L.A. ... just paging through

The legendary Southern California soil, where the braggarts say you can spit out an orange pip and be harvesting citrus by the next season, has been hard ground for the seeding of new magazines.

Blame it in part on the fact that the place is an exotic Oz that lends itself to tall tales spun for the amazement of the folks back home, about gold nuggets and blue seas, rampaging murderers and tearing earthquakes. Most of the hit-and-run writers who have inflated their renown on extravagant magazine accounts of Los Angeles did so for readers too far away to quibble.

To write about L.A. for L.A. presumes there is “a” Los Angeles, but just as L.A. defies conventional templates of cityhood, its psycho-geography defies the standard-issue magazine. L.A. is a vast centrifuge that flings people across hundreds of miles of neighborhoods. Unlike the dense urbs of Europe and the East Coast, this place has few common actions, little common dialogue, few common characters -- apart from movie stars, and mags in Ouagadougou can write about them. In L.A., “the mayor” is a different guy or gal in each of scores of cities, and a “well-known fact” in Silver Lake may be as much a mystery in Calabasas as it is in Kiev.

A magazine called L.A.: The Southern California Magazine, published briefly and heroically in the late 1950s, noted before it went under that it was the dozenth try at a regional magazine since World War II -- a death rate that would alarm the CDC. Now, more than 40 years later, the publishers’ Los Angeles has stopped trying to wear New York’s wardrobe and is choosing its own: magazines targeted not to communities by ZIP Code, but communities of interest.

The psycho-geography is that mental terrain each of us chooses to inhabit by what we imagine ourselves to be: Zoloft-ridden metrosexual or downtown loft Vegan? Tongue-in-cheek suburbanite or Hollywood party barnacle? Angelenos are not where they live but where they think themselves. So are their magazines.

Not all of them are accomplished; one I can think of manages to be accomplished without being any good. But on those bones will better magazines be made -- or worse ones avoided.

Some time back, movie mogul David Geffen told the New Yorker, an East Coast magazine, that the new Getty Museum was “too good” for Los Angeles. This new breed of magazine might ask, “Who’s David Geffen?”

Los Angeles magazine

L.A. magazine’s readers not only know who David Geffen is, they’ve probably shared a screening room with him. Or desperately want to. Los Angeles mag is to the local glossy pub biz what the Tournament of Roses is to holiday parades -- the granddaddy. It’s a grand slam page-turner through the Los Angeles the world believes we all live in -- the glitzkrieg Westside of L.A.’s rich and gorgeous, the theme park ride where You Must Be This Blond to Enter.

This monthly mag boils its pot with flossy, glossy standards -- the 10 best weekend getaways, “prime finds” like a $765 pink leather bag for your laptop. That buys the serious stuff: coverage of media, high finance and politics, like a recent profile of Laura Chick. Her name may not be on the tip of 310 tongues but she’s the city controller whose financial sleuthing summoned two grand juries to investigate civic cash flows.

Some fine and stylish journalists and authors write for L.A. I’d nearly believe foodster Patric Kuh has written about L.A. restaurants since the days when that other L.A., the 1950s magazine, had to tell its readers what “lox” was. The editor, Kit Rachlis, used to run the L.A. Weekly of lamented memory, and was an editor at The Los Angeles Times Magazine. In his pages, he practices what I think of as missionary journalism, sneaking the serious vitamins and fiber in with the fluff, delivering the verities of distant and sometimes down-market Southern California to people who go to New York more often than they get downtown.

Los Angeles Confidential

The best I can say about this is that it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is: derivative, empty, glossy, utterly indulgent, guilty-pleasure junk-food gossip calories. It’s full of big second-generation names like Tisch and Hearst, and fatigued, second-generation wordplays. A Jackie Collins column is “Jackie Oh!” and there’s “Dressed for Excess” and “Haute Zone.” There’s loads of that faux, forced celebrity writing, such as guests who are “assembled elegantly” -- what, like Swiss watches? And “the energy in L.A. is so high during awards season, it’s almost palpable” -- so reach out and electrocute yourself.

This is one of those glossies (bimonthly) whose editorial copy is scarcely distinguishable from the ad copy, except that the editorial copy, baldly, usually has the prices. Here’s where you’ll find your basic $80 jockstrap, and the celeb ashram that, for $3,500 a week, imposes on its clients the same poverty of diet and space that they could achieve by living on $3,500 a year.

The mag reminds me of an incident nearly 80 years ago, when a civic booster was trying to lure the 1932 Olympics to L.A., and a member of the International Olympic Committee asked, “Where is Los Angeles? Is it anywhere near Hollywood?” This is the magazine for people who are still asking the same question, who inhabit the pitiably parochial worlds of 310, the 405 west and 90210. The dead giveaway was a story lionizing Frank Gehry as a “local hero” and waxing enthusiastic about the revival of downtown’s “Grant Avenue.” It’s Grand Avenue. But I guess you have to have been there.

