The fall of Eliot Spitzer, the zealous crusader who relaxed with high-priced hookers, has scrambled the propriety of New York's media institutions. Not only was the staid New York Times first to publish the identity of Spitzer's escort; the latest cover of Adam Moss' usually high-minded New York Magazine is borrowed from the more provocative playbook of Spy or Radar.
New York's website carries articles from Adam Moss' excellent magazine, arty pictures of a naked Lindsay Lohan, as well as some infuriatingly intelligent blogs. But how to arrange this embarrassment of content? nymag.com has just gone through an exhaustive process to streamline its messy front page. The result, which is being passed around ahead of the official unveiling: even messier. This isn't supposed to look like a magazine, people. After the jump, before and after screenshots. See whether you can tell the difference.
Every time I get down about skyrocketing rent and service changes to the F train, I turn to New York magazine. It just reminds me that I live in the greatest city of all time, ever, and if I ever moved to a place with fresh air, I would die from lack of exposure to fusion cuisine. This week, it's The Best of The Greatest City of All Time, Ever, Issue. To ensure that New York magazine could fully illustrate just how great New York City is, the magazine commissioned designs for 25 covers. And then, because the spirit of New York and New York lies in wasteful, reckless spending, they only used two. I got the one on the right, but I'm thinking about going out to newsstands to buy the other one for commemorative purposes. That's just how awesome New York is. [Folio]
Vanessa Grigoriadis already disclosed her bipolar condition in a New York magazine cover story on the mental illness. So the personal revelations in a new documentary film project aren't exactly news. But the deceptively cute profile writer-whose personal charm masks an incisive and ferocious journalist-does come out with an intriguing line. "As someone who is over-dramatic, and over-sensitive, and moody and attention-seeking, and interested in other people's approval. All of those things add up to not being bipolar but just who I am." No wonder, when Grigoriadis explored the angst of the creative underclass in last autumn's profile of Gawker, she captured the culture of web writing so well. I hadn't realized that the symptoms of bipolar condition so closely mapped to the personality of the archetypal self-obsessed blogger. After the jump, the clip: the money quote comes at 4:58.
As the great Karl Marx said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. It's a saying that applies quite perfectly to the recreation, by the sad old Village Voice, of a cover of New York magazine which was itself a recreation of a famous set of photos of the actress, Marilyn Monroe. New York's notorious cover featured a naked Lindsay Lohan, a troubled actress who's modeled herself on Marilyn Monroe, and was taken by the same photographer who captured the drug-addled mid-century star so shortly before her death. Village Voice's model? The faded weekly's 52-year-old gay gossip columnist, the owl-like* Michael Musto, whose natural shyness is only overcome by the sheer force of his desire for exposure. After the jump, an original image of Marilyn Monroe, framed by New York's cover, and this week's Voice.
With layoffs, cutbacks and buyouts everywhere else, the New Yorker is probably the only magazine around that's actually hiring. Kelefa Sanneh and Ariel Levy are joining the magazine, making them respectively the second black guy and first out lesbian on staff. The two are expected to report, presumably on cultural trends. And with these hires, the New Yorker is taking an aggressive step to up their cool quotient.
Lindsay Lohan has never been one to shy away from press, no matter how bad or embarrassing it may be. And following right on the heels of her controversial nip-baring photo shoot for New York Magazine, Lindsay's apparently become so fond of showing off her T&A that she's decided to arrange various photo shoots displaying each of her five tattoos. And though the tats' placement aren't, as far as we know, placed in the vicinity of body parts the revealing Marilyn Monroe-inspired shoot didn't dare show, we wouldn't be surprised if a nouveau tat representing some lame Chinese saying for sobriety appeared in the exhibit, premiering this Thursday in New York. Images of LiLo's known tattoos after the jump; it's up to you to figure out how highbrow artists are going to manage to turn the oh-so-original stars and John Lennon lyrics into masterpieces:
The Men's Health editor, who blames flabby abs for all male ailments in a best-selling recent book, threatens to display his washboard stomach. Zinczenko was putting aside his media persona, hetero lifestyle coach and aggressive top, to watch the Oscars with the gays at New York magazine's party last night at West Village restaurant, the Spotted Pig. Later in the evening, Zinczenko forced New York's editor, Adam Moss, to strip off his shirt. Hot! (At any rate, for the magazine industry).
New York got 20 million page views on Monday and Tuesday. Non-Lohan content "received between 2 million and 3 million page views." Further: maybe we are wrong about everything, or some things, at least? "A spokeswoman says New York has sold 500 more subscriptions this week than in an average week." Sure to be 500 very disappointed people. Unless they really need to know the best doctors in New York or why everyone hates Park Slope. [Portfolio]
An inspired move by New York to play on Lindsay Lohan's obsession with Marilyn Monroe. Adam Moss' magazine scored one of the big web hits of the week, by persuading the Hollywood actress to strip for the same photographer who took the last, erotic photographs of Monroe before she committed suicide. Like I said, inspired. But not very original, it turns out. If Lindsay Lohan was paying homage to the mid-century bombshell, New York should have explained that it was itself paying homage to rival Vanity Fair. In 2006, Lohan channeled her alter ego in a spread for Graydon Carter's magazine. The styling? Borrowed from the first pictures of a 19-year-old Marilyn Monroe, at the beach in a white bathing suit. To think that, only two years ago, Lohan could play the ingenue without ridicule; now she's more credible as a washed-up actress on suicide watch. (Clockwise from top left: the early Marilyn, by photographer Andre De Dienes; Vanity Fair's February 2006 cover; this week's New York; and, the inspiration, the mid-century actress' "last sitting" with Bert Stein. Below: larger photos.)
