Interesting Interview with Kurt Andersen...

is here. Down near the bottom they talk about why American magazines are so terrible, which as any reader of this blog knows, is because they make their money by pleasing advertisers, not by pleasing readers. American magazines do what they are designed to do well enough, and as long as people continue to subscribe to them in spite of how boring and compromised they are, they're going to continue to stink. Andersen and the interviewer talk about overstaffing--taking their cue from Maxim's Felix Dennis. Sure, overstaffing's probably a problem--but only if the rest of the equation is sacrosanct. Why not move to Cleveland? $17,000/year to start goes a lot farther there, too. The solution is obvious, once you look from the bottom up, instead of the top down. Magazines are addicted to a certain type of prestige that their economics no longer justify, and haven't for years. I think this was why Spy never ripened into the institution it could've been.



Kurt's a very nice man, and deserves the kudos he gets (he knows his humor magazine history; check out the essay included with Gene Shalit's collection "Laughing Matters") but let's put to rest the idea that Spy was revolutionary. It was incredibly well-done, but at the risk of being overly reductive, Spy always struck me as Private Eye on glossy stock--a little wit, a little boarding-school snark, a little investigative journalism. What was new, as I remember, was Andersen's voice, which was so wonderfully "Senior explains the world to a favored Freshman." Spy was extremely well-written, pointedly observed, and excellently designed; it was also doomed from the start. Its insularity ensured that while the people who liked it would like it a lot, there would never be very many of them--and $5 is $5, whether it comes from Chloe from Soho or Bert from Sheboygan. When the post-Andersen editors saw the writing on the wall, and tried to broaden it out into a more general humor magazine, Spy died.



Spy hastened the arrival of irony as a bulletproof world-view (though that was coming anyway, thanks to the intellectual dead-end of political correctness). But it had no decades-long fixture like Richard Ingrams, no indulgent weirdo benefactor like Peter Cook, or a publishing model suited to its reality. The Eye is the quintessential clique-based, reader-pleasing, advertiser-unfriendly humor magazine--it's also fortnightly and on cheap paper. Spy couldn't face the downmarketness that its tight focus insisted upon. Now, if there had been an Internet, or they had done it like McSweeney's, perhaps the story would've been different.



None of this is Andersen's fault, and I'm only bringing it up by the way. And because there's a lot of puffery around Spy that covers up the fact that it never figured out how to thrive--editorial decisions made it samizdat, but it insisted on looking like Vanity Fair. This doesn't matter, except for one thing: as long as magazine people--on the editorial side, at least--buy the flattering but wrong idea that hipness/buzz/heat is the key, and not dollars and cents, we'll get more brilliant flameouts like Spy. And I'd like a decent humor magazine more than once a decade, thanks. And maybe if it could last...?



By the way, I'm sorry for not posting more regularly. I'm working on two new books. They'll be worth the wait.