bOING bOING #14 (Los Angeles)

Issue #14 of bOING bOING has the zine moving its offices...again...back down to southern California and the Los Angeles area. For those keeping count, that's eight moves in seven years, circa 1988-1995. This is only mentioned because editor Mark Frauenfelder and the rest of the gang have such a casual attitude about it, even going so far as to opening this issue with a recap of the publication's many homes (which is actually pretty funny). Sadly, this would prove to be the next-to-last issue of bOING bOING the print zine, with Frauenfelder, Carla Sinclair and crew moving the zine online, to a web site, sometime during 1995. While I felt, at the time, that the readers might actually be catching up with the zine's futuristic vision and subject matter, evidently not enough readers evolved to continue supporting the zine's future.

This issue remains one of my favorites, featuring cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling's proposal for his innovative "Dead Media Project", which I had the pleasure of talking about with Sterling at the DragonCon convention that year. There's also a piece on Russ Meyer's "vixens" that includes interviews with actresses Haji and Kitten Natividad (complete with pulse-quickening photos), and another interview with '90s pin-up queens the Barbi Twins and, finally, an interesting interview with horror author Clive Barker. There are a couple of full-page cartoon strips, some very cool article illustration and the book, zine and music reviews that readers had come to expect from bOING bOING.

(Click on the cover thumbnail to see larger picture)

VITAL STATISTICS:
• Issue #14
• no date given - 1995?
• B&W, 64-pages (including color covers)
• Style: cyber zine

ARTICLES/INTERVIEWS
Clive Barker interview
Russ Meyer's Vixens Haji & Kitten
Barbi Twins interview
Bruce Sterling on "The Dead Media Project"
Marc Laidlow on "Becoming William Gibson's Screenwriter"
Rudy Rucker's "Zip.6" column
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