The Thing is not your garden-variety periodical. Putting a spin on the idea of text messaging, the Thing is by turns a window shade, a baseball cap, a set of coasters and a hunk of rubber. That last issue puts the lie to those glossy fall fashion magazines that could double as doorstops. It is a doorstop.
Bay Area co-editors Will Rogan and Jonn Herschend, a pair of established visual artists, have concocted nothing less than an honest-to-goodness quarterly magazine, albeit an unorthodox one, with the mission of marrying text to household objects. "It's about giving words a different vehicle," Rogan said.
Like all magazine subscribers, the constituency for the Thing never knows the exact contents of a given issue until it arrives. Unlike most, readers might come to find a window treatment silk-screened with a rueful line written by filmmaker-author Miranda July. The issue by July, the coasters by Tucker Nichols, the baseball cap by the German-born artist Kota Ezawa and the doorstop by artist Anne Walsh have already shipped. In coming months, the editors say, critically acclaimed novelist Jonathan Lethem will chime in with a Thing directly playing off his upcoming novel. ("In a really nerdy way, that's so magical," Rogan said. "We were giddy.")
The Thing was conceived by the pair a couple of years ago when Herschend and Rogan were studying for MFAs at UC Berkeley. They kicked around several ideas for a magazine and soon realized they are both suckers for the anachronistically tactile.
"We're both fans of McSweeney's," Herschend said, referencing the literary pranksters who disguised a recent issue of their journal as junk mail. Likewise, they say the Thing owes a debt to Aspen, the fanciful mid-1960s publication in a box that incorporated flexi-discs, occasional movie reels, posters, fliers and flip books. "We both appreciate old artist ephemera and the way it accumulates history," said Rogan, a former librarian. "I love the physicality of words in print."
That physicality extends to the shipping process. This summer, for the fourth time in the journal's inaugural year, and for the first time in Los Angeles, the Thing hosted a wrapping party. Under a climate-curdling heat wave, some two dozen Angelenos -- fueled by cold pizza, gratis beer and a rousing impromptu rendition of the Police's "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic," toiled assembly-line style in the Outpost for Contemporary Art’s spartan Highland Park headquarters, packaging Walsh's much-delayed, wildly out-of-order issue No. 2. "It's like a barn-raising," said Herschend, who hails from Missouri. "It would be cheaper to pay a shipper to do everything or to do it ourselves."
