Recession Christmas
via ★gruber
The Difference Between A Men’s Magazine And A Rapist?
Researchers gave a group of men and women quotes from the British lad mags FHM, Loaded, Nuts and Zoo, as well as excerpts from interviews with actual convicted rapists originally published in the book The Rapist Files. The participants couldn’t reliably identify which statements came from magazines and which from rapists — what’s more, they rated the magazine quotes as slightly more derogatory than the statements made by men serving time for raping women. The researchers also showed both sets of quotes to a separate group of men — the men were more likely to identify with the rapists’ statements than the lad mag excerpts. The only slightly bright spot in the study: when researchers randomly (and sometimes incorrectly) labelled the quotes as coming from either rapists or magazines, the men were more likely to identify with the ones allegedly drawn from mags. At least they didn’t want to agree with rapists.
image out of context
tweet of the day
an iPad that doesn’t work
Cicero’s PencilHeads
German political magazine Cicero hired Ragna ReuschKlinkenberg to carve delicate likenesses of political leaders in the graphite tips of pencils. They then sent the pencils as calling cards in the hope of securing interviews. You can watch a douchey promotional video, with a few seconds of the pencils being carved, here.
(via +Tim Carmody)
Tim Carmody’s back at Wired
Greetings, People of Wired! I’ve been asked to write a short post (re)introducing myself to Wired News readers as the newest staff writer covering the technology and media beat here at Epicenter.
Some keen-eyed Wired.com readers might recognize my byline from last fall, when I wrote for our hardware vertical, Gadget Lab. There among the wall-to-wall smartphone and tablet coverage, I regularly drove Wired’s editors slightly batty by writing early and often about e-readers and the publishing industry, game consoles and television programming, materials science and R&D, the DIY hardware hacking community, or long thinkpieces about the future of media.
I wrapped a big rubber band around all this stuff, calling it “the tweed beat” — but really, it was just everything that bubbled up from (but wouldn’t stay in) the gadget news box. It was great fun and good work, but I knew I would regularly hear from our east coast editor, John Abell: “Good story, Tim — but you know, it should probably really be in Epicenter.”
This summer, when he was looking for another writer, John paid me an enormous compliment, saying he was looking for “a Tim Carmody type” who could cover a broad swath of tech news and offer smart angles and idea-driven commentary. “Wait,” I thought when I heard this: “I’m a Tim Carmody type!”
Congratulations, Tim!
quote out of context
My entire life exists on a hard drive and after my death, eventually the hard drive will die. Instead of putting my money into archival prints, I want to put it into these magazines. It will include the work of other photographers whose work won’t get seen elsewhere. Perhaps in editions of 500. The idea that one of these magazines might slip behind a cupboard and gather an inch of dust, but survive is very appealing to me.
Cosmo fact checker
Unsurprisingly, the work takes its toll:
Mind-blowing orgasms quickly seemed as boring as corporate-speak about mergers and acquisitions.
The Milan Review
The Milan Review looks to be a promising new literary journal/press started by Tim Small, the editor of Italian Vice. Their inaugural issue/project [The Milan Review of Ghosts] features stories by Dave Cull, Jonathan Dixon, Glen Hirschberg, Noy Holland, Jonathon Keats, Tao Lin, Clancy Martin, E.C. Osondu, Dawn Raffel, Nelly Reifler, Rebecca Rosenblum, Deb Olin Unferth, Corinna Vallianatos and Brent Van Horne and illustrations by Matt Furie and Maison Du Crac. You can preview it here.
tweet of the day
Harper’s, Lefties, Unions, the Internet, The Atlantic Monthly, Irony, Labors of Love….
There’s too much to summarize:
Harper’s, one of the last bastions of old-line liberalism and a lonely defender of a certain idea of what literary culture should be, has long been supported by the largesse of its owner publisher and patron, John “Rick” MacArthur, an author and heir to a ceramics fortune who has long supported liberal causes. And now, in a strange, ironic endgame, MacArthur finds himself fighting against his own side: His staff has unionized.
In the Clit, Room #528
From an interview with George Holz, Mark Albeit, Just Loomis — three American photographers from Pasadena — who as students ended up working with Helmut Newton.
Just: Sometimes he had to photograph certain women. Sometimes Vogue would impose certain girls on him, like a Michelle Stevens. I think he liked Jerry Hall, but he always countered those girls with somebody else. He would always have another girl as a sort of counterbalance to some of these more traditional girls, because American Vogue was so traditional in a way compared to what Helmut was trying to do.
George: But at the same time he would love a Lisa Lyons, who was shot by Mapplethorpe, because she was strange. She had the veins. She was not a traditional beauty. The way he would photograph her was amazing. He was fascinated by that kind of beauty as well.
Also:
Three Boys from Pasadena: A Tribute to Helmut Newton, curated by June Newton, is on view through January 30, 2011 at Clic Gallery, 255 Centre St, NY, NY
C A R S O N
Fans of the icon of 90s graphic design will be pleased to know David Carson has a new magazine coming out.
David Byrne said of Carson’s work: “It communicates. But on a level beyond words. Just like music does – slipping in there before anyone has a chance to stop it at the border and ask for papers.”
