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Recently in Salon Media

Media
Don't cry for me, Gray Lady
After 55 years, Abe Rosenthal exits the New York Times, unquietly.
By Sean Elder
[11/12/99]

Alt
Gang land
Can the same entertainment media that have popularized gang culture be used to combat gang-related violence? Plus: Men who collect penis bones; capital punishments throughout human history.
By Jenn Shreve
[11/12/99]

Alt
Girls will be jocks
At last, coverage of women's sports that even this non-spectator can appreciate. Plus: One writer's plaintive cry: "Enough with the sex, dammit!"
By Jenn Shreve
[11/05/99]

Media
"None of us are hip"
An interview with Allan Siegal, language czar of the New York Times and editor of its new style and usage guide.
By Susan Lehman
[11/05/99]

Media
Chinese take-out
Accusing the New York Times of a hit piece, Brill's Content does one of its own.
By Sean Elder
[11/01/99]

Complete archives for Media

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With voices Slug, Spawn, Beyond, Ant and Stress, this determinedly right-here-right-now Twin Cities hip-hop collective looks for the sound of thought. "In 200 years people will be studying Atmosphere," you hear, and there's such modest desperation in the way the line is spoken you can sense the singer reaching that far into the future, grabbing the first person he sees, shouting: "Why aren't you listening?"

7) Nat Finkelstein "Andy Warhol: The Factory Years, 1964-1967" (Cannongate)

One day in 1965 Bob Dylan and entourage arrive at the Factory for a screen test -- or, really, in photographer Finkelstein's account, for a showdown in which hip is pitted against cool, and loses: "A Jewish potlatch commenced. Andy gave Bobby a great double image of Elvis. Bobby gave Andy short shrift." The real winner was Finkelstein, who came away with a perfectly framed back-shot of Warhol and Dylan facing each other as Warhol's "Flaming Star" Elvises, their guns drawn, aim blank-eyed at both -- a concatenation of American iconography unmatched in this century. Dylan knew a curse when he saw one: He traded the picture to his manager Albert Grossman for a couch. The couch is probably long gone, the picture is worth millions, but guess who's still alive?

8) Absinthe (74-75, rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paris 1e)

On the way to the Picasso Museum, stop here and find yourself plunged into the turn-of-that-century haute bohemia of Barcelona, Picasso's first city. All the staff are in costume (you sort of hope): hair plastered to their skulls, black spit curls on their foreheads that a typhoon wouldn't dislodge, suits and dresses of outrageous and seductive design, the floor man and woman moving from customer to customer like tango dancers, the madame of the place sitting behind the counter like a madam, a dead ringer for an older, dissolute version of the woman in the Picasso Museum's 1918 "Portrait of Olga in an Armchair," a magical painting of Olga Khokhlova, Picasso's first wife. The store is magical. But in the window, seen from the street, is something more magical still. On a brilliantly attired male mannequin is a peacock feather scarf, gleaming with gold and beads, but somehow subtle in its splendor. It was the essence of dandyism: If in the 1830s Paris poet Gérard de Nerval took his pet lobster for walks on a leash, this was as close as you could come to wearing one around your neck.

9) Sweetwater "Cycles: The Reprise Collection" (Warner Archives/Rhino)

A recent VH1 film chronicled the Tragic Story of this band: adventurous hippies open at Woodstock, car crash sidelines lead singer and kills the group, the world turns, and 30 years later they reform for heroic comeback -- reincarnated as, among others, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and Frederic Forrest of "The Rose." This lovingly compiled set lets you hear the band as it really was: As Nansi Nevins makes a breakthrough to diffidence, her most passionate mode; as her sub-Grace Slick affectations give way to a shared aesthetic rooted somewhere in the final choruses of Marcia Strassman's "The Flower Children (Are Blooming Everywhere)"; as on the Woodstock stage one of the guys announces the band as "Sweetwawa" and is not immediately struck by lightning. These people were so bad it's embarrassing to be in the same room with them, and they're still resentful that they missed their "chance."

10) Marianne Faithfull "Vagabond Ways" (It/Virgin)

And when she gets it right, it can still be scary to be in the same room with her. Thanked, among others: Anita Pallenberg, Herman Melville, Kate Moss and Elizabeth I.
salon.com | Nov. 16, 1999

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