Category: Magazines

Lennon-Ono Photo Deemed Top Magazine Cover
NEW YORK – On what would be the last day of his life, John Lennon posed for photographs with Yoko Ono in a session with photographer Annie Liebovitz. One of the pictures, a naked Lennon curled around and kissing a clothed Ono, became the cover for Rolling Stone magazine’s tribute to him.
That iconic image published a month after his December 1980 death has been ranked the top magazine cover of the last 40 years by a panel of magazine editors, artists and designers. Others on the list include images from the Sept. 11 attacks, the Vietnam War and of Katiti Kironde II, the first black woman on the cover of a national women’s magazine, in the August 1968 Glamour.
The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the winners of the competition on Monday during the American Magazine Conference in Puerto Rico. The competition was held as a way to mark the 40th anniversary of the group’s awards.
“Both the choice of a cover and the execution of a cover are crucial for any magazine,” said Mark Whitaker, editor of Newsweek and ASME president. “Every editor wants their cover to stand out.”
Coming in second was the shot of a very pregnant Demi Moore on the August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair, followed by an April 1968 image from Esquire of boxer Muhammad Ali with arrows in his body. The Saul Steinberg drawing of New York’s West Side dwarfing the rest of the country, published in The New Yorker on March 29, 1976, came in fourth. Esquire’s May 1969 image of Pop Art maven Andy Warhol drowning in a can of tomato soup took the fifth spot.
Other covers on the list include The New Yorker from Sept. 24, 2001, silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers against a black background; National Geographic’s June 1985 cover of an Afghan refugee girl with haunted eyes; People magazine’s cover from Sept. 15, 1997 √≥ a black-and-white portrait of a smiling Princess Diana; and Life magazine’s image of man on the moon from 1969.
There were a few ties, leading to a total of 41 images chosen.
Magazine covers can reflect the society around them, by how controversial they choose to be, said Johanna Keller, professor of magazine journalism at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.
“They’re absolutely a societal barometer of what we find acceptable to look at,” she said.
Good covers can range from funny to poignant, she said. “The ones that work best touch us in the same way that great art touches us … stirring our very deepest human emotions.”
The list was decided on by a panel of 52 magazine editors, design directors, art directors and photography editors.
Esquire, Time and Life each had four covers on the list. Eleven of the covers came from the 1960s, eight from the 1970s, three from the 1980s, 10 from the 1990s and nine from this decade. Thirty-two covers were photographs, while seven were illustrations and two were text.

Sir Paul Rides Again
New album, new tour, new life — and nothing left to prove
Paul McCartney has just taken a seat at his piano, center-stage at a sports arena in downtown Miami. Before he touches the keys, he glances idly at his audience, which, this afternoon, comprises approximately a dozen people, mostly security guards and members of his crew. Directly opposite McCartney, on the arena floor, one of the crew members sits at a long table making notes on a sheet of paper. McCartney furrows his brow and says into the mike, “With that guy sitting over there, I feel like I’m on Pop Idol.” He’s referring to the British version of American Idol. The small crowd chuckles, as McCartney, imitating Simon Cowell, barks, “You’re no good!” Then, in the voice of a cringing novice, he says, “W-w-well, we been t-t-told we were all right.” Once the laughter dies down, McCartney turns back to the piano and plays “Hey Jude.”
The last time McCartney toured North America, in 2002, the shows grossed $126 million, which made him the top touring artist of the year. McCartney has just worked out the set list this morning for his current tour, which will begin in less than a week. “I like to keep things a little loose,” he says with a shrug. “You don’t want it to become like a Broadway show.”
Fans, of course, will come to see the hits, which McCartney happily delivers. During this afternoon’s rehearsal, he and his touring band run through “Penny Lane,” “Good Day Sunshine,” “Back in the USSR,” “Band on the Run” and “Live and Let Die.” They also play “Too Many People,” a rare angry-McCartney track from his 1971 solo masterpiece, Ram. (Beatles fans interpreted lyrics like “You took your lucky break and broke it in two/Now what can be done for you?” as references to John Lennon; they also read something into the back-cover photograph of what appears to be one beetle sodomizing another.)
