Winq Wink, Nudge Nudge

As blogger Matthew Rettenmund shows (here), I'm not the only one to appreciate global gay culture magazine Winq. (And there are others.) His blog offers a preview of the latest issue of the U.S. edition of Winq (cover, left; Netherlands edition cover lower right).

Glad to see others are noticing this good magazine. My one complaint would be this: It's a very difficult magazine to find. I never saw the first issue (had to buy it as a back issue, shipped all the way from Holland), and I quickly bought the second issue at a Borders here in San Francisco. But I haven't seen the third issue yet, despite my frequent visits to Borders. If I'm having trouble finding it in downtown San Fran, how is anyone finding it elsewhere?

I'd normally subscribe -- after all, I loves subscribing -- but the subscription price to have this quarterly delivered in the United States is $59, nearly twice the cover price (at $7.98 a pop). Not a bargain.

Hopefully, these are just the growing pains as the magazine spreads its wings (winqs? sorry) in the United States.

Magazine Memories: Fangoria in the Provinces

When I was a youngling (to cite Yoda) growing up in the metropolis of Manitowoc, Wisconsin (population 35,000), I was intrigued in my very early teen years by a freaky little magazine I'd see on the newsstands of the local Copps grocery/department store (you hadda be there) called Fangoria. I had also seen it on the stands at my favorite bookstore/newsstand/Hallmark-cards store downtown (again, only 35,000 peeps) where I pretty much spent all of the money I made every two weeks delivering the Herald-Times-Reporter. (I was very good at newspaper delivery, BTW, and may have peaked there, professionally.)

Anywho, as a geeky Starlog-reading, science fiction aficionado, I knew about Fango, its sister publication, but I was kinda scared to buy a copy. It had photos on its cover of people covered with (fake) blood and wielding chainsaws. You know, nice boys didn't buy such magazines. And there at the Copps magazine rack was Fangoria number 8 with a decomposed corpse's skull on the cover. I wanted to buy that magazine, because I knew it must contain stuff I shouldn't know about. But I didn't (mostly limited by my small weekly allowance, which -- once you have bought your requisite allotment of weekly candy -- really didn't stretch too far in those days of trickle-down economics and the Reagan recession).

I did start reading Fango the next year, with #15, which featured a slightly safer Halloween 2 cover. (Which I bought at the Hallmark store, making sure it was carefully covered in the shopping bag and feeling like someone who'd just bought Playgirl or Inches.) But I still mentally back-date my Fango allegiance to that gross Zombie cover of #8, and, to be perfectly frank, I have silently graded every single cover of Fango since then against that cover. Probably the best horror film magazine cover ever, though the Motel Hell cover the very next issue comes close, and I still hadn't worked up enough courage to buy it.

These thoughts all came back to me as a result of reading "Fangoria: The Scarlet Years" on the Horrorphile blog. If you share any of that 1980s' experience with trend-setting horror magazines, I heartily recommend that blog posting. It's a great reminder of the power that a thin little magazine that is head-over-heels devoted to covering a subject well can have on its audience, especially if its audience is made up of young people looking for something that shows them something just a bit out of the ordinary.

Mr. Magazine on Skin Covers

Samir Husni, aka "Mr. Magazine," writes that the magazines you'd expect to have naked ladies on their covers have become tame, while everyone else apparently has decided nekkid women will help pay the bills. See his always-interesting blog.

The Latest Shopping Spree, Part III

My latest magazine shopping sprees, a combination of newsstand,subscription, and in-store shopping:

SFX (July 2009): As part of my continuing self-therapy for Starlog withdrawal, I picked up the July '09 issue of British competitor SFX, which has itself come under heavy competition from DeathRay and Sci Fi Now. What made me pick up SFX (which yet again manages to cover the bottom leg of the "E" in its title so that its title looks like SEX)? The Harry Potter cover story.

GQ (July 2009): Everyone's been talking about the "first nude cover" of GQ magazine, featuring Sacha Baron Cohen in character (but out of costume) of his Bruno. It's the magazine's special comedy issue, in which it annoys me by having an asterisk (design pet peeve) on the cover copy for "* No Joke? It's Our #ü@%ing COMEDY ISSUE!" Hmm, I'll make myself sound twice my actual age and ask, Remember when men's magazines didn't try to sound profane and trashy? Ah, whatever. There's also a Harold Ramis article.

Heavy Metal (Summer 2009): The buxom women on the covers of HM aren't going to attract me (see Winq, below), but what makes me pick up each issue is the quick process of shuffling through the pages and seeing (a) if the art looks high-quality, and (b) if it looks like the stories might be of high originality. This issue passed the test at the newsstand.

Winq (Fall 2008): This was a back issue of one of my recent great discoveries, ordered from the publisher in Belgium. From fashion to Berlin's gay holocaust memorial to Arabs and the French to, er, robot love and more. Here's another high-quality, beautifully designed issue of this magazine that puts American gay magazines to shame. And it should. Oh, and did I mention that it has a cover price of $7.95 for 148 pages? Beat that, American running dogs! (Oh, yeah, there are also some pix of some rather comely men in non-nude situations.)

Playboy (July/August 2009): The long-anticipated and somewhat controversial combined July/August issue of Playboy finally arrived on newsstands and subscriber mailboxes. Whenever Playboy gets enough pages to do itself justice, I am reminded of why this is a great magazine. When they're really squeezing out a thin issue, there's often only one or two articles that interest me, and if one of them is uninteresting or stupid, well, it's a weak issue. But when they put out an extra-page anniversary or holiday issue, we all get to see that Playboy can draw the best writers and artists in the country. This issue, we get an interview with actor Alec Baldwin; a 20 Questions conversation with Judd Apatow; a profile of TV pitchman Billy Mays; a symposium on the future with such contributors as T. Boone Pickens, Seth MacFarlane, Reza Aslan, and others; a graphic novel interpretation of Ray Bradbury's classic "Fahrenheit 451"; and much more.

