While browsing the newstand at a Border's last year, I spotted this cover. An art magazine with a modest $10 price tag. A cover of crayon colored war drawings. I had to have it.
Esopus requires an adjustment to your notions of a magazine. No ads grace its pages. Not everything in it qualifies as a page for that matter. Whether it is translucent waxy images, or tear outs to make your own stellated polyhedra, handwritten letters and notebook pages, this periodical tosses tradition. Each issue has a full length CD with music inspired by stories, suggestions, ideas from the readers (based on prompts from the editor.)
This is about art, the process of artistic creation, and blurring the boundary "between artist and public."
The following is a statement from the editor, Tod Lippy, of Esopus magazine.
Esopus is a twice-yearly arts magazine featuring fresh, unmediated perspectives on contemporary culture from a wide range of creative professionals. It includes artists’ projects, critical writing, fiction, poetry, visual essays, interviews, and, in each issue, a themed CD of new music.
Lippy has stated that this unique magazine costs far more than the $10 price to create and distribute. The Esopus Foundation, Lippy's non-profit, accepts donations to help offset the costs. The website features tidbits from each issue, including audio clips from the each CD.
Check it out this month. Subscribe, donate. If you are a collector, be sure to buy two issues so that you can tear into one of them and keep the other pristine. If you aren't then just go for it and enjoy.
If this doesn't help your creativity, make you appreciate different perspectives, or absorb your blithely imaginative mind for hours and hours, then you have probably accidentally picked up a copy of The Nation or the National Review.
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