Thursday, February 13, 2020

Manhattan Interlude #1: A peek under the cover of Spy

The Puck Building, home of Spy magazine.
     Big time authors of course are obligated to go to New York City to meet with publishers and agents and publicists and such. While lesser lights go to visit their boys in law school and take in a show. So while occupied, I thought I would reach back into the vault and dredge up a few reports from previous bites of the Big Apple. 
     This one sticks in mind because setting it up was something of a scam. First I told my boss that I was visiting New York anyway, and while I was there I might as well pop into the hot new magazine, Spy, which I adored, like every other 20ish wisenheimer at the time. He fell for it. Then I called Spy and told them they were so popular in the Midwest that the Sun-Times was sending me to New York to take their measure. They fell for it. While I was at their offices, reporting this valentine, I also pitched them stories, and got assigned to write the sidebars on a delicious take-down of Bob Greene. Later, I fished for a job. Graydon Carter had an editorial assistant opening that paid a quarter of my salary, and though I begged for it—I remember being on the phone to him, standing in my apartment in Oak Park, feeling my life teetering—he wouldn't give it to me. "You wouldn't be happy," he said. He was probably right.

     NEW YORK — Not long ago, E. Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen were just another pair of writers sweating below decks of giant Time magazine, shoveling words into its roaring furnaces, straining to move the behemoth along.
     Like most writers, they felt they knew better than their bosses what kind of publication people wanted to read.They envisioned a wry, witty magazine, poking fun at the hubris-laden egos and Jabba-the-Hutt lifestyles routinely adored in the pages of their employer.
     "We both loved magazines," said Carter, relaxing in his small office on the ninth floor of the Puck Building, a whimsical, cherub-studded structure in New York's Soho district. "We loved National Lampoon, Mad and Rolling Stone, and wanted a magazine that affected us like those did."
     Unlike most writers, however, they paused from dreaming and griping long enough to turn their vision into reality. They gathered together investors, raised a few million dollars, and gave birth to the hottest, most cuttingly written new magazine around: Spy.
     Since the first issue hit the stands in October, 1986, Spy has provided what had become a rare commodity in American magazines: journalistic satire aimed at the undeservedly rich and the glaringly famous.
     Just a glance at that first cover was enough to show that this would be a different kind of publication.
     "JERKS," it blared, in orange type, accompanied by a photo of David Letterman sidekick Chris Elliot doing a groveling dance. "The Ten Most Embarrassing New Yorkers."
     "They move, they shake, they showboat. The rest of us cringe. And you wonder why America hates New York?" the article began, introducing a cast of character—Donald Trump, Rex Reed, Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, Leona Helmsley — that Spy was to revisit, issue after issue, with malicious glee.
     "Most magazines spend their time pumping up those who are already pumped up," said executive editor Susan Morrison. "We try to be an antidote to that, to bite the ankles of the overdog."
     Picking up the long-ignored tradition of Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken that married reporting with rambunctious wit, Andersen and Carter produced a magazine eclectic enough to critique Reagan's presidency and teach readers how to sneak into Ivy League club bathrooms in the same issue.
     It is difficult to categorize a typical Spy article. They tend to be short, broken up into small units, encased in boxes or scrolled down the side of a page. They assume the reader knows a lot — for example, what an arbitrager does — or at least is confident enough to guess.
     They frequently attack in an oblique way. An article titled "How Rich Is That Doggie in the Limo?" never comes out and criticizes giving your dog a face-lift, or a strand of cultured pearls, or an $800 fur coat. But the message gets across.
     "Cindy Hughes takes time out from her very busy career as a designer to cook twice a day for her Shar Pei, Coco Chanel Puppoir," writes Nell Scovell. "She uses recipes from a holistic dog cookbook. `People say I'm crazy,' Hughes says, like a mind reader, `but my sister had two kids at this age, and she cooks for them three times a day.'"
     And then, there is what has made Spy famous: the razors-bared, rabid wolf-pack attacks.
Being foremost a New York magazine, Spy saves its deadliest venom for its favored gang of New York characters: the omnipresent Trump, Mayor Ed Koch, socialites such as Mercedes Kellogg and Jacqueline Onassis, new wave writers Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York, liquor ads) and Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City.)
     "We chose people whose reputations, we feel, are exaggerated," said staff writer Tad Friend. "We don't try to do hatchet jobs. We don't pick on Mother Teresa."
     The people they do pick on are people like Revlon chairman Ron Perelman and his wife, gossip columnist Claudia Cohen, who are assaulted separately (Cohen: "arrogant, insensitive, maniacal." Perelman: a "rapacious," "balding" enigma) and in tandem ("at dinners Claudia would use her fingernails to pry food from between Ron's teeth.")
