News and Reviews

The Work Resister’s Handbook is presently being assembled by John Zerzan and Morgan Feralchilde. The authors want true stories of work resistance, how to do scams, and practical hints for curing consumption blues, e.g. shoplifting, etc. Write: Box 11331, Eugene OR 97440.

Counter-Information is a dynamic bimonthly street sheet from Edinburgh, Scotland with a circulation of 10,000. It’s in the forefront of the struggle against the newly imposed Poll Tax by urging total non-cooperation. They stress “the importance of people directly controlling their struggles, outside the control of political parties, trade unions or leaders.” Depending as they do upon reader support since their paper is free, the production collective has sent out a plea for funds so they can maintain a regular publishing schedule. We have copies we can supply upon request or write them directly: Counter Information, p/h CI, 11 Forth St., Edinburgh, Scotland EH1

The Alternative Press Index is a quarterly subject index to over 200 alternative magazines, newspapers and journals including this paper. Most are fairly mainstream leaving aside the recent spate of newly published street ‘zines and anarchist publications, but the subject listings are what one would use for research, etc.

API also publishes an annual directory of alternative periodicals which contains 400 listings. Send $3 to Alternative Press Center, Box 33109, Baltimore MD 21218.

Four Wheeler, May 1989. This is a magazine devoted to the “sport” known as “off-road” recreation where the vehicle of choice is a 4X4 (four-wheel drive) customized truck with suspension and enough power to go where cars never could. From the cover to the ads, almost every photograph in the publication is of one of these monsters ripping up some spot in nature that will never be the same once four 85R16s have ground a path up a fragile sand dune or destroyed riparian life along a gently flowing stream or just torn up some field which is home to any number of small plant, insect and animal species.

It’s not bad enough that 20% of all arable land is already taken over by roads for motor vehicles (not that it should be farmed), but these hotdogs want no part of the earth secure from the intrusion of these noisy, polluting, planet-destroying machines.

And, hey, all of you “nature lovers” on your “all-terrain” bicycles, don’t be smug about your little unmotorized machines; they, too, do a fair amount of damage themselves. It doesn’t matter if these “sports” are some people’s “fun.” They are tearing up the woods and hills and streams and should be stopped by any means necessary. —Ana Coluthon

Afterbirth, No. 3, POB 392, Decatur GA 30031. afterbirth is a magazine which reaches beneath the exterior of “politically correct” life to extricate the untamed reality of the anarchist and counter-culture community. afterbirth’s feminism is expressed through personal experience about the deadly effects of certain birth control methods. They advise womyn to “learn how to give abortions ourselves and learn our own birth control methods:” There is also a beautiful “ritual to heal after sexual assault “ through writings and photographs.

Drug addiction is discussed from the addict’s point of view which is terribly refreshing in this day of moralistic antidrug raves coming from both the state and the “movement.”

The regularly-featured wild assertions of Kerry Thornley attacks the institution of “landlordism” in this issue and the suffering it creates, finally calling for a “Permanent Universal Rent Strike”—a great graffiti idea. Poetry and graphics breathe the extraordinary revolution we are, defying the machine where “AIDS is their voodoo, gentrification their genocide” and proclaiming, “You can suffer your chains or suffer to break them.” Send $1.50 for sample issue.

—Sunfrog

Threat By Example: A Documentation of Inspiration, compiled by Martin Sprouse, Pressure Drop Press, 1989.

Punk culture may have stagnated the past couple years (with widespread complaints about recycled musical trends) but the editor of this volume, Martin Sprouse, has flushed out a timely and fascinating reflection of 27 activists and rockers from California and selected communities around the world.

Threat By Example explodes with strikingly honest summaries of modern anarchist living, where idealism meets reality in troubled but creative defiance. The best may include Alice Nutter and Bofo from Chumbawamba, an intense English band (reviewed in FE Spring ’87), Tim Yohannon, Maximum Rock ‘N’ Roll co-founder, and in a poem by Ian Mackaye, of the late great hardcore group, Minor Threat. Available through FE Books.

Demolition Derby, a new anti-civilization journal from Montreal, should have been published by the time most people read this notice. Contents include Guy Debord on Manuel Noriega, John Zerzan’s recent essay on music, “Tonality and the Totality,” critiques on Bookchin’s “libertarian municipalism” and on national liberation movements, and a long response to C. Bufe’s attack on the Fifth Estate in particular and primitivist discourse in general (from the anarcho-syndicalist paper ideas & action) that includes a critique of anarcho-syndicalism vis-a-vis ecology. Demolition Derby can be obtained from: Demolition Derby, C.P. 1554, Succ. B., Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3B 3L2. Send postage/money to cover costs; please no checks made out to Demolition Derby. (An FE staff member has written a response/discussion on the ideas & action article, but unfortunately there was no room in this issue for it.)

NOTICE TO PEOPLE WHO PARTICIPATED IN THE WORKSHOP ON RADICAL ECOLOGY AT THE TORONTO @ GATHERING: The person who collected the mailing list had a Toronto friend send it by mail to avoid crossing the border with a list of names. We got across the border without a hitch, but the list, which Toronto folks assure us was sent, seems to have been lost in the mail. Next time we need to make a copy and have two people distribute it. Sorry for the delay in publishing this notice.

In our last issue, [in “Return of the Son of Deep Ecology: The Ethics of Permanent Crisis and the Permanent Crisis in Ethics,” FE #331, Spring 1989] George Bradford quoted from an essay, “The Neo-Stoicism of Radical Environmentalism,” by Jim Cheney, which had not yet been published. Cheney has since informed us that it will be published in the journal Environmental Ethics in the Winter 1989 issue.