1. Structure
When I started Magellan’s Log, my primary metaphor was architectural. I wanted to construct a large, varied, attractive edifice where visitors could wander, which they could explore. It would be large enough and varied enough that the hurried visitor could easily find something of casual interest and that the more leisurely visitor could find things that rewarded longer attention.

Qualities which I hoped to realize in the structure: Beauty, humor, surprise, consolation, insight.

Reactions which I hoped for: Delight, laughter, serenity, thoughtfulness, meditative suspension of both belief and disbelief.

Not clever enough to, like Lao-Tze, put paradox at the very heart of the matter, I tried at least to keep it occasionally visible on the edges, popping into view now and then like a distant mountain just over the horizon.

Not to extend the architecture metaphor too far, but I also wanted the occasional surprise vista to open as a visitor rounded this or that corner. Apart from unexpected content, two techniques were used to achieve this effect:

    A. Internal and external hyperlinks. Often when an intriguing word or
        concept comes up, it will be linked either to another page (often far
        away) inside Magellan’s Log, or to an outside site. The outside link
        would be selected by entering the term in Google and then linking to
        the first, topmost Google result.

    B. A random access link to all pages within the site from almost every page.

Finally, against the technology tide, I maintained a determination to keep the design simple, venturing no further than a few basic javascript tricks. Why? Because I wanted this oasis (oops, how did that non-architectural metaphor slip in?) available to the global audience, which still means low bandwidth.

2. "Culture, Counterculture, Anticulture."
The idea was to look back, to look ahead, and to look around, to comment on and react to the past, the present, and the future as equally important parts of, well, us. Every age (just about, anyway, unless you happen to get caught in the Black Death or the like) thinks it’s the cat’s pajamas. Such hubris of course comes from severe myopia. Only the near-sighted think the far-sighted are delusional. Magellan’s Log is thus partly telescope, partly museum, partly panopticon, partly intellectual vaudeville, partly New Age quackery, partly Old Ages reminder, partly pixelized sheep’s entrails.

What I kept forgetting even as I tried to remember was the very title of the whole undertaking. Magellan, as I’ve talked about elsewhere, certainly kept a log, but it was lost. All we know about the voyage is what other people reported. So too here.

3. Borrowing
In the early issues I indulged excessively in the "borrowing" of images. As the issue-number rose, the borrowing declined. Almost all the graphics in later issues are my own (facilitated midway by the acquisition of a digital camera). If image manipulation is one of the devil’s newer seductive tricks, then I’ve sinned many many times. For example, Art Director Kai Sonderling’s many "paintings" came from a variety of sources (news photos, clip art, fractals, etc.) manipulated so many times and in so many ways that their origins are beyond tracing. Similar sinning can be spotted in my bending and re-shaping of various midi’s. As time wore on and guilt increased, I did begin to give credit for use of the rare unmanipulated midi.

4. Laughter
Some readers, including alas the most valued, found some content "offensive." This charge apparently arose from the presence of "tasteless jokes," which I persisted in including in every issue from beginning to end. (Initially, the jokes were interspersed with "borrowed" offensive cartoons—those cartoons have now been half-hidden and are accessible to only the most persistent searchers.) Infantile? Adolescent? Immature tantrums? Guilty, guilty, guilty. But the jokes, more often than not, are funny. Our need to laugh is symptomatic of both disease—and health. The solution to the mystery of all those solemn faces (why, for God's sake, aren't THEY of all people laughing?) in the central panel of Bosch’s "Garden of Earthly Delights" continues to elude me.

5. Performance Art
As the thing proceeded I became aware that, while the architecture metaphor continued to be valid and in odd ways very apt, the "structure" was taking on qualities of other arts. In one sense, Magellan’s Log is an odd kind of crotchety novel or a lapsed, unspoken theater-piece, with its well-defined cast of characters and voices.

I would get up in the morning with an idea, often knowing immediately just which staff member would write such a piece. Other times, authorship was not clear until I was well into it or even finished. But each staffer became a (to me) clearly defined person with his or her own interests, abilities, limitations, and biases.***

Now and then I thought about letting the many voices interact more directly, but quickly discovered that to do so destroyed the magazine illusion. Thus for the most part the autonomy of each writer remains intact.

In a sense it was real-time performance art, a cyber-version of Dickens’s serial publication of his own fictions, except I was doing it daily, often several times each day.

And occasionally, the masks, at least most of them, were dropped and I would indulge my own self and my own name, as in the months-long binge that led to Issue No. 35 (wall-to-wall Iris Murdoch).

6. Emotion.
In this age of unfeeling, I gingerly explored the real-time potential of the medium to produce and amplify emotional responses. Images + music + words, after all, is nothing less than a kind of low-bandwidth, low-resolution Gesamtkunstwerk, with all attendant potentials and dangers.

The professionally distanced, the terminally cool, can indeed find much here along these near-emotional lines that they will judge both offensive and inane. I have no problem with those who embrace the ugly, as long as they also embrace the beautiful. But to dance only with the repulsive while leaving the beautiful sitting on the sidelines is as dangerous as the inverse.

In an era where there was no middleground of touching (the two acceptable behaviors were either the fearsome, forced intimacy of sex, or the ritualistic skin encounters of formal handshakes and fake hugs), I chose where appropriate a range of implied skin-intimacy. (Sorry, this is getting very vague and I know I’m mixing emotion and beauty, but one is trying to talk about that which cannot be talked about.) So you find touching (through Images + music + words) along a spectrum, from hitting (when dealing with the arrogantly stupid, the powerfully mean) to caressing (when dealing both with our lesser sins and our greater hopes).

Still searching for metaphor, maybe: tapestry. A wall-filling Internet tapestry, raucous action here, pastoral there, finely worked detail here and broad-stroke narrative images there, passionate here, cool there, electric colors here, muted tones there. A lovely variegated surface to capture the eye, the mind, the heart (and behind, out of sight, the utter mess of HTML).