Independent publisher V. Vale

By Neela Banerjee | AsianWeek

According to media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), there are nine, mostly U.S.-based, transnational media corporations that control what the world sees and hears. The five largest corporations, Time Warner/AOL, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom and Rupert Murdoch’s news corporation, have a combined profit of over $85 billion annually.

After these first-tier giants, come media-related firms like Westinghouse, The New York Times Company, Gannet and Hearst, each making between $1 billion and $8 billion a year. According to FAIR, “the overwhelming majority of the world’s film production, TV show production, cable channel ownership, cable and satellite system ownership, book publishing, magazine publishing and music production is controlled by some 50 or so companies.”

But there are still rebel strongholds.

Independent publisher V.Vale, editor and owner of Re/Search Books, is one of the most important chroniclers of American counterculture today. From the early days of punk, when Vale put out a music-focused zine called Search and Destroy, to his most recent work on pagan culture, he has been dedicated to unearthing creative truths. In a mission statement for his publishing project, Vale writes that “[Re/Search] seeks to demystify the “control process” that thwarts our creativity, joy, pleasure and exercise of freedom. We seek to reclaim and reconstruct our lost insurgent history.”

Still escaping corporate destruction in a North Beach apartment that he has inhabited for nearly 25 years, Vale talks about the glory of the punk cultural revolution, how everyone is an artist and what we can do in this time of crisis.

V. Vale. Photo by Jennie Sue.

Even More Outsider

Vale’s apartment/office, located in an alley off of North Beach’s strip club-lined main drag, is full of ceiling-high shelves bulging with books, both his own and others. Computers and filing cabinets blend into a pastel colored play area that Vale says is for his daughter, whom he refers to affectionately as “the kid.”

A patch of sunlight plays across his face as he speaks: “I have to be honest, most of my interviews have been done by … white folks.”

V. Vale, who is “over 50” as he puts it, was born to Japanese American parents in California. His father was a beatnik and his mother a nightclub entertainer. His early childhood was marked with discord and “family tragedy.” His parents split up just before he was born and he met his father for the first time in 1990, when he tracked him down in New York City.

“He wasn’t that hard to find,” Vale says. “But I always had this resentment towards him for the abandonment, to the extent that I had my name changed. The first name was Vale, but I made it my last name as well.”

Vale ascribes the breakup of his family to the internment camps, which housed his mother during World War II.

“My mother was heavily damaged from being in the camps. She became mentally ill because she was this nightclub entertainer and was getting acclaim and then suddenly was in this camp, this terrible camp,” Vale says.

He was raised in foster homes until the age of 8, when he and his mother moved to a small town in the Southern California desert. Vale has never been connected to the Asian Pacific American community because of the isolation in which he grew up and because of what he says is the Japanese American tendency to become “Americanized quicker than anybody else.”

“I’ve always been kind of an outsider and if you’re Asian, you’re even more outsider,” he recalls. “Especially in a small town where there is only one black family and one Hispanic family. Whenever your creativity finally manifests, it has to be with what you grew up with.”

At 18, Vale came to UC Berkeley and graduated with an English major. Still alienated among the mass of students, Vale says he finally felt at home when he landed a job at City Lights bookstore in North Beach, in 1969. Always interested and inspired by the Beat scene, Vale flourished at City Lights where he was surrounded by poets like City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsburg, who would later launch his publishing career.

Search and Destroy

During this time, Vale absorbed as much of the vibrant underground culture as he could. Through a few select friends he was turned on to art and creative forms that weren’t really being talked about, like art movies, architecture, beat poetry and surrealist poetry.

“Of course, I embraced the hippie thing, was sympathetic to them as well as the punk scene,” Vale says with a smile. “Because as Bruce Connor says, all undergrounds are the same.”

But Vale was finally inspired to write out of a raging anger at the media.

“I started publishing because the few articles I read about punk in the papers were so maligning, negative and even worse, scurrilous, that I knew I had a crusade,” he says. “It got me really mad and anger is a good motivation to do anything.”

Vale started publishing a punk zine called Search and Destroy in 1977 with $200 that he got from Ferlengetti and Ginsberg. He used a typewriter at City Lights after hours and had art school friends help him with layout. Search and Destroy interviewed everyone from Devo to artists like David Lynch, who were all a part of the burgeoning scene.

