Sunday, May 29, 2022

For the Love of a Good Magazine


I have to say, of all the print and written media I can access in my life, I love me a good magazine. I'm constantly looking for new titles and stores to browse, seeking out that perfect balance of tone and content and design that elevates a magazine experience from forgettable to one that I cherish.

Magazines are, by their nature, ephemeral. They're designed to be recycled, forgotten on airplanes, used as kindling. They're snapshots of a certain moment in time: our collective interests, hot takes, emerging trends, thought leaders, fashionable outfits, anxieties that ebb and flow as we discover new great and terrible things about the world, and, sometimes, a crossword. Intellectually, they stand in opposition to books, which are supposed be permanent and to signal a certain brainy rigor: a whole text, devoted to...whatever. Magazines are shorter, lighter, and skip from topic to topic with a charmingly dilettante approach. As a sidebar: this is an absolute blessing in the face of the phenomenon I call "the book that should have been a magazine article," which is exactly what it sounds like: a snappy, talented nonfiction writer trying to spin straw into gold for 180 pages, padding the content with repeated ideas and irrelevant quotes, instead of just accepting his fate as someone who should have written seventeen extremely good and memorable pages and not pressed his luck. Magazines win that round! Relatedly, books by start-up bros should be illegal.

If you're a freak like me, you keep your magazines. I have dozens of white boxes in my office, organized by topic and title: independent magazines like The Gentlewoman, parenting magazines I bought in 2006 (well before I had a child! I just liked the outfits, I acknowledge I am a monster), old issues of Wired that somehow feel timeless even though nothing on earth ages faster than an issue of Wired. I have magazines from 1980s Japan, archived because they ran advertisements featuring yours truly—I was, in fact, a child model in Japan, a thing about me that is very weird—and I have New Yorkers from just a few months ago, which I haven't fully digested. 

When I was in high school, you could find quality independent magazines at the gas station; I have a memory of picking up the inaugural issue of NYLON from a 7-11 because it ran a feature on Beastie Boys uniform chic. In our small town, we had a downtown store that was stacked with issues of Jane and US and YM, magazines about poetry and yachting and interior design and celebrities, magazines about DIY culture and fashionable parenting and homebrewing. The store also sold cigarettes, and with the decline of both print culture and the number of smokers, it should surprise no one that that address is now a fancy bicycle shop. I love biking, but I miss magazines. 

Blame the internet, as always: the magazine market lost about half its value between 2012 and 2022, declining at a faster rate than most information-sector segments—think books, movies, newspapers and TV—and many titles have transitioned to a less frequent publishing schedule, gone online-only, or folded altogether. And I get it: very few people want to keep an entire issue for a single look or recipe or project; that's why Pinterest exists and blogs get traffic. But I love being able to skip around in a magazine, discovering things I wouldn't have otherwise seen. It is hard to Google and get a true surprise, but magazines can be full of the unexpected and experimental.

I think I'm nostalgic for the of celebrity that prevailed in my teens and early twenties. I'm thinking about Rolling Stone covers shot by David LaChapelle and Annie Leibovitz, and when world-domination bands would share the reviews page with first-time indie artists, when they were still doing long-form articles about school shootings. I miss women's magazines, especially ones that had a snarky, irreverent, slightly shit-disturbing POV (think Jane and the radicalized Teen Vogue). I miss celebrity coverage from before the Perez Hilton era, when the tone really shifted from interested/laudatory into "I hope she falls down the stairs." There are gifts in living in the influencer age—the rise of hot, fat women, for instance—but the curse is that we are all products, all the time. Let me turn my gaze to a silky supermodel, not a craven entrepreneur/reality star/wellness guru. Let me be the object, not the subject. 

I am waiting for magazines to rise again, the way vinyl and cassettes did, because I feel like there's really nothing that compares. Social media moves too fast, a whitewater of information and images; websites are great but discourage cross-pollination (it's no surprise that my favourite post of any website is a link roundup: a chance to read some curated articles!); newspapers, because the world is a drag, are a drag; 'zines will continue like the punk phoenixes they are every generation, but have limited distribution. Magazines stand alone: beautiful, interesting, visual, intellectual. Weirdly disposable and yet nothing leaves a mark like they can. Join me in my weird archives any time.