A few months ago, a magazine editor told me over coffee the best advice he ever received, with regard to publishing, from his mentor, Tina Brown: that no magazine can be great without some bad taste.
Bad taste is cheap. Bad taste is trashy. It’s coarse, sentimental, unconsidered. Rough around the edges, but also rough and ready. Bad taste is dumb. It’s not rebellious because rebellion requires thought.
Bad taste is Arby’s. It’s Pall Mall cigarettes. It’s Yanni.
There’s superior bad taste like Jeff Koons, and there’s inferior bad taste like 4Chan. Bad taste definitely isn’t aspirational, but it doesn’t care. Sometimes bad taste is self-aware and that’s half the goof, knowing it turns off most snobs but tickles a few. A recent GQ headline: “We Are Once Again Asking You to Wear Jorts.”
I like this line from Peter Schjeldahl: “When something doesn’t quite cohere, you can see what it’s made of.” Bad taste is plain. Then again, if something is made deliberately in bad taste, it’s often boring – the seven-year-old nephew who discovers scatology. It’s both kitsch and stink bomb. Family Christmas update letters are bad taste (kitsch). A joke about Uvalde right now would be in bad taste (stink bomb). Somewhere between those two poles, perhaps mismatched, is the shock of Brown’s point, and my guess is she knew, after running “good taste” titles like The New Yorker, that any publication, any culture, really, that takes itself seriously then needs a dollop of raunch, or a fart joke, to avoid self-importance.
That’s why New York Magazine beats The Atlantic, n+1 beats The Paris Review, Bitter Southerner beats Garden & Gun. It’s one of the reasons why Bon Appétit has gotten so bad.
Does John Waters succumb to sending a Christmas update letter? You hope so.
Of course, ugly can be just ugly, stupid just stupid; beauty can be a glitch, and rewards are short-lived. I mean, the world’s top fashion designer was spotted recently carrying a bag of Lay’s Potato Chips for a purse. But I’ll still take bad taste over good taste any day. Good taste is dead on arrival.
A new feature on newsstands, from Los Angeles Magazine, on what it’s like to go through lockdown with a rock star downstairs.
As Lockdown Spring became Lockdown Summer, Andrew started visiting more regularly. He’d climb the stairs in full glam-daddy attire: see-through blouse and a white suit, maybe a fake-fur coat and any number of scarves. Was it all an act? Flamboyance in the face of mask mandates?
And is it bad taste to quote yourself while self-promoting? Story over here.
In tomorrow’s Sunday supplement for supporters: Honestly, I have no idea, I’m writing this on Friday evening after a long week, we’ll figure it out.
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Meditations in an Emergency is a micro-essay published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful, with a longer essay once a month for subscribers, written in the woods.
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Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the 2022 California Book Award. It’s available from Bookshop, Amazon, and (preferably) your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
Books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.
OMG. The comment on Bon Appetite, which sparked a 20 minute conversation with my mother. We both have been mulling canceling our subscriptions without having previously discussed the matter. BA has become pertinacious as to its recipes selections and stories, and wholly unapproachable.