Whenever my consort, the lovely Ms. F.U.N.K.L.E., is laid out with fatigue, ennui, or the after-effects of some overindulgence or other, she retires to the bed and calls for the same prescription: a pile of rags. Not dishclothes or schmattas, mind you, but a particular kind of magazine: the guilty pleasure, the time-waster, the brain-vacation facilitator. For her, this generally means some combination of: InStyle, InStyle "The Look", People, Harper's Bazaar, and/or Jane. I feel compelled to point out on her behalf that this does not, in any way, constitute an endorsement of these magazines; in fact, they run the gamut from hopelessly fluffy to, at times, teeth-grindingly inane. Which, with rags, is precisely the point.

I have often eyed her rags jealously, and lamented the lack of any suitable male-oriented equivalents. Where are the rags for boys? I'm not looking for the new Spy, just something to read on the toilet or while nursing a hangover. Unfortunately, men's magazines are pretty much split into two groups. First, there's the Magazines for My Dad (well, not my dad, who's always been more of a Scientific American kind of guy, but, presumably, for somebody's dad). This category includes, of course, the two titans, GQ and Esquire, and all other magazines characterized by the fact that, despite their literary pretensions, every page -- even those devoted to bring-you-up-to-date articles about, say, Aimee Mann or Joaquin Phoenix -- is subliminally suffused with the unspoken anxiety of erectile dysfunction, male pattern baldness, and vague, unarticulated regrets about not having had more sexual encounters that involved Catholic schoolgirls' uniforms. In short, it's obvious to anyone scanning through GQ or Esquire that their target reader, despite the magazines's collective protestations, hovers somewhere around age fifty-five. (Exhibit A: Their tireless devotion to articles about suits -- where to buy them, when to wear them, how to clean them, what ties to combine with them. Personally, I am pushing thirty, and I have not one single male peer who wears a suit to work once a year, let alone every day.)

The second category is Magazines for Guys I Spent the Better Part of My High School and University Days Trying to Avoid: included herein, Maxim, FHM, Gear, Front, etc. etc. etc. You either go for this kind of frat-boy, party humour, "tits, tits, more tits, and then we'll show you tits" kind of approach or you don't. I don't.

So my hopes for the newest incarnation of Details were exceedingly, even unrealistically, high. Details was, once, several decades ago, a pretty good magazine. By now, most everyone must know at least the cursory details of the Details back story, but here's the point-form version: Downtown New York mag bought by Condé Nast, becomes well-regarded -- even revered -- title under editor James Truman, who cultivates a mix of snappy writing, urban attitude, and eye candy into a solid example of the perfect men's rag. Truman gets promoted; mag falters under successor, Joe Dolce, who skews it "too gay," at least for advertisers' tastes; new editor, Michael Something-or-other, brought in, redesigns mag, makes it worse, is banished, last seen spearheading extreme golf magazine. Condé Nast pushes panic button in light of Maxim's success, hires Mark Golin, Maxim editor, to helm new Details; it becomes Maxim Lite, it sucks, it fails, it gets shitcanned. Now, Condé Nast's sister company, Fairchild, has taken over the title and given its editorial stewardship to twenty-eight-year-old wunderkind Daniel Peres. First issue hits stands this month.

So...is it any good?

As rags go -- yes, it is. The most impressive attribute of this new incarnation is that it tries to hew a middle row between the boobs-and-beer lad mag and the Rogaine-pitching dad mag, and, for the most part, it succeeds. The first few pages, however, were not promising: start with the shirtless Robert Downey Jr. on the cover -- post-graduate theories about the mainstreaming of homoeroticism aside, in my experience, most straight men don't want to look at pictures of other straight men without their shirts on, unless it's next to a coverline that says "Get These Abs Now!" -- then proceed to the first thing in the magazine, a requisite bits and bites section, called, groaningly, "Know and Tell." This is a humdrum collection of factoids (most interesting: a six-year-old Sebastian Junger was babysat by the man who became the Boston Strangler; least interesting: two cocaine-centric movies are coming out this fall.) This section is kept mercifully short -- rather than the thousands of pages of useless ephemera that kick off every issue of Maxim -- and once we wade into the meat of the magazine, we find, to our surprise, that it is, actually, meaty.

