Steal This Magazine!

My booty at the library yesterday yielded an interesting little Chicago-based magazine called STOPSMILING, THE MAGAZINE FOR HIGH-MINDED LOWLIFES and a July 25 Time with Karl Rove on the Cover ("Rove on the Spot"). I was looking for bounty, for treasure, some good words drawn out in an interview (and dirt on despicable Karl Rove), which is rare in a magazine these days. But my marauding paid off in a back edition of STOPSMILING, where I uncovered two memorable interviews by two interesting people who have not (unlike Karl Rove) sold their souls to the devil.

Funny I picked up these two particular magazines. There is the corporate giant Time alongside the little guy STOPSMILING, and speaking for the little guy, I respect anyone who is doing something, and hasn't just caved to what the media conglomerates have said the world should be. Someone who has a vision and steps out and takes a risk, and doesn't wait for the perfect time, the wholly inspired or fully developed idea. Someone who acts. So I liked this magazine immediately, and I liked the EDITOR'S NOTE, with its "small fish swimming upstream in a media monolith river" message which begins,

The media consolidation of the mid-'90's has taken a toll on what once made magazines - and publishing in general - a thankless but inspiring business. Many magazines - if they haven't already folded - have lost their identities somewhere in the vertical integration that has become the practice pyramid model to quash all creativity - and in some cases, censor - any publication threatening its profit-driven global umbrella.

I, in my weakened emotional state, have been crying at the advertisements and reality TV of these media giants (of which The Surreal Life, America's Top Model and my *new favorite*, Trailer Fabulous are at the top of the list, although I did find Going Native fascinating, and Brat Camp is pretty captivating), so it was no surprise when I was choked-up while listening to a review of Jim Jarmusch's new movie Broken Flowers the other day while sitting in the parking lot of the gardens, waiting to take my solitary nightly walk through the shadows and petals.

Broken Flowers is supposedly Jarmusch's most commercial film so far, starring Bill Murray, who has become the new sad clown, after Lost in Translation, A Life Aquatic and now this film. Salon says,

The movie's center is Bill Murray, as a late-middle-age Don Juan who receives an unsigned letter, with a blurry postmark, telling him that he has a 19-year-old son. Murray has no idea who the mother might be. So at the urging of his next-door neighbor, husband and family man Jeffrey Wright (in a relaxed, amusing performance), he makes a list of the women he'd spent time with 20 years ago and sets out, by plane and rental car, to connect (or not) with each of them.

I like the movie already and I like Jim Jarmusch even better after reading the interview with him in STOPSMILING. When asked about his younger brother Tom, he says,

We've worked together and he's helped me on a lot of my films. He did an interview once in France on some of his work, and they said, "Your brother's nine years older than you. What's the most important thing you learned from him when you were a child?" And my brother said, "The most important thing I learned from observing him was, always be nice to weirdos and never judging other people." That make me so happy, because if I did have that effect on him, at least I did something good for him.

He said other kind and wonderful things in the interview, but suffice it to say I am totally in love with Jim Jarmusch.
Totally.

There is also an interview with Lou Reed in that issue that contains some little pearls (wow, I realize I am so hungry for substance in a swirl of media mediocrity), one of which is a memory of George Plimpton.

It's 1965 or 1966 and we're with Warhol's Velvet Underground. No one has ever heard of us. We're not even zero. We're just completely anonymous. Andy likes us, so there we go. They had a benefit for one of these early civil rights things at the Village Gate - I think it was for CORE. We're there, and they've got a cool poster, "Andy Warhol's Velvet Underground." We're playing "Heroin," and Allen Ginsberg is walking around. It was amazing. This is new ground for everybody in 1965 or 1966. No one had ever seen or heard anything like this - believe me - not even close (and not until this day, for that matter). Allen's doing his version of dancing with bells and shit. So anyway, we're leaving, and we don't even have a place to live. There were like 10 of us staying in some apartment someone had. We go to take the poster and Plimpton says, "You can't have that. We paid for that. That's ours." So for me, Plimpton is just a complete asshole. Fuck him. You know - rich guy. Here we were - musicians are always at the bottom. We played, but we can't have the poster? What the fuck is that? I remember.

Lou Reed, in his more acerbic delivery and Jim Jarmusch, in his laid-back sweet acceptance are both doing something despite the media giants who threaten to destroy creativity. Speaking of Andy Warhol, Reed says,

People say Andy didn't care about anybody. He wasn't evil. When we were in The Velvet Underground and we left him Andy didn't say, "Hey, you're under contract, babe. I get 10 percent." He didn't say, "We want 50 percent of your publishing. We made you who you are. You owe us for the next 30 years. You don't like it, you're in trouble." He didn't care. He said, "Off you go, have fun. This is what I think you should do."

That's almost unimaginable in our world today. For somebody to have someone else's interests at heart? And Jarmusch, speaking of a portrait of Joe Strummer in the early days of Clash written by Lester Bangs in Carburetor Dung,

...where he talks about Joe back in England and how all these schoolboys came up from London to see them play. They'd have school uniforms on but would stick a safety pin through their ears. they would have no place to stay and couldn't get back home, so Strummer let them sleep on the floor of his hotel room. He took care of them in a gruff way, but he had a really big heart like that. Who elso would do that? Who's gonna let a bunch of fucking little kids sleep on their floor because they don't hafve a place to go? I mean you're exhausted and on tour and in a rock-and-roll band, most people want to go out and get some chicks and drugs. Strummer, I'm sure, was washing out his one T-shirt in the sink telling them, "Stay in your place on the floor and go to sleep now! And I'll make sure you get on the train in the morning!"

We aren't used to this kind of behavior, are we? It is good to be reminded of its existence. So thank you, Kama Sutra Librarians for my two free magazines. It makes Karl Rove and the Bush administration seem all the more inconsequential. I am reminded that all the little things count. All the small kindnesses and tender mercies, every gentle word and courtesy. When no one is watching. Here. Today.