As some of you may know, Playboy is trying to appeal to a younger audience. So, over the last few months, they've switched editors, moved to New York, and rejiggered the editorial content. The first issue of this new breed is coming out soon--the Chicago Tribune took a look at an advance copy and gave it a thumbs-down.



This doesn't surprise me; from the article, it seems like an utterly unsurprising and calculated attempt to reach "all those people watching MTV", filled with decisions based on focus groups rather than intelligent thought. Great magazines come from a unique vision, put into practice by the right group of people. The editors have to lead their audience, and hope that the synergy and talent of their staff will draw readers. For example, you can't revamp a magazine like Playboy starting from the premise that "our audience doesn't like to read." That's wrong; people who buy Playboy must like to read, or else they'd watch Skinemax instead. The solution to circulation erosion isn't more factoids; it's exactly the opposite--more substance. Magazines need to stop trying to be imitations of television, and start being magazines again.



if they asked me how to reach the young folks with a magazine--and people used to, more fool them--I'd say, "First of all, porn is everywhere and you can get it for free. Now days, people have to read your magazine also for what it says, not just for what it shows. Stop selling ersatz, rap-video sophistication. Invest in top fiction, absolutely rock-solid experts, great design and illustration, even decent humor. Your readers aren't looking for what a print version of what they already like to watch on TV, they're looking to be molded, moved up, made adult. Playboy became successful by showing its readers what to aspire to--and the continuing uncertainty among men on what it means to be a man gives you a tremendous opportunity. Downmarket magazines like Penthouse and Hustler and the lad mags have already taken their bites of your circulation--the low end. Invest in the high end. Think Cary Grant, not Kid Rock." But they won't do it, I bet. I predict more profiles of 50 Cent, more models that look like strippers, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

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As you might have heard, FOX News is threatening a website with legal action over a parody T-shirt. The T-shirt, which reads "FAUX News" in a similar (though not the same) typeface, and a similar (though not identical) design, is clearly political speech, using a clearly transformed original to make a satirical point--that FOX News isn't real news. So from where I'm standing, it's pretty open-and-shut in favor of the little guy--if said little guy can afford to stand their ground. I'm buying a couple, and you should, too, at www.agitproperties.com. But be patient--their server is getting swamped.

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Jon and I have a humor piece on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times! Very exciting indeed. It's about Harry Potter, of course--take a look, and spread the word!

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A pagan band in the UK has asked for a "quiet place for fornication" as they play a summer solstice celebration tomorrow. The band is called Inkubus Sukkubus, which suggests that they're kinda the Skynyrd of the druid set. The C of E guys are predictably appalled, which I'm sure only encourages them.



You know, my folks just built a house in Michigan with a fornicatorium in it. It's nice. Mom put in a bunch of stuff from the Bean catalog, but then had to send it back after everybody got wicker-splinters.



By the way, for those of you concerned about media consolidation and free speech, check out mediareform.net. Seems like a high-quality source of info.

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This morning a Trotterista wrote me to pitch an idea for a kid's book he wanted to write. He's around 12, and I hear from him every so often. It was a good idea and I told him so. Here's his response: "My friend has an idea: say we give u the plot and ideas in order in the book, and u write it.  The part he wanted me to make stand out most was the part where u send some of the profits to us." Young friend, Hollywood is calling you! 

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Kate got me The Beatles Anthology on DVD for my birthday, so we've been watching it nightly. Fascinating. Meanwhile, hardcore fans will be interested in this transcript of one of the last interviews John Lennon ever did. Exhaustive, to say the least.



And here's an artifact from another famous New Yorker: Ed Koch reviewing movies for The (Greenwich) Villager....

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I did it once and have always regretted it--nevertheless, several websites are encouraging folks to sell booksthey'll never read again.



As Pottermania starts to crest in Britain, some independent booksellers there believe that HP5 won't be a boon for them. The cause is, of course, massive discounting by the chains; the article suggests that one, Tesco (a supermarket chain in Britain) could be losing as much as a Pound per book. I suppose it makes sense as a loss-leader? Only the book business could find a way to lose money on Harry Potter...There's gotta be a better way....

