KEY POINTS:
New Zealanders are used to hearing about magazines folding. It's how I ended up here actually, but that's another story. However, the news that Pavement magazine would close next month after 13 years came as a surprise.
Editor Bernard D. McDonald (known to most as Barney) said it had nothing to do with a decline in readership, which he put at 89,000. Those in the know denied it had anything to do with the latest controversial Lost Youth issue, featuring teens in their knickers and a 10-year-old wearing (shock!) lipstick. It was simply that the advertising dollar had fallen away.
So what went wrong? The launch of Black magazine this year can't have helped, but did Peter Pan finally wake up and discover a wrinkle?
The first time I heard about Pavement was when a friend from primary school days turned up on its cover. That was Penny Pickard in 1994. Art director Glenn Hunt discovered her in High St and from there she became a star on the modelling scene. Pavement was good at talent-spotting.
In my final year of journalism school, Barney accepted a profile I'd written on a local musician. I was beside myself. Before that, the only piece I'd had published was a news story in the local rag about a flood. Barney wanted the profile free but I stood my ground and told him I wanted to be paid - our tutors had drummed into us that giving away a story made it difficult for fellow freelancers. So the story went in and I was paid the grand sum of 10 cents a word. Perhaps that explains why Pavement is renowned for its artistic qualities rather than its journalism. A publication that screams liberalism with a Scrooge-like attitude towards pay? That's magazines for you.
I still recall the feedback I received from the ed about that story - it was fine but some of it read like a press release. It needed to be "more edgy". He offered me a chance to be edgy by interviewing Pluto. This was before anyone had really heard of them. I remember Barney saying he knew they were going to be successful because they already looked like rock stars. He was right. Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication over the deadline and I didn't get to do it. I thought I'd committed career suicide. And no, he never offered me a story again.
I continued to read Pavement, partly because it featured writing by a friend, but I always felt it was out of my league. I continued to buy it, much as one takes an interest in the older kids at school. The intention, the tone, the style was so austere, the fashion shoots full of (excuse the cliche but it wasn't a cliche back then) "heroin chic" girls with blocks of kohl around their eyes, pale arms wrapped around naked rib-cages.
The photographs were always beautifully shot, the themes sometimes shockingly sexy, but there was an elite solemnity about it, as if the people in its pages were so cool that happiness eluded them.
Perhaps that's why I never felt compelled to read the stories thoroughly. That, and the swathes of text that glared at you from the page as if announcing their superior intelligence. Unlike British staple The Face, which I enjoyed on occasion, Pavement's allure came not from wit but from cool. And I rather like wit.
Barney bemoaned the demise of his baby as though it was more influential on New Zealand's youth culture than television. But I came to discover things in the fashion and arts fields through other means. Plus, I got older. The friend who used to write for Pavement started writing for a business magazine. I consumed Pavement from afar. The sex issue. The plastic-wrapped issue. The Lost Youth issue, which I must say did a great job of giving teens a voice, despite all the tut-tutting, and courted the line between art - that first flourish of a girl's sexuality - and, well, something you get off the internet.
Perhaps it's just that Pavement was the face of a generation and must die with that generation. Whatever the case, it will never rest in peace. It was far too "edgy" for that.
