This week, we’ll look at a style guide from long ago and discover some timeless truths…

If you want to understand a society in its own time and place, read its magazines. Not its novels, which will evoke an imagined past or extrapolate (successfully or not) an endpoint to then-contemporary trends; nor its newspapers, which, burdened by the self-knowledge of serving as the historical record, must by and large confine themselves to the facts as they are found on the ground, with no feeling for the poetry of events.

Magazines, with their assumed disposability, report from within the cultural currents of their day. They do not report on popular culture — they are popular culture. They are aspirational as well as informational; they show us how a society sees itself, both as it is and as it wishes to be. When I was a teenager, living in the sticks and poring religiously through out-of-date issues of The New Yorker, I was learning something about what it was like to actually live in Manhattan — but I was learning even more about the idea of living in Manhattan, and what it meant.

That’s the sort of magazine that Gentry was.  While its publication history was relatively brief — as noted in the new best-of collection The Gentry Man: A Guide for the Civilized Male, selected and edited by Hal Rubenstein, the magazine was published quarterly from 1951 to 1957, just 22 issues — it came at a pivotal time for American society, and for the American man in particular.

The postwar boom was a time of new social mobility. The middle class expanded as new, well-paying jobs opened up in manufacturing and technology, and Americans found themselves with unprecedented  levels of disposable income and leisure time — and with with a bewildering array of options for spending both.

Lacking a hereditary aristocracy on which to model itself, this newly affluent middle class sought new definitions for what it meant to life The Good Life. Under publisher William Segal, Gentry put forth an attractive vision, blending European elegance and New World meritocracy with a touch of Zen simplicity.

The Gentry Man dresses well, but not ostentatiously; his sartorial hero — profiled in one of a series of articles on great men of history — is Beau Brummel, who was celebrated less for the clothes he wore than for the way he wore them. You will never see him incapacitated by drink, but he can recommend a wine to complement any meal, and knows the perfect cocktail recipe for every occasion. His furnishings are impeccable, whether for his country estate or a two-room pied-à-terre on the Upper West Side. He enjoys good food — preparing it as well as consuming it, wherever and however it might come his way. Gentry might publish an elaborate recipe for pressed duck as served at l’Escoffier, but it also ran features on getting the most out of one’s barbecue grill.

Comfortable and confident in all situations, the Gentry Man will vacation at Nassau, be it Long Island or the Bahamas, with equal aplomb — and be the best-dressed man in either place. He is a man of action, always ready for a ski trip or a sailing excursion. He knows the rules for a back-alley craps game, carries off a one-handed shuffle at poker, and can name three chess strategies to counter the Luzhin Defense. If the old fellow from the beer commercials had his own magazine, this would be it. Gentry was a how-to guide for being the Most Interesting Man in the World.

Read the rest of this article at Kirkus Reviews!

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Do your kids only get hurt when you’re busy? What kind of idle threats do you use to keep them in line?  Tell us in the comments section!

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When’s the last time you had a run in with some poultry? Tell us in the comments section!

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Lilith Fair? Great! Now all the doors are open for women! Well, they were, for a couple of years. Now rock radio is full of fifth-generation Eddie Vedder knockoffs while engaging women (other than Adele) can only manage cult followings. Men can strut around on stage until they quite literally drop dead, but Madonna is considered icky now that she’s past 50.

Women in Hollywood were summed up by the sage of our times, Stewie Griffin, when he lamented, “Chris, whatever happened to Geena Davis? She used to be in movies, but she’s not in movies anymore. She’s attractive enough but when she smiles you see too much gum.”

(Family Guy is, of course, remarkably catty toward plenty of women — Renee Zellweger, Helen Hunt, Minnie Driver, Cybill Shepherd, Sarah Jessica Parker, etc., etc. All perfectly attractive women in the real world but not in Seth MacFarlane’s, apparently.)

Fortunately, the “women in comedy” trend seems to have a bit more traction. Saturday Night Live may have permanently shed its boys-club image, years after disastrously misusing Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman and Laura Kightlinger. The Cheri Oteri/Molly Shannon/Ana Gasteyer era paved the way for a period in which Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch were the dominant voices on the show.

And while we may all wonder why Whitney Cummings needs two shows or why Laura Prepon is playing Chelsea Handler in a show that also features Chelsea Handler (What? Canceled? OK, then.), women certainly have it better in the dying world of prime-time comedy than they have in the past.

Like fellow Family Guy target Paul Reiser, women in comedy have turned literary. Tina Fey released Bossypants, and through circumstances too convoluted to describe here, I found myself reading Rachel Dratch’s book and The Office‘s Mindy Kaling’s book simultaneously.

