Luna
Park interview with David Keith and Ken Weathersby,
former editors of Hootenanny, a hand-made New
York literary journal. Editors/founders: David Keith
and Ken Weathersby. Format: ribald. Content: somewhere
between Bermuda Triangle and Mt. Everest. Born 1994.
Deceased (?) 1997. Current virtual existence: www.hootenanny.com.
First
off, why did you two decide in 1994 to begin a literary
magazine? And why hand produce each copy? Was this,
you think, some sort of reaction to what you saw going
on in New York in the mid-nineties? Why, as the question
goes, did you want to add yet another literary magazine
into the world?
KEN:
David and I started to do the project that became Hootenanny
because David moved back to the US after living abroad
for a few years. I had already been living in Brooklyn
since 1990, making paintings in my studio in Williamsburg.
In 1994 David moved to Syracuse, to work on a writing
MFA. Brooklyn and Syracuse aren’t geographically
close, of course, but it seemed close enough to me that
I was excited to be around someone I had been friends
with and done creative projects with in high school
and college in Mississippi. We had a personal history
of collaboration and coffee-fueled conversation. In
New York I knew some visual artists and writers and
music people. Many of them I met working as a gallery
guard at art museums, which I did for years. David knew
other interesting people, from his travels. The idea
was simply to ask for work—art and texts, put
it all together and make a book out of it to see what
that would be like. That was going to be the end of
it. After we got this stuff all together, we thought
it looked pretty good. It was also encouraging that
wherever we took it, people were interested. The art
museum stores and bookstores we liked went for it. The
only thing that was going on in New York in the mid-nineties
that I was reacting to was my life (as opposed to the
publishing world or anything on that level), and it
just made sense to do this unauthorized, under-the-radar
thing. It gave us license to ask people to create and
contribute work and encouraged us to do our own art
and writing. There was the “zine” phenomenon
that people talked about, but I hadn’t heard of
it until people told me that’s what we were doing.
As far as the DIY attitude, there was the indie rock
thing going on. I was friendly with members of the band
Pavement. They and I were gallery guards together at
the Whitney museum. As far as it being a literary magazine,
our conception was that Hootenanny was something across
disciplines—visual, literary, whatever. We put
in cartoons, excerpts from novels. I knew more about
visual art so that’s what I focused on more.
DAVID:
We did not necessarily think of it as a literary magazine
per se. It was more kin to the xerox art that was popular
in the eighties on college campuses -- just get some
folks together and slap some poems and whatever cartoony
xerox art you felt like and call it something. So in
1994 we'd been out of college a while and thought it
would be fun to get our circle of friends together for
another little project. It was almost more of a "where
are they now" sort of thing at first. Of course,
since then we'd made new friends and got them involved.
From the start we were interested in getting "artists"
and "writers" together in a conversation.
We celebrated the chaotic and exuberant, the ambitious
and self-effacing. I think that's kind of in the spirit
of the folk music gatherings known as "Hootenannies".
Why
hand-made? I think the main appeal was the inherent
limitation of it. You can't go too far that way. You
won't be seen as overly serious or ambitious. It's a
project of comprehensible scope. We even said right
up front we'd do 10 editions and no more. Plus of course
it's completely unique, and lends itself better to the
representation of the visual/ graphical components.
And I don't think we really considered it from the point
of view of the world. It was mainly just an effort at
creating a community of creative people, themselves
providing the audience.
Were
there any particular literary magazines or publishers
you thought you were being influenced by? And particular
writers?
KEN:
I guess I was aware of some literary magazines, but
wasn’t thinking about those as a model. I thought
of it, if similar to anything, more in the tradition
of the artist’s book. There was the handmade aspect.
We tried to do a physically different original binding
idea for each book and liked the notion of binding physical
objects into it. But then there was a lot of simple
photocopy reproduction. We included almost everything
people would give us, especially at first. I did go
through a phase when I did a little research looking
up things that might have been precedents, for example,
early modernist art publications, like Minotaur. I remember
going to the library at Museum of Modern Art and getting
permission to view some things like that.
What
does the name Hootenanny refer to exactly?
It sounds like the name of some southern party. Or the
name of some senseless act, like tomfoolery.
DAVID:
All of the above! We borrowed the term from the Folk
music world -- somewhat ironically since we did not
include music in any form. But Ken and I being Mississippians
in New York -- we sometimes enjoyed our expatriate,
Southern status, and this hillbilly word felt right
in that environment. It's just silly, memorable, unserious.
KEN:
Oh, it was some senseless tomfoolery, all right. As
to why we called it that, to us it meant something like
a party or jam session, where everybody could do something,
and the stakes were low. I guess the fact that the word
sounded country or maybe corny and uncool made it seem
apt as a name. That suited our potential self esteem
issues as two guys from Mississippi being artists in
New York. Of course I found out that everyone doing
anything interesting in New York is from somewhere else.
And has self-esteem issues.
Hand
printing and binding hundreds of issues of a magazine
sounds like–well, quite a feat. Could you give
a brief description of an average night of production
for you? Were there any serious–and perhaps unexpected–setbacks
you ran into?
DAVID:
Basically, long nights at Kinko's copying, stacking
things carefully. A big part of each edition was considering
what sort of binding we'd use. Each edition has a different
binding solution. Once we conceived of that we had to
design a kind of assembly line. We got some help from
others but 90% of the labor on 90% of the finished books
were done by Ken & me. We'd just put on the music,
brew the coffee and get into the rhythm. Often we'd
be surprised the next day how much work we could get
done in a long dedicated session like that. It probably
took about a week to produce them all once we had all
the materials ready to go.
