Why Subscribe to The Independent Ink?
In keen recognition of the mass migration of independent journalism and artistic free expression away from the profit-driven distribution models of the corporate media towards subscription-based platforms that rely on direct citizen support, there should be no question as to why your advocacy for and sponsorship of such radically hospitable information outlets as The Independent Ink – your online source for unrestricted speech, open debate, and soul-inspiring shit-givery about everything and everybody regardless of political affiliation, religious conviction, or cultural allegiance – is desperately worthwhile.
Specifically, The Independent Ink, by modeling its coverage of contemporary politics and culture after the bold and rigorously candid – dare I say unrefined – techniques of the alternative and underground press of the mid-twentieth century, is here to survey and celebrate the efforts of journalists, artists, illustrators, filmmakers, photographers, painters, poets, public intellectuals, protesters, and everyday riffraff to warn against public complacency in the face of political oppression, corruption, and the systemic constraints rendered in contempt of the progressively democratic conceits cherished by a free society. By offering personal essays, field reporting, and two video podcasts a week – one featuring conversations with creatives, dissidents, and contrarians of all sorts and another presenting lectures on art history, philosophy, satire, and activism – The Independent Ink will explore and elucidate on the serviceable parallels between past and present forms of public dissent against soft and hardcore authoritarianism and endeavor to present a comprehensive analysis of how the current state of artistic provocation and print media might be drastically improved by mirroring previous iterations, most notably the material produced during the 1960s and 70s, often referred to as the golden age of opinion journalism. It will also consider the very real dangers presented by the commodification of information and the ever-increasing corporatization of the Fourth Estate, particularly as it applies to news and social media models and the technological fragmentation of both comprehension and dissemination of narratives requiring longer format considerations.
Having been a professional cartoonist and writer for the last 35 years, publishing with many of the nation’s most reputable and prestigious news outlets, including Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, the Village Voice Media Company, The Nation, ScheerPost, The Chris Hedges Report, and the earlier and more legitimate iterations of Truthdig, the LA Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times, I’ve witnessed – and experienced! – the decline of journalism as a provocative force for the preservation and propagation of democracy, itself, for without uncensored discourse over the most substantive issues of our time a republic of the people, by the people, and for the people cannot stand.
Considering this debilitating reality and in acknowledgement of the need for solidarity at a time when our very survival as a self-guided commonwealth is literally at stake, I humbly request that you subscribe to The Independent Ink for minimally $8 dollars a month, or $96 a year, enabling me to produce my weekly video podcasts, provide regular posts and field reports, continue writing books, while standing shoulder to shoulder with you, my dear brothers, sisters, comrades, and resistance warriors, in strenuous contempt of the rightwing megalomaniacs and the authoritarian powerbrokers of government and big business who are forever demanding that we all surrender our bleeding hearts and, in exchange, take up the sort of muzzled complacency that keeps them in power and the rest of us, well, useful idiots in this burgeoning idiocracy of mindless consumerism and passive capitulation to capitalism that used to be the United States of America.
Why structure The Independent Ink on the alternative and underground press?
In consideration of content alone, there is nothing particularly unique about either the journalism or artwork produced by the alternative and underground press from the 1960s and early 70s. In fact, one might argue that compared to the material produced in radical magazines and newspapers in America during the 1910s and 20s by such muckraking journalists as Ida M. Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens, and such artists as Art Young, William Gropper, and Robert Minor, much of the work created during the 1960s Counterculture – minus the groundbreaking design element demonstrated on occasion and the refreshing hipster vernacular – was more an evolution of the truth telling tradition than an isolated and unparalleled revolution. In fact, what was truly unique about the period was the widespread sophistication and emotional honesty of the consumer class of news and information that existed at the time, something that we must all strive to recreate in the modern age.
In post-1950s America an average person’s concept of what might be the meaning of life was more likely than any other time in history to draw on a wide range of source material culled from a broad swath of disciplines throughout the culture. To understand why peace was elusive in Indochina, for example, in addition to looking to contemporary scholarship and modern reporting on the subject, one was as likely to draw on the teachings of Gandhi, Jung and McLuhan as much as on the work of Kerouac, Coltrane and Warhol. When contributing to a conversation about baseball, transcendental meditation or political assassination, insight was as likely to stem from a passage pulled from C. Wright Mills, Samuel Beckett or Susan Sontag as it was from a musical quote excised from Charles Mingus or a visual denouement remembered from Ernie Kovacs or a publicly pulled punch line from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. MAD magazine was in competition with the New York Times for truth-telling, female sexuality was the volatile and thrilling combustible MacGuffin created by combining equal parts Miller and Millett and the news analysis offered from That Was the Week That Was and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In was often eminently more insightful than that offered from Walter Cronkite and CBS News. Or Bishop Sheen. Or mom or dad.
The truth, never capitalized, was a sloppy approximation of accumulated thoughts and feelings about singularly fleeting moments; it was not a rigid and uncompromising mandate from God that was so far beyond our comprehension that we’d need to spend our entire lifetimes straining, and forever failing, to lift it off our brains.
Specifically, the concept that one required a certain familiarity with a number of different points of view in order to perceive the three dimensionality of existence – that is, that one need not automatically assume that mainstream media was the most complete and reliable information source available – was verging on common knowledge and the baby boomer generation thrilled to the notion that it would be growing up both contributing to and becoming enlightened by all the burgeoning guesswork being offered by humanity as to what it meant to be the missing link between the most compassionate apes and the most treacherous angels.
In fact, there was a very definite sense during the 1960s that, finally, after a very deliberate and concerted effort by those intrepid European and Russian intellects and Far and Middle Eastern philosophers from previous decades to facilitate the worldwide propagation of Marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, individualist anarchism, modernism, Bohemianism, naturalism, realism, nihilism, agonism, futurism, absurdism, Taoism, Confucianism, illuminationism, transcendentalism and Buddhism, that all the repressive social apparatus that had found its fullest expression by the middle part of the 20th Century had been unraveled by the emergence of the Counterculture and the growing popularity of a number of different literary, social and art movements, including the Beatnik movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Free Speech Movement, the Free Love Movement, Bebop and cool jazz, abstract expressionism and action painting, protest folk, modern dance, Theatre of the Absurd, neorealism and art house films, new and Gonzo journalism, the Confessionalist movement among poets, the feminist movement and the satire boom. Never again, so sounded the promise, would Americans need to feel so pressured to believe that their absolute fidelity and unwavering duty to both God and country alone trumped whatever personal journey of self-discovery their natural curiosities and personal inclinations begged them to commence upon and that to succeed in life they had to subjugate themselves to the woefully narrow fairy tale that the upward trajectory of Western Civilization required that everyone maintain an unquestioning allegiance to the bureaucratic elitism of the federal government while simultaneously maintaining an almost manic devotion to cloying patriotism, rampant materialism and the codification of racism, sexism and classism into the status quo.
Fuck that. Subscribe to The Independent Ink!