Dratch’s road has been a bit bumpier than Fey’s or Kaling’s. After several terrific years on SNL, she was set to move on to 30 Rock with her old Second City buddy Fey. The execs reconsidered, and Dratch’s character was recast. Jane Krakowski took the character in a different direction, but the easiest thing for the media to notice was that Krakowski is blonder and skinnier.

The ensuing scrutiny wasn’t fair to anyone involved. Krakowski has done a brilliant job creating a character perfectly suited to the non-reality of 30 Rock. And Dratch certainly deserved better.

Dratch wastes little time getting to that part of her story in Girl Walks Into a Bar: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle (Amazon), figuring that the readers want to know all about it. As all good comics must, she sees the humor in it. All of a sudden, she notices, people know who she is!

She hardly comes across as bitter, but it’s clear that her position on 30 Rock was uncomfortable. Rather than breaking away cleanly, she was kept around to play a variety of roles, as if she were a sketch comedy performer on a sitcom. In retrospect, we have to wonder why Fey and company didn’t simply give her another full-fledged part, perhaps in place of Judah Friedlander or one of the recurring TGS writer/performers.

But the 30 Rock situation is merely a prelude to a series of less publicized but equally funny/uncomfortable situations as she moves on in the dating scene and the comedy scene. Though she’s not destined to be a Hollywood starlet, she finds herself being asked out by people who just want to have a “celebrity” nearby.

The happy ending is the strangest twist yet. It’s not a conventional story of meeting the right guy and settling down. Instead, she has a light-hearted relationship with a good-hearted guy who isn’t perfect for her. That wouldn’t be noteworthy except for one thing — Dratch wound up pregnant.

Parents (yes, I’m talking to you, Jason Hare) will find her take on pregnancy and baby care funny and frighteningly familiar. Parenting comedy may have peaked with Bill Cosby’s early stand-up career, but Dratch offers the unique take of being pregnant several years after she had given up on the prospect. She also has a unique family situation — not exactly a single parent, not totally split apart from the father but not really together. She offers nothing but respect for her baby’s father and is moved to tears by a wonderful letter from his family, but she makes it clear that he’s not the Sully to her Denise.

And so the most surprising aspect of Dratch’s book is that the woman who gave us “Debbie Downer” has written something that, while never ceasing to be funny, ends up being sweet and tender.

Kaling’s book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (Amazon), covers some of the same territory. Like Dratch, Kaling was a nerdy kid who went to Dartmouth and found an outlet for her creativity through comedy. Some details in their stories overlap — Amy Poehler winds up appearing in both books, with Dratch and Kaling each admiring her take-charge personality.

And like Dratch, Kaling has dealt with some ridiculous perceptions of how she’s supposed to look. In Dratch’s case, she deals with media and casting directors who seem to think she’s some sort of small ogre. Kaling has a heart-breaking scene on a photo shoot in which someone shows up with clothes that would only fit Kate Moss.

Given her relative youth, Kaling doesn’t have as much of a story to tell about her own life. She had a relatively short wait before hitting it big as a writer and supporting character on The Office. She finished the book before the first big change in her career — NBC’s surely idiotic decision to let her walk off to Fox to develop her own show. (Seriously — look at the list of NBC’s new fall shows and name one you’d rather watch than Untitled Whatever Mindy Kaling Decides To Do Project.)

But Kaling fills the gap with a few good non-sequitur rants on reinventing TV and movies. Though she has known little but success, she sees the ironies and oddities of her business and is well-equipped to skewer them.

And she’s a more complex character than the publicity for this book might have you believe. She moves adroitly between being a superficial shopaholic and a hard-working, somewhat serious type who loves her parents and doesn’t get the concepts of “hooking up” or “one-night stands.”

If you have to choose between Kaling’s book and Dratch’s book, that choice might depend on your age and parenting status. Kaling speaks more to younger, career-oriented people. Dratch speaks for and toward those who have put kids above career, at least for now.

But both books are funny and provocative. And if we’re going to have a war on women, these books are a great way to know the enemy. Frankly, I’d rather fight on their side.

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Sarah Vowell’s funnier than this shite, right? Tell us in the comments section!

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This week, it’s a graphic novel telling a legendary origin story — but this ain’t no superhero book…

The “before they were famous” narrative is a mainstay of writing about popular culture, and accounts of the Beatles’ residency in Hamburg are at the head of that canon.