     "Claudia Cohen made a million phone calls, trying to find out where we got our information on her," said Morrison. (Perelman took a more practical approach, according to Andersen. He had Revlon offer Spy a lucrative advertising contract provided, of course, that the profile was shelved. Andersen turned them down.)
     A Spy trademark is turning the light of analysis onto people who just are not used to being written about. "Review of Reviewers" is a monthly feature taking the entertainment press to task in a way not seen since A. J. Liebling pilloried the media in the '40s and '50s.
     "Letters to the Editor of the New Yorker" permits readers to comment on the stuffy publication, which itself does not print letters. (Nor does it print a staff box, which, at a reader's request, Spy printed: a staggering exercise in research and, due to the jarring impact of its sheer size, very funny.)
     Spy prides itself in the accuracy of its reporting, and its Rabelaisian cast of victims tends to respond to questions about the magazine with grim silence.
     Contacted several times for comment, Perelman remained mum. The upper management of the New York Times, excoriated each month in a column devoted exclusively to its ridicule, would not utter a word in its own defense.
     Slightly less reticent are Koch and Trump, who made surprisingly similar contradictory statements, through their spokesmen.
     "He doesn't read it," said a mouthpiece for Koch. "He doesn't take it too seriously."
     "I don't think he's seen it," said Trump's representative, ignoring rumors that Trump personally yanked copies of Spy from Trump Tower's newsstand. "I think he's probably seen an issue or two. I'll ask him."
     In their constant search for egos to puncture, Spy has not overlooked Chicago. In the first issue, "The Illustrated History of Hair, Part I," a wordless series of photographs traced the retreat and sudden, almost magical, re-emergence of nostalgicist Bob Greene's hairline. And last month's issue included a stomach-churning account of Harold Washington's gluttonous habits.
     In addition to jabbing individuals, Spy takes on trends breathlessly trumpeted in the popular press. "Filofax Madness" emphasized the grim desperation of charting one's life in an expensive little book, and "Waspmania" deplored the emotionally hollow worship of the discarded trappings of British aristocracy.
     Spy also has a genius for the unexpected interview. In one issue, a representative of DuPont, the makers of Teflon, was questioned as to whether the conglomerate had considered Ronald Reagan, the Teflon president, as a potential spokesman for their product. ("We negated it a long time ago," said DuPont. "It gives the trademark a bad name.")
     Spy's visual style has received almost as much notice — and imitation — as its writing. Spy's make-up is an explosion of typefaces and visual elements, thin border illustrations snaking across the tops of pages, and spatterings of tiny clip art images.
     "It can't look sober and serious," said Andersen. "So we had to invent a style that's appropriate to a magazine editorially aware of everything from Moby Dick to the Jetsons."
     "Spy has a lot of writing, crammed together," said art director Alexander Isley. "It's kind of like walking down the street in New York, with the signs and everything. It is not meant to be browsed through, it's meant to be read."
     "Waspmania" illustrates another Spy strongpoint: editorial purity. The article ruthlessly degraded designer Ralph Lauren, and while most magazines would think twice about ridiculing such a big-bucks advertiser, Spy didn't hesistate to run the piece.
     "We're not reckless, or self-destructive about it," said Andersen. "But what you see everywhere are editorial decisions that are marketing decisions as well, and you get things like New York Woman putting `Red, White and Bloomingdales' on their cover.
     "Once you say to yourself, `We're not going to truckle to advertisers,' its easier to stay with it," said Friend. "It's something we're proud of here."
     In spite of its cavalier attitude toward advertising, or perhaps because of it, Spy is enjoying soaring success.
     "We have thrillingly good demographics," said Morrison.
     Circulation, which started at 25,000, is now closing in on 100,000 copies a month, with 40 percent of its readers in cities outside the New York area. The magazine is particularly popular in Chicago, although distributors couldn't say how many copies are sold here.
     "It's the best-selling magazine we have here," said Patrick Ude, manager of News Two, 2939 N. Broadway, in the Lakeview East neighborhood.
     The magazine is also "perilously close" to turning a profit, something its business plan had not anticipated until 1991.
     "We thought we would be losing $50,000 an issue at this point," said Carter. "We're not losing a fraction of that; in fact, this is as close as you can come to profit and still lose money."
     While making money is certainly important, what particularly gratifies Carter and Andersen is that they, and not someone else, were the people who created Spy.
      "What would have driven us really, really crazy is if one of our friends had done this," said Carter. "We wouldn't be alive."
     "That's what drove us," added Andersen. "What if somebody else had done this? We'd spend our lives in bitterness."

