Here are links to more info on our upcoming February workshops:
Texas A&M, College Station TX, public event
(email for details)
Mizzou, Columbia, MO, public event
(email for details)
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Analog Counterculture & Low-Tech Publishing Workshops
The Obsolete Press Mimeograph Revolution Roadshow, February-April 2026
Before there was social media, even before photo-copied zines, artists and writers found ways to publish their creations using stencil prints (mimeographs) dye-transfer prints (hectographs) and alcohol transfers (spirit duplication). Developed during the industrial revolution for copying documents without the use of a printing press, these quick and cheap techniques have been used by Avant Garde artists and poets, political dissidents and underground publishers since the 1800s.
Through public presentations and hands-on workshops, Rich Dana and Leisha Stanek of Obsolete Press share the history of pre-Xerox copier technologies and how contemporary artists and writers are using them to publish small editions of zines, chapbooks, prints, and flyers free from the constraints of the publishing industry, corporate social media platforms and A.I. algorithms.
Who We Are:
Rich Dana is a copier artist and the founder of Obsolete Press. Author of Cheap Copies!: The Obsolete Press Guide to DIY Mimeography, Hectography and Spirit Duplication, Rich has been collecting, restoring and distributing mimeograph machines to book art programs and community art centers around the US. He holds an MFA in book arts and an MA in Library Science.
Leisha Stanek is co-publisher and editor at Obsolete Press. She is a writer, performance poet and book artist who specializes in typewriter art, DIY printing and chapbook production. Her current one-woman show, What We’re Doing in Iowa Instead of Church, is now available in a limited edition artist book and her unconventional mash-up memoir OBJECT will be released in 2026.
To Book a Workshop, Demo or Lecture
The Spring 2026 Obsolete Press Roadshow will visit colleges, universities and community art centers through the Eastern, Southern and Central US starting in February. The roadshow offers presentations from half-day visits to 2-day workshops, depending on the host organization’s schedule and budget.
Half-Day Visit: A class visit and/or public presentation and demo with hands-on hectograph. One-hour slide-show and lectures are available for a general audience, book arts or art history focus.
Two-Day Visit: Presentations on history and technology, hands-on sessions with beginner and advanced techniques, and production of a cooperative book project. For schools, these can be tailored to existing class schedules and for community art centers, they can be offered as paid workshops.
Sample Workshop Descriptions
Analog Counterculture & Low-Tech Publishing: Hectograph and Spirit Duplication
Long before ink jet or laser printers, the hectograph was used to make copies when a printing press was not available. Using only dye-based ink and a tray of rubbery gelatin, anyone could produce publications for their class, club, office or organization. The Hectograph was also used by artists like Edvard Munch as a low-cost alternative to lithography.
Learn how to make and use the hectograph (and its mechanical counterpart the spirit duplicator) to create quick and easy editions of zines, chapbooks, posters, flyers and cards. Each workshop participant will leave with an edition of prints and the knowledge (and a starter kit!) to continue printing at home.
Obsolete Press Presents:
Analog Counterculture & Low-Tech Publishing: Mimeography and Stencil Printing
Have you ever wished that you could create those colorful Risograph prints without the giant Riso machine? Meet the Mimeograph!
In the 1870’s a Hungarian immigrant working in a Chicago kite factory invented a stencil paper that made it easy to print on paper without a printshop. David Gestetner’s stencil paper, along with a small desktop duplicating press introduced by Thomas Edison and A.B. Dick, sparked a revolution in indie publishing and later led to the development of the Risograph.
Learn how to create stencils, how to operate a mimeograph, and even how to print from stencils with no mimeo or riso machine at all! Workshop participants will learn about the history and technology of the mimeograph and then dive into hands-on instruction.
