2: Making a magazine.

Today is a special day. Today we celebrate just over six months of the Lost + Found blog, with something pretty amazing that we’ve never done before: actually posting to it!

I created this blog back in March — full of excitement and fully intending to post to it all the time — and then promptly never came back to it again. What happened? I could offer some of the typical human excuses for mostly neglected projects like this one: work; family travel; household tasks and to-dos; in-person fraternizing around town(s) with friends. I could, additionally, submit that half-finished or barely-started projects are areas in which, throughout my life, I have uniquely excelled. Neither of these hold a candle, though, to the real mental blockage that has persistently kept me (and probably others in recent years) from just jotting down a few notes from life every once in a while, hitting send, and letting it ride: the public performance of blogging-as-social media, and the need to be saying something Intellectual and Big-Brained with everything we fuckin’ do.

If it weren’t an example of indulging that exact tendency, I’d say more. But it absolutely would be, so I won’t. And plus, I got other things (in theory) to do. My goal today wasn’t to talk about the hyper-segmented online algorithmic content economy (yawn!) but to provide a simple life/career update: finally, I’m having a go at making a print magazine with Super Empty, and I’m excited, energized, and not for nothing, a little scared.

I can’t say exactly when it started (besides reading the newspaper at the kitchen table as a kid), but making a print product has been an aspiration of mine for a long time. In 2016, when I knew I didn’t have the time and resources for actually printing full issues of Super Empty, I settled for the next best (and much more economical thing): for a couple months, I created issue “covers” that previewed digital-only contents that were theoretically “inside.” It wasn’t a real magazine, more like 1% of one at best, but it was enough at the time to scratch the itch. To feel more refined and sophisticated than just some blog.

When I excavated Super Empty from the rubble last February, I didn’t do so with the express intent of producing a print product. More than anything, I wanted to create, even on a small, regional scale, an example of arts & culture journalism success — in whatever form that needed to take, whether that be a project built around articles and an email newsletter, or social media, or something else. A year and a half later, both from observations with SE but also the world at large, I’m now convinced that physical media is indispensable in any iteration of that formula, and will play at least some role in a huge proportion of the independent media entities that make it out of the next 10 years alive. From luxurious, hardcover photo books to stapled quarterlies to printable DIY zines, the desire for something to hold has broken the containment zone of tech-skeptical luddites and surged into mainstream cultural life — not just in one or two age demos, but across all of them.

Every day, hundreds of discrete pieces of content glide across the glass screens of our computers and phones, more than we could ever seriously give our sustained attention to. And yet, we still only come across and physically touch about as many things as we always have. It seems to follow that if want people to value something, to be willing to pay for it — as news/media institutions in the post-Google Ads era desperately need to figure out how to do — the latter would be an obvious way to go. The fact that, creatively, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, and one that brings me into collaborative contact with supremely talented and kindhearted friends old and new? Even better.

There was a small, cosmic moment to that effect as I visited an independent press in Raleigh a couple weeks ago, touring the printing facilities and talking about the intentions for the mag. As we sat down to go over their offerings and look at sample materials, the owner grabbed an item off one of the shelves, saying something to the effect of, “When I got your email, it reminded me of this thing we worked on many years ago…” and plopped a thick, black-and-white tome on the conference table in front of me. I recognized it instantly: Instead of Rent, the one-issue-only, Raleigh-based lifestyle/fashion magazine that Chayanne Scales and Sameer Abdel-Khalek had put together roughly a decade ago with the help of designer/illustrator Jason Clary. I flipped a few pages and quickly found full-page ads for Thrill City and Runaway, just like I’d remembered them.

I’ve only talked with Chayanne a few times over the past few years. But when I told him about the episode, he didn’t just tell me it was funny, or say, “man, those were fun times,” and wish me well. He offered to help. This week, ten-plus years after IoR, we’re meeting up to work on Super Empty. When the time to roll out a physical SE finally comes, I know I’ll be anxious to see it received well, to see it be a success. And I’ll have to remind myself that by certain measures — like the kindred reunion with Chayanne and Instead of Rent, or even just getting me to finally publish something on this blog — it already is.