Biography as screenplay
BY CHARLES KAISER
(10/07/99)

Hmmm, a biography of Ronald Reagan that's filled with generous fabrication, distressing inattention to detail, an emphasis on appearance at the expense of substance and continuous confusion between movies and real life? Why, it sounds to me like Edmund Morris has his subject nailed down cold.

-- David Seppa
Plymouth, Minn.

I assume Morris had some other reason besides boring material for tarting up his book about Reagan. My bet is that he found lots of interesting material -- but none of it flattering. His subject is a man who supported illegally trained and funded genocidal armies in South America, ignored a disease that ravaged sections of the American population, gave corporations huge tax breaks while cutting milk programs for poor schoolchildren and turned the gap between rich and poor into a bottomless gulf. I wonder when somebody will get paid $3 million to write the true story.

-- Juliane Schneider
New York

Charles Kaiser's imaginary conversation with Edmund Morris's editor, Bob Loomis, concerning the biography "Dutch" is closer to reality than he might think. The Random House spinmeisters had to make the book work as well as possible in the marketplace to protect their $3 million investment, regardless of how good it was or of Morris' fictional embellishments to history.

One only has to recall Random House's disastrous handling of the Joan Collins case in 1995. The publisher also had a $3 million investment, but when they panicked upon discovering that Collins' first manuscript on their contract wasn't so good, they decided to pull the plug and sued her when she wouldn't repay her advance. In the end, however, Random House lost the suit; they had to pay Joan Collins another $1 million and lost at least another million in legal fees and court costs. At the time, many publishing people wondered why Random House just didn't make the most of it by helping Collins rewrite the book, adding some heavy editing and marketing the book into a bestseller, much as Simon & Schuster had done with Collins a few years earlier, before her editor jumped to Random House.

Fast forward to 1999; armed with experience from the dumb decision-making surrounding the Collins brouhaha, it seems evident that Random House is trying to pull off what they failed to do with the Collins book: turn a disaster into a victory and recoup the huge advance they agreed to pay Edmund Morris. With the knowledge that Morris would never return the advance if they rejected the manuscript and it was hopeless to go to court to get their money, they did the only thing they could do to make their $3 million back: They marketed and published a book with all the publicity, advertising and promotion necessary to turn it into a bestseller. In spite of all the criticism of Edmund Morris and Random House, they will no doubt have to cry all the way to the bank.

-- Dennis Dalrymple
New York

Nothing Personal: We like Marky?
BY AMY REITER
(10/07/99)

I never found the Charlize Theron anti-rape advertisements offensive -- just ill-conceived, misdirected and irritatingly slick. The CK styling and Theron's dress, accent and glamorous persona are ridiculously at odds with the harsh reality of the general South African experience of rape (or anything else for that matter). The makers of the adverts seem to have been very short-sighted in ignoring Theron's alabaster whiteness and Hollywood image when publicizing a crime whose victims are mostly black and poor and have no idea who she is in the first place.

But South Africa's Advertising Standards Board found the advert discriminatory on the basis of gender. In the ad, Theron addresses the viewer, saying "Many people ask me what South African men are like," before reciting several mind-numbing statistics -- including the now-famous estimate that a woman is raped in South Africa every 26 seconds. Finally, and controversially, she says: "So I can't really say what I think of South African men -- because there are so few of them." The reactive male interpretation of this line being that the vast majority of men in South Africa are either rapists or don't care about the issue.

South Africans are understandably very sensitive to issues surrounding discrimination and stereotyping. This campaign resulted in a counterproductive storm of breast-beating and protest that finally saw the Theron advert being banned. But the truth is that the ad wasn't very effective or useful -- and its loss hopefully clears the way for a more down-to-earth and educative advertising campaign highlighting the rights of women and the avenues available to rape survivors. Empowering information is sorely needed in a country with an almost 60 percent rate of illiteracy.

