Ironminds
Ironminds. Iron...minds. Something about the name
calls for Salingerian italics. And, indeed, the web magazine puts on
display the kind of self-conscious cleverness that Franny might call
Zooey to complain about while in the throes of a religion-induced
nervous breakdown. But if you can forgive the smug name and the
facile takeoffs it inspires (do iron minds ever rust? are they
attracted to magnetic
fields?), you may find Ironminds to be just the cure for
bland-content-induced anemia.
Much of Ironminds' content is in the form of the online diary. If
you've been turned off by bad examples of this form, your first stop
should be Will Leitch's "Life as a Loser." Sure, it's 44 installments
(and counting) of self-indulgent, unrestrained, unabashed minutiae.
And Leitch knows (and doesn't mind if the reader knows) that he's not
really a loser; he's a talented diarist who also just happens to work
at The New York Times. But his column is funny, engaging,
winning, and everything we all aspire to be when we're not bashing
Dave Eggers for aspiring to/attaining those qualities. Most of the 44
(I read them all) are smart essays that stand up by themselves, and
some are downright terrific.
On the other hand, Ironminds probably doesn't need to run two
regular columns by single women about their dating adventures. One of
them, Wendy Hermanson's "The
Seducer's Diary", is somewhat reminiscent of Courtney Weaver's
best "Unzipped"
columns in Salon. But the other, Rachel Weiss' "The
Men I Meet", is just Bridget Jonesy enough to be largely
unreadable ("Everyone I know always says that they meet great single
men at weddings and in the Hamptons, so I go to a wedding and the
Hamptons.... As far as I am concerned, there is nothing sadder than a
dateless single girl at a wedding.")
When Ironminds turns its gaze outward, the results are equally
unpredictable. Scott Dickensheets (a real name, apparently) offers
media criticism that's funnier than Brill's Content and less
in-crowdish than Jim
Romenesko. Of Tom Wolfe's recent PC-bashing screed in Harper's,
he writes, "For a marksman of Wolfe's caliber, Marxist academics make
absurdly easy targets: This is like shooting Stanley Fish in a
barrel." Sports criticism on the site is just as sharp. Stuart Wade
takes the "self-appointed bards" of sports commentary to task: "Was
Omar Vizquel really 'wracked with ambivalence on that last grounder?'
No professional athlete is wracked with ambivalence. Ever." And Rick
Chandler speculates wittily on the matter-antimatter encounter between
Dennis Miller and "Monday Night Football," making the overanalyzed topic
seem fresh.
Given the site's abundance of talented and prolific writers, then,
it's a mystery why they choose to run "The Week in Web News", a
compendium of press releases that aren't intentionally or
unintentionally anything that would make them worth reading.
Similarly puzzling is the regular "WWF Roundup" column, which
continues to provide exhaustive recaps even when most pop-culture
analysts have moved on.
But even the substandard laundry-list content can't obscure
Ironminds' generally solid-to-brilliant output. It's accessible, edgy
(yes, edgy is still a good thing) and even important — who, for
instance, but Ironminds senior writer (and Chicago Sun-Times rock
critic) Jim DeRogatis would dare to dismiss Salon's Greil Marcus'
increasingly obscurantist "Real
Life Rock Top 10" with a "huh?" These ferric brains have a good
thing going, even if they do have a few wrinkles to...smooth out.
— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)