DNA (#110): I picked up this issue for the geekiest of reasons: The article on gays in science fiction, especially because it highlights one of my all-time favorites, Battlestar Galactica. I mean, the barely-clad gentleman on the cover, who seems to be having a bit of a struggle to keep his trunks on, probably doesn't hurt its newsstand sales, but I'm sure I'm not the only gay man to focus on the sci-fi article.

Was tempted by but didn't succumb: The Week, Dwell, The Economist, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, Attitude.

My previous shopping spree.

Nope

Okay, I guess he didn't. Hope Reza Aslan's sources are right in the long-term, though.

Reza Aslan: Khamenei to Soften Tone?

Reza Aslan writes on The Daily Beast today that there are reports that a deal may be in the works in Iran that would result in a run-off election between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. This is apparently the work of former president Ayatollah Rafsanjani, who heads up the council that picks the supreme leader, currently his nemesis, Ayatollah Khamenei.

Though the government's brutal crackdown has quieted things today in Tehran, Aslan says things are still raging in the provinces: "[D]espite the fact that protests in the capital city of Tehran have diminished, there are still reports of massive protests taking place in other parts of the country, including in Tabriz, Isfahan, Kermanshah, Mashad and Shiraz. These protests have been significantly smaller due to the brutal security crackdown, but they have also been much more forceful and violent."

He says that Khamenei's Friday prayers tomorrow should be a good indication of a softening of tone and therefore whether these reports of a compromise are real or not.

Now, would that new election be any freer than the one two weeks ago, aye, that's the rub.

Thomas Frank Returns, Baffled Again

The Baffler, a Chicago-based magazine published infrequently but taking regular aim at the so-called new-economy (and the evils of the old economy) is returning, according to the New York Observer and others. This development will likely be welcomed by people searching for intelligent malcontents, and it will likely baffl -- um, confound people who drink the kool-aid of group-think economics.

I had the pleasure of interviewing editor Thomas Frank back in 2001 when I was an editor at (the now-defunct) Internet World magazine in NYC. My column (I always loved my column name, "Internet Whirl") on him focused on his reactions to prophets of the new economy such as George Gilder, people who claimed that the rules of business had been totally changed by information technology. My position has been that IT changed some of the parameters within business, but the basic structure has always been the same. When people start telling you that the old rules are completely wrong and there are no rules for the future -- they're usually trying to fleece you. In 2001 when I wrote the column, there were still a lot of people trying to live in that fantasy land. I suspect there are fewer today. You can read the whole column here.

I'll always have two memories of Frank. One is that every time I say or write his name, I have to stop and think, Wait, Frank Thomas was the White Sox slugger; so it's Thomas Frank who's the intellectual gadfly. The other is that our conversation (only a small portion of which made it into my column) was very enjoyable and ranged over a number of topics, including German ancestors fleeing the failure of the European democratic revolutions in 1848.

So, welcome back, Baffler.

Those of you who live near Silicon Valley can come to The Commonwealth Club of California on September 8, when Thomas Frank makes an appearance there. Watch the Commonwealth Club web site for updates.

Lifetime Bans for Iranian Footballers

As noted in a previous post with video, six players on the Iranian national football (soccer) team wore green armbands in the first half of a recent game against South Korea. The color green is the color adopted by the opposition candidate Mousavi in the recent clearly rigged Iranian presidential elections. The game, which was televised live in Iran, surprisingly failed to delight the hard-line ultra-religious Iranian regime, and that's not only because the team's loss effectively ended the country's World Cup hopes.

Anyway, some commentary on the event noted that it was a particularly brave act by the athletes, because they would have to return home after the trip. And now the other shoe has fallen: Four of the athletes have been banned for life from the sport (we do not yet know about the other two), and the Iranian government is continuing a wide-ranging assault on other Iranian football figures related to reformist causes. That's all according to a report in the British paper The Guardian.

It's still not too late for some American professional athletes to sport a green armband in their next televised appearances. But I doubt any or many will.

Real Newspapers Include Magazines

If a newspaper has any pretension of being a true big-city daily, it has to produce its own magazine for its table-thumping Sunday edition. Now, Folio: reports that the Chicago Tribune (which, under owner Sam Zell, has seemingly been doing all it can to become a small neighborhood paper -- closing foreign bureaus, reducing national and international news, shrinking size and scope of the paper, etc.) is going to stop producing its Sunday magazine.

You know, at some point, you stop being a newspaper.

Iranian.com Online Magazine Offers Updates

Power To The People from Jimmy Misinformed on Vimeo.

On the Iranian.com online magazine (whose motto "nothing's sacred" should give you a sense of how unloved it must be by Iran's religious establishment) has a page with regular updates on the situation with the Iranian post-election protests. It included the BBC's Persian service video, above, which shows police being repelled and then chased by protesters. I fear that in the short- to medium-term, the security forces are going to prove bigger and better armed than the protesters, but it looks like the demonstrators have a healthy lack of affection for people who shoot unarmed pro-democracy protesters.

Other sources for updates: Huffington Post has an update page that is refreshed throughout the day with the latest news, rumors, and videos; so does the New York Times.