Golf Magazine and Paperback Spinner-Rack

(34:02)

Delightful as is the translation of an entire newsstand’s color-fully thin offerings into OBEY, CONSUME, SLEEP, etcetera, we may not bother to notice that the magazine framed longest for our consideration is a too-real Golf Digest, the cover of which shows a television set and the probably unsatirizable command, “Let T.V. Teach You!” (They Live thinks you’ve already done this.)

The spinner racks full of paperback books—equally too real to be fake—boast a squalid cross section of vicarious terror and wish fulfillment, tabloid opiate for the masses: Charles Berlitz’s Bermuda Triangle, Darcy O’Brien’s Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers, Kevin J. Todeschi’s Edgar Cayce’s ESP. All three hint at worlds-within-the-world, promising to deliver an evil or transcendence lurking beyond unschooled sight. But honestly, blech. If I had an hour to kill, I’d stick to the magazines.