But however bottomless the love for McCartney’s past glories, the most exciting thing about his latest tour may be the fact that — as with his peers in the Rolling Stones — it’s in support of a new album people actually like. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard has been hailed by critics as McCartney’s strongest effort since Flowers in the Dirt, the 1989 album on which he co-wrote a number of songs with Elvis Costello. For Chaos and Creation, McCartney chose another younger collaborator, producer Nigel Godrich, best known for his work on the past four Radiohead albums and Beck’s Sea Change. McCartney played nearly every instrument on the album — not only guitar, bass, drums and piano but fluegelhorn, guiro, harpsichord, triangle, maracas, gong, toy glockenspiel, Moog organ and tubular bells — with a result that’s always sonically captivating and often thrillingly weird. Because this is a Paul McCartney album, there are love songs, but most have a haunted, slightly mournful air, a seeming reflection — though McCartney insists none of his songs are directly autobiographical — of the death of his wife of twenty-nine years, Linda McCartney, from breast cancer in 1998, and of his subsequent marriage, in 2002, to former model Heather Mills.
“How Kind of You,” for example, is decidedly downbeat, with lyrics from the point of view of a grateful older man surprised to find romance in the twilight of his life. “I thought my faith had gone,” McCartney sings, as a sinister melody twists in ways that keep the listener as off-balance as the song’s weary protagonist. There’s a similar vibe on “At the Mercy,” which plays upon one of McCartney’s most famous lyrics — “The love you take is equal to the love you make,” from “The End” — in the far more ambivalent overtures of a man reluctant to choose between “the love I’ve got and the love I’d lose.”
Chaos and Creation also finds McCartney far more comfortable with his own musical past. The standout track “Jenny Wren” is a lovely acoustic ballad in the vein of “Blackbird” that could be an outtake from the White Album. And “Anyway” spins a simple “People Get Ready” vamp into a soaring arrangement that recalls the final suite of Abbey Road.
“Early on, say, with Wings, it was a necessity to not sound like the Beatles,” says McCartney, who, for rehearsal, is casually dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt that reads east hampton town dump. “I didn’t want to write another ‘Eleanor Rigby.'” He hums the melody, as if I may not be familiar with the tune. “And it’s only more recently that I’ve realized I did establish my own identity and said, ‘Well, OK, what’s the battle about, then? There’s no need to keep fighting. You’re a part of the Beatles, you’re a part of Wings and you’re a part of your new stuff now, and it’s all your style.’ And so, yeah, on ‘Blackbird,’ I had done a kind of slightly folksy guitar part which had a top melody and an accompanying bass line, and the two going together gave it this certain character. And I’ve never done anything since along those lines. And so now, on this new album, I thought, ‘Why not? What am I frightened of?’ There could be two songs in the world like that. And I wrote the first one! So it’s not like I’m nicking anyone’s thing.”
McCartney was interviewed in two sessions during rehearsals — as he snacked on broccoli, green beans and a heavily buttered slice of bread — and later after a photo shoot at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The day of the shoot, McCartney drove in from the Hamptons, where he spent part of his summer with his wife and their two-year-old daughter, Beatrice. At sixty-three, he’s trim (a thirty-three-inch waist) and a bit gray at the temples (British tabloids delighted in accusing Mills of pushing hair dye on Sir Paul, who retorted with a post on Mills’ Web site insisting he’d been dyeing his hair for years).
He began by talking about Godrich, who was recommended to McCartney by Beatles producer George Martin.
Do you and George Martin still talk regularly?
Yeah, we meet up quite a bit, actually. Particularly because we used his studio for the London end of the recording. George always pops in, especially if he knows I’m there. He’s one of the most important men in my life, and that’s including my father, my brother, the Beatles — George Martin is right up there in the top five. Really, I would like to work with him forever. That would be my dream.
Does he still produce?
No. He’s got a hearing problem, like a lot of us from the Sixties. ‘Cause we did listen to it too loud. He just got to the stage where he thinks, very nobly, that he shouldn’t produce. I say to him, “George, the engineers need the ears. You’re the ideas man.” But I think it’s very cool of him to know when not to do it. So I just rang him up and said, “If I can’t have you, who’s the man?” He chatted it around, thought about it, talked to his son, and a couple of days later he came back and said Nigel.
Had you been aware of Nigel’s work?
Yeah, but without knowing he was the man behind it. I liked the last couple of Radiohead albums, particularly the sound. And Travis, The Invisible Band. And Beck. So we just met up, chatted and liked each other — I think. I liked him. And then I sent him a couple of records that I thought might either turn him on or off, or might just be a direction to go.
Demos you’d made?
