The Press Box - George Lois and the Lost Art of the Magazine Cover

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Bryan and David are joined by ForbesLife editor Michael Solomon to reflect on the career of George Lois and the lost art of the magazine cover. They discuss the statements Lois made and the influence of his art before running through a number of his most memorable covers, such as Muhammad Ali posing as St. Sebastian, Virna Lisi shaving, Andy Warhol drowning in soup, and more! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Michael Solomon Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 Goals. It's out now on the Ringer Podcast Network, and we're having so much fun. Happy Thanksgiving media consumers.

Welcome to Press Box, final edition, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantes here. David, today we say goodbye to a massive figure from the age of magazines. George Lois died Friday at age 91. George Lois was a very successful New York ad man who conjured up everything from ads for Bobby Kennedy's Senate campaign to ads for MTV. But from 1962 to 1970, he designed magazine covers for Esquire.

Now there are clever magazine covers, and then there are George Lois magazine covers, which are elite in the non-ironic sense of the term. Muhammad Ali as Arrow Pierce St. Sebastian, Andy Warhol disappearing into a can of Campbell's soup like an adventurer disappearing into Quicksand. Here to talk about Lois and the lost art of the magazine cover is our pal Michael Solomon,

editor of Forbes' life and longtime Esquire guy himself, Michael, welcome to the press box. Thank you very much. Michael, for people who don't know Lois's work, and in fact may have come of age after magazines occupied the space they once did. How do you start to explain what George Lois did? Well, let's rewind the clock about 60 years. 1962, Harold Hayes becomes the editor of Esquire, inheriting it from Arnold Gingrich, winning a bake-off with other talented editors of the day. And this is really the advent of new journalism in magazine.

So you have writers like Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, you have William F. Buckley, Gorvidal. You start to see writers like Nora Ephron come in. He also hired photographers like Diane Arbus. He was changing the magazine and turning it from a men's magazine into a general interest magazine. And as you get into the 60s and as the counterculture takes hold, Lois becomes this figure that Hayes turns to thinking,

I need to gift wrap my magazine in something unexpected and something provocative every single month. And so Hayes goes to George Lois, who's a renowned ad man in New York, and says, I want you to do my covers. And Lois, being something of an egomaniac, a charming one, says to him, great, but whatever I give you, you have to use. And miraculously, Hayes agrees to this. Hayes is a kind of southern gentleman. He's from North Carolina. Lois is a brash, Bronx-born ad guy.

When Mad Men came out years later, everyone tried to compare George Lois with Don Draper. And of course, George Lois said to everyone, that's ridiculous. There was nothing like that at the time. I was more handsome than Don Draper. So that's the kind of bravado of George Lois. And the two of them collaborate and create some of the most brilliant magazine covers of all time. And they're coming out of an era, remember, that's really very quiet, very Eisenhower, boring, safe.

Again, not to knock Norman Rockwell covers on the Saturday Evening Post, but that's the area you're coming out of. and Lois brings an advertiser's eye to these covers, and Lois unlocks something that no one had really thought of before. His idea for covers is that there has to be a big idea, and that is transformational in magazines. David, you're the ringers art director. You and I discovered these covers around the same time

we discovered the Tom Wolfe and Gay-Talese stories that were running inside the magazine. What strikes you about a George Lois magazine cover? Well, I mean, as an art director, just every layer of the aesthetic has been super, I mean, incredibly inspirational to me. Everything. I mean, it's like the way that you get a certain feel from a scratchy old record or old black and white film. There is like a textural quality to his photography work that is incredibly evocative. and it's one of my favorite things.

But Michael's right. It's the point of view. Saturday Evening Post and other magazines of that era, it was closer to, I mean, as beautiful as some of those Rockwell paintings were, it's closer to like, what's an example, like, oh, the Oprah magazine, where it's just like, we're just going to do a different photo shoot with Oprah every month and it's not going to relate to the things inside, right? And we're just going to sort of bring you in tonally along for the ride.

