the Anniversary of September 11th. The resulting world-wide protests quickly degenerated into violence which culminated in an angry mob and/or terrorists (the jury is apparently still out on this despite the Fox News hyperbole) in Benghazi Libya killing US Ambassador Christopher Stephens.


Back to Agent Nima’s desire to dive into these murky waters:

Considering the cons, (death threats, a Fox News van parked on the front lawn of the Art Building to “defend” Malcontent, being disrespectful to the many observant Muslim students on campus, and loosing my day-job at Politically Correct College) against the pros, (honoring the First Amendment to the Constitution of The United States of America, the philosophy of academic freedom, that after all it’s just a ‘sine, and Agent Nima’s uncanny ability to be patently offensive while riotously funny and likable), I acquiesced after a long cautionary conversation.

 Though given (and taking) carte-blanche, I feel ultimately that agent Nima’s resulting article and it’s neoclassical picture of Muhammed pulled off of google image search would offend Muslim’s more due to him being third runner up in the 10 Hottest Prophefits! to Branch Davidian founder David Koresh and Christ with rock hard abs that due to the inclusion of the graphic.

 “Yep that’s him. Get over it.”

Without further adieu here is the article (click on the image or here to read in PDF format):


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ThIS report was spawned from the Malcontent tri-fold display at iSFair 2O12

Death & Rebirth in the Analog World

Sunday, March 10th, 2013


INDIVIDUAL:
IS Agent F.R. “Russ” Forster
GROUP SIZE: 4.6 million units in 2012 (up 17.7% since 2011) representing (our guess of) 1.6 million consumers
NATURE OF GROUP: indie-hipsters, club-kids, baby-boomers, throw-backs and forward-thinkers
INCIDENCE OF SOCIOMETRY: Birth, Death And Rebirth In The Analog World

Part 1: BIRTH

“Lateral-cut disc records were developed in the United States by Emile Berliner, who named his system the “gramophone”, distinguishing it from Edison’s wax cylinder “phonograph” and Columbia’s wax cylinder “graphophone”. Berliner’s earliest discs, first marketed in 1889, but only in Europe, were 5 inches (13 cm) in diameter, and were played with a small hand-propelled machine. Both the records and the machine were adequate only for use as a toy or curiosity. In the United States in 1894, under the Berliner Gramophone trademark, Berliner started marketing records with somewhat more substantial entertainment value, along with somewhat more substantial gramophones to play them. Berliner’s records had poor sound quality compared to wax cylinders, but his manufacturing associate Eldridge R. Johnson eventually improved them. Abandoning Berliner’s “Gramophone” trademark for legal reasons, in 1901 Johnson’s and Berliner’s separate companies reorganized to form the Victor Talking Machine Company, whose products would come to dominate the market for many years.

In 1901, 10-inch disc records were introduced, followed in 1903 by 12-inch records. These could play for more than three and four minutes respectively, while contemporary cylinders could only play for about two minutes.”

Wikipedia: “Gramophone Record”

My own adventure with Long Playing records (as 12” Gramophone records came to be known after the 1930s) started in the mid-1980s when I decided to start a record label named “Underdog Records” to put out records by some Chicago bands I was friends with. I rushed headlong into a world I had only known before as a consumer, naïve and fearless.  Through shear determination and a willingness to make plenty of mistakes along the way, I was able to put out six LPs, one 12” EP, and a handful of 7” records before I let a collective of bands and fans take over the label in the early 1990s.

By the time I gave up Underdog, I was disillusioned about the music business, the record distribution business, and the rapidly accelerating move from analog to digital formats for a majority of music consumers. I felt a bit burned by several early Underdog bands getting “deals” with a label started by a couple of seedy coke-snorting music industry types; I got sick of having to deal with Mafiosos and flakey slackers posing as indie record distributors to get paid; and I bought into the conspiracy theories that CDs were just a transparent effort for Major Labels to get a gullible public to re-buy all the music they already owned at double the price.

Disillusioned, I walked away from vinyl at about the time LPs were declared deceased by the music industry, unsure of whether I wanted to ever put out a record again. As luck would have it, I ended up being part of a group of ne’er do wells  who started a small press magazine (“‘zine”, if you will) as an act of satire against the push toward digital. We called the ‘zine 8-Track Mind and devoted it to the promotion of the 8-track tape as the ultimate fun music format. We had no idea of where this crazy underground experiment would take us.

Above: A selection of issues from the 101 run of 8-Track Mind with a Sears Mono-8 player.
Below: Agent Forster’s corresponding documentary So Wrong Their Right on VHS (obviously). 


Part 2: DEATH

“Ever since the mid-Sixties creative boom in long-playing records spearheaded by the Beatles and Beach Boys, the album has been the model by which any musical artist is measured. That may be about to change.

The album has endured changes in format (vinyl to cassette to CD), length (40 minutes on vinyl, today many extend to 70 minutes) and sound quality (mono to stereo to digital). Throughout, its concept has remained much the same. The ‘digital revolution’ – mp3 players, iTunes, song-swapping – is set to alter all that. And, as we have seen in virtually every recent musical revolution (Napster, The Grey Album, internet CD sales and so on) the music industry is slow to react.

