Its a little known fact to most of you that I used to run an indie music zine for over 7 years called Oculus Magazine. It started out in October 1991 as a free newsprint publication. In 1995 we started posted articles to the web. I loved it and learned a lot about publications, critical writing, and the Internet. (I also lost a lot of my own money, as did my partners in crime.) Alas, we eventually grew bored and burnt-out and Oculus cease operations. I was very uncool and took the site's content down.
Seeing an awesome publishing tool like MovableType pains me inside because we really could have used it back then. Most of my work on the Web site was spent manually coding and maintaining HTML with a lot of SSI tricks. (I wrote scripts to generate our own RSS feeds back in 1999 when Netscape for released it too.)
I miss those days and I've been thinking about putting restarting Oculus as a weblog. Today I woke up and decided to do a little bit of something about that.
One of the most popular articles we ever published was a "Jazz Primer for Rock People." Today I decided to pull that piece from my archive and put it back up -- nasty HTML 3.2 and all. I was still getting a couple hundred requests for it a month despite the content being down for a couple of years. I'll have to go back and clean up the markup and link it better.
We used to run a column penned by one Jim Glauner called "Cringe Factor: Music We Hate." Each issue I couldn't wait to read the draft Jim would hand in. I used to laugh so hard I'd cry reading his work.
I've been encouraging Jim for a bit to start publishing Cringe Factor as a weblog. I even setup one up and added all of the past columns he wrote for Oculus. Check it out here. My personal favorite was "Not Even Retarded Kids Will Like It."
Not many people know this, but I wrote a book a few years back called 1001 Ways To Improve Your Band Right Away. Rule 77 is "Burn all your Chicago records. However, like Dracula, Peter Cetera solo records must be rent with a wooden stake, or else they'll return to haunt you." Rule 915 says, "Fire your glockenspiel player," and Rule 136 says, "If Phil Collins is in your band, lose him like a sock in a dryer."
It only gets better from there.
Jim wrote one entry, but hasn't posted since. If you like what you read please send him a message and encourage him to write more.
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