Finally, here's a magazine for anyone who has a soft spot for espresso, poetry, fiction, alternative rock, art, graphic design, or socio-political debate (c'mon, at least one of those must apply). Plazm - produced three times a year in Portland, Oregon, and boasting a circulation of 12,000 - calls itself "your rest stop on the information superhighway." The editors are not kidding: it's the first publication I've read in months that doesn't have a piece on Bill Gates or the intricacies of connecting to the Net.
What Plazm does possess is a commitment to publishing promising writers and visual artists who will part with their gems for nada (the magazine is a "nonprofit cooperative"). Contributions, mostly un-solicited, are esoteric at worst and stunning at best. Greg Carter's seemingly H.R. Giger-inspired computer illustrations definitely belong in the latter category, as does Jacques Flechemuller's powerful acrylic-on-board painting, reproduced in Plazm number 7. (It depicts slabs of nondescript meat interspersed with the words: "In 7 days I lost 5 inches off my waist and 10 pounds of fat, says Janette Conpar.") Writers like Ken Foster and Rick Rubin may soon see literary agents lining up; their sparse, well-crafted fiction seems ready for the Big League.
Meanwhile, Plazm's art director and co-founder, Joshua Berger, thumbs his nose at conventional page layout, arguing that "the clean grid of Modernity has been formally rejected by the nihilism of industrial youth culture." The result can be deliberately chaotic, at times hard to read, and a tad too close to David Carson's work on Ray Gun to be brutally original. But that's all right: Carson deserves the flattery.
Plazm is Mondo 2000 recalled from cyberspace, or Rolling Stone minus its greedy, marketing-powered heart. Those who like their magazines slick and formulaic are hereby given a last chance to change their minds.
Plazm: US$4.49 per issue; US$12 per year. Available at Waldenbooks, Tower, Barnes & Noble, and Borders Books & Music. Plazm Media Cooperative: +1 (503) 234 8289, fax +1 (503) 235 9666, e-mail plazmmedia@aol.com.
STREET CRED
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