San Francisco, CA

A couple of weeks ago, I came home and saw that a complimentary issue of 7×7 magazine had been left at my doorstep. In fact, four of them had been left for all of the people in my building. So I picked one up and brought it inside; after all, you don’t ignore free reading material when you’re tripping right over it. But I was kind of wishy-washy about it because I have mixed feelings about 7×7.

See, I’d bought 7×7 before and I thought that it had some interesting articles but not enough to make them worth paying for, so I stuck to reading what they had to offer on their online site and stopped picking up the print magazine. Was the print publication bad? No, not at all. But it wasn’t suited to me. It seemed to be geared more towards people who buy $350 jeans at San Francisco’s designer boutiques than, well, what I can afford on a writer’s budget while living in North Beach. So it was okay, but it didn’t really speak to me.

Nevertheless, I perused the complimentary issue because a free magazine fits in to my budget. And I have to say that 7×7 may not have been a case of love at first sight for me but it was one which made a better impression the second time around. Sometimes you just have to get to know your reading material before you really understand it.

What had initially turned me off was that the first section, Scene and Heard was … well, just a little bit too scene queen for me. I know that I should know the who is who of San Francisco but at the same time, I really don’t care where they were spotted most of the time and that’s what I’d dismissed this section of the magazine as being all about. But when I looked at it a second time, what I saw was that there’s a plethora of information in the captions about a whole bunch of places and functions that are actually somewhat worth knowing about.

And the rest of the magazine seemed to do a turnabout for me, too. Now, I do have to ask you to keep in mind that the free copy that I received was “The Entertainment Issue” and that could have something to do with swaying my opinion. After all, I’m a big fan of the local arts and music scene and some of that was supported in the pages of the magazine. I learned some new names and discovered some new local creativity and I thought that was worth my time.

I do still think that the material of 7×7 is somewhat out of my league. It’s more like what I envision myself reading when I’m in my mid-thirties, having become somehow independently wealthy and am then able to spend my time frequenting the latest day spas and concerning myself with the attendance of local celebrities at SF events. But that’s not all that there is to 7×7. Girls who enjoy girly magazines will probably find that this is a great one for satiating the local hunger in that area. Plus, the photos are great so it’s good for collage-making.