Saturday, 29 May 2010
21C Magazine’s Ashley Crawford – Mediapunk interview
Richard Metzger called 21C his favorite magazine of the 90s and “The most unabashedly intellectual and forward-thinking journal that I have ever seen, anywhere.” Editor Ashley Crawford joined the magazine in 1990 when the magazine was still a publication of Australian Commission For The Future “a comparatively short-lived governmental entity.” Ashley took the magazine international with the help of publishing house Gordon & Breach in 1994. The magazine continued in this form until 1999. After a short lived online revival helmed by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) in the early 00s, the magazine went back into long-term hiatus.
Now it’s back in a new digital form. Ashley was kind enough to answer a few questions about the magazine’s past, present, and future for the inaugural Mediapunk interview.
How did you get involved in 21C? Were you the editor from the beginning or were you brought on later? Were you involved the Australian Commission For The Future before 21C?
OK, strange history. 21C was already up and running and had, from memory, two editors before me. I was running an independent arts/culture magazine called Tension. It was actually in the process of folding when the Commission for the Future approached me to take over. The Commission was a government body and the magazine was funded accordingly. I worked under the government structure editing the magazine from 1990-93 in that version and even then, although it had a strong Australian flavor, it was beginning to tackle cyberspace, information overload, virtual reality etc.
In 1994 I was approached by a Swiss-based international company, Gordon & Breach, who wanted to start an international art magazine – World Art. I accepted but didn’t really want to let go of 21C and so organized a take-over of the magazine. Accordingly I ended up editing and publishing a revised version of the title from 1994 to 1999. Given we were suddenly international in scope I made the most of it and approached folk I’d been a fan of for some time, amongst them such people as J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Mark Dery, Andrew Ross, R.U. Sirius, Claudia Springer, McKenzie Wark, Darren Tofts, Michael Moorcock, Thurston Moore, Erik Davis and others. To my utter amazement they all responded enthusiastically.
How different was the 1990-93 version from the 1994-1999 version?
Extremely. The earlier version was extremely parochial with a strong Australian flavor. We changed the format and structure entirely. The earlier version had a strong socio-political flavor whereas the second version, while maintaining some of that eg; covering Noam Chomsky, tended towards the more speculative which you can see in the selection on that archive site up now. The posthuman, cyberpunk etc.
In the newer material we tend to be going weirdly post-cyber. Where once it was replicants and cyborgs now it seems to be zombies. Where once it was the glittering on-line (albeit wonderfully gritty) world of Neuromancer and Snow Crash, today it seems to be the blasted wilderness of Cormac McCarthy, Brian Evenson and Brian Conn or the strange, fantastical but distinctly visceral rituals of Ben Marcus or Matthew Derby.
What was your background before 21C?
Actually I was trained as an old-fashioned reporter on a newspaper before the days of training in universities – trained on the street as it were. Never attended uni although I’ve lectured in innumerable colleges around the world. Age 17 saw my first slaughtered body on a police rounds job – a poor women cut into a million pieces – long story. Probably did insurmountable damage to a young mind. This was, mind you, 1979, and being threatened by the mafia etc, was part of the job. Fear, adrenalin, alcohol, nicotine and speed were part of the job. Then I got assigned to writing on rock music where fear, adrenalin, alcohol, nicotine and speed were ESSENTIAL to the job. Try snorting cocaine with Ian Drury, trying to out-drink Mark E.Smith or getting thrown into jail with Nick Cave as starting points…
But I was always attracted to the mind-games of folk like Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. Then along came the cyberpunks and through 21C I had the opportunity to meet and/or correspond with some incredible minds; Ballard, Acker, Gibson, etc. There is a kind of adrenalin / challenge to addressing such folk – sadly they’re rarities in our world.
In the early 00s, Paul D. Miller edited two issues of a new, online edition of 21C – what happened with that, and how did the new version come about? Why now?
The DJ Spooky combo came about when a long-term 21C contributor, Mark Dery, invited me on-board as executive editor of a magazine he’d taken editorship of called Artbyte in New York in 2001 shortly after 21C had died in its print-form. Dery had fantastic ambitions for Artbyte but unfortunately the publisher was, to say the least, eccentric. We didn’t stand a chance.
Paul was an contributor to Artbyte. When 21C died he asked if I would be happy for him to try and get it running on-line and I said why not? But of course Paul’s busily running around the world being DJ Spooky and simply couldn’t put the energy into it to do anything but maintain a fairly token presence.
