男性雜志的沒落

I've had it with men

Ten years ago, men's monthlies were making fortunes for publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. And FHM editor Ed Needham was at the heart of it. But, he says, the internet and trashy weeklies have destroyed all that: the party's over, and it's time to move on

Monday June 4, 2007The Guardian

Last summer, I moved back to London after spending seven years in New York editing FHM, Rolling Stone and - most recently - Maxim, the most popular men's magazine in the world. The role of editor-in-chief at a large-circulation American magazine is one of life's more charmed positions, but I decided to step away from the generous salary, sell the SoHo loft and manage without all the other perks and baubles that come with sitting atop a big masthead - such as the five-star hotels, backstage passes, foreign travel, limos to the airport, free (or massively discounted) designer clothes and invitations to premieres and major sporting events, including, had my hosts chosen a more reliable tout, the World Cup final. History may one day show this to be a financially moronic decision, but the internet, other electronic distractions and the UK weeklies have made the month a terribly unfashionable unit of time, and the path ahead for men's magazines increasingly difficult to chart. Of greater concern, it had stopped being fun. This genre, into which I had gleefully poured my heart and soul for so many years, had lost its appeal. I felt it prudent to move on. Someone else can have the tickets and the chauffeur-driven cars.
Just 10 years ago, though, men's magazines were in dazzling ascent, and FHM was the toast of the British magazine industry. I took over as editor in 1997, and by the time I moved to New York in 1999 it had become the biggest monthly magazine in Europe, with an average circulation of over 750,000. Our great rival Loaded was heralded in Vanity Fair as emblematic of "cool Britannia", but it was FHM that was flying off the newsstands in unprecedented quantities, thanks to a - then irresistible - formula of funny, sexy and useful. Our sales were more than those of our three nearest rivals combined. We dwarfed women's magazines. From nowhere, we suddenly found that our business cards could make traffic police tear up speeding tickets and prompt the swift unhooking of velvet ropes. Politicians sought our opinions on "young people". A private jet took us to Morocco for the day. There was lunch with royalty.Like the thrill of punk after the stodge of prog rock, FHM's success came in part from standing in such dramatic contrast to what came before. The previous generation of magazines for men felt there was no higher calling in life than to be an ultra-cool man of both action and urbane knowledge, preferably Steve McQueen, in spite of his being many years dead from lung cancer. FHM realised that generally men do not wake in the hope that each day will bring a fresh descent of the Cresta Run. Or care about fountain pens. Or consider ignorance on the subject of single-malt scotch a source of shame. At the heart of FHM was a belief that men are not noble or heroic, and are better off not trying to be. The idea that it was all right to be funny and self-deprecating about, say, failure in the pursuit of women came as an enormous relief to our readers.
But it was the women - or, more specifically, pictures of famous women in their underwear - who were the single biggest contributor to the magazine's success, and the title's biggest eureka moment came when we realised that men preferred covers of the biggest female stars of the day, such as Britney, Kylie, Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Aniston to, say, Frank Skinner in a jacuzzi or Harry Enfield with a sardine in his breast pocket. It was like the day country music discovered that "rambling" rhymes with "gambling" - once that penny dropped, there was no holding the magazine back. While rocketing sales confirmed that a lot of people liked what we were doing, a number of other people, possibly even readers of this newspaper, viewed what we were doing with some distaste, not to say horror. The magazine undeniably objectified women, in that they were shot, lit, made up, clothed and retouched to make them more appealing to look at, but complaints to the magazine were rare, and we certainly didn't sit around fretting that we were somehow hindering the progress of women's rights. Even 10 years ago, it felt like the debate as to whether such images were inappropriate or demeaning was over. Society had deemed them acceptable. There was a clear difference - clothing - between what we were doing and what you needed to resort to the top shelf for, and similar images were commonplace in advertising, film and television, music videos, even women's magazines. Our benchmark was the "tube test" - could people read it openly on the tube?
In 1999, I moved to New York to launch the US version of the magazine, and while FHM in the UK had seen off all competition with great panache, a very different set of opponents awaited us on the other side of the Atlantic. Felix Dennis had already launched Maxim, and by then was making the great and good of American publishing eat their predictions of its immediate and humiliating failure. (As a sign of that industry's enormous disconnect with the people who buy their titles, they took to calling our brand of men's magazines "laddie books", an expression that has still never been uttered instinctively by a single American male.) We were also drunk on our own brilliance - we had taken one look at the US newsstand, thought our magazine was magnificent, theirs were rubbish and couldn't understand how we could possibly go wrong. But a winning formula in Britain does not guarantee success in the US.
In many ways, good and bad, Britain is like a pub and America is like a university. Some British magazines are literally like a pub - beery and raucous - but the practice of journalism in the US is a solemn and serious activity, and not given to mischief-making. This meant that Maxim was able to grow into a monster, with a circulation of over 2.5m, and a readership six times that, yet it was still considered an aberration and a market for similar titles didn't erupt with the vitality that it had in Britain. There were other more immediate cultural differences to contend with, not least emotional ones. In one week I had to deal with three incidents of staff in tears, all of them male. I am still not sure what the correct response is to that situation. I suspect it may be instant dismissal.
