The rise and fall of magazines
Apr. 24th, 2008 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusOver the next day or so two new articles I've written go up online -- a piece about the 101 Tokyo art fair for the Frieze site and a piece about the 5th Berlin Biennial for The Moment. They probably won't get much attention -- art pieces never do -- and, after a week or two, will be completely swept away in the ephemeral rush of fresh online commentary.
I've been thinking recently about magazines, newspapers, kiosks, newsagents. In the days before the internet, the closest thing for an information addict was the newsagent. But nothing could be harder than reconstructing the magazines (let alone the cultural and intellectual climate) of a bygone era. There are hardly any pictures of the outsides of British newsagents in the 1970s, let alone the magazines on their shelves or the content of those magazines.
Here's a quick snapshot of the periodicals I would have been purchasing in newsagents in particular periods of my life:
Typical Teenager, 1975: Time, The Listener, The Montreal Star (with its groovy supplement Scene), The Radio Times, Amateur Photographer, Car, Design.
Make it new, 1980: New Musical Express, New Society, New Statesman, New Left Review, Spare Rib, Gambit, Bananas, Zigzag, Studio International.
Style Press and London Listings, 1985: Smash Hits, The Face, i-D, The Fred, TLS, City Limits, Time Out, Blitz.
Getting More French, 1990: Actuel, Liberation, Lime Lizard.
Digital and Japanese Culture, 1995: Les Inrockuptibles, Select, Nova, Wired, Interactif, Magic, Barfout, H, Beikoku Ongaku, Cutie, Olive.
Japan Seen from New York, 2000: Studio Voice, Tokion, Raygun, FRUiTS, Relax, Frieze, Index, Sleazenation.
Esoterica and Slow Life, 2005: The Wire, De:bug, OK Fred, Kidswear, Exberliner, Vice, Artforum, Ku:nel, 032c.
British newsagents in the 70s were feral, shabby, habitual places, corner shops filled with confectionery, cigarettes, mags. The struggle was always to find something intelligent in them, yet in the 70s there was still something Reithian on the racks -- the BBC's magazine The Listener, for instance. There were still left wing sociology magazines like New Society, for which John Berger, Rayner Banham, David Cooper, Colin MacInnes, George Melly and Dennis Potter wrote.
When the 80s rolled around you could find intelligent writing in the style and music press, though it was a bit more glam and flashy than the Reithian voices of the 70s. I began to turn to the French press -- Actuel and Libé. Globalization meant that you could buy those pretty easily in London. As for the art and design press, in Britain they were still in the dark ages. Peter Fuller's Modern Painters didn't launch until 1988; before then you had Artscribe and Studio International, both now gone. The Design Council's Design magazine, despite the nice cover, was full of rather snoozy insider's reports on Thorn lighting rails and trade fairs. It's gone now too, although consumer design commentary has percolated and permeated everywhere.
The fact that I'm writing now for the online presences of journals like the New York Times and Frieze (reports which don't appear in the print versions) says a lot, I think. Magazines and newspapers will be eaten by the web, and when that happens newsagents will become tobacconists and confectioners, and nobody will have to go out in the rain to try and find an interesting magazine to read. Nobody will walk up to Waverley Station's news kiosk at midnight -- as I did one evening in 1978 -- and come back with a typewritten copy of Zigzag with Iggy Pop on the cover. It'll all just be a click away, with a banner ad.
Hisae tells me that a magazine she used to read regularly, Kokoku Hihyo (広告批評) has announced that it's to cease publication in April 2009, soon after celebrating its 30th anniversary. Kokoku Hihyo (literally: ad criticism) is a cultural review about advertising. It reviews the work of ad directors and copywriters, celebrating commercial creatives pretty much the way the music press celebrates musicians.
