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BY WILLIAM GIBSON: The essays and articles, selected by the editors of 21C and World Art magazines for Transit Lounge, present a "determinedly eclectic" assemblage. "É No Limits."
Entering the Transit Lounge
I'm addicted to magazines.
Too lazy to seek out those in-house techno-corporate glossies that J.G.Ballard calls "invisible literature," or to scour the endless deltas of pop for objets trouvés, I rely instead on an unseen army of journalists, hungry freelancers ever on the alert for the least crumb of novelty.
The owners of newstands smile when they see me coming. They know that I have a habit of truly oil-burning proportions; like almost any character in a Burroughs novel, I "need it special."
Anything in English, boring monolingual that I am, but if the pictures are really good, I'll go Greek, German, whatever. Grist for my mill, you understand. Stuff. Magazineland beckons and I need a hit now.
Magazineland is sort of like an evolved pre-cybernetic version of the World Wide Web. Even more so, now, with ubiquitous computation making possible magazines like Giant Robot, a publication by and for blazingly hip young Asian-Americans, or Juxtapoz, Robert Williams' balls-out, delightfully aggressive celebration of "low-brow" art, i.e. anything and everything below the notice of "fine" art, and the further below the better.
My three favourite magazines of the '90s (in no particular order) have been: Mojo, the British rock-historical journal whose target-demographic is those aging Boomers still willing to listen to the odd bit of new music (i.e. me); Fortean Times, that indescribable crypto-tabloid devoted to the recording and study of all the weirdest Shit that Happens (or is said to) in the course of what passes for our concensus-reality; and 21C, which is, flat out, the best looking and most determinedly eclectic pop-futurological publication in the world (at least in the one language that I can actually read, and I've yet to see a better looking one in any other language).
When you buy this collection, Transit Lounge, you are in fact scoring part of the essence - the crucial essence, I tend to think, being basically a words-a-row guy myself - of a thick stack of 21C's; a stack that, had you purchased each issue individually, as it came out, to access the material you now hold in your hand, would've cost you a sizable bundle.
What I'm saying is: the price is right. These brainy Antipodean globalists have cooked it down for you and are offering it in this handy portable format. (Ever try getting on a plane with 15 or 20 super-glossy magazines under your arm?)
You may not get quite the full, impossibly lush graphic hit in this package, but you'll get your "determinedly eclectic" bigtime, and that's where 21C shines with a special brilliance.
21C and the collection inTransit Lounge is, apparently, abundantly, the product of an editorial gestalt willing to fearlessly consider any futurological possiblity whatever, to interrogate anything at all for its potential as fast-feed into some possible future.
No limits.
No hidden agendas, unconcious or otherwise.
21C is interested in whatever might be happening, whatever might be about to happen, might eventually happen. Thus you'll find big daddy Situationist Guy Debord seated opposite mathematico-hypernaut Rudy Rucker at a long mataphorical table, along with Kathy Acker, Philip K. Dick.... Well, it's a hell of a guest list, nothing if not eclectic. A truly stunning assemblage. A one-off.
This is one happening text-object.
I advise you to score.
- Saturna Island, Easter, 1997