And there was also the culture of litigation. In London we had scoffed at the niceties of libel law and somehow emerged unscathed. In the US such a cavalier approach is unwise. At Maxim the lawyers read every single word we wrote. One such piece was a diagram describing how to ski off the roof of your house on a snowy day, which the lawyers considered so irresponsible that it should be pulled immediately. Eventually we agreed to run a warning. The lawyers wanted it to read: "If you do this, you will die," a warning of such apocalyptic - and inaccurate - portent that we would occasionally put it on other stories because we liked its uncompromising position so much.
At Rolling Stone, I tried to apply some of the lessons I had learned in men's magazines. To a British eye, Rolling Stone looks very foreign and intimidating, with its oversized pages of dense copy. In the US, however, it is a journalistic colossus, especially in certain political, business and entertainment circles. Rolling Stone's problem is that it has to look backwards and forwards at the same time: back to its serious musical and political roots, beloved of its hard-core readership, but also forwards in ways that attract new readers, who in many instances do not have the patience to consume media in the long-form way Rolling Stone serves it up. This is a convoluted way of saying I wanted to get sales up, and believed that more commercial covers didn't have to compromise the quality of the writing inside. One of my first covers was a picture of Christina Aguilera on a red sheet, with a guitar arranged artfully over her naked form. The magazine sold well above average, but proprietor Jann Wenner felt we'd tipped the balance too far. No more red backgrounds and no more women dressed in musical instruments, he decreed. While I was finding out exactly where American journalism's tolerance for red bedsheets lay, however, other forces were at work to turn back the march of men's magazines.
Until recently the magazine industry considered the internet little more than a gimmick, and magazine websites were a place for second-rate journalists and off-cuts of content considered too weak for the print version. By the time publishers woke up to their spectacularly poor judgment, the internet had made a move on its audience. We once had a very genteel conversation at British FHM about whether we should run a photo of a man who had been killed having sex with a chicken. He had been surprised by a large boulder, which had crushed him and the chicken to death. It had appeared in the Spanish press a few years earlier and, while unfortunate, was quite funny, so we ran it, and it was much talked about and widely reprinted. Nowadays, the idea that a monthly magazine can be first with such a "Did you see?" photo is laughable. That image today would be in half the world's in-boxes before they got the rock off him.
Besides the internet, a battery of electronic wonders - iPods, mobile phones, video games, MySpace, instant messaging and the rest - has taken huge bites out of the time formerly allotted to magazine reading. And mass-market men's monthlies, which once stood in such thrilling contrast to everything that came before, are now thought of by a new generation of readers as last year's model, as exciting as black-and-white television. Other magazines, newspapers and websites have plundered their best ideas, which has only diluted their originality further. Men's monthlies in this country made a potentially fatal error in an attempt to shore up flagging circulation when they decided to show bare breasts: overnight, it became impossible to defend against the porno accusation. It didn't help circulation or advertising. They no longer passed the tube test. Worst of all, it meant closing the door on the hope that big celebrities would ever return, and no one sells magazines like big stars. Porn stars, glamour girls and z-listers moved in to fill the void. All this was too much for poor American FHM, which died and was laid to rest in December 2006, its official cause of death "difficult trading conditions".
By then, the bloom was long off the rose. Not even the funniest photo caption can be recycled, yet magazines will insist on trying. There is a law of diminishing returns on the ingredients of men's magazines - franchises such as FHM's "100 great adventures" become less great with each new hundred. We once ran a photo - admittedly revolting, certainly not safe for the tube but a source of immense fascination at the time - of a 13-stone tumour being removed from an eight-stone woman. I have now seen so many freakish images I find even the art of festive biscuit-tins more deserving of attention. Most disappointing of all, celebrity culture has become dull. We didn't care whether actors and actresses were talented or not, but it did matter that they were interesting. Now, thanks to their publicists, glimpses of the stars' special weirdness are all too rare. And some of them are just plain awful. If there is any justice there will be VIP section in hell reserved for the likes of Jessica Simpson and her ridiculous entourage.
The last straw came on a sales trip to Los Angeles last spring, presenting healthy sales figures, desirable demographics and a golden vision to blank-faced advertising executives whose pens sat politely untouched on their notebooks. They trooped back to their cubicles while we drove at walking pace in vile traffic to the next identical appointment. I could see why people end up going berserk with a samurai sword. A magnificent job had become drudgery.
So I got out. I'm also the parent of a two-year-old girl, and while I've never been ashamed of the pictures for which I've been responsible, the "have a good time, all the time" attitude of men's magazines now seems like a message from a different frequency. But essentially my decision is a selfish one: I've taken the ride up, and it was tremendous, thanks, but I think I'll give the ride down the other side a miss.

