A little shameless self-promotion: My Us Weekly-as-Harper’s cover from February is featured today in The New York Post’s weekly Hot List, coming in at number five. (The cover graphic appears in the paper’s print edition but not the online edition.) Also on this week’s Hot List, which is compiled and written by Maureen Callahan: The Daily Show: Indecision 2004, the first-ever DVD from that great show, and Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin, the latest book by Freaks and Geeks co-creator Paul Feig.

The creeps at Bad Touch Weekly have put Michael Jackson on the cover again. This must be BTW’s sixth or seventh Jacko cover in a row. Jeez.

This is hilarious: The fake Parents magazine cover I created for this website a couple of months ago has propagated itself all over the web, and now it’s earned its own page on Snopes.com, the excellent website that debunks or confirms urban legends. The cover’s distribution gained significant momentum last week when one of the friendly guys at Boing Boing posted it without realizing it was a joke (and without knowing where it came from). He quickly posted a clarification, but the ball was already rolling: The cover has been pulled out of context and posted in all sorts of places (32,615 hits on i-am-bored.com!), almost always by people who had no idea where it came from. Lots of people have thought the cover is real, so Snopes stepped in to debunk it.

In the post where I originally published the cover, I didn’t pretend it was real. I just meant for it to be an amusing (if juvenile) riff on a growing trend in magazine-cover design. So it’s bizarre to see the cover get taken out of context, and to watch credulous people actually wonder if it’s real.

A totally inadvertent hoax! Huzzah!

I was going through some unopened mail today and came across a direct-mail pitch from a fledgling magazine. I don’t know how long this sealed envelope had been sitting in my apartment, but I decided to slice it open and check it out. The pitch is made up of several different components, including a letter from the publisher that is so flattering it made me blush. In his letter, the nice publisher assures me that “only a select few will receive this exclusive invitation.” I have been chosen for this offer, he explains, because I am someone “with a curious nature, an acute sense of style, a level of sophistication that matches our own, and a quick and agile wit. … Someone who appreciates good conversation, great writing, and exquisite design.” I don’t know how he knows these things about me, but of course he’s right. Well, okay, I don’t know how sophisticated they are, so I don’t know if their sophistication level matches mine. But the other flattering statements are definitely true.

Anyway, it looks like this magazine is totally filled with celebrities and stuff, so I’m sure it’s awesome. Below is the most elaborately designed component of the pitch; it’s a foldout, so it has built-in suspense. I love all these wacky facial expressions—they totally make this magazine seem so much more fun and sophisticated than all those other magazines that fawn over celebrities:

And then, when you open the final fold, you get this:

[Continue reading "Direct-Mail Time Capsule"...]

When my thoughts turn to women being fed into grinders, light comedy is not the first thing that leaps to mind. See the two images below: The first, a print ad currently appearing in various national magazines, is part of HBO’s marketing campaign for The Comeback, Lisa Kudrow’s mock-reality-show sitcom, which debuts on June 5. The second is Hustler’s notorious June 1978 meat grinder cover, a major entry in the pantheon of misogynist iconography. Were the people in HBO’s marketing department actually unaware of this visual echo? Hustler has basically owned the woman-in-a-meat-grinder concept for the last 27 years; did the people at HBO think they could steal the concept and rehabilitate it with help from a cute and wacky sitcom actress? I’m guessing the Hustler connection never even occurred to them. But who knows.

The Summer 2005 issue—no, wait, the “June/July/Aug/Sept 2005” issue—of Bookforum is coming out in a week or so, and it contains a special section on Thomas Pynchon. Check out the section’s stellar list of contributors:

The man on the cover is Irwin Corey, a loopy comic actor whom Pynchon sent to represent him at the 1974 National Book Awards. When the time came for Pynchon to accept the fiction citation for Gravity’s Rainbow, it was Corey who went onstage and accepted the award from a baffled Ralph Ellison. Corey then delivered a bizarre humdinger of an acceptance speech. You can listen to a short excerpt of it here (Windows Media format). And you can read a transcript of the whole thing here.

The 1974 National Book Awards took place on April 18, a mere two and a half weeks after what is perhaps the most famous streaking incident of all time: On April 2, a streaker named Robert Opel bounded across the stage as David Niven was presenting an award at the 1974 Oscars. Toward the end of his Pynchon acceptance speech, Corey expressed his thanks to “Mr. Knopf, who just ran through the auditorium.” (The transcript indicates that a streaker actually ran across the stage during the ceremony, but I don’t think this is true—I couldn’t find confirmation of it anywhere online. For a couple of minutes, though, I was thinking, “Yes! A streaker! At the National Book Awards! Awesome!” How fucking hilarious would that have been?)

[Side note: According to a website I stumbled onto a few minutes ago, the German term for streaking is Nackerblitz, which translates roughly as “nude lightning.” However, there are only about five Google hits for Nackerblitz, so the word is apparently not widely used.]

