Category: Blog Post

One of our favorite media writers is Stephanie Zecharek over at Salon. Years ago, she impressed us by seeing the future. In 1999, she griped about the sorry state of American music magazines—particularly Rolling Stone and Spin and similar titles—and predicted a successful English colonization of same. In the years since then, that is precisely what happened. Felix Dennis launched Blender with Q magazine’s Andy Pemberton at the helm (and Spin’s Craig Marks as his flunkie), Rolling Stone hired its own British editor and a Q art director—and suddenly American magazines looked awfully British, which was all to the good, as far as we were concerned. (Folks like Jan Wenner needed more obvious proof—and the, er, rise of Maxim provided it in spades.)

Today, Stephanie writes a thoughtful piece on the new and numbing trend of magalogs—the “shopoholic” titles like Lucky, Cargo, and the new shelter-shopper, Domino. All three of these magazines are Conde Nast titles. Sy Newhouse and his modish army are not worried about competing with themselves. This is because each title is niche-defined, but still trying to reach what is considered general-interest circulation numbers—somewhere approaching a half-million or better is what is considered a comfortable, profitable national circulation. (The real unacknowledged crime here is how Lucky has influenced city magazines across the country. “Lucky” is the new watchword in city-mag offices across the land, and constantly held up as the golden calf of magazine publishing. Publish what your advertisers tell you to publish, they’re the ones paying the bills, duh!)

Being snobs ourselves, but with a streak of prankish irreverence, we like Zecharek for her lighthanded snobishness. She liked British music magazines better back in ’99 because British magazines were a lot better than American magazines. They were funnier, better written, better looking, and much less averse to risk-taking. (They still are, as far as we know.) If we had to guess, we’d say she probably has mixed feelings about what Rolling Stone has become; it is significantly less committed to troglodyte rock, and more willing than ever to tout the latest pneumatic teenage lip-syncer. On the other hand, art rock and alt-rock get more serious coverage, and the venerable old Stone still has some fight left in it when it comes to taking advocacy positions on things like drugs, guns, and Hunter Thompson. It appears to have survived its makeover, and avoided the unfortunate fate of dying with its original readership, cool but irrelevant.

The thing is, it is a rare trick to be both an elitist and a populist and to succeed while you’re doing it. In describing the evolution of Lucky—the progenitor of all these shopping mags—Zecharek laments the slow disappearance of cooler early features that drew her in. Short pieces, for example, about collecting LP covers and vintage scarves. The writer takes this as a sign that Lucky very intentionally shifted toward covering goods and services that were more mass-market than upscale—that is, more mall than boutique. This would be a natural shift, if you wanted to build circulation from the low 100s to the mid 100s, which is precisely what Lucky has done. It does not surprise us much that Zecharek would prefer a magazine in the lower circulation category, which stayed committed to servicing snobs and intellectuals. (We freely admit to being snobs and intellectuals ourselves, and we too would prefer the earlier incarnation of Lucky, if we had to choose.) We would bet dollars to a glossy, two-page spread of all available donuts that Zecharek has a strong distaste for commerical radio for roughly the same reasons. (Carp all you want, say the big boys at Clear Channel: Science—or Arbitron’s version of it—proves that most people are not snobs, and they really do want to hear “That Smell” thirty times per day into perpetuity.)

Then, too, we think maybe the populist approach is a purer form of pornography—sort of a Penthouse or Playboy to the snobbish erotica of Nerve or Libido. Better yet, shopping magazines operate like porn-browsing windows on the web. You’re waiting for something to catch your eye; so many tastes, so many fetishes—your “thinking eye” lands on something, and from there, your latent consumerism comes over you. Depending on how virulent is your need to have what you covet, and how much money you have access to, you might pursue further. Otherwise, you have the little talisman of the magazine photo—which you’ve bookmarked with the clever little sticker tabs.

Zecharek’s main argument is an interesting one: These magazines use a peer-to-peer voice (as widely attributed to Jane Pratt and Sassy magazine, though we have a pretty good idea the True Crime mags and comic books of the thirties and forties managed to do it pretty well, too) that pretends to be advocating for its readers. But what it actually offers in the way of wallpaper choices, chartreuse vases, kercheifs—is strictly declasse.