For more info, Contact ricardo.obsolete@gmail.com
Saturday, December 20, 2025
مَخْزَن • (maḵzan) m (plural مَخَازِن (maḵāzin)) Arabic, meaning storeroom
 |
During the fall of 2025, I spent much of my time digging into the Ed Sanders Papers at the Special Collections department of the Harvey S. Firestone Library on the campus of Princeton University. My intent was to gain as much insight as possible into the operations of Sanders’ independent publishing venture, “FUCK YOU Press.” For readers unfamiliar with Ed Sanders, he is a poet, musician, artist and activist who—more than any other individual—personifies the American counterculture born of the Beat Generation in the early 1960s which reached its peak in the era of the anti-war/free love/psychedelic hippie movement. The collection of Sanders materials exceeded all of my expectations. My research resulted in the discovery of Sanders-produced magazines, poetry chapbooks, gig fliers and protest handbills from the “Mimeograph Revolution” that I had never seen before. As the dates of the material moved along the timeline of the 60’s, I was also reminded of the rapid descent from the utopian ideals of the “Summer of Love” to the paranoia of the Manson/Nixon years. New media, produced by Sanders and other indie journalists, exposed the diseased, black heart of Amerika. The same grotesque and predatory virus continues to infect this society, and sadly, much of the material from the dark days of the 1970s struck me as more relevant than ever. We are engaged in a race to the cultural, political and intellectual bottom, and now, we are all complicit. We rely on our hand-held oracles, outsourcing our ideas and opinions to technology that is designed to quite literally do nothing but generate conspiracy theories… an infinite series of strings and pushpins, constructed by a sociopath to confirm our darkest fantasies. Coming of age in the era of punk collage and Burroughs-inspired cut-ups, I have always used the non-linear cut-and-paste juxtaposition of visual media and text in my own analog attempts at cultural divination. After reading Ed Sanders manifesto on “Investigative Poetics,” I set about compiling this magazine.
–Rich Dana Obsolete Press
Sunday, May 30, 2021
The Hall Mall: History of a Counterculture Institution
NOTE:
A reprint of a REALLY old story I wrote for Little Village about the history of Iowa City's haven for counterculture businesses. The building owners are ending that history this month.
-r
Like many people who grew up in the area, I first encountered much of what is referred to as "Counterculture” in Iowa City. Since the 1960's, Iowa City has had the dubious distinction of being the center of Counterculture in Iowa and it has been home to countless bars, galleries, bookshops, record stores, boutiques and music venues catering to tastes outside of the mainstream. Those of us who have spent some time in this town occasionally grow nostalgic for favorite spots long gone.
I was imprinted early - I spent a lot of time as a child playing between the aisles of Epstein's Bookstore while my parents attended poetry readings. Even at the age of nine, I felt very much at home among the beats and the hippies. In my teens and early 20's, hardcore punk was my thing, and the Unitarian Church basement was the center of our DIY scene. Still, as times changed and scenes have come and gone, certain institutions have survived.
Gabe'n'Walkers/Gabe's Oasis/Gabe's/The Picador is one such institution - despite its recent change in ownership and the removal of the G-word, The bar at 330 Washington remains the most consistent venue for local and up-and-coming bands.
The New Pioneer Coop is another – although many of their original hippy base have turned in their VW beetles for Volvo station wagons and now shop for aged balsamic vinegar rather than mung bean sprouts, it is still the town’s only retail food coop, and has employed countless artists, musicians and slackers since its inception in the early seventies.
Along with these institutions and a handful of others, another, less illustrious cornerstone of Iowa City’s alternative scene has survived since the early seventies. Less of a cornerstone, perhaps, than a cinderblock rammed under the axle of a rusting 69 microbus, The Hall Mall has remained the reliable source for all things counterculture since the days when Jim Morrison walked the earth. Dubbed "The Upstairs Underground" by tattoo artist and Hall Mall veteran Stingray, it has been home to countless vintage shops, record stores, smoke shops and tattoo parlors, providing Iowa City with its own microscopic version of London's Kensington Market or New York's St. Mark's Place.
Like the universe, the Hall Mall is in a constant state of chaos. Businesses come and go, but the vibe remains the same. The merchants maintain an "anything goes" feel and a cooperative attitude that warms the hearts of libertarians and anarcho-socialists alike. "The rent is cheap and the attitude is loose," according to Bil at Focus Body Piercing. "It's the kind of place that, if you are thinking about starting a business, you can go for it. We have built-in foot traffic and the people up here support each other."
Over the years it has been home to businesses with names like The Wicca Shop, Underground Stereo, The Plainswoman Bookstore, Hemp Cat, Good Times, Ruby Tuesday, and Electric Head. The current residents include Exile Tattoo, Focus Body Piercing, The Konnexion, Antiques and Oddities, Rusty Records, FERAL!, the recently opened Convenience Store and Velocipede InfoShop, and the soon to open White Rabbit.
Located above the ped mall at 114 1/2 East College Street, the entrance to the Hall Mall is an inconspicuous doorway sandwiched between College Street Billiards and Vito's. The narrow, poorly lit stairwell leads upstairs to a long, open vestibule, flanked by a series of identically transomed doorways, framed in dark wood popular at the time of the building’s construction at the turn of the last century. Reminiscent of a seedy office building where Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe might have hung out their shingles, one can imagine these offices once housing green-visored bookkeepers or dark-eyed palmists. Something about the location and the modest size has made it the lair of independent small businesses for over a century.
