brunch bunch
Dear
Page Six Magazine,
So I think I hinted at this last week, but I've pretty much reversed my position on your magazine. It's become my favorite thing to "read" on Sundays, from Lydia Hearst's awfulsome column to "Block Watch" to the fashion spread you did this week on how to dress appropriately for the neighborhood you are gentrifying: (leggings, ankle boots and flannels in Bushwick; high-waisted stone washed jeans in the lower-Lower East; why is this
true?). Your piece on Luciano Pavarotti's second wife Nicoletta was
totes Heather Mills part deux, and as we've already discussed your profile of Angie Harmon was like cyanide to our haterade! But don't let me get
too excited; I'm pretty sure that everything else that comes out on Sunday seems a little
stale all of a sudden. After the jump, a roundup of the competition — from
PARADE to the
Times Magazine — and a few lessons I think you could still stand to learn.
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memo to margi
Dear
Page Six Magazine,
Up till now I've been critiquing your pages on grounds of exclusive content, originality, your success or lack thereof at beginning a celebrity profile with a scene at a restaurant wherein the celebrity orders a meal with carbohydrates.You and I both know this is a false premise.
Page Six Magazine will live and die by the same rules observed by every other magazine and color lifestyle section supplementing print newspapers across the country, which is its ability to convince advertisers women are leisurely flipping through it at brunch Sunday morning, when so many of those critical unplanned buying decisions are made. Your competition is not just the
New York Times Sunday Styles Section, but
PARADE and the
Wall Street Journal's two weekend editions. And anyway, to that end, this week you won, by a long shot. An informal scoreboard, separated according to theme:
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memo to margi
Dear
Page Six Magazine,:
Congratulations! Like a true target audience member I read your latest issue intently over brunch, simultaneously transfixed and appalled, a combination of emotions I generally associate exclusively with the
New York Times Sunday Styles Section. There was the cover line, attributed to some actress named Kristin Chenoweth with whose career I was entirely unfamiliar with but who cares, you got her to say: "I'LL GO TO AFRICA AND GET A BABY IF THAT'S WHAT I WANT." Then there was model and Cisco Adlerdoer Lydia Hearst's column on playing beer pong and getting matching tattoos with Cisco and their four best dudefriends: "We thought it would be a good way to bond and distinguish ourselves — I feel we are living in a very conformist society... We want to create an Andy Warhol-esque atmosphere in our own time — we call it Factory 2.0— where people can have creative outbursts."
Jesus. Both Kristin and Lydia currently live in L.A., but the unintentionally funny blend of haughtiness/outrageous self-aggrandizement/puke-inducing entitlement/ misc. cluelessness was sooooo not quarantined to the Golden State!
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memo to margi
Dear
Page Six Magazine,
Decent issue this week! I know, I
always say that, only to go off some tangent involving me shitting all over something because I can't help myself it's what I
do, but before I get to that I'd like to point out the serendipity of your feature, "Congrats! You're Out Of A Job!" by Helen Kirwan-Taylor, a writer we last met writing about how
boring she found her children to be. Kirwan-Taylor is the type of gal who tells it like it is, and her piece explains how getting fired is basically the new rehab, which is to say, the type of life event once synonymous with shame and hermitage that is now simply just a milestone in the life of anyone important enough to "spin" it as an opportunity to start fresh and devote himself full-time to the cathartic business that is famewhoring! "The minute you get fired, go out and have a party," the story quotes an expert saying — Kirwan-Taylor cops to doing this herself. Certainly the article didn't come a moment too soon for
Stan O'Neal, who's about to pocket $160 million in deferred compensation after being sacked over those $8 billion in surprise subprime mortgage write-offs.
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memo to margi
Dear
Page Six Magazine,
Holy Denim, Batman! It's Ally Hilfiger on your cover, and my does she almost make up for the whole "looking exactly like her uglyass dad" thing with smokin hotness! So first things first: Congrats on the "get." Ally is the reason we're all here, watching roughly ninety hours a week of "unscripted" television programming on the lives of people so hideously privileged/otherwise unremarkable that finding redeeming characteristics within their peer groups becomes something of a strenuous brain exercise. Remember Ally? Sure, she was absurdly wealthy and clueless and ignorant and not even particularly attractive and had no real sense of style, but Gawd, compared to that fugly friend of hers, Jaime, she was frickin Angelina Jolie! And speaking of which, those two
invented the reality friend breakup: how is it Nicole-Paris/L.C.-Heidi get all the credit for this? Where the fuck has Ally been all these goddamn years she should have been taking credit for what she hath wrought, anyway? Chicago? A Mongolian yurt? Would you believe it if I said "rehab"?
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memo to margi
Dear
Page Six Magazine,
This is not going to go into the
P6 annals as one of your best week. Your cover girl Samaire Armstrong's whole "I don't really drink" comment hit the newsstands
the day after she checked into rehab, and, lessee.... a whopping 8 1/2 pages of ads. T-Mobile, Mercedes, Icelandair, Bucks County....
Bucks County??? Wait a sec; the readers you seek are twentysomething girls who have managed to get
away from the Benz and bed-n-breakfast strewn likes of Bucks County, am I right? That's what I get from your fashion pages, which I would categorize as "hipster." (Like, your cute feature about layering pieces: only hipsters would layer shit like that, albeit in different colors.) But then there are the celeb photo shoots: all soft lines and sparkly diamonds and evening gowns. Confusing! So you've got a dash of bipolar disorder — and a feature on bipolar disorder all in the same week; approps! That's not so bad. Despite what the story would have you believe, bipolar's is not that uncommon or life-altering, it's just a dangerous distractions from properly editing passages like this, courtesy your "Socializer" columnist Kelly Kiloren Bensimon's page:
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memo to margi
Dear
Page Six Magazine editor Margi Conklin,
Hi! Long time no ombuds. I meant to get to you earlier on this, and by the time I got to it I wrote this really long missive that I'm editing now because good advice gets lost when you don't cut to the chase. So first off, the third issue of your magazine was another overall improvement, with the exception of Hayden Whatserface. (Her outfit: don't want!) But a widely-read (at least, among people I know) piece called "They Need Weed To Succeed," by the (prodigiously talented) Emily Gould, an editor at our big brother site Gawker and former raging pothead, gave me a chance to expound upon something I spend a lot of time thinking about, being someone who basically recycles the same ten posts every day for a living: How to dress up a magazine Mad-Lib. (Rule of thumb: more anecdote, less adjective!)
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memo to margi
Dear
Page Six Magazine Editor In Chief Margi Conklin,
In Jezebel's short life I've already seen a few women's magazines die, even more when you count the ones with fatwas. But yours is the first women's magazine to be born into this trying time, and I have to be honest with you when it
sucks, even though I wrote a whole 150-word item for your most recent issue because I like your editors and am a whore. Believe me: I want you to survive, and thrive, in part because I know a lot of you and how smart (and thin!) you are, but in larger part because, unlike
Glamour and
US and all the crap in between, you don't have to sell copies. You're a gift-with-purchase. Meaning you don't "have" to resort to inane cover lines and "best jeans to fit your body!" features to vie for newsstand sales. You don't "have" to fellate celebrities because you live and die by your brutally-Photoshopped cover. I put "have" in quotes because I think it's a fallacy that women's magazines make so much money they "have" to be retarded, and to that end let me tell you a little story from the Thirty Mile Zone... (TMZ)
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Jezebel
