In my efforts to keep up with what the all the kids are hip to these days, I fished a couple of magazines out of the airport garbage when we were traveling last week: Esquire and Spin.

Voilà. And by “the kids” of course I mean, The Boys, and whichever of The Girls is hearty enough to wade through a longish profile of Angelina Jolie written by Tom Junod, a man apparently baffled to find that Ms. Jolie is a woman of actual character and not a 24-hour-a-day sex bomb. Esquire is all about taking half-naked women seriously. I let my subscription lapse several years ago when their admittedly annoying “we’re better than you” editorial voice slipped into the chasm of casual lad mag sexism — they also weren’t submitting to my demand that they replace their editor with David Sedaris. I have to say, though, at least they’re equal-opportunity sexists. They did a piece on Kevin Spacey a few years ago that was relentless in its speculation as to whether Spacey was gay or not. High-minded fashion lit apparently goes down a lot easier with a big helping of What’s In Your Pants?

Spin, on the other hand, is exactly the same. They would have us believe that all Amy Winehouse wants to do is smooch on her fiancé, get drunk, and humiliate the man they sent to write her profile for them. There’s more to the article, sure, but it’s a personality piece, and as such tells us one heck of a lot about the writer’s personality. Editors of music magazines want their writers to write about a musician’s personal life because writing about the music they make is, in my estimation, flat-out impossible. To quote former iconoclast Laurie Anderson, writing about music is like dancing about architecture — in the venn diagram of arts, there isn’t a lot of overlap here, because even though language is used in pop music, music itself is a language that can’t be put into words. In other words, they always get it wrong.

In conclusion I would like to say that magazines are full of crap, but they sure do have a lot of pretty pictures of half-undressed ladies in them. The end.

I hate to love watching What Not To Wear on TLC. I was stuck with basic cable for a couple of weeks last spring and now I can’t stop watching this horrible, enthralling trainwreck of a show.

If you haven’t seen it, the basic premise is that the friends and family of a badly dressed woman can nominate her to have her wardrobe, fashion sense, core beliefs, and self-worth undermined by the show’s two hosts, Stacy and Clinton, who will then replace her very concept of self with their expensively constructed idea of who she should be.

In other words, they throw out all her old clothes, give her a $5,000 credit limit, and hector her into buying a bunch of unimaginative crap that they think makes her look better.

According to the show’s web site, Stacy graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College with a double degree in 20th-century philosophy and German literature, and Clinton has a masters in journalism from Northwestern. These are not uneducated people, but my GOD they are condescending.

That hard part for me to take is that sometimes they are absolutely right.

Some of these women do look like hell. They have tattooed on their eyeliner, they proudly wear stuff they found on the street. But you know what? Stacy and Clinton could be nicer about it. At the beginning of one recent show the victim, a bohemian twentysomething schoolteacher, was wearing a choker she made from an old bra strap. Now, me? I’d applaud her for repurposing an unrecyclable garment into a clever accessory before asking her if she might want to think twice before wearing it any place beside Dave & Buster’s, but our hosts just looked at her in abject horror and then mocked her mercilessly. They also mocked her retro t-shirts and flip flops. Instead of celebrating her personal style and giving her tips on how to make it more grown-up, they dramatically threw it all into a shiny galvanized trash can, pushed her around a few Manhattan boutiques and, after the predictable Stockholm Syndrome transition wherein the victim ceases to trust her own taste and begins to love theirs instead, formerly unique Boho Girl came out looking like a clone of our friends Stacy and Clinton.

The point of this whole post is to point you to one of the greatest t-shirt sites in the whole wide Internet. Reckon prints film and TV t-shirts, music t-shirts, literary and art t-shirts, comedy t-shirts – even t-shirts with German philosophers on them — in sizes ranging from infant onesies to burly XXXLs. Stacy and Clinton would cringe if they saw me, a 43-year-old woman, walking around in a Gilda Radner t-shirt, but you know what? Sometimes a weird retro t-shirt is THE PERFECT THING TO WEAR.