Esquire #1000 in the Penny Press!

How could I not make mention of the fact that Esquire, one of my most steadfast glossy lad-mags, hits its 1000^th issue this month? To put it mildly, it’s not every magazine that reaches one thousand issues – hell, there aren’t many writing endeavors of any kind that reach such a milestone (blushing modesty prevents me from dwelling on the fact that over at the “Weekly” section of Open Letters Monthly, I recently ran my 1000^th signed book review).

The issue features a blizzard of quotes and excerpts from pieces dating all the way back to 1933, some arranged by topic (war, sex, etc.), others arranged alphabetically, and all accompanied by an eye-popping selection of the artwork and photos that have filled the magazine every month for all that time. There’s the famous quote from Gay Talese’s 1966 piece “The Silent Season of the Hero”:

“Joe,” said Marilyn Monroe, just back from Korea, “you never heard such cheering.” “Yes I have,” DiMaggio answered.

And there’s Chris Jones writing a brief paragraph about famous NFL cheater Tom Brady:

The ultimate survivor. Tom Brady will always win. I don’t mean that as a compliment. I mean it in the sense that if Lucifer walked the earth, he would be someone very much like Tom Brady and he would be impossible to kill.

We get an excerpt from “The Shooter,” the deplorable first-hand account of the Navy SEAL execution of Osama bin Laden in 2012:

There was bin Laden standing there. He had his hands on a woman’s shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was his younger wife, Amal …

He looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting … he was holding her in front of him. Maybe as a shield, I don’t know …

In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time he was going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! Same place. That time I used my EOTech red-dot holo sight. He was dead. Not moving. His tongue was out. I watched him take his last breaths, just a reflex breath.

And the always-dependable Stephen Marche turns in “The Ghost of Hemingway,” an original – and haltingly sad – quick profile of the patron saint of Esquire‘s founding, Ernest Hemingway:

Of all the great modernist writers, Hemingway is the least admired but the most imitated. Serious readers worship James Joyce. They worship Kafka. They worship Borges. But nobody tries to write like them, not in America, anyway. And yet every section of the bookstore shows Hemingway’s influence. “When you find a good line, cut it, “ was Hemingway’s advice to writers of the future. In his lack of metaphors, strong active verbs, and masses of dialogue, he has had more influence on someone like Elmore Leonard than on even Raymond Chandler or Jim Thompson. Two of the greatest film noir novels of all time – The Killers and To Have and Have Not – are Hemingway stories.

Of course, despite the rather uncanny extent to which Esquire has remained true to its men’s-men ethos over the decades even while that ethos was in some ways warping out of all recognition of its former self, some things have definitely changed. I couldn’t help but notice, for example, the full-page ad featuring young director-hottie tobacco addict Xavier Dolan and a new Louis Vuitton “Cartable” leather satchel. A quick consultation with the Louis Vuitton website confirms that the bag sells for $4,850 – roughly four times the annual income of the average American man in 1933. I guess the high culture messenger bags will cost around $13,000 when Esquire hits issue #2000. I’ll report back.