· Ed Needham now runs an online publishing business called Grand Parade.

作為一個google飯

blogspot以驚人的勃起-軟掉、勃起-軟掉、勃起-軟掉……的死循環頻率不停癱瘓。不曉得俺能堅持用它到哪天？

打開文件夾：WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc，用記事本打開文件夾中的hosts文件，寫入72.14.219.190 xxx.blogspot.com 其中xxx.blogspot.com是你要訪問的blogspot位址，然後保存、關閉記事本即可。

這是我目前找到的辦法。

入蜀小記

一

◎單在錦官城走馬觀花來著，種種皆銘銘在心，以后有機會當重來把盞。先列出隆重感謝名單：老板娘、麥芽、視覺、一霎時，以上排名分前後左右忠奸。一并感謝四個圈公司贊助往返機票……感謝老板娘熱情無私慷慨周到細心耐心愛心陪伴。俺充分履行曲水姑娘遠洋電話之囑：吃窮老板娘！俺發揮不怕辣不怕撐的優良吃貨光榮品質，超質超量完成了任務……再次熊抱老板娘。感謝麥芽指點若干游玩之地；感謝視覺介紹若干地方；不感謝一霎時——該人枉自在成都蝸居半載，除老碼頭火鍋外，居然半個地方紹介亦無，哼哼。


◎可惜是飛到成都，未嘗一覽蜀道雄險。一闋〖蜀道難〗、六卷〖入蜀記〗之類早成絕唱。更可惜只能盤桓三兩日，檢點著僅在市內嬉游寥寥幾地。「峨眉天下秀，夔門天下雄，劍門天下險，青城天下幽」，都告無緣。稍可自慰的是，此次閑閑游蕩，也算占了一味成都的閑適之情。

可惜沒看到滿城芙蓉，古城墻亦只在的士上一瞥而過，只能遙想當年，后蜀孟昶「于成都城上遍種芙蓉，每至秋，四十里如錦繡，高下相照」。據司機說，如今那段古城墻里是西南衛戍軍區駐扎地。多少有些煞風景。相詢老板娘，芙蓉為成都市花，不知以后有否機會金秋入蜀，賞這映日芙蓉。

可惜未能在成都這美人之都，留下些風流把戲。



◎成都向為蜀地心臟，但并不龐大。晚上略一走，低頭查地圖，已過兩個街區。逛到玉林區，臨街精致小店星羅棋布，大街小巷麻辣香襲人，茶館竹椅麻將牌舉目皆是。那晚孤身獨行，暗燈深巷，置身熱鬧人群邊，對成都不由就親切了起來。回去路上，不過是隨便去攤上買包煙，一回頭，兩個粉嫩秀明男女小朋友，手拉手來買冰棒，剎那，路燈都亮了幾分。滿心贊嘆著，真好。

臨近端午，的士車中很多都掛著梔子花，馥郁香氣散滿車廂。也算比別地清雅三分。成都司機路熟，人也不聒噪，真聊起來亦是一肚子龍門陣，從城墻到高爾夫都能侃上幾句。車倒開得生猛。還坐了一趟302路公交車，老車，木地板木椅子木窗戶木車頂，雕花和彩色玻璃點綴著，雖坐著不舒服，倒也值得看看。售票員會用普通話和四川話各報一次站。傍晚時成都也會堵車。地鐵正在修建中。

