Periodically I get distressed

Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded as the heavy petting of literature.
- Fran Lebowitz

I am a product of the golden age of magazines, and I rue what has become of a formerly noble adjunct to book reading. I scan the mag section at supermarkets and am not piqued by the offerings. My first wife used to justifiably chastise me for spending what seemed like the GDP of an emirate on my weekly and monthly intake of journals of all kinds. My current wife needs have no such fiscal fears. There is nothing to buy.

There are titles with which I’m largely unfamiliar, but that seem to be geared towards testosterone-driven young males (or testosterone-driven wannabes because if they really were such, what in hell do they need magazines for?) and devoted to extreme sports, sex, booze, scantily-clad nonentities, sex, and more sex. Nothing wrong with their subject material per se, it’s just that the mags are so brain-dead and boring.

In that aforementioned golden age I used to avail myself of such titles as Rolling Stone, Playboy, Penthouse (before it tastelessly declined into a gynecological primer – “I’m waiting for the intrauterine photos,” my brother once said.) and especially the once wonderful National Lampoon.

I haven’t looked at a Rolling Stone in years. Eventually an almost august journal that boasted such writers as Hunter S. Thompson, and carried out hard-hitting and sometimes even groundbreaking interviews with assorted notables, and not notables solely confined to the world of rock-and-roll, although even the rockers of the day were interesting enough. Eventually the magazine came to dwell more and more on such tedium as drug-legalization advocacy (and wasn’t above bold-faced lying to push its point, as it once was convicted of). But, look up egomania in the dictionary, and there will be a photo of the RS’s Jann Wenner. Anyway, eventually I lost interest in the current crop of so-called musicians, and I decided that I had no interest in wasting my time with a magazine that had become directed towards 19-somethings.

Playboy! Hey, I grew up with Playboy. However, unlike Hugh Hefner, I also actually grew up, rather than just old. PB used to be a mighty fine magazine in terms of both reading materials and cartoons that were second only to the New Yorker in their wit and capacity to amuse. The interviews were often brilliant, and the humorous pieces were superlative. Christmas Story, with Ralphie and his Red Ryder BB gun that we all watch every year, first appeared in PB, as did other offerings from the fine pen of the late Gene Shepherd, and that was where I first came across it. Oh sure, there were the naked girls. Very sedate, grain-fed naked girls that rarely succeeded with me in raising – oh well, what they were intended to raise. They were too wholesome, somehow. Once a girl I went to high school with was pictured in PB. Yes, I had sometimes wondered what she looked like under her well-filled sweaters. And then I found out. And, it was kind of weird, if truth be known. What did Uncle Marvin say when he came for Thanksgiving dinner, one wonders? Anyway, eventually PB became more and more tiresome, and less and less relevant (much like Hefner himself) and it now must be 20 years since I actually looked through a PB.

Lampoon in its glory years, with scribes like Doug Kenny and PJ O’Rourke, was a satirical gem of gems. It really was the best, especially in its first couple of years of publication. It was bright and original and devastatingly funny and irreverent to an extreme. I waited avidly for the new issue of Lampoon to appear each month and, I am proud to say, I still own the entire first year, including the very first issue – known as ‘The Sexy Cover Issue.’ Like all good things, and even all good people, Lampoon eventually declined and became silly and childish and crude. The good people left and moved on to other more notable ventures. Well, except for poor Doug Kenny who decided, for reasons best known to him, to take a long dive off a Kauai cliff one afternoon. Well, at least he didn’t have to see the deterioration and ultimate fall of his beloved magazine.

I mentioned New Yorker. The cartoons are still good, but the magazine has become tedious enough, and unoriginal enough, that I don’t bother much. Esquire is still there, but it’s merely a vestige of its original self. Even the 'Dubious Achievement Awards' have withered away in both wit and quantity. Vanity Fair is till readable, depending on the writer, but it has become (like so many other of the mags) pop-tart and Brangelina obsessed. I mean really, who past the age of 17 actually really cares about these people? And, if you do, then pick up People or Us and leave a bit of reading for grown ups who don’t actually move their lips when they peruse an article.

Time and Newsweek were once august journals boasting a lot of analysis and insight. Now they are also pop obsessed, fad obsessed, and childishly written and edited. They are also both a fraction of the size they once were.

Maybe I am flogging a dead horse. Maybe we are all so connected in other ways, such as via the Internet, blogs and our assorted electronic devices, that we no longer really need magazines.

However, as a reader I, as Fran Lebowitze suggests, sometimes have need of that bit of foreplay before I get to the real stuff. Call me hypersensitive, but I mess the courting stage.