If someone can figure out what Maxim Magazine is supposed to be, please bypass informing me and explain it to its publisher. The Lad Mags are something of a throw back to what the Real Nazi Sex UFO Man Eater Cults magazines used to be, without actually having gone through the evolution of turning into straight porn or emerging out from the soup of the adventure genre. In the latest issue of Maxim we see yet another drift, this towards covering the war. Plopped in the aft of this lifestyle and foodies and health focus celeb knob slurping is a good old fashioned grunts make good entitled 'M*A*S*H Elevation 10,000', quite suitable for Stars & Stripes. Nothing really happens during the story, but it is fairly much everything one could want from routine magazine war coverage. Here is a group of people, here is their setting, here is their role, here are the challenges they face and here is how they reflect on the situation. It's by the numbers, but very well done. If Maxim were interested in grabbing itself a direction, this might not be a bad one to go in.
Maxim and its kin did hit on the outstanding idea of putting clothing back on the girls. (Whereas Playboy is going for even more naked women with rib removal surgeries, now in 3-D.) They have however gotten themselves stuck on the idea that space should be devoted to what these no longer nude women have to say. None of these women have anything to say. Half of them do not have jobs. The other half are between gigs/aspiring actresses. In short, these are not real women in the first place, but rather models filling up their published portfolio. As opposed to making the girls work so hard at a craft that is not theirs (writing), why not use them as models in actual fiction stories. That way if someone did chance to stray their eyes from Amber Lancaster, the words they might find have a chance at actually being interesting. Instead, most of these girls wind up saying the same things, various permutations of "Work is slow and my agent suggested me doing this shoot." If Amber Lancaster (late of the Wonder Years) wanted to show off her acting talents, what better format could the magazine provide her than a work of fiction in which she is someway an illustrative element? Dressing her up as a space lady or cowgirl or whatever would certainly give the compositions some variety. Just a thought.
(All a part of my sinister plan to get fiction back into these magazines. Don't tell anyone I told you.)
A little drift in a concept as vacant as the Lad Rag is to be expected. The latest necrophilia drift in Vanity Fair really needs some explaining.
Yes, Graydon Carter, Grace Kelly is one fine chunk of ass. She is, however--how do I put this mildly?--dead. Very dead. Even Grace Kelly's children don't look this young anymore.
Again, Mr. Carter, excellent choice. Liz Taylor is very bendable. Not quite dead, but if you did deliberately run her over with your car, at worst you would receive a citation for putting an animal out of its misery in an unapproved manner. Not that that's actually Liz Taylor. Liz Taylor is a bleating, near eighty year old thing that's always getting married or divorced or having her tummy pumped or being kicked out of some rehab clinic. Currently she's been incapable of actual speech, even on the Access Stardom type shows. Even the National Enquirer has begged off her--and they have five tabloids to fill.
The editorial support for turning Vanity Fair into a dead woman stroke magazine has been pretty flimsy. Grace Kelly, being dead--and for quite some time now--hasn't actually done anything new lately. The Kelly piece was on her impact on the world of fashion. Her lasting impact. Of which she has had none. Take a look at your own advertisements if you doubt me, Graydon. As for the Taylor chomp off waste of trees who will never live again (much like the subject herself) the pretext is a book of love letters the seemingly destitute heirs of Richard Burton are trying to palm off. People who don't have the guts (or realization of their own lack of talents) to freeze their dead father's body in hopes of advances in cloning ala Ted Williams, should not be given free publicity. Or any other type of handout.
At its best Vanity Fair is the National Enquirer dressed up. Even the National Enquirer let Elvis go, eventually. I hope Vanity Fair lets these dead ladies rest. Speaking of letting it rest, you can pretty much skip the latest issues of Bitch and Mother Jones. Bitch is no longer a what it is billed as, but rather a self-debate mixed in with a PBS style pledge drive in print. Until it straightens out, I'm not covering it other than to say it may be safely passed by. Mother Jones I love, but this issue is a straight swung at a pitch over its head and chucked the bat into the bleachers affair. Population bomb? Really? It's 2010. Malthus was wrong. See 1970. Tell me when you get back to the present.
Not that I consider Bitch or Mother Jones really schlock magazines. I just normally read them, that's all. When you take my money and burn me, I call you out. I would expand our reviews to all Think Magazines, since I do read them and they are a distinct genre, but that would mean littering the electromagnetic space with words commenting about something like the following...
