Jaime Levy’s electronic magazines
After grad school, Jaime moved back to Los Angeles and renamed her magazine Electronic Hollywood. When the city was upended by the 1992 L.A. uprising, she couldn’t leave her Koreatown apartment for four days. She climbed up to her building’s roof with a camcorder and filmed the streets. There were fires everywhere. “We called it Smell-o-vision,” she said, “because you could run back downstairs and turn on the TV and there would be smoke coming inside the building.” She added those images to Electronic Hollywood, alongside an editorial about the experience. “I feel like a survivor of a post-Reagan morning after,” it reads, as a clanging industrial sample plays on loop. “I can’t even walk to buy beer anymore. Los Angeles, love it or loot it!”
In filmed interviews from this time, Jaime’s SoCal affect—to this day, she speaks in a deep valley brogue—belies a very real intensity. In one profile produced by the Los Angeles public television affiliate KCET, she spins her office chair around in a room plastered with concert flyers, describing the electronic magazines offhandedly as “my, sorta, digital graffiti.” But despite her show of Gen-X disinterest, Jaime was at the absolute vanguard of electronic publishing. Nobody had ever produced anything like Cyber Rag or Electronic Hollywood. There had been some interactive HyperCard stacks, downloadable from BBSs, and a few interactive art disks for Commodore Amiga. But Jaime’s disks, packaged on floppy, were accessible to anyone with a Mac, and with their hypertext links and interactive animations, they were exactly like Web sites—long before the Web existed.
Although she had a day job as a typesetter, she distributed Electronic Hollywood to indie book and record stores, where they routinely sold out. The novelty got her national media attention, which she leveraged into mail-order sales. After her magazines were featured in an issue of Mondo 2000, the cyberculture’s magazine of record, she was flooded with orders and fan mail. Although she made only five issues, she sold more than six thousand copies at six bucks a pop—not bad for disks that cost less than fifty cents to produce.
When Jaime finally moved back to New York, she became Silicon Alley’s first real celebrity, a poster girl for a new generation of twentysomething media titans ready to reboot the world. She was the first truly iconoclastic, magazine-profile-ready female face of the emerging digital culture. It helped that she photographed well: surly faced in polyvinyl pants and boots for a 1996 Esquire story about “grrrls” who “just wanna be wired,” or in her omnipresent grungy flannel and tube socks, clutching a skateboard, in a Newsweek “Who’s Who.” The Net was big news, and she made a compelling figurehead: young, edgy, with attitude for miles. “I was the Kurt Cobain of the Internet,” she told the Village Voice at the tail end of the decade, only half kidding.
“Jaime really knew how to present herself,” remembers Marisa Bowe. “She would go to Mac conventions and diss them in that little zine voice. Zine kids are always saying, ‘We hate these bands and we hate those bands.’ She was doing the same thing, but about computers, and on a floppy disk with her own music, and I thought it was just brilliant.” She was a hacker through and through: in her loft, a television screen doubled as her Mac monitor, and a flashing red light, the kind usually reserved for the hearing-impaired, signaled incoming calls over the din of her stereo. Instead of treating the computer like a precious object, Jaime dragged it by the power cord, banging every curb along the mean streets of L.A. and New York. The first issue of Electronic Hollywood opened with a tongue-in-cheek greeting that pretty much sums up her style at the time: “If you have never seen an electronic magazine before,” it read, “then I hope this trips you out.”
“I don’t feel like me being a chick hurt me at all. It helped because there were so few of us, and I got all the attention because I was the crazy one.”
Anyone who was anyone in the emerging tech counterculture had copies of Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood—even Billy Idol, the British rock star, was a fan. He came across Electronic Hollywood at the height of his own cyberpunk phase, as he was working on a record about sex, drugs, and computers called, appropriately, Cyberpunk. Idol loved Jaime’s floppies and decided he needed one for his album. They worked out a deal: for five thousand dollars, Jaime would make Billy Idol an interactive floppy disk of his own. It would be just like hers, with his lyrics in place of her rants and band reviews, and would come packaged in a folding cardboard sleeve alongside his CD. Her first corporate gig—and the world’s first interactive press kit. “He just really wanted to party with me,” Jaime remembers. One night, at Manhattan’s infamous Club Fuck, they got so wasted that Billy threw her across the table and broke her arm. “I was supposed to be animating his disk. I had to, like, do the whole thing with my non-mouse hand.”