The building which houses the Hall Mall was known in days past as the Schneider Building, originally the home of Schneider Brothers Furniture, Carpet and Rugs. City records show that in 1916, the Schneider Brothers empire had grown to encompass three buildings on the block, and in addition to the furniture business, the building at 114 was listed as "furniture and undertaker."
During the 1920's, the upstairs began to be listed as a separate address, 114 1/2, "The Schneider Building Offices." In the following decades, the offices housed a beauty shop, a number of lawyers, real estate brokers, lenders, "Morford the Chain Man", a publisher, and by the sixties, it was home to the Johnson County Democrats, Alcoholics Anonymous, and L.L. Pelling, now one of the biggest paving companies in the Midwest.
In the early seventies, when downtown business districts across the nation began their decline, many of the spaces at 114 1/2 went empty. It was not long before a new breed of hippie entrepreneurs, including Gregory J. Stokesberry, discovered them. Also known as "The Wizzard" (a moniker bestowed upon him by the late great artist Ed "Big Daddy" Roth), Stokesberry moved in to four adjoining spaces formerly occupied by L.L. Pelling in 1975. Along with Red Rose Old Clothes and Emerald City, "Gregory J. Stokesberry - Organic Merchant" was one of the original pioneers of the counterculture business revolution that would become the Hall Mall.
I recently visited "Wizzard World Headquarters" in Cedar Rapids Czech Village, where Stokesberry runs his current business, marketing original artwork and t-shirts and publishing a magazine, all targeted at the "Kustom Kulture" audience.
"The Hall Mall was the only place in town where a start up could find some cheap space," says Stokesberry. "I got married and had to make a living. I was into antiques, I was in to green plants, all the hippie decor stuff, ya know, and I was in to the birds and monkeys (editors note: exotic animals, not the bands) so that's what I did. I was a hail and hearty lad with a pickup truck - I used to move jukeboxes up and down those stairs."
"The first were Rose (Red Rose Old Clothes) and Kirk at Emerald City - I moved in after them. We all tried to make it nice ... I used to go out and get a bottle of sherry and cookies from Barbara's Bakery. Every afternoon we would have cookies and sherry ... it was always real cool. Eventually the bums started coming up and grabbing handfuls of cookies...the unemployed bums, I mean, as opposed to us employed bums."
The Wizzard was kind enough to take me to his storage space where we discovered a drowsy raccoon sleeping in front of the original sign that once hung outside his store. It is a hand-carved piece by Bill Schnute, the master woodcarver whose work was a hallmark of Iowa City hippie style.
Several of those original businesses survived and thrived, becoming essential parts of the downtown scene, catering to the tastes of those who couldn't find what they wanted in the sterility of the growing mall culture. Throughout the 80's and 90's, the Hall Mall housed a continuous flow of alternative businesses. "This was the place to be - I had heard of this place in Chicago. I moved out here when my girlfriend came to go to college, and I started tattooing up here in '95. At the height of the grunge era, it was always full of people," says Stingray at Exile Tattoo.
It was the 90's - the economy was strong and business was good, and a second generation of Hall Mall regulars was coming of age with their own taste for the bizarre...but times were about to change. Corporate America was waking up to the potential for profit in the underground scene, and set out to create a safe, mall friendly version to sell to the masses. By the end of the 90's, the political climate in America was changing as well. The election of George W. Bush in 2000 heralded the beginning of an era of new conservatism and intolerance, and places like the Hall Mall were bound to experience the fallout.
Hemp Cat, a hemp clothing store and one of the Hall Mall's most popular businesses, was raided in 2001 by the “The Man” and although no charges were filed, their computers were confiscated and they were forced out of business. Several other long-time mainstays left. Stingray and several others left, and Electric Head went into decline. There was a fire. The Hall Mall hit hard times. People began asking "is there anybody up there anymore?" It was down, but not out.
A new generation began to take up residence. The Konnexion, Davey Jones Tattoo, the Lowbrow Cafe and Rusty Records opened, and they were working hard to bring the Hall Mall back to life.
In 2004, with the independent spirit, youthful zeal and naiveté which is a hallmark of Hall Mall tenants, Kelly Stucker bought an existing Hall Mall smoke shop, “Shasta Mountain,” reopening under the name "The Konnexion." “I just kinda jumped in with both feet and hoped to hell it would work out.”
