When Ewa Wojciak met Bruce Kalberg, she had just received her MFA and landed a job as the art director of the recently launched LA Weekly. Kalberg was working as a temporary assistant in the accounting office. Their first lunchbreak together, Kalberg told Wojciak he wanted to show her something. He led her out of the building to his VW Bug, parked right out front on Sunset Boulevard. The car was a mess, as if he’d been living in it. The mess turned out to be piles of handmade magazines. Kalberg reached inside and pulled one out. The magazine was called No Mag. “This is what I do,” he said. Within a month Kalberg had moved in with Wojciak and the two were publishing No Mag out of her apartment.
No Mag was the quintessential print document of what would come to be known as punk, and later hardcore, in Los Angeles. Between 1978 and 1986, the magazine featured, in Wojciak’s words, “every punk band there ever was,” including Black Flag, X, Circle Jerks, Fear, Germs, Descendents, T.S.O.L., D.O.A., and The Go-Go’s, among many others. The magazine also included interviews with artists like Johanna Went and Rachel Rosenthal and filmmakers like Penelope Spheeris and David Lynch, and the first published artwork by Raymond Pettibon. In 2024, after almost four decades out of print, Wojciak compiled a new issue of the magazine, the beginning of an official relaunch.
Publishing a print magazine by hand looked very different in the late 70s than it does today. When they put out the earlier issues of the magazine, Wojciak and Kalberg were pulling their resources directly from the environment around them. They would tear advertisements off billboards and bus benches and break into nurseries after hours to steal pieces for homemade sets. Then they would go out to clubs to see bands play and invite them over afterward to interview and photograph them––in the dark, as Kalberg preferred. “We would bring a band home almost every night,” Wojciak says. “We photographed many of the bands before they were ever seen.”
The spirit of the magazine reflected the spirit of the music as Kalberg and Wojciak understood it: unschooled in execution, but deadly serious in intent. “These are not just musicians. These are people that were thinking about the culture and trying to push the edge of the art and the music,” Wojciak says. “Putting themselves out there in uncomfortable ways.” The two were adamant that the magazine feel different from what already existed in the media, not a fanzine or a tabloid (like the already established Slash), not a venue for cultural criticism, not a celebrity glossy. “We weren’t in the business of reprinting stuff. We weren’t in the business of promoting things we didn’t like. We weren’t in the business of reviewing at all. If somebody was in the magazine, it was because we thought they were cool.”
Cool, for Kalberg and Wojciak, came in many forms. No Mag #7 includes back-to-back articles featuring shock-hardcore icons Fear and feminist performer Rosenthal. Fear’s interview, subtitled “Fudge-Packing in Garageland,” presents the band in their purest form, as a gang of beer-soaked pranksters committed to the over-the-top bit of Reaganite white male chauvinism. On the same page, frontman Lee Ving declares “Apathy is the enemy… and homosexuality,” and then “FEAR only packs fudge with boys that are true blue.” For anyone who might be confused, bassist Derf Scratch soon clarifies, “The whole premise of our band when we started was to get people to hate us.”
Immediately following Fear’s interview is Rosenthal’s response, headlined “54 Year Old Feminist Rachel Rosenthal Says: ‘LEE, THAT’S JUST NOT COOL!’” In a full-page editorial bringing together everything from ants to Antonin Artaud, Rosenthal cajoles Ving to consider the impact of his words, whatever they might mean to him: “We know you’re joking…you’re smart. Very smart. With your silly tough clothes…your cute sense of humor…you want us to quake and laugh at the same time.” She goes on to interrogate Ving about his son, Deacon, pictured alongside him in the photo opposite the interview’s first page, and the femicidal rant Ving reads off the band’s garage wall on its second. “Don’t teach the kids to rape and maim me, Lee,” she concludes. “That’s just not cool.”
Publishing this kind of material required that Wojciak live what she called “a double life,” working straight production jobs during the day to finance the magazine’s moonlight madness. The culture at LA Weekly was laid back––many of Kalberg and Wojciak’s coworkers became No Mag contributors––but the culture of corporate broadcasting was not. “I couldn’t appear on the CBS roster and then on the No Mag masthead the same week,” she explains. Wojciak’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the pages of #7; in others, it’s listed under “advertising,” or another department tangential to the all-encompassing role as co-publisher she maintained throughout the magazine’s run.
Kalberg wasn’t blessed with the same flexibility. At shows, he was a character everyone recognized. He picked up the nickname “Liverhead” after he gave himself a reverse mohawk and started coating the buzzed stripe across the middle of his scalp with liver meat. In his relationships, though, he was a mercurial personality, with gifts and tendencies that lent themselves to creativity, but little else. As Wojciak describes him, “He had dyslexia. He was clumsy. He didn’t see well. He had a lot of weird little quirks…he also, early on, drank a lot, and took a fair amount of drugs, which made him not a warm and fuzzy person to be around always. The people that liked him really liked him. Some people didn’t like him. I liked him.”