But what George Lois was able to do with Esquire and to have the freedom that Michael described to do exactly what he wanted. Some of his best covers are sort of pastiches of various things going on inside, right? I mean, it's really doing a sort of ad for what's inside, but also what's a sort of book cover sensibility. We're going to distill the whole thing down to one big idea because it's because you want the customer to pick it up. You want the customer to it has to get in their hands before it can get bought. That's exactly right. And the way it was taught to me in the late 80s, early 90s, was that it was really a billboard or a movie poster, that it was one big image, one simple line, usually. This is an era when there weren't a lot of magazines on newsstands, right? There are barely three networks on TV. You're not fighting for everyone's attention. And not for nothing. Remember, magazines were the size of like a football field, right? The magazines are just enormous. They didn't have to fit in. little racks at the supermarket. They're just oversized and big. They're big canvases for someone to

play with. And Lois had a co-conspirator himself. He had Carl Fisher, the photographer. And remember, this is a pre-photoshop world. And they are coming up with concepts that cannot just be manipulated. They have to truly be art directed. And it, again, it's just transformative. It changes the whole trajectory of magazines in the mid-60s. The way that he on his, because you're right, there wasn't Photoshop, the way that he would execute photo shoots was flawless. Even in the off months,

even in the covers that aren't on the carousel of the top 20 or whatever. I mean, just to have an idea and to execute it, when you have to have like a living model and a photographer, and to have it go for it. from your head to the cover of a magazine so seamlessly is one of the most difficult things to do in the world. But then when he did use, not Photoshop, obviously, but when he did use more of collage techniques and sort of the blurring of the lines of reality and not, even that was flawless. I mean, his Kennedy's cover, where it's all the, it's like four of the same body with a different

head on each one, the famous mailer cover, which you could be mistaken. I mean, you'd be forgiven if he thought that was a painting, but he used a photograph of a mailer in that, you know, and it just looks, I mean, just aesthetically, it's unbelievable work. One thing, Michael, you mentioned the point of view that these covers convey. Going back and looking through and what's so interesting is it, it's obviously a statement about the culture of the time, about the zeitgeist of the time, and at the same time, it's also a little bit of a riddle. Like, I have to open this magazine to figure out what this is about. What, where it's the, where this is going. This is not the hacky, you know, why is Jack Nichols and Smiling

turned to page 67? But it very much invites you to open the magazine and figure out what this cover is about. That's very true. And one of the things David alluded to it, one of the things that Lois did was he didn't, you know, Hayes would send him the lineup for that month. And Lois would pick what he wanted to pick. He didn't necessarily pick the obvious cover story to write about. He was trying to surf a lot. He was trying to surf. the zeitgeist before anyone knew what the phrase surf the zeitgeis was. And he was trying to make a statement that month. And again, remember, you're talking about the mid-60s. America is coming apart at the seams. So, you know, it's the famous proverb, may you live in interesting times. Could there have

been more interesting times than the mid-60s? And Hayes and Lois kind of figured out, kind of unlocked the counterculture and really it wasn't necessarily a political point of view, but it was unquestionably a point of view about what was happening in the culture. And they were provocateurs. They just, you know, they just wanted to stir up trouble and get people talking, you know, years ago when I read Arnold Gingrich's biography, Arnold Gingrich was the founder of Esquire in 1933, and Gingrich in his memoir talked about how Esquire was not. not the magazine that would start a fight, but where the magazine that will hold your coat while you fight? And I always thought, that's kind of what a George Lois covers doing, that it's,

it's kind of, you know, pissing you off or making you think or making you laugh. And that's just not something that magazine covers did. And now you can't imagine a world in which magazine covers can't do that. And there are so many other aspects of society, Instagram among them, where people are trying to catch your eye and make you think and make you laugh and annoy you or whatever they're trying to do. I mean, the influence continues to this day. Let's go through some of Lois's greatest hits, and I'll get you guys to weigh in on him. His most famous cover or maybe sharing the podium as Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian, April 1968. This is what Lois told to Vulture.