Former editor (now publisher) Amano Yukichi is getting on now, and he's closing his mag not just because magazine culture is being eaten up by the web, but because advertising is. The mass culture ads he's reviewed -- ads familiar to all Japanese -- are becoming targeted niche ads online. The situation described by Keiko Sei in this 1990 article is rapidly vanishing:
"CMs enjoy such immense popularity in Japan that advertising comes to seem less an accessory and more a primary industry in itself, an important creative output generating yet further spin-off media. From wholly dedicated CM magazines to regular mention in the 50 million daily newspapers and 1100 million other magazines, discourse on CM takes many forms. Japan’s leading "intellectual" newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, features a weekly column, CM Watching by Amano Yukichi , chief editor of the monthly Koku Hihyo (Advertizing Critique), as well as another weekly column, Cheerful Consultations by major copywriter Nakajima Ramo. Both claim a huge readership, the former known for his skill at educing a picture of the world at large from a single CM, while the latter adopts a tried-and-true CM format to discuss eccentric queries from readers. Cheerful drivel to be sure, yet Nakajima’s media presence is telling. In any other country, the persons behind-the-scenes in advertising remain invisible; in Japan, they are familiar household names. Where else but Japan do hit commercial makers step forward and become stars? Ask any Japanese: there’s top copywriter Itoi Shigesato, and CM "creators" Kawasaki Toru, Nakahata Kishi, Sugiyama Kotaro and Lee Taeyong, to list but a few. This "up-front-behind-the-scenes" awareness is paradigmatic of the critical doublethink relationship that exists in Japan between the media and the viewer."
Eighteen years later, Yukichi says "Kokoku has come to a big turning point once more, the transition from the era of exclusive devotion to mass media to the era of coordination with internet. As things were going slowly with mass media Kokoku, we decided to have a break now." The break, I suspect, will be forever. Once-lively Kokoku Hihyo will join the list of interesting, defunct periodicals old codgers recall fondly on their blogs.
I've been thinking recently about magazines, newspapers, kiosks, newsagents. In the days before the internet, the closest thing for an information addict was the newsagent. But nothing could be harder than reconstructing the magazines (let alone the cultural and intellectual climate) of a bygone era. There are hardly any pictures of the outsides of British newsagents in the 1970s, let alone the magazines on their shelves or the content of those magazines.
Here's a quick snapshot of the periodicals I would have been purchasing in newsagents in particular periods of my life:
Typical Teenager, 1975: Time, The Listener, The Montreal Star (with its groovy supplement Scene), The Radio Times, Amateur Photographer, Car, Design.
Make it new, 1980: New Musical Express, New Society, New Statesman, New Left Review, Spare Rib, Gambit, Bananas, Zigzag, Studio International.
Style Press and London Listings, 1985: Smash Hits, The Face, i-D, The Fred, TLS, City Limits, Time Out, Blitz.
Getting More French, 1990: Actuel, Liberation, Lime Lizard.
Digital and Japanese Culture, 1995: Les Inrockuptibles, Select, Nova, Wired, Interactif, Magic, Barfout, H, Beikoku Ongaku, Cutie, Olive.
Japan Seen from New York, 2000: Studio Voice, Tokion, Raygun, FRUiTS, Relax, Frieze, Index, Sleazenation.
Esoterica and Slow Life, 2005: The Wire, De:bug, OK Fred, Kidswear, Exberliner, Vice, Artforum, Ku:nel, 032c.
British newsagents in the 70s were feral, shabby, habitual places, corner shops filled with confectionery, cigarettes, mags. The struggle was always to find something intelligent in them, yet in the 70s there was still something Reithian on the racks -- the BBC's magazine The Listener, for instance. There were still left wing sociology magazines like New Society, for which John Berger, Rayner Banham, David Cooper, Colin MacInnes, George Melly and Dennis Potter wrote.
When the 80s rolled around you could find intelligent writing in the style and music press, though it was a bit more glam and flashy than the Reithian voices of the 70s. I began to turn to the French press -- Actuel and Libé. Globalization meant that you could buy those pretty easily in London. As for the art and design press, in Britain they were still in the dark ages. Peter Fuller's Modern Painters didn't launch until 1988; before then you had Artscribe and Studio International, both now gone. The Design Council's Design magazine, despite the nice cover, was full of rather snoozy insider's reports on Thorn lighting rails and trade fairs. It's gone now too, although consumer design commentary has percolated and permeated everywhere.
The fact that I'm writing now for the online presences of journals like the New York Times and Frieze (reports which don't appear in the print versions) says a lot, I think. Magazines and newspapers will be eaten by the web, and when that happens newsagents will become tobacconists and confectioners, and nobody will have to go out in the rain to try and find an interesting magazine to read. Nobody will walk up to Waverley Station's news kiosk at midnight -- as I did one evening in 1978 -- and come back with a typewritten copy of Zigzag with Iggy Pop on the cover. It'll all just be a click away, with a banner ad.
