We e-mail the illustrations to Rebecca who photo shops them. She got this one and said she loved it but wondered why we were painting Elizabeth Taylor?
It's not Elizabeth Taylor. Or it wasn't intended to be. We were attempting to reproduce a painting on page 119 (from Actuel) of Free Press: Underground & Alternative Publications 1965-1975.
We're mentioning that book a great deal this edition (it's by Jean-Francois Bizot) and there's a reason for that. We found a lot to inspire in us in it. We flipped through it repeatedly. Those pages with text, we squinted to read.
We have some bad illustrations, on every level, and the worst of the worst don't make it up at the site. They do make it into the print version. (For this edition, the print version and the online version are completely different. Readers of the print version know why. Members of the community can see the print edition in full in this Friday's gina & krista round-robin.) But guess what, we'd rather be bad and alive than safe and dead.
We (the core six) wanted to plug this book one more time because we truly do think it charts the death of the alternative weekly. These days, all that's left is a snide attitude that's generally only aimed at Meg Ryan films and someone wants to call that "alternative." (Entertainment Weekly provides the same attitude and 'criticism' in a shorter version each week.) A hard-hitting piece these days, think New Times and all it's weak-lettes, is a high school athelete on steroids. What happened? Flip through the book and we think you'll see. Lively, creative illustrations (some good, some great -- we didn't see any bad), a scope that went beyond the feature segments of local broadcast television news, and then? And then it just peters out. In a brief history on the final two pages (before the index), Bizot offers a look back and concludes that the death of the alternative press and we'll note the section on America:
In America, the UPS [Underground Press Syndicate] went into decline after 1973, ravaged by revolutionaires facing the apathy of freaks who were drained by debts and lawsuits. The FBI had mounted a campaign against the record companies CBS and Elektra to stop them subsidizing the revolution which had made the advertising fortune of Rolling Stone.
Bizot also wonders, "Will the Internet be enough to preserve our liberties? Words may fly by, but the writing still remains." If you're doing a website or 'zine especially, we recommend you take a look at the book. Don't ape the mainstream, don't talk about the 'need' to professionalize the net. It's not just the music and times that got the ball the rolling in the sixties, it was also the press and squares don't roll.
