“The underground is not a tight, formalized, and coherent social grouping with firm boundaries; instead it is a nongeographical sprawl which must be mapped out” (57) -Stephen Duncombe, Zines: Notes From Underground The final five issues of F5 spanned three and half years, from February 1995 (not September as mistakenly mentioned in an earlier post) to July 1998. Smack in the middle of these final five issues, in 1997, Stephen Duncombe published Zines: Notes From Underground with Verso Press. Duncombe’s book is by far the most influential book on zines (more than 1,500 citations) and for good reason: it carefully
I had first heard of John Held, Jr. some years ago when I picked up issue #19 of Fluke at Quimby’s, which focused on histories of mail art via a series of interviews. As someone who knew very little about that scene and its relationship to zines, I read the issue with much curiosity, recalling that Held had curated one of the largest archives of mail art in the world, portions of which have been donated to institutions like the Smithsonian and MoMA . Influenced by Ray Johnson and Neo-Dadaists, Held (whose name is purposefully cribbed from the famous magazine
Mike Gunderloy often hosted large parties at his house in Rensselaer, just across the Hudson from downtown Albany, or as his party flier described it, from “the bowels of the [New York] state government.” He would convene dozens of self-publishers from all over the northeast, including the late Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), David Greenberger ( Duplex Planet ), anarchist Bob Black (who had been thrown out of certain parties), and Pagan Kennedy (Pagan’s Head). Archived ephemera include a single-page mailed invitation, a sign-in sheet, as well as letters of regret and thanks. One letter from this time reports an
So far this project has focused on the emergence of F5 in the early 1980s and Gunderloy specifically. I’m still working on trying to understand this emergence, especially the ways in which zines in the 70s and 80s were part of a wider, weirder assemblage that included not just punk and sci-fi communities, but counterculture, drug culture, and the occult (faux or not). In his book, Erik Davis dubs this high weirdness, “a mode of culture and consciousness that reached a definite peak in the early seventies, when the writers and psychonauts … pushed hard on the boundaries of reality—and
Gunderloy would write and publish about his motives throughout his reign at F5 both within its pages and when he opined for others, such as he did in a 1987 issue of Toronto’s The Blotter, where he distilled his desire into two primary reasons: inertia and fascination. Of the former, Gunderloy described it as the “enormity of the task” — but not so much an inertia to circulate ideas as much as a fear of disappointing his fellow small press publishers if he quit, the enormity of having to explain it to them. He shared this slightly tongue-cheek, lamenting writing