Wed 5 Dec 2007
After a scant nine months, CT Slant’s ink has finally up and dried. The current December issue will be their final release.
To honor this untimely demise, the Hartford Independent Media Center wishes to recall some of CT Slant’s more illustrious moments.
In March 2007, just after the magazine launched, we learned that their mascot, Señor Slant, was capped. Señor Slant seemed to be CT Slant’s symbol for Hartford’s racial and ethnic diversity, which after his demise, was rarely seen in the pages of CT Slant. When the magazine debuted, it was advertised as the bible of hipness in Hartford. For most of its life, it let us know that being hip in the city meant being downtown, or possibly in scattered areas of the West End– not in Little Italy or on Park Street. Their tagline, “life from a new angle,” must have been intended as an inside joke, as the angle of the magazine began, and ended, very mainstream and Anglo.
In June 2007, the glossy featured two black females on its cover. Only when the moon aligned with Jupiter and Venus did such a bold celebration of non-white races grace the pages of the magazine.
The final edition of this manual in journo-marketing reminds us as we enter the holiday shopping season that “Indie’s in!” (thank god!). The selling of a lifestyle is complete with a several page fluff piece on a group of University of Hartford students who find junk and decorate their apartment with it. Since several of the students are artistic, it’s not particularly revealing that their home will be decorated interestingly. The article doubles as a drinking game–every time a major retail outlet is advertised dissed, take a shot.
But perhaps what we’ll miss most about the Slant is its waifish facade as an alternative, even as its pay stubs bathe in Tribune watermarks.
From its ashes, however, a new media outlet has risen: Metromix. So, for all you wannabe hipsters out there who now are not sure where to get instructions and validation for your lifestyle, let your fears subside. There is an online arts and entertainment listing that will fill the aching gap that CT Slant leaves behind.
December 5th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
By “untimely demise,” do you mean that the time of its demise should have instead been 9 months ago?
December 5th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
:)
December 5th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Off topic, but you should really post a link to your RSS feed in the right column. No one can subscribe to your blog otherwise. Also suggest adding a link to My Left Nutmeg and posting mp3’s of the radio show.
December 5th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Oh, found the RSS - but just saying RSS would b e more obvious.
December 6th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Thank my lucky stars. Now when I do my laundry I won’t be distracted by piles of this glossy rag. They always seem to send far more CT Slants that were ever taken by people living where I live. The last cover story left alot to be desired. Pretty crappy writing and the photos of the decorative objects were poor. Who really cares how a bunch of young men decorate their apartment. I only looked it over as some of those guys were rather cute. But glad I live nowhere near them. Can you imagine what it must be like when the drummer gets drumming. Wake up the dead! Anyway goodbye Slant you puffy fluff.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:52 am
funny, i’m kinda sad that slant went away. what’s funnier, that until i read that here, i always thought it was two guys and not women on the cover doing the radio show.
but why such disdain? what are you for? do you want to see a magazine of glorified section 8 living in hartford? of people walking up and down park st or north main st? perhaps you’d like an in-depth lifestyle article with one of the bums from bushnell park — maybe you can finally answer a question for me: why does every single one of them have the same asinine way of begging for money — everyone is a college grad that just happens to be stranded in hartford and needs 3.75$ to fill up their gas tank or is short on money for a bus ticket back to wherever?
or maybe you’d like to interview the guys that loiter outside the “kwikimart” on n. main st. i drive by there often enough and always wonder how the hell can they always be there, day after day after day. surely that’s a lifestile in itself and should be brought to our attention.
those lifes are not a ‘lifestyle’, they are not interesting, they’re merely an existance, vagrancy. no wonder no one wants to hear it or read about it, besides you i guess.
December 7th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
OL,
It’s kind of interesting that you jumped to the conclusion that Hartford has no working class that could be honored by the media–everyone here must either be entitled or on the streets, no in between.
December 7th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
kerri,
i just have a really hard time grasping your dislike for the magazine. the first publication showed a couple that bought a house in hartford where i personally wouldn’t buy. they believe in it, and they are what one would call ‘working class’.
to be honest i’ve never read a single article in there in full, but unless the photos have nothing to do with what the actual text says i don’t understand how you could be so critical and say the magazine was anything BUT about working class.
same with the kids on the last issue. i’ve been to one of their parties. from what i recall they’re the only ones that live in the house, so i doubt the drums wake up anyone. these kids chose to live where they live, and once again i personally wouldn’t live there. i always see them at real artways. they’re normal, “on their way to becoming working class” people living in hartford. well, maybe not really fully normal, but certainly interesting.
out of all the times, i can only recall one article that ‘glorified’ downtown hartford living, if you could even call it that. it was about some couple that had a little silly looking dog and they lived at 55 trumbull with absolutely no view because it’s blocked by the at&t building. so for you to say the magazine only glorifies(ed) downtown living with complete disregard for outside of downtown is unfair. if anything, to me it didn’t have enough articles on downtown and always seemed kinda scattered throughout.
and , if you thought their adds were insulting, i think so too — because they weren’t extravagant enough and i’d have loved to see more hermes adds.
