Could there be a more perfect encapsulation of the decline of American magazines than this gallery of all 857 Esquire covers since 1933? First look at 1966, a year when the brilliant graphic designer George Lois was churning out one iconic cover after another. Then go to 2004. Or almost any year since about 1981. It’s sad. Predictable, but sad.

The 1996 book Covering the 60’s: George Lois, the Esquire Era collects the best Esquire covers from that classic era, along with commentary by Lois himself.

In 2001 I wrote a column skewering Esquire and its editor, David Granger, for publishing a silly stunt article by Tom Junod.

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categories: Art and Design, Magazines

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The middle section of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius focuses partly on the struggles of Might, the exceptionally good magazine Dave Eggers and several pals published out of San Francisco in the early and mid-’90s. As Eggers himself acknowledges in his hyper-self-conscious preface, the middle section is the weakest part of the book. But Might itself was unusually good. I own eight of the 16 issues that were published before the magazine’s 1997 demise, and I’ll soon own three more: The organization Eggers co-founded to help kids become better writers, 826 Valencia, is selling back issues of Might for $10 a copy.

The 1998 Might anthology, Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp: And Other Essays, is still in print, and it contains lots of excellent material. But Might was not just text on a page; it was very much a magazine. The editors clearly loved the magazine format, but they also loved to tear it apart. A fair amount of Might’s humor was based around subtle or not-so-subtle parodies of the sort of idiocy you see in all but the best publications: dopey front-of-the-book charts, simplistic approaches to complex material, lazy headline puns, and so forth. Those elements of Might can’t be reproduced in straight text.

If you like smart magazines but never saw Might when it was around, pick up a copy or two. I assume the profits go to 826 Valencia, which is a 100 percent worthy organization.

The graphic above is a scan of a promotional sticker I acquired at some point in the mid-’90s.

[Via Lindsay, who capped her poison pen for a second and wrote a lovely snark-free mini-essay about what Might meant to her. With endearing defensiveness, Lindsay describes her mini-essay as a “totally unfunny self-indulgent post with a cheesy moral at the end.”]

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categories: Magazines

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I was planning just to write a short post about the curiosity at right, a 12-sided Rubik’s-style puzzle called a Megaminx. I’ve had one of these things stowed away in a box for more than 20 years, and I stumbled across it a few weeks ago. My Megaminx is in its solved state, but I doubt this means I ever knew how to solve it. I think I acquired this thing toward the end of the early-’80s Rubik’s Cube fad, when I was 12 or 13, and by then I had already gotten interested in other things. Like, um, boobs and stuff.

Anyway, I was looking for a couple of good Rubik’s-related links for this post, and on the official Rubik’s Cube site I discovered a recent Manchester News story about the maverick architect Will Alsop’s plans for an 80-mile-long, 15-mile-wide hypermodern “super city” that would run from coast to coast in Northern England. Alsop’s plans for downtown Manchester include a “50-metre teddy bear” and “a revolving building shaped like a Rubik’s cube puzzle”:

Urbis, Manchester’s Centre for Urban Culture, is hosting a SuperCity exhibit. The Manchester News story explains that the Rubikian building, conceived to be a cinema, will probably never be built: “Mancunians needn’t start writing protest letters just yet. Urbis said the bear-and-cube picture was simply an image chosen to get people thinking creatively. And the city council said it had no plans to act on the ideas….”

You can buy all sorts of unusual Rubik’s-style puzzles here.

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categories: Art and Design

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When I heard last year that an American version of the genius BBC comedy The Office was in the works, I groaned. How could it be anything but a mediocre re-creation of the original, even with the erstwhile Daily Show correspondent Steve Carell in the David Brent role? Well, someone has put online what appears to be the entire U.S. pilot. I don’t know when, or if, this will actually be broadcast. The file is about 39 megabytes, and it’s in Windows Media format.

I’ve only watched a few minutes of it so far, but: It’s a mediocre re-creation of the original. The original makes you cringe in a good way; this is making me cringe in a bad way.

I just watched a few more minutes. Wow, this is even worse than I expected.

[Thanks to Maura for the tip!]

