Because the first week of SPI is coming to a close, our program directors treated us to magazine tours. My group went the beautiful Conde Nast building at 4 Times Sq., and toured SELF. After looping through the editorial offices, fashion closet and creative department, we sat down with three associate editors and learned a bit more about what it's like to enter the industry.
The editors had all landed at SELF via different paths and learning this was both encouraging and refreshing. The production process is fascinating and ever-changing and I can't wait to be a part of it.
So despite the fact that Times Square resembles a zoo on steriods, today was pretty fabulous.
Yesterday I received my pre-SPI course assignments for the magazine section and it seems as if I've seen these all before. Probably due to my superior capstone course under ex-Milwaukee Magazine editor John Fennell, these assignments will basically lead to another and quite accelerated Better Brunch launch. First assignment? Brainstorm five magazine concepts and prepare mission statements for each. Checkity check. Second, read the MPA's handbook. Thanks to Jen Rowe, that deserves a check as well. I'm awaiting more assignments, many of which will be manuscript editing, and I'm pretty excited to dive into them.
Enclosed with this round of assignments was the itinerary for the magazine section (first three weeks) of the course. Four words: David Granger, Adam Moss. If you love me, dear readers, these names should need no explanation. And as you might assume, I almost cried with excitement when I learned of this.
For the devoted, I plan to blog my way through the course and what might be the best summer yet. You're very welcome.
Yesterday there was a dearth of updates on NYMag, and so I clicked aimlessly until I found a slideshow of Lagerfeld's latest collection. What began as innocent boredom ended in nausea.
He opened with looks like this: light, airy, clean. Sure, I'd wear that on my yacht.
And this:
Adorable. Fresh. Pastel prep and bohemian all rolled into one.
Then, this happened:
What?! Do your eyes hurt as much as mine do? I applaud Karl's use of plus-size model Crystal Renn, but did he have to put her in an ill-fitting sweater, a Wet Seal-esque jean skirt from 2001, and suede boots? Absolutely not.
Then, Karl, lord of all things fashionable, hit us with this:
And this:
First, corduroy as resortwear? Since when? And if a 110-lb model can't make high-waisted ankle cords look good, we've got larger issues.
What's most perplexing though, is that in this collection Karl showed 87 looks. 87? Were all of those necessary, especially when half of them end up looking like this? Methinks no.
All photos courtesy of
NYMag.
From Emily Nussbaum's feature on The Wire's David Simon in this week's New York Magazine. Nussbaum asks him twice why he doesn't dabble in documentary film, considering his shows often blend truth with fiction. In an e-mail, this is his final response:
“We know more about what Huey Long represented and the emptiness at the core of American political culture from reading Robert Penn Warren than from contemporary journalistic accounts of Long’s reign. We know more about human pride, purpose, and obsession from Moby-Dick than from any contemporaneous account of the Nantucket whaler that was actually struck and sunk by a whale in the nineteenth-century incident on which Melville based his book. And we know how much of an affront the Spanish Civil War was to the human spirit when we stare at Picasso’s Guernica than when we read a more deliberate, fact-based account. I am not comparing anything I’ve done to any of the above; please, please do not presume that because I cite someone else’s art, I claim anything similar for anything I’ve done. But I cite the above because it makes the answer to your question obvious: Picasso said art is the lie that allows us to see the truth. That is it exactly.”