No, other people’s records. I liked the idea of toying with a kind of Asian thing, a one-chord thing. There’s an artist called Nitin Sawhney who I like — he’s a British-Asian guy. It was just a vibe I was into at the time, that sort of droniness. I didn’t know what I’d do with it. It was just a mood thing. And Nigel said, “Mmm, no. I know what album I want to make if I’m going to work with you. I want to make an album that’s you.” And I thought, “That’s the kind of producer I need now.”
So we agreed to meet up for a test period — two weeks in London. The first week was with my touring band, and we were quite excited to record together. But Nigel had this itching feeling, like he could do something else. He wanted to move in a bit more daring direction. He said, “I want to take you out of your safety zone, man.” Kept saying that — “It’s just too easy.”
Godrich eventually talked McCartney into saving his band for the tour and playing nearly every instrument himself, just as he’d done on his first solo effort, McCartney. The album was recorded in 1970 and released ten days after McCartney’s official statement that the Beatles had broken up. McCartney’s relationship with the group’s manager, Allen Klein, had particularly soured. “I used to have dreams in which Allen Klein was an evil dentist,” McCartney recalls. “That was a bad sign. I just wanted to be as far away from Apple [the Beatles’ label and business office] as possible.”
To that end, McCartney set up a Studer four-track recorder in his living room and, as he says, went from “everything to zero. It was liberating.” McCartney made the entire album alone (save for some harmonies with his wife), using a single microphone, which he moved closer to the drum kit if he wanted a louder cymbal sound. Some tracks, like “The Lovely Linda,” are mere fragments of a song, and background noises (giggling, doors opening, the clack of the tape) are audible throughout. McCartney called the album “kind of throwaway” in a 1974 Rolling Stone interview, but today its loose, offhand feel is charming, a precursor to the low-fi home taping of indie-rock bands.
In coaxing McCartney to play multiple instruments on Chaos and Creation, Godrich began with percussion. “I love kicking around on the drums,” McCartney admits. “I’ll do it at the drop of a hat. So I started kicking, and he said, ‘Yeah! This is it, man. It just turns the track around. It’s you!’ Then he said, ‘Look, I’d like to hear you on guitar. What have you got?’ I brought my old Epiphone electric guitar out, which was like a cheap Gibson in the early days. It’s the guitar that I played the opening riff of ‘Paperback Writer’ on, so it’s a lovely guitar. It can be quite varied — sort of horny and hard, like the ‘Taxman’ solo; that was the other thing I used it on. George let me have a go for the solo because I had an idea — it was the early Jimi Hendrix days and I was trying to persuade George to do something like that, feedback-y and crazy. And I was showing him what I wanted, and he said, ‘Well, you do it.’ Even though it was his song, he was happy for me to do it. And this became Nigel’s big favorite guitar.”
Do you have a lot of old guitars you end up pulling out?
I’ve got a few guitars that I like. The trouble with fame and riches is that you have more than one guitar. When you’re a kid, you’ve only got one guitar, and you love it, and you string it and you cherish it, and you put it to bed at night and all that shit. You relate to it. When you’ve got more than one, you’ve got two [laughs]. And then you don’t know which one to choose. It’s an embarrassment of riches. Then you’ve suddenly got three and four, and then at my stage in the game, people give you guitars. So you’ve suddenly got a cellarful.
But my Epiphone, that’s my electric guitar, that is the one. I like to play on it because it’s oldish and a bit infirm. It won’t stay in tune easily, like Jimi Hendrix’s guitar didn’t. Jimi was always, like, calling out to the audience, “Will you come tune this?” One night — it’s an old story of mine and I love it — we released Sgt. Pepper’s on a Friday, and on Sunday Jimi opened his show with it in London. He did this long solo like only Jimi could. And at the end of it, he had hopelessly gone out of tune. So he shambled over to the mike and said, “Is Eric [Clapton] in the house?” Eric shrunk down in his seat. Some girls said, “Yeah, he’s here!” Jimi said, “Will you come and tune this for me?” Of course, Eric shrunk even lower and Jimi had to tune it himself.
Anyway, I was into that kind of thing, and that’s why I bought my Epiphone. I went to the shop and said, “What have you got that feeds back great?” That was normally a disadvantage in the old days — in the older old days. I use the Les Paul onstage, because it doesn’t go out of tune as much, and it has a nice sound. But Nigel would wrinkle his nose and say, “It’s a bit heavy rock.”
I’d imagine it’s hard to find people, especially in the studio, who aren’t intimidated by you, and who won’t just be yes-men.