           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 8, 1988

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Viruses don’t care if you’re lying or not

The Angel of Death striking a door during the plague of Rome. (Wellcome Collection)

     Reality intrudes.
     You can crumple up the X-ray, cover your ears and hum.
     Yet if a tumor is there, it remains, growing.
     You can refuse to believe your house is on fire. Call the person who tells you a liar.
     Yet your house still burns.
     That’s why I don’t yet despair about Donald Trump, his funhouse of lies, and the Americans who choose to believe him.
     Because while anyone can ignore truth, truth doesn’t ignore anyone. Declaring yourself great and actually being great are very different things. Greatness isn’t a state achieved by declaring it on your hat. Sorry to be the one to tell you.
     Not to underestimate the danger of what Republicans are doing, trying to establish a new American system built on the whim of one powerful individual, supported by a web of lies, where loyalty is the ultimate value — not honor, not honesty, not law.
     Nothing new here. We see this in lots of other places. Xi Jinping, the supreme leader of China, stands atop a pyramid of state suppression and genuflecting loyalty. Everyone must obey. The free speech guaranteed in their constitution is just another lie. Propaganda and news are the same thing.
     Yet reality intrudes.
     In late December, a new coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China and began to spread. A Chinese ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang went on social media and tried to sound the alarm. The local medical authority warned him that “any organizations or individuals are not allowed to release treatment information to the public without authorization.” In early January he was called to a police station, accused of “spreading rumors online” and “severely disrupting social order” and forced to sign a statement confessing his crime and promising to refrain from “unlawful acts.”
     But the virus was still spreading. 


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Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Famous American



     Stamp collecting is considered a benign pastime, without the risks inherent in, say, whiskey connoisseurship or bungee jumping.
     The hobby is not, however, without its perils.
     For instance, I shudder to think how much of my brain is filled with useless philatelic information that I can easily recall without checking, from the first American postal stamp (1847) to the first commemorative stamps (issued in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893) to the first living person honored on a United States postage stamp, Charles Lindbergh.
     That 1927 stamp shows his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, but not his face, because of a Postal Service policy that forbids depicting living persons on postage stamps. The USPS considered doing away with that regulation in 2011, then cooler heads prevailed. Which is why we don't have any Donald Trump postage stamps. Yet.
     I could go on and on. The 1930 Graf Zeppelin set? In 65 cent, $1.30 and $2.60 denominations. Green, brown and blue. The green is not to be confused with the 1933 Century of Progress zeppelin stamp, which is far less valuable. When I first got a job, in 1987, I considered celebrating by blowing the $600 or so the three-stamp set cost back then. (Not a good investment; you can buy them today for a thousand bucks on eBay).
     You never know when this stuff will pop up. I was at the Northbrook Post Office last week, sending the boys their new driver's licenses, which they got over Christmas break, to get the all-important gold star that somehow makes air travel more secure.
    I looked down on the counter, and noticed a plug for the new Walt Whitman stamp. Must have missed it when it was issued last year, to mark the bicentennial of his birth.
    Did I think, "Oh good, they're honoring the greatest American poet!" or "About time!"
    No, I did not.
    I thought, "Again? He's already in the 'Famous Americans' series of 1940."
    At home, it took me all of 10 seconds to lay my hands on the cover. Yes, I still have my collection.
    There's nothing more to say, than to hang my head in shame. I wish I had spent those years—approximately between 9 and 15—studying French or literature or some more valuable pursuit.
     I suppose I could throw out for discussion the whole idea of "Famous Americans." It sounds so dated, doesn't it? The Hall of Fame for Great Americans is a neglected anachronism tucked in a corner of the Bronx. "I want to be famous" sounds almost crazy, like something mass killers say, or deluded teens who'll end up in sex trafficking. Maybe it's just the word, "fame." Too much baggage at this point, and Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame have attritted to 15 seconds. To want to be famous is to aspire toward an illusion, to grasp at nothing. Then again, there's a lot of that going around.

