Ah, sweet summer. It brings back memories of sunburn, sand in your bathing suit and that certain song. Maybe these magazines will mention the tune you will be humming during the next blizzard.
The June edition of Rolling Stone should have been dubbed “the bad boy” issue. It has a disheveled Charlie Sheen on the cover, a Q&A with potty-mouth comedian Louis C.K. and an interview with Jennifer Aniston’s ex, John Mayer, who claims the “womanizer” title is no longer appropriate since he hasn’t had a date in years. The interview is a must-read — not because of his earnest introspection following vocal cord surgery — but for the details of his new life in Montana picking up his beer from the local Albertson’s. While Mayer is busy trying to steer clear of gossip site TMZ, he does a good job of putting the gossip machine into high gear with his views on country music sweetheart Taylor Swift, who famously wrote about their break-up.
Vibe knows what sells, and slaps a “Sexy Issue” banner on its cover. But is that reminder even necessary? Sex and booty banter have always been the guiding principles of the hip-hop magazine. The music reviews, especially when it comes to female artists, seem more focused on a star’s “hotness” than anything else. Still, the issue’s oddball article on how African-Americans get “shafted” in the porn industry threw us for a loop. We’re all for equality, but that would seem to us to be quite a bit further down on the list of priorities.
P-R-E-T-E-N-T-I-O-U-S! Uncut’s cover story on Patti Smith, of G-L-O-R-I-A fame from her 1975 breakthrough album “Horses,” starts by telling us she did not want to discuss her rocker past, just her new record. Not surprisingly, the editors love the record. Unlike its top-40-obsessed peers, Uncut deserves some credit for catering to an older generation while trying to find something interesting in today’s music.
If you thought real rock ’n’ roll was dead a long time ago, Spin says you might want to check out Cuba’s thriving punk and heavy metal scenes. Havana’s tattooed thrashers — who, unlike their US counterparts, may consistently have something obvious to rebel against — include Gorki Aguila. Lyrics like “El Comandante wants me to applaud his bullsh—t sermonizing” got Aguila banned and imprisoned by Castro a couple of times. Elsewhere, we enjoyed the table of ratings for guitar gods, which, for example, gives the “pre-sobriety” Eric Clapton far higher marks than the “post-sobriety” Eric Clapton. The latter ranks just above Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien and “A Guitar Hero master.”
We’re not sure whether or not it says anything about the state of the Big Apple under Mayor Bloomberg, but most of New York’s nine suggestions for cooling off in the water this summer take place in one of two places: on the street or on the roof — and yes, there does seem to be a pattern here. If you’re not out chartering a yacht in Montauk (suggestion No. 7), you are advised to order bottle service at the rooftop deck of the Gansevoort Hotel or, if you can manage it, rent a rooftop “beach cabana” at the Dream Downtown in Chelsea ($1,500 a day). But if you fall into the other category of customer, you are invited to check out the public pool, a neighborhood fire hydrant or the boardwalk at Coney Island alongside “the seething mass of humanity.” Or, perhaps most fittingly, strip yourself down to your last assets for a jaunt on the nude beach at Sandy Hook.
The New Yorker has awakened to the crisis in publishing that’s being created by Eric Holder’s chuckleheaded pursuit of an antitrust case against Apple over e-books. While the president’s prosecutor-in-chief frets over the price of book downloads like it’s a question of national security, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ price-slashing dominance — an actual, real-live antitrust issue — is poised to kill the book industry as we know it. Amazon is “focused on customers, not competitors,” a Seattle exec says, which is a “peculiar way of describing your suppliers,” media reporter Ken Auletta notes. It’s also a typically absurd rhetorical flourish from Amazon, as if editors and presses have never been anything more than pesky middlemen getting in the way of the public’s thirst for cheap, mediocre reading.
Whenever Time runs a cover story about an afflicted group — war refugees, political prisoners, underwater homeowners — it seems unable to resist the urge to collect pages and pages of chiaroscuro close-up photos of its subjects, wearing grim, weathered, determined faces. This week, undocumented immigrants are given the treatment. “It’s recognizing people’s existence, that they are people, not abstract numbers,” according to photographer Gian Paul Lozza. Maybe a while back, years or decades ago, before Time had done this dozens and dozens of times. Now, however, it could be said that the deluge of sullen portraiture is so plentiful that it flirts with commoditization. On top of it all, we must confess we’re feeling a little browbeaten.
John Mayer, Eric Clapton, Charlie Sheen, Taylor Swift, Louis C.K., cover story, cover story, Patti Smith, Amazon
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น