The Huffington Report is live, but still no sign of Radar's blog.

Arianna's site is a very interesting experiment, and I wish her well, but I'm not really expecting a lot of interesting things out of the mouths of celebrities. There's a reason most of these people do other things than write. But who knows what might pop up there.

And it's already fun to read about. Gawker captured my thoughts and made me smile:

Yes, kids, The Huffington Post has launched! And what a launch it is! Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Brad Hall yukking it up as if “Watching Ellie” never happened! David Mamet holding forth on computers as “hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet[s]”! That lady who married the guy who writes “Curb Your Enthusiasm” bitching about the automobile industry! Yes, it’s a rich, rich tapestry. When important celebrities have a platform from which to dispense their well-informed opinions, everyone wins!

Radar, on the other hand. Expecting great things from them. Please don't disappoint me.

So you still haven't checked out Radar? What the hell is wrong with you? How hard do I have to hype? (If that's not ringing any bells, scroll down through the left column, pause when you get to the pictures.)

I was just dinking about doing a feature a week on each of their features from the last issue, when I stumbled upon this great interview with editor Maer Roshan. It's in something called The Black Table, which I probably should have known about months ago, but you know how slowly word travels out to the hinterlands. It's conducted by managing editor Will Leitch, formerly of the same role at the late great Ironminds.

Choice moments:

BT: At the airport newsstand in Des Moines, the first issue of Radar was sandwiched between Elle Girl and Cosmopolitan. What's up with that?

MR: I'm thrilled that a magazine conceived in my kitchen is getting any play in the Des Moines airport at all. And in terms of placement and prominence, being sandwiched between Elle Girl and Cosmo is a pretty good place for a new magazine to be. Far more perplexing to me is what you were doing in Des Moines airport.

... {Later, different questions, all MR}:

I was surprised by the people who responded to the first issue. Last month, on the very same day I got a very nice note from Michael Eisner, whom I've never met, I also received a box of shit from "Suge Knight," which turned out to be the, uh, handiwork of Stuff's Greg Gutfeld. I thought it was one of his more impressive accomplishments as an editor.

...

I'll be very satisfied if Radar survives and thrives and . . . we're able to prove all the doubters wrong. Then I can sell out and go to Vanity Fair.

Finally, I like my magazine story again. (Yes, the same damn story I've been working on off and on all month. I work slowly. That's why I still can't afford the move to NY.)

There's still a few rough spots, and a bit of redundancy, but I think I've got a solid draft, and my editor has been encouraging me to include her before I try to refine it.

Now it's out of my hands for the moment, and I enter the period of terror. Will she hate it? Why has she not responded? I sent it to her over an hour ago!

Hopefully she understands my horror and give me some glimmer of an indication in a day or two. But then again she might have a life of her own going on. The nerve.

I just got more time.

The gods smiled upon me and told my editor to give me till Monday.

I'm ecstatic. Now I have to be really smart and choose not to use it. Got to shoot for Saturday for a really clean edit. Rough draft tonight or tomorrow morning.

She said I should leave my house, and I'm toying with the gym, but I really need to crank this out while I can. Maybe at 10, not before.

Let's see what I can pull together.

This story is going to be SO GOOD!

Just remind me of that next week when she sends it back all cut up into little pieces and I'm bewildered. That's supposed to happen and will make it better, but at this moment, I proceed under the delusion that the draft I send Monday will be structural perfection, requiring only the lightest of airbrushing. I need to pretend that to get myself through this stage.

Ah, writing. I love the beginning phase and the ending phase. Too bad about that horrible part in the middle, where the story is nothing but my enemy.

Thank God I like magazine writing. Every story sucks the life right out of me. I couldn't birth one of these things every day.

Exhausted right now. All adrenaline yesterday as the first great rush hit, I got the first 500 words and the pieces started to fit together.

But the inevitable turmoil this morning, and the pieces suddenly didn't want to squeeze into their stations, panic about having enough material as I started to fill some of it in. Fighting it much of the morning and afternoon.

And then it just passed again. A good idea came, and another and another, and pretty soon I whipped open a new document to just outline it all out. And it all fit! Every single piece. Except maybe one, and I'm not sure it needs to be in there, which is good because I don't think I have space for all of this, and it's a fascinating topic, but maybe it's kind of a different topic.

(Sorry this is all too general. Can't say too much about particulars till it comes out.)

I've got the first 1100 words done and a 970-word outline for the other 2000, so yeah, I'll never fit half of it in. But that's good. The best will stay, the lesser moments will go. I think I've got the real outline now, that will actually hold, plus a lot of the copy that goes with it. I'm in the home stretch now. Even though I've been on it off and on for three weeks, it all comes in a big rush at the end. But I feel like Keith Richards.

