Killer Born Man: Art Black

"This record is like a nap in the woods. Which is better than being gang-raped in a leper colony I suppose, but I can think of things I'd rather do." "A straight-razor shave from a giggling little man who won't stop talking about his old job slaughtering cattle." "Imagine forming a band with the hopes that someone will call you one of the better R.E.M. imitators. Here, catch."

I have never used the above sentences in a record review. (These days, I might, without conscience, steal the last one and switch out Messrs. Buck, Mills, Rieflin & Stipe for the phrase "Fall Out Boy") They came out of the clackety word processor of Art Black. During the mid-to-late-'80s halcyon years of the planet's indie underground music scene, Black was documenting as much stuff as his tireless digits would let him. As publisher of the fanzine Away From The Pulsebeat, Black (and then-wife/ace photog Monica Dee) fearlessly ran his enthusiasm up the flagpole. The underground saluted in return, allowing him to offer free 7-inch singles with issues, as well as a primo compilation (Mondostereo), which featured some of the brightest-burning units in the scene. Sure the wax was good (I found out about the Celibate Rifles Christmas song way before the compilers of this disc), but it's Black's writing that still captivates me 20-plus years after the fact.

"It's Kismet that you've come calling at my virtual door these past months, since I've only recently pried the nails out of the sides of my head,"says Black. "You know, the ones that I pounded into my brain to hold the plywood earflaps in place so I wouldn't have to listen to the thick, sebaceous crud masquerading as music for lo, these past 20 years or so."

Home was New Jersey, right? What things made you spend time, money and tears in creating Pulsebeat? What excited you the most?
Home during the AFTP era was indeed Le Jerse Nouveau, although I believe the idea of the mag first festered while I was living in a box I built out of wooden planks in the center of a (not) friend's living room in Brooklyn. That was back when Park Slope was a polite euphemism for "bolt from the subway to your apartment clutching your wallet for dear life." Nowadays, my plank box would probably sell for seven figures.

The whole concept of the mag was born of long conversations about music with a like-minded co-worker at a shi-TAY job we both despised. I know, it's hard to even imagine such a scenario. Working a job you hate? How unrealistic. Nonetheless, it happened, and me and my pal Dean kept ourselves sane by debating earth-shattering topics such as the nascent geopolitical subtexts of the most recent Stranglers 45 (e.g., "Did you see the gazongas on that chickadoodle who squirmed out of her top onstage at the Ritz last night?"). When a coworker politely suggested we shut the fuggup and write down our stupid goddamn opinions, it was truly a tiffany. I mean, an epiphany. (Damn typewriter keys. Who keeps moving them?) I should pause here to point out that this all took place in the era of the cut 'n' paste underground, when typewriters, Xerox machines, and Elmer's glue did a fanzine make. Dean and I had a slight advantage. Our shi-tay job consisted of working for a typesetting firm. Weren't no laptops at the time. No desktops. No home computers at all. We worked on computers literally the size of washing machines with removable hard discs holding an astonishing 80mb of data. A dozen or so typesetters tip-tapped on workstations that shared those 80 megs. How fucking quaint.

Anyway, we held a contest, Dean and I, for a name. He won with Away From The Pulsebeat, a moniker I dug immediately. Speaking of moniker, no music mag is complete without a photographer, and for mine I had only to wrassle to the ground my then-galfriend Monica Dee and rub salt-water in her eyes until she agreed to take pics for the nonexistent magazine. Good to go! That is, until Dino got cold feet--or more the point, blue balls. He and his galfriend had a falling out. He wound up moving back to his hometown Chicago, where poosay apparently grows on trees and can be had for the price of a potato. Leaving me with a fanzine title, a photographer, and 80 hungry megabytes of space.

How many issues did you end up doing? You had a good run of artifacts (Mondostereo, 7-inchers et al)
When we had all our goods together to start fanzining, we were feeling a little like John Holmes in a Turkish bath fulla midgets, so it didn't make a lotta sense to just timidly introduce ourselves. "Hi, we're AFTP: Another Flat & Turgid Publication." Instead, we rolled out our first inaugural with a bold-faced lie: Issue No. 1 of AFTP was advertised as our "comeback" issue. The conceit was that this was our second lifetime. Surely you own those killer issues we put out years ago, right, Mojito? Prized by collectors and selling for tall bucks. Don't tell me you don't remember, loser. Call it the not-so-great rock 'n' roll swindle. Bottom line: It worked. With no history or pedigree, in a matter of minutes we had distributors lining up to handle version 2.0 of our "classic" fanzine. Of course, it helped that the damn thing was ho-hum mildly entertaining, and Monica could snap a shutter like nobody's business.

And because doing something well is the best reason to not do it again, we always tried to take it to another level with subsequent issues. Which led to better print quality; free 7-inch records; the Mondostereo compilation album, and live benefit shows at the best club in the history of history, Maxwell's in Hoboken. One little-recognized fact is that all of this took place over a mere four issues. The entire history of AFTP can be summed up on the fingers of a bad Yakuza. If there's a secret to our success, it's that we were the right people in the right place at the right time. Indie/alternative/underground/whatdafuck music in the mid-to-late 1980s was as strong, serious, aggressive, antagonistic, impressionistic, artistic, anti-artistic and playful as anything from the heydays of blues, R&R, garage, psychedelia or punk.

