Change is The Only Constant

September 2004 | And what a ride it's been.

Over forty years ago, when a motley group of us started PAPER Magazine with no money at my Lispenard Street kitchen table, downtown New York was a bubbling, churning, magical, ground zero of inspiration for a new sort of cultural explosion. Creative misfits from everywhere were moving to our city in droves from all over America. Whether to start living their dreams post art school or just to escape the pervasive small town conservative thinking, kids were attracted like magnets to this new thrilling utopia where rents were cheap, radical ideas were celebrated, and collaboration was an everyday activity. The language of downtown was art, music, film, performance, and just general radical idea generation. And boy did it flourish.

I wrote this column below a few decades ago and I love it because it explains a lot in not too many words. It also explains how the hell New York went from there to here. In it I first write something that became one of my lifelong mantras. Let me explain.

People who know me also know that there’s nothing I hate more than when I hear aging folks complain that “it used to be so much better”, “New York used to be so much better”, “The clubs used to be better”, BLAH BLAH BLAH. I hate that. This is such a conservative way of thinking. To me, nothing is more exhilarating than CHANGE. And nothing is more exciting than NOW. How boring is life if nothing changes? The big problem is that most people hate change. And they expect everything to stay the same. But the thing is: amazing creative people are still born every day. Creativity never stops. YOU just have to find where it has moved to. Yes, New York is not the place it was in the ‘70s. But that doesn’t mean that there are not amazing people and ideas being thrown into the zeitgeist here. It’s up to YOU to find where the new “it” is. If you want to live an amazing, creative, inspirational life, YOU CAN’T BE LAZY. And you have to be OPEN to change. Because change is the one constant in life. You will never find inspiration in exactly the same place you found it decades ago. You have to be open to new ideas, new ways of doing things, new ways of finding your creative community. You also have to be open to looking for stuff IRL— outside of your iPhone or laptop. Because change is ALIVE. And creativity is ALIVE. It’s not something discovered in the isolation of your instagram app while you’re lying in bed alone in the middle of the night. So yes, you have to open your fucking eyes and look for it. You have to move around, go to different places, see as much as you can, meet amazing people, and exchange ideas. When I do that I am never bored for one minute.

I hope this intro doesn’t sound delirious but if you haven’t noticed it’s been insane launching my new book, STUFF, and finally I’m embarking tomorrow on a crazy jam packed month long book tour to try to bring it to life all over the country, where I’ll be meeting, greeting, talking, and sharing inspiration with old friends I love and know and all the new friends I am about to meet (YAY) and get to know. (You can follow my tour schedule at Amazing Unlimited)

Believe me, I will have my eyes, ears and heart wide open and I can’t wait to let you know what I am seeing and feeling out there! K.H.

(Cover of Isaac Mizrahi, Eve, Björk, Johnny Knoxville, Chloë Sevigny, John Waters)

PAPER: THE FIRST 20 YEARS | September 2004

PAPER WAS BORN IN MY TRIBECA LOFT IN THE SUMMER OF ’84 with two typewriters, a Sure Shot camera, and my partner David's bicycle, on which he would pick up stories from our friends and "pony express" them to our typesetters on Houston Street. We could only afford to print 16 pages, so we decided a big poster would be cooler than a skinny fanzine. In those days, PAPER was about our personal universe, written by people who lived in it: downtown's artist community. Our artist, musician, and filmmaker friends wrote about art, music, and film. Others with corporate jobs came out of the woodwork to help us, moonlighting for no money, donating supplies they pinched on their way home, it was guerrilla publishing at its best. When we moved to our first Spring Street office in 1989, my mother even joined our free labor force. She still brags about how I taught her to kite checks and fib to bill collectors.

Our first birthday party was at Danceteria, but the Roxy was also pumping in those days—especially on Friday nights when that new local girl named Madonna would dance up a storm with her bevy of Latin boys. The Macintosh computer had just been introduced, which was miraculous for folks like us who were trying to publish a magazine every month with no money. We bought our first Mac, fired our typesetters and began to go digital. In '85, Warhol had already started to co-opt our underground friends like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, which made room for a new crop to enter the underground. Within a few years, a gaggle of young club kids arrived on the scene and called the Limelight their home. They were led by the cute Michael Alig, who dressed up like a clown

At the same time, AIDS had hit us hard. Everyone seemed to be getting sick. And dying. The dynamic of this horrible disease was a huge undercurrent in our community during PAPER's first ten years. It was truly surreal to be young, creative, and energetic and have to cope with so much death all around us. AIDS not only decimated downtown, but was an epidemic in gay communities in Harlem and the South Bronx as well. Downtowners like Patricia Field and filmmaker Jennie Livingston discovered the astounding gay underground house balls taking place uptown, and they became the subject of Livingston's legendary and mind-blowing documentary Paris Is Burning. Meanwhile, the East Village drag scene was exploding at the Pyramid, where fresh new faces to the scene like RuPaul, Sister Dimension and Lady Bunny gave way to a disco resurgence by their Wigstock pals Lady Kier and Dimitry, whose band Deee-lite crossed over into hit-land.

As the years crept by, rents elevated, changing downtown's landscape. Ludlow Street was no longer scary, crops of new young kids joined our staff, and indie culture became more mainstream as Gen-X boomed. Huge corporations glommed onto the "indie" trend by creating simulated "indie" products. Cigarette companies started marketing small, folksy brands. Beer manufacturers started microbreweries. Huge film companies developed indie divisions. Ad agencies began "trend marketing!" Small became big. We began to hear rumblings about a fascinating scene from Southern California that centered on skateboarding. When we headed west, we found a burgeoning music, art, sports, film, and streetwear world that was kicking the ass of the status quo. Brilliant young skaters like Mike Mills, Spike Jonze, and Mark Gonzales were making art, music, film, and clothes like we'd never before seen. At that point we realized downtown had become a state of mind and was no longer just a location below 14th Street. The explosion soon came east as Aaron Rose opened his brilliant Alleged Gallery, showing art from new stars of this movement like Chris Johanson, Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen.

History was also being made on the Internet. When the first visual Web browser, Netscape, was launched in 1994, we created our daily site PAPERMAG.COM. Applying the same guerrilla, low-budget technique that we used to launch PAPER, our Web site flourished. Then we watched the insane dot-com explosion and implosion from the sidelines, as downtown's Euro invasion brought funny money to our economy—until 9/11 shook our city out of its bloated stupor.

The biggest thing I've learned over the past 20 years is that new troublemakers and radical thinkers continue to come along every day to shake up our status quo. I detest it when people say downtown's dead or things aren't as good, smart or creative as they used to be. It may not all happen below 14th Street, but believe me, the state of mind that is downtown is alive and kicking. As I write this, you can be sure that there is a group somewhere dreaming up new and shocking ideas that will someday affect the way we do everything. PAPER will be there sniffing out their trails—and telling you about them in boldface—for the next 20.