Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Looking at venerable mags’ special editions

Friday, Feb. 25, 2000 | 8:59 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

February! Sweeps month! Out roll the big-budget productions, the envelope-pushing displays of flesh, the big-name performers, the silly gimmicks and avid attention-seeking. Yes, it's time once again for the New Yorker anniversary issue and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. What a pair of dead-tree-media institutions -- one the last bastion of civilization, the other, of course, hastening its decline.

For the New Yorker, this is no snoozy, nonmultiple-of-25 anniversary. It's the big seven-five. (Those of you who tuned in for the swimsuit models will have to wait a few more paragraphs.) Think about that: 75 years in the forefront of American letters, which was admittedly more of an achievement in the days when America had letters, but still.

Out to prove it's aging gracefully, the magazine usually dips extra deeply into its bank account for the anniversary issue, springing for big-deal bylines; this year they include grande dame Joan Didion, who weighs in on prim lifestyle maven Martha Stewart, and nebbish grise Woody Allen, who contributes a piece of comic fiction. Others include John Updike, the dead but not necessarily unproductive artist Saul Steinberg, and, in an easiliy overlooked gem, John Lahr profiling director Mike Nichols.

Scattered throughout the issue like ghosts trapped in this world are snatches of writing by such old-guard New Yorker mainstays as E.B. White, Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Flanner and James Baldwin. They serve to hyperlink to the magazine's illustrious past and, the editors must hope, to provide a foundation for the next 75 years.

The cover is an exercise in that spirit. Every anniversary issue typically uses an image of the New Yorker's mascot dandy, Eustace Tilley, generally depicted in a high, starched collar and top hat, his monocle trained on a butterfly. This year, in a photo by artist William Wegman, we have a sleek Weimaraner in Tilley get-up, contemplating a dog-headed butterfly. Updating the Tilley image (and, ever so slyly, James Thurber's famous New Yorker drawings of dogs), the cover neatly transitions from the past to the future.

Still, it must be a season of mixed emotions for New Yorker editor David Remnick. On one hand, he's editor of the New Yorker, no small thing. At the same time, reviews of the slew of New Yorker-related books out now (Ben Yagoda's "About Town" and Renata Adler's "Gone" among them) take as a given that the magazine is in its decline. It no longer occupies its singular position at the head of smart-set culture, they say; it's just another magazine now.

Which is true, in its way. While this issue is plump with good stuff, plenty of weekly issues pass with little to recommend them. I buy maybe two in a good month. Still, when you consider the stylized fluff and advertorial copy clogging most of America's top magazines -- that means you, Vanity Fair! -- the New Yorker isn't as far gone as its critics suggest.

At the other end of the newsstand, we have the promosexual excess of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, on which a funny-dog cover (a Weimaraner in a lovely Ralph Lauren two-piece?) would have been as hilarious as it is unthinkable. Irony isn't what this publication is about.

What it's about, of course, is the dialectical clash between male exploitation of sexualized images of women in a patriarchal society vs. a woman's free-market imperative to entrepreneurialize her own body. By which I mean, hot babes in next to nothing.

Oh, there is a bit of token "sportswriting," usually something about surfing, which I actually like every year because it gets some of SI's better writers out of their major-sports ruts and sets them loose on stories a little more fun and offbeat.

You'd think the appeal of beautiful women wearing fabric swatches would be timeless, yet each swimsuit edition seems to try to out-gimmick the previous one. Remember last year's portfolio of supermodels naked except for painted-on swimsuits? This year's ruse: 3-D! SI even supplies the dopey glasses. It sounds unbeatable -- pneumatic models popping off the page, right into your dopey-glasses-wearing face!

"Wait until the ministers' wives see this," my friend Lugnut said upon seeing that and, of course, he's right. While there's not much worth getting worked up over here -- with a few exceptions, the photos are pretty tame, the average suit not showing much more than Jennifer Lopez's Grammy-wear -- people are undoubtedly getting worked up over it already.

In fact, the backlash seems wearingly rote and pro-forma by now. SI will print a batch of outraged letters from grandparents who had to hide the issue from their grandkids; some people will demand that their subscriptions be canceled.

Meanwhile, otherwise sensible sports columnists are reworking last year's annual denunciation of the swimsuit edition. Happens every year. They'll argue that it's sexist; an affront to the fine, hand-crafted American sportswriting SI presents the rest of the year; and a blatant attempt to rake in big dough, as if their own newspapers are nonprofit charities doling out public-service box scores like soup to the needy.

Well, sure, as you page through these 218 babesapoppin' pages you can feel their corrosive effect on our culture, literally sense Western Civ becoming Western Sieve, all our traditions and values and good taste leaking away, but you have to admit: Swimsuit models in 3-D -- pretty cool!