It was 1968, and Ali was waiting for an appeal for drafted. evasion to reach the Supreme Court. I said to Hayes, I want to do a cover with Ali. I want to depict him as the famous martyr, St. Sebastian. And I called up Ali, told him I needed him in his pretty white trunks and shoes. And Ali says, hey, George, this cat's a Christian. I can't pose as a Christian. I'm a Muslim. I tried to explain that a symbology, but he said no. And I asked if I could talk to Elijah Muhammad, who was the head of the Muslim community at the time. So this is an amazing story, Michael. he has to call Elijah Mohammed to get

permission to do a magazine cover. Yeah, I mean, Ali, remember, Ali, only a few years earlier is Cassius Clay, and Lois had done Cassius Clay covers. You know, an Esquire at the time wasn't even calling him Ali right away.

So this was really a big statement cover, and Lois, I think quite rightly, sees Ali as St. Sebastian, pierced by the arrows. And, you know, it's easy to look back on it and think, God, what a brilliant cover. It's far more interesting to understand that Ali, as a new Muslim, didn't necessarily want to portray a Christian martyr.

And with Elijah Muhammad's blessing agrees to the cover, and one of the great magazine covers of all time is born. And it really makes a statement. I mean, you're really looking at these covers as, you know, almost political cartoons in a time when there were only political cartoons. There was not a photo illustration of that. So here's an art director, here's an ad man, taking the political cartoon perspective and trying to illustrate it with photography. Yeah, it's, you know, political cartoons are an interesting point in comparison because they're sort of, I mean, disposable, right? They're very much of the

moment and they're, you know, printed newspapers or magazines or whatever. And you sort of of read them once and forget that they ever existed, except for the very best of the best. Magazine covers aren't that much different. I mean, they're literally disposable, you know, and to have, I mean, every issue of Esquire was supplanted by the one that came after it. And to have a magazine cover like that that just lives on and on and on. I mean, it's, it's too easy to call it art, but it is, I mean, but the greatness sort of inherent in that sort of concept and execution is impossible to overstate. And listen, Lois often trawis. in that world. He liked the idea

of saints and sinners, heroes and villains. And those tropes come up quite a lot on Esquire covers in that period. Here's another one of the greatest hits. A woman shaving her face, March 1965, again, this is Lois to Vulture.

There was an article in Esquire called The Masculinization of the American woman. It sounded more negative than it was, but the point was well taken. To me, it was a no-brainer. I'd just get a beautiful woman and have her shaving. I wanted a blonde. I tried to get Monroe, as at Marilyn Monroe, tried to get Kim Novak, but they wouldn't hear of it. I'd explain that I wanted her shaving and their business manager said to me, are you crazy?

Finally, we got Vernalisi, the Italian actress, and we did this beautiful shot. Michael, what hits you about that cover? Well, again, you can imagine it would be an ad, right? I mean, you can imagine that this was a way of selling products to women or products to men, however you want to think about it. it. He was employing the same kind of advertising techniques, something that makes you stop and think. And what a perfect illustration of the masculization of American women than to have a beautiful, you know, blonde echoing Monroe shaving her face. And Esquire, Not for Nothing on the 70th anniversary, 75th anniversary in 2008, goes back to that cover and recreates it with Britney Spears. It's just, not as powerful. You know, the joke works the first time. You can only kind of do it once. And, you know, all due respect to Brittany, she's just not the same. And the impact of that cover

all those years, all those decades ago, is still profound. And in fact, the other thing about it is that Esquire was onto something, right? I mean, the story itself is on to something. So again, it's really good zeitgeist reporting, and Esquire in the 60s was famous for it. Just a really small note. If you look at that cover, I mean, you mentioned how, you know, there are many fewer magazines than there were today. In March 1965, I can only imagine, as crazy as it sounds, this would have been shocking to see as you're walking past the newsstand, right?

