I'm writing this on a sunny March Saturday afternoon. Saturday afternoons as a kid sometimes meant a trip to my grandparent's house -- Dad's side of the family -- for often theoretical relaxation and socializing. I remember Pringles and Canada Dry ginger ale for snacking, golf and Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw on the television, and a house that was always a bit too hot, no matter the season. I also recall newspapers and magazines scattered about the living room floor, like shrapnel from the intellectual explosions I imagined from the locus of my grandfather's weathered khaki recliner. It was my first exposure to the classics of 20th Century magazines, with Time and Newsweek and Sports Illustrated as the creme of the crop.
We were not a New Yorker family.
Raised as I was at the physical nexus of nothing, I was curious about the greater world around me, and those magazines provided messages from the front lines of culture and politics and athletic accomplishment, which I ate up second-hand until I could afford my own subscriptions. Being a kid interested in music but devoid of musical talent, I also looked up music magazines that could broaden and seed my dreams of affluent adulthood, so Stereo Review and Spin and Rolling Stone soon became friendly with my mail box. Years later, fulfilling a fragment of a preadolescent dream, I wrote album reviews of low to moderate quality for Bust and Alternative Press. Instead of simply being a consumer of product, I was briefly a creator, which was nice for around fourteen seconds.
I'm only snowballing, but at my magazine subscription peak, I bet I was getting over a dozen different magazines each month. But as time passed, and as the internet gained traction, then dominance, my magazine purchases started to become less frequent, and I found myself reading them less for pleasure and more as a chore, along with sorting laundry and feeding blue jays. Finally, over the past few months, I've passed two distinct milestones: I've cancelled my subscription to Time and Rolling Stone.
I'm not sure which one hurt more. Time was always the middlebrow arbiter of what must be known, an informational quasi-objective gatekeeper for those who still did their own shopping. For me, the writing was on the wall long before I pulled the trigger of cancellation, as I felt that they offered more a staid recap of events, rather than anything bleeding edge. But as a kid who loved music, the loss of Rolling Stone is a big blow, albeit a theoretical one at this stage in the life of the once-lionized magazine. For the more I learned about the music business, the more I saw Rolling Stone -- and publications like it -- for what they were (a cog in the machine) rather than what I hoped they would be (a window into the best of what artistic endeavour in the vast domain of rock and roll had to offer). A sobering education, to be sure, but one that plenty of people came to a lot faster than I did.
Ultimately, you have to ask yourself if you want to continue to contribute your time and money to sycophantic banality. I stopped writing for the two music magazines because my time there had an expiration date; I wasn't good enough or sensational to provide anyone with anything memorable, and I was tired of writing intellectually neutered content for artists that didn't speak to me. (More the former than the latter, I'm sure.) Once I read Sticky Fingers, the Joe Hagan book about Jann Wenner and the twisted path of Rolling Stone, that was the final nail in the coffin. It was time to move on.
Every week (or bimonthly, on occasion), I get a physical copy of Entertainment Weekly that I most likely read a few days before on my iPad. I don't look forward to it the way I did even ten years ago, as a panoply of web sites give me a ton of entertainment content, most often better written than anything EW can offer. But just like I'm still buying physical media like CD's and Blu-rays, I'm hanging on to this last subscription for the time being. It's a nice reminder of a life that I used to have.
We were not a New Yorker family.
Raised as I was at the physical nexus of nothing, I was curious about the greater world around me, and those magazines provided messages from the front lines of culture and politics and athletic accomplishment, which I ate up second-hand until I could afford my own subscriptions. Being a kid interested in music but devoid of musical talent, I also looked up music magazines that could broaden and seed my dreams of affluent adulthood, so Stereo Review and Spin and Rolling Stone soon became friendly with my mail box. Years later, fulfilling a fragment of a preadolescent dream, I wrote album reviews of low to moderate quality for Bust and Alternative Press. Instead of simply being a consumer of product, I was briefly a creator, which was nice for around fourteen seconds.
I'm only snowballing, but at my magazine subscription peak, I bet I was getting over a dozen different magazines each month. But as time passed, and as the internet gained traction, then dominance, my magazine purchases started to become less frequent, and I found myself reading them less for pleasure and more as a chore, along with sorting laundry and feeding blue jays. Finally, over the past few months, I've passed two distinct milestones: I've cancelled my subscription to Time and Rolling Stone.
I'm not sure which one hurt more. Time was always the middlebrow arbiter of what must be known, an informational quasi-objective gatekeeper for those who still did their own shopping. For me, the writing was on the wall long before I pulled the trigger of cancellation, as I felt that they offered more a staid recap of events, rather than anything bleeding edge. But as a kid who loved music, the loss of Rolling Stone is a big blow, albeit a theoretical one at this stage in the life of the once-lionized magazine. For the more I learned about the music business, the more I saw Rolling Stone -- and publications like it -- for what they were (a cog in the machine) rather than what I hoped they would be (a window into the best of what artistic endeavour in the vast domain of rock and roll had to offer). A sobering education, to be sure, but one that plenty of people came to a lot faster than I did.
Ultimately, you have to ask yourself if you want to continue to contribute your time and money to sycophantic banality. I stopped writing for the two music magazines because my time there had an expiration date; I wasn't good enough or sensational to provide anyone with anything memorable, and I was tired of writing intellectually neutered content for artists that didn't speak to me. (More the former than the latter, I'm sure.) Once I read Sticky Fingers, the Joe Hagan book about Jann Wenner and the twisted path of Rolling Stone, that was the final nail in the coffin. It was time to move on.
Every week (or bimonthly, on occasion), I get a physical copy of Entertainment Weekly that I most likely read a few days before on my iPad. I don't look forward to it the way I did even ten years ago, as a panoply of web sites give me a ton of entertainment content, most often better written than anything EW can offer. But just like I'm still buying physical media like CD's and Blu-rays, I'm hanging on to this last subscription for the time being. It's a nice reminder of a life that I used to have.
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