Well, since leaving the firm I've gradually been going through boxes the Bank had shipped over from New York.
While I was working I never had time to stuff like this, and now that I'm not working that much (Caribbean Hedge Funds are much more laid back than German Investment Banks where you march to the numbers), I'm gradually getting through tons-o-shit I never could do before.
ANYHOW
I've got about six good sized boxes of floppies, some going back to my Big Board (sidenote: my first computer, a Z80 machine that you built - not integrated - yourself. Built in the early 80's meant you bought a schematic, then found parts, etched a circuit board and started soldering. Took me one month to build mine, and another two months to troubleshoot it to boot CPM), Osborne I and the early 1980's. Real Time Warp looking at some of this stuff.
Included in this mess are all of the masters for HYPE NYC.
In the late 80's and early 90's I edited and published an underground New York / East Village centric magazine called 'HYPE NYC'. A labour of love, originating from and mostly written by my partner Franco Palazzolo and the folks that hung out at the art galleries I ran at the time (Skull Space and later Anti-Gallery), we made twelve issues all together. An average print run was about 10K copies, although one issue went to 18K. We were distributed nationwide in Barnes and Noble bookstores.
I had to stop publishing it when I started working at Deutsche Bank (Investment Banking doesn't leave time for - well, anything else), and during the process managed to lose about 20K of my own money (magazine publishing is not cheap). Now that I've been to Business School I'm fully aware of all the mistakes I made, and know that if I ever went back to publishing I'd kick ass since we had awesome content, but the biz side was lacking.
I've got a real hankering to publish again, so don't be surprised if HYPE is reborn (I recently registered SUBATOMICARTSANDSCIENCES.COM for this very purpose) in another form.
Now a few of the disks are bad, but I managed to get most of the information from all twelve issues off, and boy was that an exercise! None of my primary Macs (a G4 Cube, a TiBook and an iMac DV+ all running OS X (10.2), Apples Unix thank you very much) have floppy disks (the wisdom of Steven Jobs), so I had to grab my 5500 / 275
It normally sits in my kitchen running the digital cameras that monitor my garden. Before I had this 8' wall put up, I used to entertain myself with a cup of coffee in the AM watching the junkies wander by at night. My backyard is right next to a conveniently placed street light, and many drug deals took place under or close to that light at night.
Some of the living dead would even come up and look into my windows from time to time! I always keep the curtains drawn (four Macs downstairs is good enough reason for me) but even so they'd usually take a gander until they saw the camera, then they'd rush off.
The 5500 / 275 runs OS 9, but for some odd reason could read some but not all of the disks.
I visited the Mutant Hardware Vault (once again, present in London courtesy of DB), and briefly considered booting up my MacTV
Before I went to a wireless LAN, it was my primary server and I had two 5GB SCSI drives, and a 16 port Cisco 10/100 Ethernet hub I picked up cheap (ohh the joys of DOT COM bankruptcy auctions!) hung off of it when I lived in Camden Town. Ethernet wires everywhere since every room in my flat has a Mac. Visitors and drunken Mutants always tripping. 802.11b wireless LANs are just so much better.
But since the Mac TV runs System 7, I thought it might too have problems reading the disks, so I booted up an SE I just happened to have
It happily runs System 6, the same OS that wrote these disks and were were in business except for the floppies a PC made.
Now it is a pernicious secret that I share with you all : although I don't personally care for PCs (look its either Mac OS or some flavour of *nix, preferably with Enlighten), I have three here in the house.
I need a PC around not only to remind me how exquisitely crafted Mac OS is, but also because the econometric software I'm usiing for my doctoral research won't run at full speed under Virtual PC. For my research I'm modeling intraday tick by tick trading data on the S&P 500, frequently working with more than one million data points, and some of the simulations I run take a day or more on a fast P III class machine with a gig of RAM, so I've got to have Intel HW in the house.
BUT
All three PCs live in MY FUCKING CLOSET where they belong. I carefully drew the curtains closed so none of my MacGeek pals might wander by and peek in at the wrong moment (with the horror on FULL display), pulled out my IBM ThinkPad (which isn't a bad piece of hardware by the way), booted it onto my LAN and he could read the final Zip archive the Macs were having problems with.
HYPE was about interviews; we had several sections in the magazine as follows :
- Art
- Music
- Theatre
- Comix
- Deviant Lifestyles
Each section had a dedicated editor, except for 'Deviant Lifestyles', which I ran myself (well, Maw always told me to stick with what you know).
We did all of the editing work in MS Word just because I could priate a copy from work, and it could format text into colums. We had veloxes made of all pix we were running (and the art if it was grey scale), pasted up the entire issue by hand (anywhere from twenty to fourty pages, depending upon content and how much cash I could front), took the masters to the printer in New Jersey and in exchange for about $1K I would get about 10K copies of HYPE (another $2K went for the cover shoot, expenses incurred by the writers, and a big release party, usually held at my Art gallery but with free booze and food, and we'd usually manage to talk one of the bands we interviewed into playing for us privately.
Almost always I'd be on press, meaning either Franco or I would be at the printers when they were making HYPE, inspecting it as it came off the press. Usually this was at 3AM or so, since most printer run their equipment 24 by 7 and smaller runs - like HYPE - are done on the third shift.
HYPE was what printers call a "midget"; that is, something like the New York Times is a broadsheet, the NY Post is a tabloid, and a midget - HYPE for example, is the next smaller size. Its sometimes difficult to find a printer that has the equipment to print midgets.
But the work wasn't then. Now came distribution.
We'd sell HYPE on the streets of New York, mostly uptown beause we distributed for free downtown. I'd usually sell one or two thousand copies myself, and Franco moved an equal number of copies on his own, with the remainder going to editors for promotional purposes, Barnes and Noble who distributed us, bars and galleries, and the HYPE archives. I still have paper copies of all the issues, as we as the complete masters that were sent to the printer.
It was a really cool time in my life, and I've got maybe 300 interviews total that I'll look over and node if suitable. This node serves as an introduction to explain what HYPE was, and why you're seeing these interviews from about twelve years ago now.
So what was HYPE?
HYPE was a reflection of our time in the East Village before most of the artists and musicians got pushed out due to high rent. I'm still in touch with most of the folks that we interviewed, and I'm genuinely pleased that many have gone on to great success. They deserved it.
HYPE Magazine was a labour of love, a place where Franco and I and like minds could talk about things we liked and - perhaps more importantly - talk to others about stuff we liked.
I don't regret one minute of doing HYPE