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silly new magazine
Wafts of science and fashion, stink of pretension
By Jeff Bercovici
If a Nobel committee were to present an award for art-school pretentiousness, this year’s prize would surely go to Seed magazine.
A new bimonthly published out of Montreal, Seed, broadly speaking, is a magazine that seeks to make science relevant to people by showing its connections to pop culture, especially fashion.
Its motto: "Science Couture."
The premiere issue, on sale at newsstands now for $5.95, explores the theme of birth and contains articles on the endocrinology of sex, the evolutionary roots of lactose intolerance, the African bushmeat trade, and the link between eye makeup and human behavior.
Less broadly speaking, Seed is a high-concept, high-gloss coffee table magazine for twentysomethings who deem themselves too smart to read Vogue and too cool to read Scientific American.
Not that it much resembles either of those titles.
In fact, its motto notwithstanding, you won’t find much science or couture in Seed, just self-congratulatory dilettantism at its most annoying.
In his editor’s note, Adam Bly, whose fondness for the sentence fragment knows no bounds, calls Seed "[a] periscope for what’s beneath the surface. A book that reinvents science as a lifestyle."
Seed's readers, says Bly, will include "individuals who are looking for information from a lifestyle magazine by satisfying their curiosity for science and scientists who are looking for entertainment from a science magazine by satisfying other interests -- for example, politics, architecture, business and travel."
Though Bly's scientific credentials may be in order--he "ranked as the top biochemist in his age category at an international competition in the U.S. in 1998," according to his bio--it's hard to imagine any reader with even a modicum of scientific education taking Seed seriously.
The science, such as it is, mostly takes the form of cocktail party factoids, for instance: "When children and adults of varying ages are offered chocolate shaped like dog turd, most aged eight or over won't eat it, despite the knowledge that it is, in fact, chocolate. Babies, however, dig right in."
Seed's art direction reflects the influence of hip design titles like Wallpaper and Nest, with plenty of white space, stark typography and a generous number of beautiful and compelling photographs.
Accompanying many of the images and graphics are prose-poem-style blurbs, riddled with dubious syllogisms and written in the kind of elliptical, metaphor-saturated language you might find in a junior college creative-writing seminar.
One such paragraph, an ode to suckling that runs above a shot of a pacifier, contains the following passage: "Minimalist design sweetly unassuming of its genius. The bend of a snail's back leaving bridges, domes and submarines in its wake."
As for couture, aside from the odd scarf or pair of underwear, it’s almost all in the ads.
Seed’s circulation is 100,000 in the U.S. and Canada, with plans to increase to 250,000 over the next four years.
November 27, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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