There are lots of reasons to hate this kind of pornographic reduction of the reading experience to base appetites—but none that won’t inevitably sound elitist and defeatist and baldly unamerican. A wise man we know says, “Serve the rich, live with the masses; serve the masses, live with the rich.”

Another from Ted Hughes today, from The Birthday Poems, his last book before dying, and the long awaited answer to Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems. It’s a bit pathetic, as he claims to have wanted to be her support…and the one who suggested she write about her father.

Ted Hughes won all the awards and was the English Poet Laureate. But he spent all that effort to build but a nice coal fire on earth while Sylvia was a white star in the heavens. Work’s no substitute for genius, I fear.

Daddy, by Plath, is below.

The Table by Ted Hughes

I wanted to make you a solid writing-table
That would last a lifetime.
I bought a broad elm plank two inches thick,
The wild bark surfing along one edge of it,
Rough-cut for coffin timber. Coffin elm
Finds a new life, with its corpse,
Drowned in the waters of earth. It gives the dead
Protection for a slightly longer voyage
Than beech or ash or pine might. With a plane
I revealed a perfect landing pad
For your inspiration. I did not
Know I had made and fitted a door
Opening downwards into your Daddy’s grave.

You bent over it, euphoric
With your Nescafe every morning.
Like an animal, smelling the wild air.
Listening into its own ailment,
Then finding the exact herb.
It did not take you long
To divine in the elm, following your pen,
The words that would open it. Incredulous
I saw rise throught it, in broad daylight,
Your Daddy resurrected,
Blue-eyed, that German cuckoo
Still calling the hour,
Impersonating your whole memory.
He limped up through it
Into our house. While I slept he snuggled
Shivering between us. Turning to touch me
You recognized him. ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Wait!
What’s this?’ My incomprehension
Deafened by his language — a German
Outside my wavelengths. I woke wildly
Into a deeper sleep. And I sleepwalked
Like an actor with his script
Blindfold through the looking glass. I embraced
Lady Death, your rival,
As if the role were written on my eyelids
In letters of phosphorus. With your arms locked
Round him, in joy, he took you
Down through the elm door.
He had got what he wanted.
I woke up on the empty stage with the props,
The paltry painted masks. And the script
Ripped up and scattered, its code scrambled,
Like the blades and slivers
Of a shattered mirror.

And now your peanut-crunchers can stare
At the ink-stains, the sigils
Where you engraved your letters to him
Cursing and imploring. No longer a desk.
No longer a door. Once more simply a board.
The roof of a coffin
Detached in the violence
From your upward gaze.
It bobbed back to the surface —
It washed up, far side of the Atlantic,
A curio,
Scoured of the sweat I soaked into
Finding your father for you and then
Leaving you to him.

Daddy by Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time —-
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You —-

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two —-
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Some readers have written to ask whether it is ethical to take a published story and write your own version of it. In the news business this is called the “follow on,” and we’ve written about it at length before. The short answer is that it is perfectly ethical; the long answer is that it is ethical but it is karmically fraught.

The reason readers are asking about this today is because the Newspaper of the Twin Cities yesterday published what appears to be a different, contradicting version of our cover story this month. This was clearly a follow-on that was inspired by our story, and probably leveraged by our story, and that’s just fine by us. In fact, the Star Tribune’s alternative version added some very interesting elements to the dramatic narrative of how the folks at Pan Am flight school nailed Moussaoui.

A little background: Reporters have been trying to talk to someone inside Pan Am ever since September 11th, and the school has been under water-tight lock-down. When we first launched The Rake (we literally decided to go for it on September 10, 2001, then had a rocky six months making it happen), we fantasized about getting the inside story. Even though we are not primarily a news organization, this was the kind of investigative journalism we wished to practice, whenever the opportunity presented itself. As it turned out, one very resourceful, intrepid writer did get the story that no one else could get, and he came to us with it.

