By Steve Rhodes
A weekly look at the magazines lying around Beachwood HQ.
Fashion Flub
Neko Case appears in Men’s Vogue wearing an Ann Demeulemeester vest, Juicy Couture jeans, and Calvin Klein shoes.
Noooooooooooo!
Say it ain’t so, Neko!
Not only do we never want to see you in anything even closely resembing a fashion spread – which this isn’t but still – but what you’re wearing looks awful! You’re better than that, Neko. Way better.
Bright Lights, Big City
“Vee-Jay Records of Chicago was not the first successful black-owned label – Duke-Peacock of Houston stakes a better claim to that title – but until Motown exploded, it was certainly the most successful,” No Depression reports this month. “[Vee-Jay: The Definitive Collection] is unquestionably a definitive collection, far superior to 1993’s three-CD The Vee-Jay Story.
“Vee-Jay never had a sound, like Atlantic or Motown,” No Depression says. “Instead, it had a great A&R man in Calvin Carter . . . who had an astute sense of the marketplace and a keen ear, within those confines, for what made each artist different. Under his guidance, the lable moved into R&B and nascent soul, gospel, jazz and even white rock (Vee-Jay launched the Four Seasons and, more or less by accident, the Beatles’ American career.) All these sounds get at least a little play here.”
(Check out the Beatles’ 45 “From Me to You” in our very own Don Jacobson’s item about the retrospective, in the second item from this June Root Cellar column.)
Saramago!
Forgive my literary blind spots, but I’d never heard of Jose Saramago (and believe me, I sufficiently feel like a dope) until last Sunday when this headline in The New York Times Magazine caught my eye:
“The Portugese Novelist And Nobel Prize-Winner Jose Saramago Is A Stubborn Atheist, An Unreconstructed Communist, An Ornery Political Polemicist – And The Creator Of Some Of The World’s Most Magical, Imaginative, Sweetly Lyrical Fiction.”
How can you not want to read that?
And that grumpy photo! Very inviting!
Pull Quote: “Saramago’s novels are endlessly inventive, endlessly good-natured, endlessly skillful,” the literary critic Harold Bloom says. “But it baffles me why the man can’t grow up politically.”
Worldview: “If Saramago and his narrator are not quite the same person, they do, however, share a fundamental pessimism. ‘I’m not delivering any news if I tell you the world is a piece of hell for millions of people,’ Saramago said to me. ‘There are always a few who manage to find a way out, humans are capable of the best as well as the worst, but you can’t change human destiny. We live in a dark age, when freedoms are diminishing, when there is no space for criticism, when totalitarianism – the totalitarianism of multinational corporations, of the marketplace – no longer even needs an ideology, and religious intolerance is on the rise.'”
Marshall Amp
“Even at the time, not everyone in the United States was convinced,” Niall Ferguson writes in The New Yorker.
Convinced of the Marshall Plan, that is.
“‘We are through being Uncle Sap,’ Senator Alexander Wiley, of Wisconsin, declared. To Senator Homer Capehart, of Indiana, the Marshall Plan was ‘state socialism.’ To congressman Frederick Smith, of Ohio, it was ‘outright communism.’ Not to be outdone, Senator Joseph McCarthy, of Wisconsin, later called it a ‘massive and unrewarding boondoggle’ that had turned the United States into ‘the patsy of the modern world.'”
Print Is Alive
A few selections (none yet online) from Print’s September/October issue:
* ” Stop Making Type. A group of type-industry rebels in the ’20s had a startling idea: to cease all production of ‘modernistic’ and ‘freakish’ new faces and stick to the classics.”
* “Suspiciously McSimilar. The mysterious case of McSweeney’s and the corporate publications. Also: a guide for imitating. And: Whither McStyle?”
* “The Dark Side of the Glow. Radium’s shining promise was embraced by the ad world, scientists, and the public at large – but that enchanting glimmer would turn very sinister.”
* “Subtle Tea. How a ’70s-era brand updated its hippie-kitsch identity to appeal to more modern tastes.”
Play On
The excellent Play, the monthly New York Times sports magazine, also has a multitude of riches this month.
* “Back To You, You Lecherous, Micromanaging Desk Jockeys: When it comes to the job of being a sideline reporter, it’s not the women who don’t get it.”
Answers the questions you always had about what seems like a mostly inane function.
* “The Outcast: In the wake of the most scandal-ridden year in Tour de France history, Floyd Landis remains where he has been all along: waiting for redemption, which may never come.”
Even if you don’t care about cycling and Floyd Landis – like me – this is one of the more riveting profiles of the year and one-stop shopping to get caught up on all the fuss.
* “Just Live, Baby!: Over the course of four decades, Al Davis built the Oakland Raiders in his own image: militant but inclusive, radical but tender-hearted, a band of outre warriors who took the NFL by storm. But in an increasingly buttoned-down league, can one man’s peculiar vision survive?”
A fun, fascinating and thoughtful portrait of a famous figure whom we don’t know much about, and how he has shaped his pirate franchise for good and ill.
Posted on August 30, 2007