Ever since 21C passed away people have been asking me for back issues or how to source specific articles. It’s been driving me nuts. Also I keep coming across things that I’d love to see covered more thoroughly. Most recently, the plethora of writers of decidedly post-cyberpunk dystopic fiction that I’ve tentatively dubbed Apocalypse Noir in the current issue.
What have you been up to since 21C folded?
Predominantly freelancing in the realms of visual art and travel, soaking up alien cultures in as real a way as is possible in the wired world. Been spending a fair bit of time with Australian indigenous people in the bush, discovering their totally unique culture(s). A lot of newspaper and magazine work.
Magazines and other publications have been rushing iPad apps out the door. Will we be seeing 21C in the App Store?
We’re looking at that right now. I’d love to see it as an App. But I’d also love to see it as hard copy. We have a lot to sort out and, as Mark Dery has pointed out, at the moment it’s just white heterosexual grumpy men featured, so we have to address that urgently.
And on the subject of the iPad – do you see the future of magazines in e-readers of various types?
I still cherish the notion of magazines – and more particularly books – as object. 21C was fairly renowned for its design and illustration and I have yet to see an equivalent on-screen. I’m also concerned that reading substantial articles/essays on-screen is somewhat tiring – maybe that’s generational – but a great deal of what is published on line is intentionally brief – attention spans are getting slighter and slighter to the point that a celebrity telling the world that she burped after breakfast is a hot ticket on Twitter. I’m more of a fan of the approach taken by Harper’s or The New Yorker – not necessarily the subject matter, but the intelligence and effort put into the research and argument. The kind of approach you see in 21C by such writers as Mark Dery and Erik Davis. It’s all too rare in this age.
Can you do that on an iPad? We’ll know soon enough I hope.
I was going to say – there’s something of a new renaissance in indie magazines right now – stuff like Dodgem Logic, Coilhouse, and Steampunk Magazine. They’re all quite successful in their own right, though I’m not sure how many people’s livelihood each of them is able to support. And then there’s stuff like Lulu and Mag Cloud that enable people to get into print with very low risk. So it’s a surprisingly exciting time for print.
Are there any magazines coming out right now that you’re fond of?
I love parts of lots of magazines but few of them have the depth that I hanker for. A part of that is the twitter age of low concentration spans. A part of it is lack of first-hand training. A part of it is a lack of decent pay – few writers can afford to take weeks off to do decent research. I wish something like Steampunk or Coilhouse (or 21C for that matter) had the resources of the New Yorker… we can but dream…
One issue of Coilhouse actually had a piece that had originally been published online years before called “Dark Miracle” by Joshua Ellis (still available here). It was a piece of long form journalism that was “crowdfunded” (before the term had been invented, I think, and way before Kickstarter). I think that’s probably where longer form journalism is headed, especially for the indies – it’s gonna have to be paid for by someone in advance. Two of my big interests right now are “journalist as brand” and “journalism as a service” (as opposed to product).
I can only speak for myself here, but I have a terrible attention span – I’ve always got dozens of browser tabs open, I’m constantly on Twitter and I was a smart phone “early adopter.” But I still read long form journalism (from places like The New Yorker and The Atlantic and Vanity Fair) and even entire books on my laptop and Blackberry. It usually takes me a while, because I’m dividing up my attention, but I do it. So I do think there’s at least some audience there.
Speaking of distractions – have a read of this – I think it’s pertinent to our discussion.
Again only speaking for myself: I’ve been having better luck focusing on reading on mobile devices – my Blackberry and my iPod Touch. There’s just less less stuff going on on them, and I can curl up on the couch and read. That’s something I think is encouraging about dedicated devices like the Kindle – they should make it easier to focus on reading longer pieces. I’m not that worried about arguments about those sorts of devices being “passive” – sometimes it’s best to be passive for a little while.
I did notice something this morning that may be pertinent. It’s my habit to have a read of the New York Times every morning on-line. This morning there was a large and shifting bright red Coca Cola add to one side. It made it impossible to concentrate on the text. Ads in old-style newspapers don’t move and, although they may work subliminally, they’re fairly easy to ignore. The Coke ad on-line was a constant distraction making it impossible to ignore and, indeed, making it impossible to complete an article and after a minute or so I gave up and quit the NY Times altogether for the day. If this is the future of on-line advertising then not only print is dead, so is reading.
What advice would you give young professional journalists? What advice would you give “citizen journalists” in terms of learning the ropes?
