A Feast for Post-Modern L.A. Appetites

A little magazine with little articles on subjects of little or no significance, The Book/Los Angeles is visual dim sum for a post-literate La La Land.

As such, it’s a lot of fun.

Twenty-five thousand copies of the mini-magazine’s second issue are now on sale in chic boutiques, trendy clubs and selected bookstores around town and in New York and Paris.

In the premier issue editor Patrick Kahn poeticized:

Voices . . .

I hear a mixture of sounds.

Civilization in motion.

The megalopolis finds its oxygen

In the fusion of cultures.

Like the city it hopes to reflect, though, the magazine is hard to classify, hard to figure.

Kahn, a 33-year-old Paris expatriate who has owned a design studio here for the past four years, published his first magazine as a vehicle for an advertising client--the nightclub Vertigo. The influence shows.

“We try to have the ads blend in with the editorial (content),” Kahn said. “We want the ads to look good. We want there to be a good flow.”

The result is that some of the ads are intriguing, and some of the editorial content is as pretentious as the sappy cologne and perfume ads now so pervasive in mainstream periodicals.

Despite its terminally trendy mind-set, though, the magazine’s energetic artwork and jarringly unusual features frequently transcend its constraining pose of Post-Modern retro-decadence.

The current issue, 1,500 copies of which come with a Linticular 3D collector’s cover, is dedicated to an exploration of Los Angeles’ future.

Ten local artists, including illustrator Moebius and photographer Karen Anderson, were asked to render interpretations of the future, and their full-color pieces alone are worth the price of admission to this pint-sized gallery.

These commissioned pieces will be a regular feature, Kahn said. “We like to showcase art in motion, to show how an artist functions under a concept and limitation.”

For the most part, the brief verbal investigations of the future by the usual lineup of Los Angeles commentators aren’t nearly as interesting--although Pee-wee Herman does have a valid point in observing that “the people who have started growing their pony tails will have very long hair by 2014.”

Also included in the issue are a photographic tribute to the nude by 10 photographers, a quirky comic strip, a colorized piece of photo fiction, an excerpt of the script from the new film “Vampire’s Kiss” (with photos of actors Nicolas Cage and Maria Conchita Alonso in action), and a bunch of bite-size profiles of oddball Angelenos.

The ratio of words to pictures in the book is about 10 to 1, a mix guaranteed to keep busy people grazing. Because the Book also contains 350 restaurant and club listings (a surprisingly populist catalogue), Kahn hopes readers will hold on to issues. He’s made that easier to do by making the magazine small enough to fit into a pocket or purse or glove box.

“Everything is getting compact right now--cars, computers--it seemed like it might be a good idea to do a magazine in compact size,” he said.

Magazine Awards

The 1989 National Magazine Awards, the industry’s most prestigious, were announced last week in New York. Two hundred eighty-five magazines submitted a total of 1,225 entries in the competition, which is sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors and administered by the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University.

The envelopes please:

Sports Illustrated took the General Excellence prize in the category of magazines with a circulation over 1 million for--in the judges’ words--”consistently sharp reporting, elegant writing and superb photography.”

Vanity Fair won the same prize for magazines with circulation from 400,000 to 1 million for “uninhibited cheekiness and an uncanny sense of timing,” and American Heritage and The Sciences claimed the Excellence award for circulations of 100,000 to 400,000 and under 100,000, respectively.

Good Housekeeping won the Personal Service award for it’s package “Child Care ’88.”

Conde Nast Traveler won the Special Interest award for “The Ultimate Island Finder,” “Bush Intelligence” and “Bring the Kids.”

The New Yorker won for both reporting and fiction, the former award going for Los Angeles Times’ national security correspondent Robin Wright’s “A Reporter At Large: Tehran Summer,” “a sensitive and bold piece of reporting about a part of the world that has been out of bounds to most American journalists.” The winning fiction selections included “White Angel” by Michael Cunningham, “I Read My Nephew Stories” by Ethan Mordden, and “We” by Mary Grimm.

