He means in a business sense, obviously. Page Six report that Fox has been talking with Cerberus Management, the private equity firm that owns most of the magazine, since August, but they keep stalling. Fox feels very strongly about Maxim apparently, and this upsets him.

My vision is to make Maxim the must-have again, using event production, Web site development, e-commerce and digital marketing and online programming. I am trying to take a strong brand and give it legs for the future. I would take the magazine and all its digital properties and make it into a $300 million business again.

Revolutionary. He would not comment on whether he plans to kill the print version and go fully online. Which means he probably plans to kill the print version and go fully online. If Cerberus' new interim CEO Paul Miller does not meet him, says Fox, he predicts the magazine will be dead by March.

That last bit, according to a former Felix Dennis employee tipster! Since we told you about some of Dennis' various maniacal foibles yesterday, like being a neat freak and owning many dildos, allegedly, more tips have poured in! We love Felix Dennis a bit more every day. The following are just rumors:

• This one comes "second hand" so let's take it with several grains of salt, but don't you think this is awesome?: In the mid-90s, in England, Dennis throws a huge masquerade ball-type party. He arrives dressed as a king, with several women in tow. Halfway through the party, he has the then-president and VP get up and make a speech to the company about what a great job they'd done. "Then Felix took the mike and promptly fired the president and VP in front of everyone, [and] kicked them out of the party." Ha.
• He forced employees to go to his poetry book readings.
• He smoked cigarettes constantly, in a non-smoking office.
• He bought a forest and named it after himself (true!).
• He rewarded his employees of the month with free trips to his estate in Mustique, featuring servant service and all.
• Maxim's office had a full bar, and a bong.

By remaining a wild man, we hear! Wild man like a fox. Don't get it twisted: Felix Dennis may occasionally drink five bottles of wine and then confess to pushing some dude off a cliff, but he's no fool. He sold off Maxim and Blender for $250 million two years ago; today, Blender's folded, and Dennis' old company is totally financially fucked.

But Dennis still controls The Week, meaning he still has an excuse to play crazy publisher man! His latest adorable foible: a tipster tells us that Felix "shut down the office kitchen because people left milk out." And also, because he can. The man's a throwback! Why not send us more tales of Felix Dennis acting strangely, hmm?

• Hair Dye—In 2002, Maxim decided to sell its own line of hair dye. It had ads on TV and everything. To this day, when you see an overtanned 40-something with a shirt unbuttoned to his navel, lounging by a mid-rent Cancun pool with a striking head of black hair—that man is a Maxim hair dye legacy.
• Casino—In 2006, Maxim's publisher signed a deal to build a $1.2 billion Maxim Casino on the Vegas strip, with 60,000 square feet of gambling and 2,300 rooms. How'd that go? Today, the #2 Google result for "Maxim Casino" is a post on this blog.
• TV Specials—Just announced today! "E! has partnered with Maxim magazine in a two-year deal to produce a series of hourlong specials," including "Maxim's Celebrity Beach Watch" and "Maxim's Hottest Moments 2009." We have a feeling this will be the big one.

Maxim's UK edition is folding its print product and going online only next month. Men's magazines are now in a position as precarious as porn magazines.


Delta is going to start selling its in-flight magazine, Sky, at news stands for $3.99. What?


Michael Wolff is fighting back! He's writing (we're guessing) a super bitchy article for Vanity Fair about his experience being smeared in the NY Post over the whole Floethe affair thing. Could the Michael Wolff- NYP beef continue until every last participant in the saga is physically unable to type, due to advanced arthritis and dementia? It's possible.


Esquire is like, the world leader in advanced gadgetry on magazine covers. They had that blinkety-bloop flashing plastic cover of the future, and now they have a mix-n-match cover of Obama, Clooney, and Timberlake, the technology of which hasn't been seen since rudimentary jigsaw puzzles were invented. Here's how they did it. [Vid via Ad Age]

We heard a rumor of this this morning, but Ad Age got the full story. Blender and Maxim were formerly owned by wild British publisher Felix Dennis, but he sold them for a quarter of a billion dollars in 2007, in a spectacularly well-timed disposal. The new owners, Alpha Media, could never really make its new acquisitions soar. They had heavy debt and declining income. And Blender, in particular, lacked a distinct identity—see this month's cover, for instance—and in its field, that can be (and was) deadly.