I’ve done quite a lot of mentoring for younger writers in recent years. Almost all of them seemed bogged down in an academic approach where each and every word seemed to pose a problem rather than a pleasure. We seem to have two extremes – one is university speak which is unbearable, the other is border-line illiteracy. The first rule of thumb is GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT. The second is the old maxim, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE AND WHY. Don’t assume all your readers know who or what you are referring to.
Klint Finley @'MediaPunk
Dark Miracle by Joshua Ellis
There’s an old story that in the hours before dawn on July 16th, 1945, a young woman named Georgia Green was being driven back to school at the University of New Mexico by her sister Margaret and her brother-in-law Joe. Suddenly, she saw a bright flash of light, and she gripped Joe’s arm hard enough to make him swerve the car. “What’s that light?” she asked.
The thing is, Georgia Green was blind.
At that moment, some fifty miles away, a tall, gaunt man in a porkpie hat was also staring at the light, through a pair of darkened welder’s glasses. He was the architect of Georgia Green’s dark miracle, and he was very, very tired — as tired, perhaps, as anyone can be and still move and breathe. It had been a long road coming out to this empty desert spot, which he called Trinity. It had been a long war.
Some of the men around him cheered. Some of them wept. A few, mostly scientists, were quietly sick in the sand beyond the dim lights of their camp. But he just stood and watched the great glowing mushroom cloud that rose in the darkness like a judgment from one angry god or another.
I am become Death, thought Robert Oppenheimer, remembering an ancient Hindu text. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
* * *
Here are the facts: at fifteen seconds before 5:30 in the morning, Mountain Standard Time, on July 16th, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated, at a site code-named Trinity. It was the culmination of almost two and a half years of intensive work, done primarily by a group of scientists and engineers in a secret city roughly a hundred and fifty miles north of Trinity, called Los Alamos. The project’s director was a brilliant and depressive Berkeley physicist named Robert Oppenheimer.
On August 6th, a bomb called “Little Boy” was dropped by a bomber named the Enola Gay on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, another bomb — “Fat Boy” — was dropped on Nagasaki. The combined death toll is estimated to be between 100,000 and 220,000 people, possibly much higher if later deaths from radiation exposure are counted. Almost all of the casualties were civilian.
The bombings had replaced Operation Downfall, a planned invasion by Allied forces of Japan. Estimates by the American Secretary of War suggested that such an invasion would most likely result in as many as fourteen million casualties — most of them Japanese. This was the justification for the bombings; horrible as they were, it was felt by many in the Allied chain of command that the alternative was far worse. The use of atomic bombs, they were sure, would cause the Japanese Emperor Hirohito to surrender.
They were right. On August 14, 1945, Hirohito surrendered to the Allies, ending World War II — a war which had caused an estimated sixty-two million deaths in fifty-one countries around the world.
Immediately after the bombing, many of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project — including Oppenheimer himself — urged American President Harry Truman to share the bomb with the world, giving control of atomic weapons to a transnational organization of some kind, to prevent any one nation from using atomic weapons.
Truman demurred…but unbeknownst to him, a spy at Los Alamos named Klaus Fuchs had already given detailed plans for the Trinity bomb to the Soviet Union.
And so the Cold War began.
Continue reading
An interview w/ Richard Kern
One of the premier visual stylists of the No-Wave scene in 1980s New York, filmmaker and photographer Richard Kern worked with musicians and performers like Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, Kembra Pfahler and Lung Leg, a.k.a. Elizabeth Carr — who, most famously, appeared on the Kern-shot cover for Sonic Youth’s 1986 album EVOL.
Kern now photographs full-time, producing pastel-hued, soft-pornographic nudes of nubile young women for publications like VICE, who calls him their “favourtie girlie photographer” and hosts a show on their broadband network entitled Shot by Kern. EYE WEEKLY caught up with him for an espresso at the Drake during his brief artist residency at Studio Gallery, which is also currently hosting a from-the-vaults show of his work, including a film series.
What is a good photo to you?I know it when I see it. It has to be a little bit weird. At the show, there’s only one photo you could call “sexy.” Most of the stuff is just people standing there, doing things without clothes on. Well, they have panties on or whatever, but it’s not like they’re adopting sex poses.
It’s impossible not to notice the marked shift in style that happened in your work in the early ’90s. It’s like you became a different person.
It was 1988, around there. It was when I got off drugs. Everything lightened up quite a bit. The films still had humour, but most of my aggression had lifted.
What’s your opinion on the remarkable lifespan those films from the ’80s have had?
It’s extremely weird! I think it was a really lucky time to be doing them. It was right at the beginning of the video age, and I put them out on video, so people who were looking for something interesting had alternatives — you could see something different.
