Esquire

Since when is October the "Women We Love" issue? For as long as I can remember, Esquire honours the women they allegedly love in August. I guess summer isn't the time for loving women anymore -- it's a time for buying suits? Winterizing summer cottages? Who knows?

This year, the headlining Woman They Love is Ashley Judd. I'd like to tell you specifically what Esquire thinks of her, but I don't care.

The rest of the lineup is the usual, predictable, listing of nubile womanhood. Alicia Witt? What has she done for me...ever? She was on The Sopranos one time. Neko Case? Who? Exactly. Amanda Peet? 'Nuff said. A couple of foreign tarts that still don't know any better than to refuse to be photographed either topless, nearly topless, or in a dress cut so low as to crookedly expose way too much cleavage (FRANCES O'CONNOR).

Esquire actually gets it right in their brief profile of my girlfriend, Catherine Keener. The author, Cal Fussman, prefaces his story by saying how jealous all his friends were that he got to meet her, and how sexy she is -- which she is! I don't know why I'm surprised when men (or, at least, men as dull and mainstream as would write for Esquire) share my opinion of qualities that make women interesting. He cites speeches she's delivered in her films in which she's cut men in half with her rapier wit and bored, unimpressed delivery ("I'm a puppeteer." "Check!"). He says that "her allure is unconventional and unexpected" and that one of his friends dreams of licking her feet. To me, she's the insecure friend of the girl getting married, who can't stop smelling her dishwashing sponge even though it smells like a hot dog, from Walking and Talking. I don't know why she's wasting her time with Dermot Mulleathery, but -- just as I did with Craig Bierko when I found out he was dating Janeane Garofalo -- I have to re-evaluate my opinion of him, knowing that she thinks he's worth her attention. Anyway, my point is that there aren't too many lists in dad mags on which both Amanda Peet and Catherine Keener would appear, and the fact that Amanda Peet is worth about fifty words in Esquire as opposed to Keener's three columns gives me some hope for humanity.

And then, there's a shot of a shirtless Rodney Dangerfield. Goodbye.

InStyle

One of the more insightful quotes we've ever read about the nature of celebrity profiles came from that font of insight, Demi Moore, who once told magazine writer Tad Friend -- when he asked why she would agree to an hours-long photo shoot but only a twenty-minute interview -- that "no one remembers the words. Everyone remembers the pictures." And speaking of memorable pictures, this month's InStyle features a whopper on the cover. Moore -- who has been out of the spotlight for a while, and whose last film, Passion of Mind, made nary a blip on the public's radar screen -- is clearly either (a) poising herself for a comeback, (b) cheesed about all the attention her ex, Bruce Willis, has been garnering of late, or (c) both. So, apropos to nothing, she shows up on the cover of InStyle, notoriously the most celebrity-friendly magazine on the planet. (The coverline: "Demi: Living life on her own -- and on her terms.")

A good move, in theory. Except somehow InStyle managed to select for their cover the most hideous and embarrassing celebrity photo of recent memory -- a shot of Moore, jaw clenched, teeth exposed, resembling nothing more than a petulant child forced to tap dance for an audience of relatives she loathes. While physically not as disarming as the shot of an unfortunately swollen-cheeked Renee Zellweger on Vanity Fair a few months back, this photo manages to be more off-putting, simply because you rarely see a big celebrity trying this hard. Love me goddamn you! LOVE... ME!

Yes, Demi. We love you. Now please don't hurt us or our children.

GQ

This month's GQ not only features a cover story on Kevin Spacey, but a crash course in the incestuous politics of the New York magazine demimonde. Spacey was famously pissed about a profile of him that ran in Esquire at the end of 1998; the piece was called "Kevin Spacey Has A Secret," and in it, author Tom Junod flirted with rumours of Spacey's homosexuality. Spacey was, at the time, quite discreet about his personal affairs, and the article did seem intrusive and inappropriate. (Spacey has since gone on an aggressive, much less discreet P.R. offensive to prove his red-blooded heterosexuality, but that's a story for another day.) Spacey swore off interviews with Esquire and called for his fellow thespians to do the same.

So here we have Spacey, two years later, in GQ, in a story coyly titled "Kevin Spacey Just Wants to Be Honest With You." Get it? But wait, there's more. The full backstory is that Esquire editor David Granger is a former protege of GQ's chief, Art Cooper -- who was plenty peeved when Granger bolted to head up GQ's main rival. And took GQ's star writer -- Mr. Tom Junod -- with him, following a nasty and prolonged bidding war. Of course, who among the shlubs picking up GQ off the newsstand is going to know any of this, or care? The sly wink at the Esquire story is obnoxiously inside -- but enough about that. Kevin Spacey just wants to be honest with us, so let's get to the goods.

