Photo by JOSH PELTA-HELLER

NPR: David Byrne is, of course, the lead singer and frontman of the Talking Heads. The band recorded hit songs like “Psycho Killer,” “Life During Wartime,” “Once in a Lifetime,” “Burning Down the House,” and so many more.

He is also a solo artist in his own right and has recorded instrumental electronic albums, pop records, and spoken word. He’s collaborated with Brian Eno, St. Vincent, Philip Glass, and Selena to name a few. He’s written books, scored soundtracks, even wrote and directed his own movie, 1986’s True Stories.

If you wanted to find a common theme in his work, maybe it’s that David Byrne has always worked to push the boundaries of what pop music can be. While at the same time, he takes high art – the kind of stuff you see in Manhattan galleries or in repertory theaters in Brooklyn – and makes it more accessible and familiar.

American Utopia is his latest project. It started as an album in 2018, then he toured on it with a handful of dates across the U.S. Only, he’s David Byrne, so he went the extra mile and added 12 musicians, all dressed alike in gray suits, carrying their instruments like a marching band and dancing with them. Everything’s also wireless. With nothing binding them to one spot, they can dance and move completely freely. It’s not like any concert you’ve ever seen.

He parlayed the tour into a full on Broadway production, premiering in 2019. Then, American Utopia’s live show became a movie directed by the one and only Spike Lee. That dropped late last year.

If you happen to be in New York, American Utopia will be returning to Broadway on September 17. You can also experience the show on your TV. The concert film is streaming now on HBO Max. It will also be debuting in theaters for the first time on September 15. David Byrne chats with us about American Utopia and his return to playing live music. He also shares some of the music he’s been listening to lately and tells us about where he learned his iconic dance moves. Plus, he’ll tell us why his very different brain powers his art. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: David Byrne — Talking Heads architect and post-New Wave elder statesman of all things arch, artsy and oblique — is the Marcel Duchamp of 20th Century rock n’ roll, transmuting the artifacts of the mundane and the quotidian into magical charms to ward off the confusion, dread and ennui of modern life. He is, in other words, an antidote for our current season in Hell, and his arrival at the Mann last night backed by what is, for lack of a better description, The Greatest Marching Band on Earth, to deliver humane tidings of comfort and joy in the guise of high concept performance art, came not a moment too soon. For the past six months he has been touring the globe in support of his latest album, the archly titled American Utopia, and putting on what I can safely say without fear of exaggeration is, as of this writing, the Greatest Show on Earth. That is not hyperbole, if anything that is an understatement.

In terms of the setlist, the show is an ecstatic blend of modernized takes on Talking Heads quirk-pop classics and the oblique strategies and heartfelt ironies of his post-Heads solo work and collaborations with the likes of Brian Eno, Fatboy Slim and St. Vincent. Which, on paper, sounds fairly pro-forma for an artist of Byrne’s stature and vast back catalog of cutting edge work, but to see it in person, it is nothing short of jaw-dropping — a post-post-modernist miracle of human ingenuity, precision and grace. I call it MOMA-rock: A rapturous  marriage of modern dance, minimalist grandeur, shit-hot musicianship, and gorgeous gale-force chorales that sing the body electric — all performed without wires, fixed instruments, pre-recorded backing tracks or shoes. All of it cooked up by the beautiful mind of David Byrne, who, at the onset of his autumn years, with his thick shock of pure white hair, has evolved into a glorious amalgam of Mark Twain and David Lynch — simultaneously folksy and wise and kind and still barefoot in the head after all these years, displaying the tireless vitality and artistic potency of a man a third of his age. MORE

Multi-talented artist, percussionist, producer and activist MADAME GANDHI today releases her newest video for Visions track “Waiting For Me” – watch here.  Directed by Misha Ghose, “Waiting For Me” was conceptualized and produced by an all-female team and features queer, trans, female and gender non-conforming cast members and marks Madame Gandhi’s first-ever video shot in India.  With its contrasting industrial imagery and color palettes, the visual brings to life the song’s empowering message, an eco-feminist call to action that eschews institutionalized power structures in favor of forging new narratives of self-expression.  Of the video, Madame Gandhi explains:

“We as artists have the power to use our art to vividly reimagine the world we wished we lived in. ‘Waiting For Me’ is a song about questioning societal norms as they exist.  The video opens with the quote, ‘We always assume our own powerlessness, but never our own power.’ With the interconnected social justice movements happening around the world, we are seeing a larger belief in the power of the collective for change. This music video is a call to action for each of us to examine how hierarchy, capitalism and systemic oppression serve to keep us obedient, with little space for dialogue or critical thinking. My hope is that this video inspires folks to ask, ‘Are my behaviors contributing to the oppression of somebody else? And what contributes to my own oppression? What does my version of freedom look and feel like?’” MORE

VICE: It felt like an extravagant gift from my past self when Stranger Than Kindness showed up in the mail. It’s an odd and substantial object—part art book, part memoir, part jigsaw artifact—by and about Nick Cave, designed to complement an exhibit about his work at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen. (The exhibit is described by the curators as eight rooms devoted to “a spatial, multi-sensory exploration of his many real and imagined universes.”)