Idol’s album flopped, but Jaime kept her rep as savvy netizen. She got a straight job, commuting to White Plains to do “bonehead interface design” at IBM—in her baggy plaid shirts, she was often mistaken for a janitor—and was tapped by Viacom to make an interactive press kit for Aerosmith on CD-ROM. But she was too young and too punk to go totally corporate, and she was getting bored with physical media. “Who’s going to buy this shit? Who cares about these CD-ROMS?” she wondered. A coworker at IBM showed her Mosaic, the first browser for navigating the World Wide Web. She experienced it as a conversion: her electronic magazines were Web sites, before Web sites existed, built exactly the same way, with hypertext navigation and “pages” of sound, video, and text. “Once the browser came out, I was like, ‘I’m not making fixed-format anymore. I’m learning HTML and that was it.’” She quit her day job.
Around that time, Jaime started hosting parties in her Avenue A loft. She called them “CyberSlacker” parties, updating the Gen-X honorific for the wired generation. CyberSlacker was the first of the Silicon Alley parties. Within a few years, the flush of dot-com money in New York would turn the Flatiron district into a bacchanal of rare proportions. Multimillion-dollar startups with names like Razorfish and DoubleClick burned their IPO money on go-go dancers and vodka pyramids as their CEOs became celebrities, their risqué party pictures leaping from the Silicon Alley Reporter to Page 6. The most infamous of the Alley parties were funded by an early Web-streaming company, Pseudo, whose CEO, Josh Harris, was notorious for bringing together tech socialites, hungry entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and New York club kids in increasingly extravagant environments. On the eve of the millennium, Harris burned more than a million dollars on a monthlong experiment in communal living. Over two adjoining warehouses, “Citizens” in matching uniforms lived, ate, drank, had sex, and shot guns under the gaze of hundreds of streaming digital cameras until they were shut down by the NYPD on New Year’s Day 2000. The cops thought they were a Y2K cult. Maybe they were.
“Josh Harris always says he didn’t copy me,” says Jaime, who would never have his resources, “but it’s impossible that he didn’t.” Her parties may not have been as outrageous, but they had a bigger effect: part rave, part hackathon, CyberSlacker sparked the tinder of a uniquely New York tech scene, which was defined by a preponderance, as one historian puts it, of “principled slackers, arty punk rockers, and deconstructionists from ‘good’ families.” Many of these saw the Web for the first time in Jaime’s loft, on a Mac II her hacker friend Phiber Optik—Echo’s sometime tech support—set up with a 28.8K Internet connection. As avant-garde guitarist Elliot Sharp performed live, and another friend, DJ Spooky, played house tracks, Jaime’s guests gathered around the Mac’s small screen. At the top of 1994, there were fewer than one thousand Web sites in the world, mostly personal home pages. “That’s all that was up there,” Jaime remembers. “Like, ‘Hi, my name is Lisa and here’s my dog.’” From these humble beginnings, however, the right witnesses extrapolated the essential—like Jaime, they saw how irrelevant the Web made everything they’d done before.
These converts would call themselves the “early true believers,” counting the year of their arriva
l online as a mark of status, the way the first punks claimed 1977. Soon after the bubble popped, a New York magazine story about Jaime and her peers nailed the time line: “Nineteen ninety-five is cool. Nineteen ninety-six or early 1997 is all right. Anything after that is not. Two thousand makes you a real loser—a suit, a kid just out of college, a fiftyish businessman looking for one last hurrah and another hundred million dollars.”
