He asked me if I wanted to see something cool. I said “yes” because I did. What had started as Friday night happy hour drinks turned into poorly rolled joints in his small studio apartment on the Lower East Side, New York City’s turn-of-the-century party district.
We worked together at a magazine. A ‘men’s general interest’ magazine, ninety or so pages a month of soft-boiled service journalism, and PG-13 cheesecake designed to appeal to boys and balding, pot-bellied men. He edited entertainment stuff, and I edited ‘gear,’ which was the industry word for “junk.” There are two types of journalists: the insufferable do-gooders and anti-social goofs, and I was the latter.
The job was simple: polish every comma. It was also fun. Our days were spent assigning stories, arguing with the art department, and scribbling wittier kickers with pencils in the margins of proofs printed in color on long sheets of paper.
The cool thing he wanted to show me was his private collection of magazines. I was surprised. I don’t know what I was expecting at the time. Something more stereotypical? Knives? Baseball cards? Drugs?
The magazines were sealed in plastic bags. These were his prize possessions. First, a few pristine issues of Spy Magazine, Graydon Carter, and Kurt Anderson’s droll, satirical takedown of New York’s crude elite from the 80s, like Donald Trump.
His heroes were magazine editors, regal and fearsome. Our editor at the men’s magazine used to torment us by vandalizing our copy with drawings of stick figures shooting themselves in the head or hanging from a noose.
He showed me a few of 90s literary darling Dave Eggers’ quirky Might Magazine and one issue of Sassy, the pop feminist magazine edited by Jane Pratt. He had classic issues of Esquire and the fantastic movie magazine Premiere, rest in peace. I perused a falling-apart Rolling Stone with a boozy Hunter Thompson dispatch inside and a review of Pink Floyd’s newest.
In these magazines were the seeds that would become the early internet, a spicy bouillabaisse of irreverent and furious voices eager to turn the world upside down, shout at authority, and mock hypocrites. Those days are long gone, too.
The job of an editor has changed. There are still a few holdouts, bright talents who want to tell stories no one has heard before, but publishing is a pipe business now, and plumbers are needed.
We read the magazines slowly, silently, reverently, stoned.
The news that National Geographic wouldn’t be sold on newsstands anymore filled me with a sadness unique to middle age when a person begins to comprehend the truth of life fully: everything dies.
And not just grandparents and dogs, but everything you love and depend on, everything sturdy crumbles, and by the time you’re in your forties and fifties, it is happening in front of you, all around you, a fact of nature like rain or sunshine, and you’re next on the Grim Reaper’s to-do list.
Mass layoffs have also hit the iconic magazine with its yellow cover border, cutbacks demanded by its parent company Disney. This isn’t a shocking development. Print media has been shrinking for decades, replaced by a tech industry that can deliver information faster, cheaper, and sloppier directly to a supercomputer in your pocket.
The extinction of magazines is a forgone conclusion. I know this, yet I wanted to believe the trend would never take down one of the greats, a magazine that had been publishing continuously since 1888. I just naively assumed I’d always be able to walk to a newsstand at an airport or a big bookstore, open a copy of National Geographic, and explore the ocean without ever getting wet or new cultures without renewing my passport.
Society is worse off because there aren’t as many magazines, and the ones that do survive are skinny, starved of revenue, and dismissed by multiple generations who have grown accustomed to the taste of junk facts, salty and fatty, and delicious. The internet isn’t dull, one of its most profound flaws. It is nothing but fury and sorrow, love and hate, us and them, every minute of every hour of every day, forever.
No one knows it, but they’re exhausted by all of it, the supersized servings of emotions and fear. I stayed at a casino in Vegas recently, and on the way to breakfast, I saw an old man nodding off in front of the slots. His eyes were closing, a lit cigarette dangling from his lower lip, his fingers still pressing buttons on the video screens, and that’s us, you and me, only we’re passing out, hunched over our hungry screens instead of reading newspapers and magazines.
