Flatland magazine suffered from the same financial body-blow delivered to the entire zine world when the Fine Print distributors went bankrupt late last year, a blow that still has Steamshovel Press reeling. Flatland 15 is the comeback issue, dedicated by editor Jim Martin, in fact, as "the Fine Print" issue. It reflects some of the lingering effects of the Fine Print debacle: the cover is not slick and not in color. According to the editorial, Flatland no longer gets distributed to newstands, but a last-minute deal with the Desert Moon distributors kept this issue on the stands.
It's late in coming--which after all is always true of a zine of such consistently high quality content. Nothing on Monica Lewinsky gets in the way of Flatland 15's 60+ packed pages of repressed and secret evidence review. Martin interviews Peter Robbins, co-author with Larry Warren of last year's most interesting UFO book, Left At East Gate. That book told the story of the Bentwaters UFO incident as experienced by Warren, an Air Force security police officer at the Bentwaters base. Robbins, who has done much level-headed research into UFOs, as well as Wilhelm Reich, gave voice to Warren's narrative. It not only details the incident, including connection to Reichian cloudbusters, but tells of how it affected Warren's life and career afterward. Among other things, Warren was a friend of the late blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn, who shared his interest in UFOs.
Flatland 15 also contains an interview--supplemented by a "Fantasy Analysis of the Nixon tapes"--with psychohistorian Lloyd deMausse, who argues that people remember where they were when JFK died because "we don't want people to think we did it!" Kenn Thomas contributes an up-close examination of the Great Salad Oil Swindle, and Ed Gehrman reports upon biowarfare experimenters with out-of-control moral compasses. A mysterious "Dr. X" contributes an article exposing RDF, "rapid death factor", and some of the horrible reality behind the processing and marketing of blue green algae harvested in Klamath Falls, OR.
Ain't no Fine Print fuck up gonna keep fiestyFlatland from telling it like it is!
Flatland #15 is available from Flatland, POB 2420, Fort Bragg, CA 95437. Check out the Flatland Books website at flatlandbooks.com.