也去轉了天府廣場和春熙路，滿是現代感的建筑湮漫生長，拐過街角，卻是一條古舊巷陌，「錦華館」，當年的基督教青年會教堂所在，如今是「青青茶樓」和一些酒吧。時光流轉之感，讓人印象不惡。

說起來，成都到底是有文化的。錦里古街雖是新建，也頗秀美。許多本地人也會涌來吃小吃——我大抵相信，本地人會做的勾當，總是值得體驗的。又看到朋友指點說快男王錚亮會來演出的「蓮花府邸」酒吧，亭亭深院坐滿了人，倒也不見惡俗。隨后兩日見到的成都酒吧，包括很多小店，都頗見玲瓏精致之感。想想也是意料中，成都文昌之地，這點小伎倆自然不在話下。


朋友還推薦了張靚穎當年駐唱的「音樂房子」酒吧，我站在玉林廣場門口看了看，到底也沒去。佳人已不在。錯過的還有「白夜」，詩人翟永明的酒吧，是巴黎左岸咖啡館的氣質。我下午尋了去，卻關著門，不知道為什么。只看到白底招牌上「白夜」兩個黑字，在午后沉沉日光下，與旁邊一位冷艷俊男海報作伴。那男人是主演過電影White Nights的「芭蕾王子」Mikhail Baryshnikov，當年的天才舞者，古典芭蕾的頂級大師，水瓶座男人，從蘇聯逃去美國，間歇演一些影劇，近年還在Sex and the City中軋過角色。如今六十歲的他，在海報上依然俊美動人，一支白蠟冷冷豎在他赤裸胸前，似要刺入心臟。

阿穆與楚生

小買幾本書

《讓·艾什諾茲》
記得是小愛推薦我看的讓·艾什諾茲，《格林威治子午線》，很喜歡。這本是評論集，也來裝文化一下。

《日本手工藝》
中國的手工藝人慢慢風流散盡了吧？

《窺視工作間》
河童老師是我的愛。

《山河入夢》
《人面桃花》
我對當代文學不能不說是有點偏見的。格非的書，我居然都從未讀過。

《伊斯坦布爾——一座城市的記憶》
已經讀畢，跟人推薦，被問起理由，卻無言。大抵卻是因為我喜歡的北京卻少了這樣一本書吧。

《傅山的世界：十七世紀中國書法的嬗變》
作為一個偽書法飯，我忍了這么久，還是買下這本書吧。

《美國人 殖民地歷程》
這是一套書，分為殖民地歷程、建國歷程、民主歷程三本，丹尼爾.J.布林斯廷的名著。我早收過后兩本。買下這本就收全了。書是名著，可惜翻譯并不算好。

《心智的風景線》
我很喜歡王佐良編譯的英國散文，也喜歡他清麗的文字。這本是三聯讀書文叢系列里的，一本記敘他八十年代出國參加各種研討會的游記集子——在飛機上讀畢后，不由立刻想起小說《小世界》：都是以國際文學學術會議為主題，一邊是炫麗虛構的學界妖嬈百態，一邊是誠誠君子浮光掠影的恭謹印象，虛實之間，浮想聯翩。

《京劇名唱一百段 漢英對照》
中國戲曲的翻譯向來難，也頗有趣，以后有暇可以找出具體例子來分析。

附：后三本購于川大書吧37℃，美好的記憶。

一峰一人一結他

林一峰來北京，拋下稿子去看他唱歌。

上周日的事了，還是想記下來。

為他覺得委屈，在一個門前堆滿旅游巴士的劇場里，等傻呆旅游團人民觀賞完號稱少林武僧的表演后，晚上10點鐘，才輪到他上場。即使這里（北京虎坊橋工人俱樂部）過去演過梅蘭芳。