Update, May 26: Some content from Bookforum’s summer issue is now online, including part of the Pynchon section.

Received in the mail the other day: issue No. 4 of Esopus, the elegant and quirky biannual magazine designed and edited by Tod Lippy and published on very thick paper stock. My ultracool friend Lila recently gave me a one-year (two-issue) subscription as a gift, which only confirms her ultracoolness. I love the cometlike blob of melting ice cream on the cover:

Here’s how the magazine describes its mission:

Esopus is a twice-yearly arts magazine featuring fresh, unmediated perspectives on the contemporary cultural landscape from artists, writers, filmmakers, playwrights, photographers, architects, designers, musicians, and other creative professionals. It includes long-form artists’ projects, critical writing, fiction, interviews, and, in each issue, a CD of specially commissioned music.

In November of last year, David Carr of The New York Times wrote a gushy feature about Lippy and Esopus. You can read it here.

I haven’t had a chance to delve very deeply into the new issue yet, but it looks gorgeous. I’m looking forward to reading Daniel Tannehill Neely’s article “Soft Serve,” which the Esopus website describes this way: “A musicologist combed archives and spoke with a number of truck drivers and inventors to chart the evolution of that perennial summer anthem, the ice cream truck jingle.”

Here’s an amusing relic from my magazine collection. What the hell is Colin Powell doing in there? Why is he slumming at the cyber party?

Virtual City existed for maybe three or four issues in 1995 and 1996. It had some sort of relationship to Newsweek; I think Newsweek was an advisor and investor. I wrote a bunch of site summaries for an issue or two, back when I was first starting to freelance for magazines.

Despite the incredibly embarrassing cover of the premiere issue, above, and despite the stench emanating from columns written by the short-fingered vulgarian Jason McCabe Calacanis, Virtual City could actually have been much worse. Less forgiving people would have no trouble finding snark fodder within its pages. But from where I sit, it’s clear that Virtual City was put together by editorial and design pros who knew how to create a magazine for a specific niche audience, even if what they created didn’t end up working, and even if the whole thing seems kind of amusing 10 years later.

From its emphasis on reviews and culture-oriented service pieces down to its use of Bureau Grotesque for most of its display type, Virtual City was blatantly modeled on Entertainment Weekly. It was obviously conceived to be the E.W. of the, um, “cyber” world. (Now there’s a word we don’t hear very often these days, thank god.) The magazine’s boosterish tone is a quaint reminder of what things were like back then, almost a decade ago, a mere year or two after the web became the Next Big Thing. Other contributors to the premiere issue: Ben Stein, Nikki Finke, Douglas Rushkoff, Scott Rosenberg. Here’s an excerpt from the editors’ letter, which is signed by Jonathan Sacks, the publisher and editorial director, and Lewis D’Vorkin, the editor-in-chief:

Consider this: On an average day almost anywhere in the world, you can connect by computer to the greatest minds in science, world-class comedians or experts on medieval art. You can phone home from 32,000 feet above Yosemite or from your tractor in the middle of 100 acres of Iowa corn. You can hang out online with Michael Jackson or Michael Milken. You can find a crowd of people who, like you, collect 18th-century thumbtacks. You can make out.

Technology is redefining how you make friends, how you communicate, what you know and who you are. It’s the foundation of the Virtual City.

With a computer hooked to a telephone line you can move right in. The Virtual City is a distinctly human place, rich with culture, with opportunity, with things to do and people to see. It’s as glamorous as the Miracle Mile and as perilous as a deserted alley, teeming with winners and losers, lovers and haters, geniuses and fools. Take the right turn and you find the Louvre. Take the wrong turn and you land in a place where thugs steal your credit cards. It’s the place where Rush Limbaugh found a wife and Tom Clancy lost one.

Toward the end, the editors’ letter also contains this hilarious sentence, which I assure you is not taken out of context:

This premiere issue of Virtual City is the work of a team of magazine editors, writers and business people.

Really? A team of editors, writers, and business people? You don’t say!

In their quest for newsstand “pop,” many magazines design their covers in such a way that the logotype is almost an afterthought. Titles of magazines are often partly blotted out by celebrity heads, torsos, hair, and other body parts. This April 2005 cover of Parents magazine demonstrates the perils of this design technique:

(Note that I never said this was the real cover. You can find a lot more of my designs via the magazine covers tag.)

(Inspired partly by a brief moment in a recent episode of Arrested Development involving Buster and an alarm clock.)

UPDATE, June 2005: This cover escaped from its moorings several weeks ago and has traveled all over the net, creating a small urban legend in the process. See this June 14 post for the story of how Snopes.com stepped in to debunk it.

Hey, check it out, a new magazine:

I did this one in Quark.

(See more stuff like this via the magazine covers tag.)