Salon | Media Circus: UNDER THE COVERS-Separated at death?


- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Women's fashion mags: Love them or burn them in the Media area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Bestseller Hell By Jon Carroll James Patterson's "Cat & Mouse" (02/17/98) Hollywoodland By Catherine Seipp Option this column! (02/13/98) Like watching ice freeze By Daniel Radosh Bring on the cheerleaders! The anorexic gymnasts! CBS's Olympic coverage is a snooze (02/12/98) More is less By Charles Taylor "Titanic's" Oscar stampede points to a Hollywood future full of bloat and mediocrity (02/11/98) Come back, O.J., all is forgiven By Vivienne Walt Finally, L.A., gets a piece of the Lewinsky action, but not very much (02/10/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE MEDIA CIRCUS ARCHIVES		- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - page 2 of 2 Take an example from Spy's final issues: "Rock-Paper-Scissors" diagrammed power triangles in which party A beats B, which beats C, which beats A, as in the kids' hand game: "Nelson Mandela overthrows the South African government, which ends Winnie Mandela's terrorism; she had previously cuckolded Nelson." On the one hand, it's a clever illustration of the limits of personal and political power. On the other hand, so what? Exactly. In an age when graphic-happy news providers compete to out-gist one another, the sharpest unwritten joke here is on a readership that wants its geopolitical news as easy to comprehend as the laminated emergency-instructions card on a 737. This joke is lost on most of those building Spy-influenced Potemkin villages in their front-of-book sections. Teen People, for crying out loud, runs a monthly calendar plastered with cut-out mug shots of celebs like Queen Latifah and Notorious B.I.G. -- a trademark Spy visual riff -- though the text doesn't get much more arch than "Happy 31st to Lemonhead Evan Dando!" Likewise for the grown-ups: Time and Newsweek's offerings are simply Punditry Helper, imparting all the great flavor of irreverence without any of Spy's trademark acid. One notable exception is Spin, editorially revamped by Michael Hirschorn, who himself apprenticed under former Spy editor Kurt Andersen at New York magazine. Spin's "Product" section, for example, updates rather than mimics Spy's cultural take by looking gimlet-eyed at consumer goods. Thanks to the toy-porn of Wired and Fast Company, after all, the Palm Pilot digital assistant may be the Steven Seagal of our day. Granted, the section's attitude is as much drooling as it is sneering -- those cell phones and goggle glasses look pretty nifty regardless -- but this kind of ambivalence may be more thought-provoking than mere puritanism, or at least more realistic. It's reminiscent of the mass-product critiques-cum-love-letters that Suck co-founder Carl Steadman has created at Placing, and in fact Steadman contributes a brief on the alleged fellatio-enhancing effects of Altoids to Spin's March issue. Spin has also picked up the satirical graphics of Suck's Heather Havrilesky, which, in a beautiful demonstration of triple-reverse-meta in the half-tuck position, take Spy one step further by parodying the parodic chart itself. Drawn as baroque X-Y graphs and algebraic union sets, they herald an overmediated dystopic future when pop-culture analysts will require Cray supercomputers and advanced degrees in mathematics to explicate Robert Downey Jr., using 4-D CAD modeling. Yet if Suck has as strong a claim to being the Spy of the '90s as anyone does, it's also proof that no one can be the Spy of the '90s: The cycle of appropriation is just too fast. It took Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen years to evolve from media bomb-throwers to, respectively, the editor of "the monthly bible of the world's affluent intelligentsia" (Vanity Fair) and an elder statesman delivering brandy-soaked whither-media vamps for the New Yorker. Carl Steadman and Joey Anuff went from pseudonymous, disgruntled HotWired staff to marquee Wired properties in a Silicon Valley minute. If no magazine is as "dangerous" today as Spy in its early days -- when it became famous as a samizdat rag that gleefully dished on the journalism and publishing establishments -- it is because the danger itself is tamer now (though not vanquished, as the number of unbylined articles in the last Spy indicates). But don't let's assume co-optation is such a bad thing. The Spyification of media has, for example, vastly improved entertainment magazines, once star-stroking pillars of Jell-O down the line. Entertainment Weekly, one of the more capable adopters of Spy graphics, does a particularly fine job of biting the ass that feeds -- in between reviews and fan pieces. And you can thank the golden escape chutes with which Spy's founders exited for helping mainstream the magazine's attitude. Having spit in the eye of the media Cyclops and been rewarded with plush digs in the cave, Andersen and Carter have made literary bodkin-thrusting seem safe to a particular breed of angry young men and women: those who aren't so angry that they'd kick S.I. Newhouse and his wallet out of bed someday. Whether their subsequent work amounts to selling out or to offering a positive alternative to back up years of sniping, the only salient lesson to the snotterati is that, hey -- that's a damn nice suit Carter's wearing in his Vanity Fair editor's column photo. Which no doubt is why today yappin' dogs like myself race to have the definitive word on such pop-culture crumbs as the Morte d'Seinfeld and the Hallmark suicide card, much as the Underwood jockeys of the past must have duked it out over -- oh, I don't know -- news? Call this progress or call it illiteracy, but do not weep at the grave of Spy. It is not buried there. It did not die. SALON \| Feb. 18, 1998 James Poniewozik's Under the Covers columns runs in Media Circus every other Wednesday. Discuss the demise of Spy in the Media area of Table Talk.