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categories: TV and Video

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[Update, 2:25 p.m., February 1: The bandwidth for this video file is costing me a lot of money, so I’m going to have to take it down at the end of today, February 1. If you can host the file yourself, or you know a place where a 5-megabyte video file could be hosted at no cost, please let me know and I will link to it. Thanks, my apologies.]

[Update, 11:55 p.m., February 1: Okay, I’ve taken the file down. Sorry…]

The six-minute video linked at the end of this post contains two compelling and somewhat disturbing Tonight Show clips from the mid-’70s. The video is from an episode of the superb Manhattan public-access program Media Shower, a clip show that was on the air from 1997 until 2000. The Tonight Show clips are introduced by Media Shower’s host and creator, Jamie Greenberg, a New York comedy writer and performer.

What’s special about these two clips? Well, let’s just say that they wouldn’t win Johnny Carson any racial sensitivity awards. At the very least, they show that Carson was capable of egregious lapses in judgment. I don’t have any reason to think these clips reveal something dark about Carson himself, but they do reveal a lot about the sort of race-oriented humor that was acceptable on television even in the late 1970s.

In the first clip, an apparently unscripted incident from 1977, a mock-angry Carson gets up from his desk and walks down the hall to confront Don Rickles, who is taping an episode of the sitcom C.P.O. Sharkey in an adjacent studio. After a few seconds, Carson points at a black cast member and shouts, “Hey, a black man! Yo, black man! How’s it goin’ there, daddy?” Carson walks over to the actor and gives him five. And then he walks back over to Rickles and says something incredibly shocking. You may not catch it the first time, but Jamie comes on after the clips and explains what to listen for, and then he shows that part of the clip again.

[Continue reading "Two Johnny Carson Clips You Won’t See on CNN This Week"...]

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categories: TV and Video

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At the moment, my iTunes collection contains 12,383 songs culled from 949 albums by 413 artists. I listen to perhaps 50 of these albums regularly, and maybe another 50 somewhat less regularly. There are hundreds of albums in my collection that I listen to rarely, if ever. Because the Main Library window in iTunes has a built-in bias toward songs, as opposed to albums, I’m always having to scroll past dozens or hundreds of tracks I rarely listen to but nevertheless want to keep in my permanent iTunes collection. For example, I own five Frank Sinatra albums from his classic mid-to-late-1950s period. I love those albums, but I don’t listen to them much—and yet I often have to scroll past two screens’ worth of them when I’m poking around iTunes to figure out what I want to listen to next. Likewise with the albums I do listen to a lot: Why should I always be forced to scroll through a screen and a half of Fountains of Wayne songs when I always have those tracks turned on and synced with my iPod? I’d rather just activate all my Fountains of Wayne songs and forget about them.

I could lessen the load on my Main Library window by visiting Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes and plunking down $5 for iTunes Library Manager, a shareware program that allows you to maintain several separate iTunes libraries. There are lots of excellent free iTunes scripts at Doug’s iTunes site, including several that do batch edits of song titles to get rid of awkward capitalizations, extraneous song data, and the like. But I don’t want to have to chop my iTunes collection into parts to make it manageable. I want to keep everything in the same place. So iTunes Library Manager is not the answer to my dilemma.

Fortunately, there’s a simple and elegant solution to the problem of the unwieldy iTunes collection, if only Apple would implement it: iTunes should allow you to collapse an entire album or an artist’s entire oeuvre into one line in the Main Library window, and it should put a checkbox next to each line allowing you to activate or deactive the contents of that line with one click. What if you could control-click on any song in the Main Library and pull up a menu like this, which is a Photoshop-altered version of the actual control-click menu in iTunes 4.7:

[Continue reading "Drowning in mp3s"...]

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categories: Art and Design, Best Of, Music and Audio

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[Adding this to the archives…]

In July 2003, soon after lowbrow genius Bonnie Fuller fled the editorship of US Weekly to become the editorial director of American Media, then-Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers wrote, “I’m fully convinced that Fuller’s ultimate goal at US was to make the magazine intelligible to the completely illiterate. That said, she’s presumably being brought into American Media to turn Star and possibly the National Enquirer, The Globe and Weekly World News into serious journalistic endeavors—inasmuch as they feasibly can be serious journalistic endeavors.” Elizabeth concluded her post by suggesting that readers send in mockups of a smartened-up Star and an even-more-dumbed-down US Weekly.

