Magazines And Me

I like to collage. Why? Gawd, you ask sooo many questions! Well because I like to put things together in a creative way and I like being able to use random shots and words to form something meaningful. And because I can draw fairly decently, but I can collage circles around my art friends.

So as I was rounding up a few magazines to get a start on my new collage (old Nylons, double issues of Teen Vogue, a few Cosmos, but I never touch the Missbehaves because they come out quarterly and are therefore a hot commodity), I got to thinking about how I felt about magazines.

I love them. I love how for some they can be 290 page bibles, filled with glossy pages of mantras, wisdom, and life advice, but for some they can be a way to get through the day. When I was in school, I read the same issue of Nylon over and over and over again, just to combat the boredom. I can almost dictate that issue to you now.

Some people buy magazines for the articles, and some people buy them for the cover model (how I impulsively bought ElleGirl for the Adam Brody cover), and some people buy them purely based on the faith that it, based on what it says on the cover, will have all the things they want to read about.

It amazes me how a group of people can fit hours of conversation about fashion, culture, music, or food neatly into 100 pages. Certain articles can change people's lives, cause an epiphany, make your sex life better, update your wardrobe, or help someone lose 20 pounds. People live for magazines, people die for magazines. Editors-In-Chief of magazines are like celebrities. Anna Wintour, Amy Astley, Mary HK Choi, and Marvin Scott Jarrett can transform the masthead into a calling card of all-knowers of pop culture and style.

And I love zines. I love the idea of people turning to an organic creative outlet to voice their beliefs and opinions instead of just logging into Blogger and typing it out for people to randomly stumble upon.

In fact, I used to have a zine. I became antsy after endlessly pouring over my Nylons and Missbehaves and dreaming of writing for one, one day. So I made one of my own. It was called White Rice Magazine, and it was 2 only pages long because I made it on Microsoft Word, which is the only computer program I've mastered save for Powerpoint, but I wrote every article in it happily. It covered new music, fashion trends, upcoming Atlanta shows, recommended reading and a rant about whatever retarded celebrity was being retarded. It even included a current events story. It was published every 2 weeks. I distributed it to three of my friends and my mother and I was soooo proud of it.

I guess I have waxed poetic about magazines long enough, but I truly do love them. I even wrote a little love letter to a certain AWEsome mag awhile back. Now I almost buy them just to collect them. I have two years of Seventeen, two years of Teen Vogue, a year of Nylon, all the Missbehaves except for the first issue, a year of Under the Radar, assorted issues of Cosmopolitan, CosmoGirl, Jane, Entertainment Weekly, and even a year of issues from Dog Fancy back when my mom let me buy a magazine subscription in middle school.

So I'm done. The end. I sort of want to start writing White Rice again; I'd kind of just let it go, but I suppose I might when I get to the Valley and have people to distribute it to. Kthxbai.

“All "little" magazines have the luxury of thinking the reader is the same person as their editors.”

---William Whitworth

Deuces,
Erika