A six issue subscription is $20.
(via kottke)
Andeeeeee monthly (wee hope) gazette | For Andrew
Andeeeeee monthly (wee hope) gazette: The journal of the Andy Warhol Fan Club of New York City, ca. 1965 / Andy Warhol Fan Club of New York City. Newsletter : 5 p. : ill. ; 36 x 22 cm. Leo Castelli Gallery records, circa 1957-1990. Archives of American Art.
No Layout
No Layout is a fully readable library for independent publishers, focusing on art books and fashion magazines. It is meant as a support for printed publications, allowing users to flip through full content on any screen without downloads or apps. More than 100 publishers and new entries added every week.
Happy Birthday, QZAP!
So long as it is still November, I say it is still the seventh anniversary of the Queer Zine Archive Project.
QZAP has been online for seven years. What started as a way of sharing information from zines with radical queers at Queeruption has grown into a real living archive accessed by hundreds of people a day.
A wonderful living labor of love.
two quotes from the Dec/Jan 2011 issue of dwell
My daughter was accepted into the opera school last year, and I am longing to sit in the middle of row number five at the Metropolitan and listen to her sing.
The other weekend we had 40 people in the living room listening to a classical guitar, bass, and flute trio. One night this woman played a solo piece on the violin in the dark, and the moonlight was bright enough to cast shadows on the screen from the oleander outside. It was beautiful.
headline of the day, II
Ex-Playboy model convicted of murder dies in Ore.
What Was the Hipster?
Mark Greif traces the genealogy of the “movement” to find common threads. It’s core is very reminiscent of Smith’s review of McCraken’s Hipster Christianity, Greif’s “rebel consumer” is Smith’s poser:
Through both phases of the contemporary hipster, and no matter where he identifies himself on the knowingness spectrum, there exists a common element essential to his identity, and that is his relationship to consumption. The hipster, in this framework, is continuous with a cultural type identified in the nineties by the social critic Thomas Frank, who traced it back to Madison Avenue’s absorption of a countercultural ethos in the late sixties. This type he called the “rebel consumer.”
The rebel consumer is the person who, adopting the rhetoric but not the politics of the counterculture, convinces himself that buying the right mass products individualizes him as transgressive. Purchasing the products of authority is thus reimagined as a defiance of authority. Usually this requires a fantasized censor who doesn’t want you to have cologne, or booze, or cars. But the censor doesn’t exist, of course, and hipster culture is not a counterculture. On the contrary, the neighborhood organization of hipsters—their tight-knit colonies of similar-looking, slouching people—represents not hostility to authority (as among punks or hippies) but a superior community of status where the game of knowing-in-advance can be played with maximum refinement. The hipster is a savant at picking up the tiny changes of rapidly cycling consumer distinction.
This in-group competition, more than anything else, is why the term hipster is primarily a pejorative—an insult that belongs to the family of poseur, faker, phony, scenester, and hanger-on. The challenge does not clarify whether the challenger rejects values in common with the hipster—of style, savoir vivre, cool, etc. It just asserts that its target adopts them with the wrong motives. He does not earn them.
Grief’s article is worth the read, if only to see a clear picture of how the modern hipster came to be. (hat tip to @rewordsmith)
HTML Giant’s New Literary Magazine Club
HTML Giant has announced the launch of its own version of the online book club.
The Literary Magazine Club will ask members to read and discuss a single work together. It’s just that instead of reading a book, participants will read and discuss a single issue of a literary magazine. And . . .
first up is the current issue of New York Tyrant. The issue that includes works by flockers Brandon Hobson, Daryl Scroggins, and Cooper Renner.
So go buy a copy now if you haven’t already.
(Thanks to Brandon for the tip.)
Once more, time travel
proofreading at the New Yorker
An interview with Mary Norris, the copy editor at The New Yorker, about, among other things, job descriptions and the stylistic preferences of the magazine.
The job descriptions at The New Yorker are different from those at book publishing houses and other magazines. We have a copy desk, and the job of the copy editor is to do the first pass on a piece, when the manuscript is “set up,” that is, set in type for general distribution. At this stage, the copy editor makes minimal changes, in spelling and punctuation, to conform to New Yorker style. You may have noticed that we spell “theatre” the British way, reversing the “er” to “re,” and double consonants before suffixes (“travelled,” rather than “traveled”); we use the diaeresis in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect”; we prefer the serial comma; we spell out round numbers, even big ones. The copy editor does not make any interpretive changes.
(via the browser)
EVIL PEOPLE IN MODERNIST HOMES IN POPULAR FILMS
Alexander Trevi (he of my longtime favorite Pruned) twittered about Ben Critton’s Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films, then followed up by linking to these snaps of said publication.
Zadie Smith is the New Books columnist for Harper’s
“I think a good book review is a place to meet a book on its own terms not as an ideological vehicle or an academic plaything. Often people think of writing as primary and reading as the lesser art; in my life it’s the other way around. When I write about books I’m trying to honor reading as a creative act: as far as I’m concerned the job is not simply to describe an end product but to delineate a process, an intimate experience with a book which the general reader understands just as well as the professional critic.”
I love this woman’s perspective on writing as much as her writing.
