Hypestalker

Shock magazine, the Hachette Filipacchi machination that aims to douse out the flames of Details and GQ, is purportedly planning to publish twice a month come November. Sources say the editors are really gearing up, and it looks as though the magazine will actually have a budget to pay freelancers. A few on staff believe the day is coming when they won't have to edit and research stories while also stocking cups in the kitchen. If you haven't been keeping up, Shock is the American version of the French Choc. The magazine, scarily enough, will supposedly have bare breasts in its issues (must be a French thing), just to distinguish them from any metrosexual rags such as the aforementioned competitors?

It never seems quite right to pick on The New Yorker. It's such a venerable magazine, managing to maintain decent journalism and decorum amid the messy bog of celebrity-soaked drab. But how well does a piece on The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir fare alongside a column on Turkmenistan ("Talk of the Town," April 24, 2006)? And although The New Yorker managed to get the story behind the story from lyricist Bernie Taupin on his and Elton John's new musical Lestat, do we, or anyone, really care about Taupin's writerly torments? I mean, I know you guys dug deep for that one, but that's a little too deep. Let's keep it simple boys?

Recently, Celebrity Living magazine closed up shop. What, you ask, is Celebrity Living? It's a weekly magazine put out by AMI, makers of Star and the National Enquirer. What matters is not that CL closed down, but that two books strangely eked their way onto the shelves just around the time of CL's closing: one from Bonnie Fuller, The Joys of Much Too Much, details how-to-be-famous, and CL freelancer Shari Goldhagen's Family and Other Accidents. I haven't peeled open the first page of Goldhagen's book, since I have an aversion to novelists who have MFA's and allegedly bed down with fellow writers with books. It's just too much, well, literariness? 

Did anyone notice all the pieces on Christ the last few weeks? The New York Times, USA Today, etc.; the big one being that the Gospel of Judas has just been released. According to research, the actual Judas so-called manuscript was unearthed thirty years ago, so why did they wait until now to release it? Is Dan Brown behind all this to promote his new movie (The Da Vinci Code)? Or is it because we've just passed the Easter season? Such a blatant show of naked promotionalism is enough to make any clergyman sick.