I had a few hours free that night, so I launched QuarkXPress and took a shot at designing a smartened-up Star. Here’s what I came up with (and Elizabeth published it the next day):

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categories: Magazines

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Beck’s upcoming album, due for release next month, has been leaked to the net. You can download it here, at least for the time being. I’ve listened to a few tracks, and they’re excellent.

Update, 4:10 p.m.: Looks like it’s already been taken down. Sorry if you missed it…

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categories: Music and Audio

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Peter Dizikes has an excellent cover story in Salon today summarizing 34 Bush administration scandals that are worse than Whitewater. Kind of breathtaking to see them all gathered in one place.

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categories: Magazines

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Listening stations in record stores are a fine concept, but they have at least one major drawback: the communal headphones. Who wants to wear headphones that have just been clamped against the ears of any number of music fans, no matter how recently those people have showered or, I don’t know, de-liced themselves? The potential for icky gunk in music store cans is too disturbing to contemplate, and it’s the main reason I rarely sample music at places like Tower or Virgin, even though I often want to. The Internet has made it much easier to check out bands without exposing yourself to other people’s bodily secretions, but sometimes a few 30-second clips at the iTunes Music Store aren’t enough to go on. A lot of albums aren’t even offered there anyway. And finding and downloading pirated music with Limewire or Acquisition can be a hassle.

So here’s an idea: Record stores should retrofit their listening stations with 1/8" headphone jacks so owners of iPods and other portable music players can plug in their own headphones. A significant percentage of iPod owners probably carry their iPods with them wherever they go, and so do many owners of CD Walkmans and other portable players. I’m guessing that many of those people would be more likely to check out a few artists on a listening station if they could simply pull out their own earbuds and plug them in. We’re living in the era of the iPod; why not take advantage of that? I can’t be the only person grossed out by the notion of exposing my ears and head to the ears and heads of the great unwashed masses. The installation of headphone jacks would probably lead to an increase in the use of listening stations, and perhaps to an increase in album sales, however small. It would also—bonus!—have the side benefit of lessening the wear and tear on the stores’ own headphones, which are so cheaply made that a single Metallica song can be enough to break them (and then they sit there, a sad, tangled mess of plastic and rubber and metal, for days or weeks or months until the store finally gets around to fixing them).

Of course, being an American consumer means doing daily battle with the hobgoblins of bad hygiene. I bought the DVD of the original Manchurian Candidate (on sale for ten bucks!) at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square today, and the young cashier abruptly sneezed right before he reached into the cash register for my change. He did the polite thing and sneezed into his hands, but then, without so much as a quick wipe of his hands on his shirt, he pulled my coins out of the register and handed them to me. What’re you gonna do?

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categories: Music and Audio

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Get that designer a curly quote! The unfortunate sign at right hangs above a restaurant on Broadway around 102nd Street, a few blocks from my apartment. The restaurant is called Ana’s, but the long, noncurly apostrophe looks a lot like a lower-case L—which spells the plural of a word you tend to see more often in porn film titles than above restaurants.

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categories: Art and Design, Best Of

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The Indianapolis-based artist Rob Harrell and I have been pals since about 1983, when we started the sixth grade together at Binford Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana. Rob is the guy behind the excellent syndicated comic strip Big Top, which runs in several dozen newspapers around the country. Big Top will remind you of Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County. If there’s a funnier mainstream comic strip being published today, I’m not aware of it. Rob also paints and does commercial illustration; he’s got a brilliant conceptual mind and intimidating technique. The illustration below is from a few years back when he was experimenting a lot with scratchboard techniques. I’m posting it here because I think it’s perfect and hilarious.

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categories: Art and Design

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As Gawker noted in November, the American Gentrifier cover below appears on the flip side of the Winter 2005 issue of Stay Free!, the lefty cultural mag edited by the brilliant and hilarious Brooklyn resident Carrie McLaren. That’s me holding the baby; it was the first time I’d ever worn a Baby Bjorn, and it may well be the last. (The wife and baby are models too.)

