June is upon us, and that can mean only one thing. The baseball season is one-third over? No, silly. It means that lots of people are getting married. Look below for ideas on how to proceed.
Thinking of tying the knot in an upscale New York City, Long Island or Westchester location? Then The Knot’s Spring/Summer 2013 issue will give you plenty of ideas. Its pages are full of couples who give their wedding ingredients (venue, shoes, photographer) in easy-to-read pictorials. We particularly liked a list of 100 first-song ideas (Etta James’ “At Last” tops its chart). Still, this all seems to be coming neatly packaged from a wedding planner. If you cannot afford a $25,000 wedding, find another magazine partner.
Brides is the traditional wedding manual for those willing to mortgage their first-born to finance the big event. And if you think of it primarily as a catalog of wedding dresses, you can’t complain. Makeup and hairdo tips also fill the book. But finding the feature well is a chore because, well, there really isn’t much of one. It starts with a photo spread of, yes, more wedding dresses on p. 258 (out of a doorstop-sized 304). An adorable story about a country wedding in an Arkansas barn was Brides’ nod to the unconventional — the bride and her entourage all wore red shoes, perhaps in preparation for the yellow brick road ahead.
Even hipsters could use some hints on how to get married in style — their own style, that is. New York Weddings, born out of New York mag, offers it all with fabulously on-trend ideas for the kind of people who don’t do ordinary. Painted wedding cakes in blue delft pottery style, are just one example. The mag veers away from anything too girly or cheeseball and profiles gay and straight couples’ wedding stories of the “only-in-New York” kind. For instance, there’s a couple whose wedding venue was ruined by Superstorm Sandy and said their “I dos” in Katz’s Deli instead. There’s a host of off-beat ideas for pre-wedding guys’ and gals’ celebrations such as surfing and trapeze lessons. The honeymoon feature section suggests Hawaii, advising readers to head straight from the plane to the Kona Coffee living history farm to grab caffeine to deal with jet lag and tackle some active volcanos. Perfect preparation for married life.
Whatever you might think of the grande dame of homemaking, you have to admit Martha Stewart has got style. It shows in the summer 2013 issue of her prized wedding magazine, Martha Stewart Weddings, which pops with color and inspiring ideas. We liked the section on using emerald as a theme color, including lively green cocktails decorated with rosemary sprigs or kiwis. Beware, however, of some of the DIY tips, which appear to be strictly for the pros. For example, the mag advises brides-to-be to consider mini-cakes decorated with pretty dots for dessert. All you have to do is sprinkle on nonpareils using a piece of vellum with circles punched out as a stencil. Huh?
The New Yorker organizes its summer fiction issue around the theme of “Crimes & Misdemeanors,” and, maybe not surprisingly, there’s lots of good material to work with. We especially liked the excerpt from Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel, about a pair of brothers whose diverging life paths collide when one of them winds up dead. Ditto on the excerpts from Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay for the new Ridley Scott movie “The Counselor,” which follows the various drivers of a septic-tank truck packed with cocaine. Then there are the crime stories that aren’t fictional. Best is what amounts to a confession by novelist Walter Kirn that, unbeknownst to him, he had a 10-year friendship with a psychopathic con artist who was charged with murder. Going by the name Clark Rockefeller, the guy convinced Kirn that he was a “central banker-for-hire, currently working in Thailand.” The facade came crashing down after he was convicted of kidnapping his daughter.
Time makes the keen observation that Mayor Bloomberg’s maniacal campaign to fund pro-gun-control candidates could throw the US Senate into the hands of the Republicans. “Bloomberg’s consultants… know all this, but of course they don’t care,” the mag reports. Elsewhere, a curiously puffy cover profile of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel opens with the fact that he just closed 50 schools, a move that some critics have blasted as not only racist but murderous, as it will force more kids to walk farther through gang-ridden streets. “Strong stuff,” Time says, before launching into a piece that seems to find the bright side of every mess Emanuel is in right now, including a murder rate that soared after he took office. In any case, there’s one thing the article gets right: It looks like Emanuel is there to stay for the foreseeable future, as he’s got “millions banked for his next campaign, a firm grip on the city council and the teachers at a loss so far to recruit a suitable opponent.”