I think it was a Friday. It was one of our first long trips out of the house since Jordan was born, and we had time to kill between the movie and dinner, so we stopped by Tower to check out the magazine racks. I headed, as I always do, to the Zines rack, both to check if they had the latest issue of HERE, and to see what else of interest I could find, and...

...and it was gone.

Oh, the rack was still there, filled top to bottom with glossy skateboarding magazines. But the zines - all the weird variety, offset printed and shoddily xeroxed, music reviews and personal-essay rants and uncategorizable screeds of all sorts - were nowhere to be found. Until I found them, hidden on a back wall, a slim plastic bin relegated to obscurity, findable only by those in the know.

Now, this isn't to blame Tower - in fact, one e-mail and they'd restored the Zines section to its former glory, which was far more than I'd expected. But the momentary demise of the Zines rack at one store is a sign of the times: 4-1/2 years ago, when I started HERE, there was a whole culture of independently produced publications, as cheap desktop publishing and frustration at the drab conformity of the mainstream media led thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, to make and consume their own media.

A lot has changed since 1998. For one thing, Factsheet Five, the zine review bible, went out of business (the same week the first issue of HERE went off to the printer, in fact), leaving zine culture without its central gathering place, not to mention its main avenue of marketing to the broader reading public. But more than that, the media ain't what it used to be: Now, when I'm looking for literate offbeat writing, I'm less likely to visit a magazine store (though I still do) than to surf the web, where much of the creative energy that drives the zine revolution has fled. For better or for worse, indie culture is making the leap from print to electronic, and to pretend otherwise is spitting into the wind of history.

All of which is an extremely long-winded way of welcoming you to the relaunch of HERE magazine, the website. (For those new to HERE, long-winded and roundabout is our typical way of approaching a subject - you can be the judge of how this will translate to the punchy, clipped discourse of the web.) From here on out, HERE will consist of two parallel publications: the website, which will be continually updated as new material is posted (click on NEWSLETTER at the top of this screen to receive e-mail updates when there's new HERE stuff on the site); and the zine, which will continue to be published every six months or so, as we get around to it. (To get real-life paper copies of HERE in your mailbox, click ORDER at the top of this page.) From time to time, there may be things on the web that aren't in the paper zine, or vice versa - it all depends on what we think works where.

So HERE is a work in progress - but then, it always was. If you like what you see, tell us; if you hate it, or have ideas for how it could be better, tell us that, too. And if you have a story of your own that you'd like to share with our readers, both virtual and physical, them by all means drop us a line.

Until next time,

Neil deMause
Editor, HERE

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