Or not shocking because it sort of blends in at first, right? It looks like an ad. It looks like something you expect to see. And then when it comes into focus, it's, I'm sure it had the intended effect. But very, very tiny note, the masculinization of the American woman, that text is on the cover, and it's smaller than the price, right? It's the picture that carries the entire thing. And that's, you know, very different than what we're used to saying today.

And Brian, you raised this earlier. But when I teach journalism, one of the things I explain about my job as an editor is not necessarily the thing that comes to mind for a lot of people, but here's what I think my job is, ultimately. my job is to make you stop. It is a busy world. And if you're passing a newsstand, if you're scrolling through Instagram, if you're scrolling through Twitter, whatever you're doing, my job as an editor is to make you stop and read this. So if I can use a photograph to do that, if I can make you laugh, if I can upset you, if I can vex you, whatever it is, anything to make you stop what you're doing and read this. And what do you do?

You use photography, you use language, you use clever language. You use small types sometimes to draw people in. You reference it earlier, but Esquire in this period uses C-page TK to draw people in. It was not just making you stop, it was making you stop, pick it up and go to that page. That's really advanced magazine editing. And, you know, I would argue those techniques are still valuable and viable today. day. Here's another freeze in your tracks cover. The Boxer's Sunny Liston wearing a Santa hat. December 1963, it ran without text. Harold Hayes had told Lois he wanted a Christmas

cover. And with that prompt, as Lois told the vulture, it was 1963, it was a changing America, the age of the Black Revolution, and the Panthers. So I did a parody, shoving it down everyone's throat, showing Sunny Liston the meanest man in the world as Santa Clause. When I sent it to Hayes, he went wild. He really understood how important it was. What does Sunny in a Santa hat say to you, Michael, here in 2022? Well, I mean, let's roll back the clock again 60 years. I mean, America was not ready for a Black Santa Claus. And even if America was ready for a Black Santa Claus in 1963, Sunny Liston was no one's idea of the Black Santa Claus.

This was a mean fighter. This is not, you know, cuddly George Foreman that people think of today. This is someone who was snarling, who was scary in the ring, someone who many people thought of as a thug. And here was Esquire delivering a Black Santa to White America. you know, when Lois would talk about it. And one of the things I loved about Lois in the times I met him, he was gloriously full of ship. And I mean that in the best way.

In the best way of every ad man, he sold himself better than he sold any of his ads or any of his covers. He was all about the myth of George Lois. And every time he would talk about this cover in particular, the numbers would change like it was a, Donald Trump rally. He would just pull out bigger and better numbers to make it seem like this cover cost Esquire so much money.

He would talk about the advertisers that pulled out and then more came in. He would talk about the number of subscriptions lost. And at the time, I went to the editor. When I first heard this, it was late 80s. I went to the editor of Esquire, Lee Eisenberg, who was working at Esquire in the Hayes years. And I said, is this true? Does that ring true to you?

Was that, in fact, were there cancellations or is this just George Lois being his own hype man? And, you know, it was explained to me that, you know, nobody could really say whether it was true or not true. And it's kind of the man who shot Liberty Valence theory, right? It's like when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. And listen, when you're George Lois and you create covers like this, you're allowed to, you know, print your own legend. And I am sure this cost Esquire advertisers and subscribers. But my God, I mean, the cover is still powerful to this day. And think about the power of not having a cover line on there.

I mean, it was just a statement. There's one story that Esquire lost three quarters of a million dollars in advertising revenue with that cover. So it is a, who knows, but it is, but the, you know, the boldness, the bravery of, of, you know, that cover was real. One of the funniest things about the making of that cover is trying to get Sonny Liston to put on the Santa Hat. This was not assured they went to a Las Vegas hotel room. And we've heard magazine editors, photographers, art directors over the years, they get a celebrity to agree to be on the cover. And then you try to convince the celebrity to do something interesting so you don't just have a handsome shot of a celebrity.

