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The Case For Magazines
I miss flipping pages
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…