Like all such stories, the Hamburg narrative lets us look at familiar subjects in new ways. It restores to the lads from Liverpool some of the sexy-dangerous aura that faded from them as the Sixties ground on — caftans, love beads, and bad mustaches still in some hazy future, the Fab Four still Five, leather-clad shagmonsters, greasy-quiffed, tearing through six sets a night, ripped to the tits on speed, lager, and their own intoxicating youth. It provides fodder for hypotheticals — if Stu Sutcliffe had stayed with the group, had he not died so young — for when history alone can no longer satisfy. And it allows us to perform a sort of reverse detective act, tracing the evidence found in the past to reconstruct the future, predicting the shapes of the exit wounds from reminiscences of bullets that were as yet safely in their chambers.

The story of the Beatles and the Kaiserkeller has been told in countless biographies, in photographs (notably the gorgeous, limited-edition collection When We Was Fab), and in fictionalized films like Backbeat. Now the German cartoonist Arne Bellstorf takes up the tale, with his graphic novel Baby’s In Black.

But the Beatles — the Beatles as we know them, anyway — are only supporting characters here. Baby’s In Black is set entirely in Hamburg, focusing mainly on Astrid Kirchherr, the young German artist and photographer who becomes the band’s first stylist, cutting their hair in that iconic mop and designing their famous collarless suits; on Klaus Voorman, graphic artist and scenester, himself an aspiring musician; and on the individual who falls into their orbit and, eventually, out of the Beatles — Stuart Sutcliffe, the art-school chum of John Lennon’s who briefly holds down the bass chair for the band.

Though Sutcliffe never set foot in a recording studio, he was, in a way, the prototype for the postmodern rock star. He had relatively little interest in (and less aptitude for) music, but he was James Dean-handsome, with a thousand-yard stare behind coal-black shades, and it must be said he wore his bass guitar divinely…

 Read the rest of this article at Kirkus Reviews!

And for an alternate take, our own Johnny Bacardi considers the book here.

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Each edition of SMD features Sort-Of Soundtrack, an optional metal song that plays in a new window. Click HERE for the real heavy sh*t.

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Do you know people who are too busy documenting their life to live it? Tell us in the comments section!

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This week, we get down and dirty with a beloved television figure with a … unique way of expressing himself…

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You can’t always depend on arriving at the right time. Bear Grylls knows that.

In 1998, when at age 23 he became the then-youngest Briton to climb Mt. Everest, his approach to the summit coincided with the arrival of a monsoon.

Bad luck.

Now the US publication of his autobiography Mud, Sweat, and Tears—already a bestseller across the rest of the English-speaking world—comes on the heels of the cancellation of the TV show that made him famous: Discovery Channel’s Man Vs. Wild.

Grylls and the network both chalk the cancellation up to “ongoing contract disputes.”

But scuttlebutt says that the sticking point was Grylls’s refusal to participate in a couple of proposed Discovery Channel projects.

The nature of these projects is as yet unknown. But if true, this occasion might mark the first time that Bear Grylls has ever said “No” to a crazy idea.

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Grylls has, after all, eaten live bugs and worms for the TV cameras; circumnavigated the British Isles on a jet ski; flown a paraglider above the Himalayas; and even rowed a bathtub down the Thames—naked.

Many of his stunts have been undertaken for charity. And that, I think, tells you something about his character.

It’s that same go-for-broke generosity that makes Grylls such an appealing narrator.

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The book retains the characteristic voice, so familiar to viewers of Man Vs. Wild—that urgent, emphatic quality heard in Grylls’s narration, somehow entrancing in its staccato rhythms.

Grylls accomplishes this through short, forceful paragraphs.

Some as short as this.

And the well-turned sentence fragment gets a workout.

Frequently.

Strategically deployed.

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Likewise, the chapters are generally quite brief.

Very, in fact.

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As laid out on the page, the prose calls irresistibly to mind the speaking voice of Bear Grylls himself. There’s an audiobook available of Mud, Sweat and Tears, but the concept seems slightly redundant.

Simply reading the print edition, you can’t help but hear Grylls’s idiosyncratic  voice.

Inside your head.

The effect, I must confess, is infectious.

Read the rest of this article at Kirkus Reviews!

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Each edition of SMD features Sort-Of Soundtrack, an optional metal song that

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What’s in your spank bank? Do you have friends who toss off to the idea of appearing on NPR? Tell us in the comments section!

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Each edition of SMD features Sort-Of Soundtrack, an optional metal song that

plays in a new window. Click HERE for the real heavy sh*t.

 Click the pic to enlarge. 

What wrestler would you like to see make adult movies? If you’ve seen it, is the Avengers porn flick any good? Did pro wrestling used to be better? Tell us in the comments section!

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