Hisae tells me that a magazine she used to read regularly, Kokoku Hihyo (広告批評) has announced that it's to cease publication in April 2009, soon after celebrating its 30th anniversary. Kokoku Hihyo (literally: ad criticism) is a cultural review about advertising. It reviews the work of ad directors and copywriters, celebrating commercial creatives pretty much the way the music press celebrates musicians.
Former editor (now publisher) Amano Yukichi is getting on now, and he's closing his mag not just because magazine culture is being eaten up by the web, but because advertising is. The mass culture ads he's reviewed -- ads familiar to all Japanese -- are becoming targeted niche ads online. The situation described by Keiko Sei in this 1990 article is rapidly vanishing:
"CMs enjoy such immense popularity in Japan that advertising comes to seem less an accessory and more a primary industry in itself, an important creative output generating yet further spin-off media. From wholly dedicated CM magazines to regular mention in the 50 million daily newspapers and 1100 million other magazines, discourse on CM takes many forms. Japan’s leading "intellectual" newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, features a weekly column, CM Watching by Amano Yukichi , chief editor of the monthly Koku Hihyo (Advertizing Critique), as well as another weekly column, Cheerful Consultations by major copywriter Nakajima Ramo. Both claim a huge readership, the former known for his skill at educing a picture of the world at large from a single CM, while the latter adopts a tried-and-true CM format to discuss eccentric queries from readers. Cheerful drivel to be sure, yet Nakajima’s media presence is telling. In any other country, the persons behind-the-scenes in advertising remain invisible; in Japan, they are familiar household names. Where else but Japan do hit commercial makers step forward and become stars? Ask any Japanese: there’s top copywriter Itoi Shigesato, and CM "creators" Kawasaki Toru, Nakahata Kishi, Sugiyama Kotaro and Lee Taeyong, to list but a few. This "up-front-behind-the-scenes" awareness is paradigmatic of the critical doublethink relationship that exists in Japan between the media and the viewer."
Eighteen years later, Yukichi says "Kokoku has come to a big turning point once more, the transition from the era of exclusive devotion to mass media to the era of coordination with internet. As things were going slowly with mass media Kokoku, we decided to have a break now." The break, I suspect, will be forever. Once-lively Kokoku Hihyo will join the list of interesting, defunct periodicals old codgers recall fondly on their blogs.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 07:54 am (UTC)Well, there are those arty short film/music video/advertising crossovers like Chris Cunningham, Gondry, and LaChapelle. They're not exclusively advertising people, but neither is Shigesato Itoi, a name I recognize from the credits of Earthbound (http://www.largeprimenumbers.com/article.php?sid=mother2).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 07:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 08:26 am (UTC)Incidentally, the article I linked about Earthbound is way too verbose in some parts, but there are bits of it that are fascinating. I particuarly liked where he connects elements of Earthbound to influences from Kobo Abe and Murakami, and where he argues for the literary value of certain scenes and seemingly throw-away moments in the game.
One thing that absolutely SCREAMS Abe in the game is a self-proclaimed "Dungeon Designer" who eventually turns himself into a giant living maze for the player to navigate.
Not that this has much relation to the original topic, but I'd love to see you touch more on games-as-art.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 11:05 am (UTC)Also, tim rogers is never too verbose, he’s awesome :p
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 11:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 12:00 pm (UTC)"Shigesato Itoi stated that his inspiration for Giygas' speech came from a traumatic childhood experience where he unwittingly viewed a rape scene in the 1957 film The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty (憲兵とバラバラ死美人 Kenpei to Barabara Shibijin)"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 11:42 am (UTC)*raises eyebrow*
Did we play the same game? Mother 2 was a very Japanese take on Americana -- Old B movies, Small town USA, Stereotypical depictions of white people, "mom n' pop" shops, Retro cliches such as skater punks in the video arcade, kids in baseball caps, girls in frilly dresses and bows...
Earthbound is my one of my favourite SNES games of all time. Its design from the soundtrack to the story to the graphics... it was utterly unique for its time and largely went unappreciated because it was just too eccentric.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 11:48 am (UTC)"Marischal College looks very drab and run-down nowadays and occupies a large area to no useful purpose, like a dead whale washed up on a beach. The Student Union on Upperkirkgate has shut down. Bisset's academic bookshop, as was, once a shining point of culture and learning, now sells computer games."
