GQ

There's something distasteful and sort of sad about men's magazines. Until I leafed through the current issue of GQ (the January issue, with Philip Seymour Hoffman on the cover), I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was. I only planned to glance briefly at the articles and editorial on my way to the cover profile that was the reason I'd bought the magazine in the first place, but what bugs me about men's magazines like GQ and Esquire and even (to a lesser extent) Details finally made itself clear as I skimmed the GQ front section (called Fahrenheit, for some undoubtedly stupid reason that was not immediately obvious to me -- because that's where they take the temperature of the modern man? who knows, or cares).

There was a story, about a third of a page long, about Saving Private Ryan and Battlefield Earth star Barry Pepper, called "Barry Pepper Takes Aim," accompanied by a half-page photo of Pepper, in profile, aiming a shotgun. Apparently he's heavy into hunting, in spite of the fact that he's Canadian. There was also a smaller picture of Pepper with his shotgun open (or whatever -- whatever you have to do to load it) and resting on his shoulder, as he looked down exhaling smoke and looking all rugged and Marlboro-ish. But it wasn't an ad. It was editorial. He's all made up and posed with his gun, doing his "hobby," presumably for the delectation of the magazine's male readers, setting Pepper up -- much as women's magazines do with their models -- as an example of something that GQ readers should, in the editors' view, aspire to. On the next page was a quarter-page story about Survivor producer Mark Burnett's hat of choice, and a paragraph extolling the superiority of Hendrick's gin. And I realized that I don't want to know a GQ reader. I don't want to be married to one; I don't want to be friends with one; I don't even want to run into one on the street or have one call my home by accident. If the actual GQ reader is anything like the image the magazine's editors have, obviously, idealized, I want no part of him. Are the ways of men so complex -- or are men so dumb -- that they really need point-by-point explanations of how seltzer works or why people no longer travel with steamer trunks? I would mention the sex advice column by Dr. Sooth, but I'm acting like I didn't read it. No. Don't ask. I don't know what you're talking about. I think that stupid page, with its smug, condescending advice -- and stupider questions -- was torn out of the copy I bought.

ANYWAY, after all of that boring crap and about forty pages of fashion spreads, I reached the cover profile on Hoffman. And I immediately contacted my lawyer about my royalties. The author, David Kamp, shows his influence even in his author bio: "[Hoffman's] little roles accumulated, and now he's a phenomenon. He's one of the real great character actors." That he is -- so great is he, in fact, that he was one of only three HITG!s with which we launched this site, way back in July 1999. And we agree with Kamp's estimation of Hoffman's graduation to the next stage of his career -- or, rather, Kamp agrees with us, since we noted Hoffman's graduation from HITG! status in our first annual Rasco Awards, back in March 2000.

But maybe Kamp's insistence on Philip Seymour Hoffman's ubiquity as a character actor is just a coincidence of thought. "Time and again in the late '90s, we emerged from the Bijou or the Octoplex marveling over yet another terrific performance by that guy." Okay. We confess that we didn't coin or trademark the phrase "that guy" in the "hey, it's" context, and that, indeed, before Fametracker launched there were other places on the web that included similar features. However, when we did a Google search on Hoffman's name, our original HITG! feature popped up on the first page of search results. Okay? We're just saying.

The profile, for what it's worth, is actually fine, considering its venue. It's short, which means that the author doesn't have the breadth to go into the usual gaseous ruminations on the scene, the water, the air, the look in the subject's eye, what he wore, ate, felt, smelled, etc. etc. Kamp is confined to describing Hoffman's mien as "janitorial, almost," but has what is, in our opinion, a proper appreciation for Hoffman's work -- respectful without being sycophantic. The four-page story is accompanied by a sidebar listing a few highlights of Hoffman's career, including descriptions of selected pivotal scenes, and Hoffman's own comments on them.

Then, of course, the magazine undoes all of Kamp's good work by including a "humour" piece on the back page with thirty-four suggested names for the recently (like, a couple of months ago) renamed Beaver College. Some of the more clever suggestions include "William and Hairy," "Brigham Hung," "Ole Muff," and the "University of Vagina." See what I mean? Would you want to hang with someone who thought that was really funny? Would you want to be someone who thought that was really funny?

Gross.

But, good on Philip Seymour Hoffman for getting a magazine cover. Maybe next time he'll land on a less puerile publication.

Talk

We here at The Mediator make no effort to disguise our confusion, disdain, and general perverse obsession with the ongoing slow-motion train wreck of a magazine that is Talk. But this month, let us extend this metaphor: if we imagine Talk as a train wreck, then let's imagine that each monthly issue is like a car in that train, smashing and crumpling -- in slow-motion -- into a smoking heap of debris that's made up of the issues that preceded it. Further, let's imagine that the February 2001 issue of Talk is like a car in that train that is filled with volatile, toxic chemicals, and that the smashing and crumpling of this particular car results in an explosion of such destructive magnitude that it far outstrips the in-hindsight-relatively-minor catastrophes that have come before -- like, say, the Ben Affleck cover. And this car, and its chemicals, and the resultant explosion kills all aboard the train. And renders the surrounding neighbourhoods uninhabitable for miles. Because the February 2001 issue of Talk is that bad. Hell, the cover alone is that bad.

