Pause a moment - Walter Bowart

Walter Bowart, founder and publisher of the East Village Other, est mort.

For me, one of the great things about going to kollidge was visiting the periodical room of Joyner Library every Tuesday evening. There, in a pile awaiting me courtesy of my aunt the librarian, were the recently arrived editions of the EVO, the Village Voice, the Great Speckled Bird, the Berkeley Barb, the Rat, and the Oracle. I'd prop up with a Coke and a pack of nabs, and read until the room closed at 11.

If you had grown up in the rural South, you were vaguely aware that things were going on elsewhere. The occasional story on Huntley & Brinkley, cover pieces in Life magazine, listening to WABC out of NYC late at night after the local stations had gone off the air - in the age of Teh Intratubes it's almost hard to imagine the work that was involved in gathering news other than the farm report on WITN, Channel 7. I had seen the papers before, usually being sold out of the back of a van in the parking lots of concert venues. Having them delivered and gathered - for free - was a luxury beyond belief and the start of my absolute devotion to a free and unfettered press.

But noble sentiments aside, the papers were also vastly entertaining: concert reviews in a snarky tone unknown to Ralph Gleason of Rolling Stone (as slavish to the almighty dollar then as now); political ranting from the likes of Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, and Eldridge Cleaver; photography and artwork from R. Crumb, Annie Leibovitz, Art Speigleman - usually involving naked people; and first-person accounts of random events like the Levitation of the Pentagon.

And the ads were entertaining as well: head shops, "art" movie houses, psychedelic clothing stores, whole food eateries. These were usually beautifully drawn and reproduced. Imagine my surprise at finding out last year that a prominent gallery in San Francisco was mounting an exhibit of the ads done by Rick Griffin. Plus a cartoon page featuring The Fabulous Furry Freak Bros, Fritz the Cat, Hungry Chuck Biscuits, and other malcontents.

The back pages were my introduction to the swamp of human desire. From the ads for strip clubs and dance joints to the personals column with topic headers like "other scenes," they were revelatory. It was one things to see the all-black-clad dominatrix in an R. Crumb strip, it was another to see a photo of one in an ad for the Kitty Kat Klub. Or Tom Wolfe's eye-injuring illustration of Carol Doda. It was no secret that the papers survived on the sex ads. When the Barb famously declared they would no longer run them in the late 70s (because they were degrading to women) the paper lasted less than a year. The fellow who had been managing the sex ads for the paper set up a separate publication to carry the ads and remained in business until 2005, when free internet ads killed it.

So for a while the likes of Bowart kept us informed and entertained (Bowart most famously suggesting to a Congressional committee that they drop LSD if they wanted to understand Today's Yoof, a suggestion usually attributed to Hoffman or Jerry Rubin) and, mostly, vanished off the stage when the Age of Hippie passed. Bowart's last job was editing a lifestyle magazine in Palm Springs that catered to the celebrity/golf set.