This is actually our first Neo Pulp review and it's a little stale. All issues of Adbusters could qualify as Neo Pulps, if only due to its frequency, which is whenever the 'global network of 83,436 writers, artists, activists, educators and entrepreneurs' who are 'quickly growing into a political force to be reckoned with' get around to it. Which is to say not very often. This issue is packaged similar to that of the Economist, which also does a Big Ideas Neo Pulp stocking stuffer. In fact, this Adbusters issue is either a parody or it's trademark winking, the resemblance with the Economist's book is that close.
But fear not. All confusion is parted with a glance at page one. Also, here in a nutshell, is why I do not cover Think Magazines. The words are by one Christos Tsiolkas, laid out like a post it note and starting with "Don't believe anything they tell you. Don't believe the churchman or the politicians. Don't be led astray by the artist and always distrust a general." The page ends with "What do I believe in? Only in sweet, sweet (c-word)."
That's about as clever as the whole magazine got. If that part of a woman's anatomy is literally telling you what to believe, you are either (a) dating a very talented ventriloquist or (b) ready for what we call assisted care. In either case, such things are not worth reading. Not worth printing. Have no meaning. Should not have been said. Sadly, Think Magazines both left and right do too much of this. Until the genre rids itself of talking vaginas and Sarah Palin endorsements, Hil-Gle will not bother with them unless they are in real Neo Pulp form.
Unless Hil-Gle gets fooled again, which it will not be, at least by Adbusters. Consider the above our final word, c-word.
(Which one of you 83,436 issues the refund?)
The Time Life people are always more straightforward with their Neo-Pulp offerings. Life is a magazine few living people have seen in the flesh as an actual magazine. Life is kept alive primarily in Neo Pulp form and as a trademark for music anthologies. Time is a magazine people have seen but generally don't read. What distinguishes a Neo Pulp put out under either heading escapes me. They are both products of the same firm. Under both titles, they primarily ply the waters once frequented by the coffee table book.
Not that the coffee table book has gone extinct. There's Barns & Nobles full of them. The Neo Pulp form is being used as a sort of recycle bin. (It's not my intention to cover coffee table books per se, but its hard to split hairs here.) Time Great Buildings of The World is a flat out coffee table book and shovelware at that. It was first put out in hard bound form in 2004. The book has absolutely no forward and isn't really trying for much other than for your dentist to buy it and stick it in his waiting room. That said, there were some interesting take-aways: (1) Frank Lloyd Wright was a prick; (2) Never, under any circumstances, hire a famous architect to design a house that you actually intend to live in and (3) most of the great buildings of the world are unfinished, usually because the builder has run out of money. Or, in the case of Schloss Neuschwanstein, the builder was drowned at the request of outraged taxpayers. (That detail was not included in the book.) It's a rather dry subject, but you could do worse when waiting on your root canal.
The essence of the Neo Pulp, like the Pulp magazine itself, is the whiff of sensation, the created controversy. Here Life starts the ball rolling on the cover. What do Oprah, Lincoln and Jesus really have in common? (Two of the three thought they were God. One still does.) The title is nonsense and the book spends a little too much time defending it. What we have here is 100 short takes on 100 interesting people who were chosen exclusively to sell the book. '100 Random Biographies' would be more accurate, but not as snazzy. And snazzy is what we want in Neo Pulps, because the product is a useless impulse buy. This one is a pretty good read. I read it straight from cover to cover and wasn't bored a moment. The Time people hire good writers, unlike Newsweek, whose writers simply contribute so that they can appear as talking heads on television.
Just as I could not resist a gratuitous swipe at Newsweek, I could not fail to pick up this Neo Pulp gem from Neo Pulp neophyte Rolling Stone. I didn't even know Rolling Stone was in the Neo Pulp market until I saw this. Obviously, the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time is as subjective of a subject as it gets. 498 of them are in English. Which is to say that it is 'of a perspective'. Sadly, it's of a perspective that likes Bono of U2 way too much. For total lack of consistency, it both embraces and ignores what we call the Great American Songbook. Like the Bible, what got into this book was very politically determined. Unlike the two above entries, the bits found in this book are strictly the trivia, only the things you didn't already know. It will make you stupid but it is very fun.
***
Coda
Graydon Carter, for those of you not in the know, is the editor of Vanity Fair.
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