That's Entertainment

 In the early days of the pandemic, I dreamed up a series of essays called Reading Periodically. Based on some past blog posts, plus new material, it would focus on my appreciation for magazines. Progress has been slow, but it's allowed me to broaden the scope to include my late father's shared love for magazines, as well as lament the death of print journalism.

I mention this as the news broke yesterday that Entertainment Weekly (among other periodicals) will cease publishing a print edition in late March. The April 2022 issue will mark the end of just over 32 years of covering movies, TV, music, literature and occasionally video games and Broadway. It cut a niche as the gap between vapid celebrity rags like People or US Weekly and trade mags like Variety as a source of entertainment news and editorials. 

I first discovered EW in early 1997. My grandmother fell for one of those Publisher's Clearinghouse-type scams, and suddenly had a plethora of magazine subscriptions. One of those was EW; I was instantly hooked by the listicles, witty commentary, and paragraph-length reviews. She realized it wasn't for cup of tea, so I ended up taking home her issues until the one-year subscription lapsed the following winter. After that, I bought issues at the newsstand or at Blockbuster Video until I couldn't afford the $2.99 a week. (Bear in mind, I was 13.)

After reading EW on and off at my local library for a few months, my father stumbled into a subscription in Spring 1999. The first issue had a cover story on Star Wars Episode I, the second had a list of the 100 most important moments in pop music 1950 to 1999. My father was as unfazed as his mother-in-law, and EW permanently joined my cache of regular must-reads. I don't think I ever tossed out a single issue; my whole collection is in storage.

Compared to other magazines that once had circulation in the high seven figures, EW was the baby of the family. It was launched in Winter 1990, decades after rivals like Time and Reader's Digest. Following in the tradition of e.e. cummings and bell hooks, entertainment Weekly was lower-case and diagonal until 1992. It was an early beneficiary of the "infotainment" movement of the era, offering stimulating and colorful images along shorter articles on a vast array of pop culture topics. Most crucial of all, it was the first mainstream magazine to address how AIDS/HIV affected Hollywood, and always kept an ear for LGBTQ+ culture. 

Print journalism isn't quite dead yet, but it's cornered. EW only faded out of relevance when everything else in print did. Time magazine is now bi-weekly, Sports Illustrated quietly became a monthly in early 2020, and other "heritage" weeklies ranging from People to The New Yorker will someday follow suit. I fear it's just a matter of time before they all go all online as well. EW, that subtly progressive stalwart, will be missed.

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Bunny Hop II: The 'Boy in the Bubble

About 4 1/2 years ago, after inheriting it from my dead uncle, I schlepped four decades' worth of Playboy magazines into my parents' basement. I blogged about it, blurring the magazine and its semi-sophisticated aesthetic with my uncle's underachieving, too-brief life. The delicate dance of obsolescence and objectifying women came rushing back to context when The House That Hef Built turned a new leaf.

Earlier this year, "The 'Boy" underwent an overdue makeover. A lot of the magazine's decades-old fixtures were excised: the mostly unfunny, panel and page-size cartoons; the Party Jokes page behind the centerfold, featuring excerpts from the unpublished Unabashed Dictionary; the annoying "jump copy" that was standard in most monthly periodicals in the 1950s and '60s. (The back section that featured paparazzi photos and new gadgets was dropped about ten years ago.) Most crucially, however was the disappearance of full-frontal nudity; in a time and age where naked women can be easily accessed on the internet (and in most cases, for free) why spend five dollars to see three or four monthly pictorials?

That's not to say, however, that barely-dressed women have disappeared from Playboy altogether. The centerfold is still there, but the naughty bits are covered up in clever ways. There is a newfound, harder emphasis on fiction and journalism, and there's even a column from a feminist perspective. The Playboy lifestyle is still elite and debonair but far more enlightened. The goal is to compete with Esquire, not Maxim.

So where's ol' Hef in all of this? Still schlepping around, taking on possible roommates, and largely letting others take the rein of his creation. According to reports, Hugh Hefner was more than willing to drop the cartoons, but had to be persuaded to tweak his creation's most noted content. Even in old age, America's best-known pajama-clad party animal had fought tooth and nail to cantilever a mindset that withered away decades ago.

Change is inevitable, and with Playboy reinventing itself after six-plus decades of great prose, swingin' cocktails, and bogus boobies they might prove there is still life in the brand. Had my uncle lived to see this, I'm sure he would've been annoyed by the lack of full-frontal nudity but would have kept reading out of habit. For now, Playboy has taken a behindhand step forward, a curious but righteous leap into the 21st century.
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The World Through a Monocle

In late July, I discovered by accident that I had complete access to the archives of The New Yorker. I was aware that the magazine, which I'd read since I was a precocious grade-schooler, had past articles on display on their web site. I assumed incorrectly that you needed to pay a fee (my mail subscription sufficed) and that the articles were available were available only by searching by topic. So rarely am I ever so glad to be dead wrong.

The New Yorker was another one of those quick reads that molded my malleable mindset as I grew up in the Chicago suburbs. I have always been a voracious reader, and even in second grade was I aware of this magazine's status as a brass ring of intellectual savvy. Of course, upon first reading The New Yorker about 90% of my interest was in the cartoons; they were never knee-slapping funny, but witty and urbane enough to draw the attention of a bookish tween. Eventually my attention veered to Shouts & Murmurs, the short humor piece that ended each issue in the '90s and early 2000s. Then I was reading the film and theater reviews, then "Talk of the Town," then pretty much reading the whole damn thing cover to cover, rather than skimming half of the articles.

When I wrote about Playboy and MAD magazine a couple of years ago, I commented on how that particular magazine had progressed over the years. What was astonishing about reading vintage issues of The New Yorker was how little it changed. The layout of the magazine, beginning with "Goings On About Town" and a tiny table of contents on page 2 or 4, was set in late 1925... and didn't change until 1988 or so, when the contents got its own page. It was black and white and rather staid, yet straight to the point. Of course, substance came before anything else; the quality of writing, from the short fiction to profiles to literary criticism, hardly wavered. How it was presented was irrelevant.

Additionally, the sophisticated aesthetic of the magazine, especially in the early years of the magazine both gave the magazine character and proved at times a hindrance. Reading the "Talk of the Town" in any issue from the 1920s well into the 1950s has the feel of an inside joke, isolated in time even though the only people that found it funny are long dead. In short, it was the anti-MAD magazine nearly 30 years before Bill Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman joined forces. As the famed "Hiroshima" issue from 1946 proved, the editors weren't afraid to be deadly serious, either.

Alas, nothing can stop the slow train of progress, and that's where Tina Brown enters. Her arrival as editor-in-chief in 1992 shook up the stodgy, aristocratic air of the magazine's Times Square offices: "Talk of The Town" was less anecdotal and more op-ed, the page-to-page layout was tweaked, color images graced the editorial content, legendary photographer Richard Avedon was brought aboard to contribute those aforementioned images. Acknowledging the graphic novel as an art form, Brown also tapped "Maus" creator Art Speigelman to draw original essays for the magazine. Even the contents page, a weird little afterthought for so long, became more detailed. The WASP bluebloods were dying or fading into irrelevance, Brown assumed correctly; the left-leaning intellectual was the anchor was now the magazine's present and future. The old lady in Dubuque will still be on the outside looking in.

Compared to the other periodicals that I read regularly, The New Yorker can be the most time-consuming, the most challenging, and sometimes the most rewarding. I had outgrown young adult literature before anyone else I knew, and even if the leap was a little too big, I don't regret it. Access to 90 years of world class writing is more than just bridging the gap; it's providing further nourishment.

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