The Magazines and Other Observations

I was once a committed magazine reader.  I liked holding magazines and turning their pages, the physicality of reading.

Since going permanently online in 2008, I haven't bothered to purchase a single magazine, I swear. Or I can't recall doing so at any rate. Before then, I subscribed to a few now and again and always enjoyed the experience of reading certain of them cover-to-cover.

I still read magazines, or the parts of them not behind a paywall, but I as much as anyone am responsible for the tough times magazines, like newspapers, are going through these days.  I go for the free content and leave it at that.  My money goes to my ISP, not the publishers.  This is unfortunate.

You may be using the same logic to avoid buying Round Bend Press Books.

Sometimes in the past I'd pick up a magazine I was unfamiliar with because a story I partially perused at the magazine rack seemed interesting and worthwhile.

If I discovered a new one, I'd sometimes give it a try.  I think I bought the first George, just to see what John Kennedy, Jr. could do.

George didn't last long, and neither did young Kennedy.

As a kid I bought the usual, starting with Boy's Life and Sports Illustrated, the hot rod magazines, comic books, boxing mags, music mags, Mad Magazine, etc., etc.

Later, I occasionally bought Playboy, for the stories of course, and the quasi-intellectual cultural journals like Atlantic, Harper's, The New Republic, Esquire, etc.

My bible for a long time was the 40th Anniversary issue of Esquire, devoted to the best original fiction and non-fiction the mag had published from its inception.  The magazine's heyday was its first forty years, when it published great work and paid real money to its contributors.  I first read two of my favorite short stories by Irwin Shaw there:  "The 80-Yard Run," about a former football star whose college glory has passed into a miserable middle-age.  And "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses," about a man who realizes during a walk along a Manhattan street with his wife that she knows more than he'd like her to know about his attraction to other women.

Ten years later, I bought the magazine's 50th Anniversary issue, but wasn't quite as taken by it for some reason. I had both of them stashed away until a decade ago, when I cut up the forty-year issue and put the stories in plastic sheaths and took them to my education class at Portland State to show the youngsters what a real magazine looked like in the old days.  The full-page black and white pictures of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, et. al, were impressive.  "These are my heroes," I told the young people in the class, all of whom were there, like me, because the course was mandatory for aspiring teachers.  They passed the delicate pages around the room as I played a recording of me reading a short story I'd written for the occasion. I was so old I could have been some of these youngsters' Grandpa. Well, maybe not that old...but my own daughter was their age.

I decided not to pursue teaching after giving it a brief try in a local high school; I'm not sure why, except the "credential" dance was too meaningless to me, I guess.  I discovered how difficult teaching would be for someone lacking the patience for it.  It became another thing I didn't care to suffer through in order to fail at it.  The kids scared the shit out of me.

Something else happened that was sort of depressing.  I always wore a shirt and tie and some of my most presentable pants and slightly tattered sports coats to class.  My host teacher, a lifer who taught history at the particular school I was visiting, pulled me aside one day and told me my tennis shoes needed to go.  Wear loafers, he said. Real shoes.

I didn't own a pair of shoes, and I didn't have the money to buy a pair either.

I recall looking at him and thinking, My God.  You get so many things wrong and twisted in your lectures, dish out so much crap to these poor rich kids that they'll never recover from your bullshit, not even if they live to be 100, and you're mentioning this?

I thought, you're an asshole commenting on my sartorial bliss!  I didn't say it, I didn't say it...

He also had no idea that I have problems with my feet and haven't felt comfortable in shoes since forever.  But he didn't need to know that.

I was already planning changes as he poured his fraudulent heart out.

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One publication I never purchased and found intolerable was the National Review.  I'd pick one up occasionally without buying it and usually get pissed.  I wanted to tear it up, or set it afire. I disliked Bill Buckley and all conservatives in general. My family was crawling with them.  I was different.  I was the "artist."

I did however collect college football and basketball magazines for most of the '80s--Smith & Street, Athlon and other annuals.  Like the Esquire anniversary issues, I no longer have them but I can recall reading and re-reading them until the pages were tattered.  I read them in lieu of making art, pure escapism and avoidance. Sometimes I wanted to write sports stories, something I did--and not well at all--in high school.

