Magazine Life
Paying proper respect to my favorite publication format
There is an episode from my childhood that I recall with a mix of shame and amusement. I was probably five, maybe six, when my family was living in a rural community in western Massachusetts called Huntington. Our house was outside town, down a bumpy old road, and for some reason long lost to memory I was getting a ride home one evening with the parents of a friend.
As we were passing the last cluster of shops on our way out of town towards home, I piped up from the back seat and asked if we could make a quick stop at the drugstore. Being kind and helpful people, they agreed; possibly thinking I was being a precociously responsible kid who was picking something up for our family.
I beelined it to the magazine rack with one of the unsuspecting and obliging parents trailing behind me, where I snatched up the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine I had seen earlier in the week while accompanying my mom on an errand, the gruesome visage of Lon Chaney Jr. on its cover just too freaky to forget.
“Will you please buy this for me?”
I’ve been an avid reader from an early age, but I’ve always had a particular love for magazines. The very first subscription my parents bought me (shortly after the time of the story above) was called National Geographic World, an extension of the NatGeo mission aimed at kids. The best thing about getting World at home was that it was a regularly occurring instance of something showing up in the mail for me. I looked forward to each issue’s stories about kids doing science, beautiful photos of animals and faraway places, and a particularly cool back page feature called “What in the World?” that turned tightly cropped close-up photos into puzzles to be decoded.
My parents got Time magazine every week, and though it was horribly boring for the most part, the covers sometimes featured fascinating illustrations that told whole stories on their own. I’d skip all the dull political stuff and go right to the culture pages toward the back, primarily to read about movies I could maybe get my parents to take me to. Thanks to this habit I was among the lucky kids seeing Star Wars the day it opened, a thrilling and practically life-changing experience that my 9-year-old brain could scarcely handle.
As I got older, World gave way to Mad and Cracked. Then Thrasher, Spin, and Maximum Rocknroll in my teenage years, a narrowing of interests commensurate with the urgent establishment of bona fides for the particular identity I was crafting. As I began to mature (and relax) a bit more I started reading Outside, Harper’s, Natural History, The Believer, Juxtapoz and American Songwriter. Over the last couple decades it’s narrowed back down to The Atlantic, local San Jose-culture mag Content, the occasional year of Hi-Fructose, and most recently Living Bird, a free-with-subscription publication I get because I pay for use of the Merlin app (which I absolutely love). As biographical summary, my magazine subscription history tracks remarkably well with my changing interests and priorities through the years.
Magazines are functional in some important ways that books just aren’t. I can fold a magazine and stick it in my back pocket on the way to and from lunch, which I have done ever since I started working office jobs. And the simple fact that I can lay a magazine flat on the table and read it with my hands full of burrito is a differentiated benefit to which I am completely devoted. Yes, fine: newspapers and underground weeklies also have this trait, and I definitely use them in similar circumstances. But they lack the curated aesthetic of a magazine, which reveals new facets of a narrowly defined range of thematic and visual choices—choices I have already endorsed by selecting it, so I know what I’m getting. I don’t want to hunt all over the place to look at something I give a shit about; I’m eating over here! Magazines deliver. And if I dribble some salsa on the pages, oh well.
The cheapness and recyclability of magazines are a major feature. I mean, they do hang around for a while before I throw them out, sometimes years. But at some point they become grist for the collage art mill, which puts them in the “re-use” column before they even get to “recycle.” I’ve definitely been known to hang on to magazines for way too long though, particularly if there’s an article or image in them that isn’t easily found online (I’m looking at you in particular, you beautiful old copies of The Believer and Hi-Fructose). Old magazines found in thrift stores and garage sales have an intense magnetism, too. Particularly mid-century men’s magazines like True and Adventure, with their sensational headlines, vintage typography and lurid imagery; my collection of these falls strictly in the art supplies column, but when I can pick them for a few bucks each they are tough to resist.
For a few years during the so-called desktop publishing days of the early ‘90s, my love of magazines was nearly requited, earning me a few dollars as a contributor to several San Francisco–based pubs. The scant money was educational; cobbling together enough of it to live on from magazine writing was clearly going to be an incredible challenge, and I was neither confident nor industrious enough to make a real go of it. Several of my friends from that time did, and my respect for them is massive having glimpsed the challenges they faced. But I had a lot of fun being able to play a small part in the history of The Nose, Future Sex, and Might magazines, RIP all. If anyone wants to look at any of these, just come on over. I can’t bear to recycle my collection of magazines that actually carry my byline, so they’ll be in boxes at the back of the garage until I die and, I hope, become someone else’s art supplies.
Loved seeing the Xmas Issue of the Nose! Xmas and Conspiracies…. like a hand in the glove!