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UK teachers pose nude for a calendar; pupils may never eat again...Details here...(By the way, the ones at Hogwash do that just for kicks. No charity necessary. Shit, no camera either.)

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The New York Times has an article on the latest horrific wave of Harry Potter merchandizing. How kids are suspicious of it. How JK Rowling doesn't like it and tries to reign it in. How it might be overshadowing the books themselves--in other words, the EXACT SATIRICAL POINT of Barry Trotter and the Unauthorized Parody. And yet the parody isn't mentioned. There's even a section on sleazy no-goods trying to cash in! I'm a sleazy no-good, too--what about me?



Pique aside, I blog it mainly for the Oak Park, IL connection--where I went to high school. It's almost as if the Times were determined to mention every aspect of my life, without mentioning me by name...I'm trying not to be too depressed about it--the Times is mostly made-up nowdays, anyway...

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...is here. Check it!

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..."Spellbound," the new documentary about the national spelling bee. All eight students--between 10-13--are tremendously interesting; some of them inspire pity for the pressure (implicit and explicit) they're under--pressure to succeed, sure, but pressure to deal with differences in culture and class, and in the largest sense, the great task of becoming oneself..I admired all of them for how they persevered--are persevering--through that difficult time of life.



Speaking of great movies, two things: first, here's Roger Ebert's review of Jacques Tati's 1958 comedy, "Mon Oncle." You know, if one was assembling a DVD collection, one could do a lot worse than just picking up all the films on Ebert's Great Movies list.



The second thing: I am now the proud owner of The Beatles Anthology on DVD, thanks to Kate. And a year older, but Kate had nothing to do with that.

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In the 1960's, former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton scandalized the baseball world with a tell-all, Ball Four. Now, he's got a new book, Foul Ball, detailing his quest to renovate an old New England ballpark. Along the way he describes how the process was derailed by greedy town fathers (who were pushing an all-new ballpark, typical tax boondoggle). He had to self-publish the book, because the New York publisher that bought it, wanted him to go easy on GE, one of the local heavies in favor of the new park.



I haven't read Foul Ball, but I suspect it would shed a lot of light on what's going wrong with baseball, and the world. (Surely the bit about publishing rings true.) I walk around thinking, "Things could be a lot better than they are; the world is full of smart, amazing people, full of great ideas...And yet the same old shit remains, generation after generation. WHY IS THIS?" Can you relate?

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As some of you already know, today's the day that Barry Trotter and the Shameless Parody goes on sale in Australia. The Bulletin, which has been described to me as Australia's version of Newsweek (but could be that country's version of Playboy, for all I know) had the poor judgment to run an interview with yours truly. Check it out! Swamp their servers! With your help, we can make "Mike Gerber-related content" synonomous with cash in Australia!

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There's a quite interesting column by Jack Shafer in Slate today. In it he reminds us that several Giants of Journalism--H.L. Mencken, Joseph Mitchell, and A.J. Liebling--all fabricated stories during their careers. And yet no mud is on those statues. He says it's hypocritical, and after reading the facts he presents, I'm inclined to agree.

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I must admit that, after having read the obituary in the Times this morning, I'm feeling quite fond of the late actor Gregory Peck. Here's something from the article:



"A staunch advocate of nuclear disarmament, he said in an interview on the "Today" program: "I would give up everything I do and everything I have if I could make a significant difference in getting the nuclear arms race reversed. It is the No. 1 priority in my life."



When he received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1989, he warned of the dangers in having "all pictures and television" made by "two or three of these behemoths who happen also to own magazines, newspapers and cable stations."



The obit also goes on to add that Peck was Founding Chairman of the American Film Institute, and also headed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But more than any one honor or achievement, one gets a sense of somebody who did their job well, and applied a high standard of morality and courage throughout his life. And get this: he dated Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren, and Audrey Hepburn! Who says virtue isn't rewarded?

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Check out this article on a show house put together by some professional designers in New York. Looking for publicity, eBay gave each one a budget (which was deposited into a PayPal account) for their room; then each designer created a look based on what they were able to purchase. Very neat stuff.