Well, in this case, it was trying to get Sonny to put. put on the Santa hat. Would you mind doing this? And getting him to do that is also the win here, by the way, beyond just the idea and the cell and everything. Yeah, no, in my career, the story I like to tell is the day that Lassie walked out of a photo shoot at Esquire. You know, Lassie just wasn't having it and, you know, marched right out of a shoot and I had to talk Lassie back into the photo shoot. But I can imagine convincing Sunny Liston to put on a Santa hat in 1963 was a lot more complex and required some real negotiations. But again, you know, Esquire was trying to do something different. And, you know, to put Sunny Liston on the cover of a magazine,

who else was offering Sunday Liston a magazine cover back then? So, you know, it was a smart play on Esquire's part and it was smart of Sunny Liston to do it as well. Here's something I want to ask you guys about. This cover is quoted, just like the woman shaving cover many, many times. Evander Holyfield appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1997 wearing a Santa hat. Michael, when you're working at Esquire, there are less than two decades after this period. How much do you allow yourself to quote from somebody like Lois? Where does his work sit in your head as you are trying to work on the magazine?

George Lois has been in my head for more than three. 30 years. You know, I was raised to think this way. I was raised to think this way as an editor. What's the, not just what's the idea behind your story, but what's the big idea behind the story? What's the big idea you want to put on the cover? And then visually, we were all raised to think like Lois. Now, obviously, we are not George Lois. Nobody is. Nobody ever will be. but it's a pretty good benchmark to have in your head, you know, and it's a pretty good standard to try to always be reaching for. So my brain works like this now. I always want to ask myself, what would George Lois do? What would Harold Hayes do? This was really great training that has served me really well. And for sure, this was top of mind in the late 80s, early 90s.

You know, it's, it wasn't so much that you're trying to recreate it because I think that's lazy. You know, putting a Vanderholyfield in a Santa hat, it's just lazy. So what can you do that is your George Lois moment? What can you do that's your Harold Hayes assignment? That's where you start pushing yourself and you start coming up with ideas that are a little out there. Because that's the way the magazine was conceived in the 60s. And, you know, not for nothing. it is considered, if not the golden age of magazines,

then at least a golden age of magazines. David, there's this great slate story from 2009 in which Adam Moss talks about doing George Lois. And in some cases, he had self-consciously tried to recreate George Lois covers. Yeah. And in other cases... In New York Magazine, yes, thank you.

And in other cases, he had done a cover and then looked at it and said, oh my gosh. I did Lois without really consciously knowing that I was doing, Lois. Do you find yourself doing the same thing with art quoting somebody sort of accidentally without really intending to quote them? Yeah. I mean, what I do, what we do with The Ringer is, I mean, there's more and more people who are doing it online. But when we started off, you know, doing it, it was pretty, there weren't a lot of other things to copy from in the digital space, right? mean, or to be inspired by. And the point is to sort of have, you know, an editorial component to

the, to the visual, right? You know, to, it obviously works to varying degrees, depending on what the piece is about and depending on how long we have to work on it. But, oh, yeah, I mean, a piece of advice, I give artists, young artists when they ask me how to do it, you know, like how to, like how to get better. I say, just find people that are, find the greats and find the grades that inspire you and copy them. Just copy them. Just copy them. All the great painters in the world started off just doing stroke for stroke replicas of the masters, right? And eventually you can find your own style by sort of forcing your way through. I mean, sometimes you just try to cover up somebody off and it's immediately your own style because you're not good enough to do what they did.