December 7th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
OL,
Everybody’s got their slant going here. It’s true, we all don’t get off on reading about la vida on the streeta lifestyle, let alone getting hit up for spare change every day. It’s a grim reminder that some of our brothers and sisters got more elemental things on their minds than La Dolce and Gabbana. But we all got our stories, some of them tales of woe, some of them about sloth and indolence (my personal favorite lifestyle), some tales of the too rich and infamous. You were kidding about the herpes ads, right? Beware the Shopacalypse!
December 7th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
That’s Shopocalypse!
December 7th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Say it with me, brothers and sisters,
SHOPOCALYPSE!
December 7th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
actually, i wasn’t kidding about the hermes ad. it blew me away that you can actually find an ad like that in hartford.
i’d rather look at hermes ads than home depot, dicks, sealy posturepedic, and any other low budget, low resolution, runny ink, mom-and-pop-we-have-no-sense-of-creativity-whatsoever
ads anytime.
December 8th, 2007 at 1:18 am
“mom-and-pop” - What are you talking about?
December 9th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Why don’t we profile the thugs who keep shooting people at Club Blu?
December 9th, 2007 at 11:51 am
I wasn’t a big fan of Slant, but I am sorry to see it go. Anything that portrays Hartford in a good light is a good thing. We need to keep the losers in this city out of the headlines. Check out today’s Courant. Some loser shot the valet at Firebox, for no reason. This is a restaurant going into a depressed neighborhood trying to improve it and look what happens.
December 9th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Nice binary Ol. Apparently, if you live in hartford then either your a yuppie or a homeless, criminal bum who begs for money. Looks like you’d have much to benefit from hearing about those people you don’t care about who walk up and down park st, since, of course, many of them don’t fit into your superficial picture of hartford residents.
My dislike for the magazine is for the same reasons I dislike the courant, the advocate, and the local televised news, because they ignore everyone who either isn’t a glorified yuppie or a demonized criminal youth. There’s a lot more people in hartford that them. Maybe you should try to learn a bit about them. You might find something interesting about them that you hadn’t known.
December 9th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
I’d like to hear good information about hartford too, but good things happen all over the city. It seems to me that most media focus on either downtown or the west end. There is an occasional story about some other neighborhood, but not anywhere near what we hear about with regards to downtown and the west end. In fact, because we hear so little about the other neighborhoods and what positive things people there are doing there (which are even more interesting givne the little support they get from everyone else) we more easily reduce them to criminals and bums.
December 9th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Oh dear Ol you can keep your Hermes ads and whatever else you hold dear in what sounds to me like a superficial life of someone who dreams to be hip, and rich. I prefer the real deal. Hermes who sprang from a pile of rocks and a phallus. The Olympian god of boundaries, of traveler’s who cross them. The god of orators and literature, the poets and athletics. Of invention, of fire, a bringer of dreams,a watcher by night and a thief. Hermes was know as a shape shifter and a herald of the Olympian gods. And dear Ol,I walk Park Street every day on my way to work, love to shape shift, invent art, cross boundaries, read and sing out poems. So baby Ol keep your phony Hermes ads and I will keep the real deal. You sure have a crooked sense of what the city is all about but then again you don’t live here.
December 9th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
If you want NYC, then move to NYC. Hermes isn’t even hot fashion.
December 10th, 2007 at 7:47 am
OL, you write
“i’d rather look at hermes ads than home depot, dicks, sealy posturepedic, and any other low budget, low resolution, runny ink, mom-and-pop-we-have-no-sense-of-creativity-whatsoever
ads anytime.”
That creativity would be in the pursuit of selling some overpriced, brand-name handbag. Ads with high production values, anorexic models. Modern day still lifes. I buy Vanity Fair sometimes if an article or writer catches my eye. Can’t avoid the ads. They are impressive, but when you think about what their purpose is, the shine, the glitz, the glamour, the craft loses its luster. You can get high off the fumes from the perfume ads, though, so they do have an upside.
Was it Allen Ginsberg who said, ” I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Madison Avenue”. Something like that.
If we have to have ads, at least let them be clever, weird, twisted, funny.