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The Chicago Tribune asked its writers this question, and here's the list they came up with. There are plenty of old warhorses, but the list is worth reading for the surprises. I can vouch for #1, Cook's Illustrated--or, rather, Kate can. And I was glad to see the British music magazines Q and Mojo get in there, too. Anybody ever read Wizard? It's a magazine about comic books that they said was really good.



And by the way--I'm filtering out most of the pre-release hype that I read for Harry Potter V, but here are a few links. This article is about some market research done by J.P. Morgan that suggests Harry will not be the savior that everybody in publishing expects him to be. There's an obvious flaw in their method, though--asking sixth and seventh graders is about the WORST group possible. HP is a broad phenomenon--seven year olds to adults--and sixth and seventh graders (in other words, 12 to 13 year olds) are just beginning to reject their childhood identities--which for many of them included HP-worship. So all-in-all, I think this article, while conventional wisdom, is probably more accurate. The short version: I think Harry's going to be huge. A harmless escape into a rich fantasy world--a story where good trumps evil--is more attractive now than ever, don't you agree?

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The Chicago tribune has a roundup where 12 writers of note are asked if they plan to read Harry Potter V. Verdict: they are split down the middle. However, in a shocking display that must have been orchestrated by the reporter, each one of them makes a point to say "...and of course I won't be reading those awful parodies! They eat it." Even David McCullough bellowed, "Barry Trotter bites my bag!"

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Pal Garry Goodrow writes, re: Orwell:

"Mike: The Orwell piece was very interesting. Just this morning, I was reading something that I think connects nicely.



The Autobiography of Mark Twain [ghostwritten by U.S. Grant? :-) —MG] was unfinished by him when he died. His conceit in it was that since these were the words of a dead man, he could say anything he wanted. The pages were put together by editors after his death. Here’s a small piece of it, in which he discusses why certain old humorists have been forgotten:



   “Why have they perished? Because they were merely humorists. Humorists of the “mere” sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration. Often it is merely an odd trick of speech and spelling, as in the case of Ward and Billings and Nasby and the “Disbanded Volunteer,” and presently the fashion passes and the fame along with it. There are those who say that a novel should be a work of art solely and you must not preach in it, you must not teach in it. That may be true as regards novels, but it is not true as regards humor. Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. By forever, I mean thirty years. With all its preaching it is not likely to outlive so long a term as that. The very things it preaches about and which are novelties when it preaches about them can cease to be novelties and become commonplaces in thirty years. Then the sermon can thenceforth interest no one.

   “I have always preached. That is the reason that I have lasted thirty years. If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor. I should have written the sermon just the same, whether any humor applied for admission or not. I am saying these vain things in this frank way because I am a dead person speaking from the grave. Even I would be too modest to say them in life. I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead—and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”

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So quoth George Orwell is this essay on humor. Jon Schwarz, who dug it up, called it "oddly contemporary," and I have to say that I agree.



Also: I'm pleased as Punch to report that a pal of mine, Mark O'Donnell, won the Tony award for Best Book last night, as the co-writer of the musical Hairspray. Give him a round of applause!

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I don't link to SB's emails very often--I figure if you like them as much as I do, you're probably surfing to them yourself--but this one was too funny not to mention. "I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever write a song about Sibbie..."

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...was a segment on "This American Life" (I know, I know--I don't listen to it often, can I still be allergic to hipness?), an essay read by Jonathan Goldstein on losing his virginity. Tremendously funny! Anybody know where I can get transcripts? The show's website doesn't seem to have anything.



I was surprised to see that his novel, Lenny Bruce is Dead, was rather tepidly treated on Amazon, but we know that one's star ranking isn't everything, eh? And he's working on a rewriting of the Bible. I think I like this guy.

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Twenty five years after it was published, ", " is still selling. Its author is profiled in this article, which also contains a summary of his book's four main points. Oh what the hell, here they are:



"1. The direct experience of life is routinely crowded out by TV's all-encompassing imagery of living. This in turn becomes the synthetic ideal we try to live up to. "We have given up awareness, information and experience that is not part of television," Mander wrote.



2. Television transforms humans into consumers to meet the demands of the global marketplace. To do so, it shapes viewers' sensibility into a unified state of mind, ready "to confuse human need with the advertiser's need to sell commodities."



