When Underground Culture Was Hard(er) To Find

Filmmaker Danny Plotnick’s “Out of Print” is an absolutely brilliant and simple but effective short film about the somewhat lost pleasures of hunting down underground media, from cult films and bands, to underground literature and zines. By his own description, it’s “an ode to the counterculture of the 80s and 90s when unearthing quality culture was a real treasure hunt.”

I have fond memories of seeking out and encountering this stuff in the backs of magazines and zines, in the racks of independent book stores and at hole-in-the-wall record stores. It’s easy to romanticize those times when there was no such thing as a Google search, and it might take years to get your hands on a particularly rare piece of culture. It’s also easy to overestimate the availability of stuff nowadays. Still too many truly valuable cultural relics remain out of print, never having been transferred to digital, and possibly lost to all but a lucky few. Furthermore, just because an MP3 or video has been released onto the web now doesn’t mean that someone will necessarily take the time and effort to archive it for the future.

Nevertheless, times have changed, and a little nostalgia never hurt anyone. (via Stinkfight)


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