Comments on: Mondo 2000: Where Are they Now?

By: Bill

Bill — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:30:58 +0000

This all takes me back to the early 90s. Mondo 2000 along with the likes of Dan Mapes and our crew were part of the rave scene in SF. I remember the SF Fashion Center, four floors of it filled with cyber-toys and heavy, heavy house music booming from speaker stacks fifteen feet high. There was all manner of people there from gang members coming in from both the city and the east bay and all of them getting high together and getting along to old folks zoned out on E or whatever they preferred dancing the night away, tripping in VR and so much more until sun-up over the city. That’s when we’d pack up our gear and head home until the next rave and it was all due to Mondo 2000 that a beautiful time was had by most.

By: bigredvalve

bigredvalve — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 15:13:32 +0000

I had a girlfriend in 92 who’s family was tight with Bart and some of the others. She had few of her paintings published in the margins. I was a small town New England kid in CA for the first time, reading Gibson and falling in love with Berkeley. M2K farely well blew my mind, or at the least, was able to pull elements from my cyber-fantasies and lay them out in glossy full color. Brilliant. Oh, if I only knew whatever became of my original How fast, How dense T-shirt. Somebody mentioned how this thread was bringing it all back for them. I feel the same. Thanks for the memories.

By: Austin Young

Austin Young — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:55:45 +0000

I took that photograph of Nina Hagen. and i was the co-art director of the Magazine at that time. x Austin Young

By: Alice

Alice — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:35:24 +0000

So simple, and in it’s way, adorable. Perfectly designed, I say!

By: Skidoo

Skidoo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:29:12 +0000

This is like finding reels of memories you didn’t realize were packed away in one of those dark corners of what’s left of your concept of “mind.” But they’re not just any memories.

These are “fire up the Super-8″ memories. Well, the Betamax I suppose. Who am I kidding. VHS took my lunch money on the first day of school.

All this heroic effort to make the Web “do stuff.” I laugh. It’s all in service of the sublime Static Web (which is a synonym for The Singularity, you know). This is one small piece. I love it!

By: magdalen

magdalen — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:55:32 +0000

it’s tres heartening to read people’s comments (hey joshua, whaddup). mondo changed my life, too, but i eventually realized why: i grew up reading Mad magazine. lots of Mad magazine. so to me, everything is real, but it’s a joke, and parody is the best, and the way to make reality is to invent some wacky-ass thing and write about it as though it were real, and and and.

Mondo seemed to have that sense of humor down, and that flair for pranksterism and messing with people’s minds and media. when i met people there and played page five girl for Bart Nagel, and wrote for mondo, and got certain completely untrue/hilarious things mentioned in the magazine, all my amusement seemed well founded.

on the other hand, m2k DID inspire some earnest post-60s let’s-fuck-shit-upness, by combining reality with made up stuff and far out stuff. fabulous.

Wired (and yes, i eventually broke down and wrote for them a bunch of times) was a slap in the face, at first. they seemed to plunder the mondo aesthetic and the various cyberdelic weirdnesses going on at the time, and use them in the service of … ugh… business. oh well. Wired lasted. mondo didn’t. that’s how these things work.

back in the proverbial day, i recall we thought we would Change the World with this magical thing called the Internet. we would overhaul democracy (in addition to doing a lot of drugs and watching robots annihilate each other). it would all be great.

interesting thought that is, now.

other zines in the mondosphere: gareth branwyn’s excellent print zine Going Gaga. paco xander nathan & jon lebkowsky & me & wiley wiggins & everybody’s Fringe Ware Review. (erika whiteway & i guest edited an issue on “chicks in cyberspace” beginning in 1993. fifteen years later, even girls have email! o the shock!) Plazm started at that same time, too — now i’m an editor there. boing boing, too, of course. and many of these folks were influenced by the Whole Earth Review, Co Evolutionary Quarterly, and its evil digital spawn, The WELL. (where, dinosaurette that i am, i still hang out. lots.)

sorry i’m kind of sick & incoherent. i should shaddup. glad the mondo conversation is rolling, though.

HOW DAFT ARE YOU?
HOW TENSE?

By: Mer

Mer — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:17:23 +0000

Yes! Yay! Actually, our friend Joshua Ellis conducted a fascinating interview with Sirius that’s just been published in Issue 02 of Coilhouse quarterly. Sirius talks about H+ and Mondo and other stuff. One of my fave articles in the mag!

By: Chris Grayson - GigantiCo

Chris Grayson - GigantiCo — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:10:59 +0000

This looks like the perfect place to mention that Ken Goffman (aka. RU Sirius) has a new venture. A transhumanist publication called H+ that can be downloaded for free as a PDF from their website at:

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/

By: grendelkhan

grendelkhan — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:57:08 +0000

Joshua Ellis: [Jude Milhon] was the first female hacker, though, if you don’t count Ada Byron.

Jude Milhon started programming in 1967. Grace Hopper started working on the Harvard Mark I in 1943. Jean Sammet was teaching graduate courses in programming in 1956. Frances Allen joined IBM in 1957.

Either you’re terribly prone to hyperbole, or when you say “hacker”, you mean someone involved in hacker fandom, rather than someone involved in deep dorkery proper. (The sets are by no means non-overlapping, but the first makes me think more of Eric Raymond, and the second of Larry Wall or Donald Knuth.)

By: Jeremiadist

Jeremiadist — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:51:56 +0000

@nadyalev, Joshua: Thanks for the insights and (partial) reassurance. I do suspect that once “we” (or whoever are ready to play the proper role) get the hang ofthe various tools at our disposal, including, I suspect, marketing/rhetoric (a/k/a “memetics”) we may yet see the whole buggy start to rock…