'His tiny Asian wife'....yesterday's Deadspin

I've told star writers when I didn't think the lead to the column made sense or read badly or a chunk of it didn't work. The key is that you have to pick your spots because if you do it too often they will think you are doing it to puff yourself up and the natural inclination is to fight you. They have to understand, even if you don't especially like each other, that you are trying to help them, like suggesting a different golf club for a difficult shot. But shit-canning an entire column? Well, I can't recall ever really wanting to do that with a "name" -- and even with a second- or third-tier writer, if I think it's that bad, it really ought to be brought to the attention of the SE (for many reasons).

I don't read Dan enough anymore to have a grasp of his usual work, but with any writer, you have to measure them over the long haul. It is a very rare writer (Whicker) who is going to be good every day. And the fact is, if Derek Jeter makes a couple errors, you don't pull him from the game. It's easy to say "we won't run it if it doesn't meet our standards," but people who say it are full of shit. There are times when major monthly magazines have absolutely nothing in them that is worth my time and money, but as a customer I don't dump them over one bad issue -- and they're all on a month-to-month basis with me, because I subscribe to no magazine, I buy all of them on newsstands. It takes a year of consistent shit (hello, GQ magazine) before I end a relationship of years' standing. I think that is how sane readers treat their relationship with any writer that they've enjoyed in the past.

I'm not a satire guy. I liked Buchwald when I was a teen-ager, but then it seemed his satire was the same old script over and over, and I stopped reading him regularly over the past 20 years because it got old. Now no way does Dan's attempt at satire compare with Art Buchwald's best satire, but I'm not sure it's any worse than Buchwald's worst satire. In fact, it reads to me a lot like bad Buchwald.

But ... did Buchwald get worse or did my taste in humor change? I think it's the latter. I became desensitized to clean humor because of shock jocks and Richard Pryor. And people will become desensitized to the "cleverness" you allege on the part of blogs, same way we got desensitized in the 1970s to every third-rate imitator of Richard Pryor saying "shit" and "fuck." Once the shock value expires, it comes down to substance -- and not many people can do it over the long haul. To believe that there is terrific humor in great supply on blogs is to demean what is and always has been a very rare skill. It has never been in great supply anywhere -- even TV, with millions of dollars at stake, produces sit-coms that just aren't funny. And I am to believe that this wealth of comedic genius on blogs has yet to be hired away by TV and Hollywood, let alone poor old newspapers?

And like you, DD, I have no idea what my original point was, either.

 

A fine post, Frank.

Also, in all seriousness, how can anyone stand to read GQ anymore? Nothing pisses me off more, as a magazine reader, than having to hunt for the fucking table of contents when a magazine begins with a 200-hundred-page sea of ads. (It's why the New Yorker is great. Want to know what's in the magazine this month? It's always on page 4.) I really liked Michael Paternitti and Tom Carson when they were at Esquire, I worship Peter Richmond, and Matthew Teague is as good as anyone under 40 (though I think he left the magazine), but GQ is full of so much bullshit, I refuse to work that hard to find their work. I'm sure I'm missing out on some really good writing, but I simply cannot stomach 45 pages of Georgio Armani ads just to read a blow-job celebrity profile. Unless they were backing up a dump truck full of money and dumping it on your lawn, I can't understand why someone would leave Esquire for GQ. Has GQ done ANY significant political journalism in the last six years? And good war reporting? Sports writing? Because that's the kind of stuff Esquire does all the time.

Clearly they have a shit load of ads, so I guess someone is buying it, but I should be their target demographic, and I couldn't be less interested.

 

Once I stopped laughing at the Kissing Suzy Kolber blog, I was deeply offended...

 

Yeah? So this is not a cheap ripoff of "I'm Ted Fucking Williams." My bad. Original, knee-slapping stuff.

 

Wearing Jewess Jeans, I presume.

 

Along those same lines, has any magazine fallen farther faster than Maxim? I used to sit down and read that cover to cover the day it showed up in my mailbox (not because it was top-notch journalism ... because it was funny). Now it's neither. Their "hard-hitting" pieces are garbage and their "funny stuff" hasn't been remotely funny in months, maybe a year. I mean, I don't even chuckle at their jokes anymore. Now I'm lucky if I read half the mag before the next one shows up. WTF happened over there?

 

Who knows what happens. the only thing tha matters is that saps keep purchasing the mag.