The Wooden Works

 

When I was a much younger man back in the early or mid 1970s, I envisioned a magazine titled Madagascar, a sort of combination fanzine and underground comic book. The title came after reading something about the island nation of Madagascar, a land so remote from any other continent or landmass that evolution took its own bizarre path into flora and fauna not seen elsewhere in the world. A land of lemurs and chameleons and baobab trees. 

Not that I wanted to publish a magazine specifically about the actual island, but I liked the concept of someplace remote and strange; something that was so strange basically because it was so remote. I grew up relatively far from childhood friends by schoolboy standards (that is, further than I could easily ride a bicycle), and absent peer pressure or critical feedback, my tastes in music and television drifted away from the mainstream. My own private Madagascar. As Rod Serling might have put it, “A Madagascar not of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. There's a signpost up ahead - your next stop, Madagascar!”

I also liked the sound of the name, a “mad gas-car.” I could almost hear it backfiring, and from there imagine Harpo Marx careening madly around in an old jalopy, honking that horn he always kept tucked into his belt. I was into the Marx Brothers back then, as well as Bob Dylan, Firesign Theater, Tolkien, National Lampoon, and recreational psychedelics.

I never did anything with the concept (where would I even start?) but I let it roll around and marinate in my imagination for years. So it was a major disappointment to me when Disney came out with a movie with that name in 2005 – after 30-plus years of thinking about it but not doing anything, suddenly the door seemed permanently shut. There were copyright considerations (can Disney own the name of a nation?) and the realization that everyone would inevitably compare my creation to the contents of the movie (which, for the record, I’ve never seen).

But what did I have to lose? I’m retired now with all the time in the world and even though I have no experience or expertise in publishing or writing, why not give it a go? So I'm happy to announce that after some 50 years or so, I've finally completed the first issue of Madagascar. 

My interests have evolved since late adolescence and now include, among other things, various forms of avant-garde jazz and other outré music, film (not popular blockbuster movies, but, you know, cinema), video games, some very specific and limited aspects of popular culture, Zen Buddhism, stoicism, sports, and of course, myself. I imagine some aspects of all these will come up in the pages of Madagascar.

At this point, it's a freebie magazine, digital only, and a labor of love, not of commerce. I’m not paying for printing costs or distribution or copyright fees - I’m not paying for anything. It's all homemade and written by yours truly, and the photography and artwork are all original, fair use (i.e., covers of albums reviewed), or generated by AI, mostly Midjourney. 

The cover, however, was created using Open AI’s DALL-E 3 (prompt: monument for “MADAGASCAR” in the style of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, marble architecture, floral motifs, flowing fabrics, meticulous attention to detail, bright and vivid colors, luxury and decadence, realism, and historical accuracy). I figured a pompous, overblown, and over-the-top cover would be the ideal intro to what promises to be by every measure a piece-of-shit publication.