The key change is in the way consumers listen to the music. At the primary level of exposure, the listener no longer relies solely on commercial radio or on the blind shelling out of a tenner for the latest LP. Digital downloads from iTunes, Napster and their competitors offer singles, album tracks, live recordings and other tracks side-by-side, available for the consumer to cherry pick.”

Spiked E-Magazine, 11/22/05

As 8-Track Mind Magazine was building some serious underground steam in the early 1990s, the Music Industry was pushing CDs in and LPs out in much the way it had done for 8-tracks vs. cassettes in the 1980s.  Impossible claims of indestructibility and music reproduction superiority were heaped upon CDs in articles and ads, and 8-TM staff and contributors took a jaundiced eye and pen to the proclaimed perfection that we considered “seedy”. And while vinyl was the intended target of the Record Companies, the fatal wound was actually sustained over the course of the decade by compact cassettes once CD players replaced cassette players in car stereos.

But certainly vinyl took a great hit, and got hit even harder in the ‘00s as iPods and 99¢ Mp3 singles captivated the imagination of a new generation and trickled up to an older one.  In a quirky and unexpected outcome of the format wars of the past two decades, 8-track tapes became collectible (thanks a lot, eBay!) and by the end of the 1990s 8-Track Mind stopped being the screams from the audio basement it started out as and was subtly morphing into a mouthpiece for the collector market. As editor/publisher I was finding myself increasingly alienated by the pressure to create price lists and engage in real moneymaking, and my own personal love for the ugly duckling format became less reflected in the pages of 8-TM.

A wall of 8-tracks at the IS home office. (In the mid 90’s IS agent m[i]le[s] was pulled into the apartment of agent Vollmer to watch So Wrong Their Right. The Compound (IS spiritual birthplace in San Diego’s Hillcrest neighborhood) was already the location of weekly 8-track dance parties. After the viewing, agent m[i]le[s] began an analog correspondence with agent Forster that eventually resulted in multiple cross-submissions to each others projects and culminated in PRO a Chicago banjo and trash-can street-band covering 8-track era heavy-metal and punk classics. ~ IS ed.)

So I shut the magazine down in 2000 and walked away from the 8-track “scene” while I could still do so without animosity.  Certainly there were those who thought I was crazy to step away from “success”, but to cash in on the collector scene would have been too antithetical to the original “8-Noble Truths Of The 8-Track Mind” (which were concerned far more with fun and fraternity than with profit) for me to bear. My 8-track and LP collections became my own quiet personal seawall against the accelerating digital tsunami (which ironically I also participated in somewhat begrudgingly as music I wanted to listen to became impossible or prohibitively expensive to obtain on vinyl).

It cheered me somewhat that some of my favorite indie rock labels like Touch & Go and Matador and Sub Pop were still offering reasonably priced LP versions of many of their artists’ works, and I secretly applauded the dance DJs who were keeping many small vinyl pressing plants from bankruptcy, but I feared this underground support would not sustain long-term.


Part 3: REBIRTH

“As counterintuitive as it may seem in this age of iPods and digital downloads, vinyl — the favorite physical format of indie music collectors and audiophiles — is poised to re-enter the mainstream, or at least become a major tributary.

Talk to almost anyone in the music business’ vital indie and DJ scenes and you’ll encounter a uniformly optimistic picture of the vinyl market.

Pressing plants are ramping up production, but where is the demand coming from? Why do so many people still love vinyl, even though its bulky, analog nature is anathema to everything music is supposed to be these days? Records, the vinyl evangelists will tell you, provide more of a connection between fans and artists. And many of today’s music fans buy 180-gram vinyl LPs for home listening and MP3s for their portable devices.

“For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release,” said Matador’s Patrick Amory. “The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music.”

Wired Magazine, 10/29/07

It defies logical explanation, but now in 2012 vinyl is not just staying alive on life support but is actually thriving!  With every passing year LPs present a measurably increasing share of all physical music format sales. Vinyl has a new generation of fans who weren’t even alive when it was declared “dead” in the 1990s.  The rise of Mp3s has actually done more to diminish CD than LP sales, in a highly ironic turn of events. Even used LPs retain value much more readily than used CDs


The Rise and Fall of Music Delivery Formats ~ by reddit user Dwellonthis

In 1996 I decided after half a decade of absence from the recording studio to write some new songs and tiptoe back in as an “extreme” solo artist, doing all playing, drum machine programming and singing myself. My first experiments proved to be quite unsuccessful, and disappointed I put recording aside in favor of my film/video and ‘zine efforts.

But the urge to get my music on tape (or hard drive) raised its head again a half decade later in 2001, when as part of a tour promoting my video Tributary (chronicling the tribute band “scene” in the US in the 1990s) I ventured into ace engineer/producer (and editor of the amazing DIY recording magazine Tape Op) Larry Crane’s Jackpot studio and recorded four songs in one day of fast and furious recording.

One of the efforts from those sessions turned out well enough that I vowed to get it on an LP within the next decade.  It took me another 5 years to get back in the studio to record tracks for the debut LP by RAKEHELL (my extreme solo project), and another half decade plus to finally get everything mixed and ready for public consumption, but now at this very table you can see a tangible bit of proof that vinyl has not died; my own modest effort to keep analog alive in the 21st Century.


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ThIS report was originally published on a tri-fold display at iSFair 2O12

RAKEHELL performing live at iSFair 2O12

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