Beach Brawl
The history of the two magazines would make for good beach-blanket reading in either. Owned by the Small Newspaper Group, Lake was launched as a quarterly in 2000 by Deborah Loeser Small, a journalist who married into the Small family and became infatuated with the dunes and beaches east of Chicago. Small published four issues and moved to California, but she stayed in close–perhaps uncomfortably close–touch with her new editor, the wife of Gary’s deputy chief of police. Pat Colander is a former Chicago journalist who’s led a life rich in vicissitudes. Lake would be yet another. Her first issue set a tone: it carried her interview with Donald Trump and her friend Denise DeClue’s account of the days when Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir were shacking up in Miller Beach.
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Like other successful city and regional magazines, Lake is “relentlessly about the locality we cover,” wrote Rodkin. “Those who read Lake or Shore are reading ten other magazines, and what Lake tries to do is speak in the language of those other magazines. You don’t see much first person in the New Yorker. If it’s always ‘I went here, I ate this, I did that,’ it’s more about you than the subject.”
(Colander explained to me that because fresh biographical information had surfaced, Denise DeClue was updating her tale of the two authors’ fling. In the interests of full disclosure, I must say here that DeClue figures in my will. She’s been bequeathed a fetid old poker table Algren briefly owned.)
The other day I spotted a Reuters story about the Cannes film festival. Hollywood is arriving with its summer A list, Reuters reported; for instance, “The Da Vinci Code, starring Tom Hanks and France’s Audrey Tautou, is one of the most eagerly awaited films years, both because of the success of Dan Brown’s novel and the outcry from Christians over the plot.”
