Wordsmoker

In the summer of 1991, I was an intern at Spy Magazine. For those of you too young to remember a life without the Internet, a magazine is like a website on paper. And Spy Magazine was sort of the Gawker of magazines, only it was the first of its kind which makes it the ancestor of media and celebrity satire. Spy’s tag line was “Smart, Fun, Funny, Fearless,” and for a short while it was, and I got to be a part of it.

My internship began after my junior year of college. I worked in the art department for three days each week and was paid a stipend of fifteen dollars per day, which almost covered lunch and that night’s beer money.  In order to pay my rent, I also worked several other jobs. I sold posters and souvenirs at a shop on Bleeker Street called French Kisses; I freelanced for a typeface designer who may have been going through menopause; and I danced in a cage suspended above the dance floor of a once-popular nightclub. Read the rest of this entry →