You know, I mean, it manifests in so many different ways. But yeah, there's lots of times where I've done art and where, you know, Sean Finnessy or somebody else at the ringer will say, oh, that's a George Lois. or like we, or it just reminds them of something else. It's baked into everything that we do. And I think that there's, the most central part of it is this sort of tension between, this exciting tension between grabbing the eye of the audience, of the potential readers, just bringing someone to a piece, but not on the flip side overdoing it.

On that list and cover, on Lewis's notes for that list and cover, It says no cover copy. This is when he's deciding what's going to be on the cover. No cover copy. Let people decide for themselves what the cover says. And it's that sort of respect for the audience, while still an ad man's sort of like desire to get you to pick it up. It's the respect for the reader is baked in.

And that's, I think, where a lot of the real power comes from. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think of it in terms of what the great literary critic, Harold Bloom, used to call the anxiety of information. influence, right? I mean, that it's by osmosis, it's just sort of in your brain and it's just sort of swirling around. And I put a word on it that I use a lot called klepto amnesia, where you steal something that you forgot you knew. And you're not even aware you're doing it. Adam Moss, to go back to that example, Adam Moss came out of Esquire in the 80s. He was trained on those covers. He grew up with those covers. It is not surprising that that he,

started, you know, trying to do George Lois covers. And frankly, in the era, everyone was. You know, if you look at Forbes covers in the mid-60s, they're kind of doing their version of George Lois. If you look at one of the most famous covers that Time magazine ever did, April 1966, is God dead. That is a clearly a George Lois influence cover. And six months later, in Esquire, October 66, Lois comes back with his own God cover. He comes back with a cover, a black cover, white type, giant type for a story by John Sack about M Company in Vietnam. And the cover line is just so powerful. It's a left hook to the jaw. It says, oh my God, we hit a little girl. That cover is still a gut punch. It's still amazing.

All right. Couple more for you guys before we go here. A personal favorite Richard Nixon's makeover, May 1968, picture of Nixon with his eyes closed and all these hands coming forward to offer lipstick, eye makeup, hairspray. Lois would tell Vulture, I hated the son of a bitch. And Hay said they were going to do a piece on him running again. I had a clue that one of these guys who flies with them on Air Force One,

had a photograph of him napping, and I'd shoot a bunch of hands making it look good because everyone knew he lost to JFK because the way he looked during that debate, like hell. The cover came out and it was a big hit at Nixon's press secretary called up Hayes and said, you commie sons of bitches, you left wing this and that. Michael, what do we think of Nixon's makeover? Well, I think that, again, this is one of those things where the magazine is trying to cause trouble, right? I mean, they found a picture of Nixon's sleeping. on a plane and doctored it in a way that, you know, just that wasn't done, right? You're talking about, we talked about Norman Rockwell covers.

You're also talking about an era where Life Magazine is the biggest magazine in America, where it's all photojournalism or celebrity portraits that are quite beautiful, but you would never tamper with a photograph on the cover of Life magazine. So the idea that Esquire would have a little fun with Richard Nixon, who not for nothing, is the, you know, the spirit animal of the dubious achievement of awards, which also started under Harold Hayes' watch in 1962. Nixon was the perfect foil for Esquire. And, you know, again, this is the lowest cover comes back. In 2015, Time magazine did a story on plastic surgery, nips, tucks, or else, and had a woman on the cover with a needle heading toward her face and a compact,

and a scalpel, and it's straight up an homage to George Lewis. Yeah, co-sign everything. I mean, them trying to wrinkle people, them trying to make people mad with the cover, it's something, frankly, that you wouldn't see today, at least not in most major publications. You'd be too worried about having to deal with being on the bad side of somebody important. But there's also just this incredible, how did they do it aspect to it? The fact that he had a photo of him sleeping on the plane would be the last thing that you would If you're looking at it, you're like, you actually would see the magazine cover and wonder whether or not Richard Nixon sat for this photo shoot.