“I used to hang out at the Hall Mall when I was about fifteen – I remember flirting with the cute guy at Moon Mystique. Twelve years later, I have my shop in that same spot…it felt really freakin’ awesome when I got my key to the front door and the old Moon Mystique. It was just fate…”
In October of 2004, my wife Ericka and I were pedaling my paintings and custom bikes and her jewelry at the "Inktober" Tattoo Expo when we met Kelly and Davey. They convinced us that the Hall Mall was coming back, and we should consider renting a space. We opened FERAL! on a shoestring, just before Christmas, selling vintage oddities, lowrider bikes and outsider art and homemade organic catnip toys. It seemed, somehow, like a good fit.
"The Hall Mall revival is underway," according to Brad Allison of Antiques and Oddities, one of the most recent residents. "Back in the day, there was a waiting list to get a space here. 20 years later, there is space available, and I jumped at the chance."
As with all things, the cycle is coming back around, and the "Schneider Building Offices" are being reinvented once again. The Hall Mall has become a music venue, featuring some of the best young acts in the area and offering the only space in town available to the experimental and unabashedly weird. Plans are underway to give the hallway a new look, and to do a mural project in the stairwell. Before long, we hope to have a film festival. Free wireless and comfy sofas provide one of the few smoker-friendly places to study and hang out. As it has always been, the potential of the space is limited only by the resourcefulness of its occupants.
As I grow older and more cynical, I remain optimistic about the Hall Mall. As I watch the increasing corporatization of our society, it seems more and more essential to maintain an outpost whose only mission is to buck the system. If counterculture can truly have a tradition, it is ours to uphold. Like Marlon Brando in "The Young Ones," when asked, "Hey Johnny, What are you rebelling against?" the Hall Mall answers, "What have you got?"
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Mick Farren: The last OBSOLETE! Story.
This was supposed to be the first of a series of stream-of-conciousness column/rant/stories that Mick was going to write for OBSOLETE! Unfortunately, it was to be the last piece he will write for us. It's classic Mick Farren.
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WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM, AGENT X9?
”The very
planet proves to be alive. And very pissed off.”
The report on you is filed, my
friend. You, Agent X9, above all others, should realize that the data cannot be
reversed. The algorithms of the Corporate Hegemony are inflexible. The images
are graven. They rule with cool and absolute binary authority. The database may
only be amended and items only added to the labyrinths of detail and the
profiles that stretch to the edge of entropy. The report has been filed Agent
X9. It has joined the endless and ultimately personal catalogues of caprices
and conceits. A major responsibility of the Intelligence Committee of the
Corporate Hegemony is to preserve the minutiae of peccadillo and purchase, intimacies
and indiscretions and store them on the mainframes in those mines measureless
to man. It is a vital foundation of the Sociopath Agenda. You were once one of
our most respected Continental Operatives. As such you should be aware that
absolutely nothing is reversible. All structures are indistinguishable one for
another in infinite reflection, standardized by electric dissection and
quantified by template. You are Damned Agent X9. That’s how they would have
expressed it in the ancient days. What’s that? You want a cigarette? The
general regulations specify this as a non-smoking facility but here in the
white room we might make an exception. Will someone fetch Agent X9 a cigarette
and the means with which to light it?
The
report is filed, Agent X9. Smoke your cigarette and reflect how the requirement
is helplessness. The requirement has always been helplessness. Not only from
the victim but from the victor. Our drones
release death from the above. They fall free from a clear blue sky. They do not
consider the merits of the mission or contemplate its morality. They are merely
machines. The same could be said of the machines air-conditioned operators deep
in their protected bunkers. They perform their assigned tasks. They calibrate
for assigned targets. They are compliant. They obey. They do not question. In
fact they strive for excellence in what they do. They believe the infallibility
of their instructions. Remember the good Colonel Benton? "I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy. I
have a duty, and I execute the duty.” You also believed Agent X9. When
you were sent against the Hello Kitty subversion, the Deathless Men, The Horst
Wessel Brigade or the Ancients of Lhasa you also complied with discussion or
argument. What happened, Agent X9? When did you
develop this philosophical schizophrenia? In former times, when you stood are you
in hall of mirrors and the Lady from Shanghai opened fire, you ducked
the shining shards and carried out your mission. What changed, Agent X9?