KEN:
It was ridiculous. I actually was involved with patterns
and repetitive processes in my paintings, so I could
kind of enjoy cutting a little shape out of all the
pages of hundreds of books. David had less patience
with that kind of thing, but we did it anyway. After
a while, we slowly started to figure out that we could
get some help and people would join in and it got easier.
Alison Moritsugu (the painter) once volunteered and
came over and brought a friend and I remember that she
kind of had to insist on helping. I had this attitude
that we had to just do it all, and always get it done
in as close to one continuous session as possible.
Of
course, why did you stop? Was it simply the hard work
of publishing a magazine by hand? In a way, the two
of you put more work into your magazine than nearly
any other literary magazine around–at least in
terms of physical, hands-on work. Wasn’t it tough
to hang it up?
KEN:
It was always a lot of work. Part of the time I was
on the night shift at my museum job, and that allowed
leeway to put in the hours on it. We also pretty much
funded it ourselves at first, then were starting to
get it paid for in other ways—subscribers, events,
grants—but it didn’t look like it would
ever make our day jobs obsolete. It was kind of a surprise
to us to begin with that it came alive that way it did
for the time that it did, then at a certain point, because
of circumstances or just because it was time, it went
on a hiatus, which just kept stretching out in length…
DAVID:
Even with all our foresight to limit our scope up front,
we underestimated the work involved. A lot of it certainly
was the physical book-making effort. But just the regular
dealing with manuscripts, solicited and not, plus we
organized the readings and other events. It took a lot
of time, money from our own pockets mostly. Ken had
a job and I was
wrapping up an MFA getting ready to go back out on to
the job market. Reality was heavier than all our exuberance,
turns out. I threw up a web site just to have a kind
of presence alive, which I thought would be less effort,
but even that was hard to sustain after while.
This
is for both of you: who were you most excited about
publishing in the magazine? What piece?
KEN:
High on the list for me were the interviews we did with
Rupert Sheldrake and Terrence McKenna. They were talking
about things I was interested in at the time, as ideas,
and I was just blown away that we could make a couple
of phone calls and get to go and sit with these people
and have a conversation for an hour or two and ask them
whatever we wanted. Getting to publish it afterward
was exciting, too, but for me was more like a documentation
of the real thing, which was the chance to have the
talk. I remember that with Sheldrake there was one slight
disappointment for me. We had a great interview, and
then I tentatively brought up this strange idea I had
that I was calling the “shrinking universe theory”.
I won’t get into what that was, but at the time
I had the notion that because Sheldrake was very iconoclastic
and working with novel ideas, maybe he’d like
this weird astrophysics idea I’d come up with.
I spilled it, and he looked at me strangely and dismissed
my theory by saying something about the Doppler shift,
and that was the end of that line of conversation. We
didn’t publish that part, needless to say. One
contributor that I now wish I had followed through with
was Tim Griffin, who is currently the editor of Art
Forum magazine. At that time, he was also a gallery
guard at the Guggenheim Museum, like me, and he was
interested in contributing something he was working
on related to Allain Robbe-Grillet. For whatever reason,
it never happened. It seemed like a coup when we were
able to get an
interview with Yves Bonnefoy, who was, in addition
to being a great and respected poet and a writer about
art, a bona fide surrealist. He was someone who walked
away from his association with the surrealists at a
certain point, actually. Eric Gamalinda, who also was
our poetry editor, did that interview. We published
quite a few things by people who were somewhat known
already or became so later: David Berman, Lawson Fusao
Inada, Jim Knipfel, Paul Watkins.
DAVID:
There are lots of gems that I love to look back at.
But without a doubt, having the Hootenanny
credentials to get us in to speak with Terence McKenna
during a visit to New York was a real highlight for
me. Ken had also previously interviewed Ruper Sheldrake
and I know that was exciting for him. But we both got
to interview McKenna. He was such an amazing conversationalist,
and so unbelievably generous to speak with us.
How
did you get Hootenanny into CBGB’s, one
of the most famous rock venues in New York history?
Is there a story there?
DAVID:
Yes and No. We wanted to stage a reading and needed
a space congenial to a little performance art as well.
CB's 313 gallery filled the bill purely as a venue.
Of course, CB's lore was huge for Ken and me -- being
early fans of all those CBGB regulars when we were in
high school in Mississippi. There's definitely a bit
of the feeling that if you're doing anything in CBGB's,
even reading some little poem, part of you is communing
with Patti Smith. But you know, it was totally easy
to get in. We just pretty much asked Hilly Krystal (the
owner) if we could do it. He neither cared nor didn't
care. It was business as usual, the space was free that
night, so why not.
KEN:
I think at the time, getting into CBGB’s was a
matter of going and talking to Hilly. Tim Trelease,
a good friend who is a painter and performance artist
had organized a goup art show there in 1991, where I
showed some paintings I had made in the previous year
before moving to New York. I remember seeing one of
the Ramones in there at that exhibition, looking at
one of my paintings, this image of a plowed field in
Mississippi, and my mind just flashed back to being
a teenager in Mississippi and looking at the cover of
the first Ramones album and hearing about CBGB. Anyway,
when Hootenanny got ready to do our first event
there, Tim already knew Hilly. The things we did there,
like have performance art, musicians, authors reading
and visual art together was an extension of the book.
You
mention future plans for Hootenanny on your
website–what’s that all about?
KEN:
We are thinking about putting together a site to include
input by some of the original contributors as well as
some people we have gotten to know since then. The guiding
creative idea of this version is that it will be less
labor intensive!
DAVID:
Not sure. Watch
this space...