December 10th, 2007 at 11:50 am
ok,
thanks for the pointless greek mythology overview. do you want to be a shape shifter and invisible while walking on park st? you’ve really lost me there rich.
the hermes ad that i was talking about actually showed a plate, not a purse. i’m really not fond of long looking at pictures of purses. but, i did like this image, for whatever reason. it will not motivate me to go and spend $1400 on their ostrich skin mens wallet, but i can appreciate the image. if it makes you feel better, put tj max on that ad and i would still like *that* add. this could be a whole different discussion, but perhaps because they have a much larger ad budget they can afford better photographers with better creativity than some 16 year old kid photoshoping a picture of a mattress and writing “BOB’s” in bleeding red.
what is the argument of “real” hartford here? what are we trying to glorify or not show? where is the bias? once again read what i wrote in #8… unless you have specific examples of glorified yuppies taking over hartford that i haven’t seen in that magazine, please point them out! i also haven’t seen any articles on homeless people, although it would have been interesting to read about barber joe.
no, not only bums and yuppies live in hartford. more indians and bums live in hartford than yuppies, even if you include indian yuppies.
maybe given enough time they’d write about mozzicatos (sp?) although i don’t even think it’s a good bakery, and i used to live a block away. maybe they’d take a walk down franklin ave and would write about all the little restaurants that you see there. but, in their defense, you can’t convince me that they only told you to eat at max or trumbull kitchen. in their defense you can never say you saw freakish looking people, people dressed up in cheap suits at god knows what parties - ala niche.
please… write in a paragraph what it is that you hated about slant so much, point out a specific article that rubbed you the wrong way. i am very pro hartford. i don’t want to see the city whored for its bars and restaurants, but you won’t persuade me to believe that that is what slant was doing. could it have been better, sure, but was it bad, not in the least.
December 10th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
There are archived blog posts about this. Do a search of the site and you’ll find them.
December 10th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
such an eloquent and expanded response…
but, this is your blog and i have entered it. i will bite my tounge and leave as randomly as i showed up. i will only assume that perhaps you’re so tired of repeating yourself to dimwits as myself that you haven’t written more than two! sentences to answer me.
December 10th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Hey Richard,
Thanks for refreshing our memories on who Hermes was, before they named a handbag after him. Hope his mythological descendants are getting residuals.
December 10th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Straight from the horses’ mouths: We were happy with the CT Slant article about our lives together and our house because it was kind of a ridiculous joke, and we thought that we could have some fun turning the tables on Slant. Hey, take it easy. SHRED IT. We can’t afford Hermes. We probably have friends who can, but no ones pointing fingers. We wanted to know if anyone else was having any fun in this town, but the writer wouldn’t publish our question in print…
December 10th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
p.s. which one of you said you’ve been to one of our parties? Did you have fun? Which one of us is the cutest?
December 11th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
If Slant didn’t die, they coulda done a regular feature, cribs around Hartford town. My kids are into watching Pimp my Crib, Pimp’s Cribs, all those kinda shows. Why should just the too rich and infamous show off their living spaces?
Seems easy enough to do, get a willing subject who wants to show off their interior design skills and someone wid a digi camera.
December 11th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Lords of Oxford Street, you ask:
Is anyone else having fun here in River City?
Hell, yeah! The key is to have a rich inner life. (A reliable source for mood alterers is good too.) The rest falls into place.
As that guy in CSN&Y sang, “If you can’t be in the place you love, love the place you’re in.”
December 11th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
To the lords: Cutest? I would prefer not to choose and just make-out en masse, like a make-out collective or co-op.
for ol, We[the regulars] do end up repeating ourselves alot. We are called on to argue point-by-point in a debate where its not the details, but the central premise that we think is f**ked up.
Slant was a marketing publication, period. It was part of a larger campaign to introduce an incredibly tame lifestyle veneer over Hartford, in order to cash in on the demographic it was heavily geared to (hint: the demographic was not already living in hartford).
like most things brought in from the outside, and not started organically, it pretty much failed in this mission.
here’s my manifesto about hartford:
A city is not a suburb with tall buildings. If you fetishize saftey and find poor people in plain view distasteful, Hartford is not for you. No one should wait around for some “other” people to move into the city and save us all. Those of us who love this place are creating as fast as we can and its kind of exhillarating.
There is no marketing plan for this kind of love and it is not embarrassed by poor people.
I will meet any premise not based on this central concept with distain, as will probably a lot of the other bloggers on this site.
December 11th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Ooh, Junie Moon, I love it when you get disdainful.
And that’s a manifesto I can live by. I’m gonna get me auntie to stitch that on a sampler. Better yet, I’ll get the boys in my crafts group down at the Open Hearth to stitch up a bunch of them for the holidays.
December 11th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Thank you Juniemoon your # 29 says it all so well. And Bottle and Can Man you always know how to say it. #28 is a good reminder for all. Thanks. Now excuse me I have to shape shift and go back upstairs to my reception desk, smile, be nice, no spitting, chewing gum, passing gas,eating or drinking or heaven forbid being revolutionary. Just a nice boy giving out directions to people who don’t really listen and mess up going from here to there. HA! Keep up the great blog everyone.
