What Works for Me is a new part of the ASME website—an opportunity to find out what ASME members are reading, seeing, doing, thinking. The series kicks off with Fred Woodward, the Design Director of GQ, which this year has been nominated for eight National Magazine Awards, including General Excellence, Design, Photography and Photo Portfolio. A member of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, Fred was the Art Director of Rolling Stone from 1987-2001; he also designed the ASME logo. Fred grew up in Mississippi and now lives with his family on the Rockland County side of the river. Fred was a member of the GQ team that recently played LeBron James—just LeBron James—and had the honor of scoring the only GQ basket, a moment immortalized on the GQ website.
What magazines are you reading? I try to look at most everything, but I subscribe to The New Yorker (like everybody else) and try my best to keep up (like everybody else)—at least with the cartoons. I always, always read Anthony Lane’s reviews. I’m pretty loyal to: Vanity Fair, New York, Dwell, W, Teen Vogue (screening it before I hand it over to my 12-year-old fashionista daughter), Paris Vogue (screening it before I hand it over to my fashionista wife), Interview (though I already miss Fabien [Baron]’s touch) and The New York Times Magazine. I shouldn’t admit it—at least not in this forum—but I probably spend more time reading books these days than magazines. I finished the George Plimpton oral history, George Being George, awhile back and enjoyed it immensely—nearly as much as Graydon Carter’s essay in The New York Times Book Review that led me to it. I’ve given away at least five copies (and counting) to my buddies. And during a very recent trip down south I re-read Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, just to get back into character after being away too long.
One of the great rewards of giving your kids a better education than the one you had yourself is that you can always do a little remedial work just by following their reading list. I’m presently dragging out the last chapter of Willa Cather’s My Antonia. I can’t stand to see it end. There’s a blurb on the back of the paperback by H.L. Mencken that declares, “No romantic novel ever written in America is one-half so beautiful as My Antonia.” Even though his review was written almost a hundred years ago, I have to believe he’s still right.
Next, I’m starting either Memo From David O. Selznick or the recently published Flannery O’Conner biography—that is, if I don’t flip back and start My Antonia all over again. What image—a photograph, an illustration, a magazine cover—have you seen recently that you wish you’d commissioned or done? The “Great Performers” portfolio that appeared in The New York Times Magazine back in mid-February made me a little green.
The hardest thing to do at a magazine over the long haul is to keep it fresh—especially an ongoing feature that essentially becomes a part of the franchise. The very thing that you loved most about it the first time you produced it can become the heaviest of burdens farther down the road. You have to find ways to re-invent it. And not just for your reader—but at least as important, for yourself.The good people at the Times Magazine (led by photo director exemplar Kathy Ryan) were able to do just that with enormous success in their sixth year of the portfolio. They did it by changing the structure of the story they told, as well as the genre of photography that told it. Instead of shooting damned near all of the Oscar nominees (or so it always seemed), they limited the essay to only eight. After commissioning some of the world’s greatest studio-portrait photographers (Inez and Vinoodh shot at least the first couple), they hired the documentary photographer Paola Pellegrin to work environmentally.
