Fantastic. The latest copy of New York Magazine has arrived. Why do we even get this again? Did my mother buy a subscription for my birthday seven years ago and has some rogue, sinister male telemarketer made an annual appointment to dress in a patent leather bondage suit and beat off while looking at photos of Evan Handler while convincing her to keep renewing it?
I have never gone cover to cover with a single issue. My wife never reads it either. Our three-year-old rips it to bits sometimes and uses the pieces as speeding tickets in his cops and cars chases. We never write him up for it. Once in a while we’ll do the crossword puzzle. But today the coffee has hit my intestines as the magazine hits the front porch, I grab the rag as I head to the crapper, and I open it.
OK, here are the “best doctors.” Eleven hundred forty-four physicians in every category. Well, they’re in New York. I’m near Seattle. And even if I did need a lobotomy or another vasectomy or another kind of “omy,” would I really trust a commercial magazine’s rating of the “best”? Seems like payola. And who sang “Stereotomy?” Was it Supertramp?
I don’t know. But let’s not forget about the cover story. “Fox News made a circus out of the Republican Party. And boy, does Roger Ailes regret it now.” No chance I’d ever read this. I’d rather look at a diorama made up of petrified shits I took from Mexican meals for the forty minutes it would take for me to digest this story about a television channel I don’t care about and a broken political system that I don’t care about.
Onward to a piece titled, “In the Future, Every Millionaire Will Buy and Sell Fifteen Warhols.” Not going to read this, either. I am not a millionaire, and I don’t really buy and sell anything. I work for a living and I don’t get paid enough. I am trying to write a book on the side, and it’s probable that I will not make enough money from said book to earn more in an hourly wage than I would make busing tables at the Mexican restaurant where I ate in order to create the turds that are dried up inside my diorama.
“The Franchise: Ebersol ends era for sports.” Yes, it’s tragic indeed. Multi-millionaire Dick Ebersol, the tanned, eighteen-home-owning despot who used to run NBC Sports, has just quit or retired or was fired or who gives a flying fuck. I worked for NBC Sports for a brief time and smelled that asshole’s cigars in the hallways. He was the type of asshole who thought it was perfectly fine to walk through the hallways and smoke cigars because he was Dick Fucking Ebersol and he ran the place. Fuck him.
“Restless Minds: Guilty Parents Get Own Bedtime Book.” Yes, yes. Here’s the tale of the “unpublished rhyming picture book called Go The Fuck To Sleep,” you know, the one that was the “No. 1 title on Amazon last week.” It’s a “Facebook gag turned PDF samizdat turned publishing sensation.” And here I thought I could write a story about a real person and maybe get it published. Who am I kidding? And is this even English I’m reading?
Turn the page. Now it’s the society parties and who showed up. The photos. The screening of Midnight In Paris party attended by Rachel McAdams and Judah Friedlander and Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. And Chloe Sevigny and DJ Paul Sevigny (Are they brother and sister? Are they dating? Is there any chance I’m going to remember that I even bothered asking these questions to myself when I saw their picture in this magazine?) at some Hugo Boss something-or-other. Lack of interest taking over. Move on.
“Chris Licht. Backstage at 30 Rock, the almost-former Morning Joe executive producer and soon-to-be CBS News V.P. lets go of the controls, briefly.” Dude looks like he’s 28 years old, if not younger. I scan the article to see how old he is. No age listed. Just quotes about how important he is and how he’s changing things at CBS and there are no sacred cows or something about something. Oh, go wander into a fastener factory while naked and get your dick stuck in the machinery.
“Letter to a President with a Problem.” This ought to be good. Liberals complaining about Obama. Save it. You nominated John Kerry in 2004. You nominated Michael Dukakis in 1988. Oh, and you’re in the same party as Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty and Michelle Bachmann and Rand Paul and Paul Rand and everyone else you say you hate. You’re all criminals. Leave me alone.
OK, now the big Fox News/Roger Ailes feature that I’m ignoring. That’s at least ten pages. And another big one about David Brock and a right-wing conspiracy. No thanks. And something about Saif Qaddafi. Don’t care about him either. And “Last Supper of the Food Hacks: A Chopper Ride to El Bulli for the ‘Mother of all Boondoggles’”, which is not English, either.
And an advertisement for New York Magazine that features a photo of the same issue I’m leafing through, which makes me wonder why anyone would buy a magazine they’re already reading (OK, maybe they’re trying to hit the “I’m checking it out at the dentist but don’t have the balls to take it home with me, so I’ll pick it up at the bodega near my apartment building and give the nice Sri Lankan boy something to smile about” market), and a fashion section with women’s bathing suits and two old bearded guys who look like ZZ Top in a movie about what happened when ZZ Top got really old, and reviews of restaurants that are three thousand miles from where I’m squatting,
Well, now, hey, if it isn’t Morgan Spurlock, who’s now searching for an apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn? So even our very own modern-day Upton Sinclair, the goateed little-man’s champion who sparred with corporate America to eradicate the mindless super-sizing of those poisonous McDonald’s meals we, the idiot public, love to fatten up on, yes, even he’s eyeballing a 3,300-square-foot “quadruplex” with a rental unit. Of course, he won’t let us down in the trendiest neighborhood in the trendiest borough. The pad is “built with eco-friendly features like a solar hot-water heater and low-emissivity windows,” and it’s only “priced at $2.95 million.” Good for you, Morgan. Good for you, man!
Now wait a minute. I’ve moved the bowel and broken the wind through fifty-seven pages of the book and haven’t seen anything about “American Idol”? Of course I haven’t. Page 58: “Judging ‘Idol’: Comedian Paul F. Tompkins on eighteen months of writing about TV’s most cynical show,” also known as, “Take an automated wine-bottle opener and jab it into my gaping cock-hole right now.”
Blah blah blah, album reviews, Felice Brothers, Danger Mouse and somebody else, the requisite Lady Gaga mention, art I won’t see, architecture I won’t see, a movie I won’t see, where’s the crossword puzzle, where’s the crossword puzzle, where’s the crossword puzzle?
There’s the crossword puzzle. Now let me take a shit in peace and get out of here.
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Tom really does love New York. Really …
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Thanks Tom, now I know what’s the most satisfying ass-wipe. The Last Man will certainly be enjoying this little diddy. Now I’m just as aggravated as if I read Nyork times, but the picture captures it well.