ARTHUR - the magazine

dang.

only read it once (when i found a copy at the late silver spring, md tower), but i liked it a lot.

yeah i randomly came across a couple copies at a music store here in maine and happily snagged them. that joanna newsom article was one of the best pieces of music journalism i read all year. 'tis a shame...

Laris Kreslins insisted that I buy him out of his 50% share in Arthur [I own the other 50%] if I wanted to continue the mag since he didn't want to do it anymore, and I couldn't raise the cash and get someone to sign the deal that Laris wanted signed. So, mag is dead. The new issue was 85% done when we stopped work. 72 pages, all color, new art directors. Yoko Ono interviewed by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore on pre-Lennon life and other stuff. The Seth Man on the forthcoming Sly & the Family Stone reissues (12,000 words) with a centerfold poster of Sly from a vintage Jim Marshall photo. Greg Saunier of Deerhoof talking about all-ages gigs. A new column on... Ah well. Maybe we'll post some of the pages on the walls of Family at the Wake on Thursday so people can see what would've been.

from the Village Voice blog thing
http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/runninscared/archives/2007/02/freak_flags_fly.php

Keach Hagey | posted 2:14 PM, February 26, 2007
Freak Flags Fly at Half-mast as Arthur Mag Calls It Quits

In the end, there just wasn't enough peace and love to go around.

After five years of publishing consistently interesting music, arts, politics and drug journalism in the mold of the underground rags of the 60s and 70s, Arthur Magazine died last Friday, according to founding editor Jay Babcock. He pinned the cause of death not so much on a lack of cash (although he did mention living off friends' clothing donations and credit card debt) as on his inability to continue seeing eye-to-eye with his partner, founding publisher Laris Kreslins.

Negotiations for Los Angeles-based Babcock to buy out Philadelphia-based Kreslins started last year and reached an impasse last Thursday, both men said. The breakdown locked up the magazine’s credit line, which was tied to Kreslin's publishing company, Lime Publishing, and abruptly halted production on the magazine's next issue, scheduled to lead with a cover article on Yoko Ono and Fluxus by longtime contributors Thurston Moore and Byron Coley.

"The magazine can't be restarted," Babcock said. "It's a done deal. It's dead. The situation can’t be unfucked.”

Kreslins, who controls the website and the trademark for the free bimonthly magazine, took issue with Babcock’s assessment and posted his own last night that the publication was simply on "indefinite hiatus."

He said that five years of working without investors had become too much of a burden, and he had been looking to get out of his half of the business for the past eight months.

"I was focusing my energies on other things, and I was ready to move on," he said.

Babcock, 36, and Kreslins, 32, co-founded the magazine with little more than their credit cards in 2002 while living on separate coasts. They didn't even meet until after publishing their first issue, which, in a manifesto-like gesture outlining both the form and content of things to come, featured a 16,000-word essay on the 1967 Yippie exorcism of the Pentagon.

Both co-founders hailed from the dank basements of underground music fandom. Kreslins, a Maryland native, had previously published the popular music journals Sound Collector and Sound Collector Audio Review. Babcock contributed to Mojo magazine and the LA Weekly and once helped his girlfriend run a pirate radio station out of LA’s hipster Silverlake neighborhood.

In the beginning, both lived cheap – Kreslins even moved into his parents’ basement for a while – and enticed mostly unpaid contributors by offering a venue for things other publications wouldn’t run. This promise attracted regular contributors like Douglas Rushkoff, Alan Moore, Erik Davis, Kristine McKenna, Trinie Dalton and Model-T Ford.

Moore and Coley wrote their hyperactive must-read roundup of recent underground music releases from the first issue. “They’ve never been paid a dime,” Babcock said.

Although Los Angeles and New York were the magazine’s major markets, a network of volunteers distributed many of 50,000 copies to highly targeted countercultural outposts in cities and small towns across America. Kreslins said that in the end, this distribution network, which echoed the touring networks for punk and alternative bands in the 1980s, is one of the things he’s most proud of. “The network kept growing,” he said. “That's why I was so excited about the possibility of a new publisher taking it to the next level.”

Arthur was oversized, free, colorful, patchouli-scented but whip-smart, unapologetically political, sometimes silly, often anarchist and always willing to listen to voices way, way outside the mainstream. Above all, it was prophetic, usually about two years ahead of the rest of the country in its loves and obsessions.

Case in point: Arthur ran the first feature ever on songwriting virtuoso and harp sprite Joanna Newsom in 2004. Rumors are she’ll appear in Vanity Fair before the year is out. So perhaps its appropriate that the 12,000-word cover story on her for the Winter 2006 issue – written by Erik Davis with a trance-like devotion that would overwhelm a more conventional magazine editor – will be the magazine’s swan song.

“The tragic element is that we were doing better, year by year,” Babcock said. “This was going to be our first all-color issue. We were staring to get inquiries from all the important liquor companies with their huge ad budgets, and yet we maintained complete editorial autonomy.”

