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Marketing to Men.

Bagazine Marketing to Men
The Good Ole Days are a myth. They only exist in your mind.

People are as creepy and perverted and weird as they’ve ever been — it’s human nature. The only difference between now and, say, 1956, is the dissemination of information. Which is to say our times are no more depraved or sick or twisted than any other time in history — it’s just that CNN wasn’t around to broadcast it 24/7; in fact, I think we have it all pretty good, for the most part. Sure the economy sucks, and there’s no cure for HIV or cancer, and the Earth is getting warmer and over-populated, but I’ll certainly take living in The Present over The Past.

Marketing to Men is my contribution to Bagazine #4, and it conveys my thoughts about just that — our creepy, pervy past.

Bagazine Marketing to Men

There’s eight ads from the back of various mens’ magazines (all mid-century), and they’re hawking everything from fake cop badges to cheap firearms to porn to vanity products. My favs are the how-tos: how to make one-way mirrors and listening devices that take “ordinary materials” and turn them into a “Super Directional Mike [sic] that amplifies sound 1000 times. YES, YOU CAN ACTUALLY HEAR CONVERSATIONS THRU WALLS A BLOCK AWAY.”

There’s a guide to street fighting, and if you’re a “Man & Wife team with a camera”, you could “earn the kind of money you have always dreamed of.”

The first forays into amateur porn?

Who knows — but if you sent a buck to “Artek” in Hollywood, CA, I think you might have been surprised at whatever advice they offered.

Or not.

100 copies signed and numbered, gocco print and a good, old-fashioned hand stamp for title and colophon (am I contradicting myself?); 3 proofs marked “A/P”; concertina fold.

Bagazine Marketing to Men

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Johnny Brewton

So I’m walking down Mission Street with Jack Micheline. It was the winter of ’96, I think. I had just met Jack a few weeks earlier at The Adobe Bookshop, where I had bought some of his paintings.

We developed a fast friendship, probably cause whatever Jack handed me, I’d buy.

Anyway, Jack brings up this cat doing some pretty remarkable work. Some chapbooks. Some broadsides. And something called X-Ray magazine.

I didn’t know anything about any Johnny Brewton, and Jack found that pretty hard to believe. Looking back at it now, so do I.

Jack said, in that drawn-out sort of way he had when he spoke, “you mean you don’t know Johnny Brewton? Ohhhh mannnn, you gotta see his work!”

A few months later I was poking around Kayo! Books when I came across the recently published X-Ray #6. I remember flipping through it and thinking superlative thoughts. And it really made me wonder about the work I was doing. Up to that point, I was basically running chappies off a copy machine. When I saw X Ray, I knew I had to step up my game. I immediately paid for it and set off to meet Johnny, and see what he was all about.

At that time, he worked at a used record store in the Haight. By then we had exchanged a few letters, and one afternoon I jumped on the #7 and made my way up to Recycled Records.

When I asked the dude behind the counter for Johnny, he gave me the sort of look you’d give an undercover cop.

Our meeting was pretty uneventful, except Johnny was kind and courteous, and we had some things in common, and it was the beginning of a friendship that’s closing in on a decade, now.

Johnny ended up designing two books for synaesthesia: Barry Gifford’s The Strangest One of All and Hal Norse’s Sniffing Keyholes.

Those two books were a departure for synaesthesia. I was a mimeo guy before, but meeting Johnny and having him design those two books would mean a change for me; I just upped the ante a bit with Johnny’s help, you know? At least I’d like to think I did.

X-Ray Book Co. is still making great books, and I’m still watching.

And buying.

And learning.

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Neeli Cherkovski — Johnny Marries Giselle

cherkovski.jpg

When Johnny Brewton married Giselle Orsolio, I approached Neeli Cherkovski to write a poem for the occasion. I had met Neeli few times earlier at his home in San Francisco, and he was always a gentleman. This made it easy to approach him about the project, and when I called him on the phone, I was right. Not only was he kind, he was genuinely enthusiastic about writing a poem for Johnny & Giselle, and, just a few days later, he called me and said it was finished.

I printed up a hundred or so and handed them out to the guests at the reception.

Johnny Marries Giselle

I

it’s a wonder
like grass, the glass
in that music, brittle
steel, strong
silence pushing a man
through print
into light, the marriage
of spirit and
soul, the union
of imagination and
mind, the rooms
two will find
together and those
that remain
locked in one set of eye

II

“…the marriage
of true minds…” how
we read ourselves and bend fog
backward and dream
waves, arm in
hand, lip to lip, hand in
the sky, till we bend
to our twin reflections and
never do anything but live

Neeli Cherkovski
2 May 1998