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 12:19 pm (UTC)If you haven't, I'll upload the ROM for you and you can play it using one of the SNES emulators for the Mac (http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/mac/).
You can also download the soundtrack here (http://gh.ffshrine.org/soundtracks/5751)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 01:49 pm (UTC)At the same time I was hunting for issues of the already-extinct Mangajin, I was secretly reading Oasis Magazine Online, a pre-weblog monthly "e-zine" for gay youth. There was a "Columns" section, where anyone could write in and do safe, anonymous, free, unfiltered and highly confessional writing for an audience of peers. It was what helped me develop a gay political consciousness and later it got me into the first honest confessional/autobiographical writing I'd ever done.
Oh, and there was the highschool literary magazine I took part in. My fag hag and I had big plans but no real discipline or skill to execute them, so we kinda ran it into the ground. That could be another factor in the rising magazine mortality rate: their relatively high overhead makes them more sensitive to managerial incompetence!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 07:56 pm (UTC)Well, how shocking it *was* at the time. Nowadays there’s lot of other “quirky” RPGs. But Mother was the first one which dared to break the template.
Like Tim mentioned, Mother 2 is explicitly designed to be readen aloud, because old text-heavy games like Dragon Quest were hiragana-only and thus you had to read them aloud to make sense of it. It goes as far as showing Dragon Quest–like battle narration. Even Mother 3, a 2006 game, goes the hiragana route for the same reason.
There’s like a ton of these little satires and nods spread through the game. There are small quests with no rewards other than the feeling of completing a quest; there’s the built-in set of “filthy words” for character names, validating a timeless prepubescent gamer practice; there’s the way you can see the world after the story closure, again referencing Dragon Quest; there’s the single Closet Door you can open… Playing Mother 2 without being fluent in videogames is like watching Kill Bill as your first martial arts movie: it’s surely pleasurable by itself, but there’s a LOT of jokes you’ll be missing. For the non-gamer, I’d highly recommend to start with Mother 3 instead — even though it makes an important reference to Mother 2 at the end, it’s not *about* videogames the way Mother 2 is. It’s about death, society, social conformance, money, government, psychedelic trips. And music. Great music.
Also, the Mother series is anything but “unappreciated”. It's one of the most well-known RPG franchises in Japan. When Mother 3 was launched a couple years ago it instantly topped the charts purely on brand recognition — despite the fact that the Game Boy Advance was then already dead, and that it took twelve years to be released since Mother 2.
--leoboiko, too lazy to create an lj account
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 09:45 pm (UTC)I think it was Brandon from insertcredit who said that videogames could gain a lot from the involvement of more writers, designers, painters and other artists; I couldn’t agree more.
--lazy leoboiko
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 04:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-25 07:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 08:18 am (UTC)It's a shame everything else sells but the magazines anymore, and it's kind of mindboggling imagining all the titles that came and went with barely anyone noticing. Some of that is probably Albany's fault though, this is a town where the mayor still calls people "youse".
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 09:13 am (UTC)unfortunately, information on the long-defunct print mag is hard to come by - in its place, myspace sites and other hasty publications use the same name, but to nowhere near the same ends - so here's the closest i could find to a proper link: http://www.published-in-sweden.org/pub/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=1
they definitely helped to shape my young brain, and their frequent writing about japanese art/sound/architecture (i remember distinctly the first issue i purchased, #5 or #6, had a feature on the "fluid" architecture of Tokyo) - and the Western artists informed by same - likely have a lot to do with why i read this journal each morning.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 09:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 10:20 am (UTC)It's funny to think of Click Opera as a magazine. With 30,000 words of monthly topical content (plus pictures) it really could be one.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 10:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 05:51 pm (UTC)I'll be in Berlin the first week of May - should I bring you a scanned copy?
Erik brown
NYC
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 06:04 pm (UTC)I don't really keep proper archives -- I rather enjoy the ephemerality I'm celebrating / bemoaning here. That's all part of of the joy of periodicals. You can't keep celebrating newness -- that fresh rush -- without constantly repudiating yesterday's newness, or deliberately forgetting. It doesn't build on itself, it occludes itself. And one of our problems, now, is that we've forgotten how to forget, thanks to digitization. Then again, lots does still get lost -- thank God!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 06:21 pm (UTC)And I don't miss those old issues of Wallpaper and Tyler Brule-informed commentary on design.
