
Here's the third issue of Bald Ego, the literary and arts magazine that I publish and edit with my partner Max Blagg. I said that yesterday to a guy from England and he looked at me like he wasn't quite sure what I said.
My friend Lisa, who was standing there, then said, "You said your partner…"
I keep forgetting about that. Oh. "My boyfriend Max Blagg," I said. "I hate this 'partner' stuff. 'Boyfriend' was good enough for my dad, and it's good enough for me."
In fact, Max and I are hopeless heteros and business partners in this little magazine. (My dad was a hopeless womanizer.) With George Plimpton dead we thought it was a good time to do a literary magazine for our time. Actually, we started it before George died. Even though it's supposed to come out twice a year, or that was the original idea, we just put out the third since the end of 2002.
That's why we don't call it a periodical, we call it an occasional. Actually we had an issue #3 all ready to go a year ago but then our ad salesman quit, and we were short on ads. Had we published I would have been broke. So we held off until the lack of Bald Ego forced the business community's hand. My friend Andy Spade had a proposition. Over drinks he explained his concept of the commercial readymade, inspired by Marcel Duchamp. There was a barbershop that Andy liked and he paid the shop to put the logo of his company, Jack Spade, the men's bag and accessories maker, on the shop. If we would put Jack Spade on Bald Ego he would get involved.
This story is recounted more amusingly in the Editor's Encyclical in Bald Ego, which I urge you all to purchase and read, but to make a long story medium, Bald Ego came out with "Jack Spade" where "Bald Ego" would usually be. Maybe we'll sell even more. But I think we have made history as the first magazine to sell the cover as an ad. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The new issue is the best yet, 64 pages longer than the last, with a great group of contributors. We decided that the literary magazine for an illiterate age should have a lot of pictures in it, so this one features pictures from Dike Blair, Phillip Taaffe, Don Van Vliet, Richard Prince, Jeremy Blake, John Lurie, Duncan Hannah, Elizabeth Peyton, Jane Dickson, Jimmy Gilroy, Fred Tomaselli, Charlene von Heyl, Keith Sonnier, Jack Pierson, Steven Mueller, Mel Kendrick, and Tom Sachs, and photographs, many of them sexy, from the likes of Santé D'Orazio, Stephen Frailey, Lloyd Ziff, Andrew Brucker, Jahmani Perry, Justen Ladda, Sam Matamoros, McDermott & McGough, and Todd Eberle, among others. The writers include Gary Indiana, James Salter, Elias Khoury, Linda St.John, Julie King, Gerard Malanga, John Stravinsky, Theresa Duncan, Adrian Dannatt, August Kleinzahler, Hooman Majd, and Davitt Sigerson, who gave us a piece of his new novel. Not to mention the editors, who selflessly included their own work. The writing is all fiction and poetry—our motto is, "No journalism or criticism since 2002."
Anyway, I highly recommend this historic journal. You can pick it up in better bookstores and magazine stores everywhere. That would include, in New York, St. Mark's Bookshop, Hudson News at Grand Central, and the Union Square Magazine Shop; in Boston, Trident Bookseller; in Chicago, City Newstand and Quimby's Books; in Washington, Newsroom; in Hollywood, Daily Planet Books; and in Berkeley, Cody's Books. Plus many more distinguished locations and, of course, Amazon.com.