Sorry, no goods. No nothing. After all that build-up, all that cock-of-the-walk, inter-magazine one-upmanship, the only actual reference to the Esquire piece is this: "A few years ago, Spacey was burned by an Esquire piece that purported to out him as gay....I offered him the opportunity to comment on that piece, but he declined." Which is, of course, Spacey's prerogative. But then why frame the whole damned piece as a response to the Esquire article when you've got a big fat nothing to add to it? Maybe it's because all GQ actually has to offer is the usual inane blather that constitutes a men's magazine celebrity profile these days, stuff like, "First, however, we rehearse some of the conventions of celebrity-profile journalism." We're not sure why writers insist on indulging in this kind of meta-profile nonsense, in which they "peel back" the layers of the charade, exposing it for what it is -- maybe it's boredom with the form, or frustration that they're stuck writing four thousand words about nothing rather than clearing a place for that Pulitzer on their mantle. But Fametracker just wants to be honest with you: it's hackneyed. Stop it. And while you're at it, no more cover lines like this: "Kevin Spacey Needs a Hug." Gay Talese wrote the "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" article forty years ago. Let's move on. When you insist on reminding the reader of it, you will never come up on the right side of the comparison.

People

I don't watch daytime talk shows (I really don't!), but I sometimes flip past Springer on my way to Blind Date. And if the issue is particularly incendiary I will pause. I am human. And while I know that there have been charges that Springer is staged and that the show's participants are actors, surely not all of them are. And as I'm flipping past, I sometimes think that there aren't any people left in America who have not already been on one of the many daytime talk shows. Right? You'd think they've already exhausted the country's supplies of attention-starved humanity, and yet the shows just keep on coming.

That's how I feel about People, too. There are just so many pages I flip straight past because they're about normal people I care nothing about -- either small-time heroes, or small-time entrepreneurs, or medium-sized villains or criminals, or dead people who did something notable once and are being eulogized. Where do the editors find them? Why do they suppose I care about some guy who teaches a college course in videogames? And there, in my mailbox, is an entirely new issue every damn week! I keep them in the bathroom and I still can't stay ahead of the game.

Anyway, I know the latest issue has Meg Ryan on the cover, but I haven't even touched that one yet, and anyway, aren't we all pretty sick of hearing all about Meg and Dennis and Russell by now? My comments are by the latest-issue-but-one, which featured a cover story on Sarah Jessica Parker.

Let's just get some things straight about Ms. Parker.

I hate her.

Her show is vastly overrated, and I'm not saying that because I have any objection to seeing four women hoing around New York; more power to them. I just don't think it's that funny. And while my fat ass is scarcely in any position to cast aspersions on anyone else's looks...she just isn't so pretty. She has a horse face, if you must know my true feelings. When the issue featuring her snout was sitting out on my desk, Glark was given to holding it up to his face and whinnying at me from behind it. And, like I said, I'm not saying I'm such hot shit in comparison, but no one's greasing me up and slapping me on the cover of Entertainment Weekly to perpetuate the fiction that I'm really sexy. The opposite is true of Sarah Jessica Parker, and I just don't think that's right.

People being People, the thesis statement of Parker's profile seems to be, "Don't worry, America; unlike Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker is not a whore!" On the set of Sex and the City, she's a "self-appointed den mother," she's been "[m]arried since 1997" to "a great lover and friend." (On the other hand, the only quotation in the story attributed to Matthew Broderick, Mr. Jessica Parker, is, "When I wake up I can see the newspapers spread out everywhere, and an empty coffee cup, so I know she was there." Trouble in beard paradise?) And, People being People, the details of Parker's poor childhood are lovingly catalogued ("once so poor she qualified for free school lunches"; "[w]e didn't have electricity sometimes"), with special attention paid to demonstrating how her rough upbringing made her a better person: she "uses the word 'grace' as a screen saver on her cell phone (to remind her 'to be good to people'...)." Her cell phone, y'all. See how unaffected she is? It's not like she went out and had it made into some gaudy piece of jewellery or something, because she's real. And, as in every Parker profile, S&TC co-star Chris Noth is quoted assuring readers that despite the fact that she is literally a size 0, "That woman eats." Okay, we get it. What does she want, a medal? Where would she pin it, underneath the ugly-ass fabric flowers she's apparently contractually obligated to wear now?

The other big celebrity story in this issue (other than the break-up of Julie Cypher and Melissa Etheridge -- which, though unfortunate, was kind of overshadowed by the break-up a month or so earlier of that other famous showbiz lesbian couple) is about the apparent suicide of Paula Yates. The story is accompanied by a photo of Yates and Michael Hutchence (another apparent suicide, and the father of one of Yates's children). I used my highlighter to colour her hair bright yellow. It suited her. Um. R.I.P., I guess.