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Provocateurs

The hellcats and chutzpah behind Prague's most outrageous publication

March 21st, 2007 issue

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST
A serendipitous encounter between Ley, left, and Moye led to the launch of an audacious zine and burgeoning expat multimedia operation.
Many great leaders ascend with a sense of predestiny. So it must have seemed like fate that September night in 2004 when, stumbling through the black separating the rock club Abaton from the nearest tram stop, would-be media empress Marika Ley met her co-conspirator.
It was Pamela Moye’s first night in Prague, and she thought the area a bit sketchy at 4 a.m.
Hearing Ley’s accent, she approached the pink-haired woman and her friends.
“So, you guys are speaking American,” she ventured. “Do you mind if I join you just to get to the tram safely?”
“You seem like the kind of person that might be a writer,” Ley responded.
Earlier that year, Ley had started
www.provokator.org, a Web site filled with whatever content she could get. Moye signed on, and helped launch the venture that would turn into the print magazine Provokátor.
Now ubiquitous in Prague cafés, bars and skate shops — places frequented by expats and Czech subculture types — Provokátor is a fold-out monthly “mapazine” with content built around an entertainment guide and map of the city. During that first year, the pair also began booking punk rock shows under the moniker Bat Country Booking, and launched a film festival, the Anti Anti Fest.
The whole shebang now runs under the name of Instigator Media Group (IMG). Currently, 15 people volunteer for various Provokátor and IMG functions.
Each issue of Provokátor follows a theme, be it the current “euthanasia/youth in Asia” (because that pun won’t die), last month’s “torture” or December’s “free” — as in freedom or free stuff. Earlier issues were more loosely formatted, featuring reviews, rants and a firsthand account of one man’s intimate experiences with gay skinheads.
“We’ll take learning writers, growing writers, opinionated crusty assholes, people who are open to other cultures and people whose interest is piqued by pushing boundaries,” says Ley, a New York native who will be 37 in April and moved to Prague from Gainesville, Florida, in September 2003. “We’re not groundbreaking, and we’re certainly not professional. But we’re sincere, and I think that’s something really hard to find in the press.”
‘Pain-in-the-ass work’
Full disclosure: This story isn’t an unbiased take. I met Moye in 2002 in San Francisco when I swigged her Jim Beam after seeing a mutual friend’s band, and stayed pals with her when I moved to the Idaho town where she’d gone to high school. When I got to Prague, Moye and Ley were my roommates. On my first day in the home office, they handed me some papers and a pen and said, “Fix this.” I’m still called on to type a few hundred words every month and, er, put right several thousand more.
Ley’s requests for assistance are hard to refuse, but maybe that’s because she’s assigning more than asking.
“Marika had all these ideas and no way to organize them, and I’m really good at organizing things and I had lots of free time,” says Moye, who now lives in Hollywood, where she’s finishing her master’s thesis in social psychology.
The early trials in Provokátor’s development were trying; the errors, educational.
“During our transition to print — while still maintaining the online version — all my preconceived romantic notions of working in publishing were thrown out the window,” says James Gogarty, who has held just about every position at Provokátor. “It was work, pain-in-the-ass work. But eventually it came to fruition, and I can honestly say I have learned a lot along the way.”
The mapazine has grown as well. It’s been redesigned into a format folded to fit more content while maintaining its A5 size, and has begun printing 6,000 copies every six weeks with the current issue, as opposed to the previous monthly print run of 5,000.
It seems everyone knows Ley — and, if she has her way, those who haven’t heard of her or her empire will. Tag along to any bar, and be the staff or clientele expat or Czech, she’ll greet half of them (the ones she already knows) and meet the rest. Many who meet her ending up contributing in some way to IMG.
For all that, Ley rejects the term “empress” — even as she jokingly refers to IMG as a “media empire” — but she hopes to leave something behind with Provokátor. “The modicums of success and the little points of movement toward a goal are better than any drug, and they’re much more energizing,” she says. “They keep me going. It’s a legacy of participation and not just skating by and complaining about it.”
And the empire continues to grow. Ley recently decided to expand IMG’s operations to Berlin. She’s added a monthly Berlin report to Provokátor, and she and Moye screened the Anti Anti Fest’s cream of the crop there Feb. 24.
The showing sold out most of Z Bar’s 35-seat theater — a showing successful enough that, though neither Ley nor Moye slept much the night before, the two celebrated until around noon the following day. Then they said goodbye, recommitting to conspiring across the Atlantic instead of in the Londýnská street office where they once made magic happen together.
It’s nights like these that make all the hard work worthwhile. For Ley, there’s no other way. “The times when I’ve wanted to throw myself in front of a tram have been many, because it’s been really, really hard,” she says. “You just hold your shit together, and hopefully there’s enough chemical substances to chill you out until you can start surfacing.”


Other articles in Tempo (21/03/2007):

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