This site is the creation of AstralGlamBoy, aka Antonio Lopez, who was a co-founder of Ink Disease, a punk zine in LA started in 1982 and died in 1990. This blogzine is not a new Ink Disease, but rather re-appropriates the spirit of DIY media using pixel tape, glue, Xerox machines and typewriters. Punk never died, it just dematerialized. Welcome. This is fun. I hope you like it too.
View Antonio Lopez’s profileA brief subjective history of Ink Diseease I currently teach zine publishing to teens at a local youth culture center. Not too long ago I had a weird epiphany when I realized that the kids I work with were born after I published my first zine. I’m only 40 years old and it doesn’t at all seem like 25 years have past since creating Ink Disease, but here I am, there it was, and what a long strange trip it’s been. But even stranger was when a freshman told me she was going to see her favorite band, I asked her who. She said the Dead Kennedys and I asked her if Jello Biafra was still singing with them because I had read that he was feuding with the band over whether the rights to “Holiday in Cambodia” would be sold to Cherokee Jeans for a commercial. When she replied, “Jello who?”, we had to have a long sit down.
The original cover from 1982.
In the summer of 1981 I disappeared into the blackness of an art house theater in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, a Jewish neighborhood buffering old world, hardcore junky Hollywood against the posh region of West LA. What took place inside was not necessarily seeing the light, but a chopped up grayscale version of reality which fully distorted my notion of culture and music. I was just short of my 15th birthday and somehow the snarling and spitting punks in the documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization, resonated deeply. Punk mangled the mainstream with such poignant and beautiful powerchords, it would forever change my outlook, and my hair. The tribe of combat-booted freaks called punks became my own.
It wasn’t long before I was fully engaged in the nascent, DIY media activities of the movement. Starting a zine was the next logical step after discovering how simple it was to get letters published in Flipside, the leading voice of the LA’s punk underground at the time. You could say the thrill of seeing published my primitive, immature screed accounts for the initial dose of ink that later turned me into a print junky.
My arty middle class up-bringing hardly compares to that of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain whose punk exploits described in the book, Just Kill Me
So there is nothing scandalous to report here, nor steamy exploits on the blotter worth sensationalizing that led to the creation of, or the experience of publishing Ink Disease. All of us who labored on it were products of LA’s experiment in alternative education. It basically evolved out of a summer project by the neighborhood teens that were bored and wanted to do something. Having already published several letters in LA’s seminal fanzine, Flipside, I found it a bit too easy to air my views in someone else’s rag. It seemed natural for our group of friends to just publish ourselves
In the beginning there were mainly three of us: Rachel Siegel, Ivan Morley and myself. We all lived on the same street in a Bohemian neighborhood of East LA. My stepfather, who inherited a wicked sense of Irish black humor, gets credit for coming up with the zine’s title. He also loaned us $60 so we could do our first print run of 60. (Incidentally, when I went to Kinkos to reprint the first issue 20 years later, it cost $2 a copy. Talk about inflation!) We peddled the zine by hand to local record stores on Melrose in Hollywood and at Poobah’s in Pasadena; we also hocked them at shows. We actually broke even, so by punk standards the first issue was a huge financial success.
I sketched the first cover by tracing it from a ratty book made in the Seventies out of England called, Punk. Little did I know I’d be at the bleeding edge of appropriation that’s the trademark of punk and postmodernism. I was just a naive kid attracted to the image and I didn’t know how to draw. So much for art theory.
The second issue attracted more contributors from our circle of friends and remained Xeroxed. We went from three staples to one, so perhaps we slid a bit in quality. While those in the ‘hood pushed on with production, since I spent my high school years in boarding school, I only had summers to work on the zine. I was thrilled when issue three came out: it had a real logo designed by an unsolicited graphic artist and was produced en mass on a sheet-fed press. The jump led to a windfall: free records. Suddenly record companies from all over were sending us booty. This was an expected but welcome perk. The other benefit was the chance to interview our heroes like the Minutemen and DC’s The Scream.
As I spent less time in LA, my input into Ink Disease became diminished. The zine leaned more on the hardcore scene and production was handled largely by Rachel’s brother, Thomas and his best friend Steve Alpert. Other regulars, including Joe Henderson, wove in and out of the staff. While my contributions were limited, I did continue to review records. In order to deal with the massive volume of albums, I made a few simple rules. First, if I didn’t like the record, I wouldn’t waste my time reviewing it unless I needed to use a band as an example of some despicable practice, such as big hair metal, but that was way too easy (sorry Tommie Lee, you’re still spent). My other rule was never to review a record that had the band’s photo on the cover. I figured the group was more into ego than into music.
I spent countless hours skipping the needle across stacks of vinyl. Most records got about a minute to make the first cut. Then the second cut would be made and I would have a month’s worth of reviews to write.
Ink Disease paralleled the rise of the personal computer. We were fortunate that Thomas and Rachel’s dad, Herb, was a techie at Jet Propulsion Laboratory so we were able to employ computers early on. Still, our origins were humble. We used screwed-up typewriters before there was a font to emulate them, and tape and glue were used amply. Rub-on letters and wax adhesive were some the other old school tools we used. To be honest, I might seem a little old fashion, but I prefer laying out by hand over computers and to this day tend to use it not only for aesthetic purposes, but also for the therapeutic effect of cut-and-paste.
My only claim to fame came when I got to interview Sonic Youth at Kim Gordon’s parent’s house in 1986. Beyond that I have no snappy anecdotes to pass along. I’m sure others on staff could relate countless stories that are far more interesting, such as the time when Fugazi crashed at the Siegel residence.
In 1990 I helped with the last issue of Ink Disease. While the zine had departed from its artsy roots to focus on music, Rachel and I got a grant from the City of Los Angeles to do an insert called, Emissions. In it we got political, tackling the nascent drug war and gang politics. We got back into collage and poetry, tapping into our early roots of combining art and politics. Sadly, soon after, 16 issues and eight years later, Ink Disease was deceased.
From a personal standpoint, creating and working on Ink Disease helped shape my life and launch my career in writing and publishing. The fanzine’s name was prophetic because in my own life I’ve had ink running through my blood, and no doubt my gravestone’s epitaph will say something like, “Antonio bled ink, and died of ink disease.” Now, as I work with the next generation of DIY publishers, I bring in Ink Disease and show them how it gets done from scratch.
Ink Disease now lives on in one respect, albeit in name only. My stepfather bought the Internet domain name inkdisease.com, which so far has survived the dot-bomb. Blog Disease is a hybrid, the next generation of DIY publishing: the blogzine. With this project I hope to live up to tradition.
