Open City was a weekly underground newspaper published in Los Angeles by avant-garde journalist John Bryan from May 6, 1967 to April 1969. It was noted for its coverage of radical politics, rock music, psychedelic culture and the "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column by Charles Bukowski.
Video Open City (newspaper)
History
Bryan was a journalist who quit the San Francisco Chronicle in 1964 to found the brief-lived San Francisco bohemian tabloid weekly Open City Press, publishing 15 issues from Nov. 18, 1964 to March 17-23, 1965. Open City Press was a local forerunner of the Berkeley Barb, providing coverage of the Free Speech Movement.
After closure of Open City Press Bryan relocated to Southern California. After a stint working for Art Kunkin as managing editor of the Los Angeles Free Press, he launched Open City in Los Angeles, starting the volume numbering with vol. 2, no. 1 (May 5-11, 1967). At its peak Open City circulated 35,000 copies. Unlike almost all other underground papers which were published in tabloid newspaper format, Open City was printed in the larger broadsheet-sized format. It published some of Charles Bukowski's earliest professionally published prose in his regular column "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," which appeared in all but a few issues.
In March 1968 Bryan was prosecuted on an obscenity charge for printing an image of a nude woman in a record company advertisement for Leon Russell. Six months later, in September 1968, there was a second obscenity bust over the short story "Skinny Dynamite" by Jack Micheline, about the sexual antics of an underage girl, in a literary supplement to Open City edited by Charles Bukowski. The cost of Bryan's legal defense and a $1,000 fine on the first charge eventually put the shoestring operation out of business. (Bukowski's "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" was subsequently taken on by the Los Angeles Free Press.)
Bukowski published a satirical and somewhat cruel fictional account of Open City in Evergreen Review under the title "The Birth, Life and Death of an Underground Newspaper."
John Bryan's follow-up to Open City was the ambitious but brief-lived Sunday Paper, which published six or seven issues in San Francisco in February and March 1972. Published in the large broadsheet format, each issue was fronted by a two-page section of underground comics edited by Willy Murphy and printed in full color.
Maps Open City (newspaper)
See also
- San Francisco Oracle
- Summer of Love
References
Source of article : Wikipedia
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