I suppose it is. With Nigel, I pretty much knew the minute I met him he was gearing himself up to tell me no. From the word go. When I first brought him some songs, he just passed a few by and went to the next one, like he was shopping. I brought them back later and said, “Well, you didn’t look at this one.” He said, “I like the other one better.”
Did you wrestle with that kind of bluntness initially?
Yeah, I was well pissed. “You don’t like my songs. How dare you? Who are you? Punk.” But I realized he was looking for a vibe. So if one of my songs was a bit perky, maybe he didn’t think we should do it this time around. I might have thought, “Well, I’ve heard a lot of good perky songs on the radio. And I’m in a perky mood!” But he was just like, “Nah.”
And it was good for me, because it was like working with a band member. It was like working with . . . I mean, it’s too heavy a comparison to say it was like working with John. Because if I say that in Rolling Stone, it’s a huge statement. But it was like working with a great band member. It was similar to me and John, back to when we were just kids, before we’d been discovered.
There was one key moment when it all rose to the surface. I was in the studio, raring to go. Got my Hofner [bass guitar] out, tuned her up, knew what I was going to play. I was in a good mood. I was just about to listen to the track and find my way through a bass part when Nigel said, “You know that song you played the other day? I really didn’t like it. I think it was crap.” I said, “Oh, yeah?” And I thought, “What will I do now? Fucking . . . punch him? Or just spit at him? Tell him to fuck off? Or what?”
(Excerpted from RS 985, October 20, 2005)

The sexiest? Jessica Biel
Who’s the sexiest woman alive? Elizabethtown’s Jessica Biel, 23, according to the November Esquire magazine.
Esquire editor Granger on Biel: “She’s talented and about to burst onto the scene. She’s fantastic.”
“She’s been an underground icon to the generation of men who are coming of age now,” says Esquire editor in chief David Granger. “She’s been this unexpected but iconic figure for a long time. She’s talented and about to burst onto the scene. She’s fantastic.”
Last year’s pick was Angelina Jolie, 30.
The magazine also names the hottest women of their generation: Gong Li, 29, Sharon Stone, 47, and Rene Russo, 51.

Lohan Bares All for Vanity Fair
Lindsay Lohan is set to bare all for an upcoming Vanity Fair cover. The 19-year-old Mean Girls star, who has been the subject of weight loss shock stories in the US media for the past year, is keen to show off her healthy figure – and she has chosen to get naked for the style magazine. According to America’s In Touch magazine, Lohan shot the top secret cover photo on a beach in Malibu, California last week – and it was actually her idea to pose naked. A source says, “It was Paris Hilton’s recent Vanity Fair cover, where she’s topless and covering her breasts with her arms, that inspired Lindsay to push the envelope even further.” In some of the Vanity Fair photos, Lindsay mimics her idol, Marilyn Monroe.

SONGS LIST BELONGS IN BLENDER
The October issue of Blender magazine, on newsstands Tuesday, lists “The 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born,” which, for their readers, means the best songs since 1980.
No. 1 is “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. Catchy, important. A good choice.
But after that, Blender veers into “What the hell?!?!?”
Out of any number of Van Halen songs that could have made the list, editors made “Jump” come in at number 162.
Twenty-five of the Top 50 are rap songs. And there’s not a single Red Hot Chili Peppers on the list.
Some tune called “Mybabydaddy” by B-Rock and the Bizz – plus two songs by critics’ darling Outkast – beat out anything by Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Green Day or Rage Against the Machine.
“We just wanted to give people some new juice for their iPod,” said Blender Editor-in-Chief Craig Marx. “They’re all really good songs.”
No chance! Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” is No. 45, but Britney Spears’ “… Baby One More Time” is in the Top 10?
50 Cent, who puts “In Da Club” at No. 10, beats Eminem, Public Enemy and N.W.A.?
And whatever happened to rock ‘n’ roll? The Police had three albums in the ’80s, and their only great song, according to Blender, is “Every Breath You Take”?
“Sampling a loop, like it or not, is what’s considered great, vibrant music these days,” says Marx, whose team of list-makers apparently holds a grudge against anyone who actually plays an instrument.
“For Blender, what makes a song a great song doesn’t have a lot to do with the level of musicianship,” Marx adds.
Well, that much is obvious.
Blender’s top 10 choices are:
1. “Billie Jean,” Michael Jackson
2. “B.O.B.,” Outkast
3. “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” Guns N’ Roses
4. “One,” U2
5. “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana
6. “Like a Prayer,” Madonna
7. “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” Joy Division
8. “Sucker MCs,” Run-D.M.C.