Erik brown
It's all rather nostalgic
Date: 2008-04-24 10:34 am (UTC)I recently got asked to move to london to work for a magazine. A well established world-wide publication. They were very interested in having me join them, and i graciously accepted their offer. However when it came to talk of salary they said "oh you won't get paid, it's like an internship."
Well screw that. This is where the pinch is coming in this industry. Yes i understand the need for internships and work experience and it has been happening for years, but how exactly do they expect me to be able to afford to move to london and live.... This magazine makes a huge profit and that's all they care about. They don't care that maybe i'm the ideal person to have on board, they care about getting anyone to work for free - and some poor sole will, some london dweller who happens to live within waking distance. Is that how you advance your publication? By limiting it to those who live close by? This is one of the reasons why magazines are failing - the big ones that are left are only left because they don't spend money on the things that used to make magazines great (the staff) Did anyone ever think that it wasn't just the presence of the internet that was forcing falling sales, but for me it's because the great writers are on only found there, not in the magazines The presence of a car will nullify a bike, but only if someone can drive it- no-one can afford to have them any other way so they work for free from home - thus magazines are dying because they don't spend the cash, they're appealing to a smaller and smaller market who buy them despite their diabolical state. If you have any sense these days you don't buy masses of magazines, but not because they are expensive and often hard to locate, but because if you want to read great writing online is the becoming one of the only places to find it.
wwb
Re: It's all rather nostalgic
Date: 2008-04-24 11:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 10:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 11:02 am (UTC)http://www.johnmenziesplc.com/assets/sounds/menzies2.wav
A lively young damsel named Menzies
Inquired: "Do you know what this thenzies?"
Her aunt, with a gasp,
Replied: "It's a wasp,
And you're holding the end where the stenzies."
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 11:11 am (UTC)A spicy young lady called Menzies
Who gave me her number said "Ring us
We need naan bread and poppadoms
Vibrators and condoms
And anything else you can bring us"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 11:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 09:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 10:03 pm (UTC)A spicy young lady called Menzies
Gave me her number and said "Ring us
We need naan bread and poppadoms
Vibrators and condoms
And anything else you can bring us"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 11:36 am (UTC)Was it Mark Perry of ATV or Mark E Smith who had one of those revolving Woolworth racks full of albums? I know Perry was seen lying naked on a floor strewn with all his favourite LP's.
I also recall the newsagent in Peeping Tom where folks came to buy dirty postcards.
The hipper mags were always to be found in Better Books in Forrest Road. In the Bristo magic triangle opposite the Oddfellow's Hall.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 11:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 02:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 02:47 pm (UTC)I think I wanted the things in Spare Rib to be universal. I wanted women to be much more active and discriminating in their mate selection, for instance (ie choose me and do all the work I would otherwise have to do!). But actually what I found in those magazines was the opposite of that mainstream thing you're describing. I found that they allowed fairly mainstream, bourgeois, articulate white people to identify themselves, somehow, as a culty, spiky, cliquey, mysterious subculture. I think I was drawn to that as an escape from class guilt about my privilege, and through my general attraction to margins and alternatives.
My favourite theme in those days was "femininity as alienation". (http://soc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/citation/12/3/582?ck=nck)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-24 06:30 pm (UTC)Not even a Wikipedia disambiguation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz) for this poor old forgotten London style mag -- they do remember "a weekly "what's on" magazine published by Arc @ UNSW at the University of New South Wales" of the same name, though.
You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media
Date: 2008-04-24 08:42 pm (UTC)Many think that due to an overly digitalized world that printed news, books, literature, etc. will cease to exist because of the popularity of a hyperlinked information super-highway. But, what I think a great number of people neglect to see is that if something is interesting enough to a reader then they will inevitably end up printing it off and passing it along. Printed press will never disappear, and it's actually more available than ever before thanks, in part, to the internet. Anything published on the web can be ordered in material form or simply printed off.
periodicals old codgers recall
Date: 2008-04-24 11:19 pm (UTC)He's in the Iron age of industrialization in the UK with some amazing achievements and great pics.
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/IssueTOC/issue/1061
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-26 07:13 pm (UTC)