The Web gave the early true believers creative, spiritual purpose and offered them an opportunity to sidestep the media giants that seemed to hold the only key to creative employment in recession-era New York. “It turned us all into apostles,” one Alley scenester proclaimed. “It wasn’t a money thing; it was, ‘Hey, here’s this pure channel.’” Then, of course, the money came to town, and—for a short while—they became the giants.
WORD
Jaime was always telling Marisa Bowe she should get into electronic publishing. “I didn’t know what she meant,” Marisa says. “I mean, I liked electronics and I liked publishing, so I probably would like it.” She wasn’t alone—beyond Jaime’s floppies, and a few early experiments on the Web, publishing online was an unknown quantity.
For Marisa, that would change in 1995, when a software company called Icon CMT tapped Jaime, then at the height of her fame, to be the creative director of a new online magazine called Word. The budget was good, or at least more than nothing, which is what Jaime had in the Cyber Rag days. The editor in chief, Jonathan Van Meter, was an industry veteran who’d previously helmed VIBE. It seemed like he’d let Jaime be Jaime: the snarky, pot-smoking doyenne of the cyberunderground. The team was hers to assemble.
The last thing she wanted was for Word to feel trendy, like Billy Idol’s failed foray into cyberpunk. She trusted only one person to ensure Word would be cool: her friend Marisa Bowe, aka Miss Outer Boro, whose spellbinding effect she’d witnessed firsthand on Echo. When Marisa went to interview for the job, she decided not “to pretend like I’m some super-straight magazine person,” she tells me—and “by straight, I mean, gets along well in the corporate world.” But she and Van Meter hit it off, and he hired her as Word’s managing editor. Having never worked in the magazine world, she had no idea what that meant.
In fact, putting a magazine on the Web at all was a new proposition: Word would be among the first. To say there was no business model is an understatement. Word’s backers assumed that online publishing would be a subscription business: like traditional magazines, readers would subscribe, and because there’d be no printing or distribution costs, the profit margin would be huge. They’d be selling something ineffable, again and again, without ever running low on inventory—the dot-com era’s delusion of choice. Icon thought they’d make millions in a matter of months.
Van Meter dropped out shortly before Word’s 1995 launch. Jaime says it’s because he didn’t know anything about the Web. Marisa suggests that Icon hadn’t been straight with him about the editorial budget, which he was accustomed to having in Condé Nast proportions. His absence left Marisa at the helm, technically unqualified but totally right for the job. With her head start on online culture, she “knew how to approach a medium by looking at what it was.”
Marisa would later say that while she appreciated what would become Word’s primary competition—brainy online magazines like Salon, Slate, and Feed—she loved the homespun feeling of bulletin board systems and personal home pages much more. Amateur writing, Marisa observed, is the bread and butter of the Internet. In a 1996 roundtable discussion with a handful of other online editors, she confessed to being “hooked on amateur stuff. At best, it’s fascinating—passionate, intimate, unpredictable, and disarmingly lacking in artifice.”
She brought that sensibility to Word, which published, almost exclusively, accounts of everyday people’s experiences. The site’s most popular section featured weekly testimonials from people in every line of work imaginable, edited down from interviews largely conducted by Marisa’s brother, John, a Studs Terkel for the digital village. He went on cross-country road trips to find real people to interview, and Word published his transcribed accounts of the lives of prostitutes, hat salesmen, UPS deliverymen, and heavy metal roadies.
Word staff weren’t above sharing their own stories, either. The masthead was a showcase of entries from everyone in the office, and Marisa went so far as to publish snippets of her own high school journals, mastering the confessional tone of proto-blogs. Her very first editorial was an abridged life story: speedboating on Lake Minnetonka, her father’s ice cubes rattling in the boat’s cupholder; being first on the school bus and singing along to “King of the Road” with the acne-riddled driver; hating her “fascist-looking” Brownie uniform. It includes a recipe for beans and a passage in pig latin. Word was documentary, not commentary. Marisa felt that what mattered about the Internet—and what was at risk of being lost—was the voice of individual people. “What was fundamentally most fascinating and different about the Internet,” Marisa tells me, “was that people are the medium that you’re working with.”