Like everything else, the exhibition is now indefinitely postponed, but the book more than stands on its own. Cave, who fled Australia for London and Berlin as soon as he came of age, became famous for his work with the Birthday Party and then the Bad Seeds, which quickly became two of the most influential post-punk bands in the world. That vague descriptor doesn’t do much to describe their appeal, a crashing intersection at the crossroads of brooding, gothic imagery and music that’s by turns mournful, savage, and lustful.

Cave has become known as the towering king of snarling melancholy, and Stranger is a pastiche that seems to get at his essence. It features his lurid, bizarre, beautiful, touching artwork and handmade books; photos from his life; and notebooks and scraps of paper that show him puzzling out his most famous songs, showing little glimpses of alternate history, verbal garden paths he chose not to go down (what if the tender, spiteful love song “Far From Me” had gone a little further, describing a departed lover as running like a dog?). It has moments both high and low: The handmade books often have a religious element, the Madonna and Child featured over and over, but there’s also a hand-drawn flyer of Cave as a nude, penitent, weeping, anatomically correct angel, clearly from his famed wilder years, advertising a shirt he sold to pay the damages for a hotel room he apparently wrecked.

All of that would be absorbing for a Cave devotee, as I clearly am. But anchoring the book, and giving it far broader appeal, is an exquisite, winding essay by the American novelist Darcey Steinke. The essay is, simply put, extraordinary, particularly for anyone who does any kind of creative work. It’s not entirely—or even mostly—about Nick Cave, but instead begins with Faulkner, and takes detours through Elvis and Graceland, Johnny Cash, sin, angels, Jesus, and resurrection day before landing, gracefully and sideways, into Cave’s work. MORE

THE GUARDIAN: What you see in this book lives in the intricate world constructed around the songs, and which the songs inhabit,” writes Nick Cave in his introduction to Stranger Than Kindness. “It is the material that gives birth to and nourishes the official work.”

That intricate world includes drawings, lists, collages, scribbled notes and lyrics, found photographs and several handmade books, creased and stained, sometimes in his own blood. Therein the sacred and the profane, the biblical and the pornographic, exist side by side as they have done in Cave’s songs for about 40 years of often frantic creativity. There are pin-ups alongside devotional images of saints, sketches of nude female torsos alongside portraits of the madonna, and there are hand-written, home-made dictionaries listing arcane words, such as anchorite (a recluse), and autogamy (self-fertilisation).

Cave calls it the “peripheral stuff”, which is “the secret and unformed property of the artist”, but here on the page it takes on a life of its own, revealing his often compulsive way of working, as well as his abiding interests and obsessions: desire, faith, sin, despair, redemption, grief, love, and the transformative thrust of language itself. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: If you heard a distant rumble or saw a flash of light on the Northwest horizon last night around 9 p.m., that was Nick Cave, like a bat out of hell, smiting Glenside to a crisp as per his satanic majesty’s request. And it was good. Very good. How could it not be? Everyone knows Heaven has better weather but Hell has all the best bands. Cave looked and sounded in peak form (good hair, great suit, whipped himself about the stage like an electrocuted Elvis), and his voice contained multitudes. Deep, dulcet, and strong like bull. Part angel-headed hipster, part Pentecostal preacherman, part medicine show barker, part lounge singer lothario. All pomade and sweat and jive and Old Testament gravitas. MORE

NEW YORK TIMES: You’ve talked in the past about your desire for your documentaries to convey ecstatic truth³ — or deeper truth — rather than what you’ve called “the truth of accountants.” Does anything about the need for ecstatic truth feel different now, at a time when even factual truth feels destabilized?

WERNER HERZOG: I’ll make it very simple. My witness is Michelangelo, who did the statue of the Pietà. When you look at Jesus taken down from the cross, it’s the tormented face of a 33-year-old man. You look at the face of his mother: His mother is 17. So let me ask: Did Michelangelo give us fake news? Defraud us? Lie to us? I’m doing exactly the same. You have to know the context in which you become inventive.

NEW YORK TIMES: Does ecstatic truth have any connection to morality?

WERNER HERZOG: Invented truth or facts can serve a dubious purpose. What I do serves a purpose, and that is to elate us, to lift us up, to give us a sense of something sublime. Ekstasis in ancient Greek means to step outside yourself. All of a sudden, we have a glimpse of something deeper that might be behind the images. Something like an ecstasy of truth.

NEW YORK TIMES: Did you ever find out who shot you?⁴

WERNER HERZOG: I was shot at various times. You mean here in Los Angeles?

NEW YORK TIMES: Yes.

WERNER HERZOG: No, I wasn’t interested.

NEW YORK TIMES: When you pulled Joaquin Phoenix from a car accident⁵ did you know it was him?

WERNER HERZOG:Yes, although he was upside down in this car, squished between airbags that had deployed and wildly trying to light a cigarette.

NEW YORK TIMES: I have to say, I like a lot of your films very much, but I think the most inspiring thing about you and your work is your ability to keep envisioning these fantastical projects and then actually make them. Is there any advice you can give about how to do that?

