There some points of really fresh interest in the 2005/08/22 New Yorker. At first glance there are no ads; after a minute you realise that in fact that one advertiser has bought all the space in the issue. Their name never appears, as far as I can tell, but all the pages that would be advertising are filled with graphics—in a very New Yorker style—that feature the advertiser’s icon, one you’d probably recognize. Inside, there’s a good feature on Kinky Friedman, minor country-music star (the Texas Jewboys) turned successful mystery novelist, who’s now running for governor of Texas. Friedman says: “You have your life and your work, and you should get the two as confused and as mixed up as possible. Make it all one fabric.” Which is a fine goal, if perhaps not achievable by everyone; lots of people just have jobs, and lots of people are fine with that. Me, I’ve got a vocation. But then I realized that this issue of the magazine is getting with Kinky’s program too. The real “job” of a magazine, what it gets paid for, is selling advertising; and in this case, they’re mixing up their graphical identity and their job in a fairly challenging way. Advertising, as it’s done now, works less and less every year. I’m not saying that this New Yorker gambit is the One New Truth, but in a trade that really needs some new ideas, anything different is news.