Before the battle of Passchendaele a British general
issued an order, “Maps must conform to plans and not plans to maps. Facts that
interfered with plans were impertinencies.” The Intelligence
Committee may not totally agree with this
concept, but it certainly has its historical merits in that it is plainly a
forerunner of modern thinking by the Corporate Hegemony what would
ultimately find form in the Sociopath Agenda. The
mass must move as one with a driven uniformity. For each to plot an individual
course would create the abject chaos of uncharted anarchy. Law enforcement
fills the prisons. It is their vocation. They are not required to reason why,
just fill their quota. The sick die. The poor starve. The churches preach
insanity. The advertising industry creates impossible desires and implausible
expectations. Tolerance is eliminated and fear is substituted. The pliable iron
is set in the soul of men. You have done your part in establishing that
program, Agent X9. Ignorance has been nurtured and nourished. Pornography is
encouraged. Paranoia is cultivated. The underclass is publicized as the
ever-lurking threat. There but for the grace of consumption go you and go I.
Their internecine criminality and territorial gang violence is tacitly fostered
as a means of intimidation. Their drug traffic is clandestinely regulated and
monitored to keep them within the designated boundaries by psycho-chemical
manipulation. Education has now fully collapsed on itself and the children
remain feral, but eruptions are managed and the destruction is confined to
their own habitats. They burn their own turf. The bodycount is media fodder.
The sub-culture is exploitable. Function is inflexible. Function is always
inflexible.
Did
you forget that Agent X9 when you flaunted your new found individualism? Individuality
can only be the prerogative of a tiny and elevated elite and, even then, it
must be subject to multiple and geometric restrictions. Public postures of
leadership and private poses of decadence among this quasi-elite are as
narrowly proscribed as the tailored delusions of the masses. They are permitted
their gaudy party favors, their garish notoriety, and extravagant illusions of
superiority, their deviant sex and their own costly and rarified varieties of
recreation drugs. They are dazzled by their own glitter, their metallic
eyelashes, and the contents of their gift bags. They are encouraged to amass
their toys, their mansions, their yachts and their jets, to consume beyond
reason, and leave their vast carbon tire tracks. They are conditioned to strive
for fortunes so inflated they are abstractions. They are taught a magical
arithmetic and a numerical concept of the elemental self-esteem. They are
reminded how they are bright candles but the wind is always waiting.
Even we on the Intelligence Committee
do not attempt to think for ourselves. The very fabric of our society dictates
that all levels adhere at all times to the essential
construction of the Corporate Hegemony and the Sociopath Agenda. But you, Agent X9, have elected to think for
yourself. You have embraced a condition is wholly singular, when, at the very
least only the binary is recognized and only the totality is accessible or
acceptable. You appear to believe you are the recipient of a revelation. You
imagine you have seen the error of our ways. You have attempted to apply logic
where logic is inapplicable. You make the essential mistake of believing that
humanity as a species can be saved. As long ago as 1949, the great Harry Lime
notably remarked, “Nobody thinks in terms of
human beings. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped
moving forever?” You ignore the crucial tipping point after which
humanity became fully viral and its general survival became unworthy of
consideration except in small and carefully selected superior enclaves. As for
the rest, it is unfortunate. As a virus they are a destructive infection of the
overall biosphere and only worthy of elimination. The choice is not easy but it
has been made, and that choice is the core of the Sociopath Agenda.
So you see, Agent X9, any misguided attempts you might make
to save humanity or civilization as we know it are far too little and their
lateness defies contemplation.
Your sorry
attempt to forge a treasonous liaison with the Daughters of Gaia only serves to demonstrate your
unqualified misinterpretation of the cybernetic
feedback systems operated unconsciously by the biota.
You linger in the 20th century. Agent X9. Once upon a time, the
Corporate Hegemony assumed itself a total odds with the Lovelock proposal.
They too saw no alternative to preserving humanity if only as
producer/consumers. It was only when the emergent Intelligence Committee
presented evidence of how human beings in their current numbers were inimical
to the broad stabilization of the conditions
of habitability in a full homeostasis that the higher thinking began to change.
Our masters accepted that this world of
humans is dying, Agent X9. They accepted it very easily. Parts of it are
already dead. They cannot be resuscitated. Our only option was to maintain a
semblance of order as the systems fail. It was the only alternative with which
to retain power. The Corporate Hegemony was well aware they were the descendants of all feudal lords, warrior
chieftains, violent dictators, and totalitarian butchers of old. In their form
at the time of the tipping point they were opportunists motivated by
self-interest and greed, and inclined to dominate or subjugate those around
them through manipulative means. A new order needed to evolve from the previous
policies of destructive self-interest.