I did when I first saw it for sure. Yeah, I mean, one of the most remarkable things about what, again, what Lois does, and this comes from advertising, is in general, it becomes the shift to conspiring with celebrities, right? So, celebrities until this point are just models. They're just posing on a cover, whether it's a women's fashion magazine or Life magazine. Here at Esquire in the 60s, they take celebrities, Liston, Andy Warhol, drowning in a soup can, and they're conspiring to either let the air out of their own tires a little or have a little fun with their self-image. In this case, they are simply co-opting someone very famous, Richard Nixon, and not just letting the air out of his tires, but keying his car and doing a lot of other things.

you know, he was a clear foil for the magazine for many, many years. All right. You mentioned Andy Warhol, falling into a can of Campbell's soup. This is May 1969. This is the heavyweight champ or co-heavyweight champ with St. Sebastian of George Lois covers. Lois would tell Vulture, and please go read this Volcher piece by Emma Rosenblum, which is invaluable. This was hot shit. The article was basically a caustic review about what was going on in the arts in America at the time.

and without even reading it, I knew I wanted Andy Warhol drowning in his own soup. I just had the image in my head. And I called him and said, Andy, I want you on the cover, Vesquire. And he said, wait a minute, George, you always have an idea for a cover. What's the idea? And I told him and he said, I love it. Michael, Andy in the soup. Well, I mean, here's Warhol at the height of his 15 minutes, right?

I mean, it's Warhol sending up his own image drowning in the soup can. and to go back to an earlier point David made, which is exactly right. Lois never said what that cover meant. If you think that's the end of pop art or avant-garde, okay. If you think it's a statement about how brilliant avant-garde art is, okay, he was fine with that. It's kind of his soprano's final episode. Think whatever you think. You bring as much to it as a reader, as a viewer, as I do as an art director.

And I think that's a very powerful concept. And not for nothing, you know, the idea that both Andy Warhol and George Lois are now hanging in MoMA, because a lot of these Esquire covers are now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art is extraordinary. Yeah, I mean, as an art director, I read that tension into it, right? It's just like there's a, I mean, you might see yourself as an ad man, but there's got to be a part of you that's the thing that is eternally questioning why one thing is art and what I'm doing is not, right? Who knows if that was on his mind, but that's certainly part of the way I look at it. I mean, one of the hardest things to do, to work with in any sort of magazine cover,

book cover, whatever, is art, right? I mean, to deal with art in an artistic space is really difficult. And the way, I mean, he certainly had the advantage of Warhol being a character, being an identifiable person. But yeah, I mean, the sort of ambiguous commentary that Michael mentioned, it's, it's, it's, there's a power in not knowing, you know, there's a power in the, in the, in the ambiguity. And, and there's certainly a power in just a composition that covers, it's an unbelievable cover. Two quick ones before we run. Michael, what magazines got in the same zip code as Lois for a period of time in terms of making covers that make you stopping your tracks? So I think the most obvious one would be Tina Brown's Vanity Fair. You know, I think that when she starts working with Annie Leibowitz, you start getting,

it's a different way of conspiring with celebrities, obviously. There's not, you know, the buzzword for Esquire in the 60s was irreverence. I'm not really sure that applies to Vanity Fair in the 80s, but I think there is certainly there is a co-conspirator quality to, Vanity Fair in the 80s. And, you know, if you think about Demi Moore, pregnant, naked on the cover of Vanity Fair, it's one of those, you know, beyond provocative images that I think George Lois would certainly respect and relate to. And not for nothing, often imitated, right? I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's become such a trope that everyone kind of does a riff on that.

