Slate...Tales...Stale. A group of New York free-lance writers played with the letters and came up with a parody of Microsoft's online magazine that even Editor Michael Kinsley says is dead-on.
A one-shot webzine, Stale, in the words of creator Daniel Radosh, skewering the lofty, much-maligned tone that Kinsley has tried to adopt since heading west to launch Slate.
"They come off as saying that they're on a mission to civilize the Web, as if they're the only ones who can make it safe for America," said Radosh, 27.
Stale features an almost picture-perfect parody of Slate, reminiscent of the Harvard Lampoon magazine take-offs of the early 1980s. Skipping back and forth between the two webzines, it's sometimes hard to tell which is which - though the line "Join us or die," in
Stale is something of a reminder.
An almost article-by-article parody, Stale is peppered with digs at Microsoft ("Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is, 'Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated,") Seattle ("For those us of stranded here in
flannel land, rewriting stories that originated from the East Coast gives us a much-needed sense of importance,") and Slate's own attitude ("Stale is not the first "webzine," but it is the first that feels the need to put words like "webzine" in quotes.")
Radosh and his partner in crime, Michael Tritter, got the idea three weeks ago when they were perusing Slate and ran across a note that one anagram for Slate was Stale.
"That hit me and I e-mailed Michael and we were on it the next day," Radosh said.
Freelance writers in the New York Web scene, the duo called ten friends. Working in their off-hours, they put Stale together in about two and a half weeks.
The very basis of the Web itself - hypertext - adds something new to the parody genre. At the bottom of a particularly effective re-write of Kinsley's own introduction to Slate are the words "Still confused? See how another editor introduced his webzine."
Click on the highlighted words and the reader is jumped directly to the Slate article being parodied.
"In a sense, I think we make better use of the World Wide Web than Slate itself does," Tritter, 26, said.
Slate editor Michael Kinsley deemed Stale "very well done."
"Here we've been publishing for about a month and there's this very detailed parody. It's incredibly flattering," the former "Crossfire" combatant said from his office in Redmond.
In an aside that perhaps more than anything shows up the generational nature of the split between the two 'zines, the 45-year-old Kinsley said he realized he had a connection to his
parodist.
"Daniel Radosh? I know his father, Ronald Radosh, the Washington writer. I've published and edited him."
"Oh, God," was the younger Radosh's only response when alerted to the connection
Stale can be found at http://www.stale.com. Slate is at http://www.slate.com |
