Chip Rowe, "The Playboy Advisor" writer: Mr. Media Interview Classic

Originally published July 14, 1997

Chip Rowe is an expert in two fields. The first is sex. Every month he spends his days researching, studying and writing about the most obscure and most obvious elements of physical intimacy for one, two or more consenting adults.

Now, if you're an expert at sex, most people might wonder when you have time -- or need -- to develop any other interests. But before Rowe became the Playboy Advisor in 1994, one of his other great obsessions in life was zines.

Zines are homemade, not-ready-for-newsstand magazines created for self-expression rather than profit. Rowe himself is the publisher of Chip's Closet Cleaner, a sort of "Your Zine of Zines," periodically collecting the best material in other people's zines. And now he's gone a step further, interviewing zine publishers and compiling their best pop culture and counterculture humor, essays, interviews and cartoons in a new paperback, The Book of Zines: Readings From the Fringe (Owl Books/Henry Holt).



Even better, Rowe can connect the dots between his day job at Playboy and his zine hobby.

"Some of the funniest advice to give is when I can find an answer or insight in a small zine like Black Sheets or Bust, which had one of the best pieces I have ever read sort of about sex called 'Don'ts For Boys.'"

"Don't for Boys" is one of three stories from Bust magazine featured in The Book of Zines. It offers advices such as "Don't lie. I'll catch you." And "Don't call me if you haven't gotten over your last girlfriend or mother."

If you've ever read or published a zine, you're probably wondering who would ever publish a book of articles from them. For one thing, the vast majority of zines are horrible to read and horrible to look at. But the cream of the crop are often better -- and infinitely more compelling -- than many corporate magazines.

"You see certain articles, certain viewpoints that just strike you as brilliant, and you look around for somebody to go, 'Hey, look at this!' " Rowe says. "I had this vague idea there should be an anthology, and in late 1994, I started seeing articles about the zine revolution in Rolling Stone, Details, and notably in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal did a front page article, 'Zines of the Times,' and just to show how unhip they are, they were obviously trying to rhyme 'Zines' with 'Signs.' They got it wrong. But book publishers in New York were educated about zines and recognized their significance. Enough people know what zines are that somebody walking into a bookstore who sees The Book of Zines will be curious enough to pick it up."

Not that Rowe was motivated by visions of big bucks. That would go sagainst the grain for a zine aficionado, after all.

"My feeling was just to do it because it was ready to be done," he says, sounding more like a zine publisher than an editor at one of the world's best-selling magazines.<>The Book of Zines include:

"'Solve it Yourself' JFK Assassination Diorama," from a zine called Verbivore, provided readers with the tools to recreate the scene at Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Was Lee Harvey Oswald, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon or space aliens behind the plot to kill the president?

"Rejected Apes Subplots," a feature in Hitch, suggested new ideas for the Planet of the Apes films, including: "Dr. Zaius calls for an end to feces-throwing during council meetings."

"Open Up and Bleed" is a graphic guide to legendary to legendary stuntman Evel Knievel's many broken bones. It first appeared in a zine called Heinous.

Rowe's book is full of stories, lists and graphics such as these that appealed to his sense of humor and the offbeat. It is not, in any way, the last word on zine culture -- that's what Factsheet Five , an occasional catalogue of zines and where to find them (profiled in Mr. Media last fall), is for. The Book of Zines is one of at least three recent books describing the once underground phenomena of zines. Also available in bookstores is The Factsheet Five Zine Reader: Dispatches from the Edge of the Zine Revolution (Crown) by R. Seth Friedman and A Girl's Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution by Tristan Taormino and Karen Green (St. Martin's Press).

Since 1989, Rowe has published 13 issues of his own zine, Chip's Closet Cleaner. The first one was just eight pages long and photocopied in glorious black-and-white at Kinko's. The last one was 68 pages, printed in two colors, published in a quantity of 900 copies and online at Rowe's Web site.

