Fish, Tits, and the Vampire Diaries
Print is a sensory argument. The smell of it, the slight resistance of glossy stock, the specific indignity of a laptop balanced on your knees in the bathroom versus a magazine that just lies there cooperating. There’s no digital substitute for any of this and I’m not interested in finding one. So I’ve started burning through whatever I can grab at the newsstand—no system, no categories—and the current stack is remarkable mainly for its range.
NYLON goes deep on the cast of The Vampire Diaries—Nina Dobrev, Paul Wesley, Ian Somerhalder—feeding the post-Twilight vampire mania that had been building since the films landed. The interview subjects have extraordinary faces and the magazine knows exactly what to do with them. Elsewhere in the issue: Sarah Silverman and fifteen bands you’ve never heard of, which is precisely the kind of promise that either pays off completely or wastes twenty minutes and leaves you oddly defensive.
VICE does its thing: elderly Italians philosophizing about sex, photographs of people mid-chew, a profile of the author Dolly Freed. The magazine operates on the belief that radical authenticity looks exactly like controlled provocation, and at its best that’s correct. At its worst it’s just pictures of people with food in their mouths.
FRONT doesn’t bother with pretense—two very blonde, very generous women named Emily and Hannah shot with the kind of frank enthusiasm that makes apology seem beside the point, plus an anniversary tribute to Hulk Hogan and an inexplicable argument for why you need a xylophone in your life. That last one I haven’t resolved. Cooler, meanwhile, goes the other direction: pro snowboarder Nicole Angelrath, a relaxed conversation with Yeasayer, and a nostalgia piece anchored in Edward Scissorhands, Nirvana, and Pulp Fiction. That particular early-90s trinity hits differently in winter. Most things do.
NEON is in an existential mood this month—what to do when heartbreak becomes lethal, how long you have left, what your sex IQ reveals about you. All three feel genuinely pressing at the newsstand and faintly absurd by the time you get home. Then there’s Blinker, a fishing magazine I grabbed as a joke, which turned out to contain a feature on trout, a piece on fishing the Balkans, a handful of recipes, and a bonus DVD. I read the whole thing. I’m not certain what that means.