The Antimagazine

Send it back to Hell!

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe declared that the future of writing to be “magazineward” and invented/perfected an entirely new genre of fiction – the short story – to fit the demands of mass markets and power presses, mags have always been good barometers of pop culture.

They have become kind of noumenal in their way; pushed by commerce, sex, market-tested color preferences and the size and heft that the consumer finds most comforting into a kind of perfectly adapted and perfectly optimal form, that lives on past the racks by the checkout counter.

Even given the literally unlimited amount of space that the digital world theoritcally afford publishers, by their names – e-“zines” – and their content (a mix of eye-snagging graphics, writing and advertising) the electronic world bows it’s head to the perfection of the form, even as it tinkers with the delivery system and content.

Now by and large, content-wise, popular magazines suck kinda hard.

They just do.

Their purpose, lest we forget, is exactly like that of commercial teevee; draw a crowd and push product, and to do that they slather the covers with the same drivel month after month: blondes, diets, who’s fucking who, how to make your lover come like a rocket, tinting tips, etc. with a few columns of actual prose tamped in between ads for vodka that’s radically different than every other vodka that has ever been because of the lasercut work on the bottle...and the sprays and unguents (a word I just don't get to use often enough) guaranteed to make your cooter smell like a pine forest after a fresh-squeezed orange juice storm.

Me, I’m a “Hilights” man; I just love finding those goddamned hidden heads in the trees! Also, on an irregular basis, Scientific American. National Geographic. Conscious Choice. Lots of things. Basically whatever grabs my eye at the bookstore, and if the internets weren’t heavy-laden with free porn, that list would be a lot longer.

When I was a younger driftglass, not as smoove and skilled and clear-complexioned as I am today, my friends and I – believe it or not – read a lot of stuff along the lines of Cosmo. Basic geek research: we wanted to generate many pant-jettisoning moments with the girls we knew but who were completely unaware of us, and since they weren’t on the verge of just blurting out the Big Answers to how to get them enthusiastically behind the whole pant-jettisoning campaign, we did what geeks do.

We sought out the OEM info, the user manual and technical specs.

Cosmo was about as close as we ever got.

Actually Cosmo is still kind of fun, whereas the mag Moses is holding aloft in the pic and about the smash into a million bad adjectives is the Work of the Devil Himself.

For example, today between things I scared up a copy of the April 2005 Cosmo, which tells me important, exciting datum, such as:

...There is an Ultimate Sexual Pleasure that can be taught in 10 seconds (you'd think this would have come up before.)

...How to tell he adores you (not "if": Cosmo is a very declarative-sentence kinda mag.)

...Your Burning Sex Questions -- Answered (apparently there are combustible consequences if you fuck up the Ultimate Sexual Pleasure thingie, so no wonder it never came up before. I wonder what it could be? Like, what, freebasing cooter?)

...Sex Treats for HIM. (Yay!)

A health alert. And AMAZING people skills most women aren't taught. Again you have to wonder what would make a “people skill” AMAZING. I’m guessing it has something to do with being able to set fires with your mind...which would be pretty fucking amazing...AND which might relate to the Burning Sex Questions! Cosmo, you are a creature of so many mysteries.

Cosmo also reassures me that, if anything, I actually speak with too little inflection.

Alas at that moment I was forced to drop the magazine and move along so, like Tantalus forever stranded with his wishes just beyond his fingertip, I shall perhaps never know the Eight Sure Fire Ways to Drive Her Barkingly Orgasmic, as imparted by the climaxologists who undoubtedly labor in the state-of-the-art genitalaboratories of House Cosmo...forever searching for new, fleshy secrets that a billion years of evolution and 100 generations of assiduous sensualists might have missed.

Sorta like the Tide guys: always room at the sweet end of the Bell Curve for the New and Improved.

Sadly, this now leaves me on my own, armed only the simple, homespun pleasuring tools and techniques a mere single lifetime of hedonism, native research and a naughty imagination have bequeathed to me.

But see? Isn’t Cosmo kinda...fun? Or can be made into some fun with a little mental origami.

“Lucky” is different. “Lucky” isn’t fun.

I had twenty minutes on a treadmill this afternoon and picked it up just to see what was in it.

There is nothing in it. Nothing. No thing.

You know that bit cautioning against looking too long into the Abyss, lest the Abyss look back into you?

Well turns out the Abyss has a magazine called “Lucky.”

I read through the whole thing cover to cover and back, and it was nothing but ads.

It was amazing; I even lingered a bit over the sinister, subliminal artistry of an ad for a carcinoma delivery system simply because the Federally-mandated CO and Cancer warnings imbedded in the two-page-tobacco-porn-centerfold piece contained more actual content that any other square inch anywhere.

I’d cite quotes from it...but there were no quotes; just glowing, catalogue blurbs for flignits and doojobbers that YOU Mr. and Mrs. America simply cannot live without.

It was...dizzying. But then again, maybe that was the treadmill's doing.

I’ve picked out good articles or funny articles or interesting articles from inside just about every magazine I can remember. I even read some decent short fiction in an in-flight magazine once (Poe would've been delighted.) But who in their right minds would plunk down hard coin to buy a mag that is literally NOTHING but advertising from start to finish.

(FYI: If you want to get an early start believing that we should just write off a certain percentage of our species entirely, consider that "Lucky Magazine" has won awards for its circulation which was reported to be at 810,000 as of Spring 2003.)

With this magazine I think I may have caught a glimpse of a doomed subspecies beginning its death-spiral.

A mutant, like the saber-toothed tiger, whose chief weapon overgrows its place to such an absurd degree that it becomes life-threatening.

Like Christopath Republicanism.

Or like some rare breed of rodent that only mates with cousins and only eats its own feet until it bleeds out, I don’t care how fast it fucks and reproduces, you just know that they’re not long for this world.

Such a magazine is “Lucky.” XXX-Hard-Core porn for the Conspicuously Consumptive. A beast that exists solely to flog products of every shape and description to the obscenely idle, the dead-mule stupid and the wastrel rich.

Every bauble you could imagine.

Every useless trinket you could think of.

Every conceivable service.

Well, every good and service but one.

Nowhere in this profligate wasteland of words and picture did I find a single ad for the United States Armed Forces.

Word has it that the longtime Army ad agency -- Leo Burnett – re-upped with the military to the tune of a $350 million dollar contract, provided they do not use the word “Iraq” anywhere in their ad copy. And yet with all of that firepower they can’t find a few bucks to salt a half-page, “Army Of One” buy anywhere in poor “Lucky” magazine with its 818,000 well-off, well-fed and nothing-better-to-do-than-read-this-swill subscribers.

Cigs, yes. Booze, yes. Service to country, no.

We’ll I guess they know better than anyone what their demographic’ll go for, and what it won’t.