WERNER HERZOG: Do the doable. I do only the doable, including moving a ship over a mountain.¹⁸ But I’ve had very difficult shoots, and nobody knows about it. Much more difficult than “Fitzcarraldo.”Like “Fata Morgana.”¹⁹ I think it’s a very irrelevant criterion for Herzog to be, for example, the first barefoot runner on Mount Everest. I won’t be, because that would be stupid. But moving a ship over a mountain is not stupid. It’s a big, big, big metaphor, although I don’t know for what. I know it’s a memory that has been dormant inside many of us.

NEW YORK TIMES: It’s a collective dream that was manifested?

WERNER HERZOG: Yes, and I’m the one who articulated it. MORE

3 Herzog’s documentaries unabashedly and movingly feature invented scenes and dialogue.

4 During an interview with the BBC in 2006, Herzog was shot by an unknown assailant with an air rifle. His response to the wound was a classic of resigned stoicism: ‘‘It’s not significant.’’

5 The actor described the 2006 incident: “I said to myself, ‘That’s Werner Herzog!’ There’s something so calming and beautiful about Werner Herzog’s voice. I felt completely fine and safe. I climbed out.”

18 Which, of course, is a central plot point in ‘‘Fitzcarraldo’’ (1982). Herzog and his crew figured out a way to drag a ship over a jungle mountain, though at a cost — multiple crew members were seriously injured.

19 Herzog’s 1971 film consists mostly of a series of images of the African desert. He has described how he and the crew were imprisoned during filming as a result of mistaken identity. He also contracted the parasitic disease bilharzia.

UPDATE: we’re up to 4.2 MILLION unique visitors since this was made.

This if f*cking INCREDIBLE! Arguably the greatest music video since “This Is America.”

The 5-minute short film, made at the Brooklyn-based experimental studio Art Camp, is set in a dream world inspired by fragments of Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood’s imagination and made up of over 3,000 hand-illustrated frames. […]

Art Camp commented on their process interpreting the latest track from Thom’s current album ANIMA:

“Our first and last goal was to serve the feelings of the song and the record. Thom shared a list of visions with us, disconnected images from his dreams, and we expanded on it with visions from everyone who joined the video team, over a dozen of us. At its core, our intention was to communicate the experience of feeling completely on your own, surrounded by people you see yourself in but don’t understand, who have lost their minds to the city and can’t see that you need their help.

The process for making this animation was extremely iterative and cyclical, and started from every direction at once. We experimented with clay sculpture and one-cent 3D horses, crowd simulations and charcoal dust, linear storytelling and abstract expression. We made the entire video and threw it away, made it again, threw it away, dozens of times. This of course was stressful but also beautiful.

Our goal is to create work that is surprising to ourselves, that we don’t understand how it happened. A lot of that has to do with trusting in the collaborative process– finding a wavelength where everyone feels free to go crazy in their own way, and push for what they most believe in. Our values are constantly being tested and rewritten in pursuit of creating a community where people really do feel loose and free and safe. When it works the best, you end up with work that speaks in everyone’s voices and one voice.”

PREVIOUSLY: Radiohead @ Franklin Music Hall

PREVIOUSLY 10 Snarky Things I Thought Of Watching Radiohead Last Night

PREVIOUSLY: An Oral History Of OK Computer

PREVIOUSLY: King Of Limbs Album Review

PREVIOUSLY: 25 Zingers About Radiohead In Camden 2007 For The Lulz

PREVIOUSLY: Insta-Review Of In Rainbows After Listening To It Three Times In The Three Hours After It Came Out At 3 AM

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following essay by Phawker almnus Elizabeth Fiend [pictured below] about her early days as a weirdo punk rocker/comic strip artist is included in THE BOOK OF WEIRDO just published by Last Gasp. Legendary in alt-comic book circles, Weirdo was a comics anthology created by R. Crumb in 1981 and ran until 1993. THE BOOK OF WEIRDO includes a comprehensive history of the publication, interviews with its three editors — R.Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and Peter Bagge (of Hate fame) — and testimonials from artists that contributed over the years, including Miss Fiend, hence this essay. Robert Aline Crumb will be at the Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia University on Monday October 28th from 6PM-9PM for a discussion about the history of Weirdo and the work it published.

ELIZABETH FIEND: My first comic was three frames. A cop says “nice ass” to a punk. She kicks him in the groin; he says “I won’t be able to get it up for a week.” She reaches into her leather; pulls a gun; shoots him, remarking “You’ll never get it up again.” A few months later Mumia Abu-Jamal was arrested and charged with killing police officer William Faulkner. Philly 1981, was a time and place where a cop could be threatening to arrest you and checking out your legs — at the same time.

Employment for punks was scarce and I spent a lot of time drawing. I took a pen name, Luna Ticks, and named my comic strip The Young and The Frustrated: A Continuing Strip Tease. I distributing Xerox’s at punk shows. I gauged success by how many sheets littered the ground at the end of the show – many. My housemates were a dwarf, a black woman, a gay Mexican American, and the son of a police chief, along with my husband. The cop’s son stole our rent money and we were evicted. At times like this there’s only one thing to do. We started a band.

