Tuesday, September 11, 2007

9:45 AM | Ten Years of Nerve

I can't believe Nerve Magazine has turned ten years old. Have I really been around that long, and was college really a decade away? It makes for some urgent introspection. (It doesn't help that the newest online venture from the Nerve team is Babble, a "magazine and community for a new generation of parents," and it has lots of baby pictures all over. How we've all grown up, it seems.)

Because Nerve was a cornerstone of my college existence, up there with Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill, the books of Douglas Coupland and David Leavitt, the Scream movies, Friends, Madonna's Ray of Light, Ben Stiller's Reality Bites, and Armani Exchange. (This was in the glory days of the 1990s, pre-Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, pre-George W. Bush and 9/11, pre-Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, pre-Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls -- when everything was rich and rosy, and we were all so naive and brave and innocent.)

Because I remember reading a hype piece by Joel Stein in Time during those heady early days about this online magazine, centering on this incredibly hot couple Rufus Griscom and Genevieve Field who were starting a blushing online magazine that wanted to talk intelligently about sex. I remember saying: "What great names they have, Rufus and Genevieve, perfection for literate smut." The website, originally designed by Joey Cavella (see left), looked outstanding and was considered revolutionary at the time. I was hooked since that day, even went through the Nerve Personals phase where I used to have this really sexy, intelligent chat with somebody from California. There was no day I wasn't online and reading about kinkiness in the pages of Nerve. And then, when they established Nerve Premium and you had to pay for the good stuff -- for the wonderful stories, the eye-popping photography by David Morgan, Andres Serrano, David Sprigle, Ellen Stagg, Jack Louth, Terry Richardson, and Greg Gorman, the searing personal essays by Em and Lo and Lisa Carver-- I just kinda drifted away and got on with the grayness of "real life."

Today, I stumble on the old site, and found it's already ten years later. And then I wonder, where did all that time go...

The magazine has an oral history of Nerve's wildest years up and running in the site.

Labels: magazines, sex

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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