There is good interview with Seymour Glass of Bananafish magazine at:
https://www.noisextra.com/2020/01/01/in-conversation-with-seymour-glass-bananafish/It is interesting, but also kind of annoying reminder about state of things. Amount of people who are
really into magazines is rapidly declining. Bananafish is rated as cult magazine by many, yet man still had boxes full of his old issues waiting for people to buy. You can grab them from Tedium House website. Yep, I guess that's the news. There is still good old internet 1.0 html website with items for sale. I found it quite brutal reminder of my own behavior, that I didn't even know Bananafish still had issues available! I just assumed all are gone 15+ years ago.
If you count out Special Interests forum, I do not visit "internet sites" almost at all. Theme could be combined with internet sites disappearing all together. Noiseguide, Heathen Harvest, all the yahoogroups, etc. When one needs the old info and some interview to make quite from... it's likely no longer out there.
It is unfortunate fact that most places I tend to go, is merely platforms of huge businesses, not private websites. Not that I would use much of bandcamp nor most of the social media services either. Been removing most of my own stuff from places like that unless I absolutely don't have other option.
Internet 2.0 is so far from mindset of "magazine", that those who have lived decade on free instant gratification, probably are unlikely to type url, visit store, send email order, wait to be billed, pay (including probably annoying price of shipping) , and wait box to arrive.. might not feel it relevant at all. I can understand that very very easily. Yet one can see that this leads to magazines to cease to exists.
Like mr. Glass says, spending year with project, investing all that time, money and energy, and by each issue getting less back, was not really encouraging. Less - not being less money, but less enthusiasm. I am guessing that not even artists dropping short message of thanking to be included and all the friends just throwing the magazine into piles of "will check later on better time"... haha. I guess it comes down to is that amount of effort mentally equal to be seen only by... 100, 200,.. people? Instead of 500, 1000, 2000...?
Magazine like Bananafish couldn't probably downscale it. I would assume that this is obstacle that perhaps most magazines had. ND, ALAP, Bananafish, and so on... can you just downscale it to level of making it "fun" again - and maintain the spirit of magazine? Hard to say. Although I would say that if next week would be announced series of mini ALAP 'zines consisting all material that was generated over the years, I'd prefer that over several hundred pages book that might or might not get done?
Market for old 'zines... I was quite surprised at some point when I did discover bookogs. It felt like really needed and good idea, that
could potentially fill the gap. Both, selling new inventory, but most of all old stuff. Then, very quickly one could realize that IF the main site Discogs is so touchy about the content, you can be damn sure that any slightly transgressive zine worth buying, any slightly obscure book you'd be into getting, won't be there after one bozo files complaint.
So, all in all, I would think that despite thinking internet will preserve and make everything visible, actually there is and will be underground culture, that remains to be accessible for limited time and limited amount of people. It might be also good thing, although I'd like to see magazines documenting it, be able to spread 10 fold print runs.
