who we are | where we came from | yesterday's tomorrow...today!

THE COMPANY LINE: THE SAGA OF TELEPORT CITY

Who We Are

Keith Allison
Founder, Editor, Writer
Born in Kentucky, schooled in Florida, and currently based out of New York City, Keith Allison was the guy who got bored one day and, rather than working on advancing a legitimate writing career, decided to tinker about on this thing they were calling the World Wide Web. Since that fateful day, he has remained steadfast in his dedication to doing very little to advance himself as a real writer, though the breadth of his knowledge as relates to all things Reb Brown is staggering -- and a bit terrifying.

Keith splits his time between running Teleport City, working as a technical writer at New York University, and sniffing out freelance magazine writing opportunities in the fields of travel, adventure, and entertainment. Previous engagements have included aborted careers as a graphic designer, a police beat reporter, an AP news wire editor, photographer, construction worker, and dandy rakehell and cad about town. His work includes stints with Toyfare, Route 66, and City magazines, among others, as well as contributions to the film studies book Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head. His most recent hobby is bugging National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Go, Esquire, and the magazine of the New York Museum of Natural History and Science for possible assignments.

Todd Stadtman
Writer
Todd Stadtman is a Bay Area based musician and writer whose past history of playing in marginal punk rock bands has left him with a deep feeling of kinship with all things unloved and obscure. This affinity is perhaps what lead him in late 2006 to create The Lucha Diaries, a website that was initially dedicated to obsessively cataloguing and reviewing Mexican wrestling movies, and which in turn helped to launch his high paying career as a film reviewer for Teleport City. When not releasing music that few people want to actually pay for or reviewing films that no one in their right mind would want to see, he has worked at a series of rent-paying jobs in San Francisco's white collar ghetto--and at one point made ends meet by selling vintage Japanese toys on the internets for exorbitant amounts of money until eBay came along and messed everything up. His past writing "gigs" have included stints as a film reviewer for both the SF Weekly and the Los Angeles Village View and as author of a column on film-related toys for the short-lived magazine Hollywood Collectibles. In recent years his position on marriage shifted dramatically when he met a woman who named War of the Gargantuas as her favorite film. He and his wife now share space with his rapidly metastasizing DVD collection in San Francisco's sunny Mission District.

David Foster
Writer
David grew up in rural Australia in a small town called Echuca. Echuca has become a successful tourist centre now, but back then it was another struggling river town, the halcyon days of it’s past long behind it. With very few prospects, he moved to Melbourne, unable to resist the bright lights, the colour, the sounds, and the sins of the flesh. Melbourne has a population of 3.74 million people of which David is now considered the city's 3,729,845th most dangerous man.

WRITING: In 2002, David entered his first novel, a black comedy called Arsehole in the Vogel Literary Awards in Australia. The book was not shortlisted and received no acclaim. At this stage it has been rejected by six prestigious publishers. David keeps all his rejection slips, and is in the process of hiring a private eye to track down those responsible.

MUSIC: In the late 1980's, David was a founding member of the progressive Blues Boogie Band, Heaps Of Roots, where he played Bass. A particularly ugly coup within the group forced David to give up his position, but his passion spurred him on to form the El Pistoleros: Blues Band, where he played Piano Accordion. After another coup, the El Pistoleros busted up after playing just one gig. Today, David is a member of the Zombie Warlords: Jazz Ensemble, possibly the world's laziest band.

David now spends his time working as a low rent Graphic Designer and writing reviews for Teleport City and his spy blog Permission To Kill.

Where We Came From

Back in the Fall of nineteen-hundred and eighty-seven, I decided to use the access to a copying machine granted me by my position as a "teacher's assistant" to publish my own fanzine. Called And When There's Darkness, after a line from an old Token Entry song, it was hand-written and pasted together. In 1989, I joined the staff of the high school newspaper and was able to leverage their HP DeskJet 500 printer, Macintosh computer, and Aldus PageMaker software (now Adobe, of course) to spruce things up a bit. When I left for college in 1990, I was able to expand the circulation to something like a monstrous 300 thanks to a friend who worked the graveyard shift at a 24-hour copy shop and some positive reviews in places like Maximumrocknroll and Factsheet Five.

At some point, however, I'd pretty much said everything I wanted to say about punk rock, and I lost interest in interviewing bands. The content began to shift more to cover the crazy kungfu and horror films I was digging up with help from my friends Pat (who published his own zine at the time, Kungfu Zombie) and Dave, who was the first hardcore video collector I knew (hardcore as in he worked hard at it, not that he collected hardcore porn -- well, not a lot of it). Eventually, I decided to change the name, first to Outside the Asylum (stolen from one of Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently" books), which only lasted one issue, and then to Kungfu Girl, which lasted a few more years and got positive press from all sorts of places that only mean very much to people with low aspirations -- Film Threat magazine, Sentai magazine, a few others. By this time, the focus was almost entirely on Hong Kong action and fantasy films, with some music, Godzilla, Doctor Who, and Prisoner stuff thrown in for good measure.

