Paper’s Cultural Fabulousness
[Editor's Note: Please welcome our newest Magazineer, Kevin Smokler, the author of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times and a contributor to the first issue of Fray Quarterly.]
Recently I read a New Yorker profile of Kim Hastreiter, the founder and editor of Paper and decided, after just three paragraphs, that she’s led the world’s most charmed life. A downtown boho in the 1970s who now carefully tends her pop culture periodical as carefully as a master arbourist would an orchard, Hastreiter and Paper seem the living incarnation of how I imagine the Paris Review under George Plimpton - a rowdy blurring of work and play, of high-minded cultural curation and shuffling into work at noon. Editors like Graydon Carter and Tina Brown seem to be working hard to pull the fabulous into their orbit. New Yorker author Dana Goodyear called the staff and friends of Paper “a freewheeling, kitschy, Munsters-like family, but a happy and highly functional one” made of writers, designers musicians and artists, many of whom call Hastreiter “aunty.” It makes her and her magazine seem both unattainably hip and nice at the same time.
I wanted Paper to be my best friend, and I’d never read a single issue. So when I emailed their New York office asking for a sample issue and Associate editor Alexis Swerdloff wrote back with “how many do you need?”, my expectations were high. Now they are highly satisfied.
Paper traffics in cultural fabulousness. The magazine profiles and reviews the artists, filmmakers, musicians, authors, and celebrities that you should know more about. Best I can tell, their taste leans forward yet accessible. They’re not trying to impress you with obscurity and, while there were at least a half-dozen new-to-me’s in the three issues I read, a more-obsessive friend might find their choices a bit safe. Whatever. I don’t complain when a magazine needs to put Andy Samberg on the cover to draw advertisers and newsstand sales. I can find the table of contents and jet off from there.
Paper’s simple taxonomy can be summarized as What to Look Out for (Paperview: One page profiles of lesser-known creatives), What You Probably Already Know About (longer articles and photo spreads of designers and the bit-more-famous) and What We Think About What’s Already Out There (Paper of the Month: Reviews of new movies, music and books that they cleverly outsource to other fabulous people). There’s a smattering of columns on politics, movies and (in keeping with a rather dated view of pop culture geography) Los Angeles, as well as a throwaway spread of nightlife and party photos. Those feel obligatory. I concluded subscribers really signed up for a primer on what to read, listen to, and watch next.
Paper’s design feels almost 60s minimalist, bare white backgrounds, blocky text, a single photo predominates. With the exception of a name columnist like Cintra Wilson (whose take-downs of fame read like boa-clad performance art), the writing is understated, purposeful. Paper seems less a talent show for journalists or a boast about access to famous people and more like an act of curation. Paper is your outsource buddy (what I call a friend with excellent taste whom you rely on for some area of your cultural consumption) in print form. And although I didn’t spend a lot of time on their rather dense web presence (blogs, shopping, Paper TV, the works), what I saw felt like leftovers from traditional celebrity journalism. It’s telling that Paper only does online what US Weekly considers its reason for existence.
Paper has been around since 1984 and some say it invented the pop culture periodical. I’m not sure what it says that it now appears to stand alone. Pop journalism today is either fawning (Entertainment Weekly), snarky (Radar), a stand-in for fashion (Interview, Black Book) or politely condescending (The New Yorker). We can’t talk about movies, music, television and books without immediately passing judgement on pop itself. Paper, like any good friend, doesn’t demand tat you be impressed by it or dare you to disagree, but rather the rarest of qualities in a magazine: to sit with it and listen.
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