Welcome back, Ten Years Ago in SPY




A couple of years ago I made a Net-friend in Joe Clark, who at the time was writing Ten Years Ago in SPY -- a spectacularly obsessive sort-of-weblog in which, every month or so, he would break down the contents of a selected issue of SPY magazine.

I myself am something of a SPY magazine collector. I have all but 13 issues of its complete run, which ran sporadically from 1986 to 1998. I even own side-projects like SPY Notes and SPY High and STY, an "unauthorized parody" of the magazine that employed stupid pig-puns. (Remember that brief craze for putting out magazine spoofs involving animals? STY is by far the strangest -- and at over 80 pages, it's also weirdly thorough and well-written and trenchant.)

Anyway, when I discovered Ten Years Ago in SPY, I devoured it. Eventually, I was scanning pages from my own collection to help illustrate Joe's reminiscences. Joe, a self-described "curmudgeon" who really ought to buy his own scanner, breaks down each issue in a granular and idiosyncratic fashion -- obsessing over the typography in the ads, spinning into personal anecdotes, fixating on anyone with red hair (actually, he does that more in his other blogs), and offering a surprising amount of biography on the designers who helped make SPY, in its first few years of life, the most vital and influential magazine of the late 20th century. It's one of those weird bursts of literate fandom that could only happen online, put out by a wicked writer of great and particular passions.

And so the good news is that Ten Years Ago in SPY returns from its lengthy hiatus today -- with a typically fast, funny and fearless breakdown of the December 1987 issue. And I understand that Joe's just been interviewed by George Kalogerakis for some sort of official retrospective book on the mag.


Posted: Mon - December 13, 2004 at 10:00 AM        

|

©