In the punk sea of non-conformity we were the weirdos. Five color hair; a silver space suit; pink floral over-top polka dots. We had a big presence. We walked everywhere because we had no money, paying for a bus would have been an extravagance that would never have occurred to us. Our style was so new and so alienating, once a man jumped out of his car in the middle of an intersection and start beating on us. A reporter described my appearance as having “both a sense of atmosphere, the bizarre and an inexplicable range of covertness.” I continued drawing, a lot. I got heavily into the fanzine scene which was bursting to an unprecedented size not seen since the ‘60’s. My characters were punks, set in a future-now world. They were raw and gritty, evoked strong emotion – mostly anger. I thought I was Anais Nin drawing feminist-erotica. The public thought I was a pornographer.

I got a job in a TV Script Archive. Twenty hours a week I read prime time TV scripts and analyzed them for content. That’s a job? Yes, it’s called academia. It afforded me plenty of free time, I spent a lot of that writing letters, my mailbox was jam-packed. I was printed in hundreds and hundreds of issues of mostly mail order fanzines. I was getting good reviews “Luna Ticks eroticus maximus make GREAT bedtime reading, informal, nasty artwork including barbecued men’s testicles, don’t miss out” [Hardcore Fanzine, SF Punkland]. And “Not merely crude, but always thought provoking.”

I was a woman in a man’s world. I was popular with prisoners – guys who maybe pulled armed robbery to get money for heroin – they wanted to be pen pals and asked for free copies of my self-printed mini-comic books. I always obliged. A lot of crazy people wrote to me. They sent multi-page letters in crayon detailing how they knew I was speaking directly to them via the comics, and ‘thanks.’ It was getting a little scary. A ‘fan’ sent me bits of dead animals. I received a baggie of assorted moss. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: Q&A W/ Weirdo Editors Aline & Robert Crumb

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip hop musical about the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton has tapped into the politico/sociocultural zeitgeist, generating the kind of rabid fandom usually reserved for things like Marvel and Star Wars, and commanding thousands on the grey market for a seat at one of its sold out shows. The touring production opened Wednesday at Philadelphia’s Forrest Theatre where it will play through November 11, bringing Hamilton’s story to the city where the titular protagonist spent 15 years of his life while a member of the Congress of the Confederation and the Constitutional Convention. In fact the location of the events of the infamous “Reynolds Pamphlet” featured in the show transpired only a few blocks away from The Forrest Theater on the block 200 Walnut where Hamilton’s house once stood.

What often gets lost in the breathless headlines about astronomical ticket prices and the social media bragging rights bestowed on those lucky or deep-pocketed enough to land a seat in “the room where it happens” is the fact that Hamilton’s story of a poor immigrant who works his way up from nothing to become a Founding Father of this great country has never been more relevant. While the production pre-dates the Age of Trump, Lin-Manuel’s transposition of the race and language of the cast of Hamilton has become a de facto touchstone of The Resistance. Hamilton keeps the audience ruminating on its themes of power, race and family with its super-catchy hyrbird of traditional Broadway tropes, R&B motifs and banging hip-hop.

The touring production is no less impressive than the Broadway version, filling out every nook of the cozy Forrest Theatre stage with its minimalist walkways and staircases, while Edred Utomi perfectly rattles off bars in Lin-Manuel’s trademark nasal flow. Watching Hamiton, as the US wins its independence from England and begin ratifying its own constitution, you can’t help but be reminded of what this country once stood for and the foundation of hope, generosity and tolerance it was built upon.  Bearing witness to the legacy of that “bastard, orphan, son of a whore, Scotsman” and the fruits of his labors which we still enjoy to this day really spoke to me, not just as a critic, but as a human being. — DAN TABOR

This is easily the best thing Kim Gordon’s ever done. And I’m old enough to remember when buying Bad Moon Rising on vinyl wasn’t just a hip format choice, it was your only option. “Sketch Artist” is the lead-off track from her just-announced/first-ever solo album, No Home Record, to be released October 11th on Matador Records. No Home Record follows the recent opening of Gordon’s solo exhibition “She Bites Her Tender Mind” at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) in Dublin and “Lo-Fi Glamour” at Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA. The video for “Sketch Artist” was directed by Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Loretta Fahrenholz who notes “‘Sketch Artist’ is a haunted car ride. Kim drives as ‘Unter’ Pool summons passengers throughout nighttime LA. The city drifts by, passengers intermingle in the back seat and Kim‘s deadly stare shocks pedestrians along her route.” The clip includes a cameo from actress and writer Abbi Jacobson. See above.

