It's an arty, avant-garde techno-anarchist mag, which is a lot more fun. It's a magazine designed by people who were obviously heavily influenced by boxes of Tide or Trix. In fact, you don't even know what color the next page will be. Flipping through it, you never know what you'll find on the next page. Wired is one of America's great browsing magazines. From now on, let's call them "sessumses." That way, we can warn our friends to avoid them: "Don't even bother with that story on Liv Tyler," you could say. There ought to be a name for this kind of article. He just riffs on it, like the Liberace of the word processor. Sessums never uses these "revelations" to provide any insight into Tyler's character or her art, such as it is. Pretty soon, he and Liv are in a Lebanese restaurant in Hollywood, eating hummus and hot peppers, and he asks, "Who was the first person ever to kiss that mouth?" And she starts talking about how a kid in a day care center used to fondle her private parts, and then she confesses that. Was there ever a question of terminating your pregnancy?" Later, Sessums lunches with Tyler's mother, former model and rock groupie Bebe Buell, and asks: "Do you remember the night Liv was conceived?" On cue, Buell describes her night of amour with Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler in a "gorgeous antique French bed." Sessums asks a follow-up: "You left Steven Tyler when you were three months pregnant and went back to Todd Rundgren. Instead, Tyler prattles on about her romance with co-star Joaquin Phoenix, which Sessums describes as a "Pirandellian pas de deux."
Of course, no 19-year-old can answer such a question. Can the consequences be the ones that the orphans suffered in "Moon Lake" - a constant turning from loving everything too much to loving not at all?' "
Mostly, though, he quotes himself: " Can a surfeit of parental love be as damaging as none at all?' I ask Tyler. Pretty impressive, eh? Obviously, Sessums is no mere hack writer. There's a lovely line in it: All orphans were at once wondering and stoic - at one moment loving everything too much, the next folding back from it, tightly as hard green buds growing in the wrong direction, closing as they go.' " He says to her: "Ever read that book by Eudora Welty? It's a group of interconnected stories titled The Golden Apples.' There's one called Moon Lake,' about a summer camp for orphaned teenage girls. A lesser reporter would have picked one and said thanks. Tyler walks into his room at Los Angeles's trendy Chateau Marmont hotel and, without saying a word, holds out two golden apples. Sessums's latest piece - a cover story on 19-year-old actress Liv Tyler in the May issue of Vanity Fair - is not quite that memorable, but it has its moments. It was awful - the article, that is, not the pie - so awful that you can't forget it, like the decor in the Jungle Room at Graceland. Later, he asks, "Do you pray?" and Ryan begins to weep, so Sessums gives her a comforting hug and then soothes her soul with some of his sweet-potato pie. At one point Sessums asks Ryan about the effects of husband Dennis Quaid's cocaine use on his erections. Who can forget, for instance, Sessums's piece on actress Meg Ryan a couple of years back? It's a classic of this dubious genre. It's the same sensation produced by watching Geraldo or Jerry.
MOON LAKE EUDORA WELTY FULL
His pieces are so full of embarrassing questions, purple prose, bathos, obsequiousness and over-the-top self-conscious exhibitionism that you don't know whether to laugh or cry, so you just cringe. Sessums writes celebrity profiles for Vanity Fair. Or maybe the Geraldo Rivera of magazine journalism. Kevin Sessums is the Jerry Lewis of magazine journalism.