A friend once told me, you don’t need a penis to park a car, and so it is with reading PORT magazine.
I guess you could call this a back handed compliment. Why oh why is Port, according to the spine and not the cover, I note, a magazine for MEN.
As a person endowed with female genitalia, I found it almost impossible to find the gender exclusivity in your excellent magazine.
When I bought it, should I have slipped it between a copy of The Lady magazine and, oh, what do women read these days? Oh yes, gossip, fashion and cookery. I am guessing here. I used to be a magazine-alcoholic but I have been clean now for over 10 years. My only weakness being the occasional, Scientific American Mind, Wired and magazines for…men.
As if to endorse my peculiar behaviour, I was recently told, whilst waiting for a train, by the station guard… Ooh would never have pictured you as a, Wired reader. So, shoot me!
A woman reading about technology, ideas, business…get thee back into that thar kitchen, wench.
After glancing at Port magazine on the third visit to an airport terminal, I succumbed. This was in June 2012.
Philip Seymour Hoffman. (He deserves his own sentence).
This man’s brilliance, however, will never be discovered by asking him to talk about himself.
So let me enlighten you. The diversity of his acting skills is, in my humble opinion, unsurpassed.
When playing a drag queen in Flawless, you are watching the character, not PSH playing Rusty.
When he takes the part of Allen in Happiness, we believe him, feel his struggle. Genius. And even though we know Truman Capote was a much smaller man, PSH is Capote.
Port is a quarterly magazine of note. It is not one of the, read and throw in the general direction of the doctor’s waiting room or the recycling bin. No, this magazine will adorn one of my bookshelves along with some rare copies of Vogue circa 1960s (addict days), Boulevard France, Allure and The European. The last three now sadly out of print. I only hope my new found passion won’t…No, that’s girl talk. So, apart from Philip Seymour Hoffman and his three page interview, what else captivated me sufficiently to spend 6 of my hard earned English pounds?
The Death of French Culture. I live in France and this is spot on, and funny. Plus, all the other articles. Only the male fashion pages (as would female fashion pages) held little interest.
And then we come to the fiction. Dog. (Man’s best friend. I can say no more).
Now you won’t find that in Woman’s Weekly. Okay, guessing again, never bought a copy. I was an addict but never of the ‘meths’ variety. Scared, moi? The editor of the aforementioned magazine knows how to use the worldly wide web? You sure?
So pray tell me, dear Dan Crowe, editor of PORT, should I pass my copy to the ‘man’ on my left? And, seriously, what possessed you to call it a magazine for men? In fact you are not sure are you? I mean why put that on the spine but not on the cover? Hmm? Wait, women, can’t read vertically? Who knew?