From: kutcha@eos.acm.rpi.edu (Phillip Rzewski)
Subject: Re: Factsheet 5
Organization: The Voice of Fate
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 22:31:43 GMT


In article <1992Aug12.032144.8507@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> ahawks@nyx.cs.du.edu (andy) writes:
>Does anybody have any info on the current status of Factsheet Five???  I heard
>from Steve Brown of SF Eye that different people are publishing it now, and I
>have also heard that it might become an e-zine....

    Well, people have already posted a sufficient response to this. However,
before they had, I typed in the following article with intent to provide some
information. So if you're interested in some old info about Factsheet Five,
read on.

--
    I was never a Factsheet Five reader, myself, but I have a friend who was
very involved with it and also publishes his own zine. In fact, in the last
issue of his zine, he wrote a little bit on the state of Factsheet Five and
where it was headed. My understanding is that it was written quite a while
ago, so it may or may not still be accurate. Nevertheless, it's free
advertisement for his zine and may give the information you need. This
article will be "reprinted with permission" as long as I supply you with the
name and address of the zine. So here it is:

    "Reign of Toads"
    Kyle Silfer
    PO Box 66047
    Albany, NY 12206

    Reign of Toads is published quasi-ennially. A single issue is $4.00, a
4-issue subscription is $14.00, checks payable to Kyle Silfer. Trades generally
acceptable. Advertising rates available on request, ad trades encouraged.
Submissions of all kinds welcome.

--
"Factsheet Jive"

So Mike Gunderloy loses his mind and shuts down Factsheet Five, indispensable
telephone book of the marginal media, in mid-production of the last issue and
shortly thereafter sells the whole shebang to some shmuck in Ohio. The end of
an era and I was there. Well, actually, no, but I was right near by. I went
over to his house in July [note from Phil: I'm pretty sure this is the July
that happened a year ago+. :)] sometime and picked up a bunch of music to
review. He was working in front of his computer. His shirt was off. It was
hot and humid. There was a cassette out on the front porch that he said he
couldn't touch because it had been sprayed with perfume deadly to his
chemically-sensitive allergies. He made a valiant attempt to xerox the info
sheet that came with the music, trying to hold it with his shirt, I think, on
the glass of his personal photocopier, but the odor was too much for him. I
said I would review it. He thanked me. I picked it up on my way out. That's
the last time I ever saw Gunderloy.

A couple of weeks later, I was hooking up a computer BBS in my mother's
basement with my pal, Searchlight Software fountainhead Frank LaRosa, and we
happened to log on to the Factsheet Five BBS, where the news first hit the
street that Mike had decided to shut down the magazine. Shocked is a good
word for our reaction. The phrase "holy shit" was frequently invoked. The
scuttlebutt reaction on the board was violent, too, but close on the heels of
shock was the realization that, given the inhuman task Gunderloy had set for
himself, reviewing a good 70% of the stuff coming into Factsheet Five and
enduring a 100+ hour work week for sub-sub-minimum wages, it was a wonder he
had held out this long. The so-called Factsheet Five collective, first a
threesome with Jacob Rabinowitz and Cari Goldberg, then a duo with just
Goldberg (make that Goldberg _Janice_, following her loudly-announced
marriage), had clearly flopped. It was still a megalomaniacal one-man show.
He waved away offers of help, suggestions to scale down the operation that
was bleeding him dry. He made his decision in private--two weeks after I saw
him and he hadn't mentioned a word of it then--to avoid, I believe, others
pressing the obvious solutions of either delegating larger portions of
responsibility to a larger staff or taking more human bites of the zinedom
sandwich. All or nothing: he chose nothing. I may be totally off-base here,
but that's what it looks like to me. The entire world was falling apart at
the end of that summer: the Soviet Union, my marriage, Factsheet Five, my
mother's sanity... what the fuck was going on?

Actually bumped into Cari Goldberg Janice at a party shortly after the
terminal announcement--said encounter serving to confirm my low opinion of
her presence on this planet. Besides the fact that her writing is putrid--a
sort of Reader's Digest-meets-the-underground patronizing know-it-all
suckdick whining trite community newsweekly columnist shtick in case you
haven't noticed--she herself is quite annoying in that as a FF mover-and-
shaker, she'd pretend she didn't recognize me and Karin--FF staffers of
almost _two_ years, mind, you, old fucking _hands_ as it were--whenever we
encountered her, even though she'd almost always be at Mike's house, tapping
away some inane commentary into a PC clone while we pawed through the
cassettes and LPs, pardoning herself as she squeezed by us to use the john or
whatever, Gunderloy's two behemoth hounds bleating and squawking and snorting
all around us. ``Oh... _you're_ Kyle and Karin!'' Feigned surprise. Gimmie a
break. Okay, I _really_ don't know the woman at all. Maybe she's a lovely
person once you get to know her, but I HATE the way she writes (_particularly_
her lame-ass comics reviews--she knows NOTHING, her aesthetic sense is
MORONIC and CONDESCENDING to the form). All right, forget it. Anyway, _she_
didn't seem to know jack about the FF shutdown except that Mike had decided
to do it more or less without her input. Collective, my ass. I thought it was
hilarious when FF readers got confused and thought Cari and Mike were married
since she announced her impending trip down ``the aisle'' (her words) about a
zillion times before it actually happened. And gosh, does she like to bowl!
Let me tell you. Yee hah! Mr. and Mrs. Factsheet Five and their problem child
Jacob R., where are you when we need you?

So then this Hudson Luce guy decides to offer a ``six-figure'' amount for the
works: the mailing list, the name, the advertisers, the hubris... First he
says no reviews of anything except 'zines. Then he says next issue out in
November. Then it eventually comes out sometime in winter 1992, and the
entire local area network that pushed mucho copies of Factsheet Five to the
capital district (Albany's ERL Records alone sold, say, thirty copies a
month) is completely out of the loop. Which is particularly disgusting since
one of the new editorial collective (there's that _word_ again) is located in
Scotia, NY, an easy 30-minute cruise from the Albany/Rennselaer epicenter. So
much for maintaining grassroots contacts. Apparently there _is_ an issue out,
though. I haven't seen it, which is pretty funny. I grabbed a mess of music
to review for this issue when it was under Mike's aegis, never reviewed it,
was never asked about what happened to it, was never so much as spit upon by
the new FF posse as a staff member of the previous administration might
expect to be... a de facto firing. Well, fuck 'em and good luck to 'em.

--
    If there were any typos in there, oh well. If you want the official
guaranteed typo-free version, order a subscription to the magazine. :)

--
   Phillip Andrew Rzewski                      Internet: kutcha@acm.rpi.edu
   "I was very let down with the budget. I was expecting a one-million quid
      handout. I was very disappointed. It was the government's fault."
                            --- Mark E. Smith
Newsgroups: alt.zines