A photographic imagination

Over ten years ago when Lionel Martinez and I were trawlng FactSheet 5 for material for our local show Zine TV, it was already clear the most edgy and provactive material was being produced not in NY or SF but in all places in between where there was an all night Kinkos.

As a matter of record, self publsining did not begin with blogs. Micro niche publishing did not begin with blogs. What blogs came to the table with was push button software like the Brownie camera, a way of keeping score with counters for links and page views, instant feedback and Ad sesne dollars.

Urban Scrawl
From the NY Times

BY Megan O'rourke

Does Downtown still exist — and does it matter? The quick answer to the first question is no. “Up Is Up” drives home the argument that it wasn’t just rising rents but AIDS that brought this period to a definitive end. The age of outrageous play was replaced by an age of sex ed and condo conversions. The media may proclaim Red Hook or Bushwick the new Bohemia, but these neighborhoods simply don’t have the seedy charge of the East Village in the 1970s and ’80s — and contemporary hipster style, intellectual and sartorial, hardly has the same anti-authoritarian bristle. As little kids in New York in the 1980s, my brother and I were scared (I blush to remember) of punks’ metallic studs and mohawks; it’s hard to imagine first graders being terrified of a hipster in a trucker cap and expensive jeans. Today, the city is so expensive that the real Bohemians are dispersed among disparate, far-flung neighborhoods.

But maybe that’s not so tragic. After all, the third factor in the disappearance of Downtown is the Internet. In an era when real estate is costly but virtual space is cheap, the community that once could be found only on Astor Place exists online. Today, there are plenty of magazines and Web sites continuing the do-it-yourself tradition of Downtown. But they’re largely in the yonder regions of America, where outfits like Spork (out of Tucson) and Forklift, Ohio (out of Cincinnati), to name just two I like, are publishing irreverent work that swipes at the mainstream. In the afterword to “Up Is Up,” Dennis Cooper declares “I wanted to make it as a writer, and I thought I had to be in New York for that to happen.” But many writers no longer feel that way. If there is to be a new Downtown, it is probably taking shape in a city like Portland, Ore., out among the fresh pine trees, and those of us in New York can visit it online.