Monday, February 10, 2020

Some covering fire in defense of the Tribune

News boy 1948, by Irving Penn
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)
      One does not often get beseeched, appealed to or entreated. I can’t remember seeing the word “rally” used, not as a noun referring to a gathering, but as a verb, demanding we come together and fight. But there it was, in a posting headlined, “NINA STATEMENT ON ALDEN GLOBAL PURCHASE OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE.” Right in the opening sentence:
“The Northern Illinois Newspaper Association today calls for journalists, news organizations, units of government and the general public to rally around Tribune Company employee efforts to maintain the integrity of one of our nation’s great news organizations. This statement follows reports that Alden Global, a New York hedge fund, has bought a 32 percent stake in Tribune Publishing.”
     “Journalists?” Hey, that’s me!
     My first thought — God, this is embarrassing — was, “Is the Sun-Times even a member of NINA?” We tend not to join that sort of thing. Save the $250. I checked NINA’s membership. The Hinsdalean. The Woodstock Independent. The Rock Island Argus. Thirteen publications and three individuals. The heart breaks. 

    Whew! I thought. Off the hook.
     Such a petty reaction made me reconsider. What did it even mean to “rally” around the Tribune? Send thoughts and prayers? Lash out at Alden? That loathsome vivisectionist of newspapers, buying them up, selling off assets, hacking away expenses, leaving behind a stripped corpse. Tribune writers are lining up to do that already, ignoring that Alden exists in a gold-plated empyrean of wealth far above the influence of public image. “What matters infamy if the cash be kept?” Juvenal writes.
     What hasn’t been said? There’s the Michael Ferro angle. Ferro sold out to Alden, a petty act of vindictiveness that hasn’t gotten enough scorn. I knew him, slightly, had lunch with him. He had his own wacky notions of where the paper should go — reporters would wear Google glasses and livestream news events that algorithms would automatically chop into videos. Maybe that’s still coming.


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Sunday, February 9, 2020

Vindictive, never vindicated.

The Funeral of Chrystom and Marcella Vindicating Herself, by William Hogarth
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     "I was thinking about you and your OED yesterday," writes faithful reader John Powers. "With The Cowardly Liar claiming vindication, then having Lt. Col. Vindman escorted from the White House vindictively, I wondered if the two words have similar roots, despite their seeming opposition. Sure enough, both derived from Latin roots that describe vengeance."
     He stopped there, noticing the common root.  But his observation demanded further digging.  What's the connection? Vindicta is indeed Latin for "vengeance," so "vindictive" is, in my Oxford, "given to revenge, having a revengeful disposition," a perfect description of our president. "Vendetta" comes from the same word
     A negative trait. So how does another of vindicta's children, "vindicate" end up meaning something positive? "To clear from censure, criticism, suspicion, or doubt by means of demonstration."  
    I have a theory. In our era, we think of proof of innocence as offering vindication. Due to evidence, argument. But in more rigidly religious times, a person could also be exonerated through punishment or vengeance, as seen in the first two definitions in the OED, 16th century usages that have to do with "to revenge" or "to punish." You did wrong, received punishment, and were thus redeemed in the eyes of God. Vindicated.
     Samuel Johnson, oddly, has no entry for either word in his 1755 dictionary. Daniel Webster cites the modern usages of "vindicate," but also presents it as a synonym for punish, quoting John Pearson's 1659 "Exposition of the Creed"—"God is more powerful to exact subjection, and to vindicate rebellion," noting such usage is "entirely obscure" in 1828, when the dictionary was published.
     I am an amateur etymologist, if that, and to avoid the risk of inflicting upon you some ghastly ignorant fancy, I ran the theory by an actual professional, British linguist Paul Anthony Jones, whom we met last week thanks to his observation that the word "hobby" derives from "hobbyhorse." (I'm currently reading his excellent book "The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities.")  He kindly replied:

Wholly possible that this development was late in both English and Ecclesiastical Latin of course—and oppositely, even if this change of meaning was already established in Latin before English caught on, all that does is shift this change of meaning further back in time, not alter the reason for it. (I hope that makes sense!!) Either way it’s a neat idea and seems perfectly plausible to me—it’d be interesting to see if any other words have followed a similar track of punishment->reward, and whether there’s a religious element to their development or not.
     So "plausible." While "plausible"—I feel obligated to point out in this age of smeared realities— is far from "correct," it seems a good point to end our examination, with only one thing left to add. Whether punishment eradicates crime is a valid philosophical and social question. What certainly does not erase a crime, now or in the past, is lying about it. Our mercurial president is incapable of knowing that. His vengeful supporters should know that but don't, or pretend they don't. Yet it is clear. Trump is eternally vindictive. And he will never be vindicated.

