> Leftists are rightfully criticized for the drabness and ugliness of their
> movements and culture. Just look at all the creativity that anarchists
> brought to protest in recent years, which had been dominated by the
> Leftist aesthetic of drab protest rallies and marches, as well as
> uninspired printed materials.
>
> This attitude that "our message is more important than the presentation"
> is very on display in the Leftist press, including such ugly publications
> as Z Magazine. My reply to those leftists who dismiss spending any effort
> on the aesthetics of presentation is to ask them why they even bother to
> edit the articles that go in their magazines. If the ideas are so
> important that they can stand on their own, why bother with editing?
We're moving into issues mapped out by Oscar Wilde, in his essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism," where he argued that _aesthetics_ could be the basis for achieving a just society. After all, if we were properly offended by the presence of poverty and deprivation and injustice, should we not apply ourselves to eliminating such things? (Sadly, the most-often-applied solution to this problem is to move such things to a point outside of our peripheral vision.)
And while there have been decent artists who'e worked within the political Left, it's always seemed to me that the aesthetics of their work ought to be separated from any ideology they might have expressed. Picasso would have been a brilliant innovator even if he was to the right of Ezra Pound. It's nice that he was on "our side," sure. But I don't think any movement ought to claim any artist. It sort of sets us up for disappointment when the artist suddenly (and loudly) changes his or her opinions.
As for leftist aesthetics, well, it's a mixed bag. The main journals have decently clean layouts (_The Nation_, _The Progressive_). But the further left one goes, one starts seeing a lot of butt-ugly design schemes-- like _Z_, or _Covert Action_. And beyond _those_, into the realm of anarcho- socialist newsletters, it's the same visual crap over and over again. The high-contrast photos of soldiers and military hardware, collages depicting George Bush buttfucking Dick Cheyney, the cut-and-paste look that was edgy when Malcolm McLaren used it for the Sex Pistols twenty-five years ago, the irony-by-the-rules use of 1950's-era clip-art... It's all one big _ugh_ to me.
As for Michael Albert and _Z_, well, I haven't seen direct proof about his attitude towards copyediting, so I can't say anything about it. I'm glad the magazine's around, but I do wish it was was a better read. He really doesn't seem to want to edit Chomsky (whose writing style has really deteriorated), I've never felt that Lydia Sargent's much of a humorist, and the general layout of the magazine looks like a tenmplate that came with the desktop-publishing program. (I did get one book review into _Z_, but my experience was probably atypical. At the time, Gerry O'Sullivan was doing some editing for them, and he and I took a bit of a piece I'd written for another magazine, and reworked it to fit it into an open slot in _Z_. If anyone's interested, it was a review of Michael Medved's repulsive _Hollywood Vs. America_, and the full-length version's on my website, www.briansiano.com.)
I once designed a magazine project called _Evil Magazine_. It would have been devoted to reporting on evil, with stock investment advice for companies that dealt in military hardware, ads for the School of the Americas, that sort of thing. I couldn't decide on the writing approach. But it was to look like a professional, mainstream news magazine, written and laid out as slickly as a combination of _Forbes_ and _Newsweek_, and between Pagemaker and Corel, I did a pretty nice job on that. To me, the design was at _least_ as important as the content. It had to look clean and professional.
Oh, and just to address some replies I got on my comments about efficiency and construction. I did put quote marks around the word "efficiency." That's because efficiency is, well, dependent upon what people want or need to be efficient. If you want to develop the best possible design for snow removal, or thermal control, or wind resistance, or energy usage, or whatever, yes, that's efficient, but it also requires a lot more R&D and higher initial costs. On the other, if you want a design that's adaptable to other uses, can be erected very quickly with standard parts, whose geometries aren't going to vary much from every other building out there (fast and cheap), then you're going to go with the usual boxlike crap we get in office parks. And that imperative's just as likely to turn up in a capitalist society as it would a socialist one these days.
I'm not a fan of Wilhelm Reich. His _The Mass Psychology of Fascism_ had some interesting insights, but his stuff on the orgone, "cloudbusting" and UFOs is demented bullshit.