Fashion-hunting in the Penny Press!

It’s fashion month in the Penny Press these days, which means the square-bound glossies are suddenly a bit thicker and much more tightly crammed with full-color full-page spreads of varied and frenzied incomprehensibility. As many of you will have no trouble believing, fashion is a mystery to me; not only do I completely lack the physical traits that make it feasible in the first place, I also completely lack the herd mentality at the very heart of the concept. You need to be susceptible to that kind of herd mentality in order to justify spending money (often exorbitant amounts of it) specifically for the purpose of looking ridiculous – the only way an otherwise normal person would do that is if it were very important to them that they be doing something lots of other people are doing, and damn the consequences.

Take young men’s current fashion as a case-in-point: skin-tight clothing, pantlegs that end at mid-shin, no socks, ridiculous faux-1950s hats, enormous barn-owl sized eyeglasses (worn almost exclusively by pretty illiterates) … the combination of these things makes the wearer look, objectively speaking, like a homeless superhero in secret identity mode. Even now, without the benefit of twenty years’ hindsight, such a getup looks just plain ridiculous, like all those embarrassing photos of grown men wearing dashikis in the ‘70s. But fashion not only embraces the ridiculous, it caters to it – so the lavish photos filling these issues can be a mysterious little education in themselves. I sometimes stare at one or another of them, trying in all seriousness to figure out what the point is. What’s the point of a Perry Ellis ad featuring a young man staring in wonder at a woodpecker, for example? I don’t know and I don’t think I ever will know. I’m not meant to know. Such ads are windows into an entire world that I will never visit.

Fortunately, I can still manage to find my footing even in fashion-crazed theme issues. Magazines like Esquire and GQ might rent out more space than normal at this time of year to ads showing James Franco hawking perfume of Tom Brady championing shoes (at least, I think it was shoes – maybe you’re not supposed to care; maybe you’re just supposed to say “Oh look, it’s Tom Brady”), but their editors aren’t entirely driven from the field, and so some genuine content can still be found if you did far enough into the rear section of the magazine.

Take the latest Esquire, for instance. It has plenty of clothing ads, but it also has the redoubtable Scott Raab turning in the capstone to his magnificent chronicle of the rebuilding taking place at Ground Zero in Manhattan. When he started this project, I thought it was a dud of a subject, the subsuming of the sublime into the quotidian, but I should have known better: it’s the writer who makes the subject, not the other way around. Raab’s ongoing chapters have been superb (award-worthy, one might add), and this latest one – about the 1 World Trade Center that’s been erected at Ground Zero and the people (certifiably insane in my opinion, but Raab is more sympathetic) who are contemplating setting up offices inside what even an optimist has to consider the world’s biggest terrorist target.  Raab puts as valiant a spin on things as he can:

Gutting the values and principles that’s we like to think define us as an exceptional nation – you know, that whole Bill of Rights deal – isn’t the response of a country confident in its freedom It’s the cowardice of a nation to fractured by fear to face the truth about the human condition: We’re always vulnerable – all of us, together and alone.

It takes courage to accept that vulnerability and not let it rule our lives, private and public. That’s exactly what the rebuilt World Trade Center demonstrates already, already filled with people courageous enough to embrace life and liberty as a matter of fact, not foofaraw. In short: Americans.

It’s all hooey, of course – anybody who voluntarily works in that building is publicly telling their friends and loved ones that they’re perfectly OK playing Russian roulette every single day – but it’s certainly Grade-A hooey. I wouldn’t be surprised if that quoted passage weren’t read aloud at the mass memorial service, in the wake of the next attack on this specific target.

The odd confluence of foofaraw and Americanism is at the heart of another standout piece in this issue, John Richardson’s antic, surprisingly nuanced profile of nutjob radio host Alex Jones, who’s become the darling of the frothing lunatic fringe mainly because he doesn’t believe in any narrative of past or present events whatsoever that he hasn’t constructed himself. The moon landings? Fake. The attacks of 9/11? Inside jobs. The Boston Marathon bombings? A ‘false flag’ operation by the Obama administration. Jones is the high priest of the cover-up; in his world-view, enormous forces are at work constantly, everywhere, planting plausible-seeming cover-stories over every single thing that makes the headlines. It’s permissible to enjoy him for about fifteen minutes of YouTube clips (his idea of gun-rights defense, for instance, was to challenge Piers Morgan to a boxing match – the musky rumpus rooms of men like Jones are the only places in the West where the fantasy of trial by combat lives on), but any more than that and your brain starts to go mushy with an overdose of paranoia and shouting.

He’s a punchline, in other words, but Richardson, to his credit, doesn’t treat him that way. Although he does gets in some of the exasperation he must have felt while spending time with his subject:

There is something oddly comforting about being with Jones. In a world where so many of us suffer from an “inability to constellate,” the modern affliction where stars no longer arrange themselves into the outlines of gods, he has the reassuring authority of Father Knows Best updated for the apocalypse. But when he’s talking in italics, it must be said, the dude is freakin’ exhausting…

If anything, Richardson’s profile of Jones is a lot more palatable than Tom Chiarella’s star-struck fluffery in the same issue about Avengers star Chris Hemsworth. Chiarella talks with him on the deck of a borrowed beach house overlooking the crashing Southern California surf, where the star is munching on fruit served to him by his pretty actress wife, Chiarella breathlessly reporting that the whole time Hemsworth seems genuinely happy as if this is some sort of counter-intuitive revelation (the reason why they’re out on the deck instead of inside – that Hemsworth was chain-smoking throughout the interview – is of course never mentioned, nor is the star’s rather banal Aussie brand of stupidity).

Over in the latest GQ, the hunt for actual substance is a bit grimmer and more protracted. The issue is full of blathering about the NFL and how to eat like a man, but sure enough, if you wade far enough back, there’s a choice nugget: Matthew Woodson’s excellent dissection of the attack on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan in 2012, in which 15 Taliban dressed themselves like American soldiers, entered the heavily-fortified base, and proceeded to blow things up. Woodson has a fantastic story to tell, and he’s up to the task, pacing his dramatics perfectly in a story that seems ready-made for Hollywood:

[Major Robb] McDonald had no idea how many attackers had slipped in, but he knew where he might find them: out on the flight line, looking for more aircraft to burn. He enlisted three Marines to have a look. “I’m gonna go count the jets,” he quipped to a startled sentry on his way out.

Ultimately, when my Penny Press reading time was up, I’d learned a good deal about a handful of fascinating subjects and enjoyed a big healthy dose of great prose. I was still in the dark about the woodpecker, however.