When Vale talks about his punk rock days, his eyes glaze over and it’s almost as though he is expounding on a religion: “Punk was the last international underground that I think is capable of ever arising. The corporations, with their cool hunters and advertising experts, are just too savvy now to let an underground movement happen again without immediately cashing in on it.”

Vale celebrated the do-it-yourself backbone of the punk revolution, that had people starting their own bands one week after picking up instruments for the first time, reconfiguring thrift store clothes with hand-stitched slogans and creating their own media.

“When all this first started, normal channels of distribution wouldn’t touch [the music or the magazines], they were afraid of it,” Vale explains. “So hundreds of small punk record stores opened up and those were the people who distributed me. They very rarely paid, but the word got out.”

A Grandiose Scheme

Because Vale worked at City Lights, he began thinking about ways to get his work into more established bookstores. In 1981, he borrowed money from a friend to go into the typesetting or printing business. This not only helped Vale pay the bills, but it also allowed him to upgrade the status of his books.

“What was pioneering about what I was doing, was that I was able to put out really professional looking books with completely uncensored content,” he says. “That only became available to the public in the 1990s when desktop publishing happened.”

Now, armed with his own typesetting capabilities, Vale was ready to change the world. He wanted to do what he calls “a complete cultural remapping.”

“Because in all the arts I felt like the priorities were all wrong. The people who I thought were really great were oftentimes unknown and certainly a lot of the information you got from them had been filtered so much, often through the sensibility of a professional art critic. So, I wanted to give voice to really interesting people.”

Vale was very influenced by artists and writers like William Burroughs and Andy Warhol, who were changing the way the interview was published. Burroughs’ The Job is a nearly 300 page book of transcribed Burroughs’ interviews, presented as pure, unfiltered ideas. Warhol’s magazine Interview, started in the early ’70s, was dedicated to talking to real artists and interesting people, not just celebrities.

“He would put in all the ums and pauses and mistakes, everything,” Vale says. “They don’t do that anymore.”

Because Vale felt as though Burroughs was a distant mentor to him, the first Re/Search book focused on this incendiary writer. Featuring pictures of Burroughs with a collection of guns and full of enough subversive material to get the Department of Homeland Security all excited, this first book published in 1982 still remains surprisingly relevant.

“I was always asking about how you create, what are the secrets of creativity? Because one of the things I got from surrealism, was that everyone is pretty much born with an imagination. And your dreams, the dreams you have at night, those are all you need to be an artist, and everyone is an artist, and everyone has that machine in their brain called the imagination.”

The Heyday

Since that first book in 1982, Re/Search has published over 30 titles. Because Vale’s magazine was already carried in most record stores, they continued to distribute his books, putting him in a market that was better than that of most book distributors.

Vale tackled almost every subject possible in the underground world: from in-depth looks at music and film that were almost impossible to find, in Incredibly Strange Music and Incredibly Strange Films, to a book looking at the modern day prankster and furthering the idea that the prank — like when Joey Skaggs convinced The New York Times that he and his group of actors were a Gypsy rights group who were lobbying to change the name of the Gypsy Moth because it was offensive to them culturally — was an important form of avant-garde art, to Vale’s more recent declaration that swing dancing was the new underground.

Vale’s heyday came in 1991 with the publishing of two of his most popular books, Modern Primitives and Angry Women. Modern Primitives, Vale’s most popular book to this day, explores the world of modern body modification and art. Featuring everything from tribal tattooing to corsets to the Japanese gangster tradition of inserting pearls under the skin of the penis for each year spent in jail, this fascinating book continues to make the hardiest of people shudder with amazement.

Vale’s work didn’t go without notice. His books helped to define the underground and established him as a major figure.

Nancy Peters, co-owner of City Lights Books, says that Vale was incredibly innovative.

“He’s been a really interesting figure in San Francisco publishing and culture,” she says. “He was a wonderful documenter of the movement, really finding the voices that were not being heard so much and putting them out there.”

Martin Wong, co-editor of popular punk/APA magazine Giant Robot, says that he has been reading the Re/Search books since the 1980s and that they really introduced him to so much.

“For someone who was just in college at the time, it was a real guide to counterculture,” Wong says. “It definitely expanded my horizons.”

Corporate Takeover

But by 1995, the writing on the wall for independent publishers looked bad. Barnes & Noble and Borders Books and Music began a campaign to wipe out independent publishing and establish themselves as the only channels for distribution.

