By Jonathan Shipley

Filling in this week for an ill Jonathan Shipley.
Vanity for the Bonfire
Vanity Fair‘s massive 500-page March issue is out and causing hernias everywhere. We might be able to take Graydon Carter’s convenient political moralizing more seriously if his Editor’s Letter didn’t appear after 121 pages of smelly advertising. Of course, it is the annual, Oscar-ready Hollywood issue, but how disheartening to have to wade through endless Burberry, Grey Goose, and Dolce & Gabbana ads to find the world-class work of the legendary investigative duo, Don Barlett and James Steele, who examine a McLean, Virginia company with 9,000 government contracts, most in secret intelligence. Which is kind of what Barlett and Steele provide to Vanity Fair.
Not to be missed in the vanity-run-amok department is Michael Wolff’s column on disgraced O.J. Simpson publisher Judith Regan. Wolff is a world-class twit who knows far less of whence he speaks on media matters than reputed, but he happens to have known Regan since college and writes that he has heard her anti-Semitic garbage for years. Wolff confesses he used to find it funny.

Read More

Posted on February 21, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup of the magazines on Shipley’s nightstand.
Take-Home Pay
Frank Blake, the new CEO of Home Depot, will make $8.9 million a year, according to Time magazine. Yeah, you know times are tough when a guy like that can’t get a clean $9 mil. Guess he’ll have to hold off on that 22nd addition.
Secret Sex
Reader’s Digest reveals the seven secrets to a sexy marriage. Yes, that’s right, Reader’s Digest. Hey, circulation is tough all over.
Number One
Subscribe to sexier magazines.

Read More

Posted on February 10, 2007

Hello Mr. Steve Rhodes:
The following press release about a college student’s book that could prove the existence of God, may be of interest to your audience. Any editorial comment or mention that you may give this press release would be greatly appreciated.
– – –
COLLEGE KID PROVES CREATION, WRITES BOOK ABOUT IT
Dateline: February 5, 2007 . . . Bowling Green, KY
Contact: Samuel J. Hunt
Phone: (918) 809-6278
E-Mail: samuel.hunt1@wku.edu
Web Address: www.ScienceProvesCreation.com
BOWLING GREEN, KY – February 5, 2007 – In what could turn out to be the most controversial document since a patent clerk penned the theory of relativity, Episteme Scientia – The Law of All that Is, suggests science has been proving God’s existence, all along.

Read More

Posted on February 7, 2007

By Rick Kaempfer

As a long-time radio veteran, and someone who has followed the story of media consolidation as closely as anyone, even I was appalled by the details of the Minot, North Dakota train derailment that Eric Klinenberg recounts in the introduction to his new book, Fighting for Air.
According to Klinenberg’s excellent narrative, local officials tried to contact the radio stations in Minot to declare an emergency because a toxic cloud five miles long, two-and-a-half miles wide, and 350-feet high was heading straight for town.
There was only one problem: Clear Channel owned every radio station in Minot, and all of its programming was automated. There wasn’t a single person in any of the local studios to answer the calls of emergency response officials to alert the public about the impending danger.
By the time the cloud had dissipated, one man was dead, and more than a thousand people needed medical care. If Minot’s radio stations hadn’t been consolidated and downsized, the town could have been easily evacuated before the slow-moving cloud reached the city limits.
And that’s just the introduction of Fighting for Air.

Read More

Posted on January 27, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup from Shipley’s nightstand.
Urban Redevelopment
In the January 26th issue of Entertainment Weekly there’s a small blurb about Keith Urban, who, after seven months, is out of rehab for alcohol abuse. Now he’ll just start sucking sober.
Table of Incompetence
The February issue of Vogue might prove interesting, what with stories about Joyce Maynard (who once had an affair with J.D. Salinger), Renee Zellweger (who once had an affair with Thomas Pynchon), and Italian label Derercuny (who once clothed Harper Lee). Yeah, might be a cool issue but, goddammit, after thumbing through 1,200 pages of ads, I still can’t find the freakin’ table of contents.
Tupperwarrant
The CD era must be coming to a close because the good folks at Better Homes and Gardens are already thinking about repurposing. For example, in their February issue the BH&G staff suggests using stackable containers for Tupperware storage and a CD rack for the lids – filed by size.

