About

Conceived as a monthly art & politics journal, we published our first edition of 4000 newsprint copies in August 1998, distributed freely in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, the East Village, and Lower East Side. For the next six years, the WBO published regularly—if not always on schedule—until the August 2004 Republican invasion of New York City and our Anti-Convention Insurgency Issue. Spiritually exhausted by America’s acquiescence to the Bush Mob’s coup, we did not publish again until May 2006, devoting this, our final print issue to supporting that month’s massive peace march in downtown Manhattan. A selection of the best work from our print issues can be found at http://bopcollective.org.

Now, through the miracle of the Internet, we are carrying on. Like our unofficial headquarters in the now defunct Right Bank Café—Williamsburg’s original bohemian watering hole—the WBO has always been about publishing an eclectic commingling of the highbrow and low, blending critical theory with proletarian humor, pornography with politics, telling truth to power in unconditional terms. It is our conviction that today, as the American Empire approaches its bloated climax and decline, writers and artists must provide new language and images to illuminate our exodus from the Corporate Hive-Mind. As Bertolt Brecht once put it, “You can’t write poems about trees if the forest is filled with policemen.”