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By Cintra Wilson

May 19, 1999 | (Alluring lead line, hypothetically pulling the Reader "into" the story.) You 're a new-ish magazine, competing in today's crazy magazine marketplace, and you are trying to get a whole lot of hip young people to spend their hard-earned discretionary income on you! So what do you do first? Well, don't panic! (Familiar tone, reassuring the Reader that this isn't just a dry, impersonal how-to article, but one expressly for Them.) You do what everybody has been doing since Condé Nast started ejaculating glossy multicolored ego-spattered print-sputum monthlies back in the dark ages! You have a big party at New York's good old Limelight club (which was once upon a time a really "hot scene," but is now just another overcrowded, dark, loud, smoky room to feel irritated and claustrophobic in) and invite all of the popular celebrities you've had in your magazine in recent months! Also invite models, lotsa models. This will establish you as "cool," and everyone will like you and you will be rich.

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Put the most famous person you can get (who is unpopular enough to let you) on your cover!

I went to a party for "hip" POV magazine and its night life supplement, Egg. They were honoring Goldberg, the wrestler, and Peter Beard, the photographer! Wrestle-mania! It's huge! There's even a "Complete Idiot's Guide to Pro Wrestling" now, so that even deeply brain-damaged people can understand the nuances and subtle finesse of professional wrestling! This is typical, I guess, and what I have come to expect of whatever achieves widespread mega-popularity in America -- I don't fucking understand what the attraction is at all. Put the World Federation Wrestling right up there with Celine Dion, "Memoirs of a Geisha," Beanie Babies and all of the other phenomena that I feel excluded from, because I hate them, hate them, hate them.

Cluttery safari-photographer/diarist Peter Beard was supposedly at the party, celebrating his unforgivable Egg phantasy photo layout, "The Secret World of (supermodel) Marcus Schenkenberg." (Six pages of the model-boy engaging in a bored-looking dance-floor dry-hump with three or more winsome and drunk-looking she-models, then all of them crammed importantly into limousines, then photos of all of the model-girls wearing thongs and self-consciously cuddling Marcus in bed and "acting" like they are going to have a slobbery bisexual supermodel foursome just as soon as gross old Peter Beard stops snapping pictures of them. How "artistic!" How "daringly original!" Models, acting sexy! Whoda thunk of it? Genius.) And Alison Eastwood, fetching, no-longer-drunk, blond daughter of Clint was supposedly there, and that was supposed to be exciting, because she was seen barely concealing her breasts on the cover of the spring issue of Egg.

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Articles -- uh-oh, this is the hard part

Before you can have the big party, you have to have the magazine, and this may come as a shocker, but magazines can't be all fancy advertisements of beautiful girls wearing bras. They need some words in them, too! (This is the bracketed place where I, the magazine writer, pretend to feel sorry for you, and say something disarming and personable, like "Hey, I almost opened my wrists with a miter saw the last time I needed to put words in a magazine. Don't worry, you're not alone, chuckle, bleh bleh bleh.")

It's easy. You hire some starving hack writers to joylessly bleed out banal articles that are the exact same articles featured in every other magazine, and have them advertised in BIG LETTERS on the cover, i.e. SEX –- Have A Fling! Or SEX –- Making It Better Than Ever, or SEX –- 10 Secrets Only The Stars Know, etc. Make sure that all the articles are written in the same unchanging, time-honored hack-format that all the other magazines use, i.e. divide the article up into clear-cut little sections full of not-quite witty information and examples, with a heading in bold print at the top of every section! Use this article as an example!

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How shallow is your demographic?

What kind of hip young people do you want reading you, if you're a hip young magazine? Take POV. POV appears to want to be a male Mademoiselle for pink, fat, aspiring golf bastards. It has the same artless, kiss ass to the privileged young adult flavor of a Ron Howard film. For example, it has a one-page article by Tyra Banks on the importance of confidence, and how she got hers. Frankly, I'd rather blow a dead dog than read what a woman who makes an enormous, multimillion-dollar living being photographed in panties has to say about her secrets of personal confidence. Then again, I think all models should be required to wear a little soundproof Plexiglas head-box when not being photographed in their panties, to discourage their offering opinions and bringing mental pain to themselves and others. Egg magazine is POV, but drunk and more horny.

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