Spy Magazine

Is this really the first thread for the erstwhile National Lampoon/New Yorker hybrid? Or was it more of a snarky Vanity Fair? I was just browsing through some back issues here and found myself getting nostalgic for the days when the enemies were Michael Milken, Leona Helmsley and, uh, Donald Trump. So many inconsequential quotes from Spy pieces have stuck with me all these years: Iggy Pop: "I just love filling this thing (points to head) with knowledge." Cory Feldman: "I'm wearing black every day this year to call attention to the issue of racism." And those Walter Monheit/Eric Kaplan movie blurbs! "Read my lips: the silver screen is John Ritter country!"

Anyone else on board with this?

we all liked Spy. i miss Movieline. and Libby Gelman Waxner in Premiere.

Joe Queenan in Movieline especially. i stole everything from him.

I loved their art-world stunts, the "My Kid Could Paint That" prank where they put kindergartners' paintings in a gallery under the auspices of an important new artistic movement and surreptitiously recorded patron comments...and that one where they had Ricardo Montalban stand in the corner of a gallery until the crowd had swarmed around him, then introduced a cart of donuts in the opposite corner, to see how long it would take for every single gallery-goer to migrate from the celebrity to the pastry.

Just the fact that Donald Trump has never been able to shake the description "short-fingered vulgarian," even as he runs for president, conveys eternal glory on Spy.

I'm half-finished Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland. Hard to find much fault with the basic premise: that Trump is the logical end-point of four or five hundred years of people in love with the idea that they're free to believe whatever they want to believe. (Andersen's Canadian, I'm Canadian, so I'll glide past who these people are.) And it's a good overview of delusional thinking and the blurring of reality with fantasy. Two things, though. For anyone who doesn't care about religion, there's too much religion. Way too much. And he somehow avoids any mention (checked the index) of Seinfeld. Things like the Peterman Reality Tour and the Merv Griffin episode say a lot of what he's trying to say more succinctly and more imaginatively than he does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RGxs8jzcUo

Oops--it's Graydon Carter who's Canadian, not Andersen.