Around the same time, which would have been 1992 or 1993, I decided to launch a supporting BBS. I wanted to do something that would be part of Tom Jenkins' FidoNet system, because he was a punk rocker, but I was too dumb to ever really understand how FidoNet worked. So I got myself a copy of the Spitfire BBS software. This was something I could deal with, as it was controlled and configured almost entirely though batch files (we're still back in the days of DOS, mind you). In 1993, The Body Hammer (stolen from Tetsuo II: Body Hammer, which I had just seen) BBS went online. It was a pretty feeble affair, with a single dedicated phone line hooked up to a 386 computer with a one meg hard drive and blazing fast 1200 baud modem. Only one person at a time could use it. But still, there it was, and shortly after launching it, I decided to change the name to something I got from Arctic Animation's fansubbed VHS of the anime series Patlabor: Teleport City.

Teleport City came and went. In 1994, I moved to a new apartment and was no longer able or willing to pay for a dedicated modem line. In that same year, someone told me they'd found a bunch of information about Godzilla films on something called the World Wide Web, which was sort of this graphical upgrade of the Internet. At the time, ISPs were still hard to come by (other than AOL, Prodigy, and GEnie), and most of them didn't offer...heck. What was it? WinSlip/PPP -- the protocol you needed to access the Web through a graphical interface like Mosaic. The only place I could see the Web as the Web was in the University of Florida computer labs. But what I saw when I was there was pretty cool. In the summer of 1994, I taught myself HTML over a weekend (it was HTML 1.0 -- it wasn't hard). A couple months later, I'd dumped most of the old Kungfu Girl and Teleport City BBS reviews into html. I applied for a web hosting account through the university. They gave me a whole meg of storage space. I had a website.

It was rough going, of course. All text, grey background -- some of you remember what it looked like back then. I didn't have any way to do screencaps, so there were no graphics except for some poster art I'd found elsewhere on the Web. From home, I accessed the Internet via the public library-controlled Alachua Freenet, which was about all I could afford at the time. There was no graphical interface, so for a while, I maintained Teleport City through the UNIX-based PICO text editor and could only see it using tin, the text-only UNIX-based web browser. For months at a time, I maintained the site without actually seeing what it looked like.

In the Spring of 1995, a semester late, I graduated, and as such, lost my university-based hosting and access. Teleport City went into hibernation for a while as a result, and I resumed publishing the Kungfu Girl fanzine. At some point, however, I settled into a nice house with incredibly cheap rent and got a steady job. I could afford to entertain the thought of signing up for a real ISP. I ended up going with Mindspring. In 1996, the website relaunched, but under a different name. I can't even remember what the name was. By this point, we could do things like add background graphics and tables and frames, and I'd managed to get a copy of Photoshop 3.0 (Photoshop before layers and with only three undos, if you remember) so it was a marked improvement over the old version. At the same time, being new to Photoshop and largely untrained as a designer, there was perhaps a little too much abuse of Sweet-Tart colored beveled buttons, though I'm confident they'll make a comeback someday soon.

In 1997, I left Gainesville and moved to North Carolina. Shortly thereafter, I decided that I liked the name Teleport City better than whatever name I'd given the site when I relaunched it. I toyed with calling it "Big City After Dark," after the title of a Link Wray song (and I still want to use that title somewhere), then decided that it should just be Teleport City again.

Yesterday's Tomorrow...Today!

Teleport City slowly picked up steam as search engines became more useful. When I moved to New York, I decided to buy a domain name -- considerably more expensive then than it is now -- and since teleportcity.com was taken, much to my surprise, I went with the hyphenated teleport-city, even though it's a pain in the ass to explain to people.

Since then, Teleport City has steadily built up and occasionally lost readers from around the world. We stand now as one of the oldest and largest cult film, music, and book sites on the Internet, with readers spanning the globe from the United States to Turkey to Japan, and all points in between. In a busy month, we see as many as 30,000 visitors to the site, each of them hungry for more information about Reb Brown and Filipino midget spy thrillers.

In 2008, we are celebrating our tenth year of continuous service from our teleport-city.com domain. I wish I'd saved the dozens of previous designs (you can find some of them, in various degrees of disrepair, lingering about at those sites that set out to archive the Web) for a gallery. Anyway, thanks to everyone who has stuck with us over the years, and thanks to everyone who has discovered us along the way. It's been a blast. Not a lucrative blast. Not a blast that helped me get my writing career back on track after being derailed by computers. But still a glorious, drunken, typo-laden blast. Here's to the next ten, which at some point I'm sure will see the launch of the Teleport City virtual reality sphere.