From: antenna@well.sf.ca.us (Robert Horvitz)
Subject: Help VOKNO - Send Mind-Fuel
Organization: Internews
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1992 19:44:14 GMT


Recently I visited the office of a Czech magazine named VOKNO ("Window").
This is a really really really neat publication, sort of like Semiotext(e)
or Re:Search, with a bold/wild graphic style.  Thumbing thru the 160-page
current issue, there are articles on "chaot-ocracy and menstrual art";
the music of Skinny Puppy;  excerpts from "Last Exit to Brooklyn";
interviews with British sci-fi author J. G. Ballard and Czech performance
artists Derevo; an essay on hippies in Poland;  Dr. Michael Fox on animal
rights;  an interview with a New York "shaman" named Michael Medicine
Eagle;  part 2 of an analysis of pornographic fantasy by Susan Sontag;
...and lots more.

For 10 years prior to 1989's "velvet revolution," VOKNO was an
underground publication.  Its editors were harrassed, shadowed and
sentenced to a total of 15 years in jail.  Now they are legal - and
still pushing the limits of Czech sensibility.

Their current editor, Blumfeld S.M., asked me to relay a request:  they
have no hard currency and are hungry to know what exciting things
are being published elsewhere.  He would like people to send them sample
copies and back-issues of innovative non-mainstream periodicals.  As
Blumfeld explained in a follow-up letter (his English as written),
VOKNO is for

    "...Czechs with interests about marginals, edges, fringes,
    alternatives in culture, philosophy, art, music, literature,
    films, ecology, trends and tendencies in thinking...  We don't
    need, as I think, surface of freedom.  If we speak yet, time to
    time, about VOKNO as an `underground' magazine, it means that we
    want to seek  d e e p e r  values, associations, relations and
    try to resist the `aboveness' - flatness, one-dimensionality
    of being....

    "[Please ask] post-intellectuals not to throw cans full of
    informations/magazines/books to junk, but find a way to recycle
    it here, in centre of Europe.  Especially these paper and brain
    materials (not only new but also 5 years old, if possible):

       HIGH FRONTIERS  *   MONDO 2000  *  ARTFORUM  *  FLASH ART
       SEMIOTEXT(E)  *  OPTION  *  SPIN  *  B-SIDE  *  RE:VISION
      MOTHER EARTH NEWS  *  THE FACE  *  I-D  *  HIGH PERFORMANCE
        PORTABLE LOWER EAST  *  DRUNKEN BOAT  *  FACTSHEET FIVE"

...and others that they haven't even heard of yet.  So if you want to
help a struggling and quite remarkable mag, here's a way to do it.
Thanks in advance on their behalf.  Their address:

                    VOKNO    (ISBN: 80-85 239-10-8)
                    Bolzanova 7
                    110 00 Praha 1
                    Czechoslovakia
                    Phone:  +42 2 22-47-53
                    Fax:  +42 2 26-72-75

I didn't see any subscription info in the issues I have, but the cover
price is 40 Kcs. per copy ($1.50 - a steal for this much magazine),
and it comes out twice a year.


-- 
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        Robert Horvitz, Radio Consultant, The Soros Foundations          
        Karlovo nam. 15     121 27 Praha 2      Czecho-Slovakia
antenna@earn.cvut.cs     antenna@csearn.bitnet    antenna@well.sf.ca.us