Rowe is also the publisher of a second zine, This Is the Spinal Tap Zine: An A to Zed Guide to One of England's Loudest Bands. He's the kind of guy who collected Reader's Digests as a kid because they made his world "neat and organized." As an adult he indexed several months of the Weekly World News -- for fun.

Zines is Rowe's first mainstream book.


"I did books when I was in fourth grade, circulation of one," he recalls. "My parents still pat me on the head, even after this book came out."

Rowe, 30, took over the coveted Playboy Advisor job in 1994 from James R. Petersen, who dispensed sage and sometimes sardonic advice to men for 22 years. Only four or five men have held the job since the column's first appearance in September 1960.

Each month, Rowe answers up to 18 reader questions (of 500 submitted each month), mostly about sex, but sometimes touching on wine, stereo equipment or how much their old Playboy collection is worth. Almost all queries are answered in print or by mail -- including one Mr. Media himself sent as a college student back in '79.

"We have form letter responses for a lot of them," Rowe admits, "but the ones that really take a lot of time, of course, are the ones you have to research and that you haven't heard before."



That's where Rowe combines his job and his hobby.

"When you are writing about sex every month, you have to read stuff that keeps your interest up," he says. "You can't read sex manuals every month; they are pretty much the same. Sex is not that complicated. So I find some of the freshest writing in zines. I just mentioned Rollerderby in the Advisor. It is a really well-known zine by Lisa Carver, who interviewed a woman who had a hand fetish and was very eloquent. It was in answer to a guy who wrote in saying that his girlfriend had commented on his hands and is this weird? I said, no, not at all and I quoted from Rollerderby and not Time magazine. I feel more comfortable quoting from Rollerderby because I am sure the guy hadn't seen that or wouldn't see it except for me giving him the address."

You're probably wondering the same thing I was: Why him?

"People always ask me, 'How do you qualify for a job like that,' and I get to say, 'Well, I am just good at sex. And I have always been good at sex'," he says, perhaps half kidding.

"It is a cool thing. What qualifies me for this? Well, I am a journalist, and I am curious. I love finding stuff that I can tell people.

The most common question asked of Rowe typically ends, "Am I normal?" One guy recently wrote in that he sneezed five times after every orgasm -- "Is that normal?"

Well, Chip?

"I walked over to the Northwestern University Medical Library and found a reference in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association)," he says. "A physician had prescribed a patient some nasal spray that solved the same problem. I found it just amazing that somebody had addressed this and I was able to give this guy an answer.

"It is kind of a cool feeling to know that in some sense I can help set standards of sex, that great sex involves pleasing your partner, it is unselfish, if you want to have great sex, it doesn't begin with yourself. Great sex is really focusing on the other person."

When people learn what Rowe does for a living, he becomes the life of any party. Well, almost.

"My wife rolls her eyes," he says. In fact, before they were married, journalist Charlotte Snow wrote an article for NewCity in Chicago titled, "I'm Dating the Playboy Advisor!" In it, she revealed how her parents responded to her boyfriend's occupation (well, actually) and how her friends now turn to him for advice.

At his 10th high school reunion, one former classmates got on his hands and knees, worshipping at Rowe's feet.

"Omigod! Omigod!" he kept repeating, awed by Rowe's position.

Curiously, the Playboy Advisor column has always been uncredited. People came to know Petersen over the years because he wrote books and toured college campuses. Rowe figures all that is still ahead of him.

"I am in no hurry," he says. "I still have a lot to learn about sex."

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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R. Seth Friedman, "Factsheet Five," editor: Mr. Media Interview Classic

Originally Published November 11, 1996

If your reading taste skirts the fringes of what's typically found on the newsstand, R. Seth Friedman has the magazine for you.

Factsheet Five is the bible of underground publishing, an A-to-XYZZY news encyclopedia of the most bizarre, tasteless and irreverent zines the world has ever known. Each issue of Factsheet Five offers reviews of some 2,000 small-press and Xeroxed rags covering topics as narrow as Hair to Stay, "For Men Who Love and Appreciate Natural, Hairy Women."