“We were almost at this point where you were going to have a full-color nationally published culture magazine, with the editor-owner being a firm anarchist in the tradition of Noam Chomsky. That was the ideology of the magazine. That would have been a unique thing in American publishing at any time, but in 2007 . . . ” His voice trails off, in a combination of wonder and frustration.

But in 2007, he seems to imply, when announcements of the death of print alternate hourly with news of yet another media merger, it would have been like something out of the magazine’s regular column magic.

ouch.

it is indeed sad-- a good mag with lots going on for it, WITH ONE EXCEPTION: it was fucking ugly. really really hard to look at. the writing in it made up for that, thankfully.

Don't agree with that -- I loved the look of it. The style suited the content.

whatever man, let's smoke a bowl.

The uncompleted issue features the debut of a whole new approach to the art direction of Arthur by new art directors Mark Frohman & Molly Frances. Maybe we can put some of it online sometime, I just don't know.

i gotta admit i'm curious what the 50% added up to, money-wise. couldn't have sold arthurshares to a kosmic kollective of friends and family?

aww this sucks.

a picture i took once appeared on the cover (not as the main photo but still it was kinda cool)

scott - it wasn't the money. it was, amongst other factors, the wording of the contract. the investor's lawyer said it was full of loopholes and the investor had to walk.

hay jay you should still have arthur fest every year anywayz~!

chaki - i'd love to but i can't afford to go any further in debt

Damn, this sucks. Do you do the Magpie blog Jay or is that Laris? Any chance of doing anything online in the future?

walterkranz - I've been doing the Magpie blog since before Arthur started. We incorporated it into the arthurmag.com website for kicks. Another too-trusting move on my part, it appears.

Well, I enjoy it and I hope you continue to do something similar.

The uncompleted issue features the debut of a whole new approach to the art direction of Arthur by new art directors Mark Frohman & Molly Frances. Maybe we can put some of it online sometime, I just don't know.

Sigh... well, I can certainly say that I'd love to see what it would have looked like!

I am now superbummed.

It was always a great day when I found an issue of this laying on the floor of Freakbeat in the Valley, 'cause I would take it to a Coffee Bean and kill a peaceful hour or 2. And I loved the design! Probably my favorite looking music magazine around, in fact!
Anyway, thanks for all the good reads!

Thanks for all the kind words. In a bizarre twist, I still have access to
myspace.com/arthurmag
so i will update that site with news about what all the Arthur contributors are up to, etc etc
In the meantime -- let's all welcome back LA RECORD!!!!!

fwiw -- The Magpie blog will return to its original home at jaybabcock.com starting Monday, if not earlier.

*whistles idly*

Arthur Magazine Joanna Newsom Cleavage! TV On The Radio View similar active items
Sell one like this
1 $3.00 $7.00

i always looked foward to my box of arthurs every month and even as it got less East Village and more slikked up ,,th content always perked sum earbrows..i gave out alot to unsuspecting folxx and they always were a lil shocked it was free...even at a dollar it may have helped?who knows..from ashes come forged tools of dissent to render placid flesh stripples?

needed more viking metal.

u think everything needs more viking metal

"East Village"

http://www.dbass.org/resources/artistimages/230/beavis%20and%20butt%20head.gif

Was a good read, R.I.P. Will the Yoko Fluxus piece appear somewheres?

Bump. Jay? Do you have some kind of announcement?

Yeah, I also heard something third-hand today and was hoping for confirmation. . .

Arthur has been recalled to life.

I bought Laris's 50 percent interest in the magazine thanks to the efforts of family and friends.

Now I own 100% and am moving forward with all Arthur activities as quickly as possible.

Apologies for the interruption in service.

To celebrate the occasion, we've posted the whole ALAN MOORE ON PORNOGRAPHY piece from Arthur Magazine V1 N25 online on our Magpie blog.

Wow! :-)

NOW WITH 15% MORE VIKING METAL

hehe...babcock..hehe

good news, arthur's always a bit harder to find down here but i always enjoy it when i find a copy.

Yay! I just found out about Arthur a few months ago, and it's since become one of my favorite publications!

fwiw, we're gonna be posting some of the stuff from the cancelled issue (Arthur 26) on the arthurmag.com blog over the next few days. The Bull Tongue column by Byron & Thurston is up there now.

congrats, glad it's coming back

What can we (the readers!) do to ensure this does not happen again?

Only ever read Arthur once when I got a copy sent by a friend when he mailed me some records. I enjoyed it.

filthy dylan - Thank you for your concern... Honestly, though: this was a one-time-only thing that should never have happened. And it's something that the readers could not have prevented from happening, anyway.

Can I find this in London? (this ex-Los Angeles fan living abroad hopes yes)

You can get it shipped internationally for $20 from http://www.arthurmag.com/store/index.php?ID=31

Ben - I know that they carry Arthur at Rough Trade in London, but I doubt they have any copies left of the last issue at this late date.