BEGGARS BANQUET: With a career spanning nearly four decades, Kim Gordon is one of the most prolific and visionary artists working today. A co-founder of the legendary Sonic Youth, Gordon has performed all over the world, collaborating with many of music’s most exciting figures including Tony Conrad, Ikue Mori, Julie Cafritz and Stephen Malkmus. Most recently, Gordon has been hitting the road with Body/Head, her spellbinding partnership with artist and musician Bill Nace. Despite the exhaustive nature of her résumé, the most reliable aspect of Gordon’s music may be its resistance to formula. Songs discover themselves as they unspool, each one performing a test of the medium’s possibilities and limits. Her command is astonishing, but Gordon’s artistic curiosity remains the guiding force behind her music. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: Kim Gordon’s BODY/HEAD @ PhilaMOCA

Opens May 4th at James Oliver Gallery, 723 Chestnut Street, 4th floor. Reception from 6pm – 9pm.

PREVIOUSLY: Q&A W/ David Jablow

800 block of North 4th St. Philadelphia. Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA

“May 10th. Thank God for the rain which has helped wash away the garbage and trash off the sidewalks. I’m workin’ long hours now, six in the afternoon to six in the morning. Sometimes even eight in the morning, six days a week. Sometimes seven days a week. It’s a long hustle but it keeps me real busy. I can take in three, three fifty a week. Sometimes even more when I do it off the meter. All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” — Travis Bickle, TAXI DRIVER (1976)

BY MARIAH HALL A zine is a self-published, limited circulation and often hand-distributed work, often featuring art, photography, poetry, and prose. Zine culture is rooted in the social and political activism of the ’60s and ’70s, and later became associated with the underground music scene. In a reflection of D.I.Y. values, zines are more focused on expressing particular views rather than gaining profits, and they act as a mode of communication and a platform for those not typically granted a voice.

The last decade has witnessed a resurgence of zine culture, a revival of print media in a paperless age. Although some zines can be found online, published through sources such as Tumblr, WordPress and Issuu, many zines exist physically as hand-bound paper booklets. This is perhaps because zines are an artifact of another era, a time before the all-consuming torrent of social media. It stokes the joy of creating something tangible, something you can hold and collect. It is impossible to accurately track the circulation of zines and this ephemeral nature is a major component of its allure. It is an experience to hunt and find these fleeting and intimately personal works.

So much of our lives exist in the abstract void of the Internet. We regularly take the role of observers, hooked on the inexhaustibly refreshed feed and endless scroll. We are constantly being bombarded with information, an incessant digital yelling. Buried within our phones in every spare moment, it seems people have lost the ability to communicate verbally or connect with strangers. We don’t get to know our neighbors, we ignore each other, adopting a facade of apathy. Zine culture is a way of connecting with the local community through the sharing of art and ideas.

The Philadelphia Secret Admirer is an independent monthly print magazine based in Philadelphia. Issues feature short stories, crossword puzzles, interviews, horoscopes, comic strips and a section called “Overheard,” in which readers submit snippets of out-of-context conversations. It initially began as a free weekly, but after creator David Commins had some luck with Bitcoin investment, he was able to improve the production into monthly booklets. In a recent interview with Phawker, David Commins and art director Rachel Pfeffer [pictured, right] discussed the inspiration of the Admirer, the recent resurrection of zines, the influence of technology on printed word and the spirituality of paper.

PHAWKER: What was the inspiration for The Secret Admirer? How did you get started?

DAVID COMMINS: The inspiration from the monthly came out of, about a year ago I was on a road trip and went through Rachel when she was living out in Colorado. My friend Morgan and I stayed with her and her partner. We got to talking and she’s from the area, she was already familiar with the weekly. I needed to do something different. I’d been doing the weekly for almost eight years at that point and my two paths were either make the weekly into a bigger monthly or start Johnny Appleseed-ing weeklies in cool cities around the country. Keep this one going, get a staff, go to Brooklyn and get one going there then go down to North Carolina or Georgia, kind of start seeding and then be able to live in a shack out in the woods and create the general content like the crosswords, but have them do the overheards and stuff. It was either live a lot more in your city or live a lot less in your city. It wasn’t something I felt I could do alone. It was coming across Rachel and stoking that enthusiasm that gave me the belief it could be done.

PHAWKER: So Philly is the only place it’s published currently?

DAVID COMMINS: Right now yes.

PHAWKER: It didn’t start somewhere else?

DAVID COMMINS: It started in Bloomington, Indiana as a monthly zine. It came into what it was going to look like as a weekly in Flagstaff, Arizona. Then it became the weekly in Athens, Georgia.

PHAWKER: Was it mostly something you started for yourself or did you feel that there was something lacking in underground zine culture?

DAVID COMMINS: To be completely honest, I had just had a really bad breakup and I was a debilitating alcoholic, I couldn’t hold down any kind of job. I was like, well I know how to make crossword puzzles and write so I’m just going to go make this piece of shit thing and print out eight dollars’ worth of copies and try to pay rent. There was an immediate warm reception to it that I made a bunch of money right away. It came out of a place of necessity, it was either make this weekly or be homeless again.

RACHEL PFEFFER: I don’t think there’s another magazine like it. This is more speaking to when I got involved in the project, we started dancing with it a year ago and started producing the first issue right before the beginning of 2018. At this point in Philadelphia I think there’s a need for it.

PHAWKER: Where are both of you from?