We
have no Cossacks, no pogroms, no purges, and no final solution. The secret
police operate primarily for their own amusement. Humanity will be largely
destroyed but we are not the destroyers per se. Lovelock himself made it clear.
"The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating procedure
with physical, chemical, biological, and human components". The Earth's survival depends on the
interaction of living forms with inorganic elements and one of those living
forms is now too degraded to be part of the interaction. The human
component has grievously malfunctioned and Earth will eliminate it. The Earth
itself will destroy humanity. That makes your failed alliance with the
Daughters of Gaia all the more ironic.
The very planet proves to be alive. And very pissed off. It will push man to
extinction. The Corporate Hegemony
may help speed the process in some small ways. An epidemic here. A famine
there. A withdrawal of aid. A nuclear accident or a toxic cloud. The Earth will
do the rest. It will throw off viral humanity. It will cure itself with
earthquakes and volcanoes, fire and flood, climate shift, and things at which
we can only guess. Our own minor efforts are what might be called
transactional. We sacrifice our own kind in return for exceedingly limited
numbers of us being allowed to continue as what might call living fossils. A
tiny percentage of the former species world given sanctuary in protected
enclaves from which we guarantee we will not spread and cause no more harm to
planet. In this we embrace the largest possible picture. The Sociopath Agenda
is, at root, an acceptance that humanity has outgrows any possible usefulness,
and we are making what we can from its demise. Didn’t I make clear that the Corporate
Hegemony was a coterie of advanced whores and evolved opportunists?
But what of you Agent X9. We on the
Intelligence Committee are not the frivolous or gratuitous torturers of old.
Pain is not our entertainment or distraction. Your life will merely be
concluded as painlessly as possible because, knowing all that you know you
cannot be allowed to persist, world at an end. Would care for another
cigarette, Agent X9? And perhaps a blindfold?
© Mick Farren, Brighton UK,
2013
Mick Farren: Do Gooders Suck
I ran across this article a while back in an ancient copy of the international times that I gought at a flea market. It's a good example of Mick Farren's early writing style. And, it's still relevant!
Sunday, July 28, 2013
RIP Mick Farren: The Obsolete Interview
I did this interview with Mick late last year- it appears in OBSOLETE! #7 and "The Best of OBSOLETE!"He was so generous with his time and loved the underground paper aspect of OBSOLETE!– he was our single most consistent contributor. His guidance and encouragement was a big part of what kept us going.
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OM: Do you think there is room for a real “underground” in
the age of twitter?
MF:I think it’s probably a double-edged sword. It’s never
too clear what’s meant when we talk about an underground. If we’re talking
about the psychedelic left – which is how I’ve pretty much always described my
political persuasion – then social networks, blogs, Twitter, and, indeed the
whole of the internet, make a lot of things possible that could never have been
achieved in a time of print, limited access to radio, and even more limited
access to broadcast TV. The internet is impossible to control and almost
impossible to censor. It is a near infinite resource of a vast variety of
information. You want to build a bomb or cook crystal meth? Hell, it’s all
there. The potential offered by instant communication has scarcely been
scratched. Flash mobs? Viral protests like the ones during the BP Gulf oil
spill? They are only the tip of a huge subversive iceberg. Like I said though,
it’s a double-edged sword. It’s a huge resource and if you want to find out
about The Rapture or the Earth being flat that’s all there too. The internet is
also wholly transparent. Any passing troll or secret policeman can see exactly
what you’re doing, and, of course, computers never forget anything. A perfect
example occurred during the recent UK riots. Looters were coordinating their
efforts on iPhones and Blackberries but also had the police listening in, and
then rounding them up later using their call records. You have to keep moving
and keep a low profile. It makes visible leaders like Julian Assange hopelessly vulnerable.
OM:I feel like digital technology has knocked some of the
sharp edges off western culture. Does your experience as a writer of science
fiction inform how you feel about the new media environment? Is this the future
you would have expected?
MF:I guess this is close to the future I expected. It’s not
the utopia I dreamed about, but it also isn’t the glow-in-the-dark nuclear
wasteland that was our worst-case scenario back in the 20th century.
