ZINES, MAGAZINES and... ulp! ...COMIC BOOKS

This is not Fact Sheet Five...

OK, I confess, I am not, actually a big 'zine reader. In fact, I don't read any 'zines except by accident, or if my friends publish them. Well, yeah, there's Ben Is Dead, but the famous "Sex Issue" was all sold out by the time I heard of them... so why bother? Speaking of sex, or at least gender, my girlfriend has a subscription to BUST, a sex positive, irreverent magazine for the postmodern female set. It makes Jen laugh, so I think that's a good sign. You can e-mail them, easy as can be, at: BROWBEAT which comes out about once every three or four years, and is the coolest guide to irritating industrial and noise music ever. Besides, I wrote some stuff for it once, and I think if enough people go to his website, I'll get a quarter or something. Another KALXer, Dan, does a mini-comic called Tiny Deaths which I like a lot. It's one of those semi-autobiographical black and white doolies, but Dan is a hip guy and also writes some really funny bits about indie rock. What's up with his lovelife, though? Oh, and now he tells me he has an actual zine zine coming out, called NERD, which I haven't read yet, but I'm sure holds great promise... For more info, you can contact him at: brogrimm@pacbell.net

Oh, okay -- I guess I have read a few... but just the best-known, most obvious, common denominator flagship 'zines... Like Cool Beans!, a Bay Area 'zine whose publisher is a devoted listener of my radio station... (I see some sort of throughline developing here...)

Wanna know what I really read? What I'm embarrassed to admit? Well, okay, so I used get both SPIN and Rolling Stone sent to my house, though if you really pressed me, it would be hard to say why. I guess I just wanted to "keep up". Has anyone else noticed how completely similar they've become? Back in 1998 they had the exact same table of contents for six months running! I'm convinced their editors just go out drinking together and do it on purpose, to see if they can get folks like me riled up. It's not gonna work, though. Uh-uhn, no way... I was thinking of sending both publications the same letter pointing the similarities out, and see if they would both run it in their letter columns at the same time. That would be funny.

The magazine that really rocks, though, is The New Yorker. I think it's the best magazine in America. Growing up, I was a New Yorker baby -- my mom had a subscription, and I used to read all the cartoons and look at the bra ads. A few years ago, when they made their big switch into the Tina Brown pop-culture editorial phase, I was dubious. I liked how fusty and stuffy the old version was -- it represented a snooty, chic, back-East intellectualism that I was raised to think was cool. Now it's even cooler; pretty much every issue has at least two or three articles I really want to read, and on a good week the proportion is even higher. Their biographical profiles, fiction, political commentary, art and pop culture articles are of a calibre way beyond most other rags on the newsstand today. The cartoons and bra ads are still pretty good, too. These days my favorite writer at the New Yorker, without a doubt, is Adam Gopnik, an American living in Paris whose foreign dispatches are so funny and insightful that my ribs hurt from laughing each time I read one. Particularly wonderful were his articles on how "Barney" became a hit in the otherwise-tasteful French republic, and one on the World Cup soccer finals (which France, the host nation, won, to the dismay of the rest of the soccer-watching world). I'm telling you, this is the nation's best magazine, though I do miss Eustace Tilley.

Uh, maybe I'll write about comic books some other time... when I'm not feeling so self-conscious about being such a geek...

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