Magazines

crackerjack

Well-known member
Julie Burchill, writing about and liking Patti Smith at the NME sometime in the '70s, but really desperate to go home to listen to Tony Blackburn playing the Isley Brothers and Odyssey and dancing around her room to the music she really loved, then feeding this back surreptitiously into her articles.

Isn't that just a bit of creative revisionism from Burchill - I'm sure she was a massive Patti Smith fan, her response to the Hip Young Gunslingers ad was an appreciation of her. I don't think liking both was that incompatible, even then.

The most controversial thing that happens these days is that you ask a star the wrong question, they get in a mood, you apologise and cringe, and then write it up as if you had some amazing confrontation, which you didn't. You just pissed off some famous wanker who was probably in a bad mood anyway, and then shat yourself in case your editor got annoyed because you ruined any prospect of future exclusives or access. Then wrote it up to make yourself look as reasonable and safe as possible, to save any skin left (or worth) saving.

Or things like this happen.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Isn't that just a bit of creative revisionism from Burchill - I'm sure she was a massive Patti Smith fan, her response to the Hip Young Gunslingers ad was an appreciation of her. I don't think liking both was that incompatible, even then.

Er, probably, yes. I was ranting and raving last night. I actually sound a bit nuts. Alarming behaviour.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
Er, probably, yes. I was ranting and raving last night. I actually sound a bit nuts. Alarming behaviour.

I think it may have been the bog-standard UK punk bands she didn't like writing about. I'd quite like to see some of her stuff from 77. The first I read of hers (apart from Boy Looked At Johnny) was about 1980, when her rep was already established.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I used to have the Love It Or Shove It collection, which is very entertaining. I remember one particularly good Face article that started with the line, "Poor old Nancy Reagan, she's got egg all over her facelift..."
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
I used to have the Love It Or Shove It collection, which is very entertaining. I remember one particularly good Face article that started with the line, "Poor old Nancy Reagan, she's got egg all over her facelift..."

I still have that. Remember looking all over Brighton for it – the only shop that had it had stocked it in the humour section. A right mixed bag. There's an essay on Graham Greene which develops into an anti-Irish Catholic stream of filth ("what could be more Catholic than the dirty protest?"*) that Paisley would've rejected as being a bit toooo much.

*I probably shouldn't use quote marks there since I'm going entirely by (very bad) memory.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
You can always tell when I am writing plastered because you get posts from me like those earlier ones, loads of little paragraphs filled with nonsense, and I must retract one thing about Morley's sleeve notes being high points of music journalism. They aren't. Why?

1) If you read the sleeve notes to Billy Mackenzie's Beyond the Sun (superb album, by the way) they are embarrassingly bad, particularly for a 40-something critic as Morley then was.

2) Marcello Carlin is spot-on in his dissection of Morley's Frankie sleeve notes in this little piece:

http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/frankie-goes-to-hollywood-welcome-to.html
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I watched Martin Scorsese's documentary about the New York Review of Books to save you lot the hassle.

It wasn't very good. An extended love letter to the NYRB editorial board; a spot for various contributors to say, "the NTRB is really good because it lets me write what I want" in various different ways; an indulgent film-maker's meander without any atmosphere or tension or insight. Except as a witless, sychophantic tribute, I saw absolutely no purpose in this at all.

One crucial subtext that was completely excised, but played some important part across the pages of the Review, was the split and fight between Cold War liberalism and the counter-cultural left. It is possible that the documentary was unable to address this because it totally failed to establish the Review's origins in the milieu of the New York Intellectuals and the little magazines (Partisan Review, Dissent, Commentary, etc. etc.); the battle took place within and between all these magazines and in many cases they shared contributors. This fascinating hinterland was absent from the film. NYRB didn't just materialise from nowhere to take on the torpid New York Times Book Review, but was a platform upon which the New York Intellectuals and their extended allies (and enemies) could attack it directly and surpass it (see Norman Podhoretz, 'Book Reviewing and Everyone I Know').

So having made no attempt to convey any of this, which is really the whole thing to begin with, we are left with a flacid, dilatory collection of clips and talking heads. Well, yes, it's fun to watch Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal insulting each other on TV, or Susan Sontag humiliate Norman Mailer at a public meeting of feminists, or Norman Mailer...actually, enough Norman Mailer now, thanks very much Marty. None of this told me anything about the Review's narrative or its real place or culural influence beyond an occasionally influential magazine article. How did NYRB liberalism develop in relation to McGovern, Reagan, neoconservatism, Clinton? Not a clue, but Timothy Garton Ash did write an important essay on the Velvet Revolution (cue, TGA, "There I was, in Prague...").

What a load of rubbish.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I'll be fair, it did attempt to do the job properly in regard to James Baldwin and the Civil Rights movement.
 

Leo

Well-known member
i'm the only person i know who still has dozens of print mag subscriptions. since i'm a bit (!) older, it's a lingering tradition that i don't want to abandon, even though i also spend a stupid amount of time reading things online. i guess it's similar to how some people still love vinyl versus digital music: i just really enjoy the ritual of getting a new print issue of a magazine, having it, relaxing at home reading, keeping it in some cases, etc.

the one i'd miss the most would be the new yorker, by far. it's the rare magazine (also to a much lesser degree with vanity fair) where the contents are divided between articles on topics of interest and those which you thought you had no interest in, yet the general level of writing and depth of reporting enlightens you to a new subject. you don't find other magazines willing to devote 10-12 pages to one article, which took a year to research and write, and sometimes i wish they went on longer. and they don't take the knee-jerk northeast liberal position on everything, take for example the recent feature on ted cruz.

i also really like frieze, ostensibly an art magazine but goes beyond that into other cultural issues (as well as the occasional reynolds music piece). i read artforum but the heavy art theory stuff largely goes over my head.

the economist is pretty much the main way i have any clue about international affairs, also very well written. i wish we had a US equivalent of private eye, my wife's UK family gave me a gift subscription for xmas and it's clever but doesn't mean much to me, since it focuses on UK politicians and businesspeople who i don't know.

and, of course, the wire. :)
 

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
Vak Magazine - Norwegian fly-fisher mag killing all fishing mags I see at WH Smith in terms of paper quality, design and photos (the writing is a bit so-so, it's full of flyfishing snobbery). Probably a losing proposition long term, but bless the publishers for doing something like this. I get friends to bring it over to the UK whenever I get someone visiting from the old country. Here's a taste
http://vakmag.com/magasin/vak-3-2013

Took out a stack mag subscription a year or so ago, different mag each month and good value at a fiver a month for getting random decent quality magazines about plants, happiness, design and music (yeah it's Wire).
http://www.stackmagazines.com/the-magazines/
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I see that Tribune has relaunched with our very own ex-comrade Owen Hatherley in the role of Cultural Commissar.

I pitched him an article on ‘The Jews in Fascist Italy’ but he didn’t seem interested, which is a shame.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
No need for consolation, my pitch was cheeky and humorous!

Re: New Humanists, woah, what, which Dissensoids?
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
LRB still routinely brilliant - this article on the AIDS crisis, and how it has been historicised, is phenomenally good imo https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/tom-crewe/here-was-a-plague
Some stats are mindblowing - 14,000 deaths in the States in 2012, two decades after antiretroviral therapy came in. Also this is my own naivete, but I didn't know that the US prohibition on HIV positive people entering the country was only overturned in 2010
 
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