Jam Magazine: Charlie Sheen Nightmares With Cox And Gallagher
THE News of the World launches men’s supplement Jam – what a very sad and tired retread of masculine fetishes it is. The title alone is a pre-Loaded memento mori – y’know, bedroom air guitars. Nasty lank hair.Wanking.
Cover boy Liam Gallagher is a ’21st Century Boy’ when the b/w pic harks back to the mid-90s. Yellow-toothed David Bailey snaps the portrait, sooo 60s, darling.
The John Lydon Glenda Slagg page snarls into sundry confusions: he tells us that he calls the Royal Wedding the Royal Weeding – “because there will be a bit of cross-pollination in the family for once.” Gardening question: what has weeding to do with cross-pollination?
Did someone edit this magazine or was it thrown together by celebrity bookers weathered by eye-rolling riders?
Another 90s-looking relic, in the shape of Prof Brian Cox, boldly recycles his old uni notes to tell us about a star that blew up 700 years ago. Nothing more recent from the atheist campaigner? The accompanying eye-like photo would be better placed in a Specsavers ad, with Cox as the ‘before’ case study.
Jam being a cliche-in-progress, the feature on organised crime groups inevitably follows. With street crime rates on the rise, this is just what the world needs – another magazine crime polish for the enlargement of mirrored scrotism.
It’s just as well the publication is a giveaway: anyone in mags will tell you dark covers don’t sell. And a near-monochromatic inside, with bits of spot colour (in the few ads mainly), associates dreary notions of fantasy machismo with psycho cellar dwellers. If you want to give someone a nervous breakdown in this fragile little world suggest a piece on trannies and whether they dress right or left in drag.
I once wrote apropos of Tony Parsons, and an idiotic piece he wrote inGQ about his soldier daddy and his (Tony’s) love of guns, that cultural masculinity thrives on the degree of harm it causes: the more others are deprived of something the more the depriver – the hapless male catalogue reader – feels valued as a man. Jam brings nothing new to this Charlie Sheen nightmare.
One bit of hope is in the editor’s letter, pre-written in spirit in another age by aging scrote James Brown, the founder of Loaded, now proud owner of the Sabotage Times website: ‘Most men [don’t read magazines],’ writes Mark Hayman. The poor chap must be a professional masochist.
Posted: 7th, March 2011 | In: Key Posts Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
