The Case Against Paper
Apparently there is a magazine called Paper. It is the "hippest magazine on earth" according to the Los Angeles Times; it is "the premiere journal of all things trendsetting" according to itself. I know this because about a year ago I read From Abfab to Zen: Paper's Guide to Pop Culture, "an insider's tour of an exploding scene whose impact will be felt well into the next century" and incidentally a book so aggressively bad that I have been unable to write or speak about it until now. I have to admit I'm not sure why a thousand-year-old Buddhist sect is considered pop culture, but then I'm not as "street" as Paper is.
Of course, no one's as street as Paper, judging by their self-congratulatory introduction, except perhaps their readers, who are "fearless innovators at ground zero, taking risks" etc. (The "ground zero" line may sound strange, but this book was written in 1999.) They also use the word "hipoisie" (no joke).
Now, I am not very hip, so I'd like to take a moment to learn, from Paper, just what hipness means. Let's start with a topic I know only a little about, and would like to know more; let's flip through these alphabetical listings to H for "Hong Kong Cinema." Here's the entry, in toto:
It's easy to pick this entry apart for its errors and omissions and it use of the tired cliché "balletic violence," but these problems are all overshadowed by the fact that an entry marked "Hong Kong Cinema" mentions one American director, one Hong Kong director, three America actors, three Hong Kong actors, two American movies, and no Hong Kong movies. Surely there's something wrong here. The year, remember is 1999; do you even know anyone who knew less about Hong Kong cinema than these people in 1999? The fact that the primary concerns are making references your parents would understand and gauging how actors do "at the box office" is, it turns out, emblematic of the rest of the book.
The format of the book itself may be part of the problem. The entries are "sushi-sized pieces of delectable information" (shudder; their phrase), too small to convey any real content. But the content they do contain is essentially on the level of a press release. What are to make of the assertion that two members of the B-52s "have both put out solo records that have been eagerly scooped up by their adoring fans"? I guess adoring fans are eager, but does anyone actually scoop records (presumably actually CDs)? Or the statement that Milla Jovovich "has already conquered the worlds of modeling, music and film." Yes, she has appeared in films, is that what they mean? These sentences are nonsense, little commercials of the sort you might expect to see in Wizard. The entry on Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa ends with the fawning pronouncement: "We have not heard the last of him." Is this some kind of joke? Apparently it's hard to pass through the pages of Paper without getting your ass kissed.
(The one acceptable instance: I will tolerate the otherwise spurious claim that Ian McKellan "received universal praise for his performance as James Whale" under the assumption that the brown-nosey word "universal" is a play off the name of Whale's studio. All other occasions of "universal," "omnipresent," "peerless," etc., are hateful.)
But of course the editors of Paper don't want you think they are soft, and so every once in a while they take a courageous stance and dare to criticize a sacred cow by uttering some unpopular truths. For example, here's their daring take on "Family Values":
Now that's telling it like it is. I'm not sure how the claim that Falwell wants to censor theater makes him a hypocrite, and it's a little weird that "virtuous" is apparently an insult now, but I'll grant that the adjective "reptilian" is pretty funny. After that brief puncturing of hitherto idolized figures they then return to business as usual, enthusing that Li'l Kim "is one of a new breed of rap superstars that like it dirty and designer all the way." You've gotta be pretty hip to take on Bill Bennett!
Commerce is never far from Paper's mind. The climactic sentence of their entry on Out magazine runs: "The crème de la crème of advertisers use Out to target the highly sought-after gay market that likes to read about everything from gay-bashing to out celebrities." This is a wonderfully Paper sentence in the way it trundles out buying power as the staple of success, in the way it manages to flatter everyone (those elite advertisers! that desirable demographic!), and also in the way it writes itself into a corner. The "everything from...to" construction is clearly supposed to wow us with the broad spectrum of gay interests, but of course it was too hard to actually think of a spectrum, so instead we get two subjects that do not, in fact, bound a very large territory under that intimidating rubric "everything." I'm interested in everything from binturong feeding to binturong grooming, but I'm not going to say it that way, because I would sound like an idiot. But "everything from...to" (one of the hallmarks of lazy writing) appears again and again in Paper, and even when they actually manage to list two diverse subjects they're no better off. Under the entry "'Zines" Paper lists some "with strong, smart and funny voices whose content ran the gamut from gross-out summer camp stories to opinion pieces on the perfection of mint chocolate-chip ice cream." Leaving aside that "funny voices" does not mean what they think it means, I must point out that the gamut of summer camp and ice cream, while perhaps broad, is nevertheless stupid. They are trying so hard to think of quirky things to enumerate here that they are probably sweating.
Much of the book is just useless and lame. Try paging through and checking how many entries of this "insider's tour" contain absolutely zero information that your parents don't know. I suppose in fifty years someone might come across this book and be fascinated by three sentences roughly outlining who O.J Simpson is. Did you know that IPO stands for initial public offering, and "fortunes are being made on IPOs"? If you did, you know as much about the subject as the authors of this reference book.
And did anyone just plain copy edit? The IPO sentence is only one of the innumerable overuses of the passive voice in this book. "Hundreds of permissions had to be secured from photographers worldwide and each of hundreds of entries had be written, researched, edited and fact-checked." Or: "...the bar is raised and minds are opened." I'm not one of those grammar-checkers who red pen every use of the passive, but come on. Also:
Page 20: "Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome has been this generation's Vietnam..."
Note how cleverly they vary the sentences, so you hardly notice you're reading the same one twice! (Bonus points to anyone who can find its third appearance in the book.) Also, they use variations of the cumbersome phrase "transgendered youth on the Christopher Street piers" again and again. Is there no other name for these guys? Couldn't they think of a synonym for "youth"? Here's an idea, you hip thing you, how about if you make up a name? After all, you made up "hipoisie."
I'm not even going to discuss the moronic article on "cartoons." (There are, of course, no mentions of anime or manga in a book written in 1999 by people whose "keen sense of what's up clues [them] in to trends, people and fashion long before they hit the mainstream," although the entry on "multi-culti style" [sic] does mention that "Japanese kids brought their sci-fi cartoon vibe to the streets," which might count for something.)
It's possible, I suppose, that Paper the magazine is not as pathetically shameful as the book, although since the editors are the same I tend to doubt it. And in all fairness, it may well be that greed, shallowness, "starfucking," and ignorance are the building blocks of hip, and Paper is therefore just as hip as it claims when it wallows in these vices. But I can't help but notice that Juxtapoz does a better job of concealing them.
And in case you were wondering:
There it is, the last entry in the book (they're not strictly alphabetical). That, in toto, is Paper's entry on "Zen."
