Clay Felker (1925-2008): Would it be going too far to say that he turned his own one brilliant idea into garbage?

Word comes of the death of Clay Felker today at his home, of cancer, at 82.

The NYT has an obituary by Deirdre Carmody up online.

It's taking a moment to set in, and I realize it's because the feelings are buried so deep. The wound is long since covered over with scar tissue.

Felker's great invention, the original New York magazine -- created in 1963 as a Sunday supplement to the old New York Herald-Tribune, and then after the Trib died retooled as a standalone magazine in 1968 -- was a joyous burst of noisy innovation. Even in its unevenness, it was a chronicle of intellectual ferment, creative challenge, and fun. If I think just of political coverage, and the work done by writers like Richard Reeves and the brilliant cartoonist Robert Grossman, I remember why the magazine was once such an important part of my life.

But I also remember that long before Felker was Rupert Murdoch-ed out of his job at New York in 1977, Felker himself had done the heavy lifting in turning the magazine into a grotesque caricature of what at least seemed to be his original vision, a bible of upscale orthodoxy and consumerist conformity. The magazine that had once seemed to embody the challenge to live life creatively and humanely turned into a glossy celebration of the stifling of the celebrity-besotted soul.

Oh, I guess the seeds of the rot must always have been there; everyone seems to agree that Felker was an in-crowd, celebrity-obsessed kind of guy. It just wasn't so noticeable back when the magazine was championing so many terrific writers, giving them the freedom, indeed the mandate, to take a skeptical look at the world around them.

Naturally, New York was widely imitated, but it was mostly the soul-deadened, in-crowd-obsessed New York that served as the model. And while naturally there have been successive generations of revolutions in magazine "hip," each has managed to build on the worst of what came before. Ironically, one of the most ambitious voyeur-players in this process of generational crapification, a trend-sucking hack named Adam Moss, is now the editor of New York.

A fitting end of sorts. But it's awfully depressing now thinking back to that good idea that Clay Felker once had. I wish there was something left to celebrate. Mostly I'm just feeling numb, but it's a numbness that's already decades old.

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