It appears that Dave Eggers, the writer whose unhealthily-obsessed, unemployed hipster fan base is thought to be the largest after those of Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk, and David Sedaris, has launched a DVD-based magazine titled Wholpin. The line-up for the first issue , I must say, is rather impressive with contributions from Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, and Miranda July, although it would have been better if all those contributions weren’t originally created for something else. As usual, Eggers’ McSweeney’s/The Believer publishing empire will be going all-out to pimp the new magazine; the next McSweeney’s, the number #18, which is is slated to hit bookstores next week, will include the inaugural issue of Wholpin.
This should make the folks at RES very, very nervous. The last time RES has delivered an issue this solid was, well, never. Yes, yes, I know that RES is a print magazine with a supplementary DVD and Wholpin is a magazine on DVD, but the thing is that no one really reads RES as no one give a shit whether that trust-fund-kid “director” no one is going to remember by the same time next year used Canon EOS-5D or EOS-1Ds Mark II to shoot the background photography for his/her stupid video for some shitty band no one has heard of. One could also point out that while Wholpin is for narrative-centric short films while RES focuses on digital, post-production-heavy, “oh, look at that detailed shading” ones, but it’s the occasional narrative-centric ones that’s paying RES’ bills as ones that “explore the boundary of digital motion art” or something or other tend to suck. It also doesn’t help that the quality of RES DVDs has declined significantly over the past two years, and nowadays is completely unwatchable except for the sporadic Michel Gondry music videos (that you’ve seen, albeit on a lower resolution, four weeks ago).
It also doesn’t help RES that Dave Eggers seems to know a lot of filmmakers who are actually good. With McSweeney’s short story back catalogue and ever growing number of rabid Dave Eggers fans, it wouldn’t be surprising if Dave Eggers is running a movie studio in a few years with RES by then long gone.
Uh, and by the way, McSweeney’s now has a much expanded distribution and is now available at the University of Waterloo Bookstore and the Waterloo Chapters.
