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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
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Poor Mag : Page 1, 2
Worse still is Dan Friedman's "Some Thoughts on Design, the Cold War and AIDS." Again, it sports a cool visual interface (quasi-surrealistic photo at left; a red petal floating feather-like over a black background while some appropriately futuristic ambient-techno bloops in the background), but where exactly are the thoughts advertised in the title? One gets the feeling that Friedman might have penned this twaddle – four wholly unsubstantiated declarative sentences – between stops on the subway.
Similarly, Theresa Braine's ponderously-titled "The Poverty of Values Inherent in Attaching a Monetary Value to Everything and in Measuring Poverty Merely in Terms of Money (by default, the current Poor's most substantial offering) barely elicits a yawn. While the visual drama of the title page suggests that Braine is about to drop some serious science on us, in reality, she does little more than bitch, moaning on about American materialism and the "linear thinking" that's resulted in the transformation of our educational institutions into vocational training centers for the work-a-day world.
She writes, for example:
School is geared almost solely toward "jobs" – arts curricula are cut because bean counters judge their worth solely on the tangible aspects, and think linearly – that is, they say, "A person can't get a job in music, therefore it is extraneous to teach music." This linear thinking ignores the reality that subjects like music and art feed into the very skills educators are trying to build. Studies are now showing that understanding music helps children understand math – the latter of which is needed in the ever-exalted job market.
I mean, is this news? Aren't most of us – particularly the sort of people most likely to stumble upon a mag like Poor – already aware of all this? So where do we go from here? It is clear that someone other than Braine will have to tell us.
These three pieces pretty much exemplify the sort of beautifully adorned but almost entirely vaporous text that Poor serves up. Would-be readers who've taken the trouble to download the Shockwave plug-in in order to see the 'zine in all its glory will be particularly irritated at what they find inside. And that's a shame because Poor's design team is certainly top-flight. Hand these folks some meaty content and there is no telling what they might do.
So what about those questions that so plagued Yoshi Sodeoka? Do you think Poor's designers are worried about that sort of thing? Nah. They're busy putting together the next issue blissfully unencumbered by any thoughts of guilt or responsibility to their writers. See, they already know what visitors to Poor are bound to discover: without the eye candy, Poor Mag is no mag at all.
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A graduate of Columbia University and The University of Pennsylvania, life-long New Jerseyan and New York Mets fan, Tom Hartman now lives in Philadelphia where he's an Associate Poetry Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. Over the years his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Photo Review, City Paper (Philadelphia), and Philadelphia Weekly. When he's not writing he spends far too much time hating the Atlanta Braves.