Among The Village Voices 25 Favorite Books of 2006 Winner of the
2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated
Book Design category. Sometime after Andy Warhol's heyday but
before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers,
guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists
transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it
became known simply as "Downtown." Willfully unpolished and
subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy
Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel
Pinero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to
produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and
music that breathed the life of the street. The first book to
capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up,
But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that
encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992.
Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the
book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and
photographs of people and the city, many of them here made
available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The
book's striking and quirky design-complete with 2-color
interior-brings each of these unique documents and images to life.
Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically
to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry
readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East
Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop,
unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed
copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often
attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker's short
fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content,
sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of
real life. With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and
Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years
of New York City's smartest and most explosive-as well as hard to
find-writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most
exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.
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