Ingenue

In 1996, Esquire magazine ran the perfect hoax, the perfect parody: a cover story about Allegra Coleman, a rising starlet, admired by Deepak Chopra and Woody Allen. “The Allegra Coleman Nobody Knows” was the cover line.

Nobody knew her because she didn’t exist. The witty hoax mocked the celeb interview. Put Allegra Coleman on the cover and you have Ingenue.

Its subtitle is “New Hollywood at Work and Play,” and it’s a sort of trust-fund kids’ People magazine, a $4.99 quarterly with look-at-me graphics. It’s mastered the cliches of the insider-faux-color interview. This month’s star in question, Cillian Murphy, “walked back from a meeting at the Chateau Marmont, stowed away his iPod, and ordered a Heineken.”

It pays the bills with ads for Neiman-Marcus and Van Cleef & Arpels’ hip but high-priced goodies, do-good celeb ads (Orlando Bloom for the Union of Concerned Scientists, Kristin Davis for the ACLU), and ads for stuff that prove you’re a bold-thinking risk-taker: soy vodka, bowling and Von Dutch urban grime gear.

An editor’s letter promises Ingenue will be “an upscale companion for those wanting a deeper look into how life ‘on the inside’ really works,” which except for the “upscale” part makes it sound like a prison newsletter.

I did like a review of studio commissaries -- Universal’s has a “Mafioso vibe” and Sony’s has a $15 “gourmet hamburger.” I’d be more fascinated by a $15 burger that wasn’t gourmet but got away with charging $15 anyway.

Ingenue did misspell Georgia O’Keeffe’s name, which may be OK, because she’s dead and not gorgeous, but misspelling “Juilliard” is not OK, nor is the interviewer’s mangled grammar in a Q and A, “The realization must of come at a fairly early age ...”

Metro Pop

It calls itself “the fashion magazine for the rest of us” and it’s published in Long Beach, so it’s already two points ahead.

Metro Pop and its advertisers do indulge in moments of preciousness, and this quarterly magazine can look like a font-software meltdown, but it’s well aware of the inherently commercial nature of what it does, and makes mock of itself and its subject. Check the story on Vivienne Westwood, old enough to be grandma to most of the readers.

Even some ads are more about attitude than product. One, for a shoe, is nothing more than the bottom of a bare foot flipping the reader the middle finger. OK, toe. Another is a perfect sendup of a consumer profile, the consumer in question listing among her hobbies “nude kabuki theater,” and her accomplishments, founding “Horticulture for Hotties.”

It’s in Long Beach, as I said, but it too can be geographically challenged. Few magazines write about Calabasas as home of hip, but its reportage undergoes a SigAlert when it describes Calabasas as “half an hour or so northeast of Los Angeles,” when in fact it’s northwest of Los Angeles. A half-hour northeast and you’re in, like, the woods.

My favorite: a gift guide recommending a limited-edition figurine dressed like the cops you see putting down anti-WTO demonstrators, complete with weapons and “trademark seditionist mask.” Maybe I’ll buy the Sid Vicious figure too, to give the cop figure someone to whack on.

Anthem

Another straight-outta-Long Beach mag. Is Long Beach, once the refuge of the broken-hip generation, now hyper-hip? It’s soon stepping up from quarterly to bimonthly, which really puts the pressure on me, because it takes me a while to get through one, usually because it’s pretty dense with stuff worth looking at. The exceptionally clean graphics and accomplished text surely aren’t meant for the skateboard-and-post-grunge crowd, and it shares some of the advertising aspirations of Metro Pop (a double-page spread of a quartet of hip tourists visiting a dump -- “Mount Trashmore” -- in the advertiser’s threads).

You can sense the fluid, familiar media-crossover nature of the magazine and its readers in an interview with Michael Stipe, who fronts for R.E.M. and was also a producer on “Being John Malkovich.” He’s got another film, “Saved,” coming out this summer. That these mags speak to an uber-world of interest and not geography is evident in a culturally ecumenical snapshot of South Africa. And then, there is the fashion layout: looking chic in an artfully filthy cell.

It’s not seamless, and it’s a little too quick to whip out its MFA credentials: “looming symbiosis” gave me a frightening college art-appreciation flashback, and I think I saw “naissance” used without a hint of irony.

Fugue

Two points up: Fugue is published in downtown L.A., and its first cover is a black man who isn’t holding a Grammy or a basketball. One point down: Its cover shows you how to pronounce “fugue,” which rather reduces the hipness quotient.

Some of my favorite writing in this quarterly is the page numbering -- “106 out of a possible 172 pages” -- and the cheekiness on the contributors’ page, where one “would rather not talk about her recent kidnapping,” and another “hopes someday to travel the world and be a Princess in the Rose Parade.”

