The beautifully absurd idea
A magazine launched without funding, permission or a particularly convincing plan.
A book in progress
The Last Magazine
The 17-year life, COVID-era death and strange AI afterlife of Chicago INNERVIEW.
Coming soon
The story
A dead music magazine, excavated by AI.
Chicago INNERVIEW was a local music magazine Jay Gentile started at age 26. It grew from a homemade publication assembled with equal parts ambition and questionable judgment into a fixture of Chicago’s independent music culture.
For 17 years, it survived collapsing ad markets, changing neighborhoods, the rise of digital media and nearly every reason a free print magazine should have disappeared. Then COVID finally killed it.
The Last Magazine tells that story through memories, old issues, sales letters, photographs and artifacts—while an artificial intelligence tries, repeatedly and imperfectly, to reconstruct what happened.
“I started it primarily because I wasn’t smart enough to know why I shouldn’t.”
Inside the project
Part memoir. Part media archaeology. Part argument with a machine.
Proof we existed
Seventeen years of issues, assignments, letters, photographs and stories from Chicago music culture.
The strange afterlife
A collaboration between the person who lived it and an AI that keeps getting parts of the history wrong.
Coming soon