https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/magazine/old-magazines.html
"How alien are the ways we once described the world; how swiftly we freeze the
past into its mere idea, a cartoon of this or that distant year or decade. I’m
writing a book about the singer Kate Bush, and another about my education,
projects that require much paging through magazines from the 1980s. In the
London-based style monthly
The Face, I find a cover story on “Electro: the
beat that won’t be beaten.” It’s May 1984, the first wave of hip-hop is long
past and this summer belongs to the Roland drum machine and the imported sounds
of New York clubs. I turned 15 that month, and remember this musical cusp very
well. What surprises me now in the pages of
The Face: There are just the
tiniest hints of the British miners’ strike and the swelling unemployment that
are convulsing the country politically. And not a single mention yet of AIDS;
in a Wrangler ad, a model’s speech bubble announces, oblivious: “I’m Positive.”
In these magazine pages, it both is and is not the 1984 of my memory.
“Priceless flotsam they seemed to us then,” Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote,
recalling her youthful fascination with old jazz records. I’ve long felt the
same way about magazines, old and new. As a teenager in Dublin in the 1980s, I
relied on (mostly British) magazines to keep me informed, and furnish my
dreams, about music, fashion, art, literature — and the ways you could write
about them. Others my age may know by heart the songs they listened to and
poems they read in adolescence, but I remember page layouts: where certain
phrases sat in some urgent-seeming essay or review, the choreography of image
and caption and byline. My romance with the magazine page thrills away still
inside me, so that when research takes me offline to libraries and archives, or
(better) into the depths of a dusty eBay find, I can’t stop at the magazine or
journal pages I was looking for; I want to read everything, from masthead to
classifieds.
Old magazines are cheap time machines, archaeologies of collective desire. Find
a print issue, specialist or popular, preferably more than 20 years old (though
10 may do the trick), and read it from cover to cover. You will execute no deep
dive, vanish down no rabbit hole; your reading is instead a lateral slice
through a culture, class or milieu. A few years ago, while writing a book about
great sentences, I went looking for photo captions that Joan Didion composed in
the 1960s during her time at
Vogue. I found these perfectly formed,
uncredited fragments, but also Didion writing about a new museum in Mexico City
— “One comes away remembering certain small things, haunted by oddities” — and
other high-toned pieces: Hardwick reviewing movies, articles on Alberto
Giacometti and Günter Grass. There were fashion photographs by Gordon Parks and
William Klein. I confirmed what I suspected about the aesthetic sophistication
of midcentury American magazines and their readers."
Via Esther Schindler.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