“They started a relentless takeover and moved into every town in America next to the indie bookstore that was doing well and put them out of business,” Vale says sadly. “They wiped out thousands of book and record stores that used to buy me and they don’t order me because it takes too much work, because at the same time they could be ordering me they could be ordering from some distributor that will give them 2000 corporate titles.”

Vale points out that all the books, music and media that these stores carry are chosen by one or two people in central offices, with “one person dictating the cultural content for the entire country in each office.”

Vale says that Re/Search has survived because he never was doing it for profit and that he has survived by knowing how to live frugally and survive on very little.

“Corporate capitalism moves towards monopoly capitalism, they don’t want to be fair, they want to own the whole darn tamale. They don’t want there to be any competition,” Vale says angrily. “Basically that’s what they have done to information dissemination systems. They’ve made it possible for there to be this monopoly. I’d say that if you can’t find my books in the major bookstores in America then I am being censored, de facto.”

While Vale still has faith in the independent media out there, his outlook is pessimistic, saying that they don’t have a very good chance to get distributed nowadays.

When faced with a barrage of panicky questions from an interviewer who insists that all cannot be lost, that there must be some way to battle corporate evils, Vale goes back to his punk sensibilities.

“All my books, the ideas come from punk rock. It was the best time, you had people from all social classes, all backgrounds coming together for a relatively short burst of time, they just wanted to be creative. They didn’t want to be a consumer. If you wanted to be punk you had to make your own clothes and give yourself a haircut,” Vale says. He recounts how in 1977 he shared a house with three people in San Francisco and his monthly rent was $37.50.

“There is only so much individuals can do,” Vale says. “Like Michael Moore says, try to talk to everyone you can, just even one to one. That’s the way to fight ignorance. Those of us who can should be publishing zines or doing research. And of course, vote with your pocketbook. I really do try to avoid buying corporate products. That’s not easy, but I try.”

Though Vale is sad that he has such minimal connection to the APA community, he believes that the connection — especially to culture — is extremely important.

“I think anyone who was raised with an ethnic cultural heritage just ought to thank their lucky stars and learn as much about it from day one,” Vale says. “From a standpoint of pure survival, depending on the whims of the Bush administration, any ethnicity may be subject to attack.”

Overall, Vale continues to push his idea that the best way to change this world is to be proactive.

“Just try to do something, create your own culture.”

Reach Neela Banerjee at nbanerjee@asianweek.com.

Re/Search Recommendations/Highlights

This is the first real Re/Search book, published in 1982, and featuring an interview with Burroughs where he talks about living in New York City’s Bowery, guns and mind control. It also has excerpts from obscure Burroughs books like The Place of Dead Roads and Early Routines. There are also interviews with writer Brion Gysin, who was rearranging newspaper text at random to create poetry, and with the strangely subversive band Throbbing Gristle.

V.Vale says this book may just be his favorite, so take heed. Way before Tom Green was showing us his testicle in a jar or Johnny Knoxville was zapping himself with a stun gun, the artists and pranksters in this book were causing public mayhem and forcing the world to take a good look at itself. Featuring everybody from Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman to Jello Biafra and John Waters, this book makes you want to go out and cause some trouble. Don’t miss out on the interview with Joey Skaggs, outlining his amazing series of pranks on the media.

Re/Search Publications’ most popular book to date, Vale says this book was a kind of prank on his part. “I did this book because of the puritanical, body-hating mindset of this country,” he says. “To remove the guilt.” Exploring everything from the basic tattoo to serious genital remodeling, this book really covers the whole universe of body manipulation. Not for the squeamish.

This book captures music that escapes definition, from the rebel folk music of The Cramps to Eartha Kitt’s sexual banter. This book also speaks to record collectors who have made sure this obscure music exists today. A great resource for DJs looking for that unique sample.

“Paganism is the perfect religion for anarchists,” V. Vale says in the introduction of his most recent book. In the book, over 50 individuals talk about why paganism is the anti-hierarchical philosophy of the future. From druids to sexologists to spiritual troublemakers, this book helps shed light on a movement that has been growing larger and larger in the past 30 years.

Go to www.researchpubs.com to order any of these books and check out the rest of the collection. The Holiday Special, available through Dec. 30, offers free shipping for any two or three books sent to the same address. Also, be sure to sign up for V. Vale’s extensive Re/Search Mini-Newsletter, which includes a great mix of interviews, reading/music/movie selections and general opinionated ranting. Email him at info@researchpubs.com.

— Neela Banerjee