New BüKs

Buy it at the BüK Shop

Hey, kids: remember that nutty Valerie Solanas? Before she shot Andy, she published the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, an anti-male polemic—“her radical tract is a stunning salvo in the age-old battle of the sexes”—that has recently been reissued by the folks at BüK.

And what is a BüK? It…

…is an inexpensive pamphlet—just $1.49—containing one provocative essay, short story, portfolio of pictures, collection of poems, or other surprising entertainment, readable in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. At 5 x 7 inches and 16-32 pages, a BüK fits easily into a pocket, purse or backpack, where it is always ready to serve up absorbing material by or about architects, artists, actors, composers, critics, directors, designers, divas, educators, economists, environmentalists, essayists, models, moguls, novelists, photographers, politicians, poets, singers, and scientists.

Buy! There’s a fairly interesting and extensive catalog that includes titles on Liberace, Greenland, and the hobo lexicon.

Bad mags

Tom Brinkmann’s site for Bad Mags, a book “due in 2005,” is such a train wreck you might find it curious that I’m citing it as rich in design resources, but there it is.

Dig deeper: there’s an impressive collection of sixties and seventies zines, sorted by category (Sharon Tate, true crime, occult sex, bikers, punk, blue films) and by publisher (I’m unfamiliar with their names—Seven Seventy, GSN/Classic, TNC/Dominion, Pendulum/Gallery Press, Sari/Press Arts—but almost all of them were based in Los Angeles or the San Fernando Valley and carry particular house vernaculars). Warning: the website loads pretty slowly, so you might want to get a cup of coffee in the meantime.

A small sampling of the wares, displayed here (click through for larger images from the website), reveal some pretty cool work, heavy on the clip art and tabloid look but graphically bold, smart, and fun. (Note that promiscuous font-mixing has a long and glorious history, even in the days of paste-up.)

Cut

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.

—Hamlet, 1.5.76

I’m, alas, just about buried but not too far away from sending Cut—issue ten of Link—to the printer.

My fellow editors (Stephen Janis, Mark Durant, and Janet Little) and I have been dealing with the usual headaches that come from putting out a small, independent journal, but there are pleasures, too: this time, in the form of essays from journalist Eric Trump (on voluntary amputation) and medievalist Kerr Houston (on the cinematic grammar of jump cuts, and how they’ve been quickly absorbed into our visual culture).

I’ll have more to say about their work soon—I’ve been working up a piece on Houston, whose work will interest anyone reading ff—but, in the meantime, the issue previews at the Baltimore Book Festival over 23-25 September in Mount Vernon. Mark your calendars for that Saturday, 24 September, when yours truly and the rest of the gang will be hosting a launch party at the Contemporary Museum, downtown, from 9p until midnight. Alcohol will be served, a dj will be spinning, and Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture will still be hanging. I hope to see y’all there!