Frankly Speaking #6 Saturday, July 13, 1996 Well, guess I am still a cultural outlaw. Last night, the cops busted THE ARTISTS' CAFE ... one of those truly underground tiny places which have always threatened the regular world ... busted it for having me and my band jamming in the early Friday evening. It's flattering to think my voice is a subversive weapon ... just wished the cops would show up in time to take me to jail, instead of showing up ten minutes after I had left and stopping the poor folk singer who played after us! Anyway ... you have in your hands the chubby issue! We had to add more pages to cram all the stuff in ... but we didn't have the heart to raise the price. That reminds me ... a special thanks to the performance artist Jenny Strauss for loaning us her scanner. That saved us big bucks both for this issue and our new WEB OF ALL POSSIBILITIES website at: http://users.lanminds.com /~fmoore. While we are at it ... I have a new e-mail address: fmoore@lanminds.com. If you want to talk to me personally ... The Web is the place. In fact, a lot of the folks in this issue are on the web ... and they are hot linked at W.A.P. ... and tons of art and other shit ... in other words ... visit our web site! I had to use the web to get visual art for this issue. Each week there is a pile of great pieces of writing in our p.o. box. But we rarely get art, cartoons (except from T. R. Miller Cartoonist who we can't keep up with!), or photographs. Yep, I'm telling you visual artists to get your asses in gear! We did get the mind-blowing group of Cuban artists when the Cuban artist collective BANCO DE IDEAS Z sent us a copy of their artist book and of their calendar ... both hand-printed on home made paper. (Now we are going to great lengths to get their comp copies to them in spite the U.S.'s boycott of Cuba). Oh sure, I could have rested on the "in-house" art of LaBash and the twisted talents of John Seabury and the other amazing artists we already had. But I wanted more! So first we called our good friend Les Barany ... the gothic figure in the Giger chair. He got us HR Giger, the famous tattoo-artist Spider Webb, and Flo Fox (the fox in the mirror on the next page ... more about her later.) But I wanted more! So I went surfing! And I found Tony Ryan in Tasmania and Eric Boutilier-Brown in Canada ... all by surfing the web. We live in an age of whining people who think they are owed something, who think they have the right to not be offended, to have reality be padded to their satisfaction before they will even think of playing the game of life (an actress auditioning for my play actually said she would be in it only if I get a woman director!). We receive letters from prisoners (and also from would-be advertisers and would-be contributors) saying: "I'm in prison. Send me a free copy of your zine." ... as if being in prison (or being a woman, a victim, a crip or whatever) entitled him. I never give such a person a comp ... although we give a shit load of comps away. The reason I put Al's personal ad on my page is he always has come from being a risking artist, rather than from being a jailbird. Flo Fox is definitely not a whiner. She was on the NYC streets at 14, both parents dead. A very lusty woman. Married and knocked up at 18. Divorced at 26. But that was when the fun started. She got a camera. Didn't have to close her one eye because it was blind ... perfect for a photographer. Became a famous photo-journalist, focusing on the street scene. Then in 76, she became legally blind. No problem. She just had to wait 2 years before they invented the auto-focus camera ... and she was back in business and art. She started teaching the blind photography. When her MS put her in a wheelchair and the city didn't build curb cuts, she started building them herself, carrying sacks of cement on her chair! Guys, if you go to her apartment, she'll have you whip your cock out for her "dicthology" series. Girls, she has a pussy series too! Flo is too busy playing lustfully in and with life to withdraw into the self-absorption of a victim. She comes to the table to play ... to play every hand, to match and up every bet ... not for power (the power game is for chumps) but for life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness! A foxy hero!