他講很多話。

國語比多數香港人好很多，畢竟他17歲開始寫國語歌，畢竟他在少年時跑去過臺灣。

他講他坐兩個小時的公車，跑到很多北京人都沒有去過的郊區。

他講他在冬雪的歐洲火車上，聽到香煙的燃燒聲。

他講他17歲在化學課堂上寫出自己的第一首國語歌。

他講大哥李宗盛親手做了把吉他送他。

他提到豆瓣上對《兩支牙刷》的“419分析論”，他說這種討論看著很過癮，但他不會告訴你究竟是怎樣。

他吊人胃口，講自己當年聽到的一首內地的歌，不知道名字，讓大家幫他找——唱出來，是《冰糖葫蘆》。

他唱很多歌。

其實自己的歌他倒沒有唱幾首，作為一個創作豐富的音樂人。

他肯定是因為豆瓣最近的討論，于是快活地唱起《兩支牙刷》，不過他把《家》也摻了進去，多了些溫暖。

他講自己的旅程，他總是一個人，跑到某個地方，帶著自己的吉他。

他來北京待了一周了，坐公車，騎自行車，他唱起《公路塵埃四合院》。

他講他看到快樂的騎行在水池中的孩子，他講自己在歐洲火車上的觀察，他唱《重回布拉格》。

他唱了很多別人的歌。

開場，不是一貫唱游會上的《突然單身》，而是齊豫的《答案》。

他提到自己少年時受臺灣音樂影響，香港諸多流行西樂和本土音樂天王并沒有shock到他，他的心在聽到80年代臺灣民謠時變得十分柔軟。他唱《飛鳥與魚》，《鄉間小路》……

他把李宗盛的《給所有單身女子》和自己的《與你共枕》連起來唱，溫柔澄澈，想到他書里寫，他是愛起來就忘了其他的人。

他說現實里越來越少刻骨銘心的愛情了，他唱《覺（遙寄林覺民）》。

他唱了潘越云的《飛》，這首李宗盛寫的歌，他是在17歲在電臺第一次聽到，感動到落淚，第二天就去買了潘越云的卡帶，土生土長的香港小孩，自此被國語民謠射穿了青春。

他唱之前，說這是他希望是自己寫的兩首歌之一，另一首，竟然是大陸郁冬寫的《虎口脫險》——我們有多少人，又記得那一段校園民謠的青春熱浪。

大陸的歌，他竟然還唱了《快讓我在雪地上撒點野》。

他還請了默默唱了十年但一直沒機會出碟的大陸民謠樂隊“山谷里的居民”當他的嘉賓——他的音樂會向來沒有嘉賓的，他們僅僅三日前認識。他喜歡他們的音樂和聲音。

他說他設計了很多衣服，很多衣服是給別人穿的，他今天穿了幾件給大家看：

《謝謝儂》《By My Side》《月光燈（琥珀主題曲）》，還有那段很多音樂radio會用的“我要我的音樂”——他現場演繹了一個很激情的版本。他的現場比唱片多了不少激情。

他藏在幕布后面出來的，剪影很好看。

他穿了條破牛仔褲，金色圖案的黑T恤外罩小馬甲。

他抱著吉他。唱歌時會微微搖擺身體。

他把自己在旅途中拍攝的照片投影在旁邊的屏幕上，最新的一張，是南鑼鼓巷的兩把紅椅子。

他一個人，唱歌給我們聽。

有些歌想聽但他沒有唱，但這樣我就很滿足了。

午夜來臨。

他問，要不要唱到天亮？

他唱，《愛的代價》，他淚流滿面。

他跟我們一起唱，The Best Yet To Come。

他深深鞠了一躬。

然后蹦蹦跳跳消失了。

（圖片：咣咣）

附：北京唱游曲目

　　　　1. 答案 + 謝謝儂
　　　　2. 家II + 兩枝牙刷
　　　　3. 飛鳥和魚 + 未完舞曲
　　　　
　　　　4. 冰糖葫蘆 + 我和泡面
　　　　5. 公路，塵埃，四合院
　　　　6. 快讓我在雪地上撒點兒野 + 鄉間的小路 + 忘盡心中情
　　　　7. By My Side
　　　　8. 月光燈 (琥珀)
　　　　9. 給所有單身女子 + 與你共枕
　　　　
　　　　10. 夢田 (with山谷裡的居民)
　　　　11. 山谷裡的居民 (山谷裡的居民)
　　　　12. 我的家 (與山谷裡的居民)
　　　　
　　　　13. 虎口脫險
　　　　14. 覺
　　　　15. 一個人在途上
　　　　16. 但願人長久 + 煙圈和肥皂泡
　　　　17. 重回布拉格
　　　　18. 飛 + 燃
　　　　19. Moon River + 愛的代價
　　　　20. The Best is Yet to Come