      

Saturday, February 8, 2020

St. Jane decorates the thronged and common road




     "Do you mind if I take a photograph of your monkey lamps?" I asked the woman behind the front desk at the St. Jane Hotel, 230 N. Michigan. "It's for my blog."
    Lauren Kaczperski, the hotel's executive meetings manager, said she did not, and added the lamps were custom-made for the St. Jane in Europe.
     "They're certainly special lamps," I said, stepping over to a corner of the lobby and snapping a few shots. I was on my way to Northwestern's downtown Medill graduate school to talk to a friend's class. But had a few minutes to spare. The Carbide and Carbon Building is one of my favorite Chicago buildings, for its brawny industrial name, Art Deco trim and hard-to-pin-down black/green color, so give it extra scrutiny in passing. Which is how I noticed the monkey lamps through the window.
     The St. Jane opened in 2018 in what used to be the Hard Rock Hotel Chicago. Kaczperski said they spent $30 million fixing up the place, which is now cooly elegant with a slightly funky, artistic vibe. The hotel is also named, delightfully, for Jane Addams, the tireless social reformer. Though one does wonder what the Nobel Peace Prize winner would think of a fancy hotel being named for her; she was concerned about the conditions faced by girls working in Chicago hotels, so I suppose she might not mind, provided the staff is treated well. She did once write, "We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by traveling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road," which could very well include introducing distracted travelers to the existence of the author of "Twenty Years at Hull House" by naming hotels in her honor.
     Nor were the lamps the only artistic touch. The wallpaper in the entrance is marbleized like the endpapers of a 19th century book. Hanging there is "Hustle Coat," where Chicago artist Nick Cave had lined a street vendor's black raincoat with the kind of glitzy baubles being sold. 
The St. Jane says "Hustle Coat" is one of only two Nick Cave public art installations in Chicago. 
     Maybe not quite “Domplatz, Mailand," the enormous square Gerhardt Richter painting that the Pritzker family bought for $3.8 million in 1998 to decorate the lobby of their new Park Hyatt up the street. Fifteen years later, perhaps realizing how the work had appreciated, they sold it off, fetching $37.1 million at Sotheby's, a record for a living artist. Think what a modern Jane Addams could do with that kind of money. 
     We talked a bit about the hotel, someplace to bear in mind if you are trying to place out-of-town guests: funkily designed, well located and courteously run. And they accept dogs at no additional charge.  She offered me a tour, but I begged off—couldn't be late for that class.
"Hustle Coat," by Nick Cave

   
   

Friday, February 7, 2020

Iowa caucus mess offers lessons to Dems


     Monday’s Iowa Democratic caucus disaster already feels like ancient history, with Tuesday’s teary Queen-for-a-Day State of the Union and Wednesday’s shameful Senate impeachment acquittal in the meantime.
     But before the smoldering wreckage disappears in our rearview mirror, it’s worth a second look. Self-criticism is a liberal superpower. We can consider ourselves, assess candidly, recognize what is wrong and, in theory, fix it.
     So let’s take a look. Shadow Inc., an obscure tech company founded by former Hillary Clinton campaign staffers, was supposed to be the secret weapon to bring the Democrats up to speed against well-oiled Republican technology efforts. Instead, it thoroughly botched what should have been a dramatic Democratic milepost to the 2020 presidential election. What happened?
     I spoke with Shlomo Engelson Argamon, interim chair of the computer science department at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He began by cautioning that neither he nor anybody knows exactly what went wrong yet and won’t for a couple weeks.
     That said, there are obvious take-aways that can considered right now.
     “In software development, a Silicon Valley attitude is: ‘Move fast and break things,’” Argamon said. “Build things quickly, throw them out there, see what happens. Get feedback from users. If they break, fix them and improve them. Learn by deploying.”


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