An Introduction to Collected Ephemera.
Every picture - or item - tells a story, it is said, and this Substack shall explore whether this maxim can hold true. I’m starting Collected Ephemera because I truly love the disappearing analog world. The worse it gets out there in the AI slop-driven rot economy, the more determined I am to dutifully stake my place in what Jonathan Richman lionized as the old world, not merely out of nostalgia, although there’s no denying that there will always be that.
It’s more that I’ve lived enough years on the planet that bits of ephemera from my early lifetime (primarily the 1970s, and/or ideas or physical things from the 60s that were still in circulation when my brain was forming) now have the character of museum pieces. I don’t want them to be forgotten, because they were so central to subcultures, collectors and to those both on the margins and in the mainstream. These include many of the things that got me really excited at a young age: political rabble-rousing from the far left and the far right; underground music arcana; the smut and not-appropriate -for-children strange magazines I’d see on the grocery or convenience store magazine racks; motel postcards; hippie/biker/drug culture stuff, and so much more.
It’s not even that I’m a true collector of these things, per se. They just seem to find their way to me. I’ll get wound-up about, say, vintage pulp magazines, and all of a sudden, hey, my wallet’s a little lighter and my “ephemera” storage boxes are a little heavier. I do very much enjoy going to collector gatherings of this stuff, though, and invariably I’ll exit with some trinkets and tokens of appreciations for the form - maybe a broadsheet from the Revolutionary Communist Party, or a handful of Chick Tracts, or some cornpone country music fan magazines. These have built up over the years.
If you bought something like this, but you didn’t get to prattle about it on the internet, did you really even buy it? Probably not! That’s our going-in supposition here at Collected Ephemera.
A bit about me: my name is Jay. I live in San Francisco, California, and have done so for most of my life. I am in my fifties. Any audience I’ve gathered in the past has generally come from one of the underground music-related projects I’ve tackled since my early twenties: a print fanzine called Superdope in the 1990s; an early 2000s blog called Agony Shorthand; another couple of print music fanzines in the past decade called Dynamite Hemorrhage and Radio Dies Screaming; as well as associated podcasts and writings elsewhere.
I currently have loads of fun writing up my very favorite form of collected ephemera, music fanzines, at a site called Fanzine Hemorrhage. That will continue, as will a site of personal writing called The Word Goes Flesh. A lot out there to look at!
I’m a big fan of Substack, though, and after a couple of false starts, I finally figured out what I wanted to claim as my own micro-niche over here. I hope you’ll subscribe, and no, I’m not charging anything for any of this. It all starts with those boxes of ephemera that I want you to take a peek at. Let’s get started, why don’t we?