This Is MORE STUFF!

A WEEKLY PEEK BACKWARD AT 3 PIVOTAL DECADES OF CULTURAL CHAOS I WITNESSED AND HELPED CREATE IN THE GREATEST CITY ON EARTH: NEW YORK! FUNNY HOW SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE.

Dear Reader,

WELCOME TO MY NEW weekly SUBSTACK. It's called: This is MORE STUFF. Although I am launching this today October 22, 2024, much of what you’ll be seeing every Saturday morning is stuff I wrote many years ago over three decades. HUH? Why the hell am I doing that? And why would that be at all interesting to anybody??? It’s a long story.

Illustration by Maira Kalman

40 years ago I co-founded an offbeat indie New York zine with my writer friend David Hershkovits (and two art directors who left soon after we started). Downtown New York was exploding with creativity in those days and we wanted to make something that would spread the word about and support the insane wild cultural chaos that we were witnessing and participating in back then. We not only wanted to document our community of friends, many of whom were the radical and creative pioneers defining our city’s underbelly, but we wanted to invite them to participate and communicate their POV on our pages too. We called it PAPER and it was a total guerrilla zero-budget DIY venture. We made it with interns (who came after their day jobs) in the middle of the night for the first few years out of my Tribeca loft on Lispenard Street and then in a barebones office on Spring Street and Broadway where we often had no heat and stole our electricity off the streetlights. My retired culture vulture mother did the books and the subscriptions (gratis of course) and smart kids from all over flocked to intern for us as it was a hub of fun and creativity and a wild place to hang out. 

For the first six years of PAPER, we mostly typed our stories on typewriters and used wax machines and mat knives to make layouts with our copy typeset on Houston Street at a spot called STRONG SILENT TYPE. The hottest invention in those days was the answering machine and the fax machine, which we grew very dependent on. The word “digital” was not yet in our vocabulary—no computers, cellphones, or internet yet. Our favorite new technology we coveted was a miraculous version of a Xerox machine that would enlarge and reduce photos you’d copy on them. This was how we did our layouts. We couldn’t afford one, so we’d ask our friends and interns who worked day jobs at Conde Nast, Hearst or Fairchild to Xerox all our photos for each issue in every size imaginable so we could make layouts from them. Then we’d shlep these huge boards every month to the printer on Varick Street who would then strip the photos into film. We rejoiced when computers came around and we were the first in line to begin what they used to call “desktop publishing”. We even became beta testers for Apple, which of course was our brand of choice.

As a right-brainer, my role at PAPER from the beginning was to be the boss of the visuals, design, style, production and selling ads. My partner David was in charge of all the words, written stories and our future burgeoning digital efforts. The great thing about PAPER was that we were NOT traditional journalists. That doesn’t mean we didn’t live for a scoop or shining a light on what we saw as new ideas or brilliant people, but we would much rather invite our most creative friends to write about whatever crazy shit they were passionately obsessed with than simply assign a story to a “journalist” who wasn’t embedded in what they were writing about. We’d run a piece by some young kid deeply involved in some b-genre of movies even if they’d never written before or ask a young comedian to write a comedy column. David got Futura 2000, his artist friend, to write a technology column for us and Afrika Bambaata to do our dejay column. That’s just how PAPER was. And one of the things that made it so special. 

ALTHOUGH I WAS A TOTAL VISUAL PERSON AND HAD NEVER WRITTEN BEFORE, I have a big mouth and was always ranting about all sorts of things (I’m very opinionated). So one day in the mid-nineties, I decided to start writing a monthly column in PAPER which got buried in the back of the book (probably because of my amateur writing status) near my monthly style section. I wrote this column every single month for 22 years (from 1995 until we sold PAPER in 2017!) about whatever crazy shit was on my mind and I swear no one ever read it. It was called Note from Kim and was a sort of rambling “from where I sit ”. After selling PAPER in 2017, I would rifle through these columns every so often (I have a big drawerful of 200 of them!) and a lot of them blew my mind. I realized in retrospect that these eclectic essays I wrote told great and sometimes even prescient stories about the historical importance of New York’s evolution— including when we changed our calendars from 1999 to 2000 (which was a big fucking deal), as well as our generation’s transition from analog to digital which as we used to say was going to be “bigger than the invention of the wheel”.

The best part of perusing these piles of funny observations is that you not only learn how today came to be, but you’ll also see that some things never change. I hope you’ll enjoy tripping through these historical times that we witnessed and that it helps you contextualize the present and gives you a new perspective of how history morphs into the future. Especially if it’s told truthfully. Remember kids, YOU must be responsible for telling your own history. Truth in history matters!

Love, Kim

So who the hell am I and what do I do?

I’ve always had problems explaining to people what I do. When people ask me I never know what to say. I guess if I was forced to label myself, I’d say I am first an artist and then a cultural anthropologist. For my 32 years at PAPER, people called me a journalist, a fashion person, a magazine editor, a curator, a trend predictor, a design buff, a scrappy small business owner. But I’m not really any of those things. Those who know me say I’m enthusiastic. I’m definitely a manifester and a truffle hunter. I dream up ideas and search high and low for brilliant new ones concocted by others. New ideas make me swoon. And I see these ideas in my mind super clearly and it drives me fucking nuts if what I make doesn’t come out exactly how I envisioned. I also love culture. And I love tracking where it all comes from because it astounds me. Whether fashion, art, music, performance or anything radical that shows up on the streets, creativity comes in the most amazing forms.

Oh and BTW I have a new book coming this spring. It’s called STUFF! (A New York Life of Cultural Chaos)

Check it out and preorder HERE if so inclined!

(STUFF is co-published by Amazing Unlimited and Damiani)

Cover art by Jim Joe, Videos by Waylon Bone