Browsing

I have a magazine fetish. I love stepping into a well-stocked newsstand and taking in the scene. A newsstand is a garden filled with fresh information. It's a sort of cultural skin, and one sweeping view can tell you what's warm and what's itchy. It's a lot easier to take the pulse of the culture from a newsstand than from a TV set---the script of a typical news story on TV wouldn't fill two pages of print. The newsstand gives you the benefit of a simultaneous comparison of multiple views, multiple sources, continually updated. Every weekend, unless I'm out of town, I swing by at least one but usually several newsstands and check out what's on offer. Every weekend, I buy between $10 and $20 worth of magazines. I love magazines.

Last Saturday I went to Harvard Square, as I do almost every Saturday, and browsed through the newsstands. As it happens, Harvard Square is one of the best places in the world to browse through newstands. It's a great bookstore place, too, but I'm not here to talk about books. I'm a sucker for bookstores, but then books are more intimidating. Books actively taunt you when you buy them and don't read them. Furthermore, it is a grave sin to throw away a book. Magazines, on the other hand (with the obvious exception of National Geographic), are practically begging to be thrown away. I will happily purchase a magazine for the sake of a few interesting paragraphs in one article, because I know that it may litter my memory, but it will not clutter my house. It's a great feeling to plow through a stack of magazines and then send them off to the recyclers: done forever!

If you spend a lot of time in newsstands, you notice certain patterns. For example, women's magazines are big on numbers, as in 12 Ways to Make Him Commit, or 5 Grapefruit Diets That Work! I always wonder whether that represents something inherent to the feminine personality or merely the pack instinct of a few editors. As with the seasonal fashions appearing in stores, magazines are generally ahead of the calendar when they reach the newsstand. This can make news magazines look silly, as for example, when Time speculates in its September 3rd issue what may or may not happen on August 25th. Pornographic magazines, on the other hand, pay no heed to what month it is. Women are as naked one month as they are the next. Consequently, the May Penthouse may well be hitting the stands even now. I find it a reassuring gauge that winter is nearing an end when the July issues of Playboy appear.

If you're going to Harvard Square to buy magazines, the two landmarks are Nini's Corner and Out of Town News. I prefer Nini's Corner, because the guy at Out of Town News yelled at me once for reading too much. Hell, I can't really blame him, but then again it's easy for me to carry a grudge, so now Nini's Corner gets most of my business. I included Tower Records on the map because they carry, in addition to records, a rackful of obscure zines, like Modern Ferret (honestly), two different urban graffiti magazines, and a magazine for men who have a fetish for women who smoke. I could browse through that stuff for hours. It's like peeling back the scalp of the world.

Browsing is a verb that originally described how herbivores like deer munch on the branches and tender shoots of shrubs. A big fat newsstand is just about the best place I can think of to munch on tender shoots of information. I love the thought of all those overworked editors working their fingers down to bony tips just for me. They sift through potential stories, assign writers, and working under the ax of an unforgiving deadline, they winnow down the best stories for placement on the cover of the magazine. Every magazine cover is already a best-of-best filter for that issue. Now put a few hundred magazines next to each other, and the amount of total data that you've filtered down is staggering. A newsstand is a terrific user interface.

Here's a snapshot of what I picked up this weekend---all purchased, by the way, at Nini's Corner.

Generation (Lifestyle Magazine) Premier issue. Cover story: Body piercing. Premier issues are usually fun because you know the editors are killing themselves to get it right. If they can't make it work in issue one, they've got real trouble. Generation has got real trouble. Bad color, no ads to speak of (not even the big vodka ads that float even the most dubious publications). I was a sucker for the cover picture of a female midriff with a pierced navel, but the article was tepid. To be honest, I only bought this one because I knew I was going to write a StarChamber piece about buying magazines. Who bankrolls these things? This one won't last three issues.

ICON (Thoughtstyle Magazine) Cover story: a football player turned actor I don't know or care about. On the other hand, there's a good article by Jim Hogshire about opium (not the fragrance), and a short piece by Art Fry, the man who invented Post-It pads. This one's a keeper. Depressingly, the editor for this is an alum of my university who graduated seven years after me.

Detour (Entertainment with Style). Cover story: big-chested babe in a purple lycra shirt. This is a glossy big-money LA magazine, almost entirely about movie stars. Normally not my style, but I bought it for the article on Charles and Ray Eames. Maybe the purple shirt tipped the scales, but there's also an entertaining article about bizarre public-access cable TV. Plus, there's a fashion photo shoot where the models are all dead, bloody, and posed around a crashed airplane (check it out, page 142). Zeitgeist alert: heroin chic is out, but massive trauma chic is in.

Parabola (Myth, Tradition, and the Search for Meaning). Cover story: Millenium. Year 2000 bug as mythological construct. If these guys want to get with the times, they really need to call it a Mythstyle Magazine. Parabola is a good magazine for keeping things in perspective. Consider that compared to the year 1000, the year 2000 is a piece of cake. There's an interesting article in this issue about how in the year 999 (turn that one upside down), many people believed the Pope was going to turn into the devil and destroy the world. It didn't happen. I do have it on good authority, though, that on January 1, 2000, the devil will turn into Geraldo Rivera. You heard it here first.

First posted March 2, 1998

Ned (Paracelsus)

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