A Brief Magazine Autopsy

Here’s a cover I “designed” for this obscure, already-on-life-support music magazine—back when print was circling the drain but still clung to a pulse for Luddites, tactile fetishists, and old ladies who needed something to stack on glass coffee tables. The cover never ran. Apparently it was “too abstract,” “too artsy,” whatever. I didn’t care. They’d already wired me two thousand bucks—no contract, no questions, the kind of transaction that felt like both a bribe and an insult. After that, it became obvious the whole arrangement wasn’t going to advance my creativity and ultimately chipped away whatever illusions I’d been nursing about the publishing world.

What the fuck?

I met the founder—owner, big boss, magazine messiah—for dinner one night at this Chinese restaurant that tried way too hard to be upscale. The staff wore black button-downs and pained expressions. All the writers and designers had on jackets or ties like they were auditioning for some retro newsroom fantasy, while I wore an Alice Cooper t-shirt. One of the wives asked the server if the rice was “the type with plastic in it.” I thought she was joking until she launched into this deranged explanation about something she read online. I was then politely informed that the kitchen would almost certainly spit in our food. It was that kind of night.

My girlfriend texted while I was still at the restaurant.

“How’s the circle jerk?”

“Expensive. Someone just asked if rice has plastic in it.”

“Jesus.”

“They’re talking about market penetration now. The deodorant demographic.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“The cover? I already did it. Took like thirty seconds.”

“Is it good?”

“Fuckin’ sucks. That’s the point.”

“You’re such a cunt sometimes.”

There's something exquisitely repulsive about these lavish dinner parties—like observing a housefly drown in slow motion, performing its entire pathetic death ballet for an audience of nobody. Capital, it turns out, functions as an extraction device for anything resembling human sincerity, and here was the demonstration model: money hemorrhaging in all directions, projects conceived during cocaine reveries, the performed ecstasy of people incinerating currency as a leisure activity. The persistent American mythology about wealthy people possessing some mystic competence is, naturally, complete horseshit.

The insider jargon came fast: buzzwords, half-truths, fantasies about “the male demographic,” mass-market deodorant and beer and cars, all delivered with this frat bro earnestness that blurred fantasy and reality until they were the same joke. At some point I decided, instantly and with a kind of perverse joy, to make the worst cover I could muster, just to see if these slack-jawed dipshits would green-light it.

I had already slapped my contribution together in under a minute, cutting and pasting additions to an already tactile collage on my laptop while folding laundry, the glow of the screen flickering across an ashtray piled with cigarettes. It was barely a design, more like an uninterested middle-finger dressed up as art. But for a couple grand on a Saturday afternoon when I was hungover and hollow-eyed and the world felt like a busted amp, it was perfect.