Save for sorting through crappy tote-bag take-aways, I, like just about everyone in North America, haven’t touched a print magazine in almost two years. Don’t weep too much for print media, though, as the industry has its own peculiar self-destroying culture: no one gets a promotion for saying the business model is dead. Thus, this year print has woken, painfully, to a missing advertising base and smaller circulations limited to boomers who get demoralized by caps-lock incidents. Yet, before we have to come to grips with Gawker’s inevitable purchase of Us for 20 bucks and some drink tickets, let’s reminisce on what magazines could (and to a certain extent, still) do right.
Before the internet arrived in earnest at the turn of the millennium, we had to make do with small-scale maquettes of it. Mail art, activist networking, fan culture and self-promotion-as-identity were all individually formed, post-war efforts spread culture-wide, to be sure. But if you were looking in the right place, those could all be glimpsed working harmoniously in FILE, the artists’ magazine published by Toronto’s General Idea from 1972 to 1989 and now collected into one mind-bogglingly cool package.
FILE may have been born on Yonge Street but it was read in every outpost of conceptual tomfoolery around the world. Unlike the rest of the underground of the time, General Idea weren’t “against” mass media. They simply bettered Warhol’s revolutions by using what was available to them. More than just a collection of collages, images and parodies, FILE would be mass media remade on its creators’ own terms, with, as added bonuses, mail-in beauty pageants and Residents flexi-discs. “We wanted to be artists and we knew that if we were famous and glamorous we could say we were artists and we would be,” General Idea wrote for their Glamour issue. “We knew glamour was not an object, not an action, not an idea. We knew glamour never emerged from the ‘nature’ of things. There are no glamorous people, no glamorous events. We knew glamour was artificial. We knew that in order to be glamorous we had to become plagiarists, intellectual parasites.” This box set is a souvenir trinket of a time you probably missed out on but the idea contained still resounds as the beginning of an incredible change in what art can be.
The Rock Bible *****
Henry H. Owings
Quirk Books, 144 pages, $17.95I almost recycled The Rock Bible because the title suggested Jack Blackian, scrunched-face, devil-horns-in-the-air non-jokes were about to happen. I was so wrong. The Rock Bible is a guide on how to be in a band using the collective wisdom of Chunklet, one of the last good music magazines left wheezing. Beyond the balls-out partisan humour (see below), The Rock Bible offers real-world advice to anyone who knows what tour van–foot smells like. Divided into gospels meant for each member of a band, the book ensures no one escapes a giddy flaying (again, see below). For bands in general: “You can’t hand your CD to a successful musician and say, ‘We’re much better than this now’” or “If you’re now in your early twenties and in a band that people seem to care about, consider the complete opposite of that situation and apply that to your late twenties.” For vocalists: “Witty, onstage banter is intended only for witty people.”
Gospel #240 may nail indie record business practices with the succinct, “Fifty percent of absolutely nothing is absolutely nothing,” but the true value of The Rock Bible is in its chapters on words and phrases critics can never use again, and words and phrases underused by critics (yes, this is the below). With any luck, we can say goodbye to, “blistering” and “elder statesman“ and say hello to “chemical induced boner,” “like a thrift store crutch,” “curbside appliance,” “all trippy ’n’ shit,” and “over licking the envelope.”