And then, sadly, there was Nirvana.

Ahhhh, sensei! I see where this is going. When did you stop?
I can tell you the exact moment AFTP ended. My buddy Greg was visiting from Tokyo or Hong Kong or wherever he was working at the time, and as usual, we rendezvoused in a titty bar in Newark. Somewhere in the middle of the night, the post-disco and hair-metal anthems split like the Red Sea before Moses, and outta nowhere, the platinum blondies began bumping their poles to the beat of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Life hasn't been the same since.

Every once in a while I pull out the cassette tape I made of Nirvana's early gig at Maxwell's and try to like it, and every time I fail. Nobody was more surprised than me to hear their commercial breakthrough, and Thor knows, nobody was more surprised than me to discover that I actually liked their major-label spew.

The problem wasn't Nirvana. The problem was everything else. My Bronx chum Roland tells me that Nirvana changed the world for the better on his turf, where the 1980s meant tough guidos in mascara and hairspray. Once Nirvana broke, suddenly flannel was in and poseurs were passe. Me, I couldn't have hated the 1990s more. Everything I used to like about music and culture--everything that used to be isolated to people who were into these things because they were genuinely into these things--all of it became a new fashion, a way to sell magazines and move units. The heart disappeared and in its place we had Green Day. And Tool. And Helmet. And, and, and. And that's when I pulled a Rumplestilstkin. Thank you, no. I'm goin' to sleep. Wake me for Armageddon. (Editors note: I think he means Rip Van Winkle, or his son, Robbie Van Winkle.) I folded the mag and breathed a sigh of relief that I no longer had to deal with the Satan spawn that are magazine distributors. Perhaps the only saving grace in the demise of literacy is that most of those yellow-stained ball-sucking leeches have been driven outta business.

You stopped doing AFTP, but you were contributing to various fanzines. What have you been doing all these years since?
Scott Crawford [former publisher of Harp, now CEO of the online mag Blurt]in Maryland was the first to seek me out, and I wrote and ultimately served as contributing editor for his mags Noiseworks and Bent. Billy Childish sent me an illustration that became the header for one of my columns. It was in Scott's mags that I started playing around with non-music writing. Back in AFTP I had a catch-all closing column called Shock! Horror! Boobs! Blood! where I scribbled about books, movies, comics and whatnot, but for Scott I went totally off-topic and spooted stories like the one about the poosay industry in Asia (title: Babes in Thailand).

Mike Weldon was the next fella to ring me up and ask if I was interested in laying down words for his mag. I'd known Mike since he used to hand-write the Xeroxed fanzine Psychotronic, at that time a weekly guide to obscure and oddball flicks showing on NY broadcast TV (pre-cable, y'see). We used to bump into each other in basement clubs on St. Marks Place or screenings in Queens where Ted Mikels or H.G. Lewis flicks were showing. Remember, back then, those were the only places to catch dusty cult flicks. No videotape. It was a different universe, Tonto.
Starting with issue two of Psychotronic Video Magazine, I had a regular column devoted to record reviews. Yes, I said "record," not "CD." I was one of the last holdouts for vinyl, kinda like those Japanese soldiers in Borneo who hid in the jungle for 40 years and refused to acknowledge that WWII was over. Eventually, of course, all those soldiers packed it in and became CEOs at Honda and Sony, and now I have a Sony CD player in my Honda and that's that. The world moves on. Daniel Clowes drew me a pic that became the header of my column. And I continued to listen to music I despised and write increasingly cranky reviews about it. Ultimately, Mike, who knew my interests well, grabbed me by the lapel and shook me till my diamond cufflinks rattled. "You hate this stuff," said he. "It's your column. Why don't you write about what you're passionate about?"

It was, needless to say, a "duh" moment. So I did. Gotta hit the rewind here to explain what it was that had snagged my passion after the Nirvanification of the underground. The answer: Asia. Back in the 1980s, Hong Kong cinema owned my eyeballs. Starting with John Woo and Jackie Chan, of course, but spreading from there like Ebola on steroids. American cinema was in a period as fallow as American music, but overseas there was an electricity so strong, it reinvented the entire language of film. Sadly, we all know where that led: to the co-opting of everything unique and interesting; the absorption of Asian action into Hollywood film; the cannibalization of the Hong Kong film industry; the slick commercialization of a wild guerrilla style and the death of yet another individualistic regional identity for the greater good.

But back in the day, when HK cinema was in its prime, I went hog-wild writing about it for Psychotronic, and ultimately a boatload of other places like Asian Cult Cinema, Hong Kong Superstars, Thunder and Kung Fu magazines, TV Guide's website and their annual Motion Picture Guide, and various other books. I also began working with international film festivals as a programmer and wrote for their festival guides.

Be honest: Do you have the slightest inclination to check out any new music?

Music? What's that? Art before the whores.