I’m not one of those ancient 1960s freaks who whine about the revolution being
a lost boulevard of broken dreams. The gay movement, despite a fatal plague,
has made great advances. Feminism is changing the face of society. We warned of
a lot of current dangers, especially in the area of the environment and the
spread of global totalitarian capitalism, but we were ignored, often ridiculed,
and now the price is being paid. Yes, we told you so, but you chose to believe
the oil baron’s media shills! The current media environment is nothing short of
bonkers since Craig’s List gutted the newspapers – both mainstream and
alternative – by taking away the classified ads. “50 Shades of Grey” is a
bestseller while small independent imprints are publishing any worthwhile
writing and inspired experiments in print. Literature and especially poetry is
rapidly coming a wholly DIY business – only business is hardly the right word
since no money is being made on the web except by Amazon. Sony can’t keep free
Bob Dylan off YouTube; creativity on the internet – that may well be the
repository of most popular creativity – can’t be supported by paid corporate
advertising and t-shirts. Ultimately the web may spawn a form of
cyber-socialism since capitalism can’t really handle it except by constantly
reconfiguring the hard and software to sell us new but hardly improved versions
of the same old shit..
OM: In your autobiography “Give the Anarchist a Cigarette”,
you describe your time on the scene in London in the 60's, and it reads to me
as having been ground zero for the “Modern Age”. In many ways it seems more
modern than the present, despite our technological advances. There was an
energy and excitement about the future, and revolutionary changes in all
aspects of life. Where do you think that went?
MF: In the 1960s, we were on our way to the Moon; we thought
we were going to Mars and Stanley Kubrick told us we’d make it to the moons of
Jupiter by 2001. We took our drugs and believed all things were possible. The
floodgates looked wide open, even as the corporate filters were closing on us.
Obviously I am extremely disappointed that all we’ve now got in the future is
fancy phones, robot drones, CCTV and Twitter. Some developments are nothing
short of bizarre. The Black Panther Party is nostalgic history, but America
elects center right black president. Norman Spinrad predicted in his 1969 novel
“Bug Jack Barron” that, by around 1980, Acapulco Golds – legal packaged marijuana – is sold
across the counter. In reality the War On Drugs drags on into a new century and
is close to destroying Mexico. Where do I think the energy and excitement went?
I think it got hard when it ceased to be just a sex, drugs, and rock & roll
culture war and we hit the real thing. We were taking on the whole concept of
capitalism. It might not look like it, but capitalism is fighting for its life
and capitalism fights hard and dirty.
OM: Are you seeing signs of real revolution anywhere now?
MF: I think
it’s all around us. There’s Occupy, there’s the One Percent. But, for the
moment, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for America. A century ago the
Bolsheviks had no trouble motivating a Russian underclass that was starving and
oppressed by Cossacks. How you move a proletariat that weighs 500 pounds, lives
on animal fat and high fructose corn syrup, and is hard wired to Fox News and
the Bible is beyond me. You have to look past the USA and think more
internationally. Kids in the UK went one a mindless instinctive rampage looting
and burning. The workers in Greece and Spain have been pushed much too close to
the edge by the so-called austerity – a racket that’s truly nothing more than a
global scam for the rich to get all of the money. They’re mad as hell and not going
to take it much longer. Then there’s the Arab Spring in the Middle East, which
is a real AK47 shooting revolution. The only problem there is it will most
likely be taken over by jihadists who will drag it back into a very nasty
thirteenth century. I hear interesting things coming out of Bangalore, the
Indian DIY Silicon Valley. Indeed, my revolutionary bets are on the “BRICK”
nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China and Korea. Pussy Riot may be showing us
all the way of the future.
OM: In
addition to being too fat to fight, Americans are too medicated as well. In the last issue of OBSOLETE! we ran a
story called "Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnoses as Mentally Ill",
in which psychiatrist Bruce Levine lays out how the American medical
establishment is actively engaged in maintaining the status quo by medicating
away dissent. On the other end,
kids in the Northwest are getting arrested for possession of anarchist
literature, essentially thought crimes. I know that the UK is surpassing even
the US in CCTV use and other high tech surveillance- since returning to live in
the England, do you see that having an effect on the national consciousness?
MF: This
shit has been going on at least since Napoleon banged up The Marquis de Sade in
the lunatic asylum at Charenton, Let’s not forget that De Sade – aside from
being a world class perv – was also an early utopian socialist. Stalin was very
good at locking away dissidents in mental hospitals. In the US ECT and lobotomy
were 20th century favourites for keeping the rebellious in line.
Think of Francis Farmer or the fictional McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoos
Nest. Nurse Ratched is the scourge of though crime. In the Levittown,
production-line conformity of the 1950s, the CIA had a mission goal of creating
what they dubbed the “psycho-civilized society”. Totalitarian capitalism where
conformity would be maintained with speed, barbiturates, and meprobamate happy
pills (Milltowns) a pre-Valium tranquilliser, reinforcing a constant barrage of
anti-Soviet better-dead-than-Red paranoia and massive sexual repression. I
believe Elvis Presley and rock & roll did a whole lot to upset that apple
cart.
