An Evening with V. Vale, In Conversation with Dan Fox 

Presented by the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

V. Vale was born in 1944 in a Japanese American incarceration camp to a Japanese showgirl mother and an actor father. He was later fostered by a Polish family in Peoria, his Japanese uncle in Fresno, and a Black family in Whittier, California. After a stint as keyboardist for proto-metal band Blue Cheer, he worked at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco where, after being gifted $100 each by Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, he set up Search and Destroy, one of the most important punk fanzines of the period.

In 1980 he started RE/Search, a magazine that gave sustained and unrivalled coverage to fringe and underground culture: the first issue alone included Julio Cortazar, Sun Ra, and Throbbing Gristle. Later books were devoted to or written by William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Kathy Acker. Other titles included: Angry Women, Bob Flanagan: Super Masochist, Incredibly Strange Music, Pranks, Industrial Culture Handbook. Modern Primitives (1990) played a crucial role in making tattooing and piercing practices better known to the public.