Read More

Posted on January 26, 2007

By The Beachwood Dixie Affairs Desk

So says Regnery, the right-wing publishing house founded in Chicago and once closely affiliated with the University of Chicago, in the following promotional copy that landed in The Beachwood Dixie Affairs Desk inbox.
*
From the Founding Fathers to the frontiersmen who tamed the West to the country music, NASCAR, Bible-thumping heart of ‘Red State’ America, the South is the quintessence of what’s original, unique, and most loved about American culture. Yet, thanks to the big-city elites, the South is under attack. The PC establishment is so intent on spreading the myth of the South as prejudiced and ignorant that it even wants to rewrite history.
But author Clint Johnson rises up in fierce resistance to the second war against the South. He reveals that, far from being the backwater of the nation, the South has always been the center of American culture and history, and that the South is truly rising again.

Read More

Posted on January 23, 2007

By Jonathan Shipley

A weekly roundup from Shipley’s nightstand.
Soul Hole
The cover story of the January 25th issue of Rolling Stone is a warm tribute to the life, times, and music of James Brown. However, on page three there’s a picture of his corpse as well as a picture of Michael Jackson embracing Al Sharpton. And the only one who looks alive and well is Sharpton.
Space, the Capitalist Frontier
Richard Branson wants you to fly Virgin Galactic – into space. The December issue of Wired reports that Virgin is selling seats for just $200,000. Industry analysts say the real money will be made selling overpriced CDs to a captive market.
Fair Warning
I’m sure the February issue of Vanity Fair is pretty good. There’s a cover story on Demi Moore. There’s a story about John McCain and his possible 2008 Presidential run. There’s a story about the new Broadway show based on Joan Didion’s wonderful book, The Year of Magical Thinking. But I’ll never really know because I can’t get near it. Boy, you stink, Vanity Fair! Thank your cologne advertiser Acqua Di Gio for nothing.
Alternate Analysis
Am I supposed to read this magazine, or wear it?

Read More

Posted on January 19, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Previously:
Part 1/Daley mobilizes black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts here.
Part2/Daley denies there are slums in Chicago, then pledges to eliminate them within a year.
Part 3/Daley negotiates an agreement long enough to get King out of town, then reneges. His private feelings about King are revealed.
*
With the election safely over, the truth about the housing summit came out. Keane, the number -two man in city government and Daley’s co-negotiator at the summit, declared on the floor of the City Council that there was no open-housing agreement. “There were only certain suggestions put down and goals to be sought,” he said.
. . .
[Daley] agreed with Keane that the housing summit had produced no enforceable agreement, although he did concede that there was a “gentleman’s agreement unded a moral banner” to address the concerns that were raised there. By backing up Keane, he was sending a clear signal to the white wards that they did not need to worry that the summit agreement would cause their neighborhoods to be integrated. At the same time, his talk of a “gentleman’s agreement” and a “moral banner” offered blacks just enough that they could probably be convinced to continue to vote for the machine.”

Read More

Posted on January 19, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Previously:
Part 1/Daley mobilizes black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts here.
Part2/Daley denies there are slums in Chicago, then pledges to eliminate them within a year.
*
The night before the summit began, [the Chicago Freedom Movement] cobbled together a set of proposed reforms. True to his character, Daley plotted his course of action more carefully. He assembled a team of experts who would be able to go head-to-head with the civil rights delegation on any subject they were likely to raise.
. . .
Daley’s approach, as it had been with the 1963 open-housing ordinance he drafted, was to blame the lack of fair housing in Chicago on the real estate industry rather than city government. Once again, it was a formulation that made Realtors and the civil rights movement the combatants, and avoided placing Daley in a showdown with King.
. . .
White working-class residents of the Bungalow Belt, accepting the open-housing language of the agreement at face value, were convinced Daley had handed their neighborhoods over to blacks . . . Black activists were just as convinced it was their side that had been betrayed.

Read More

Posted on January 18, 2007

By The Beachwood History Club

Excerpts from:
American Pharaoh
Mayor Richard J. Daley
His Battle for Chicago and the Nation
By Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
*
Previously:
Part 1/Daley mobilizes black machine politicians to undermine King’s efforts here.
*
Coming back from an eight-day vacation with Sis and four of the children to the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico, Daley declared at the San Juan airport that there were “no slums” in Chicago, only “bad housing.” In a January 26, 1966, taped television appearance, he predicted that all of the city’s blighted buildings would be eliminated in the next two years.
Daley insisted that he was working as hard as anyone to improve conditions in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. “All of us, like Dr. King, are trying to eliminate slums,” he said. “Elimination of slums is the No. 1 program of this administration, and we feel we have done more in this field than any other city.”

Read More

Posted on January 17, 2007