Red China Magazine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This page has been listed on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. Please see that page for justifications and discussion.

The name Red China carries with it more than an empty symbolism and a great magazine. It was also the moment when a creative group of nearly forty would implode, leaving behind a core team of fashonistas, writers, and ethnobotanists to edit and design one of the most "well-failed" journals to have graced the internet.

When editor Alex Smith decided to name his debut journal effort Red China, there was an upheaval among his early constituents, namely Harold Hauser, his wife Cheryl, and two others that were never named in the scandal. "Red China," he exclaimed to the then New York Post editor Arthur Pendleton. "Red China was what finally made us sick of him."

The magazine's launch issue contained various emoticons that were manipulated to look like "the genitals of gods (Peter Labier, '78)," among other tchotchkies and found things. Hauser and his wife, now believed to have been romantically involved with the then 11-year-old Ronald J. Johnson, had been thinking of diverging from the literary concern after Smith announced the name to a small group of friends and collaborators. "We thought it was some kind of sick joke," Cheryl said of the evening. "He had a big (expletive removed) flag that he had hung on the rafters of his loft. He said 'Red China' and then he poured a beer all over himself. His girlfriend was humiliated. Then LaBier jumped off the balcony onto about seventy-five matresses."

After much drinking and comraderie, Smith walked to Hausen and offered a congratulatory shake at the wrist. Cheryl spoke briefly to this moment on the phone to a Page Six reporter months later: "Harry said, 'Don't touch me. It's over.' And then Smith, who'd taken to calling himself 'Jon 500' around his friends, asked us both to leave."

At this point it is reported that the design team, spearheaded by the androgynous Christopher Reed, attempted to hurl themselves into one of the eighteen cakes hanging from the ceiling. "But, as the story goes," Pendleton writes in his book Many Flavors, "the cake they jumped into was fashioned of plywood and caulking. There was, according to Reed, only one real giant cake hanging from that ceiling. They chose the wrong one. (pg. 23)" One person was hardly wounded, another came away wholly unscathed.

Hauser didn't see any of these celebrations. He left the party with 15 others who "hated the title and despised what they had become (pg. 19 Many Flavors)." Hausen went on to write the bestelling book Problems We Found and Clark: What He Wrote When He Wasn't Looking. The latter of the two would win the Pulitzer and bring the oft disregarded pseudonym of Ronald J. Johnson, Daryl Clark, to the forefront of literary history.

Red China, the magazine, remains a seminal volume of discovery and anthropomorphism via text and textiles, and has been listed among the likes of The New Yorker and, more recently Day of the Dead as one of the greatest, most problematic failures of the late 20th Century.