August 16, 2005 @ 7:03 am
A new magazine hit my mailbox yesterday. Well, actually the first edition arrived around a month ago but it had a coffee table life of about 30 minutes.
The new mag is published by a division of Gannett and has offices in Scottsdale. It looks like a Scottsdale publication. It looks the way I imagine Scottsdale thinks it looks... bright and shiny like the paper it’s printed on. The glare off the paper is so harsh that you need your sunglasses to read it.
The magazine is called "The Foothills." It flatters me by explaining the foothills is Tucson’s premier community. Well, I’m not sure how much of a community we are. For one thing we are a helluva lot more diverse and edgy than these guys suggest.
The masthead boasts that The Foothills is distributed "by direct mail to every home and business within the master-planned community." Huh? What master-planned community? Apparently these guys think Cuvee is in the foothills, but then their offices are in Scottsdale, so what should I expect?
This mag is like every advertising mag published from sea to shining sea and distributed to bemused visitors in luxury hotel rooms. It offers a small slice of the upper crust that supports luxury shopping. What it shows us could be Anywhere, USA.
Particularly annoying is a fashion spread coyly headed, "School Days, School Daze" that features fashions for "the campus." High School? Grade School? I’m the last guy in the world to knock sexually precocious little girls tricked out to look older than they are, but these are models from a Scottsdale model agency. We have plenty of good-looking kids right here in Tucson who would have welcomed the chance to play at "pretty."
In the end "The Foothills" misses the mark precisely because it thinks we are some kind of master-planned community with no connection to the rest of Tucson. The pictures are pretty, though. Never saw the ladies of the real estate industry look better and I adored the over-aged destroyers in the singles club.
Estimated coffee table life? Generously, about an hour. Enjoy.