3. Television is a mind-numbing instrument producing neuro-physiological responses in its audience — effects that amount "to conditioning for autocratic control." (Go ahead and laugh, but who hasn't remarked on TV's ability to zone us out, or likened TV to a drug?)



4. The technology of television acts to filter out nuance from the information it conveys, inevitably favoring "gross, simplified linear messages and programs," wrote Mander, adding, "Television's highest potential is advertising."



On a lighter note, or perhaps a much more ominous one, somebody on eBay is selling a ghost in a jar, complete with a story of suitable creepiness. Why would anybody buy this? Not to throw it at other people, I hope.

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I read this column on Iraq by Thomas Friedman in the Times this morning, and thought it was right on the beam.



Those of you who prefer the escapism of wordy folks bickering, check out the Letters section of Moby Lives. Ian Spiegelman and John Hodgeman (who I knew at school, full disclosure, very good guy) go toe-to-toe over Spiegelman's new novel, the inevitable Eggers, et cetera. Bracing!

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Jonathan Schwarz writes in with two amusing letters written to The Guardian (UK), "Thank god," he adds, not even bothering to capitalize the G in God (which to me was a bit of a giveaway), "that The New York Times and the Washington Post don't run things like this." Hear, hear! We Americans prefer our humor safely in the mouths of paid professionals. In the wrong hands, free-range joking can lead to all sorts of dangerous things, like voting. Anyway, here are the letters:



· If Tony Blair imagines that those Labour MPs who voted for war are so spineless and unprincipled that they will allow him to get away with flat denials of all the accusations made against him by Clare Short and Robin Cook - apparently because no evidence has been presented by them, followed by promises of yet another dossier as a substitute for dealing with past discredited dossiers - he's probably right.

Geoff Woolf

South Harrow, Middx



· As a professional bureaucrat, I must strongly protest against the misuse of the term "bureaucratic" by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, to describe the US justification of war on the basis that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (General admits chemical weapons intelligence was wrong, May 31).



As should be well known, we bureaucrats never engage in deliberate lying, or, indeed, any other form of intelligent processing of information.

David Allen

Kinoulton, Notts"

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I apparently enjoyed a brief period of lucidity during an interview with the SF/fantasy website Wotmania. I thought the questions were particularly good. So if this blog isn't enough for you, check out the interview here.

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BBC Online reports that a bunch of books once owned by comedian Spike Milligan are set to go on sale at Christie's. What makes the books, mostly Victorian and Edwardian children's books, uniquely valuable is that they are jammed with Milligan's comic marginalia. Bought for GBP30, they're expected to fetch at least ten thousand at auction. Prospective bidders can read the story here.

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Fellow Yalies might be interested in photos of the damage suffered by the Law School in the recent bombing, posted on a librarian blog. (Small aside: I love the Web.) All-in-all, it seems pretty minor. A carved rabbit named Pufendorf was uninjured.

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In light of my recent rants, you might be interested in this article in today's New York Times. Briefly, TV people are concerned that increased corporate consolidation will stifle creativity. "It's hard to challenge the premise that `All in the Family' would never be scheduled on a network today," said Tom Werner, a partner in Carsey-Werner-Mandabach, one of the more prolific independent production companies. "I'm not even sure `Seinfeld' would get on. It would look too quirky."



But not everybody agrees. Here's the kicker to the article: ""The fact of the matter is with 100 channels in competition, it is tougher than ever to break through," said Warren Littlefield, former entertainment president for NBC and now the president of the Littlefield Company, a production partnership with Paramount Network Television. "That's why no good idea can be turned away. It's still more important than anything to a network to have that hit show."



But here's a question: how can a show become a hit if it's never aired in the first place? A hit means "the most popular among what is being offered." What's going to combat the bias every institution has towards playing it safe and doing what worked before? The raw demands of 100 cable channels, perhaps? Even then, will we see 20 different types of channel, repeated five different times? Quick, somebody tell me the difference between Discovery and TLC. Or USA and TNT....

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Oh, you gotta go see "Finding Nemo." It's terrific. Terrifically conceived, well written, wonderfully designed. It will also make you forget today's FCC ruling for 2 hours...

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