Jon Carroll
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Print is dead. We all know that. If you are reading this on actual paper, you have probably lost touch with the leading edge of culture. You probably still own Fleetwood Mac recordings - vinyl or CD, doesn't matter. If a real artist saw you on the street, he would say, "Get away, you are twisting my consciousness in a bad way." You probably don't even tweet. How can you call yourself a citizen?
And yet ...
Wander on down to Issues, the fabulous store on Glen Avenue right off Piedmont in romantic Oakland. Issues has issues of every magazine you might want to buy - though no porn, if that's what you'd be wanting this cheerful morning - plus a lot more you never even heard of. If you think print is dead: It isn't. It thrives. Fewer people buy it than before the Intertubes became a fad, but still. Many, many magazines for people who like magazines.
I decided to buy some magazines and look them over. The rules were: (a) the magazines had to be attractive in some ill-defined way, (b) I had to never have heard of them, and (c) they had to be printed in type large enough so I could read them with my 1.75 drugstore glasses.
Some of the magazines I chose did not exactly meet these criteria, but since I made the rules, I figured I could also break them. In no particular order:
Tank is a magazine of art and fashion. The ads are all fashion; the features are (mostly) about art. This may be an anomaly; the cover line of the current issue of this London quarterly is "Art Attack." But I do like its motto, also on the cover: "Elitism for All."
Let's say off the top that the photographs in this magazine are stunning. Even the worst of them are pretty good, and the best are astonishing. The oversize format and spiral binding makes the work easy to view comfortably. A lot of thought has gone into Tank, and it's all up there on the page.
Ah, but alas. There is always a line in fashion art (and high art too, come to think of it) where parody takes over. What are we to make of this headline for an article: "Lacoste goes back to the Ming Dynasty in search of the perfect polo shirt"? We're supposed to take it seriously. But that's because we're supposed to take polo shirts seriously.
Or these opening sentences: "We can expect some tall tales and odd behavior from the 6th Liverpool Biennial this autumn. The line-up includes Antti Laitinen, whose recent video 'It's My Island' shows him dragging sandbags into the freezing waters of the Baltic Sea in a King Cnut-like attempt to build an island"; "Hector Zamora, who wedged a zeppelin between buildings at the last Venice Bienniale ..." and so forth. Sounds very Monty Python.
(I recently spent an evening at the closing concert of the Other Minds festival, and much of it I enjoyed, and some of it reminded me of Peter Sellers - the comedian, not the director - doing a "Goon Show" send-up of the avant-garde. Again, the line seemed to me very thin indeed.)
And so forth.
Glass is another British magazine, heavily supported by fashion advertising but dabbling editorially in architecture, design, social activism and the arts. Its editorial focus is more intense than Tank's, although it's nowhere near as gorgeous. Some of the articles are surprising and moving, although they're harder to find than a Christopher Hitchens column in Vanity Fair - shoes, necklaces, chemises, gloves, feathers, Sun Yat-sen! Yes, a full profile in the middle of all this glam cheese. The articles are pretty well chosen; one must admire the tiny staff that put this magazine together.
And yet, again, the writing. From a profile of Charlotte Rampling: "November in Paris is also a somber month. The flush of yellows and russets is over, the sky is leaden gray and it rains a lot, a mist hangs over the river, it's dark at 4 p.m. and the chill damp of the Seine spreads beyond its banks and bites the hands and cheeks." Oh please.
Thursday, we'll tackle four more magazines and form unfair opinions about each of them. In the meantime, please continue to read prose printed on paper. It's the hip thing to do.
Reading magazines on a winter's day - there's nothing more amusing and lovely and, occasionally, enlightening.