As Marisa honed authentic stories, chasing the human touch that had first hooked her as a teenage zbrat, Jaime Levy focused on more literal interactivity. She described her goals to a reporter soon after the site launched: “In the world of Word, we don’t just read ‘See Spot Run,’ we have a three-dimensional encounter, in which Spot not only barks and bites but in which you might want to carry a pooper-scooper.”
Like that analogy, the interactive features Jaime designed for Word were both startlingly original and characteristically caustic, like Word’s chatbot, Fred the Webmate—a pixelated, misanthropic New Yorker you could talk to by typing questions. Fred was damaged, with sexual issues he often alluded to but never addressed. If pressed, he claimed to have been recently laid off by a large new media company. “Even the name ‘Webmate’ was sort of playing a joke,” Marisa explains, on those “crappy” helpful avatars companies were starting to put on their Web sites, all shades of Clippy, the dreaded Microsoft Word paperclip.
Here are a few more things you might have found on Word.com, circa 1996: photo essays of Russian prison tattoos and Manhattan clocks. Bawdy paper dolls. Found thrift store paintings. An interactive game in which the objective is to pop zits. Dean Martin horoscopes and clip art comics. Meaningless interactive toys, like a cartoon microwave you drag a dog into. Depressing children’s stories. Photographs of empty billboards and road signs taken across the country. Scanned cocktail napkins with phone numbers and the sad, sexy stories of the people who scrawled them. At least one first-person account from someone who got a coffee enema.
Word was not the first magazine on the Web, but it was the first to demonstrate the creative possibilities of online publishing—and its formula worked. By 1998, Word was logging ninety-five thousand daily page views, and one to two million hits a week, which was massive traffic in those days. Newsweek announced Word as its readers’ favorite online destination, and the New York Times used the site as an example in one of its earliest articles about Web browsers. Even the first commercial Web browser, Netscape, which was used by essentially every person online in the mid-1990s, gave it a place of privilege. Netscape had a row of buttons beneath the URL field: “What’s New?,” “What’s Cool?,” “Destinations,” “Net Search,” “People,” and “Software.” “People” led to an early Internet white pages, “Software” to Netscape’s own upgrades. “What’s Cool?” pointed to Word.com.
Everyone at Word shared a certain basic aesthetic: Twin Peaks, zines, pop culture, weird home pages. Marisa once compared herself and Jaime to the “Beavis and Butt-Head of the Internet,” but the magazine “functioned more like a rock band than a publishing entity,” and Marisa and Jaime made great frontwomen. “Jaime and I had as much a chance as anyone, just the two of us, at doing something good,” says Marisa. Where Jaime was obsessed with multimedia—“She would literally hiss about text,” Marisa says, and laughs—Marisa knew how
to cultivate writers. One particularly dynamite photo of the two of them from this era might as well be a band photo: on the rooftop of the Word office, Jaime in combat boots and track pants, Marisa in a leather jacket, a smoking computer at their feet, screen smashed to bits. But as in any good rock band, egos ran wild.
In the escalating fever of the dot-com boom, it was hard for Jaime to stay centered. Silicon Alley was changing fast. Friends who had been techno-bohemian party people only a few years previous were becoming millionaires. Right before joining Word, Jaime had turned down a one-third stake in a Web development shop, Razorfish, that was now on the eve of a $1.8 billion IPO. “We knew people who were getting filthy rich,” Marisa says. With opportunities passing left and right, Jaime started to get itchy.
And there were other tensions. The public persona Jaime had been cultivating in the press for so long, as a rule-breaking digital zinester, was starting to get on her coworkers’ nerves. “All the attention was on me,” she admits, “instead of on what it should have been.” She was a strong brew, always blasting her music loud and gunning to work on her own stuff. She wandered away from Word after a year and a half to pursue freelance contracts on her own. Although a Silicon Alley gossip column at the time pegged Jaime’s departure as a power move—“Jaime Levy has the last Word”—Jaime wishes, now, that she could have hung on a little longer. “I’ve never been a person to last anywhere with anybody,” she says.
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