Cool Retooled

What does man want? Particularly young man?

Action, film, sex, duds for dudes, gadgets and rock ‘n’ roll. Particularly loud rock ‘n’ roll.

Oh, yes. And goo. Goo is good.

“This is cool,” Seth Seaberg, chief executive of RayGun Publishing, is saying. He’s caressing a juicy copy of the August Bikini, RayGun magazine’s sister publication, a chick-baring title for male hipsters, which is opened to the goo page. “It’s eye candy. I love it. I don’t know what it is.”

Whatever it is looks like a wad of gum stretched between two adorably skinny people, connecting them to each other and to a wall. In the fabbest clothes, that is. Parading around in Helmut Lang isn’t enough to keep people together anymore. A boy who needs a girl also needs some goo.

OK, so this is really a fashion spread and not a statement on humanity--manity, maybe. Young men may be the magazine-buyingest category of magazine buyers these days. And when it comes to the supply side, that can only mean one thing--war.

Of course, in this arena, the race is to the cool. Cool is the first 10 years of adult life. Cooler is alternative music and hip-hop. Coolest is being the Rolling Stone of the millennium. Which, for the record, rules out Rolling Stone magazine, according to its younger counterparts, who sniff that the granddaddy of music magazines has aged with its audience.

“Rolling Stone has to cater to an audience that ranges from ages 12 to 40,” says Michael Hirschorn, editor in chief of Spin, a Rolling-Stone-of-the-millennium contender. “It’s holding onto its baby boomer readers and trying to get new readers, so you see this kind of schizoid quality to the magazine.”

We are watching the New York-tethered editor sink his teeth into a wonder of California--a spicy chicken pizza. (No, Seaberg is nowhere in the vicinity at the moment. Out & About refuses to cater to your blood lust and stage a death duel between these two competitors, even though Seaberg says young men like gore as much as goo.)

Now you may be wondering why we’re lumping music magazines in with men’s magazines. Because men buy them, that’s why--twice as many as women buy. There’s a biological reason for this, according to Hirschorn, who’s celebrating his first anniversary as editor since Vibe Ventures bought Spin from Bob Guccione Jr.

“I think the music geek thing has always been a guy thing,” Hirschorn observes. “Did you seriously collect albums when you were growing up and catalog them really carefully?”

Not unless they were attached to new lipsticks. Did you?

“I think I threw them around the room. But knowing more about music than the next person is not something that chicks really care about--the competitive, sort of chest-thumping, I-know-more-obscure-information-than-you-do-about-some-band-from-Ghana thing. That is not a female instinct. And God bless you all for it.”

Any time. And what hath all that manly war wrought? Redesign.

Dueling weirdo, alternative rock magazines Spin and RayGun unveil their new looks in the September issues. Bikini is being refreshed, to use RayGun-speak, in October.

Spin’s September cover is three covers: Take your pick of your favorite zillion-CD-selling Beastie Boy. The magazine is switching to new fonts; a new, improved music section called Noise; cleaner layouts; and a newsstand-friendlier logo anchored to the upper-left-hand corner of the cover.

And don’t forget the extremely tiny bylines.

In case anyone is paying attention.

Like the editor.

“Yeah, we’re working on that,” Hirschorn says. “It doesn’t mean we don’t respect the writers.”

Whatever. As for RayGun, it’s the end of “the end of print,” to borrow the catch phrase of the magazine’s former design guru, David Carson. Carson rocked the graphic design world several years ago with smudgy, overlapping, often illegible type and layouts.

But a new day dawns in RayGun’s fabulously air-conditioned offices in Santa Monica, where prominent type designer Barry Deck has been proclaimed prince of print (and a new hip women’s title is being planned to launch next year). Indeed, the magazine has taken on a new revolutionary mission that Seaberg sums up in one chest-thumping motto: “It’s cool to be able to read stuff.”

Right you are. Readability is cutting edge. Content is the watchword of the future.

“Content is a new word in the vocabulary of culture and media,” Seaberg instructs. “A lot of people toss the word around as in, ‘We’re developing content for our Web site.’ ”

Seaberg will now use “content” in a sentence: “Leonardo DiCaprio was content two months ago, but he’s not content today.”

Yikes, if you don’t mind our saying so.

Not that we’re snooty about content. Why, some of our favorite L.A. metropolitan newspapers traffic in it. And besides, content can be useful, the broader the better, especially when it’s coupled with readability.

“We see Spin and Rolling Stone departing from a music foundation and broadening their appeal to increase the size of their readership,” Seaberg says. “I mean, we’re all in business, and the point is there’s an opportunity here to really be the next big music brand.

“To that end, we’re trying to have RayGun make the future of music more accessible to people by creating this new look for it.”

Hirschorn agrees that profits are music to his ears.

“My goal in life is to put out a magazine that people go, ‘Wow, that’s a really good magazine. That’s really impressive.’ To put out an intelligent magazine and make money. I have no interest in making Spin a critical success and a financial failure. I want it to be both.”

Did we forget something? There’s one more component of cool--cool cash.

*

Animated Offerings: Not long ago, Robin and Marsha Williams were out & about in L.A., chatting with their buddy, animator Faith Hubley, over martinis. Would it surprise you if we said the subject turned to little green men?

“We were talking about alien intelligence,” Robin is telling us. “She said that a friend of hers who’s a microbiologist said that everyone thinks of aliens as little green men, but maybe they’ll come as microbes.

“I said, ‘Like an intelligent infection?’ ”

Robin leans forward and his eyes widen.

“She said, ‘Yes.’ ”

Now don’t get us wrong. We’re not ratting on anyone for having too many martinis. This is about something even more entertaining--soul mateness.

What does it take to be on Williams’ rarefied wavelength? An appreciation for germs with wanderlust, world mythology, astronomy and the work of that nutty artist, Joan Miro.

“I’m visual,” Hubley says, “and when I walked into their house [for the first time two years ago], there was a huge Miro painting, and I thought I would die. And so I sat and looked at it for half an hour. And then I knew, I knew. They knew, they knew.”

Hold the martinis. We are chatting at Storyopolis, which has just unveiled an exhibition of Hubley’s artwork from films she made alone and with her late husband, John Hubley. In minutes, the hybrid bookstore on Robertson Boulevard will screen her most recent film, the charmingly autobiographical “My Universe Inside Out.”

The closing credits include a thank-you to the Williamses, and it’s not for picking up the bar tab. It’s for helping to finance her last two films. Because there’s something you may not know about the Williamses, which is that quietly, on the sly, they’re art patrons. The film industry has made Medicis out of some of its artists, who are helping others in less lucrative niches, such as animation.

“As I tell my students [at Yale],” Hubley says, “if you want to be an artist, the first thing you have to learn is how to beg. Because there’s no money for us, so I’ve been rattling the cup for 21 years.”

The triple-Oscar-winning animator sent a cup-rattling letter to the Williamses, who were already enchanted with her work. Robin says his son Cody turned him on to Hubley three years ago, when Cody was 3. Cody’s connoisseurship was right up there with that of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which gave the Hubleys--including animator daughter Emily--a retrospective last winter.

Says Williams: “Her animation has a whimsy to it, but there’s a real power. It’s a weird combination. I can’t describe it. I can only pimp for it. . . . This is way beyond Mickey.”

The exhibition runs through the end of August.