I had nothing to do with the concept or design of this cover; I simply showed up at the photographer’s studio and did my best imitation of an emasculated Park Slope husband. The issue is being distributed free throughout Brooklyn at cafes and other establishments. If you’re rarely or never in Brooklyn, you can buy the issue for $2.95 at a number of bookstores around the country, including one of my favorites, Manhattan’s St. Mark’s Bookshop. The issue is also available via the Stay Free! website.

Carrie apparently thinks I look like the archetypal clueless yuppie, because this is the second time she’s enlisted me as a model for one of the parodies that appear on her magazine’s back cover. Four or five years ago, I appeared on the back of Stay Free! in an anti-S.U.V. parody:

Don’t you love how my belt doesn’t match my shoes? Carrie just marched me around the streets of SoHo posing me in front of parked S.U.V.s. They were everywhere. I was surprised to discover just how many of them there are. I have a driver’s license, but I rarely drive, so I’d never really had cause to notice them.

Carrie had this ad made into postcards, which you can buy on the Stay Free! website.

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categories: Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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Did you watch the first episode of the new season of The Bachelorette on Monday? I didn’t, and it wasn’t an oversight: Reality TV makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a runcible spoon. But today I learned that my former co-worker Ben Sands is a contestant on The Bachelorette this season. Ben was the associate producer of the Lingua Franca and University Business websites when the plug was pulled on those magazines in late 2001. (University Business was subsequently bought and revived by another company.) In his bio, which identifies him as a ski instructor from Aspen, Ben explains his “greatest achievement to date”: “Finally being able to define and understand what truly makes me happy.” On Monday he made the cut when the Bachelorette winnowed the 25 original contestants down to 15.

I didn’t know Ben well, but I always found him friendly and smart. I’ll be watching, and I’ll be rooting for him.

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categories: TV and Video

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I love how the Times has started posting Frank Rich’s columns on the paper’s website four or five days before they appear in the Sunday print edition. I don’t remember them ever posting anything more than a day or two in advance before.

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categories: Miscellany

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In case you’re wondering, some giant media conglomerate beat me to the domain name hearst.com, so that wasn’t a possibility.

The name of this site is derived from panopticon, a word the British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) used for the name of an ingenious new kind of prison he spent years devising in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The word comes from the Greek words for “all” and “sight.” As Bentham conceived it, the panopticon would be a kind of ultimate surveillance machine: Prison cells would be arrayed around the inside of a huge circular space, and a hidden sentry would observe from inside a single tower in the center of the space. The sentry would be able to see all the prisoners without being seen himself; the prisoners would never know if or when they were being monitored. Thus the prisoners would have to be on their best behavior at all times. The prisoners would be forced to internalize their own subjugation, and the sentry would be rendered more or less unnecessary. Bentham tried to get a panopticon built, but he was never quite successful. His ideas eventually influenced the design of prisons such as Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, which was built in 1829. The concepts behind the panopticon also influenced the architecture of other kinds of institutional buildings, including some hospitals, which obviously have a similar need for efficient ways to monitor large numbers of people simultaneously.

Bentham conceived of the panopticon as a benign system that would result in prisons that were more humane, but of course its implications are hugely disturbing. Today the panopticon is famous mainly because of its analysis by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who saw it as an utterly diabolical concept and a metaphor for “the oppressive use of information in a modern disciplinary society,” as David Engberg puts it on a website called The Virtual Panopticon. For Foucault, whose analysis appears in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the panopticon concept also signaled a historical shift from “punishment” that targeted the body to “discipline” that targeted the mind and soul. I’ve oversimplified things here; you can read more about these ideas and their influence on this page.

Anyway, I’m interested in all these ideas, but they aren’t going to be the focus of this site. In the 19th century the word panopticon also came to be used as the name for a kind of hands-on museum where a wide variety of objects were on display, and that’s a suitably vague description of what this site will be. I’m very interested in the media in general and magazines in particular, so there will be a lot about that sort of thing here. I’m kind of a pack rat when it comes to magazines, so I’ll regularly be sharing things from my collection, including a number of inadvertently hilarious guitar magazines from the hair-metal era. Yngwie!

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categories: Best Of, Miscellany

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