The Fanatic was a short-lived and elusive underground magazine initiated by countercultural spearheads John Michell and William Levy in the mid-1970s. The editors, who knew each other from their work for International Times, conceived a DIY magazine for anybody to compose and publish under the umbrella of The Fanatic. “Make your own Fanatic…” it says in The…
Abbie Hoffman was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1936 into a Jewish middle-class family. Hoffman already won a reputation as a prankster and troublemaker at high school, from which was expelled in his second year. His first arrest followed at the age of 17. After his expulsion from high school…
Harold Norse was born Harold Rosen to a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in 1916. After having graduated from Brooklyn College he became close friends with W.H. Auden – after the latter’s move to the USA in 1939 – and William Carlos Williams, who helped publish Norse’s experimental and groundbreaking poems…
American photographer, poet and publisher Ira Cohen was born to deaf parents in the Bronx in 1935. After having dropped out of Cornell University, having married and having had two children with his wife Arlene Bond, Cohen sailed to Tangier in 1961, where he stayed for four years. In those years Cohen published his seminal Gnaoua journal with contributions by Jack Smith, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Harold Norse a.o. Cohen returned to the US…
Martin Disler was a self-taught Swiss painter, draughtsman, sculptor, author and publisher. Born into a family of gardeners in the canton of Solothurn in 1949, Disler attended a boarding school in Stans, from which he was expelled in 1968. The following year he had his first studio in Solothun together with the painter Agnes Barmettler…