Alternative Media Expo Wrap-up

This past Saturday, April 17, saw the (if I'm not mistaken) third incarnation of the Alternative Media Expo, sponsored by Leo McGovern and the good folks at Antigravity Magazine. Esconced in the urban vibe of the warehouse section of the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans' gallery district, the annual shindig highlights such homegrown, grassroots entrepreuneurial ventures as the New Orleans Craft Mafia, Defend New Orleans, Dirty Coast t-shirts and Crescent City Comics. Deep South Samizdat Books was, of course, honored to be in such esteemed company, and the day proved to be fun, inspiring and lucrative.

The organizers charge five dollars admission, which I admit I questioned the wisdom of originally. However, I have completely come around to the concept, as it seems to prime the pump for the festival of independent, noncorporate commerce that takes place, the collective thumbing of the nose to the Targets and Gaps and Old Navys that eternally threaten to turn us into just another Cincinnati or Dallas or Topeka. The interaction that subsequently takes place is not one of frenzied consumption, but one of appreciative engagement with artists, craftspeople, journalists, or in my case, a creative recycler of densely packed, interactive nuggets of intellectual, philosophical and spiritual wisdom known as books.

And the books you people were buying! Multiple copies of volumes by the erotic apostle D.H. Lawrence; quantum psychologist and cult novelist Robert Anton Wilson; modern mythmaker Neil Gaiman; transgressive science-fiction outlaw Samuel R. Delaney; Cold War-era Eastern European science fiction Solzhenitsyn Stanislaw Lem; Gothic Suburban Surrealist Shirley Jackson; militaristic crypto-libertarian Robert Heinlein; Noir Underbelly-of-the-American-
Century chronicler James Ellroy; the Mississippi Moonshine Modernist, William Faulkner; the creator of Conan, the spinner of sword and sorcery from central Texas, Robert E. Howard; the Florida sunshine and southern spice of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston; and the cyberpunk standard-bearer Bruce Sterling.

Now, I had the presence of mind to bring multiple copies of the aforementioned, but I would have been hardpressed to proclaim that they would outsell such counterculture mainstays as Vonnegut, Huxley, Rand, Camus, Hesse, etc. Heavy on the speculative fiction, with a smattering of classic modern lit, all embodying the ambiguous yet highly evocative gumbo of alternative media. Well done, my friends.