The Baffler
The Baffler, issue 5.
Semiannual, Chicago-based ascetic journal of cultural criticism (founded in 1988 by University of Virginia undergraduates Keith White and Tom Frank) that tackles the big questions weighing on the minds of indie-rock-loving and -hating intellectuals. Defiant, anti-commerce Baffler mottoes include “Accessorize Your Dissent,” “The Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge,” and, on the back of one of the magazine T-shirts, “Your Lifestyle Sucks.”
Each issue seeks archly to debunk the hip-seeking excesses of the corporate culture business. The early 1994 “Alternative to What?” issue mocked the post-Nirvana commodification of rebellion (or, in Baffler parlance, “consolidated deviance”):
The Anarchists’ Cookbook,
"The Anarchist Cookbook" by William Powell (Barricade Books)
Cult classic on how to cook hash brownies and bombs. Although most bookstores have refused to carry The Cookbook since its 1971 release, it is one of the most successful mail-order books ever, with sales passing two million in 1993. Many acts of violence have been blamed on the book: David Koresh, for example, consulted it to make his hand grenades.
William Powell, the book’s then-21-year-old author, has since relinquished royalty rights and now lives somewhere in Asia. The Cookbook has inspired a whole industry of criminal manuals, such as “How to Launder Money,” “Successful Armed Robbery,” and “Complete Guide to Lock Picking,” distributed by fringe-culture mail-order dealers like Amok and Loompanics (Loompanics actually dropped The Cookbook because of recipe errors that can lead to unexpected detonations).
Anarchic Adjustment
Design from the Anarchic Store website.
San Jose-based purveyors of “digital workwear.” Founded in 1988 by a trio of English expatriates, Anarchic Adjustment took as its trademark a cleaned-up version of the punk A-in-circle anarchy symbol.
The Anarchic sensibility, though, was logocentric, baggy skate-wear that evolved into a range of clothes in hi-tech-looking fabrics. These are sometimes decorated with anime characters and pseudo-political slogans like “Mankind could make this world a heaven, or he could make it hell.”
Anarchic Adjustment has benefited from the patronage of entertainers like Timothy Leary and Deee-Lite; and the company became successful in Japan after a well-known DJ wore an A.A. T-shirt in a magazine.
AIDS Quilt
The entire AIDS Memorial Quilt, Washington D.C., Oct. 11-13, 1996 (Paul Margolies/NAMES Project Foundation).
Folk-art project commemorating people who have died of AIDS-related diseases. The national AIDS quilt comprises thousands of homemade 3-by-6-foot panels (sewn by volunteers into 12-by-12-foot sections) created by the loved ones of the deceased; panel designs range from simple crayon drawings on sheets to those more elaborately festooned with personal items, photographs, and poems.
Conceived by gay activist Cleve Jones (b. 1964) in 1985 and developed by the Names Project in San Francisco, the quilt is intended to be symbolic of healing, comfort, and warmth. When it was first unveiled in October 1987 on the Capitol Mall in Washington, the quilt included 1,920 panels.
AIDS cocktails
Protease inhibitor Crixivan
In February 1995, the first reports of a “more optimistic wind . . . wafting through the AIDS research community” (the Los Angeles Times) began appearing. The hopefulness was based on the discovery of a new class of drugs called protease inhibitors (thought to be 50 to 100 times more potent than the existing reverse transcriptase inhibitors AZT, ddI, and ddC) and a fundamental shift in the way HIV was being treated.