Magazines

craner

Beast of Burden
Does anybody (still) work in the magazine world? Not, like, online magazines, but actual, tactile, living-in-your-hands MAGS? The racks are still full and Conde Nast still stands tall and spans oceans but, still, it seems deflated, all the air let out. Or am I wrong? What are the best magazines around? Italian Vogue? National Geographic? Standpoint? Vanity Fair? What is your favorite defunct magazine? Are magazines better than books? Or merely equal?
 

Dr Awesome

Techsteppin'
All about Nat Geo (that hardly counts though).
TIME and The Economist are pretty good reads too.

Edit: Oh yeah - I find Vice is occasionally worthwhile, although it seems to fluctuate between on point cultural analysis and hipsterdouchebaggery all too much.
 
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luka

Well-known member
i always thought there was something very unwholesome about magazines. i remember my joy at hearing the face had folded for example.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
i've been in a huge magazine malaise for a long time now but they have meant a lot to me down the years.

Jockey Slut is probably my fave defunct mag.

i may not read old faves like the Economist, the Wire, Vibe or the New Yorker much (or at all) these days, but as a stand-by they're still reasonably go-to. i even like Time Out titles (although Chicago, London and NY are the only ones i've ever read w any regularity), i know all the criticism us Dissensians have w them, but for addresses of food and drink gaffs alone it's worth a read at WHSmiths. (you don't need to pay for it, granted.)

the magazine i look out for on home turf is Opening Times, the Manchester and Salford real ale magazine, it's a modest but very good free-sheet distributed monthly in the area, normally about 24-36 pages. i would pay for it.

if i'm in the States (the country where i have spent the most time after UK, as Oliver knows), then i like the tradition (certainly in larger cities) of weighty, often free alterna-rag type tomes (i think Seattle's Stranger is the oldest). the Chicago Reader captured my heart a long time ago.

i used to read Songlines a lot, i think that's still going, and Gramophone, which is definitely still going.

Monocle and Wallpaper are sort of porn.

you can recycle your magazines. and you can cut out pictures and text and plaster your lavatory with the pictures and text.

books remain generally better but VANITY FAIR, by jove, that's a fine read.
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
I read Prospect Magazine every month pretty much, it's pretty reliable and a good antidote to the shite journalism and opinion you are subjected to any time you pick up a paper. It makes me wonder why broadsheets are supposed to be 'quality' in any way at all.
I've also got a subscription to Cabinet quarterly which is a kind of wanky cultural mag but it's pretty good too. I also sometimes buy Wire for a larf and a bit of music info (not that it's really necessary).
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Aaah magazines- used to be essential didn't they ?
How much money did I spend on mags ?
Most of what was good in them is by now long ago clipped, gone through a second or third time into a much smaller stack in back of the closet.
Just threw a pile out today, though some old '80's Jill and Photo mags remain in ... another stack.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Bought the current issue of The Chap recently. :) First magazine I've bought for months, though. Only title I've ever had a subscription to is LM (make of that what you will!). I have a look at the Economist and Statesman when I find a copy somewhere, occasionally New Scientist too. But that's about it.

Edit: oh yeah, Private Eye is quality, goes without saying.
 
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Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
Magazines are holding up quite well me thinks. I was going to compare it to vinyl culture in music, but I think mags are doing a lot better? Reading and looking at photos/artworks just works better on paper.

http://magculture.com/blog/ is a good one to follow.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
I subscribe to Viz :cool:

top mag.

used to sub to Private Eye, now just pick up maybe once or twice a year, but generally remain always impressed on the whole.

used to sub to the NYRB, which i still have quite a bit of time for. alongside the larger essays and reviews, little fragments of verse sometimes crop up, that sort of thing. no real reason, but have always preferred it to the LRB or Paris Review.

When Saturday Comes is the best football magazine on UK stands by a country mile, although you get a lot of interesting world football titles at any half-decent * news-agency these days. and that's not including the 'zines.