9. “… Baby One More Time,” Britney Spears
10. “In Da Club,” 50 Cent

Cruise Speared on Cover of New Magazine
Movie star Tom Cruise is bracing for his most savage critical attack yet in a new magazine article about his loyalty to Scientology. A doctored photograph of the actor in his underwear appears on the front cover of US pop and politics magazine Radar with five arrows appearing to pierce his skin, suggesting the article inside, by investigative journalist Kim Masters, will leave him wounded. The controversial piece is headlined, ‘Risky Business: the untold story of Scientology’s movie-star martyr.’ In the accompanying article, Masters speaks to a handful of former Scientologists and business acquaintances of Cruise, who all link the actor’s recent passion for the controversial religion to the fact he has risen through the Church to a level just under leaders like his close friend and Scientology chief David Miscavige. One former Scientologist, who worked closely with the religion’s celebrity members, claims Cruise is close to becoming a member of the Church’s mythical Sea Org level or something similar. She says, “You feel so good, it’s like you’re high on coke. If you look at him, he has that dedicated glare that Sea Org members have.” High-level Scientologists insist the Sea Org level never existed and such claims are ridiculous. The article also suggests Cruise’s War Of The Worlds director, Steven Spielberg, was far from happy about the actor’s Scientology-heavy interviews and romantic gestures for new girlfriend Katie Holmes at a time when he should have been promoting the summer blockbuster. Producer Marvin Levy coyly remarks, “It (the non-War of The Worlds talk) certainly took some of the emphasis away from where we would have liked it.” Levy also tells Masters that Spielberg was upset when he saw Cruise’s famous sofa leaping episode on Oprah in May, as he declared his love for Holmes. Masters writes, “When Spielberg later watched Cruise’s manic declaration of love, Levy says, he sensed that the film’s carefully orchestrated media plan might be slipping off the rails.”

Aniston Resilient in First Interview
NEW YORK – In her first interview since splitting with Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston says she was “shocked” by the breakup and is trying to “pick up the pieces in the midst of this media circus.”
Aniston broke down twice during the interview for the September issue of Vanity Fair, on newsstands nationally Aug. 9. Mostly, though, the actress comes across as resilient.
“Am I lonely? Yes. Am I upset? Yes. Am I confused? Yes. Do I have my days when I’ve thrown a little pity party for myself? Absolutely. But I’m also doing really well.”
Holed up in her Malibu, Calif., bungalow, the 36-year-old actress says the media coverage and tabloid rumors have been hard to deal with √≥ especially reports that she didn’t want to start a family.
“A man divorcing would never be accused of choosing career over children,” she says. “I’ve never in my life said I didn’t want children. I did and I do and I will!”
Aniston filed for divorce in March, citing irreconcilable differences after 4 1/2 years of marriage. The couple separated in January.
Aniston says she was aware of Pitt’s attraction to Angelina Jolie, his “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” co-star, but doesn’t blame their split on her.
“It’s just complicated,” Aniston says. “There are all these levels of growth √≥ and when you stop growing together, that’s when the problems happen.”
But when pictures showing Pitt and Jolie together with her 3-year-old son, Maddox, on a beach in Africa were published, the former “Friends” star says, “the world was shocked and I was shocked.”
She was also hurt by a fashion spread in W magazine √≥ a concept of Pitt’s √≥ that showed the actor and Jolie as a 1960’s-style married couple.
“There’s a sensitivity chip that’s missing,” Aniston says of Pitt.
Says Aniston: “I just don’t know what happened. … I feel as if I’m trying to scrounge around and pick up the pieces in the midst of this media circus.”
Otherwise refusing to talk badly of Pitt, the actress says she doesn’t want to mimic the bitterness of her parents’ divorce.
“I love Brad; I really love him. I will love him for the rest of my life,” says Aniston. “I don’t regret any of it, and I’m not going to beat myself up about it.”
“The sad thing, for me, is the way it’s been reduced to a Hollywood cliche √≥ or maybe it’s just a human cliche.”
Another false report, Aniston says, is her relationship with Vince Vaughn, her co-star in the upcoming movie “The Break Up.”
“I like a lot of people, but I’m sooo not `in like’ with anybody.”
Aniston also hasn’t lost her sense of humor. On Pitt’s recently dyed blond hair, she says, ” Billy Idol called √≥ he wants his look back.”