“He was not an easy person,” she goes on, “He was an intellectual. A lot of people just thought he was some fucked up guy standing in the corner at some show, but that was just how he presented. I think the people that got to know him really had some pretty deep conversations with him.” No Mag’s original run only lasted until 1986, but Wojciak and Kalberg continued to live and work together until Kalberg’s death of leukemia in 2011. Shortly after the magazine ceased operations, Wojciak founded her own agency. Kalberg taught himself computer skills and worked for Wojciak as a designer. In 2005, the two founded Yes Press to publish Kalberg’s novel Sub-Hollywood under his pseudonym Bruce Caen.
In many ways, Sub-Hollywood is a fictional companion to No Mag, a largely autobiographical account of a young man’s coming of age on the West Coast music scene at the turn of the 1980s. One of many real-life events the book dramatizes is a 2008 altercation between Kalberg and his friend Peter Haskell, which ended with Kalberg shooting and killing Haskell in self-defense. A lengthy feature in the same LA Weekly at which Wojciak and Kalberg met presents the event as the defining moment in Kalberg’s life, one that brought to a climax years of instability and repressed violence. Wojciak sees it very differently. “Somebody came into our lives and a bad thing happened…and that pretty much ended [Kalberg’s] life in many ways,” she says. “It’s unfortunate, but I don’t think it’s important to the discussion about the magazine, or he would. It’s cheap sensationalism.”
For many years, Kalberg and Wojciak agreed not to publish anything else under the No Mag banner. “As long as I’m alive,” said Kalberg, “what’s the point of doing this again?” Even after Kalberg died, Wojciak turned down multiple offers to revive or anthologize the magazine. Then, says Wojciak, “a weird thing happened.” With Donald Trump’s second term as president on the horizon, she had a revelation. “When we first did the magazine it was Ronald Reagan, and everybody was out of work, and people were being let out of mental hospitals, and we all thought it was really the end of the world in many ways,” she muses. “Now we have a much bigger monster that we all have to figure out how to live with.”
Tapping back into the ethos of what at the time was a cutting-edge DIY enterprise was easier said than done. “Now, to find somebody that can print something that looks like it has some edge or accident to it,” laments Wojciak, “nobody wants to do it in a cost-effective way.” The original issues of No Mag were printed on cheap newsprint of a quality usually reserved for porn publishers. Wojciak had to reach as far as Lithuania to find a printer who could approximate the same quality paper and the same color ink at the same page size. The materials and methods Kalberg and Wojciak were using in the 70s and 80s fell out of favor for a reason, but Wojciak wanted the publication of the new issue to feel “seamless, like it came out three months after the last one.”
Achieving this seamlessness was easier with the cooperation of so many of the original magazine’s most frequent contributors, including photographers Frank Gargani and Ed Colver, performers Went and Ron Athey, and Pettibon, who sent Wojciak “four times the amount of work that’s actually in the new issue.” Despite her existing network, though, Wojciak also made a point of including just as many young artists she knew not because of their outsize reputations, but because she happened to meet them or see their work by chance, including avant-folk singer-songwriter Calvin Love, “digital daemonologist” Norberto Gomez, and cover stars Cole Alexander and Zumi Rosow of Crush.
“The people that are in this issue symbolize, to me, active thinkers, and active doers,” Wojciak says. “They’re all people making stuff that is in some way not pretty, or testing whatever that edge is, or whatever that means, to test the edge. They’re trying to push those boundaries.” For the magazine to resonate like it did in its heyday, she believed, it would have to capture this spirit: “In a world where everything is on Instagram thirty seconds later and everybody is weighing in, how do you make something that feels fresh or new or has any meaning?” For Wojciak, the answer was to publish a magazine that guaranteed that “every time you turned the page you would be surprised.”
Staying true to this spirit also meant refusing to cater to the institutions who now control the legacies of many of the artists who have been Wojciak’s friends since before any of them could imagine a future, let alone a legacy. Paul McCarthy and Jim Shaw, for example, couldn’t be included without Wojciak crediting their galleries. Counteracting this influence was a matter of maintaining an honest curatorial eye. “I put everybody together on the same page, and the blue-chip artist doesn’t necessarily get the bigger page or the bigger space or anything else,” she says. “I think that a lot of those people really craved seeing how their artwork would speak to the other things, that curation for me of trying to forget who some of these people are.”
The result is neither a direct recreation of the magazine as it once was, nor an exercise in nostalgia that reveals how much has changed since, but something else altogether. What happens when a return to form means working against what the form has become? Wojciak can’t destroy the world she and Kalberg built, but she can see it with the same eyes and decide what belongs, and what doesn’t. The new No Mag is that vision fit to print. It’s no longer a shared vision, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true to the vision of the partner who used to share it. “I don’t feel like I’m channeling Bruce,” Wojciak says. “But I feel like he would be pretty proud of this.”
