PrefaceNote that all of the FringeWare press releases were written with distinctive style and grace by Paco Nathan. And most of the FringeWare Store's graphic design was by the inimitable Monte McCarter. I owe them both more gratitude than I can say here. Let me also extend deep gratitude to Clayton Counts, Jeff Gorvetzian, Justin Hurzeler, Jon Lebkowski, Jen McCarter, Eman Sojoodi, Jim and Jamie Thompson, Don Webb and Wiley Wiggins. The years have only made it all sweeter. As far as the other reviews, notices and announcements are concerned, I have tried to cite authorship as best as possible. However, much of the FringeWare Ephemera in the Jonesian Archives has been reduced to gnomic pre-Socratic fragments where attribution has been, to say the least, clouded. As always, if you have a vexing issue about this, let me know at scotcasey@gmail.com Any failures of chronology, context or re-presentation are mine alone.
CaveatThis is a long indulgent exercise in highly idiosyncratic chronology. As such, it is a sad excuse for what actually was. In the documentary, Viva Les Amis, about the once great, now gone, Austin cafe Les Amis, Newman, the owner, complains several times that any attempt to capture what it was all about is useless. And worse, runs the risk of replacing the real memories with something documented. I couldn't agree more. Still, my hackels rise when I encounter some Johnson I never ever met before who reduces FringeWare down to one or two of the following terms: subversive website hacker rave hypercard mondo weird elitist bookstore bizarre conspiracy freak hardcore radical occult OTO collective magazine zine ubergeek marginalized psychopathic smart drug outsider weapons fetishists fucked up creatures in jars subgenius bettie page manson family terror world wide SRL anarchist pranksters who throw burning TVs off of roofs. The funny thing (funny 'cause it's true) - and anyone that was really there knows this - I could add a thousand more terms to such a list and not even begin to circle the wagons around the Bones of FringeWare. So I figure only to retrace my own peculiar path into it all and set down a few impressions before all those "psychopathic smart drugs" further blank the slate of whatever it was I was just writing about.
Europa Days
I worked, managed, lived, breathed and bled at the FringeWare Store on Guadalupe, from June 1996 to its closing in June of 1999. It was one of those beautiful jobs where there was no separation between your life at work and your life outside of work. For most of us, when our shift would end, we would usually just go grab a beer from the back fridge, sit on the couch and read or talk to whomever was there. It was good. I first heard about FringeWare when I worked at Europa Books back in the early 90s. I started working at Europa in Dobie Mall in the Fall of '91. On the first of January 1992, Europa moved to the old Yaring's building on the Drag. The manager, Lynn Bender, would throw these insane "book receptions" for UT professors with dozens of cases of good wine and hundreds of faculty and students. Mixed in with UT group were the S&M crowd (we had all the current and back issues of PFIQ, Dungeon Master and SandMutopia Guardian), the Zinesters (we had a ever-growing display full), the Punks (a huge selection of underground comics), assorted Drop-outs (Loompanics and various drug-related texts) and titty-dancers from the Crazy Lady (Jock Sturges and Joel-Peter Witkin). There was also a fanatical splinter of hackers, phrackers and phreaks usually found eidetically memorizing issues of 2600 or deeply absorbed in the latest issue of Mondo 2000. (I can remember a very young Wiley coming in wearing headphones and some variation of a blue box strapped to his back.) |
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