Paid subscriptions fell 8% [from 2007-08] to 768,000, while newsstand sales declined 18% to 44,233.

Ad pages at Blender also plunged 31% last year and another 57% from January through April, according to the Publishers Information Bureau and Media Industry Newsletter

Blender editor Joe Levy is now the new editor of Maxim, and Maxim's former editor Jim Kaminsky is leaving for undisclosed reasons. [Ad Age]

Mr. Wilson replied, “You realize that was a joke, right?” [The Oprah producer] did not! Mr. Wilson asked if they would still require his expertise on the show. The man had to double-check. Mr. Wilson knew it was all over. “I could been the James Frey of midair masturbation,” he said.

You know, telling "jokes" is all well and good, but messing with the integrity of Page Six Magazine is no laughing matter.

Ha ha — gotcha! Bwahahaha....

And coincidentally (?) the lads at Maxim have backpedaled on their brutal Rex Reed-like criticism of Parker last winter, when they crowned her the Unsexiest Woman Alive.

In a rather pathetic effort to make amends, the August issue tries to make up for the bullying piece with a shiny new judgment of Parker's appearance. Too bad it’s just a brilliant use of semantics, twisting the same exact insult into a more flowery-sounding version of its original assessment: "This Barbaro-faced broad [needs to] pull her skirt down, Secretariat, we'd rather ride Chris Noth." (Um, we hear Details is hiring?)

To which SJP memorably respondedat the time: "Do I fit some ideals and standards of some men writing in a men's magazine? Maybe not. Am I really the unsexiest women in the world? Wow! It's kind of shocking... It's condemnation, it's insane. What can I do?"

Well, SJP? Apparently, get that mole removed and, voila! You're now the magazine's "Unexpected Crush." Congratulations! We think! Sort of!

• LATE AMENDS [NYP]

"We all read 'em," said Pfc. Paul Rubio, 31, of Bakersfield, Calif. "There are times we just read 'em for the technological parts like the new gadgets that come out. They have good stories sometimes too."

Sgt. Simon Brown, 34, of Daytona Beach, Fla., said men's magazines build morale. "It's not all about the pictures, although 80 percent of it is," he said.

Pfc. Greg Smith, 21, of Northboro, Mass., a regular Playboy reader, said soldiers should be allowed to buy nudie magazines at the exchange.

"Playboy is good entertainment while you are on the can. They have jokes and good stories," he said...

"It would suck if they ban it," he said. "It's bad enough we are down there to begin with. Taking that away would be like a knife in the chest. I'm not saying I'm depending on Maxim to keep me alive over there, but it helps."

[Military.com via Dan Savage]

When the issue came out, the previews were laid out as reviews complete with star ratings. I never at any point or to anyone claimed to have heard these albums in their entirety. Whatever decisions Maxim made after I turned in my work were beyond my control.

It is very, very easy to imagine an editor at Maxim, known more for its near-naked photos of young women than its editorial standards, sexing up an article well past the boundaries of evidence or writerly intent. But as the LA Times noted, Peisner's items contained stronger opinions than one would typically expect in a preview. On the Black Crowes album, for example, his article said:

Now that they're legitimately grizzled, they sound pretty much like they always have: boozy, competent and in slavish debt to the Stones, the Allmans, and the Faces.

It's entirely possible some disclaimers and context were cut away, and likely that if the piece had run in a different section, without the star ratings, there would never have been such controversy.

No matter who is at fault, everyone can now safely review the March issue of Maxim without having read it: "shitty."

(Cover shot via Style Dash)

The Black Crowes' label didn't make advance copies of the album available for review, so they were surprised when they saw Maxim's turn up. The writer couldn't have heard more than one song off the album, the label says. When they contacted the magazine, they say an editor emailed them:

'Of course, we always prefer to (sic) hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don't want to ignore that aren't available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It's either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former.'"

Yea, that's just not right. If you want to tell the Black Crowes they suck, at least listen to the album first, so you can be specific. Imagine a critic handing you this review without having heard your record:

The response from the band:

Then again—now, a lot more people are reading that negative review. There's two sides to the PR coin! The band better hope that its full album is strong enough to make Maxim look foolish.