RACHEL PFEFFER: I’m from the Philly area. I lived here until like 2015, then lived in Colorado for two years, then moved back last fall.

DAVID COMMINS: I’m from New Hampshire.

PHAWKER: What brought you here, eventually?

DAVID COMMINS: I was a bit of a traveler and my younger brother came here after he graduated from college. We’d fallen out of contact and he was living here and I was a bit rootless at the time. I was like, oh I’ll go hang out with him and reconnect. He’s since moved away but I liked it here.

PHAWKER: Did either of you go to college?

RACHEL PFEFFER: Yeah. I studied painting.

DAVID COMMINS: I went to school for microbiology with an emphasis on pre-med. Then I took hallucinogens and decided I’d rather be a writer. So I dropped out of one college and went to another for creative nonfiction. I had one of those real tough Hemingway journalism professors who on the first day was like, “None of you are going to be writers.” I was living in a tent in the woods while going to school, because I couldn’t afford both. One morning— I always got there first because I was living outside so sun comes up, I’m up—he sits down and was like, “You do have a chance at being a writer, but you’re not going to find out how to do it in college, so you should leave. If you want to go to another town and make a fake resume just tell me what it says first and I’ll verify it for you.” So I went to Georgia and started working for an alt-weekly, doing music reviews.

PHAWKER: What are other jobs you’ve had before doing this?

DAVID COMMINS: I’ve had all sorts of jobs, kayaking outfitters, shoe stores, Walmarts, driving school buses, trying to find that niche.

RACHEL PFEFFER: I’ve also had a lot of jobs. I did study painting in school. Before I even graduated I was doing graphic design, illustration and screen printing. I’ve had some full time design jobs, some freelance stuff. I also have my own business making junk, called Rainbow Feather. The graphic design stuff for me was less of a creative thing and more of a job to pay bills.

PHAWKER: Do you have other art projects you’re working on outside of the Admirer?

RACHEL PFEFFER: Yeah I have my company, we make shirts, enamel pins, patches. I do commissioned illustrations and I have a screen printing business called the Rainbow Ranch.

PHAWKER: I feel that lately there has been a revival in zine culture, can either of you speak to evidence of that?

DAVID COMMINS: Yeah, I think this is the moment. The moment for making the magazine was chosen, it didn’t just happen to coincide. I feel that we’ve crossed a hill with trusting the internet. I think there’s a general zeitgeist about interacting with each other. I knew it was coming, I think it came earlier this year where people were just like, fuck this. There was the net neutrality rollback and just blow after blow to the credibility to the internet, with Facebook and advertising and ulterior motives. People trust paper more than screen. Especially if there’s a long established name, there’s something more accessible about that then something you find online.

RACHEL PFEFFER: There always has been a contingent of people who prefer to have a printed thing. That has always been a niche thing. Also the Internet is all algorithms but the content we put out is me and David curating it.

DAVID COMMINS: People like having a piece of paper to do a crossword, to play a game of tic-tac-toe, to make a to-do list. Paper is still very much a part of our spiritual being. I think we collectively miss it and it’s an easy gap to slide into.

PHAWKER: Do you think this revival of circulating print and independent publishing is in part due to political circumstance?

DAVID COMMINS: I do, that’s a component of it. I think the isolation of existing in a digital way in public, or in your house, living on your street and not knowing your neighbors is a fairly new thing. Sitting in a bar and no one’s talking to each other. There’s a general gag reflex to that direction.

PHAWKER: Does zine culture exist in a physical space? How can you access this world’

DAVID COMMINS: I’m an avid journal keeper and The Secret Admirer is very much a journal art piece in its origins. All it takes is writing something relatable and distributing it. Everyone has something they can say that’s relatable and I’m really psyched about the zine uptick. There are some people in this town that are doing great things, like Dre Grigorpol who does the zine conference every year. I used to work over at the Wooden Shoe and curate that library.

PHAWKER: I know there’s Philly Zine Fest and you can find zines at different coffee shops, but I feel there isn’t one place where it all comes together. So how do people find out about other zines?

RACHEL PFEFFER: Before I did the Admirer, I would vend art festivals, I would make some art zines. Denver Zine fest, is amazing, they have a whole library, Denver Independent Comic Con is another awesome event. There are similar events in every city. Some cities have nationally recognized events for small presses and self-publishers. A friend of mine just started Trident Press, publishing people who used to make writing-based zines as actual books. Years ago I had a subscription service where people would just send you a bunch of zines in the mail. The way we distribute the Admirer is more a periodical in some ways, we consider it a zine on steroids. Two of our comix contributors are starting a magazine called Good Boy where they curate a selection of comics, because they felt it’s hard to get into comics because people don’t know where to start. It seems that the zine universe is inextricably bound from comics.

