Word: felkerism
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...over the magazine, a Triumph of Venality. An Apogee of Slickness. In the beginning, you see, or maybe not that early, was Clay Felker, he of New York magazine and The Village Voice. Felker tended to have this O.K. Corral effect on people--they would go in to talk to him and say, "New York isn't big enough for the both of us, so... I'll leave." Some with less amicability than others. And what could be more natural than a former political reporter with New York magazine, a book to his name and money in the family, buying...
What's harder to figure are the people involved in the beauty treatment. For his executive editor, Kramer brought in Ron Rosenbaum, a contributor to Esquire and New Times who had once been a larynx at The Village Voice in the throaty pre-Felker days. He hadn't wanted to play Doc Holiday (hired dentist, that is) to Felker's Wyatt Earp, and got out to do eye, ear, nose and throat on his own. But it seems he's never made it past tonsillectomies--his major contribution to the inaugural issue is a light pan of soft-core pornographic...
Even more puzzling, given Rosenbaum's known antipathies to Felkerism, is Kramer's choice of master cosmetician, or design director, as they are known in these circles. In charge of the new layout is Milton Glaser, about as close an associate as Felker has--design director for both The Voice and New York, as well as chairman and vice-chairman of various Felker publishing companies. Glaser's work is appropriately glossy--with the ever-legitimizing Marlboro Man on the back cover and an uninspired Spiro Agnew elongation on the front, plus a new logo without the brackets--since [MORE...
...while the whiff of conspiracy emanating from all these Felker connections may be only that, a whiff, the content of [MORE]'s new issue gives off such a stench of conspiracy that you'll forget mere takeover theories. Foremost on the list of subjects is Spiro Agnew, who would still be in prison were it not for plea-bargainers in the Justice Department like Elliot Richardson. Instead, Spiro the Kickbacker is on the bestseller list, with a novel charging, among other rantings and ravings, that a Jewish cabal controls the media and exerts extreme pro-Zionist influence on American foreign...
...Angeles (circ. 100,000), now owned by a medical-book publisher, was once eagerly sought by New York's Felker. Los Angeles has developed over the past 15 years into a smooth, narrow-focus magazine that is deliberately preoccupied with helping its readers to "get the good life together" and, like many of its affluent readers, only mildly concerned with Los Angeles politics and problems. "City government is just not a spectator sport here as it is in other cities," explains Editor Geoff Miller, 39, who joined Los Angeles shortly after graduating from U.C.L.A. The sport in Los Angeles...