Over its 20-issue run (1993-1994) NoHo Magazine bore witness to the art of the NoHo Arts District at its beginning. In doing so, NoHo Magazine itself became a creative product of the arts district and an answer to the question, “What is the art in the NoHo Arts District?”

I have myself, at times, discounted the whole arts district thing as a real estate marketing gimmick conjured up by the Community Redevelopment Agency to rebrand a depressed and dilapidated neighborhood that spent most of the nineties covered in dust that blew off the MTA’s North Hollywood subway construction site. Heck, the 1994 Northridge earthquake did more to hasten the demolition of worn out, vacant buildings than it did in actual damage to valuable structures. That, combined with federal aid money with which to rebuild, turned a natural “disaster” into a convenient assist from Mother Nature.

But then I reread NoHo Magazine and I realize that only on the surface was the NoHo Arts District about a geographic place and the buildings that cover it. In the pages of the magazine, the location, the building, the real estate, was absolutely trivial and inconsequential to the artistic expression that we were trying to experience, understand, interpret, and share with our readers.

At NoHo Magazine we wrote about people — creative people doing creative things the best they could with their given talent and resources at hand. The only real estate story we did was about the El Portal Theatre and the struggle to remake a 1920’s-era movie house into a viable, functioning live theatre venue. The El Portal is an architectural curiosity in North Hollywood and could not be ignored, even though it was a very small part of the art of the NoHo Arts District.

Now, 20 years later, you can read NoHo Magazine yourself as I put the content of the magazine on the Web. You can judge for yourself if there was enough art in North Hollywood to warrant a name and a district.

NoHo20 is a two-fold project

First, it is an archiving project. There are probably few people who remember NoHo Magazine, an infinitesimal number of people who possess a copy of the magazine, and probably only one person in the world who has a copy of every issue that was printed. That person is, of course, me, the publisher. Eventually I hope to have most, if not all, of the content of NoHo Magazine uploaded to the Web.

Second, NoHo20 is a memoir project entitled “Critic’s Dilemma.” At first I conceived “Critic’s Dilemma” as a documentary film, which probably has more to do with my secret fantasy to be the subject of a documentary than it does the suitability of the subject for film. Since I have some experience and talent as a writer, and absolutely none as a filmmaker, I have reconceived “Critic’s Dilemma” as a writing project. But I still harbor a suppressed desire for it to become some sort of performance/video/film project. “Critic’s Dilemma” is the behind-the-scenes story of NoHo Magazine.

So this is where you come to a fork in the road. You can go the route of NoHo Magazine, or you can take the path of “Critic’s Dilemma.” Or, of course, you can do both at your leisure.