* spectacularly bad in-joke...
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
he will have to settle this in the morning.

Lithuanian would perhaps be less socially acceptable than Latvian, mind you.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
There aren't any music mags still being produced that are worth a shit.

Largely because there's no longer any money to send journalists on jet planes to LA to take drugs with degenerate rock groups or rap stars, publish three pages of purple prose and slurred quotes and pay them for it -- but also, I am sure, for other reasons too. Trawling through hideous Camden pubs with thick 19 year olds for shit money doesn't quite have the pull for thrusting young music journos who must therefore -- like lovely, lizard-eyed Alexa Chung, Queen of Climbers -- look to TV for a future full of travel and free drugs and glamorous sex.

There's the possibility of a few 200 word reviews for Uncut this month (review copies on the way) and all this deadness wasn't so different by 1998 (say). And who in their right mind would want to write about pop music beyond the age of 30 anyway? (31 year old man employed by Observer Music Monthly sits down in front of three Sugababes to discuss current career patterns -- but what exactly happened to his life? Why is he not being flown to New York to uncover Jay Z's dark soul at a surprising tete-a-tete outside New Jersey?)

I love magazines though and I largely miss something in them -- part of the unwholesome nature is essential and endemic like Anna Wintour or Tina Brown or some other nutcase deadline-visionary who wouldn't even spit on Jockey Slut or The Fader (this is possibly a matter of taste). Guy Bourdin in Vogue or Christopher Hitchens in The Nation or Harold Evans on a whim thinking up Conde Nast Traveller or -- ideally -- something like the PR crowd and their enemies and allies and satellites and interventions.
 
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scottdisco

rip this joint please
this was in Prospect once, which Grizzleb did laud ^

i love this.

I beat a retreat until lunch, in a Greek restaurant in the Dupont Circle area of Washington.

The proprietor is a friend and familiar who plays up to Hitchens’s Rabelaisian presence, automatically presenting him with a full tumbler of Johnnie Walker as they banter about the finer distinctions between halloumi and kasseri

Brad Pitt said not so long ago that he felt the best reportage/journalism (long format, anyway) was to be found in the sheafs of reports Human Rights Watch put out. (not magazines, true.)

a lot of young magazine writers these days (Dissensians among them) seem to have to flit from harbour to harbour (as w Oliver nailing the changing market ^), a bit of money for a 200 word capsule review here, something else from there for a longer think-piece, and so on.

a Jockey Slut staffer made a weak and pretty insulting attempt at humour over the phone to me once, i must say!
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
Good Journalism should be about looking at a tiny particular event or scene and using it to bounce off into a kind of universalism... I'd like to write but I don't really have a clue what about. Well I do but I get easily dissuaded by myself. How is it possible to have a career in journalism? I feel I could batter out a good piece about something if I had some sort of brief...but about what?
 

craner

Beast of Burden
a lot of young magazine writers these days (Dissensians among them) seem to have to flit from harbour to harbour

Which is harder than having to write something good -- I often think these boys should give up and go into advertising or marketing...it's a heartless creativity but it's full of £££s and life is short and the world is large. And the only kind of reviews they get to write these days run the emotional and aesthetic spectrum of effusive praise <> disappointment. The Big Critical Assassination can no longer happen: there's no need and there's no space. No one is paying attention and there are too many opinions to ignore. This is why K-punk still labours in the shadows and you hear nothing from Penman: their world has disappeared.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Living Marxism?

I think it used to be called that, but it was plain 'LM' when I had a read of it. I think by that time they'd shifted from a straightforward leftist position to a more generally contrarian, libertarian or anti-establishment one, and some of the things they published could probably be considered pretty conservative ("neo-con" if you're George Monbiot!). I think I read about six issues before they went bankrupt after their disastrous libel case against ITN. There was some interesting stuff in it, all the same.
 
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