My Spy
A collection of Spy magazine--Spy: The Funny Years--is out. It would make a good Christmas gift but I won't buy it. That's because I still have the original issues from when I subscribed.
During its short reign in the late 80s, Spy was the funniest, smartest, nastiest magazine around. It took on the powerful--socialites, celebrities, politicians--in ways that probably still make them wince today.
In Christopher Buckley's New York Times' review, he notes how intensely the magazine was edited. I can attest to this.
See, back in those days, I wrote a lot of letters to magazines and newspapers. Yes, I was a crank. Now I'm just a blogger. Anyway, Spy was the only place that actually had someone call me to discuss the letter and explain what it meant before they published it. (It was in defense of mimes, but that's another story.) I liked the magazine already, but that impressed me.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:53 AM
4 Comments:
My favorite thing was how the went after Donald Trump relentlessly. He was always referred to as "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump".
Unfortunately The Donald correctly predicted Spy would go under even if several years off while Spy predicted that by this time Trump would be making "Crazy Don" commercials for his "first class" limousine service (if I am remembering right. One could argue that DT leveraged the mocking of his personality and his tiny common digits into being a media star (if he was just a Real Estate mogul, he'd be boring)
What will be the effects upon the targets of scorn form the Daily Show? I wonder
Yes, I remember they featured this quote from Trump about how Spy would be going under in a year, with a countdown calendar to go along with it. When they survived, they started a countdown calendar (for one issue as a joke) for his death.
Also, when it came out, Spy didn't look like anything else on the magazine rack. Its design was gorgeous. At least, that's what made me first pick it up.
It's so hard to realize now but, since I lived in Dallas, Spy magazine was my introduction to Trump, Giuliani, Tisch et al -- not people I would have read about or cared about otherwise.
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