

So I wanted a gallery where kids felt invited and included.” With high rents dictating who could survive, the idea of communal space got pushed aside. “There’s an overall vibe in the art world that you don’t belong if you’re not a collector.
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He, too, said it was a community-building project, free of the internet that had played a part, via Instagram, in creating copycat art and its attendant burnout. Leo Fitzpatrick, who appeared alongside Chloë Sevigny in Larry Clark’s skate-punk coming-of-age film Kids, has opened Public Access, a tiny gallery on St Mark’s Place, in August. Nearby, the DIY ethos has found other adherents. Photograph: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images Paper co-founder Kim Hastreiter, publisher of the NewNow. It’s like the annual soup party I do, only it’s printed.” (The NewNow includes soup recipes – an obsession describes as a “coping mechanism”) That meant I could do anything I want and be a complete lunatic. “The most exciting thing is to have no money involved, no brands. Last week, 5,000 copies of the publication – not a newspaper, according to Hastreiter – were published free of charge, free of advertising and free of the internet, and distributed to friends and small booksellers. In another contribution, the psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster writes about the patients returned to their earliest traumas by the pandemic. We’re in the middle of what happens after the before and before the after.” “Time feels like it’s either standing still or sped up, or both, churning and spiralling on itself,” REM’s Michael Stipe writes in a meditative entry. Months later, as the weather warmed, she set up an informal office on a bench in Washington Square Park and came up with a concept: what is the new now? Hastreiter gave her writers one stipulation: no mention of the 45th president. So I wanted to make a community, and to address what we’re living through,” she said. Like many, Hastreiter, 69, found herself housebound and creatively paralysed last March. It’s detached, like tunnel vision, but a little soft and malleable.” Putting stuff in print and saying fuck it was a big relief.

“By the time we came out, we’d all been online too much with its rules about identifying that you’re on the right side. The decision to abandon the internet and the frenzy of social media came as a relief, Banse said. “Are we meant to keep retweeting, liking, reposting, and sharing echo-chamber content that honestly becomes boring and dangerous after a certain point?” reads Canal’s manifesto. With four issues to date, and print run of just 1,000, the latest being the Valentine’s themed Love & Life issue, the Canal is a hotly anticipated downtown print that eschews the internet and its discourse – or lack thereof. With the chaos and total depression of the pandemic – and we’re not making light of it – the only thing we could do was laugh.” “We ran with it in the hope that for someone out there it would better their day. “Covid made everyone feels so separate, and we wanted to create some kind of community that people could recognise,” Guterman told the Guardian. The founders of the Canal, Gutes Guterman and Claire Banse, both 23, said the concept came to them in July while sitting on a park bench.

Years after the demise of alternative newspapers like the Village Voice, two of those expressions have taken form in print: the NewNow, from thee former Paper magazine editor Kim Hastreiter, and the Drunken Canal, a self-described “biased news source”, that treats Brooklyn as a foreign land, runs a horoscope of mostly bad omens and a column entitled: “Uh-oh … sorry to hear you’ve been cancelled”.