‘Reader’s Digest’ reaches 1,000 issues
CHAPPAQUA, N.Y. (AP) – If your grandmother claims she’s squirrelled away every issue of Reader’s Digest, there will soon be an easy way to check: just go up to the attic and count to 1,000.
The 1,000th issue of the 83-year-old mini-magazine comes out this week, and the occasion is likely to prompt thoughts about the Digest’s colourful history and its status as an American symbol.
But the magazine, which is celebrating with a party in Manhattan on Thursday night, is studiously looking forward rather than back. The commemorative August issue includes a 95-page section devoted to “the big ideas that will change our lives in the next five to 10 years,” such as do-it-yourself doctoring, food as medicine and extreme vacations.
“History can be found anywhere these days, books or the Internet or whatever,” editor-in-chief Jacqueline Leo said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have to tell people that we are not only of their present but of their future, too, and that we’re looking out for them.”
The cover proclaims Special 1000th Issue, but the magazine barely mentions its own history. There’s nothing about founder DeWitt Wallace, who priced the first issue in 1922 at 25 cents – it’s now $2.99 US on the newsstand. His magazine was a quick success, and by 1925 the Pleasantville, N.Y., post office was forced to expand to handle all the mail. The Digest moved to Chappaqua in 1939.
There’s “Laughter, the Best Medicine” and “Humor in Uniform,” but no mention that Reader’s Digest has run more than 100,000 jokes and paid more than $25 million for them.
And there’s a table of contents, of course, but no mention that until 1998, all the stories were listed on the cover. For its first three-quarters of a century, you didn’t have to open up the magazine to see what was inside.
Soon you won’t have to open the magazine at all. Beginning July 26, the entire issue will be available on the Reader’s Digest website. It’s free for now, but Leo said that may become a new way to subscribe. The magazine’s small size means it can be seen at actual size on the computer screen, she noted.
“Reader’s Digest is going to be available any way the reader wants it,” she said. “We find that young people love the size. It fits in their pocket, it fits in their backpack, it fits in their glove compartment.”
The Digest, which started as a collection of articles condensed from other sources, is now at least 80 per cent original. It still favours gripping adventures and inspiring human interest pieces but has more consumer-oriented stories than in the past.
“We want to own this century like we owned the last one,” Leo said. “We want to help our readers deal with it.”
Once considered a conservative magazine, “we now present the issues instead of a strong point of view,” said spokeswoman Ellen Morgenstern. She said the Digest now stresses “fairness, decency, hope and optimism.”
Circulation, once as high as 17.75 million, was purposely trimmed from 11 million to 10 million in 2004 to focus on the magazine’s most loyal readers. That’s still enough to make the Digest the largest paid magazine in the world.
There is a Spanish-language edition, Selecciones, sold in the United States, plus 48 editions – including a Canadian edition – in 19 languages sold in more than 60 other countries.
Publishing Director Laura McEwen said readership is 41 million, “and you can’t get that even with a Desperate Housewives finale.”
Leo said the age of subscribers recently showed “a slight downtick” from 51 to 50.
“It’s no longer your grandma’s magazine,” Leo said. “Or maybe it is, but it’s yours, too.”

No ‘Desperate’ climb
A year ago, she was a relatively unknown former daytime soap actress who had just shot a pilot for a TV show. Even then, Maxim magazine saw something in Eva Longoria that inspired the editors to reserve a place for her on their annual Hot 100 list.
This year, the red-hot Desperate Housewives actress has catapulted to the top spot in the special issue, which hits stands May 19.
She follows an impressive list of previous No. 1’s, including Jessica Simpson (this year’s No. 9), Jessica Alba (this year’s No. 5), Christina Aguilera (this year’s No. 16) and Jennifer Garner (this year’s No. 3).
“It’s kind of exciting and shocking all at the same time, because I was No. 91 last year,” says the Mexican-American beauty, 30. Longoria called in from her L.A. home shortly before taking off for Canada to begin work on the feature film The Sentinel.
“Considering all the women in the world, No. 91 isn’t all that bad. But (last year) I didn’t go to the (annual Hot 100 celebration) party, because I don’t think anyone wants the 90s at the party.”
Longoria, who appeared on the January 2005 cover of Maxim, is the only one of the Housewives on the list, but her co-stars aren’t surprised. Co-star Felicity Huffman says, “What’s hot about Eva is her smile, her laugh, her joie de vivre … and following all of that, her (behind).”
