Cheap and cheeky

A couple of new magazines are tailored to readers who have more style than money and have't lost their sense of irony.

The magazine racks are always a minicourse in anthropology, a slice of this month's culture.

In the '90s, which already seem so long ago, shelter, fashion and even gossip magazines gleamed with a high gloss of hope. With the tech boom, federal surplus and manic stock market, so many of us could dream over those Manolo Blahnik slides and toile-flounced rosewood sleigh beds ("If my Enron stock just keeps going up. . . .").

We even felt kindly about the rich and famous, with gossip reaching its apotheosis in the Renaissance-toned photos and fawning prose of Vanity Fair, and celebrity worship mating with shopping in InStyle.

Here in 2003, the stock market is so far down Zoloft couldn't bring it up, we're more preoccupied with layoffs than luxury, and America is no longer Mr. Nice Guy. It's time for cheap chic and cheap talk.

A couple of new magazines are riding that trend, aiming squarely at Gens X and Y and operating on the premise that the declaration of the death of irony was premature.

Radar borrows all over the place, from Spy and Interview, George and Talk (its editor and publisher's last job) to take on, as its cover declares, "pop, politics, scandal, style."

Budget Living is a sometimes practical, sometimes tongue-in-cheek twist on fashion and lifestyle, subtitled "Spend Smart. Live Rich." It debuted last fall and has bagged more than 325,000 subscribers and a nod as best startup of the year from advertising industry bible Adweek.

The bimonthly magazine is not one of those dour penny-pincher newsletters about using scraps of soap. It's a breezy, cleanly designed book, hip but not too, with retro visual touches reminiscent of what used to be called ladies magazines.

Budget Living is tailored to an audience that has more style than money, readers looking for what editor Sarah Gray Miller describes as "a high esthetic level with a low price point."

Cheap, of course, is a relative thing. Given that the magazine's editorial offices are in midtown Manhattan, the staff's notion of cheap may not match Middle America's. In the April/May issue, the staff is all agog that an interior designer who's a thrift-store maven managed to furnish her family's 4,000-square-foot vacation home for less than $20,000. In the main fashion spread of '50s-inspired sundresses and khaki suits, the $20 Route 66 jeans from Kmart are paired with $130 polka dot Lulu Guinness espadrilles.

Compared with a Vogue page with a $3,000 frock and $1,500 sandals, that is cheap. And most of the magazine's content is common sense as well as cool.

The upfront section, Loose Change, is a mix of useful tidbits (tips on the longest-lasting flowers for Mother's Day) and wacky fun. A feature called Check Out takes a celebrity shopping, in this case brilliant New York restaurateur and Food Network star Mario Batali, who gets $20 to shop for a meal in a convenience store in Brooklyn.

He comes in almost $7 under budget for appetizers, aperitif, main course, cheese course (Kraft Twist-Ums) and dessert. The photo of him dubiously holding up his entree, a 14-ounce "previously handled" burrito labeled the Bomb, is worth the cover price.

A feature on throwing a Cinco de Mayo party is the antithesis of Martha Stewart fussiness: Buy roast chickens at the supermarket to make taco filling, then let guests assemble their own. Martha would have you start by raising the chicken. Some of the tips are not for everyone. The fashion spread's skinny female model sports a duckling-yellow cardigan from Gap Kids, "where the fit is snug and the prices cheap." For most of us, even most Gen X 'n' Yers, "snug" is hardly the word.

But there's a great story about a "guerrilla sculptor" who creates her art out of concrete pavers in the aisle at Home Depot, takes photos, leaves the sculptures behind and sells the photos in galleries for $800 and up. With a scam like that, she won't need to read Budget Living.

She may show up in the pages of Radar. It's got some cheap chic of its own going. Editor and publisher Maer Roshan's last job was as editor of the last six issues of Talk, the glitzy creation of ubereditor Tina Brown (also late of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, now a columnist for Salon).

Talk debuted in 1999 with a jaw-dropping launch party at the Statue of Liberty for 800 celebrity guests. It tanked in January 2002, leaving corporate backers Hearst and Miramax with a $55-million loss.

Roshan is taking a budget approach with Radar, publishing this month's premiere edition (135,000 copies) with a teensy $1.7-million from a handful of backers. And, the news release promises, "There's no launch party. Really."

What Radar does have inside its mock tabloid cover is a mix of mildly bitchy celebrity dish, wise-aleck entertainment news, topical humor a la The Daily Show and a few pieces on politics.

The last are the least successful. A gee-whiz profile of Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean and a tone-impaired piece on human shields in Iraq skim surfaces. Miami Herald columnist Jim DeFede contributes a piece on Noelle Bush's personal drug wars and father Jeb's politically adroit spin of her struggles that may be news elsewhere, but for Florida readers it's the same old stuff.

Radar has a surer touch with pop culture, especially in a creepy piece about the sad little subculture of former reality show stars in Los Angeles. A lame "oral history" of legendary '80s New York nightclub Area, though, is an object lesson in "you had to be there."

But the cover story is perfectly nasty. "Monsters Ball" is about the "scariest people in America," as the cover hollers under a photo of Jennifer Lopez looking as if she's about to shake Ben Affleck by the scruff of the neck. She's No. 1 on a list of the 65 most obnoxious celebrities.

The piece stacks little icons next to each bad celeb's photo to indicate the crimes against good behavior: a whip for "employee abuse," a target for "death threats," a mouse silhouette for "worked for Disney." Text dishes the details.

Courtney Love, whose claim to fame is "professional widow," gets the most icons, seven. But she has plenty of company, ranging from Tom DeLay (four icons) to Michael Moore (two). And that's a good indicator of Radar's willingness to take everyone on.

One of the monster story's sidebars, on "Cryptomonsters: killing with kindness," includes writer Dave Eggers, Katie Couric and Roshan, described as a "profligate media whore who would trade sex with Cindy Adams for two column inches." The squib is an inch and a quarter.

- Contact Colette Bancroft at bancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435.

For online versions and subscription information, go to:

Budget Living at www.budgetlivingmedia.com/

Radar at www.radar-mag.com

Budget Living is widely available at newsstands. Radar's premiere issue is at Borders and Barnes & Noble bookstores.

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