The cover, if you haven't yet seen it, features Heather Graham in a position that can only be described as toad-like. Toad-esque. Toad-errific. She's squatting, her corseted bosom spilling out in a manner usually reserved for the cover of Oui or Cheri, and she's looking for all the world like she's stoically squeezing out a particularly stubborn pellet of scat. Or, perhaps, entertaining a group of merchant marines by picking up a Coke bottle without the aid of her digits.

Who is to blame for such a mishap? Heather Graham herself can be excused, because celebrities are routinely coaxed into ridiculous and unflattering poses by photographers, and it seems unlikely that, while squatting toad-like in the studio of David Bailey, she was shouting terse orders to her publicist to make sure that the crapping photo makes the cover. The photographer, likewise, may be blameless, having suggested the pose only as a joke, perhaps after a tiring day of watching Graham in full emote mode. Who can blame him for snapping the photo when she, surprisingly, obediently, folded herself into the toadstool pose?

No, the blame for this cover has to fall squarely on the shoulders of the magazine's editors, which is to say, on the padded shoulders of Ms. Tina Brown, who has clearly entered some kind of DefCon 5 of desperation. Here, she is willing to humiliate her cover subject and discredit her own magazine and generally make all involved look like complete asses in order to generate a teensy-tiny bit of buzz around her failing vanity project. Well, Ms. Brown: mission accomplished.

But while the cover is so very, very hard to ignore, it's not even the worst thing about the issue. It's become clear over the last few months that Talk -- which was, at one time, actually envisaged as competition for Vanity Fair -- long ago abandoned any hoity-toit pretensions and is now looking to carve a niche for itself somewhere between Redbook and Reader's Digest. So in this month's issue you find the usual hodgepodge: there's a whipped-off piece on porn by Martin Amis, who by now must surely have paid off whatever debt he owes his former amour, Ms. Brown. What does she have on him? Photos? Tapes? In any case, his "exposé" on the porn industry -- complete with an all-nude, five-porn-star photo shoot that's shocking! Shocking! -- reads like he typed it with his left hand on a laptop while flying from London to New York and sipping a Dewars. The magazine also features a fascinating "Take a Sabbatical from Your Marriage" story (was it really a few short years ago she was editing The New Yorker?) and an oral history of Ehud Barak, comprised mainly of quotes from people he went to school with.

Then you turn to page 109, and a story called "The Horse That Was All Heart," which is (we kid you not) an excerpt from a biography of (we couldn't make this up) the famous American race horse, Seabiscuit.

Seabiscuit.

"The Horse That Was All Heart"? What is this, Life magazine? Did Tina Brown lose a bet? Is the staff at Talk raiding the slush pile of Ranger Rick? We have no doubt that there are people out there who want to read a story on a 1938 racehorse. We also have no doubt that not a single one of them reads Talk. And certainly there is no demographic overlap between people who want to read about Seabiscuit, people who want to read Martin Amis holding forth on porn, and people who want to see Heather Graham dropping a pellet.

This is not editorial variety. This is the Kursk submarine of magazines.

Vanity Fair

By comparison, this month's Vanity Fair reads like an issue of Harold Ross's New Yorker. While they clearly lost out in the no-doubt frenzied Seabiscuit bidding war, the editors at VF deliver not one but two decent celebrity profiles, which is two more than they usually manage in any given issue.

(First off, however, we feel compelled to point out that the unraveling of the Fan Fair section, as detailed in an earlier Mediator, continues apace in this issue. The section's been moved to the front and further stripped bare, now weighing in at five anemic pages. This latest move likely paves the way for the amalgamation of the best of Fan Fair -- that is, the little review of a movie trailer -- into the Vanities section two or three issues down the road. Okay, back to the celebrity stuff.)

The Keanu Reeves cover story features plenty of pleasing photos of the lad, and we've got to say that, since The Matrix, we've got nary a bad word to say about him. (Okay, one: Pat O'Connor, a director who worked recently worked with Reeves pretty much sums it up when he/she says "He's such a private person -- very intelligent, very private -- that sometimes he becomes almost inarticulate." Ah, so that's it.)

The second story is a perfectly bitchy little thumbnail sketch of Lara Flynn Boyle, who herself acquiesces to some compromising photos, the first of which is a nude shot of her splayed nude in a transparent bathtub, and which pushes the envelope of the "If my nipple's not showing, I'm not naked" school of celebrity portraiture. Ultimately, she comes off as a hard, unscrupulous, but not entirely unlikable dame straight out of an olde tyme Hollywood flick. Yes, she's sleeping her way to the top. Yes, she has sex with creepy-grandpa Jack Nicholson in order to get to sit at his arm at the Oscars. Yes, she understands all this, and no, she doesn't feel bad about it. Though you might, once you've finished reading the piece.