5 Years of Butt-Magazine and ‘How to disappear in America without a trace’

I just visited my favourite berlin bookstore yesterday. This bookstore is always the last stop on my weekend shopping sprees. It is a reliable place to spent money when i am frustrated because i didn’t find what i hoped to find in the hip and trendy fashion stores filled with hip and trendy skinny-berlin-mitte-girls and boys and japanese tourists. :-) So this is what i purchased and what i recommend to you:

My favourite queer fanzine Butt Magazine by Gert Jonkers and Jop Van Bennekom (also publishers of Fantastic Man magazine) is celebrating its 5 year anniversary with a 560 page softcover book published by TASCHEN. And no, it is not the naked butts and penises in this book i am a big fan of (well.. maybe a little bit.. ;-P ), what i really like about this fanzine are the many smart, very personal and authentic interviews of homosexual personalities like Michael Stipe, Bruce LaBruce, Gus van Sant, John Waters or Marc Jacobs (to name just a view) among other not so famous gays.

This other book i stumbled across is a little brochure called ‘Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace’ by Revolver Books.

It is a text that was originally uploaded to the Skeptic Tank website by an anonymous writer. (The Skeptic Tank website claims to be an extensive archive ‘..on destructive groups, individuals, and ideologies with special focus on religion’s impact upon history as well as religion’s impact upon rights, liberties, health, and safety of the world’s populace in contemporary times..’ I just checked the website out and it seems to be worth a second visit.) The author of the text writes:

“There are many good reasons to disappear from society. There are many bad reasons to want to. There are many good ways to disappear from society and there are many bad ways to disappear. While I won�t delve too deeply into the whys of disappearing, I will cover my opinions on how to disappear successfully. This essay covers what I consider to be most salient points on how to disappear and remain successfully hidden in American society.�

Though i am not planning to disappear from society in the near future and you may think it is kind of useless information i found it quite interesting in social study and human society context while reading it.