Lots more work to do fleshing it out and especially sharpening it, but that's my favorite part. Can't wait to have it all together.

And then start over again on another one.

I've forbidden myself to post again until I get my magazine story done, but I just found myself on a roll in an email to my editor, so I'm going to share it with all of you here:

oddly, i watched an old charlie rose interview w/ zadie smith over the course of three meal breaks today. i love her! i'd always meant to read white teeth, but wasn't completely sure about it and never got around to it. (same with the interview, actually. it's been sitting there on my tivo for a good six months. i think it was the beret that kept scaring me off.)

she is way too wise for 24. i was sure she was going to be a real idiot, because 24 year olds can really be idiots and really be full of themselves when they're prematurely successful (which is redundant), and no surer sign than a beret that they're trying to dredge up the ghost of jack kerouac. just put them out of their misery now. she wasn't. she sounded wise as my 65-year-old mentor. that's not fair.

but she also said just the right things to make me feel better. she said writing could be agony because you're always wracked with guilt (shame?) that you're not working hard enough, even though you know it's impossible to force it out any more quickly, but then the day comes along where three thousand brilliant words spill out and there's just no feeling like that in all the world. God, has she been hanging out in my apartment? i've been trying to force myself into labor for a week and a half now, cursing and berating myself and threatending to file for divorce, and around 9:35 this morning, my water suddenly broke and that must be one hell of a placenta, because the juices have been spilling all over the apartment and the carpets are soaked.

charlie also asked her what her best writing quality was, and without a beat, she said empathy. the beatlessness was slightly less impressive once i remembered she was on book tour and had been asked that 500 times, but i still felt an amazing kinship with her immediately. that's what joan walsh always told me my best quality was, and i never heard any other writer say it before. and she followed empathy quickly with curiosity, which is right up there for me too--although i guess they go hand in hand, don't they? can't wait to finish up this story and run out to Tattered Cover to get her book.

i hope it isn't crap. i'll be so dissappointed. the conversation made it sound like a stephen frears fillum, though, or perhaps i was just drawing that connection because i just heard about his new movie, and heard it was good, and where the hell has that guy been? i've been waiting for another Sammy and Rosy Get Laid for a long damn time, and the grifters even longer--since i had to work backwards into his older stuff--and both the new film and her book remind me of sammy/rosy. (i'm not fusing directors here am i?)

see how i get distracted. but i needed a little break.

I first saw the ad in Radar, thought it was a joke. Not. Coming to Bravo, this month. But I have a feeling I'll hate it.

Looking forward to Boy Meets Boy though.

OK, "new" is questionable. It's had two issues, been out about two months now, but I find most people I stumble into it--even homos--have never heard of it, at least out here in The Hinterland. So it might still be new to you. Otherwise, you have no reason to continue reading this post.

Radar is the first magazine I've fallen in love with since discovering Salon (a bit late) back in the spring of '99. A cross between Spy and Vanity Fair (the early, good, spy, before it grew angry, bitter and unfunny). But, oddly, not somewhere between those two, more like Spy in the front, then you flip a page and it's Vanity Fair, with shorter features. (Which is a shame. I'd actually like them much longer.)

I never, ever read any magazine cover to cover, because I couldn't care less about most of the drivel inside them. I subscribe to several, but rarely get around to opening most of them, because even the flip-through feels like a big waste of time. Same old crap, same lame writing, who cares.

(OK, the writing in NYT mag, The Atlantic, Harpers and sometimes Vanity Fair is definitely not bad, but it doesn't always sing either, and the material rarely turns me on. Suprisingly, I was just returned on to Mother Jones. I thought it was all dead except the burial, but the writing is truly stunning.)

But Radar, I am completely taken with. I've read both issues cover to cover (just about--there's always some crap I don't care about, but very little of it). I almost never read that dreck that fills up the front of most magazines. Why do they even bother. It's clearly just filler, it's hardly ever clever--just get on to the features and be done with it. That's the best part in Radar.

So far, the cover features have been:

Monsters Inc.

Meet the Scariest People in America

&

B-List Nation

Why screwy second-rate stars are conquering America's A List.

Either of those could have been great in concept, awful in execution, but they nail each of them, hysterically and relentlessly. (And the first cover is priceless for the bitchy pic of J Lo, presumably letting loose on a cleaning lady or delivery man, over the Monsters headline.

Great stuff. Two for two, so far.

Now if I could just convince them to let me write for them. Consider this my application.