When Worlds Collide, I

A most striking representative of an item from a completely different world than mine is the magazine Angeleno. It is among the most glossy of the glossy magazines I’ve ever seen. I’ve no really strong idea of who its intended readership is – this has been a mystery to me for so long, but by default it clearly can’t be someone like me (an academic), I decided upon first seeing it. (You can read about the raison d’être of their parent company, Modern Luxury, here.) For some reason it arrives (for free although the cover price is $5.95) in my mailbox every month and I don’t know why. It is almost as though it’s a joke on the part of some prankster deity or other.

It has nevertheless done an excellent job of sneaking past my defenses. I don’t immediately throw it away when I receive it, and I find myself alternately annoyed and fascinated by it. Could this have been part of their plan all along?

It used to be that I was just plain annoyed when it would arrive – as much as 1/2 an inch thick, larger in square footage than most other magazines, highly airbrushed A-list star on the cover, and every page super glossy and shiny – and it would sit there for weeks until I’d find myself glancing inside it … just to confirm that I was justified in my righteous annoyance, you see. Sure enough, it would not disappoint. It has pieces devoted to ways of spending oodles of money on pointless stuff at extraordinary prices. There’s be the hot new treatments (“is Fraxel the new Botox?”). There’d be a gaudy diamond-encrusted PDA for your microscopic toy dog, that you supposedly must have because, well, Paris Hilton’s microscopic toy dog has one. That sort of thing -but done without the slightest hint of irony whatsoever! There are advertisements for fancy Beverly Hills Lawyers, or Realtors selling very fancy properties. These ads are simply amazing because they’d come complete with fashion shoots of the partners in the law or real estate firm, etc.,… except that I don’t think that they were intended to be fashion shoots, but that’s how they look.

Speaking of fashion shoots, the big cover story of the magazine would be to take the A-list star on the cover and do an interview with them, interspersed with full-page hardcore fashion shoots of them in clothes by famous designers (captions would include “handkerchief by Versache, $780”) – except that the interviewers are not often very interested in exploring anything in any depth. It’s just an excuse to mention the star’s latest project, and use them as a clothes horse to shift more product. That was largely my entire view on it until the time they featured Robert Downey Jr., and showed a lot of sense of humour in the piece by having shots of him attired as I mentioned above – but lying face down on the ground in some shots. Then I saw some leeway for seeing some humour in the whole enterprise. It became less (ok, slightly less) annoying.

Then there’s the section entitled “The Radar” with subsections named things like “Now!” which try to tell you what stuff to get, club to go to, or other things which are going to keep you part of the herd. There are bits called “Hot” which list a few things that are supposedly acceptable to be into, closely followed by sections called “Not”, which actually try to tell you what not to to be into. I’ve pretty much lived my entire life avoiding a lot of that sort of pop culture advice, so this annoys especially deeply. But then, occasionally, there’s a surprise. For example, there was a piece in “The Radar: Now” by Wendy Wong that started out “Got money to burn…?”, about three new bottled water products. I was ready to get all annoyed, but then she said

…the most head-scratching of them all has to be Liquid OM, the first ever “frequency enhanced bottled water.” Apparently its water molecules vibrate to mimic the yoga matra, thanks fot a fancy arrangement of its “crystalline structure.” Confusing? Sure. But just remember: This is essentially the same stuff that comes out of your tap, folks.

Wow, there’s a pleasant surprise. While affecting that “oh, I’m confused by all that science” tone that seems to be a requirement in these publications (will someone break the mold please!) she showed an unusually vigilant amount of skepticism about the claims made for the products, and at the same time still fulfilled the section’s gold to tell you about the trendy hot stuff. I think she did this rather well.

Of course there’s the stuff that goes along the lines of: “guess who we saw in the line at Pink’s – Selma Hayek!” which I cannot make up my mind is interesting to read in a magazine or not. I’m not going to be so snooty as to deny that sometimes it is kind of interesting to hear about things like that (we could go on about how our culture is set up to give a certain artificial familiarity with the personalities that are pushed into our faces all the time, to the extent that of course it might be interesting that one of them was queuing for the very same tasty sausages as you) – what I’m saying is that it’s one thing to hear it from a friend or someone you know, or in the context of a larger story, and it is another to hear it from the collective anonymous staff of a magazine. Or not. I don’t know.

But somehow, it got under my skin. The main overall reason is that I stopped being annoyed by default, and got fascinated by just how far it could go with this stuff while keeping a mostly straight face. (The answer seems to be: arbitrarily.)

I think that the specific reasons that it breached my defenses can be found in two aspects of the magazine that I can’t help but look at over the course of the month it is knocking about the house. One is the listings of some of the city’s restaurants by region, together with a brief description, and the phone number and address. This is sometimes useful, and sometimes they’ll let you know when some new interesting one has opened up. You’re not going to read about some of the excellent low- to mid-priced places here, but that’s ok. I like it as it lets me keep my eye on some of the movements in part of the restaurant world. You get snippets of information on which chef’s are working in which kitchens, or sometimes opening new restaurants, or what future projects some restaurant owners are working on, etc. I find that interesting, since the culinary world is interesting to me in general, and it informs me about the landscape of the Los Angeles, somewhat.

The other aspect is less useful, but an often amusing diversion. It’s called ” Scene in LA” and it is basically a set of snapshots of people at various events. It is again a bit celebrity-obsessed, but not entirely, as there are sometimes some behind-the-scenes people showing up as well (if only by accident (?)). The combination of the event and the people who showed up can often be strangely interesting, bizarre, or just funny. Sometimes it’s an opening of something utterly pointless (but tasty)- a gourmet chocolate earring store in Brentwood, say. It would be hosted by, oh, I don’t know… Halle Berry, who, it would turn out (you’d be surprised to learn) is devoted to earring-shaped confectioneries of all kinds. And she (or somebody) invited a bunch of people, and there are snaps of them dressed to the nines- perhaps all holding little swag bags from the store – in all sorts of unlikely combinations. So there’s Halle, in a group hug with …. is that really?… yes it is… Tipper Gore and Barbara Bush. Huh. And Maggie Gyllenhaal is there, in a curiously bizarre photo with Magic Johnson. (My fancy Beverly Hills lawyer says that I should insert here that I made that all up by way of illustration, but it is otherwise accurate, if you follow me.)

Other times, it’s simply some award event or other, where the people who show up are more uniformly distributed in terms of what part of the Industry they were drawn from. Those would be less interesting to me, but then it would often be funny for another reason, such as the cloning. You’d get a group shot of (I’ve run out of names here) some new soon to be A-list 20-something stars I’ve never heard of: Mindy Thurston, Amanda Portunoy and Binky Smiggles, And they’d all three of them look exactly alike. Same hair, same makeup, all looking exactly like clones of, say, Cameron Diaz.

So, yes, it is a different world from mine, which is what I started out to say. But what of the “collision” to which I referred in the title of the post? Ah. Well, it nearly threw me off my seat when I dipped into Angeleno the other day, opening the February edition (featuring Christina Ricci, and who always makes me think of General Relativity whenever I see her) turning by accident to the “Calendar: Social Events” section (showing upcoming events) to find – among only eight events on that page – the USC event I co-organized a couple of weeks ago! (Video here.) How weird is that?! I wonder if anyone came to it as a result of reading that announcement?

-cvj