Gunpowder Magazine and a Wintour/Brûlé orgy

I can't imagine anything more dreadful: an Anna Wintour-Tyler Brûlé sandwich (with ancient old me as the filling) in my canopied four-poster. And yet that is the dread image summoned up as I click through a newish online fashion daily called Gunpowder Magazine.

It confessedly aspires to match the work of the two divinities of Fashion & Style (Fasyle?) - my Wintour/Brûlé body warmers - though I can't help but wonder whether either of them would ever willingly showcase the work of, say, photographer Justin Monroe and his Muscle Mary fisters (almost) or The New InterCourses Cookbook and its Creamy Stuffed Figs, as Gunpowder does. I fear that editor Nick Clarke is dangerously contiguous to Arcatiland and its intermittent preoccupations with cock-cunt permutations. If this is the case then of course I am deeply honoured and welcome the future cross-fertilisation of ideas between Gunpowder and the unreadable and deadening zombielands of Vogue/Monocle/Wallpaper*. Certainly, Anna looks like she could do with a Creamy Stuffed Fig.

Even an Enache Florin-designed Peugeot, "with its lightweight body covered with sexy touch-sensors," is headlined I Touch Myself. Can you imagine Tyler, whose carbon footprint makes him the Yeti of International Travel, touching himself? Actually, I can.

So Gunpowder Magazine gets my ringing endorsement: anything that can sexualise a fig or a Peugeot can't go wrong. The fashionistas are sure to catch on once they've learnt there's life after Ugly Betty and death assured to Anna.

Perhaps these two trends can be hastened in a legally nice way.

Click here to have sex with Gunpowder Magazine.

The Pink List - good for Radio 4 farties

The Independent on Sunday's Pink List – naming the most influential moving-shaking cock-cockers and cunt-cunters of our island races – lists Duncan Fallowell at No 82 of 100, a woefully low position in my view. At No 1 the farts of the paper have placed Evan Davis – or “crystal tits” as he is known at The Green Carnation, etc – only because they listen to Radio 4’s Today on which he is one of the anchors.

Yet in what way is he more influential than, say, Elton John (at No 6)? Davis' broadcasting role is more functional than people realise, he just follows the news agenda and asks subjects a few questions before handing over to the weather forecaster. And in what way is Tyler Brûlé at 62 influential? – I would wager that no more than 10 people a week complete one of his impenetrably boring pieces on international culture or travel – he simply is crippled by an inability to engage his readers in his craze to board a plane and fart out his carbon all over our lovely green theme parks prior to name-checking the latest gleaming shopping mall in Nova Scotia. If he has influence of a sort it’s in the expansion of prose dullism – but then this sect has many avatars.

The list in general betrays the self-perceived class of its hacks. Why would novelist Charlotte Mandelson be at 44? Talented as an award-winning writer as she is, she’s not known beyond the micro-orbit of the London literary party circuit, and not for want of trying. Rabbi Lionel Blue at 26? – oh yes, another Radio 4 burbler. Sandi Toksvig at 14 – more Radio 4. Johann Hari at 39 – well, he works for the Indy. Otherwise - brutal truth time - unknown outside journalism!

If you want someone infuential think Paul O’Grady (at 77) who draws more audience than Davis. Or Peter Tatchell (at 33). Fallowell is far more influential because of the range of his work: his New Zealand travel book sold internationally and was reviewed very widely. That’s influence.

The most influential queers however are not on the Pink List – that’s another list altogether.

The Pink List

Andrew Neil: Polishing the trophies

I must commend Rob McGibbon's video interview with Andrew Neil on the former's new and enterprising Access Interviews site. It is quite illuminating.

Filmed in December last year Neil reveals that he attended a Private Eye lunch only two weeks before, sitting just behind editor Ian Hislop. Apparently the two men enjoy an amicable relationship - they exchange stories when they meet and have a laugh together - which will come as a surprise to many Eye readers raised on the mag's regular and teasing misspelling of Neil's name ("Neill") and the much-published photo of him in a vest with an "Asian babe" by his side - in fact an Afro-American friend of his (and not old girlfriend Pamella Bordes) who was the "No 1 make-up artist in America". Why, she even made-up Barbara Walters!

He wasn't too impressed by the Eye lunch. He expected it to leave him fizzing with hot goss but it failed to: "I was a little disappointed". A pity Madame Arcati wasn't there then - though to be fair, an Eye poppet did invite me to a lunch just after I first burst forth on the blogosphere. I declined due to a wardrobe confusion.

One engaging aspect of Neil's character is his need to remind us constantly of his professional successes, his in-demand lifestyle, his Tyler Brûlé-type weekly globe trotting (New York, Dubai, London, etc), the two or three TV shows he had to film in one day, the 19-hour workdays, the blah-de-blahs and etcs. This used to be called boasting but that's an inadequate and blunt word. Neil is a tremendous success by anyone's reckoning: but the self-advertisements alert us to the much-polished career trophies standing on his mental mantelpiece, arranged a little too ostentatiously. Perhaps he checks his reflection in their surfaces once too often. Still, his self-confessed Mr Angriness is the greater worry.

Rob asks him: What happens after death? "Nothing" he replies. For once being a know-all fails him.

To view the Andrew Neil movie, click here.

Tyler Brûlé: Aping Phileas Fogg for Christmas

The Monocle founder and editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé why-oh-whys in the International Herald Tribune about the lack of Christmas spirit in London and New York (nowadays). But just when I fear he maybe doing God on us and thinking of empty churches, he adds a clarifier: “Shop windows were generally joyless and there even seemed to be a lack of special packaging in the department stores.” Ah, it’s the consumer landscape that troubles him, the lack of demonstrative, tinselly commitment to Christ’s the-till-bells-are-kerching-ing. I understand.

I’m not sure he’s right. My local garden centre opened its Christmas shop in September. Their wiry robot reindeers have been head-nodding ever since as mile-long ropes of pulsating light convey the message-seed of Christ’s birth (again) and fibre-optic trees iridesce like squid. Still, Tyler offers a comparative perspective based on his incessant, manic travelling - I wouldn't want to carry his carbon-heavy conscience.

In the IHT piece alone you can count up the air miles over a few days: "During a swing through New York last week ... "; "It wasn't until I was settled in on a fully decorated Lufthansa Airbus to Munich ... "; "Back in London 24 hours later ... "; "On Tuesday evening I boarded an ANA flight from Heathrow to Tokyo Narita ... ". In Japan he finds the Christmas that matches his festive expectation: "I actually got a bit emotional at the Tsutaya bookstore in Roppongi Hills as the music piping through the store reminded me of shopping with my mom at Ogilvy's department store in Montreal ... " Ahhhh.

Fortunately, he's not tempted to fly back to Montreal. But then these days he does live in "Switzerland, Sweden and Britain".