DAVID COMMINS: I think they overlap heavily, but there’s something about zines that’s independent from comics. In regard to how do you find zines, there’s something inherently ephemeral about zines. You find it and it’s like good for you, it’s difficult. I deliver the Admirer to the same places all the time. So if people really want to they can get all of them. There are hundreds of issues of the weekly, I don’t think anyone has read all of them. I used to do a lot of band touring and every time you go to a new town, there’s a shelf in the living room just jammed with xerox copied zines, I’ve read wonderful stuff I’ll never find again. That’s one of the inherent differences to the internet. Part of the reason people have this spiritual aversion, it solidifies you. The opinions you say on social media, the things you affiliate with publicly, come to define you externally. Something you write in a zine is not immediately accessible its one of strengths of the genre is you can’t go to one place, you have to hunt it out.

RACHEL PFEFFER: In most towns with a college there is some coffee shop where someone is real into zines, like Mutiny Information Café in Denver. But the library is never complete, if you ever deep dive something on the Internet and read everything there is to know, you can’t do that with printed zines, there’s always more.

DAVID COMMINS: People have tried. I come from zine culture, I don’t even have all the zines I’ve made.

PHAWKER: Is that part of the reason you stopped putting them online, because the physical copy became more important and accessible?

DAVID COMMINS: I just felt it would be a diminished experience to read it online. It’s not out of anyone’s reach to keep it only print.

RACHEL PFEFFER: There was a point in time where magazines became kind of expensive to subscribe to, especially if you were really young but they would do a cheaper digital subscription, like Issuu, and it was so unsatisfying. It’s not the same, you can’t tear things out, hold it.

PHAWKER: Do you feel it would be more popular if it was also online or do you have a steady fan base that keeps it alive?

DAVID COMMINS: The people who find it, love it, because it’s something local. There’s nothing we’re doing that’s better than something online, you can find a better crossword or horoscope, more interesting stories. I don’t try to compete on that access. If I advertised online as a print-only thing, more people would physically subscribe. Some short stories do well online, like blogs or if you want to be a Twitter personality, you could be successful, but it’s not very appealing to me.

PHAWKER: What’s the creation process like? Who else is involved?

RACHEL PFEFFER: It’s mostly just me and David. We have a comix editor, Josh O’Neill who used to own a comic book store in West Philly. Now he makes one of the comics in the mag, he has a small press called Beehive Books. And then all of our contributors. Half the month is doing our own content and wrangling contributors and trying to sell ads. Then we’re in the studio together trying to aggregate the magazine.

DAVID COMMINS: Our typical day in the office, I get up really early so I’m in by 7 or 8 and Rachel shows up around 10 or 11 and we overlap for a while, then I leave first. That morning energy works well for me to be alone.

RACHEL PFEFFER: The afternoon is my power time. We’re constantly trading ideas.

DAVID COMMINS: This would be too much work if it wasn’t enjoyable.

PHAWKER: How do you create ideas for content? I know it changes from month to month.

RACHEL PFEFFER: We’re moving towards loosely themed issues, but not super strict, just a general suggestion.

DAVID COMMINS: Like the next one is summer fun, the one after that is nostalgia, then the lies we tell ourselves, then how do I hate my family more compassionately.

RACHEL PFEFFER: It’s not like all of the content has been on brand. Some of it is directed by what contributors are sending us. I get a weird feel of each issues based on how we feel making it, and it seems to come through somehow. We have a lot of solid contributors.

DAVID COMMINS: We have too much content all the time and we constantly have to disappoint people.

RACHEL PFEFFER: We get a lot of submissions but if I know someone that’s doing something cool, I’ll ask them to work with us and it’s rare someone’s not into it.

PHAWKER: Does that apply to the artist profiles? Is it usually people you know?

RACHEL PFEFFER: We don’t always know them, a lot of times its supporters of the Admirer or whose work I really love and think they have something interesting to say, I’ll reach out to them.

PHAWKER: How much of it is submission-based versus your own writing? You used to write under pseudonyms, right?

DAVID COMMINS: Not at the moment. If it’s me its David Commines or Emily Centipede. Anything other than that isn’t me. It used to be 100% mine, but it wouldn’t be interesting to read one person’s madness for forty pages.

RACHEL PFEFFER: Can you imagine if you had to take on 12 different personalities?

DAVID COMMINS: Yes, I can. That was originally why I did the pseudonym thing. I’m working on novels and stuff in the background. I wanted to learn how to do different voices, try and write from different perspectives and have it be believable.

PHAWKER: Is that where the name comes from?

DAVID COMMINS: Well it was originally called The Admirer and it was going to be a music review thing, all positive reviews, like even if you don’t like the album you can find something nice to say about it. I was going to intentionally get people from one genre, like have a death metal kid to write a review of a twee band. So much of the mythology is invented at this point, it’s been so many things, I try to keep it amorphic.

PHAWKER: Who is your target audience? Who are the kinds of people that are reading this?

DAVID COMMINS: Existentialists. People who feel a general sense of lack.

RACHEL PFEFFER: The bored and lonely.

DAVID COMMINS: I want it to feel like getting a letter from a friend, to distill that element. The kind of people who need a letter in their life.

PHAWKER: Have you met your fans? Do people stop you like, hey aren’t you the guy?

DAVID COMMINS: Well I deliver it myself so mostly on the route, but also I’m fully branded. [Gestures to his purple tank top, which has the Admirer logo on it.]

