A Little of the Old In and Out

In: Rena Xu, who writes for Monday's Harvard Crimson:

"Carrie Bradshaw, heroine of TV�s Sex and the City, famously remarked in the episode where she models for a New York fashion show, 'When I was broke sometimes I would buy Vogue instead of food. I felt it fed me more.'

"As I recently perused my own copy of Vogue over a meal in Annenberg, it struck me that almost every female body featured in the magazine looked as if it had perhaps skipped one too many meals. Of course, this was no novel discovery�the endless pages of endless legs were little surprise. After all, models are almost always expected to fit an unhealthily tall and skinny image. What was surprising, however, was the fact that the pictures of impossibly thin, bikini-clad models appeared just pages away from an article discussing the serious battle against anorexia and bulimia fought by one of the most prominent of these models ..."

Bravo.

Out: Graydon Carter, beeyatch. The oily Vanity Fair editor has indeed become everything he once detested when he was a clear-eyed and writer in Spy Magazine, after a childhood yearnings of WASP writerly glamour back in la Canada, eh? Does it really matter that Graydon has done gone and sold his ass?

Certainly it does. And my nemesis Toby Young gets it just about right:

"Well, as someone who worked for Vanity Fair from 1995 to 1998, I think it does matter. When I first met Graydon in 1993, he was in the pupae stage of his metamorphosis. He'd left Spy two years earlier (the New York Observer came in between), but hadn't quite settled into his new role. He tried to give the impression that, despite being the captain of this Conde Nast flagship, he remembered what it was like to be a pirate.
Two years later, when I became a contributing editor, Graydon still prided himself on not being for sale. He was contemptuous of the publicists who clamored for his attention and urged his staff to put all press releases in "the circular file." He made it a point of principle that Vanity Fair, unlike other, lesser magazines, did not grant celebrities copy approval. He encouraged his writers to remain slightly aloof from the world they were covering.

"There were compromises, of course. Sometimes, to gain access to a big star, he had to strike a deal with a publicist and promise to include a less well-known client in the magazine. This D-lister would then appear on the front page of the Vanities section, a slot referred to by the staff as "blond bimbos on the horizon."

"But it would have been impossible to edit the magazine without coming to some accommodations with the PR machine. Within these limits, Graydon did his utmost to preserve the independence of the magazine. He knew he was on the losing side in the battle against the culture of celebrity, but he wasn't about to surrender.

"Now, however, he's in thrall to the voodoo priests and priestesses of the entertainment industry, and Vanity Fair is no more tough-minded than any other glossy magazine. The most embarrassing detail of last week's story was that Graydon recently tried to set up meetings at a number of Hollywood studios to pitch the idea of a movie based on a Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales, with himself as a producer. (Graydon had stuck a toe in the water when he was one of the producers of the Robert Evans documentary 'The Kid Stays in the Picture.') Despite the best efforts of his agent, however, only one studio granted him an audience--and passed.

"As the co-founder and co-editor of Spy, not to mention an outstanding editor in chief of Vanity Fair for more than a decade, Graydon Carter was a giant in journalism. If he had traded in his professional integrity to become the head of a studio, or even for a three-picture deal, that would have been one thing. But he has sacrificed his reputation to become just another hustler scratching around for scraps from the Hollywood table. I always feared he would sell out eventually. I just thought he would have commanded a higher price."

I did as well.

In: The Lindsay Lohan breast augmentation theory got a, uhm, boost from that significant cultural artifact The National Enquirer, which writes:

"Lindsay Lohan is busting out these days. And it's not just thanks to the 17-year-old's hit movie, Mean Girls. 'There is no question in my mind that she has had breast augmentation, and I think the results are very good,' Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Wallace Goodstein tells Star. 'It looks like she has saline implants, which have taken her from a size A or small B to a size C or small D. The bigger breasts look very natural, which is what surgeons aim for,' adds Goodstein, who does not treat Lohan. When contacted, Lindsay's rep Leslie Sloane Zelnik laughed it off, saying she's 17 and still growing. But Star got a second opinion anyway. 'What you see is what you've got,' says New York-based cosmetic surgeon Dr. Geoffrey Tobias. "It would seem to be obvious... that she did have breast augmentation.'"

Or, as they might say at Whatevs.org, so obvs.

Out: Grown men running around Central Park in diapers? Say wha? What the fuck? Blogger, please.

In: Polly Jean Harvey's new video, The Letter (link via Stereogum). The Corsair likes his women like he likes his coffee: strong and dark. PJ Harvey, dancing in her black dress by the window in the night is an image that sexily haunts.

Out: Travel, unless, of course, you can make it into a performance art, like Massimo Redaelli has. According to Fashionweekdaily, "I�ve become an expert on traveling. My trips are the ultimate in performance�they are all calculated down to the minute. And everything is done to maximize my time, since traveling is just a waste and loss of valuable time."

"...Massimo Redaelli has the kind of action-packed, glamorous life that puts most corporate execs�not to mention bona fide jet-setters-- to shame. As International VP of IMG�s European Fashion division, this Italian-born 38-year-old is traveling non-stop between London, Paris, and Milan, but thankfully, he�s mastered the art of the high-end, hassle free viaggio. He�s got British Airways' 'Special Services' on speed dial (no ticket or passport lines, thank you very much), two sets of Vespas parked in London and Paris (the quickest way to make an airport connection), an impossibly chic wife ( French Vogue�s contributing editor Masako Kumakura) whipping up authentic Japanese meals for him at his enormous Avenue Victor Hugo apartment in Paris, and a supremely well-connected 'roommate' in London (art curator Alannah Weston, whose daddy owns Selfridges and Fortnum Mason). Basically, Massimo�s on a non-stop, never-a-dull-moment ride that takes him from the well-appointed boardrooms of Milan fashion giants in the morning to power lunches mid-day to the hottest table at London�s Cipriani restaurant for dinner."

In: Are you a Neoconservative (link via Memefirst)? This quiz from the Christian Science Monitor is pretty definitive, for a non-scientific quiz. BTW: The Corsair scored "Realist."

Also In: Did you, by any chance, read this New Yorker article on the search for Architeuthis? Fucking amazing. The New Yorker has gotten so interesting of late, no?