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Practicality makes certain demands -- and practical people are willing, quite reasonably, to listen. Steven Skilkin, for example, faced the challenge of living in a 10,000-square-foot house; how, in such a home, does one go about obtaining a meal? One certainly doesn't walk down the stairs. Here's Mr. Skilkin's architect: "We came up with an 8-by-10-foot section of the main kitchen -- an arc-shaped segment with cabinets, counter top, refrigerator, and a microwave -- that can travel to each floor like an elevator. It sounds a little extravagant, but if he wants that turkey leg he left in the refrigerator last night, he can just press a button." Of course, when you put it that way, it doesn't really seem extravagant at all.
Lifestyle copy feeds most magazine journalists their meat and potatoes, but newspapers are still using the extra-light stuff largely as a garnish. The sniff-sniff-this- isn't-real-journalism attitude shows: After The New York Times ran a story on funny Asian translations of American film titles in November, the comedy webzine that invented the titles pointed out to the newspaper that they weren't actually, like, real. And the Times reporter who wrote the whoops-it's-not-true report explained himself in this way: "I'm disappointed and depressed. If it was hard news, I probably would have been more vigilant. But it was a light item."
The hey-it's-just-light-stuff attitude has a greater daily effect on the general direction of lifestyle coverage at the editorial level, though. When the real editors upstairs deign to point their softer companions in some vague new direction, the results can easily be worse than the product of long-standing editorial laissez faire.
The Los Angeles Times is a powerfully queasiness-inducing example. That newspaper's longtime View section one day became the Life and Style section, then more recently transformed its begging-to-be-put-to-sleep self into some hideously awful thing called Southern California Living. The "Smart Aleck" featurette appearing on page two, for example, asks readers to provide the humor for staff- written scenarios. Asked recently what the president of the United States should do after his term ends, readers came up with hilarious answers like: "He should pimp." A few pages deeper, and the Times offers professionally written comedy: The Rugrats, to paraphrase a 1 December joke, have become so big since the debut of their movie ... that they'll now only "poo-poo" into "cloth diapers." And then on the same day there was the 150-word profile of a guy who -- get ready -- laughs during sitcom tapings for a living. One question comes to mind: Who is this for? Poo-poo jokes? Pimp humor? Inside-sitcom-production featurettes? Pauly Shore does live in Los Angeles, we're pretty sure, but he's only one guy. How many newspapers can he buy?
Then there's The Wall Street Journal.
If The Wall Street Journal were a person, it would live on a bus bench and converse meaningfully with the passing traffic. Actual human beings, after all, have a limited capacity for making sense of radically contradictory messages bubbling up from different parts of the brain. Not so the strangest newspaper on Earth. Day after day, largely without exception, the best reporting in the country -- the best reporting in the English-language press -- appears on the Journal's front page (and, really, throughout the news pages). Alix Freedman's 18 June story on the use of the antimalaria drug quinacrine to sterilize women in the third world, for example, was rightly pointed to in the October issue of Brill's Content as the kind of tough, smart journalism that can actually make the world a measurably better place.
Rather impressively, the Journal also reaches deep into areas of the United States that don't often show up in publications edited in New York; take the 13 November front-pager on an arson fire at a tiny Northern California town's high school, a story that neatly explored the evolution of community in rural American life. (For another recent example of the same kind of reporting, read the 28 October page-one story on the controversy among onion farmers in Georgia; another national paper would have made it seem quaint. It's not.)
And then, bellowing from the right side of the newsroom, there are the hatchet-murderers on the editorial pages -- hammering their polemics into a stone tablet with primitive iron tools. Bill Clinton, he bad man. Dow go 15,000. Liberal fire bad, burn. Max Boot.
And so it was an interesting set of possibilities that arose early this year, when the Journal introduced a new lifestyle section to its Friday edition: Ed-pages raw red meat stew, or elegantly prepared news side-supper? The section, titled Weekend Journal, turned out to be both. It turned out -- unlike the wandering, identity-free Southern California Living -- to be run by people who've locked on to their demographic with remarkable clarity; folks who read the Biddletown Post-Bugler probably wouldn't know how to relate, exactly, to a story about "a growing number of wealthy pragmatists" who find that they need a different kitchen for each wing and floor of their home, a story the Weekend Journal came up with back in March. ("Cooking, after all, can be so unglamorous -- particularly in open-plan family kitchens where chaos is difficult to conceal.") Nor would they murmur approvingly, we suspect, at the 20 November story on wine snobs who simply couldn't be expected to drink from ordinary restaurant glasses. As the deliciously named Andy Kuntz, a frozen custard retailer in Missouri, explains, his $75 Sommelier Hermitage glasses are perfect if "it's a real classy dinner."
Meanwhile, the Journal's bizarre sane/not sane dichotomy drifts, at the end of every week, into the Weekend section. There is, yes, a sort of cultural editorial page at the back of the section, complete with a classy title that has to make Andy Kuntz want to bust out the fancy stemware: It's called "Taste." Among the recent tasteful contributions was deputy ed-pages chief Max Boot's helpful explanation of the political differences between professional athletes and professional entertainers. Footballers and baseballers hang to the right, Boot explained, because they work at jobs that require personal accomplishment; Hollywood types hang to the left, he continued, because there are so many fucking Jews there. This isn't exactly how he phrased it, but it's close enough for hand grenades or horseshoes. Or, you know, The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages.
There's a terrific, nouveau piss-elegant scent wafting up from the Weekend Journal, a delicious odor of frantically perfumed sweat from people who are trying way, way too hard. And it makes for great reading.
Consider that there are plenty of people wandering this Earth -- and Texas, too -- who make Steven Skilkin look elegantly restrained in the area of kitchen architecture. A Los Angeles couple living in a 23,000-square-foot house (or maybe we should call it a 23,000-square-foot "house") have kitchens on each floor, with additional kitchens in the guest house, pool house, and tennis court area. This, they explained to the Journal, isn't extravagance any more than Skilkin's Willie Wonkaesque elevator-kitchen: It's just good healthful common sense. "When the property is so big," explained Dr. Irene Kassorla -- a psychologist! -- "you can't be running to the kitchen all the time. You'd kill yourself."
Still better, mobile home park developer George Gradow and his wife, Playmate-turned-actress Barbi Benton, maintain professional and residential kitchens in their 27,500-square-foot Aspen home, known locally as the "double double-wide." (Who but a mobile home park developer could reasonably be married to Playmate-turned-actress Barbi Benton? And who but Barbi Benton could be married to one of the nation's most important mobile home park developers? See how elegant fate is?) And real estate developer Dennis Pryor and his wife "like the fact that having a commercial kitchen minimizes their contact with food preparation." ("We're very much offended by cooking smells," Pryor explains.)
Finally, wonderfully, caterer-to-the-silly-rich Colin Cowie describes precisely the value of keeping a kitchen near each and every individual section of your home. "You have the ability to alarm the rest of the house," he explains, "and remain in an isolated capsule."
Here we have something approaching heaven: isolated in an alarm-encased capsule, free from the nasty old world, swaddled inside the private world you built with your mobile-home-park fortune.
And the best part? You'll have something to read while you're there.
