Get your pails and shovels! It’s time to go to the beach. Whether you’re going by bus or by yacht, read on:
There’s little point thumbing through Hampton Sheet unless you develop a burning urge to gawk at Manhattan’s uber-affluent and self-obsessed. The oversized glossy shows page after page of the privileged mingling at their elegant catered benefits, dripping with designer handbags, Harry Winston jewelry and Cartier watches. All for a good cause, of course. If you’re lucky Editor Joan Jedell, you might espy yourself exquisitely appointed in Armani or a DVF wrap sidled up next to Brooke Shields at the Alzheimer’s Association gala at the Waldorf Hotel. But pity the reader who picks up the magazine to read the profile of 76-year-old Hollywood icon Robert Redford, which rehashes his past glories instead of focusing on his new flick, “All is Lost.”
There is a Gatsbyesque quality to Avenue on the Beach’s summer beach issue. In case you don’t quite get it, the cover story is about fashion designer Shoshanna Gruss, the adopted daughter of Holocaust survivors, Jerry Seinfeld’s ex and wife of a finance scion, who is friends with “The Great Gatsby” star Toby Maguire — a fact mentioned in the second graph. A mere half of the 160-page issue is ads, but don’t let that fool you. The magazine is all about salivating at the money that is gravitating from Park Avenue to the Hamptons for the summer.
We give kudos to New Jersey Monthly for an issue that appropriately pays homage to the devastation of Sandy without dragging shore-goers into a summer guilt trip. As hard-hearted as it may be, folks want to think about carefree frolicking at the beach and NJ Monthly helps you get there without completely ignoring the fact that there will be rebuilding along the shore this summer. NJ Monthly also scores a fun Q&A with Jersey resident Whoopi Goldberg ahead of her June 6 show at NJPAC. Apparently the comedian is POed about her property taxes, which skyrocketed last year to $93,000 from $46,000. We don’t see the humor in that, but surely she will find it.
HudsonMOD overflows with ads for Ferrari dealerships and local jewelry stores and reads like it was created for someone starring in Bravo’s “Real Housewives” series. Its cover star is “Dancing With the Stars” celebutante Karina Smirnoff. We’re gobsmacked by a 12-page feature on Smirnoff vamping it up in a va-va-voom photo shoot complete with pullout quotes about her lack of a life partner. Here’s Smirnoff’s watery endorsement of Jersey: “I had lived in every borough of New York City and I was tired of not having enough room for my shoes and purses so I gave New Jersey a look.”
It’s the year 2013, and the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” can be decidedly potty-mouthed when it wants to be. This week, a piece on comedian Colin Quinn unleashes a “F–k you,” and one instance each of “s–t” and “t-ts.” That, obviously, is something we are still unwilling to do. What caught our eye this time was an item on the opposite page that reports on a pair of publishing hipster dads in Brooklyn who stand accused not only of being “narcissistic a–holes” and “pieces of s–t,” spelled out in their entirety, but also “d**chebags,” with the two asterisks standing in for the “o” and the “u.” This raised our antennae, but it appears that we haven’t come across a word that still makes the New Yorker squirm. Rather, they’re simply quoting an anonymous critic online who, unlike the potty-mouthed New Yorker, was too squeamish to spell out the word himself.
If you haven’t heard already, the Hamptons are in a panic. With the Jersey Shore still recovering from Sandy, the beer-swilling Snooki crowd has begun to infiltrate their upscale beaches. Which is why we wonder whether the powers that be didn’t place a phone call to New York, ordering it to quickly assemble a “Post-Sandy Beachcomber’s Handbook” that lists all kinds of non-Hamptons options. The thing is, most of these options, unlike the Hamptons, are still in reconstruction mode. Rockaway Beach, the first on the list, “caught the brunt of Sandy’s furor,” while “Sandy was not kind” to Long Beach. Both are rebuilding, with limited amenities and transportation. So kids: maybe it’s time for a drunken weekend in the Catskills.
Time puts the Oklahoma tornado on its cover, and actually manages to pull a pretty good story out of the mess. Rather than the usual overwrought poetry of raging winds, splintered homes and uprooted lives, it takes the clever angle that residents were given an emergency warning to take cover 16 minutes ahead of the tornado’s arrival. “That’s how much time you have to save your life,” the mag declares, rather frighteningly. Inside, there are tales of close calls that we found quite gripping. Even better, there’s a nice analysis of the importance of the early warning system to saving lives — and how it has broken down at key moments recently, including during Sandy.