Bumrush

I started putting together The Riot Act in 1995 in college – original tag line "Hard News, Extreme Sports, Alternative Politics" – and published a zine with cut heds and decks and columns I printed on my Mac and pasted on blue-line graph paper over photos clipped from surf and ski magazines, plus whatever kinetically dynamic shots I could shoot and develop myself. The inaugural cover shot featured a main photo of a wetsuited surfer dropping pigdog into an overhead left, with Frank Sinatra's smiling head, collar and bow tie pasted over Kelly Slater's dome – cut line "My Kind of Style."

I wrote dry, angry assessments of current events and culture that were occasionally funny. I reviewed and recommended books and music old and new, and I re-typed up cool, edgy, better work I found published elsewhere and printed it (with full attribution, of course, I have ethics). I was aspiring toward what was later described as culture-jamming or Artbustersism. It was DIY punk. It was Hip Hop and for a moment Grunge, and it was all being co-opted into the inevitable mass production machine. There was political violence blazing in weird hot spots around the country. Some of my cohort were creatively active, and some still are.

My zine's design, philosophy and strategy was inspired by Playboy, using a flashy front to get you to open the mag and discover a spectrum of quality articles and vivid culture inside, with the added visual brilliance of my favorite outdoor sports periodicals. I loved the New Yorker founding myth, Harold Ross stubbornly building his own institution through his unerring instinct – taste – to edit and publish a good book every time. I admired the raw grit and the dogged history of The Nation. And there were some fresh acerbic zines at the record stores, the proliferating coffee shops, at the bookstores and news stands – back when these things were. I was trying to fashion a tiki lounge editorial lair in my apartment and in my attitude around campus, part Hunter, part Hugh. And let's not forget Grand Royal.

I'd print some of my issues in color to keep for myself, my future records, and a bunch in black and white to leave around campus. Small-scale night time pamphleteering runs on my skate or my bike with a stack and a staple gun in a backpack. I had email then, but I published simply as owenman and edited under the alias Joe Cripes and didn't offer any contact. You picked up the thing around campus and hopefully passed it along or kept it on your grubby or fancy coffee table for a few weeks, I hoped.

I graduated and moved to L.A. and continued to write the thing, but the move ended my zine-publishing run. I went into journalism as an editor and writer for other properties, and it's gone well mostly as a career ever since.

Thirty years later, it's time to self-publish again, I'm compelled to comment and distribute resources, and confront the moment. We are living through an astounding time.

In Pursuit of Profligate Democracy, or Democratic Profligacy,

Hard News, Kind Life, All Free.

Tam armis quam ingenio

The National Riot

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