DIARY

Hey, everybody, welcome to the premiere issue of Ane magazine, for summer 2002. I hope you enjoy it. It's been a pretty crazy two weeks of obsessively and single-handedly making an online parody magazine. I have to thank my roommates, Jessica and Keith, for their patience and their help taking pictures. I have a few things I want to say about this project, so get ready for the pretentious bullshit section of my magazine.

First of all, my motivation for doing this comes from a sincere love of Jane. I didn't read Sassy at the time, and I wouldn't have liked it if I had. Now that I've grown up a little, I really enjoy reading old ones from Jessica's collection. It really was a ballsy thing to do with a teenage girls' magazine. And Jane is also pretty ballsy for a women's magazine (I guess I shouldn't be using a compliment that refers to men's sexual organs here). I mean, yes it's celebrity- and beauty-obsessed, but hey, it's a magazine, what do you want? It's still sassy, sarcastic, interesting, funny, and has at least a half-assed commitment to genderfuck. What I'm saying is that I respect the magazine's ability to walk the line, to be mainstream enough to be culturally noteworthy and make money while still being radical enough to be interesting and politically agreeable to people like me.

I've tried to make my parody touch on the issues that I think are important about Jane--when I wasn't just falling back on my usual goofball sense of humor, that is. The most obvious one is the attempt to be both mainstream and radical. This has got to be a difficult thing to do, and is a constant source of criticism of Jane (just check the letters page of any issue). The idea itself is a little bit contradictory, and it's one of those things; like Abraham Lincoln said, you're always going to piss somebody off. Body image is the most problematic instance of this for Jane. It's probably my biggest criticism of the magazine, but not something I did a lot with here because I'm not using a lot of pictures and becuase I don't think it's very funny. (What would I do, fat jokes? Skinny jokes?)

Jane's position on gender and sexuality issues is also important to me. Jane is a women's magazine that doesn't assume its readers are all women. That's pretty cool. More than that, it doesn't assume its female readers are heterosexual. This doesn't surface a whole lot, and when it does, it still catches me off guard, but I like it. So Ane is supposed to be ambiguous as to whether it's for men or women and maybe whether it's by men or women (my role as Ane is half me playing Jane and half me playing myself--okay, probably not half and half). And I try to play up and satire Jane's gay-friendly undercurrents in a couple of not-so-subtle ways.

Finally, this parody isn't just of Jane, of course, but of the whole idea of sincere communication and making sense. I just think it's really funny to say wacky things as if I'm being serious about them. Is that so wrong?

So let's talk about what it's like to make an online parody magazine. First of all, the camera I used obviously sucks. I'm sorry. That thing is the size of a pack of cigarettes, and the front is shaped like Minnie Mouse. Seriously, it's a toy. A cheap toy. We did the best we could. Secondly, writing everything was easy, but writing HTML and trying to learn and write CSS all day on a modem using a shared AOL account and the only phone line in the house sucked. Thirdly, when I say "writing everything was easy," that's because I half-assed this thing. You'll notice there are no features, just the regulars, and not even all of them. That's because I have the attention span of Jar Jar Binks and because the features in Jane are always either about celebrities or are interesting, creative pieces that kind of, you know, thought-out. I don't care about the former and am incapable of producing the latter in a realistic amount of time, if at all. Quick shots where half the joke is that the format is from a popular magazine are much more my style. Fourthly, I hope everybody really fucking appreciates the cactus-wrestling bit, because I really took a few for the team on that one. The joke is, of course, that we're recommending something no one would be stupid enough to do. Problem: in order to get pictures, I had to do be stupid enough to it. Of course, I thought I could fake it; you know, stand near a cactus with my arms kind of around it or something. It turns out that even simulated cactus wrestling is very dangerous.

Thanks for reading,
ANE

P.S. For those of you who worry about these kinds of things, my use of any material owned by Fairchild Publications for the purposes of this parody is protected by the First Amendment and the "fair use" clause of U.S. copyright law.

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