But I think you look at, you look at Mark Selleger's photographs from Rolling Stone in the same era, and you start to see sort of, you know, celebrities who want to want to own a piece of their own image and have a little fun with their own image, want to goof on it a little bit. And I think you start to see this really to this day. You know, I think Instagram follows a lot of these George Lois principles. And I think, you know, if you look at something like Ryan Reynolds' ads for Mint Mobile or even Aviation Gin, he's not afraid to let the air out of his own tires. He's not afraid to make fun of himself. And again, I think that's something that George Lois and Esquire in the 60s help celebrities do. They give permission for celebrities to not take themselves so seriously. So that's where it is. And that was my second question. The DNA that we would think of as a George Lois cover or a great magazine cover generally. David, it lives in magazine covers, but also

Instagram, also ads. Where else do you see it in the culture now? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's, those are the main spaces for it. I mean, it is, there's, but nothing, it's just so hard to capture that sort of power, right? The sort of power, I mean, it's, it's the small, I mean, the, the, there were fewer magazines that there was much more focus on every magazine that was out there.

And there was the, I mean, the artistic vision, right? I mean, he's not, get, he's not taking notes, from the magazine side. That's a pretty spectacular setup, but also just the determination of both him and of the magazine to, to, to, to, to, to, push it forward. It's, it's, it's, um, it's hard to imagine anything else really having that impact now,

right? I mean, if you look at, if you look at, well, I mean, there's obviously comparisons like spy magazine. All those covers were like forthrightly fake, right? I mean, they could do the montage and you would know immediately what you're looking at. Um, you know, there's other magazines like, I'm trying to think, like George, George magazine, which had a, which had a, which had a, which had. had a similar aesthetic at the start, and then it turned out to be just sort of they only had one joke,

but they, but it was, but aesthetically, it was similar, although, you know, philosophically, it was sort of empty. Cindy Crawford, yeah, that's, that's from the George Lois coaching tree, for sure. Yes. And then, you know, De Niro in the powdered wig, by that point, it had a little bit less power. But when you get, but, but the, the, the, the New York magazine covers of the Adam Moss era are instructive because they were lively and attention-grabbing. They were noisy.

They were deliberate. And obviously they were from, you know, they were from the lowest school. But it's impossible to have the same sort of, the same sort of legacy in this day and age, in that day and age, the lowest did decades prior. And now it's almost impossible. I mean, there's, in some ways it's great

because nothing is art, right? nothing in everything or art at the same time, but it's so hard to have any sort of permanence. And that's why I think we'll continue to remember those Lois covers. You can watch Michael Solomon conjure up the legacy of the old master at Forbes Life. Michael, thank you for helping us get the right headline treatment, the right cover line for George Lois. Thanks for coming on the press box.

And now it's time for the second weekly edition of David Shoemaker guest is the strain pun headline. Yeah, ha, ha. Today's headline comes to us from valued listener and 538 editor Maya Swedler. It's from the Brooklyn Eagle. I've got to read you the lead of this article because it is very Brooklyn. A frisson of excitement broke out in the neighborhood the other day when a fancy blue coffee cart appeared on the beloved Brooklyn Heights Promenade. Inside the cart, two men were selling coffee.

Now you may think that's convenient. I like coffee, but not so fast. vendors have never before been allowed on the landmark promenade, an alarm quickly spread throughout the community via the next door neighborhood app, Brooklyn Heights blog, etc, etc. The alarm was sounded, David, about this new coffee cart. What was the Brooklyn Eagles strain punt headline? Coffee, boardwalk,

waterfront. Oh. Why would just stick with coffee here? Okay. Red a red alert. Coffee. Moka. There was a little bit of a to-do caused.

A little bit of a rumpus. A stir? A stir for sure. But there was a little bit of a thing. It was a thing where people get agitated. It was a. I got what I said to do. An old-fashioned word.

You're in the right old-fashioned zone here. God, I have no idea. How do we make coffee? What do we do? What do the action? Percolate? No basic. Coffee maker?

Yeah, what does the coffee maker do it? It bruise the coffee? Brews? Oh, a brew-haha. Okay. There we go. Coffee cart on Brooklyn Heights Promenade causes brew-haha.

he is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantus. Have a fantastic Thanksgiving. If that's your thing, we'll see you Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.