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Open City
Series
Identifier:
IA.ITM.001515-->
Description
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.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). In March 1968 he 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 $1000 fine on the first charge eventually put the shoestring operation out of business.
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. 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."
(Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_City_(newspaper) )
Related people
John Bryan (creator)Charles Bukowski (contributor) (created)