Editor Peres points out in his opening note that there's an unusual number of stories in the premiere issue about kids of famous people: Cameron (son of Michael) Douglas; Eric (son of Michael) Eisner; Jakob (son of Bob) Dylan; and Robert (son of Robert) Downey, Jr. The upside is that all of these pieces are good reads, even though I liked the Robert Downey-in-prison story better when I read it in Vanity Fair. But Details does score a scoop of sorts in getting Jakob Dylan to talk about his famous father, something he's been famously reluctant to do in the past. And the profile of Michael Douglas's ne'er-do-well offspring, Cameron (to be fair, not a prodigious ne'er-do-well; after all, if you're the son of someone famous, drunken car crashes and well-publicized coke busts are almost obligatory) offers up this golden nugget from the twenty-one-year-old, on the privileges afforded a celebrity progeny at Universal Studios Theme Park: "We got these special passes to cut all the lines, ya know what I'm sayin'? That was so much fucking fun I can't even tell you. 'Cause the shit thing about going to a theme park is that you have to wait in line for, like, forever."

The feature articles are solid as well -- a finely executed piece on billionaire arriviste Paul Allen; a nice take on TV impresario Darren Star; and a stiff but readable look at dead dingbat millionaire Mark Hughes of Herbalife fame. None of the pieces approach the kind of writing that enlivened the old, old Details -- pieces like Chris Heath's famous profile of the Lobster man, an abusive, venal circus freak whose kids were put on trial for his murder -- but they're about eight steps up from the stuff of, say, Stuff, and a nice break from the self-consciously literary prose churned out by the writers at Esquire, who all sound so similar that you wonder whether editor David Granger is growing them on some sort of pod farm.

There are a few missteps in the new Details, the worst of which is "45 minutes," an apparently recurring feature in which an interviewer spends -- you guessed it -- forty-five minutes with some celebrity. In the premiere issue, we get to spend three-quarters of an hour basking in the star-wattage of...Joan Osborne! Perhaps this article should have been called "43 more minutes than you wanted to spend with..." All we get out of this goofy contrivance is the pleasure of watching some poor hack try to squeeze meaning out of his encounter through an excruciatingly detailed play-by-play:

"It's a dreary morning in Brooklyn, and Joan Osborne wants out of the city. She's snapping wintergreen Dentyne, tapping her foot, doing a distracted, impatient dance. We're waiting at the entrance to a parking garage in her quiet, leafy neighbourhood while an attendant retrieves her 1961 Mercury Meteor, which she'll pilot to her weekend house upstate....'Oh, my baby!' she purrs, and climbs onto the bench seat. The interior is powder blue, dappled with little flecks of sparkle. It has the metallic musk of a classic car -- not the trace of patchouli odor-tree you'd expect to find in the car of a Lilith alum. Osborne forgoes the seat belt, slips the transmission into Drive, and blasts out onto the street...." OKAY. WE GET IT. After several such paragraphs, you expect the article to descend into: "Osborne intakes a lung full of life-giving oxygen, mixed with nitrogen and carbon dioxide, as is the case in the atmosphere of this planet we call Earth. Her nostrils flare as the air rushes in past the Sesamoid cartilages and up through her septum. 'Ahh,' she remarks, gripping the steering wheel. 'Air.'"

In true rag-errific fashion, however, the misfires are few, and the best part of the new Details is how it looks. This is eye-candy supremo, from a stunning shot of a "sun machine" room where architects test out models of their buildings, checking to see how light and shadow will fall, to a fantastic photo essay of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his Bavarian-kitsch-filled home, that's more telling about the star than any written profile could hope to be. The style spread, with Joseph Fiennes in Sicily, mixes lush fashion images with found bits of Sicilian flavour -- weathered photos, architectural details -- and climaxes with an odd but compelling two-page shot of Fiennes's eyes. Hey, we never said it has to make sense -- just to be surprising, stimulating, and fun. The magazine itself is oversized, wider than your average read, which is a pain in the ass on a crowded streetcar, but which gives full play to the abundance of great photos inside.

Perhaps most indicative of the new character of Details is the final page: it's called "The Last Word," and poses a number of "When was the last time you..." questions to a notable subject, in this case MTV's Tom Green-come-lately stunt comic, Johnny Knoxville. It's a relatively fresh spin on a tried-and-true magazine formula -- see Vanity Fair's "Proust Questionnaire," or Esquire's "What I've Learned" -- and even the name ("The Last Word") is fresh and smart in a kind-of, sort-of, not-really way. But in all, it's a fun read and the photo of Knoxville in the Heisman pose with a severed pig's head toes the clever/stupid line perfectly. Which is to say: with the back page, as with the magazine as a whole, Details hasn't reinvented the wheel, but they have reinvented Details, which, when ennui or hangover strikes, is very good news for a rag-hungry boy.