You’re associated with the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression movements. Was making art for you just a by-product of being a listless young person, or was there any intentionality to it?
It’s more like a “fuck you” to everybody. That was the big statement. Back then my favourite band was the Sex Pistols: everything was shit; fuck everybody; you’re all stupid. And then I stopped drugs and it was like, "Wait, I’m stupid!" Except, people still identify with those films.
You collaborated with Lydia Lunch, and those films [The Right Side of My Brain, Fingered] have dated very well. Would you say she was approaching art-making in the same way? What was your working relationship like?
The reason those films stand out is because of her. She’s in them and her personality is all over them. The second one, Fingered, was made in direct response to The Right Side of My Brain, which got bad reviews. People were like, “What is this shit? This is misogynist!” And we were like, “You think that’s bad? Wait until you see the next movie.” We wanted people going in and expecting a Maya Deren film or something and leaving totally disturbed.
There are a lot of young women now who like and identify with those films.
Yeah. It wasn’t that way at the beginning. It was the exact opposite.
Lung Leg has become an underground post-feminist icon. Does that seem strange to you? Do you feel the burden or responsibility of that?
No, I don’t. It’s just that it seemed like everyone else finally figured out what we thought we were doing. Ideas get into society and mutate and affect people’s opinions. Video is really powerful for that kind of stuff.
But did you ever have any kind of feminist intentions in making those films?
My main intention was, “I’ll make these films, people will watch them and I’ll fuck up their heads.” I always thought, this is a Trojan Horse: they think they’re coming to see something cool and it’s gonna really fuck them up. Just your basic anarchist manifesto.
A lot of your recent photography is notable for its extreme prettiness, softness, exquisiteness. It’s the same stuff; it just doesn’t have that darkness in it. And jokes! A lot of jokes. If you watch [my film] Manhattan Love Suicides it has a lot of the same jokes that are in some of the photos. The girl with her head in the toilet, that kind of thing.
Aside from getting clean, does that aesthetic shift have to do with getting more successful, with having more resources at your fingertips?
I pretty much live the exact same lifestyle as I did then. I’ve had a couple of good years with photography, and I can actually make a living at it, but there aren’t that many photographers who get rich. When I got off drugs I was so broke a friend of mine was letting me stay at their house. And the only thing I could afford was black-and-white photos, so that’s what I shot.
How has underground culture changed since you started working?
I know underground culture is out there somewhere right now but I don’t know what it is. I don’t do Facebook or Twitter. I’m on the ’net nonstop but, and it may be a stupid thing to say, but I feel like Facebook is like joining a fraternity. It’s just a giant group of people saying, “Hey, let’s all do this.” The challenge to me now would be to somehow get outside of all of that stuff, where nobody is. All I know is that if there’s something you want to do you’ve just got to do it, all the time. People who are making good art aren’t sitting around on Facebook all day.
Why are you so private and exclusive when you do your photography work?I think a lot of people are surprised when they work with me that it’s not some crazy shoot. It has to be quiet. It has to be small. And when I do do something that’s commercial and there are a lot of people around, the first thing I say is “Don’t talk. If you’ve got anything to say to me, say it outside.” Because I’m just walking around thinking. It’s about me and the model.
Do you keep touch with a lot of the models you work with?
Yes, quite a few. I don’t hang out with them, but everyone has email accounts. Big shock, though, when I see someone I shot 20 years ago. Big shock when I look in the mirror! Lung Leg, for example: you just think of this 18-year-old girl with this really beautiful face. She doesn’t look quite like that any more. She still has the exact same style. But it looks like she’s had a hard life.
David Balzar @'Eye Weekly'
When shorts were short...
A new translation of Dante's "La Commedia" by the avatar of no-wave cinema, Amos Poe
As some of you may know, Amos Poe is one of the leading figures of the no wave cinema movement and is considered by many to be the father of the modern indie American cinema. (see Celine Danhier's "Blank City"). His films include: "The Blank Generation", "Unmade Beds", "The Foreigner", "Subway Riders", "Alphabet City", "Rocket Gibraltar", "Frogs For Snakes", "Steve Earle:Just An American Boy" and "Empire II".
CHECK OUT THE NEW FRAMES!
His current project LA COMMEDIA di Amos Poe is inspired by Dante Alighieri’s 700 year-old literary masterpiece “La Divina Commedia” and Edward Muybridge’s 19th century breakthrough “The Horse In Motion”, arguably the first “motion picture”.
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