Together they were able to pull off what has become the near impossible in the age of the über-publicist-handled mega-celebrity, publishing a number of intimate, unvarnished photos of each subject—including (the most private of the private) Sean Penn at home, making himself a burger. Kate Winslet appears on the cover in hair rollers the size of orange-juice cans. And on top of all that, both were eventual winners. Jeez. That was one of those Sunday mornings when all you can do is crawl back into bed and pull the covers over your head.What are you watching on TV? March Madness—and soon I’ll move on to the NBA playoffs. It’s my favorite time of year.Lots and lots of Netflix—in the past month or two I’ve watched: Repulsion, M, Rome Adventure, Easy Living, Pierrot le Fou, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Visitor, 8 1/2 , On Dangerous Ground, Band of Outsiders, Twentieth Century, La Dolce Vita, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Point Blank, Safe Men, Croupier, The Matador, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Changeling, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Layer Cake, In Bruges, Man on Wire and Happy-Go-Lucky.I love Turner Classic Movies, 30 Rock, The Office (and looking forward to the Amy Poehler spin-off), Flight of the Conchords, and ESPN’s SportsCenter. SNL, if I don’t fall asleep first. I’ve been catching up on old episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire and have Friday Night Lights on order. I’m sure to re-watch season 2 of Mad Men before the new one revs up. I’m excited that In Treatment has returned and seems (from the first two nights, at least) even better. During the election year I became (too) obsessed with Countdown, Hardball, The Daily Show and the lot. I lost every Sunday morning to politics for a good, long while there. I’ve pretty much weaned myself, and my mental health seems (at least a little bit) better.Which website do you visit every day? I remain faithful to The New York Times morning delivery, paper edition. Seriously old school, I know. The ritual of reading the paper front-to-back with a good cup of coffee before anyone else in the house wakes up is still the best part of my day. I can’t claim to visit any site every day, but at lunch I sometimes check in with The New York Times, Talking Points, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, The Year in Pictures (James Danziger’s blog) or SPD.org. My friend (and fellow GQer) Andy Ward introduced me to Wolfgang’s Vault (concerts.wolfgangsvault.com), and if you care anything at all about live music, you simply have to check it out. Trust me. You can hear the Allman Brothers (joined at times by Jerry Garcia) for nearly three hours straight at the Cow Palace on New Year’s Eve, 1973. Free! Now tell me the world isn’t a wonderful place. What are you listening to on your iPod? In a concerted effort to stop worrying (and learn to love the recession), I’ve been listening to a lot of early Jonathan Richman—the most joyously therapeutic music I know. The new Neko Case, Middle Cyclone, has recently gotten repeated playtime during my night drive home.For the past week or so, I’ve been putting the final polish on the sequencing of my semiannual Happy Spring From the Woodwards mix. I’m happier than any grown man has a right when I hear Lucinda Williams growling “Honeybee” after Slim Harpo’s “King Bee” groan, or Blossom Dearie’s girlish French version of “It Might as Well Be Spring” sung in reply to Billy Eckstine’s “April in Paris.” I send them out this time most every year to neighbors, friends and family—just trying to wish away winter.A week or so ago, I was making a road trip through the Mississippi Delta with my cousin, searching for pictures (and deep-fat-fried tamales), drinking a pecan-flavored local brew and listening to all this music I’ve been compiling over the past couple of years. It’s a playlist that was triggered by hearing “I’ve Got Your Ice Cold Nugrape” off Oxford American’s annual-music-issue CD. It began as a memory exercise of trying to think of every song I’d ever heard play over the greasy little plastic Philco in my grandmother’s kitchen when I was a boy, but (over the course of 50 CDs worth of songs) mutated into something akin to musical autobiography. Hillbilly, rockabilly, blues, gospel, Stax soul, Dixieland jazz, doo-wop and pop—mixed all together with the occasional commercial for the local Piggly Wiggly. Anyway, that’s what we were listening to. I think we made it through the first 19 discs during our travels, and it was downright spooky how often the song playing inside the truck mirrored so exactly what was happening in the landscape flying past.
Could have been the pecans.If you were an editor, what would you tell your design director? “Make me look good.”But more than likely: “How many words is that layout holding?” What do you remember about the shot you made against LeBron James? Absolutely nothing—but I’m happy that the body remembered.Beatles or Rolling Stones? Hemingway or Faulkner? Superman or Batman? Stieglitz or Steichen? As a kid I loved (loved!) the Beatles—for the past 20 (or 30) years, the Stones. Faulkner (but really Fitzgerald—though I know that’s heretical for a native Mississippian to admit). Batman. Stieglitz—if only for his life portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe.
When you quit magazines, what are you going to do, where are you going to go?
I’d prefer a quiet place on the mantel to the cold, cold ground.
