Synchronicity
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Magazine, Man.
This world will break your heart, if you let it. It will also fill your heart to bursting with wonder at the synchronicity and beauty present in every mysterious interaction.
Well established magazines enjoy finely honed organizational charts. Art, Copy, Advertising, Editorial, Management— employees of each department stick to their lane, engaging in tasks explicitly laid out in the Job Description. But a startup magazine, particularly a rock rag, steeped in a DIY, punk-rock aesthetic, suffers from no such strictures.
In the early days of SPIN, there were no job descriptions to hew to. Which meant that if something needed doing, or if something looked vaguely interesting, you just picked it up and did it. Record reviews, product tips, band interviews, anything to fill up space. One time in that first year we were closing imminently, and someone noticed we had a half-page hole in the issue. Glenn O’Brien reached out to the pile of records sitting on his desk (every desk had a pile of records on it in those days), grabbed the top one and muttered to me, “Go sit in my office, play this thing, give me five hundred words before six o’clock.”
I played Steve Earle’s Guitar Town repeatedly, wrote that review, and then thrilled to see my words in print a few weeks later. With the internet, people have grown used to having their every thought available to the entire world in the stroke of a key. Back then, a couple hundred thousand readers or viewers (of one’s photographs) was powerful stuff. College friends would write (remember?) to tell me they recognized my voice in a story about a band. My mother would accost nonplussed newsstand operators demanding they give my SPIN covers better placement. And plenty of people I didn’t know read those words. Steve Earle is the real deal, he’s been proven to be a capable songwriter and performer for several decades. For the record, Guitar Town is an excellent album that stands the test of time and sounds good to this very day. My review was utterly, terribly, embarrassingly wrong. I gleaned an inkling of this when I saw Earle himself on MTV threaten to kill me. Not so much me, as “some asshole from SPIN,” but my name was right there next to the review, so, close enough. Again, it is hard to conceive from the vantage point of the internet age, but back then when the klieg light of media attention bore down on one, it made one’s ears burn. I nearly passed out that time Howard Stern read my letter on the air asking him to be in our swimsuit issue. Behind the scenes was my natural space; I think it’s probably why I became a photographer. Appearing in front of the camera/media/audience? Well, now that took some therapy.
All sorts of people were reading SPIN. And my dopey tossed-off record review had not just artistic, but economic consequences. Beginner’s Mind can be an excellent impetus, prompting you to take chances and do things you have no experience with. But it can also lead to a hubris detrimental to one’s karmic health. At 25, I also sorely misunderstood the tension between art and commerce I would go on to wrestle with my entire career. Commercial art, whether song, movie, novel, photograph, emphasizes that tension. “Hey kids! Let’s put out a magazine!” is lots of fun in theory; in practice it’s much more complicated. Steve Earle, if you’re listening: thanks for the schooling, glad I never ran into you in person, consider this a nearly forty-year-late apology. Guitar Town is an excellent album and you should all buy it.
The chaos of a startup newbie magazine makes for fabulous fun too. I was totally taken by this series of ads for a clothing company called Esprit. So much so, that when the call came for us to advertise for subscriptions, I raised my hand and offered my services. I proposed ads featuring our excellent overworked and underpaid staff, based on Esprit’s “Real People” campaign, which featured employees wearing the company’s clothes and free-associating about their lives.
This past weekend, an old friend from my SPIN days came to visit. I haven’t seen Alexandra in the ensuing years, but it was fabulous to catch up. She dropped a syllable from her name, I added one, but otherwise it was instantly like old times. We got to talking about SPIN, of course, and I pulled out my stack of issues. Of course, we came across those ads I’d created ‘lo those many years ago. As it happened, hers was the first in the series. It’s also the best.
Look, I haven’t had a haircut in six weeks, my bangs are a mess, and I’m running out of Chanel lipstick. I mean, how am I supposed to run a magazine when I can’t even groom myself properly?
Alex had famously made publisher Bob Guccione Jr. swing by the Chanel store in Paris and bring her lipstick so that copy was dangerously close to reality. I got Legs McNeil to threaten to take his clothes off, Pam in Marketing’s baby was in black but she had the blues, and our account manager doffed her corporate suit for high 80s Madonna lace and opera gloves. It was so fun to pick a staffer, see what copy they’d let me get away with under their name, shoot a portrait and design a full page ad in a national magazine. Absolutely the sort of thing that would never happen at a normal, established publication. But the opportunity that makes those SPIN years, despite crushing poverty wages, roach-infested apartments and long hours such a halcyon memory for me.
But wait, there’s more. Remember I told you my inspiration for these ads was a fashion company called Esprit? Well, cue the Twilight Zone theme because it turns out a young Liz Mechem, later known as Liz Carroll worked on those actual ads. Oh yes, we had each had parallel formative “real jobs”: me at SPIN, Liz at Esprit. Little did I realize just how parallel those early jobs turned out to be. I see skies of blue, red roses too, some for me, some for you, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
What a blast!!!