P.S. I sort of like that young blond artist he has some very good paintings. But agree they are all cute, young and fresh.
December 11th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
All five of us have impoverished inner-lives. Totally bankrupt. We are deeply shallow.
December 11th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Hey Lords,
It worked for Chauncey Gardiner, no reason it can’t work for you…. living on the surface, that is.
December 11th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Hey Lords, while we’ve got your attention, some questions:
Did you call yourselves the Lords of Oxford Street before the CT Slant interview?
Is the name a take off of the Young Lords?
December 12th, 2007 at 9:24 am
We definitely HAVE NEVER called ourselves the Lords of Oxford Street. It was the writer’s idea, we’re assuming. God, how affected do you think we are? Naming ourselves after the Young Lords doesn’t seem culturally sensitive or very appropriate.
Stay cute.
December 12th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Used to be a street gang in the West End called Los Preppies. Believe their colors were ivy league green and crimson red. Damn, they were a cold bunch.
December 12th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
If the reporter did call out a new name for your family and you mind then I hope a lesson is learned here by you guys. A lesson that I learned years ago. First be careful. For myself I never allow anyone to interview me, quote me or in any way do a story if I don’t have complete control over all the words, ideas, photographs and contents. (most likely why I am so underground for so long) I never allow the Advocate or the Courant to quote me. The only way is if it’s a person from a publication that I trust or a bog site that I trust or I do it myself. I have been burned over the years as a queer activist,art worker and rabble rouser. A reporter calling you guys The Lords of Oxford Street makes you sound like you are pretentious. I gather you are not. I wonder what your lovely liberal neighbors think about anyone lording over their street? ha!
Someone pointed out an article to me about the latest hip place and you guys were mentioned as the Lords of Oxford Street again. Once annointed it is hard to shake off a title. This was in that culturally accepted counter cultural weekly rag the Advocate. Now there is one to be careful of. Some of their writers try to be cute and they are not. The Hartford Courant is another. That Java use to be real bad until she died. Both pubs like to change around words,and many times the idea is lost but in their minds it is how they see it so is correct. Can anyone imagine if a two bit reporter or editor tried to change around Gertrude Stein’s words.
So anyway this posting has been fun. We do need fun in these times. If anyone wants a little more fun scroll down the side bar to Queers Without Borders site, give a click and read the new holiday greeting by our revolutionary Trans sister Jeri.
P.S Can’t wait for the next art show. Keep us posted. In fact go over to QWB and post it like you want to. People coast to coast will read about your art in your words and I bet they will like it.
Hey Bottle and Can Man. I remember the Los Preppies. They were the bunch who stole all my jockey shorts off the clothes line one night. Worse than hard hearted Hannah from Alabama. I had to move out of the West End.
December 12th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
So, a student of mine was written about in a recent gossip column in the Hartford Advocate, and I was joking with him about it because the “reporter” or whatever was just gushing over him. In that article, the writer referred to the Oxford St. residents again as the Lords of Oxford Street. Bizarre! Anyway, this student said that in the write up about him, the person latched on to one idea and then blew everything else out of proportion.
December 12th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Hmmm… Kerri, was this in the Vegas Blvd. Lush Life column last week? If so, can’t think of whom we misinterpreted and would hate to think that our festive imaginations caused anyone any grief.
“Lords of Oxford Street” was certainly intended as a joke. In fact, I had just seen the Slant issue that night (in the Palace of the Lords of Oxford Street) and we were all pretty freaking amused by it.
December 12th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Edie, it was. I think he was a little embarrassed by what was written, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.
December 12th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
A. One of our favorite queers, Andy Warhol, gave interviews constantly and we take the lesson from his example.
B. Like 5 people read this thing, really…
C. Bartosz loved it. The embarrassment was feigned out of modesty.
December 12th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Modesty?
It was a bit over the top. The kid did some modeling, but it’s not like he was annointed as the official Dolce model.
How’s he ever gonna live this down?
December 12th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Different strokes—–Out of anyone that was around the Warhol circle I always found lesbain drifter and playwright Valerie Solanas to be the most intriguing. Too bad she wasn’t a better aim for a complete art piece.
Guess you missed the point of #37 which I wrote in response to your #35. As long as you don’t mind others calling out a name for you and perhaps misquoting you fine. I think it was Dali that said, “I don’t care what they say, as long as they talk about me everyday.” But I don’t think that anyone of us in Hartford are a Dali or a Warhol.
Its been fun now on to other things. Good Night Slant posting.
December 12th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Yes, goodnight.
True, no one around here is a Dali or a Warhol (no one tries), or a full time D&G model for that matter, which is why we’re getting out of here as soon as possible. We think Richard’s last statement was most telling.
Bart will “live down” Lush Life’s hyperbole when he moves on too, but we know that he’s already gotten over it.
We have enjoyed the conversation, sincerely.