Magazines

There was a Boomerang meeting/get-together/drink tonight, and obviously, the topic turned to our search for identity, to what we should want for the Boomerang.

I have no easy answer.

The thing is, making the ideal magazine is tough, maybe even impossible. There is no magazine right now that I read cover to cover every month. There used to be - Science & Vie Junior, a French Science Magazine - but I outgrew that years ago, and nothing has replaced it.

The problem is, I don't really know what would.

Maybe I'm spoiled by the internet, where you can easily pick and choose what you like. Maybe it's because I have odd tastes. I don't know. All I know is that while I like music magazines, I usually only read them at the train station ebcause the ten to fifteen minutes I have to spend there are usually enough to read all the parts I find interesting. Movie magazines are nice but ridiculously expensive, and don't really rival the internet-only stuff. There is one movie magazine online that I usually read entirely, Bright Light Film Journal. The drawback? It only comes out once every three months. As for the so-called "lifestyle" magazines, they bore. And the political ones usually have one or two interesting articles that really go in-depth about something, but they're terrible, well, unhip about a lot of things, articles about things like blogging or geeks or anything related to that always annoying me with their fragmentary, condescending nature.

There is one magazine I discovered in the US that I found particularly intriguing: Interview. All there is inside is interview of celebrities, actors and musicians mostly, by their colleagues and friends: people they've worked with, people they know, people who'll skip past the basic boring questions and ask unpredictable ones. The result isn't always great,but it never fails to be different.

I really have no reason for complaining about missing the one definitive magazine for me. After all, there's the internet, and it is my companion. I kind of assemble my own magazine in a way. Take an interview from the New York Magazine, a humor piece from the New Yorker, a billiant idea to make the iPod video succesful from a site called the SFGate, a philosophical article on postmodernism , the sex column from The Onion AV Club, and finally an article on Dada from the IHT. My own magazine, of sorts. The only prolem being that it takes some time to assemble.

Does the internet make magazines superfluous? I doubt it. The most interesting articles I find online usually come from a printed magazine. And despite my not having found the ideal magazine yet, I'd love a subscription to Interview, to McSweeney's, to The Believer, to The New Yorker, to Rolling Stone and many, many others.

I guess the dilemma is even bigger because I vaguely, in the back of my mind, still have the ambition to become a magazine writer, even seeing this blog partly as a training ground (keeping in mind that all the entires here, except for the Boomerang articles, are first drafts written down at high speed) for that. But the ultimate magazine will probably remain a dream.

H.

Oh, and if you're interested in the ideal magazine cover? See this.