“What doesn’t make her a hottie?” asks Jesse Metcalfe, the lucky young buck who gets to share a bed and sometimes a bath with Longoria on ABC’s hit prime-time soap. “She’s pretty much flawless. She’s not a diva in any way. Normally, when they’re that hot, they’re not that cool.”
Longoria, who says she has a steady beau (but won’t say who), credits her TV character with helping to elevate her Maxim ranking. “Maxim and Gabrielle go hand in hand,” she says of the mag aimed at young men. “Gabrielle’s sexy, confident and sensual, and I think Maxim shows those beautiful qualities in their women. When you look at the Top 10, it’s singers or working actors who are doing really good things in the entertainment business.”
This year, Longoria outranks such popular leading ladies as Tom Cruise’s new love, Katie Holmes (No. 22); Catwoman Halle Berry (No. 41); and Star Wars queen Natalie Portman (No. 42).
Though thrilled to be No. 1, Longoria would place No. 7 Angelina Jolie √≥ Brad Pitt’s “pal” and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ goodwill ambassador √≥ atop her own personal hot list.
“Angelina is the definition of sexy,” Longoria says. “Everything about her is sexy √≥ her empowerment, confidence, strength, beauty, character, her morals and what she stands for.”

Weezer’s Weird World
Rivers Cuomo hasn’t had sex in two years, and boy, is he ready to rock
By VANESSA GRIGORIADIS
A couple of days ago, Rivers Cuomo was helping his parents out with an epic spring cleaning at their house in suburban Connecticut — “I was the motivational coach,” he says. “My role was to ask, ‘Do you really need this third can of hair spray?’ ” — when it was decided that it would be better not to do the European promotional tour for Weezer’s new album, Make Believe, the band’s first record in three years. That meant two weeks free before they started rehearsals for the Make Believe tour. That meant Cuomo could do some more vipassana, a strict style of meditation developed by the Buddha and passed down by Burmese monks.
“There was nothing else for me to do,” explains Cuomo.
Nothing is exactly what one does on a vipassana retreat: ten days of twelve hours of silent meditation beginning at 4 a.m., with small breaks for food but none for conversing. Most people wouldn’t enjoy this, but Cuomo, 34, is not most people. Life to him seems to be a gigantic behavorial experiment, a large part of why Weezer have put out only five albums in thirteen years, despite their Prince-like vault of hundreds of songs. Cuomo had been to ten retreats in less than two years — following precepts like sleeping on the floor and fasting after noon — and he was ready for another. In fact, he completed one in northern Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago. That one was twenty days long, and he spent it in a closet. “It was great!” he says.
So instead of asking the band to head to the East Coast for the Rolling Stone photo shoot and interview before leaving for Europe, Cuomo decided to fly to California for a retreat in Yosemite, and if it was possible to accommodate the magazine in Los Angeles, great, but if not, he wasn’t missing his retreat. “How many people would love to be on the cover, and then you’ve got Rivers saying, ‘I can only do it on this one day, and if you can’t fit it in, it won’t work’?” says Weezer guitarist Brian Bell, 36. “On one hand, I’m like, ‘Jesus, how could you do that to us? We’ve worked hard for twelve years and we finally make the cover, and you screw it up with one sentence.’ Then there’s another part of me that’s like, ‘That guy has balls!’ Even if it is really selfish.”
These are the kinds of things that happen, though, when you’re living the moment, which is Cuomo’s new mantra — untethered from miserable thoughts about the past and future and free at last from the greedy ego, Cuomo is currently in communion with his deep, true self. This self needs to be free, and, accordingly, Cuomo has been careful not to make any pacts about future Weezer recordings; he has also only agreed to support this album until the end of this year. “We were going to call this record Either Way I’m Fine,” says drummer Pat Wilson, 36. ” ‘Cause Rivers kept saying that when we had to decide about things.” Serenity is important to Cuomo. The shoot at the Playboy Mansion for the video for their first single, “Beverly Hills,” posed a threat. “There were 150 fans around, and when we played we heard that sound, that deafening sound that you get onstage,” says Wilson. “I could see Dude telling himself, ‘Hold on, hold on, don’t get too excited!’ ”
Dude, as in the chill stoner hero played by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, is the band nickname for Cuomo, though Cuomo and the Dude could not be more different. Cuomo is not chill. He has budgeted one hour for our initial interview, and when we sit down at a cocktail table in the plum-colored foyer of a Hollywood recording studio, he pushes the alarm on his tan-and-black digital watch. It is eighty-five degrees out, and he is wearing a sweater and has set a black parka on the couch. “I don’t really notice where I am,” he says. “I don’t differentiate all that much. I don’t look around much.” Talking to Cuomo is like talking to a newscaster. He’s altogether pleasant but stiff as a board. No emotion registers on his face, at least not until he hears something that interests him, at which point he curls his lips into something resembling a smile, widens his brown eyes from saucers to soup bowls and exclaims, “Wow!” “Great!” or “Holy cow!” The most interesting topic, of course, is meditation.