Esquire won the Feature Writing award for “The Transformation of Johnny Spain” by Chip Brown, which the judges called “a gripping story of a man born white in Mississippi who grew up to spend his adult years in prison as a black revolutionary.”

Rolling Stone won the Design award.

National Geographic won the Photography award.

Harper’s Magazine won the Essays and Criticism award for “The Urge for an End” by Edward Hoagland; “Who Won the West?” by William Kittredge; and “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent?” by Shelby Steele.

Hippocrates won the Best Single Topic Issue for “Choices of the Heart,” an examination of medical ethics.

California Magazine was the only hometown team to return from New York clutching ASME’s award--an “Elephant” stabile created by Alexander Calder and an accompanying bronze plaque.

California won the Public Interest award for Bay Area writer Cindy Ehrlich’s two-part series “Halcion Madness,” a first person investigation of her almost fatal reaction to America’s most widely prescribed sleeping pill.

In presenting the award, the judges said, “as a result of the article, the FDA is again investigating the drug’s side effects. More poignant was the outpouring of letters from readers who said, ‘You saved my life.’ ”

At California, the folks aren’t quite as giddy as Sally Fields clutching her Oscar, but they aren’t too cool to gloat a bit about the fact that their stories beat out Reader’s Digest, Atlanta, Detroit Monthly, Philadelphia, and Consumer Reports’ Suzuki Samurai expose.

Ehrlich’s articles were “not just straight turn over the rock and watch the snakes scramble” kind of investigation, said executive editor Bob Roe. They were compelling because of the personal approach, and because they addressed the uncertainties everyone faces when confronted with medical decisions today, he said.

In the past few years, investigative reporting has “fallen by the wayside,” losing credibility with some readers and proving economically unfeasible for most writers, Roe added. California hopes the award will let writers know “that this is the place you can come to do some good serious investigative work.”

Also, here in Los Angeles last week, the Western Publications Assn. sifted through about 1,300 submissions and presented its annual Maggie award in 68 wide-ranging consumer and trade categories.

The award for best overall consumer publication went to Hippocrates, for it’s Jan./Feb. issue, and the best overall trade magazine award was presented to Personnel Journal for its September issue. Among the other consumer magazines winning awards were California, Mother Jones, Angeles, American Way, Sacramento, and Phoenix Home and Garden.

A Profile in GQ

Readers with healthy sleep habits will want to move right on to the neat jackets and sweaters in the May issue of Gentleman’s Quarterly. Late-night TV addicts, however, will find the profile of Chris Elliott, David Letterman’s loosest cannon, indispensable reading.

The 28-year-old Elliott, whom writer Glen Duffy describes as “a man with no credentials to be on television except for an insatiable appetite to be on television,” is arguably the funniest man on television (though anyone arguing such a position probably has serious problems).

The way Guffy tells it, the story of Elliott’s success, in life and career, is a heartwarming one. A production assistant on “Late Night” (a sort of talent scout for exotic birds, Duffy writes), Elliott courted his wife, Paula (in charge of booking people who collect rocks that look like food), “by doing embarrassing impressions of her in public and tacking cruel caricatures to her office door.”

He courted a spot on Letterman in much the same way, as “a humble office runner who was constantly mumbling seething invectives against the boss.”

Elliott, it turns out, is the son of Bob Elliott of Bob and Ray fame. The difference between father and son, Guffy writes, is that “Bob Elliott does parodies, Chris Elliott does parodies of a man attempting parodies.”

Longtime “Late Night” viewers will find it hard to believe that Elliott’s portrayals of classic comedy characters such as “the guy under the seats,” “the panicky guy” and “the fugitive guy” were viewed by the show’s writers with “respectful trepidation.”

But Guffy reveals that in fact, the staff only put Elliott on the air because they figured if they had to put up with his alleged comedy behind the scenes, America might as well endure it as well.