-- Mark van Dalsen
Cape Town, South Africa

Great taste, less thrilling
BY HEATHER HAVRILESKY
(10/07/99)

Heather Havrilesky mistakes getting dressed with a creative act. If the most original and daring thing you do all day is put clothes on your back, you need a better job. Or a better life.

It's a myth perpetuated by the fashion industry that dressing is the ultimate act of self-expression. If you design and make (or have made) your own clothes, then yes, it's creative. If not, it's consuming.

Buying lots of stuff and re-arranging it on your own body is fun. Too often, women are sold the line that getting dressed is an important act of self-definition. But a self defined that way is hollow, devoid of any real meaning or purpose. Didn't Flaubert write "Be violent and original in your art, live like a bourgeois?"

-- Kate Coe

It's about time someone focused on the excessive money and attention spent achieving some rigid ideal of tastefulness. I have long lamented being part of the generation that has to elevate everything -- a cup of coffee, a glass of water or a cigar -- to its most ridiculous possible level. But this excessive attention to detail does not seem to extend to creativity. Everything from clothing to furniture is boiled down and predigested to its simplest common denominator. Social occasions are now a sea of black and brown T-shirts and tank tops. The simplicity does not, however, extend to the price tag. It may look like the Gap, but this is big-ticket stuff, baby. We've achieved a sort of high-cost fashion rigor mortis. It's enough to make me run for my vintage orange cashmere sweater.

-- Megan O'Hara

Is technology unplugging our minds?
BY JANELLE BROWN
(10/07/99)

The complaint that life is just getting too complicated is as old as me or you. Modern liberal society has always offered an overwhelming amount of choices and the subsequent decisions that they require -- not only in the arena of information and technology, but in our broader lives. Our society asks each of us to make all the right decisions, but does not often help us make those decisions.

We assume that more freedom in every aspect of our lives is better, but that assumption is based on a more arrogant (and dangerous) assumption that we are capable of making responsible decisions with our freedom. Technology and info-glut is only one aspect of this growing phenomenon.

In my own life, I feel that managing the barrage of media bits that bounce off of my brain every day is just one of the challenges that I face in trying to live a responsible and fulfilling life. As the speed of the barrage increases, it is my own responsibility to manage it.

I can blame MTV for giving me ADD and I can blame the Internet for letting me stay home for days on end, avoiding face-to-face contact with other people. But I know that I can also turn MTV down, switch off my computer, unplug the phone, put my pager under a pillow and go the park and toss around the Frisbee with my friends. It's my choice -- and my responsibility.

-- Kayvaan Ghassemieh
San Francisco

Janelle Brown must have been multitasking when she wrote, "I grew up with mouse and remote in hand, so it's easy for me to understand what has changed." Just the contrary, I would think: If she had instead grown up with a book and pencil and paper in hand, she would better understand the shallow frenzy of today's info jargon and would mourn the loss of contemplation.

-- Mark Blackman

Can Robert Johnson bring more blacks online?
BY RAYMOND RAWLINSON
(10/06/99)

So BET's Bob Johnson wants to be the digital "Messiah" who brings the Web to African-Americans? If Johnson shows the same commitment to quality on the Web that he has shown with his BET cable channel, BET.com will be digital junk mail. After all, this is the man who, when asked by reporters why he was getting involved with the Web, said, "We've got the greed motivation." He's so motivated that Dun and Bradstreet estimates BET's revenues for this year to be $85 million.

He generates those dollars with a product that is on display 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Johnson boasts that the BET name is recognized by 90 percent of the African-American audience, but he fails to mention an important point. The audience may recognize BET but they don't watch it. The programming is cheap and for the most part mediocre. According to the latest Nielsen data, BET is hardly a blip on black folks' TV radar. Two decades after its debut, BET's prime time shows draw only about 379,000 viewers or about 1 percent of the black population.