“At first I was vehemently opposed,” says Cuomo. Rick Rubin, who produced Make Believe in off-and-on sessions that lasted more than a year, suggested meditation. “I sent him a very anxious page, saying, ‘Rick, no. I cannot get into meditation because it will rob me of the angst that’s necessary to being an artist.’ And he said, ‘OK, don’t worry about it, forget it.’ I think because he put no pressure on me, I began to get intrigued. Then I did a Tibetan-Buddhist meditation retreat. That wasn’t intense enough for me. I knew I wanted something extreme.”
Says Rubin, “I’m often associated, or in some cases blamed, for Rivers’ meditation practice. It’s worked for him — you might see him smile or laugh now, and before you would never see that. I never suggested the particular style of meditation he’s doing. Whatever Rivers is interested in, he dives in a thousand percent. He takes thing to radical extremes.”
Radical extremes are what Cuomo has made his life from, and in the context of his history, the Either Way I’m Fine era isn’t all that outrageous. It even makes some sense given his childhood, which was spent on ashrams — first at the Zen Center in upstate New York and, after his father left the family when he was five (he eventually settled in Germany for a while as a suffragan bishop in a Pentecostal church), at “Woodstock guru” Swami Satchidananda’s Yogaville commune in Connecticut. Everyone was a vegetarian, and no one raised his voice or cursed. Cuomo didn’t like it much. He declared himself a metalhead at eleven and started playing Kiss covers with the neighborhood kids. “I was only interested in Slayer and Metallica then,” says Cuomo. “I still love that music, but now I have so much appreciation for what my parents’ generation did for opening up our country to Eastern philosophy and raising me like that. I feel so lucky.”
Some of Cuomo’s phases make a little less sense, though. Like when he followed the blockbuster success of Weezer’s first album, Weezer, also known as the Blue Album, which went platinum in 1995, by getting his right leg broken: The leg was forty-four millimeters shorter than his left, and in order to make them equal, a metal cage was affixed to his right thigh; every day he’d tighten some screws on it to pull the leg a little longer. Or when, shortly thereafter, he shelved rock stardom to pursue an undergraduate degree at Harvard, studying there from 1995 to 1997, when Weezer’s second album, Pinkerton, was released (he resumed his studies last fall and now has one semester left). When that record proved less critically and commercially successful than the Blue Album, Cuomo went back into his shell. Living in a Culver City apartment building under a Los Angeles freeway, he put fiberglass insulation over the windows and hung black sheets over the insulation. Then he painted all the walls black, disconnected his phone and spent a lot of time with his pet gecko.
Punishing himself has always seemed like a good bet to Cuomo, and you only have to look at his perpetually hunched shoulders and balled-up palms to realize that the assignations he keeps with himself are brutal. He gets off on deprivation. Cuomo doesn’t own a car, even though he lives mostly in L.A. (“I don’t have a parking space,” he says, by way of explanation). He rarely listens to music. But one song he cued up recently was Kiss’ “Goin’ Blind”: “Little lady, can’t you see/You’re so young and so much different than I/I’m ninety-three, you’re sixteen/ Can’t you see I’m goin’ blind?”
“I’m so moved by those lyrics,” says Cuomo. “I can’t believe they came up with that.”
As far as his lyrics are concerned, Cuomo has long protested that Weezer’s songs are not funny or ironic or anything other than a reflection of his own anguished state. Most of the songs on the current album are about things that happened to him. “Pardon Me” was written after he attended a meditation course in which the teacher told him to repeat over in his mind “I seek pardon from all those who have harmed me in action, speech or thought.” “Freak Me Out” is about a spider, says Bell. “Beverly Hills” is about, well, how Cuomo feels about Beverly Hills. “I could live in Beverly Hills, sure,” he says, meaning he could afford it easily. “But I couldn’t belong there.”
(Excerpted from RS 973, May 5, 2005)