PHAWKER: Is there a story behind the logo?

DAVID COMMINS: I was looking for a mascot and I was walking through Hobby Lobby and I saw all these stamps and I saw the wolf and then I stole it. And then there’s Coffee News, this international free weekly, one little column of text between squares of ads. I simultaneously loved and hated it. I saw it in different towns around 2007, but it’s in decline. I loved finding them but I was like, I could do this better. Their mascot is this stupid little dude wearing a bowtie and a checkered suit. When I saw the stamp of the wolf I had this vision of the man cowering and this giant wolf leaping out. They tried to sue me with this international lawyer, they sent me a letter address to Mr. Leon Wolffe.

RACHEL PFEFFER: Leon is the wolf’s name.

PHAWKER: Is there a reason he’s called Leon?

DAVID COMMINS: In 2008 I lived in a house with 17 other people. My friend Greg had a cat named Leon and my friend Nick who helped me learn InDesign to make the first few issues lived there with me. Leon the cat always hung out with us and Nick was like, “I think Leon thinks he’s wolf,” because the way he’d walk around. Nick would draw pictures of what a cat who thinks it’s a wolf would look like.

PHAWKER: Do you feel the Admirer has been influential in Philadelphia?

DAVID COMMINS: Yes, it tends to resonate with people that are sad in some way, it’s like this warbling shadow of a friend.

RACHEL PFEFFER: People are like, it’s Sunday I sat down with a nice breakfast at my coffee shop with the Admirer and I’m having a meal with myself. It seems like a sort of companion.

DAVID COMMINS: I feel like I share in hundreds of tiny of nice moments. Its given my life meaning, I’d be dead without it. I’ve struggled pretty heavily with suicide, there have been moments where it gets me out of bed because other people rely on it.

RACHEL PFEFFER: It’s like leaving a breadcrumb trail.

DAVID COMMINS: It’s some psychosomatic trick I play on myself to keep living. But it works, even if it’s a placebo.

RACHEL PFEFFER: There’s something that comes along with doing a periodical that affects your own life. Every month has a comforting routine, like I have to make sure I’m okay this week because I have to make this magazine people care about.

DAVID COMMINS: It staunches the self-hatred a little bit. People send postcards and gifts to our P.O. box. That’s something I personally need, to be appreciated by strangers.

PHAWKER: Do you have future goals or a direction you’re moving in?

DAVID COMMINS: The most concrete goal is to get more ads in there. I have enough money saved up to keep it going for a minute, but not two minutes. I’d love to get some distros in other cities, to send to place like the Wooden Shoe, like Red Emma’s, info shops. Every once in a while I shave off a bit of profits and buy a bunch of Plan B or abortion pills and give those out to people that need it. I want to be able to affect more energy in the world with it, become a bigger platform. I want people to see what’s going on with this or that action or democratic socialist meeting, or let’s interview a local political candidate. I want to reach people that seem to be disaffected and depressed. Our demographic is strongly twenty-somethings. Which is a powerful group of people that haven’t had a platform traditionally but is now gaining one. I’d like to give resources and to serve the people that enjoy it. It would be more sustainable on an existential level if it were doing something.

PHAWKER: In terms of it being a platform, is there a specific message or issue you’d focus on?

DAVID COMMINS: It would have to conform to what’s going on at any given moment. It’s value is in getting attention to a specific thing. There are standing issues that can be addressed but I’d keep it topical. Openly talking about mental illness or your own inadequacy can be empowering to hear.

PHAWKER: Are there any artists that inspire you?

DAVID COMMINS: Ursula Le Guin, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Tom Robbins. Those are people that ride the line between social commentary and journalism.

RACHEL PFEFFER: Lisa Frank, Tatsuyuki Tanaka, the animator of Akira, and Rick Griffin, who was a poster artist.

PHAWKER: What advice would you have for someone producing their own zine?

RACHEL PFEFFER: We talked to some students in a Drexel program about that. If someone is determined enough you can do anything, but there were some things that would’ve been prohibitable expensive and time consuming without printing experience.

DAVID COMMINS: My main mantra is there’s no final product. It’s not a novel, you put it out there and then it fades away. Putting something out regularly and knowing it’s not your final product. It doesn’t have to look great, you can start with nothing, find your voice. Sometimes it’s hard to release something imperfect. It’s a very specific kind of art. The periodical lens means it never needs to be finished.

RACHEL PFEFFER: It adds an element of time, that is different from a novel or your magnum opus piece of art. It’s timely. The flip side of that, we don’t hold shit back, we put the best shit we have in every issue. We don’t save anything and it keeps us motivated to come up with the best content for every issue. Neither of us could do it alone, there’s something to be said for collaboration and knowing when to involve other people.

DAVID COMMINS: I knew I couldn’t do a monthly by myself. I needed to bring someone into the cockpit.

RACHEL PFEFFER: I don’t collaborate readily. But this, I don’t think I could do with anyone but David.

DAVID COMMINS: It’s a new kind of relationship, it’s not a friendship or romantic thing, but a creative thing, like a band.

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