Alas, I didn't give it much of a go, submitting one to the Willamette Week, which the paper wasn't interested in because it wasn't very good.  It was supposed to be about Mouse Davis' now famous "run and shoot" offense at PSU, one of the earliest versions of today's ubiquitous spread offenses. I don't remember what I wrote, but I doubt it was about Davis and his football genius at all, and I didn't bother to archive a copy.

I worked odd jobs to survive and forgot about sports writing.  Then about two years ago I finally published a short book about the Portland Beavers. A baseball story. That is all, my life's work as a sports writer.

I lost the sports magazine collection a long time ago during one move or another. I was tired of lugging them around.

So since going online it's been hit or miss with the discarded mags I find on the shelves at the senior center across the street from where I now live.  Sometimes I pick one up for the hell of it, as I did today when I spotted a copy of The New Yorker (Feb. 29, 2016).

Price $7.99.  Too steep for me.  Luckily this one is free, like the copies of The New Yorker my serial-reader, co-worker Suzanne once passed on to me while we were in the employ of a Northwest Portland restaurant in the '90s.  

My latest free New Yorker is on my desk, and I'm looking at the magazine's cover, which is a colored drawing of six forms that look half-human and half-like Oscar statues.  Red VIP rope is center-left in the picture.  The carpet is red. A redheaded man in shades, holding a clipboard and wired up with a communication device, appears to be checking the statues into or out of--it isn't clear which--some sort of controlled environment where a deliberate exclusivity is being managed.  The statues are larger than the checker, and in the foreground three of them are larger than life. Three others behind the rope are awaiting entrance/exit to a dream.

At the bottom left of the picture, a hint of what awaits the statues/guests is clear: photographers, paparazzi,  are represented by a small glimpse of their equipment, including a black lens with a patch of gray merging with black at the picture's edge.  On the gray area, small type reads, "Clowes '16."

Ah ha!  The artist's signature.

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The back of the magazine features a Cadillac advertisement with the copy reading:

ONLY THOSE WHO DARE
DRIVE THE WORLD FORWARD.
INTRODUCING THE FIRST-EVER CADILLAC CT6.

Below the picture of the Caddy, under the Cadillac logo there is this: DARE GREATLY.

Directly below the picture, which has only a hint of color in its dominant black and silver-gray motif, this, in smaller caps:

THE PRESTIGE SEDAN, REINVENTED.
CADILLAC.COM/CT6

The first-ever CT 6 is a black beauty with shimmering silver wheels and an impressive form like a sleek whale beached on a cobblestone-street just off Pierce St. in NYC.

The car appears to need valet service, as it is in the middle of the narrow street unattended.  Perhaps the valet is already in the car, readying to drive it to the nearest parking lot.  The windows are blackened out, so how would you know? (Or perhaps the adman is a step ahead; we don't need no stinking valets!)

Near the car a handsome couple is walking on the sidewalk, likely headed for a nearby cafe or theatre outside the frame.  She has long, flowing black hair and a silver/gray shirt covered by an open, lightweight brown-leather jacket.  Her long, thin arms protrude out of the jacket too far, making her appear awkward as she is captured mid-stride. She is carrying a black purse on her right hip, held there by a thin shoulder strap. It is as if the jacket may be ill-fitted, like she's grown out of it.  Her hips are wide, but not too wide, in the fetching way some thin women's hips are; bony and pronounced in tight denims. Her left hand appears to be grazing her handsome companion's right hand, as if the camera caught the pair just before they joined hands in an expression of their mutual satisfaction with both the Caddy and each other. He has a shadow of a beard and could be a little older than the woman, maybe 40 to her 35. He too is in denims.  He is wearing a black jacket, also open in front, of indiscernible material. His left hand is slightly blurred in the image, as if it was moving as the photographer clicked his camera. The couple is looking at each other admiringly, confidently.  Their relationship and the car are both solid and their lives are good, you can tell. You can almost sense they are about to embrace because they are so happy.              

Unknowing "extras" carry on with their less distinctive business in the background across the street, walking in several directions.  In the foreground, just behind the car, a young man wearing white tennis shoes and a dark sweatshirt is crossing the street right to left.  He is carrying a gray pack strapped over his right shoulder.  The tote has settled on his lower back. His face is not shown. He is probably a student, but you never know. He could also be a terrorist.

Inside this issue of The New Yorker in the "Talk of the Town" is a commentary by Jeffrey Toobin, in which the author expresses his dislike of the recently deceased Antonin Scalia.

What Toobin says is mostly right.  I read the piece because a conservative did not write it.

TS