Once the cat was out of the bag, of course, we started fielding calls from all over the country—including local TV stations, CNN, and the folks at “Sixty Minutes.” It was a great story, and most interested parties asked if we would give them access to our main souce, flight instructor Clancy Prevost. For reasons of his own, Prevost wished not to speak with anyone other than our reporter. That was undoubtedly frustrating for journalists wishing to do follow-on stories. All we could offer them was our story, our reporter, our cover and inside images. Many in TV felt this was compelling enough, and our writer has been making the rounds. Newpapers, in contrast, ignored the story—until the Strib was able to publish their version six days after we’d published ours.

By the way, our main problem with the Strib’s version is that it was positioned by their editors to contradict our story as directly as possible, almost to the point of dishonesty—the implication being that Prevost was not the guy who caught Moussaoui, Nelson and Sims were. The Strib muddied Prevost’s role, and focused on Nelson and Sims, the managers who ultimately made the call to the FBI after his instructor (Prevost) had got his first troubling impressions of Moussaoui. The Strib’s story at first attempts to make Prevost look like an unskeptical rube willing to teach any old customer how to fly a 747, but then it relies on Prevost quotes from our piece to paint the opposite picture. Nelson, in particular, seems to want to discredit Prevost in an effort to get some credit himself—he claims to have pulled Moussaoui’s file before he even arrived in Minnesota—and the Strib obliges him in this. It is possible that all three men had independently come to the conclusion that the Moroccan was up to no good. But both our story and the Strib’s suggest that there was some resistance from folks higher in the organization—Strib sources not very convincingly say that unnamed people at Pan Am’s national headquarters in Miami resisted. Our story, which names a lot of names, suggests that it was the local management that at first didn’t see any danger in Moussaoui—and we confirmed it with those managers. Again, it is possible that both accounts are true. People are certainly entitled to their own recollection of the events of a few days in August, 2001, and there is surely enough glory to go around. We didn’t wish to get into the nitty-gritty of the differences in the two stories, but we felt slightly tempted to swing back, when the Strib damned us with faint contradiction. It is not clear why it is important to discredit Prevost to tell this story, nor why both stories can’t in some meaningful sense be valid. It would not be the first time management wished to take the credit of labor, nor the first time a major newspaper did not credit the work of a petty little independent competitor.

We want to be clear that the Strib’s story was quite good as newspaper stories go, and it revealed more of the story for anyone interested in how Moussaoui was initially caught in Eagan. Also, it is not in the Strib’s interest to promote our magazine (though they have done that in the past, for which we are grateful). In this case, the follow-on reporter, Greg Gordon, did an impressive job of finding and approaching two more sources with key, inside knowledge and their own compelling perspective. (It makes it easier to get others to speak on the record for the first time when you can show them that someone else has done so, and, y’know, don’t you want to set the story straight and give your side of it?)

Anyway, we say congratulations to the Star Tribune. Also, we both recognize and appreciate the backhanded gesture of credit offered deep into page A-4—so thanks, fellows.

We’ve had a bit from Sylvia Plath, so here’s one from her husband Ted Hughes. Just for balance, perhaps, because Plath is one of our favorites, but so is the much maligned Ted. Remember Plath supporters, she was nuts before she ever met him. It wasn’t his fault.

Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days
by Ted Hughes

She gives him his eyes, she found them
Among some rubble, among some beetles

He gives her her skin
He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her
She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment

She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists
They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her

He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully
And sets them in perfect order
A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired
She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing
Incredulous

Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them
So that his whole body lights up

And he has fashioned her new hips
With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled
He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it

They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily
To test each new thing at each new step

And now she smoothes over him the plates of his skull
So that the joints are invisible

And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach
With a single wire

She gives him his teeth, tying the the roots to the centrepin of his body

He sets the little circlets on her fingertips

She stiches his body here and there with steely purple silk

He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth

She inlays with deep cut scrolls the nape of his neck

He sinks into place the inside of her thighs

So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment
Like two gods of mud
Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
They bring each other to perfection.