Plazm's transfusion gives the art and culture 'zine new money, new ...

The new Plazm magazine is the heftiest yet, almost 180 pages jammed with photography, art, stories and a crazy quilt of graphic design ideas that manage to hang together just because they are so adventurous.

Called "Born Again," it's also a milestone issue. Twenty years ago, Joshua Berger and a small band of Portland confederates accumulated and designed the first Plazm, and this one is Issue 30. Berger says, "Half the battle is continuing," and Plazm has hung on, through shifts in personnel, size and frequency, through a four-year hiatus, through vast changes in the media, never making any money and never going past 10,000 circulation.

That's part of the reason this Plazm is also the first published by New Oregon Arts and Letters, a nonprofit run by Tiffany Lee Brown, who is also the co-editor of Plazm, the first to receive a Regional Arts & Culture Council opportunity grant and the first to be partly funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign, which raised more than $8,000 to help defray printing expenses.

What did this money help create? Here's a very partial table of contents:
A set of photographs of nighttime cityscapes by Christina Seely "inspired by the disconnect between the immense beauty produced by human-made light and the complexity of what this light represents."

A series of interviews by Brown with seven futurists (including Bruce Sterling, Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr and Amber Case) about the effects of technology on the human brain and identity. (Carr: "It seems overwhelmingly strange to me that we've reached a point in human history when the value of intellectual depth has become debatable.")

A wild interview by Stephanie Snyder with David Lynch (who has figured in previous Plazms) around an exhibition of Lynch's artworks. (Snyder: "So my first question is, 'Do your works of art begin in the universal slipstream where the tiny fishes dwell?'")

Chilling photographs by Lori Waselchuk documenting the inmate-organized hospice program in Louisiana's state penitentiary.

A couple of beguiling short stories about the human heart by Kevin Sampsell, beautifully illustrated by Zak Margolis.

But this doesn't begin to capture the energy bursting from the pages, because the graphic design is so interesting, and the illustrations, photography and artwork so different and compelling.

Each issue of Plazm is a little like a great party, full of entertaining guests and bright conversation, a little like the party Plazm threw for itself at Disjecta on Saturday night, which attracted a variety of Plazm-associated artists, designers and writers, including the Decemberists' Colin Meloy and his wife, artist/designer Carson Ellis, who read from their new young adult novel, "Wildwood" (in which Forest Park is transformed into the darkest possible woods).

Every great party needs the right sort of host, and Berger has hosted Plazm, with a lot of help, for 20 years. A good host is a facilitator, making introductions, solving problems, providing a stage and then receding to the shadows

Here's how Plazm co-editor Jon Raymond describes his experience at the magazine: "For me, the lessons of Plazm have been many and varied. Most of all, I'd say, the lessons have stemmed from Josh as both a creative collaborator and as a human being. His combination of incredible open-mindedness and dogged determination on a practical level has been an example that I've turned to many times in my creative life. Think broadly, and then figure out how to make it happen. That's a life lesson for so many things."

Berger and such early Plazm confederates as Reuben Niesenfeld, Neva Knott and Patrick Bardel were open-minded from the start in 1991. They mixed big, national names with local designers, artists and photographers.

"Importing and exporting culture from the region, that's always been a part of it from the beginning, (including) Storm Tharp and Yoko Ono," Berger says. Plazm was and is egalitarian that way, a place where the famous and the not-famous work together because, as Berger puts it, "creativity is creativity."

"We were a group of artists looking for a new avenue of expression," Berger says about the first Plazm, and the philosophy behind it, a zine philosophy, "to put things out that we care about," has stayed central. So has the idea that the graphic designer was an equal partner at the table, "one artist interpreting another artist's work," Berger says. And finally, social concerns have always figured prominently, as the current issue attests: This party has a serious side.

It's also had serious talent involved. Designers have included John C. Jay (and many other Wieden+Kennedy designers), Art Chantry, David Carson, Robin Raye, Marcus Burlile, Milton Glaser, Ed Fella and Rebeca Mendez. Contributing artists include director Todd Haynes, Michael Brophy, Vanessa Renwick and Susan Seubert, in addition to Tharp and Ono. And Raymond, who worked with Haynes on the recent HBO miniseries "Mildred Pierce," leads an array of local and national writers who have worked with Plazm.

For the future, Berger, Brown and Raymond remain print diehards, though Brown says Plazm is moving to the Web in addition to continuing its irregular print publication schedule. ("We're trying to do one a year now," Berger says.) As Raymond says, Plazm is "a conversation that keeps finding new topics."

-- Barry Johnson

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/art/index.ssf/2011/08/plazms_transfusion_gives_the_a.html

aubrey o day boston weather chelsea handler our daily bread diana ross the onion immigration reform