Much of the fun in reading F5 is in the zine titles: Pants That Don't Fit; Three Entire Minutes; Meshuggah; The Curmudgeon's Home Companion; and Details Omitted For Clarity. More specifically, Junk Magnet is the story of a man named Nicholas who found contentment in life through his Apple IIci computer. I Was A Teenage X-Phile is devoted to the TV show, "The X-Files." Wagons of Steel is devoted to people who race station wagons. And Black Giantess is 81 pages of "loving carnage imposed on truly small men by big black women."

"Name a fetish and I can probably come up with an actual zine that covers it," Friedman brags.

Reviews are split up by categories, including "sex," "grrrlz," "B-movies," "comix" and "food." Under the category of "Politics," for example, you'll find: 2% Homogenized (bizarre politics in Wisconsin); Cement Squeeze (a liberal voice in Phoenix); Red Star Rising (Marxism); and Yowl ("For Today's Zealot").

Some people may wonder what separates a "magazine" from a "zine." For the most part, it's a matter of business design and passion. Magazine publishers are motivated by profit; zine publishers are spurred on by an irresistible desire for self-expression. And the lifespan of a zine can be as short as one issue. "The publishers either run out of ideas or money," Friedman says.



Friedman, 32, is in his fifth year at the helm of F5, although the magazine actually began publication in 1982.

Founder Mike Gunderloy was involved in science fiction fandom and "anarchist politics" when he first noticed similarities between the two and created the original F5 as a guide to the two worlds.

But in a scenario Friedman could later appreciate, F5 took over Gunderloy's life. By 1990 — more than 40 issues later — he called it quits.

Around that time, Friedman, a fan of F5 and frequent contributor to zines with names such as Anarchy and Blue Rider, was a strait-laced working stiff, managing a local area network (LAN) for a Wall Street firm. When he was downsized out of a job, Friedman tore off his tie, moved to San Francisco and produced his first zine, Food For Thought. In his heart, however, Friedman yearned for the organization and clarity F5 brought to underground publishing. He took over.

"I thought it would be fun," Friedman says wistfully. "Then it took over my life.

"It's not just the workload, the 2,000 zine reviews," he says. "It's the 2,000 zines and the 2,000 egos, 2,000 subscribers, 10,000 people who buy it on the newsstands, newsstand dealers who never seem to get enough copies but never have money to pay me and the advertisers who always want to buy ads but never return my calls."

Maybe that's why each issue of F5 takes about three months to produce, despite the full-time attention of Friedman and Contributing Editor Chris W. Becker, as well as 20 others who work on it part-time.

Still, unlike many of the small-time publishers whose work Friedman reviews, F5 provides him a living. "It pays my rent," he says. "But not by much."

So why does he keep doing it?

"I don't really want to get a job," Friedman says. "And I've always been a politically-motivated person. And politically, I think this is the best thing I could be doing with my life. I think Factsheet Five improves the lives of many people. It encourages people to express themselves. The main problem with politics today is that people feel they have no outlet to express themselves. I'm telling people they can build virtual communities, they can express themselves outside of work. I think Factsheet Five is a force for good."



In an effort to get back some of his life, Friedman recently announced a reduction in F5's publication schedule from four or five issues a year to two. He's not giving up on the field — he wrote about the world of zines for the 1997 edition of the Information Almanac and has edited a collection of zinedom's best work, The Factsheet Five Zine Reader (Crown Books), which will be published in February.

If you've ever thought about publishing your own zine, Friedman offers these tips:

• Get as much of the zine produced for free as possible; finding someone with access to a photocopier is a good start.

• Produce a zine that "reflects you as a person," he says.

"Many people produce a zine because they think it's cool. But if they have no passion, no interests, they should wait. There are already enough bad zines; we don't need any more."

But Friedman has faith in you.

"Inside everyone," he says, "is at least one good zine."

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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