Still, this is a serious mag, which I know because I’ve not heard of most of the profile subjects, and it’s text-heavy, disinclined to go crazy with graphics and typefaces until your eyeballs flutter like Mel Gibson’s doing a mad scene. Its multi-culti striving took it to San Pedro for a photo spread; make of that what you will. Fugue gives the reader credit for an attention span longer than a Nike commercial. It’ll have to work hard, though, not to become a one-trick pony.

Beautiful Decay

Pay no attention to fact that its offices are in Culver City. This is the quarterly for the “been down so long it looks like up to me” crowd. It wants to clobber the walls between high art and low, above-ground and low-life.

Its issues are lettered, not numbered; what happens when, like Sue Grafton’s novels, the alphabet runs out? Issue F is “dedicated to every crust punk, hardcore kid, zine-maker, co-op worker, animal rights activists, indie record label” and so forth “who has stopped listening to the masses blindly and is taking control of their own life.” Put aside the frantic, messy grammar and metaphors and you get a magazine that is as intense and unfiltered as a Gauloise, which the readers would probably smoke if they could find one.

“Beautiful decay” is one of those splendid terms that attaches itself to genteel decline, to elegant corruption -- a kind of death-chic. It’s not too far from “noble rot,” a winemaking phenomenon that looks horrible but concentrates the sweetness of the grape. “Noble Rot” was the title of the screenplay John Belushi was working on when he died at Chateau Marmont, a victim of his own rather ignoble rot.

Giant Robot

Think of this quarterly as an Asian-tilted music video on slick paper. The bright, jumpy, busy graphics, drawing on the immensely popular Japanese cartooning style, hew pretty closely to the bright, jumpy subjects. I felt batted back and forth from really sinister looking “pornime” videos to a too-short interview with Gavin Menzies, whose book posits that the Chinese discovered America decades before Columbus. Every time I thought I was into the rhythm of this magazine, it switched the record on me, which is probably what it intends. The in-your-face factor from the “outs” who now find themselves way ahead of even the “ins” is positively joyful; a proofreader asked, early on, “Do you think anyone in this issue was popular in high school?” and the editor answered, “Probably not. We weren’t. Were you?”

Ten years ago, the debut issue was photocopied and stapled together and about as focused as a narcoleptic’s blog. It was $4 then. It’s $4.95 now. Yeah, pay the 95 cents.

Angeleno

Finally, the retailer’s dream -- a magazine that is all advertising. Or so it looks at first glance. And second. The men’s issue of this outsized monthly had James Spader on the front and Burberry on the back and in between ... the seamless synergy of news and advertising.

Angeleno’s features run to a calendar page of good deeds and their celebrity doers, a “dish” feature of a few dozen words about a juice bar in, surprise, surprise, Beverly Hills, a book page with volumes on the male mystique, Playboy, steelworkers and a 75-pound, $3,000 book about Muhammad Ali. Its “scoops” are inclined to Madonna’s cabala delvings, a high-end Hancock Park papermaker to the stars and celebrity yoga hideaways.

Everything between its covers has the brevity that makes Angeleno perfectly suited to be the official magazine of Those Waiting for Friends in the Lobby of the Standard, or Those Waiting to Get the Bandages Off the New Nose in the Plastic Surgeon’s Office.

Arkitip

This bimonthly is priced at $22.50 an issue, for which you’d at least expect a free tote bag, no? Perhaps it’s the cost of some of the die-cut bonuses, like an origami shoe. I think it was such pricey delights that did in Flair mag after a dozen memorable issues in 1950-51.

Arkitip is all about the visuals; the medium really is the message. One issue I riffled through made sure to point out that it was designed on a Macintosh -- itself a sort of cult object.

It’s something of a trope of the age that there’s not really any such thing as a piece of bad art, and if you have the temerity to say otherwise, then you got a problem, pal -- not the artist, you.

Arkitip really puts this to the test. Its covers seem to be encoded to attract its target audience, which I would divine to be the skateboard/hip-hop/gangsta rap crowd, and repel anyone else -- the print equivalent of the adolescent’s slammed door.

And some of what’s between its covers is good, and some is ... not: clip art, doodling, crude cartoons. The good leans to the photographic, my favorite being the classic tough-guy gangbanger shot with the gritty skyline in the background, and in his hand -- a clear, see-through plastic Uzi. At least I think it’s an Uzi. And I hope it’s plastic.

My favorite page in Arkitip, the one I want to make into my Christmas card, is an ad for a T-shirt company, whose product bears no resemblance to the image: the classic chiaroscuro Jesus agonistes, and in his hand, pressed to his cheek, is ... something ... and what it is becomes clear from the letters above his thorn-wrapped head: Jesus Shaves.