Esquire/GQ - C/D

I sometimes find something interesting to read in them (my mom and sister like to buy them), but I can't stand all that fashion/advice/what champagne to buy in order to shag that cute co-worker crap

GQ pioneered metrosexualism for better or worse and I liked it better when they alternated covers between pat riley and bryan ferry and were more focused on, um, fostering the brand (when's the last time you heard someone use "GQ" as an adjective?).

Details I loved as a kid, that brief period during the early nineties when John Leland edited it and they had an oral history of something or other every issue. Then I got smarter (maybe), they got dumber, their 'who the fuck are we'/'let's change our editorial identity' flipflops reached blur speed, I think the last thing I read in a Details was some Pete Bagge cartoon on 'gen x: wtf' and an embarrassing Rick Moody gushpiece on Ethan Hawke.

BAHAHA. Seriously, post some of their picks, will ya?

Wots that?

Anyway, dud for both - just come clean and buy a jazz mag fer fucks sake! Great writing my eye.

Esquire has been pretty good over the past several years, where it has made an honest effort to recapture some of their past glory. It's still not an essential read, and it's a little too proud of itself, but I have really grown to enjoy it again. They've got a handful of great writers and an editorial who has taken a lot of chances on style that sometimes succeeded greatly. I think Esquire tends to be much more realistic about fashion than GQ. I thought the 70th anniversary issue was far too self-congradulatory.

GQ also has great writing from time to time. The fashionista aspect of it has been cloying for decades, and if you really read it you'll notice that high-end fashion is kind of a sidebar to the personality of the magazine. I'm worried about Jim Nelson being the new editor--at first I was excited because he did a lot of music writing for GQ prior to his ascention, so I thought that the music coverage would improve. But it hasn't. I think there's been more of it in the first two issues Nelson helmed, but it hasn't been too good. And he's publicly declared that articles would be getting shorter and more newsy or some shit. It seems to me that he feels FHM/Maxim/etc. taking readers so rather than make an effort to refine GQ, he's going to dumb it down. His first two issues were kind of limp and I'm not optimistic about where he is going.

I subbed to Details for a year or so, when the music reviews were actually worth reading. Didn't review, once I saw there were were more cologne samples than worthy stories. (The samples were why I'd never read GQ in the first place.)

Rust Hills, R.I.P.

The Harold Hayes documentary--Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire in the 60s--is on Tubi right now. Wasn't sure if I was seeing it for the first or second time, but good stuff, with lots on the most controversial covers by George Lois (Sonny Liston, William Calley, Ali). Kind of sad the way Hayes ends up picking a fight with Gloria Steinem before leaving the magazine, but there's a nice grace note when he goes on to write a couple of well received books on Africa and Dian Fossey.