I would
venture that a slightly different perspective on the war on drugs is that it’s
a face-off between Ritalin, Adderall, Valium, Prozac and Thorazine on one side
and pot, acid, MDMA, and DMT (if we could get it) on the other. It’s the
lockdown drugs against the liberating drugs. Those are the chemical battle
lines.
I don’t
worry about CCTV too much because I’m so fucking ancient I don’t participate in
street actions any more, I do notice that teen fashions now tend to conceal the
face – masks, hoodies, balaclavas etc. (Pussy Riot), anything to hide the
facial biometrics. I’m hoping we will have a future fad for really elaborate
renaissance-style masks.
OM: At some
point in the 70's you turned from writing for the underground press and song
writing to writing Sci Fi. I first got on board with The Song of Phaid the
Gambler
in the
early 80's, but then went back to DNA Cowboys and other earlier stuff. How did you start
writing Sci Fi- were you a fan as a kid and does that relate in any way to the
political or musical sides of your work? There is a thread of Sci Fi
sensibility in the bands you have written for- Hawkwind, Mötorhead....
I really
don’t have a neat answer for this. I was a space cadet before I was a rocker.
It’s like the two halves of my brain and it’s all interconnected. I started at
five years old with a Brit comic Dan Dare Pilot of The Future and Flash Gordon
and just sailed on from there. Sci Fi has such potential for stretching one’s
imagination. The path led through Arthur C. Clarke, Orwell, Phil Dick, Ellison,
Mike Moorcock, (who is a friend) and on to Uncle Bill Burroughs (who was a
mentor), which meshed neatly with the surreal “Gates Of Eden” period of Bob
Dylan. The DNA Cowboys books were really an attempt to set a narrative in a
quasi-Dylan world. And of course, Sci Fi was an essential preparation for
psychedelic drugs. It’s also a perfect medium for satire and oblique political
commentary When I started, I didn’t really didn’t give up anything else, I was
working at the NME and writing songs with Lemmy and Larry Wallis and later Andy
Colquhoun with whom I still work today. I just wasn’t singing in a band right
then which gave me some time on my hands and you can only watch so much
television after the bars close. This all makes perfect sense to me. I don’t
know about anyone else.
OM: Sci Fi has been very much
fan-driven since it's earliest days, as was rock and roll. The
"Fanzine" goes back to early 20th century amateur Sci Fi
publications, long before the pre-internet punk rock "zine"
explosion. Now, the blogosphere is like one giant fanzine. As a veteran
of the indie publishing scene, what roll do you see for indie book publishers
in the coming years?
Whatever
future I might have in print – especially now I’m concentrating on poetry and
experimental fiction – would seem to be entirely in indie publishing. There’s
essentially no longer any point in dealing with the major publishing houses in
NYC or London. They only want to publish Harry Potter, 50 Shades of Grey and
cookbooks. The real question is how much of the work I’m doing will be in
print. I firmly believe that popular art and popular culture always adapts
itself to the prevailing technology. The 1960s underground press – particularly
the very colourful one like Oz (UK) and The Oracle (Bay Area) – got real jiggy
with the web offset printing. Punk zines of the 1970s where make possible by
fairly sophisticated copier machines like the Cannon 500. Now we have all the
ramifications of the internet from Twitter to YouTube, to Pirate Bay. On the
other hand, people still have a need for tangible objects from the past. The
obvious example is music on vinyl. (Or Obsolete) I could see a lot of my
fiction coming out as ebooks. (Although I do see a problem with a lack of
visual reinforcement. Where would all those Conan books have been without the
Frank Frazetta covers?) Other stuff, especially poetry lends itself better to
print. Book will increasingly become object rather than just delivery systems
for information. They will be read but also be treasured, collected, and put on
shelves or left lying around to impress visitors. All in all, I’m open to
anything, open to offers, and riding into the purple sunset to see what happens
next. Right now I’m pushing the novelette Road Movie that is published by Penny
Ante. The UK indie publisher Headpress will be bringing out the first deluxe
hardback edition of Elvis Died For Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine, which is a
mammoth “greatest hits” collection of my essays, commentary, short stories
etc., and I also wrote a learned introduction to a coffee table collection
called Classic Rock Posters. And back catalogue is still up on Amazon. (Mick
has left the computer.)
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