Magazines are dying and the web is surging, but maybe there is a web ad bust on the way, and also maybe the web is what is killing magazines, or maybe no one reads anymore, and (former Gawker managing editor) Choire Sicha is trying to figure it all out in today's Observer. He's also trying to figure out Rolling Stone's Britney Spears cover and New York's Lindsay Lohan cover, the two most important magazine covers of this century. But, about that Rolling Stone piece—we all saw the good bits, because they were leaked, by RS, to Perez, but maybe we mostly missed the more "important" thinky bits of Vanessa Grigoriadis' story, because RS only put the first 606 words on their website? Regardless, Rolling Stone had their "best week ever in the history of the Web site," even without the story. So maybe all they needed were the photo galleries? "Until the people on the business side are sure they're going to replace that revenue, that's how it's going to be," says an editor. Maybe we don't actually need content anymore, just the idea of content? That will save everyone a bit of time and money!
As we pointed out yesterday, Lindsay Lohan's nude body [pic via New York] is only interesting insofar as it generates lofty intellectual analysis. What underlying effect might the photo shoot have on Lindsay, her career, and American culture as a whole? Radar rounded up reaction to these questions from several esteemed media observers (including Ronn Torossian), but we decided to turn to the world's foremost experts in these matters: the Gawker commenters. After the jump, five incisive observations from two commenters that summarize—in verse, no less!— this sordid moment in our history.
Click to viewAh, President's Day. We cannot think of a greater way to celebrate the memory of Millard Fillmore and James Garfield than to spend the next ten or fifteen minutes (hours?) rifling through New York's nude photoshoot with Lindsay Lohan. Just last week, we were celebrating Lindsay's new Sober Face, but even we must admit that it pales in comparison to her new Sober Nipples. Which, we might add, are on full display (!) in two of the spread's ten slides. As far as career rejuvenation stunts are concerned, we are predicting that this tastefully titillating homage to Marilyn Monroe's "Last Sitting" is poised to sit alongside Drew Barrymore's role in Poison Ivy in the pantheon of greatest breast-baring comebacks of all-time. A few of the tamer (but still NSFW!) selections follow after the jump; the rest can be found in this week's edition of New York. You have been warned.
You hoped the cover of Time Out was the pinnacle of Julia Allison's inexplicable celebrity? Tough. The Star magazine talking head is letting slip that she's being profiled for the New York Times. (Allison gives a little oops to indicate that she really should be more discreet. Yes, she should.) The former dating columnist was to have been subject of a piece in New York magazine, until editor Adam Moss determined she was "over-exposed". And that was before the Time Out magazine cover, and the vast output of drivel on Allison's personal blog.
Ariel Levy's New York Magazine profile of Clay Aiken, the fey second season American Idol runner up and new star of the Broadway musical Spamalot, is as peculiarly entertaining as the singing sensation himself. Judging by his statements in this interview, Aiken, who is essentially a fried chicken lollipop made animate, does not battle with his sexuality as popular gossip would have you believe. Rather, he simply embraces a strange, forced asexualism that he credits to his busy work schedule. (Though, he may be, um, forgetting a few things.) Also embraced by the lanky leader of the Claymates is a silly, lonely yokelism that, the piece suggests, will both isolate and embolden him in cold old New York. While Aiken may sit at home every night, alone in his apartment, Levy calls him a "Promosexual", and posits that that bit of him may fit in perfectly with many a self-selling New Yorker. But before she comes to this somewhat sunny conclusion, she tears into him in hilariously bitchy fashion. My favorite segment of the article lies after the jump. [NYM]
Sunday's New York piece on Bourne director Doug Liman was basically your typical boilerplate profile of the weird genius. Annoying-but-brilliant, healthily despised, and-for the purposes of this here piece-highly redeemable. That is, if you don't count the debasing way the director, son of a hero of civic litigation, treats his assistant. Less relevant to his character, but still a major put-off, we hear Liman doesn't brush his teeth!
"In a sample of 314 tenth-graders in a wealthy suburban community, the rate of 'clinically significant anxiety' was 5 to 9 percent higher than the national average, and among girls, the rate of 'clinically significant depression' was three times the national norm. Drug use exceeded not just national averages but that of low-income high-school kids she followed in a parallel study." [NYM]
Let's Talk About Love is the latest record to be given the treatment where an eminent critic ruminates at book-length about a seminal album—OK Computer and Highway 61 Revisited and Doolittle were previous picks in Continuum 33 1/3's series. Don't worry, though, this doesn't actually mean that Celine Dion has somehow become ironically hip. Instead, Carl Wilson has ended up writing about taste itself: "Wilson tends to side with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that taste is never disinterested: It's a form of social currency, or 'cultural capital,' that we use to stockpile prestige." What a cool idea! Of course, the way this idea of taste-democratization gets turned into a New York headline, online at least, is: 'Why Celine Dion Is Better Than You Think.' [NY]
