Monthly Archives: March 2007

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 […] Click to continue reading this post →