I am not suggesting I want to live my life without my smartphone. I text and scroll and giggle at dumb videos. I tweet and post and comment. But I miss the quiet of a magazine. The internet is a technologically augmented collective consciousness, a chaotic chorus singing hymns about what to think and buy and who to hate. But a magazine is a garden. Colors. Words. Ideas, pruned. It’s a beautiful and surprising escape resulting from hard work and creativity.
My dream vacation is a lounge chair by a pool next to a stack of magazines about everything: foreign policy, gourmet cooking, and country houses. I accept that this is a dream, as in a fantasy, like world peace. I will sit poolside during my next vacation but will likely listen to a podcast.
I have rarely felt older than when I recently explained to my niece that Manhattan used to be home to huge international magazine stores with thousands of magazines from all over the world, magazines about anything you can imagine; there was no niche too narrow. I used to stroll those stores and read about cars, high fashion, or fancy desserts. There were sexy magazines and brainy ones. I could spend hundreds of dollars there, easily, and spend an entire weekend sitting on a couch, leafing through thick books and wide ones, magazines that burst with style and attitude and deep-dives into wonderful subcultures. There are so many interesting people in this short life and magazines can sit down with them, talk for hours, and invite you along.
Silicon Valley’s rise to power can be told in the dwindling fortunes of the print magazine business, which was once a stable if competitive business, and successful magazines made vast sums of money from subscriptions and newsstand sales. The editors-in-chief of these chic tomes dictated what was in and out in Washington, Hollywood, Wall Street, etc. They were the gods of buzz, which is a ridiculous thing to rule over, it’s like being the god of ice cubes on a summer day. Their judgments were superficial and entertaining, preferable to the hot and cold passions of the mob but just as fleeting. Then came the tech gods, who ended the printing press’s impressive five-hundred-year run as information’s most essential technology.
I never worried that a magazine would fuel a feedback loop of rage or spread combustible lies about democracy. A magazine is only alive when being read; when it isn’t, it’s either collecting dust or waiting to be recycled.
Today’s most popular magazines are either fighting for their financial lives or leaving the journalism business entirely. They’re lifestyle brands now, and I don’t envy any business’s pivot to profitability, no matter how extreme. It’s not the remaining magazine’s fault that tech decided, long ago, that attention was the goal, the only goal, attention without any understanding.
If I could pitch magazines to a venture capitalist, if I could make a case, I’d start first with the user-friendly interface and intuitive navigation. I’d follow up with the product’s affordable price point and unique disposability — if you spill water on it, no problem! And then there’s the software, written by journalists and edited painstakingly, carefully, each article fact-checked and copyedited by an actual human being working for an organization whose business is quality information and is, therefore, ethically and legally responsible for every word printed. A magazine is unhackable. A magazine is an ideal environment for an advertising message to take root and bloom. There is zero danger of a magazine suddenly randomly printing hate speech unless it’s a hate speech magazine.
And think of the post-apocalypse: you can read a magazine, and when you’re done, roll it up and throw it on the fire for warmth. Can you do that with social media?
A magazine is like a decentralized blog with a closed comments section that can only go viral if it’s physically handed to someone else. This is my pitch. I should raise billions. The internet is suffocating, but a magazine breathes. I long to be disconnected from the racket of online combat and to sit under the shade of a deeply researched long-form New Yorker article about artichoke farmers.
There was a time I would browse stacks of magazines, choosing popular ones about entertainment and thoughtful quarterlies that focused on the opinions of obscure literary types and other outsider artists. I also enjoyed zines, xeroxed and stapled pages covered in scrawls and poems and cartoons, messy letters from the subbasement of authentic crackpots and loonies, which I would find piled high inside coffee shops on the Lower East Side.
I know that immense amounts of paper and ink were required to produce these magazines, and many of them weren’t good, but more than a few were, and they never shouted at you, threatened, or insulted you; they are private little strolls through other lives lived, holy texts, even the magazines full of weight loss tips and cheesy pick-up lines. Yes, those rags were silly, but they were edited by people who cared about the words, even the commas.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of John DeVore's work on Medium. And order his book, Theater Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway here.
Comments
Leave a comment