For 20 years Johnson has filled BET's program schedule with music videos that include violent images, sexually explicit lyrics and dozens of scantily clad women. Add in a few recycled sitcoms and infomercials, and you have the BET program schedule. And he has made it abundantly clear he feels no responsibility to use his business as a vehicle for delivering positive messages or providing socially responsible programming to black America. BET is one of the few television entities that accepts hard liquor ads, something particularly troublesome to a community that has more than its share of problems with alcohol abuse.

Bob Johnson wants to be black folks' digital messiah. But his track record would indicate he's more likely to be our digital antichrist.

-- Tom Jacobs
Cleveland, Ohio

What would Nancy do?
BY AMY BENFER
(10/07/99)

and

Who was Carolyn Keene?
BY AMY BENFER
(10/08/99)

and

Perky fellows in a gay-looking speedwagon: The Hardy Boys return
BY STEVE BURGESS
(10/07/99)

As I made my way through my mother's 1950s-era Nancy Drew collection, I was influenced by the titian-haired sleuth in contradictory ways. I admired Nancy because she was smart, resourceful and courageous -- though it didn't hurt that she was pretty, drove a convertible and had a steady, college-age beau. Imagine my mother's chagrin when I announced, at age 12, that I had decided not to go to college, because Nancy had never attended college and she had done just fine!

Once the shock had worn off, my parents informed me in no uncertain terms that I was going to college. The week I left for Yale, I sent my set of Nancy Drew books to Goodwill. Too bad -- I could have made a nice profit if I'd just held onto them for another 15 years.

-- Lisa Hoffman

I thought I was the only grown man who had lamented the cultural updating of these testosterone-filled heroes of my youth. And one does wonder, as Steve Burgess suggests: Are we the sales target of these reissues? Could be.

Let me suggest that McFarlane's magic formula was a little more complex than Burgess makes out. I suspect that the enthralled boys devouring book after book (many times over; I must have reread the early entries in the series at least six times) were not adolescents but preteens 10 to 13, in that plateau period when boys are more masculine than they ever will be again (puberty does tenderize a bit). Frank and Joe were older brothers just within reach: brave, ingenious, quick-witted, and with girlfriends who -- mercifully to a 10-year-old in 1940 -- were pretty much offstage and didn't count for much in the male scheme of things. The presence of girls, and their marginalization, were part of McFarlane's astute reading of his audience. His observation that "wholesome American boys never got a hard-on" suggests that he wrote better than he knew.

Let me also suggest that the Hardy Boys were, in one crucial way, "unlocking the mysteries of life." That combination of "Walton's Mountain wholesome" with "Capone's crime-ridden Chicago" was dynamite: It suggested in terms young boys could understand and in ways they could empathize with that the world may not be what it seems or what they are taught. The xenophobia of "The Sinister Signpost" was certainly lost on me, but, along with "The Missing Chums," it did, vividly, suggest that the grown-up world can be a pretty dangerous place. At their most sinister, as in "Signpost," these dark adventures are like the movie "Blue Velvet," but without the X-rated elements.

Liberal critics of children's literature (and all our teachers, of course) sniffed at the Hardy Boys: "mass-produced," not "literature"; "juvenile," not "real." And certainly not book-report material. Thank God. They corrupted me completely: I went on to a Ph.D. in English literature.

-- Gerald Trett

I felt an almost Proustian rush reading the article by Steve Burgess: Oh, the cool sheets of my parents' bed where I got to recover from measles, and read for hours at a time! After finishing the Nancy Drew stories (the originals, thankfully, from my mother's library) I started on the Hardy Boys series (from my father's side of the bookshelves), and had a thrilling 8-year-old crush on Frank, so earnest, so darkly handsome, so unattainable!

That was fun. Glad the fellows are back in their original great form.

-- Colleen Craig
Valley Glen, Calif.

Mildred Wirt Benson may deny that Nancy Drew was a feminist, but as "a person who believed in her own freedom," that was exactly what she was.

-- Aaron Propes