Hey, Big Spender!
The Times's new Distinction magazine joins a fine tradition of vapid local glossies
Among the insights into L.A. society I gleaned from the premiere (Sept./Oct.) issue of Distinction, the new bimonthly magazine published by the Los Angeles Times's parent Tribune Company, is this: Art Luna is not just a hairstylist but a "beloved hairstylist-cum-landscape-designer" and "a great human being." This may not be all that distinct from insights gleaned from the telephone-book-weight fall issue of the 18-month-old L.A. Confidential ("The onset of fall doesn't have to mean increased body fat") whose big scoop ("What Maria really thinks") about cover subject Arnold Schwarzenegger is precisely this: "Maria is 100% supportive." Equally similar is the September Angeleno's fourth anniversary issue ("Hollywood's newest hunk" Raoul Bova wore his seersucker Armani jacket three days in a row, "but does that make him any less yummy?"). As well as the October Los Angeles (Disney Hall is "a place where tourists and residents will go," theorizes editor-in-chief Kit Rachlis, "because, in an elemental way, Disney Hall will make them feel better"). But in a tough media economy, it's always impressive to see an ad-laden new kid on the block.
Now I'm sure that Los Angeles, which is a glossy city magazine with occasionally interesting articles, not a glossy controlled-circulation magazine where occasionally interesting writers sometimes go slumming, will take umbrage at being tossed into this group. But, let's face it, these mags all compete for the same ad dollars from cruise companies and day spas and makers of overpriced leather goods, and they're all piled together in those gratis coffee-table arrangements in upmarket hotel rooms. Besides that, they share a blandly earnest sensibility so completely irony-free that the folks at Distinction evidently saw nothing funny in giving their "luxury lifestyle" mag a name that evokes the working-girl bump-and-grind anthem "Hey, Big Spender." As in: "The minute you walked in the joint, I could tell you were a man of ..."
Granted, there is a certain L.A. tradition that magazines should be distracting, like catalogs, rather than engaging, with articles you actually talk about and remember. "My wife and I have subscribed to Los Angeles for more than 25 years," a TV producer once told me over lunch.
"Really? What do you like best about it?"
"Oh, we never actually read it," he said. "We've just always gotten it."
The business here seems to attract those with a flip-through sensibility. "I don't read magazines!" said Annie Flanders, who in 1982 founded Details in New York and a few years ago was the creative consultant for the short-lived Glue, a hip Silver Lake/Los Feliz magazine started by fashion writer Laurie Pike, currently Distinction's editor-in-chief. "I know it sounds ridiculous," Flanders giggled, sounding as if for some reason I wouldn't believe her, "but I don't!"
I do get depressed now and then by the complete fatuousness of our local glossy media, because I used to write for the now-defunct Buzz, which - and obviously I'm prejuduced - did have, for better or worse, an attitude. This extended beyond the office. My fellow former Buzz columnist Sandra Tsing Loh and I used to amuse each other for hours on the phone reading aloud particularly smarmy letters-from-the-editor in competing local glossies. (L.A. Style in its waning days, as I recall, was a special favorite - before it was bought and killed by Buzz, which was bought and killed a few years later by Los Angeles.) We came up with a character, Crappy Hackington, who served as a kind of shorthand reference for our regular gripefests about rancid local journalism. It's thanks to Buzz, in fact, that I developed the habit of quickly scanning the room at parties for people who hate me.
Of course, Buzz was still a city magazine, and therefore had its own share of fatuous service pieces and celebrity covers, as we were well aware. The week it died, Sandra devoted one of her NPR radio commentaries to the state of L.A. magazines in general: "Call it Los Angeles magazine, Buzz, New West, L.A. Style, L.A. People, L.A. Hats," she said, "there is this totemic Los Angeles ur-magazine that one will always be able to grab as one whips through the airport ... [on the cover is] some waify actress with beautiful skin. Who actually, once you start reading her cover interview, is SO much more down-to-earth than you thought. Before you became a hip, savvy reader of ... this magazine."
But it is possible to do even advertiser-pleasing stories for luxury lifestyle magazines with a certain flair, which is why I get frustrated with the limp execution of our hometown product. Devastatingly snarky British writer A.A. Gill, recently assigned by Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter to take on cultural sacred cows, made his name writing for the U.K. society magazine The Tatler, where his incessantly needling style extended even to his contributor's notes. (I still remember one from the early '90s: "Although married and a father, Gill was once arrested for calling a policeman 'darling.'") Distinction also bills itself a society magazine - except that in it, society is taken extremely seriously, and thus is extremely boring. But guess what? It really doesn't have to be.
The cover subject of Distinction's first issue, for instance, is philanthropist Lisa Taylor Jones, an investment banker's wife and former model famous in the '70s for photographer Helmut Newton's S&M-inspired Vogue fashion layouts. Reading Distinction society editor Merle Ginsberg's ploddingly fawning profile, I kept being haunted by the nagging feeling that Jones really is more interesting than she seemed in this piece. And it turned out I was right. Because - and here I had to double-check my assignment ledger to make sure (how's that for an I've-been-doing-this-too-long Crappy Hackington moment?) - it turned out I'd interviewed Jones myself, for Harper's Bazaar in 1991.
Now Bazaar is also a puffpiece-filled glossy that caters to advertisers (and, therefore, subjects). I remembered that I'd had to write the Jones story while being bugged by frantic, twice-daily calls from Bazaar's then-west coast editor, Nancy Dinsmore, who kept futilely pleading that I somehow work the name of a certain tableware shop into the story. (Evidently she owed them for some reason.) And I'm not claiming that my own Lisa Taylor Jones piece wasn't fawning; it just wasn't ploddingly fawning. Distinction's didn't have to be, either.
I will say it's a pretty magazine. Or, as the song goes, "Good looking, so refined ... " But honestly, can't a magazine whose title evokes a dance-hall floozy theme song have a little sass?Published: 09/25/2003
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