Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Salon Columnists
Follow these links for the most recent column by:
Susie Bright
Robert Burton, M.D.
Joe Conason
Sean Elder
David Horowitz
Garrison Keillor
Anne Lamott
Greil Marcus
Joyce Millman
Camille Paglia
Amy Reiter
Mary Roach
Scott Rosenberg
Ruth Shalit
Michael Sragow
Virginia Vitzthum
Sarah Vowell
Cintra Wilson
Burt Wolf

+ Columnists' schedule

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Media

Alt
All tech, all the time
Going e-postal and other tales of the technological revolution. Plus: Blood-spurting penises and mushrooming: adventure sport for the elite?
By Jenn Shreve
[12/17/99]

Alt
Y2blecK
Why some people still yearn for the apocalypse. Plus: A beer-soaked argument for the re-segregation of baseball and an absurd portrait of two macho men duking it out in court.
By Jenn Shreve
[01/07/00]

Column
Real Life Rock Top 10

By Greil Marcus
[01/10/00]

Alt
Two! Four! Six! Eight!
Who do we love to hate? Alternative weekly journalists share their true feelings on SUVs, cell phones, minks, celebrities and others.
By Jenn Shreve
[01/14/00]

Alt
When good governments go bad
These pernicious moments brought to you by your elected leaders. PLUS: Sisterhood pyramid schemes, supermarket warfare and a man and his hooptie.
By Jenn Shreve
[01/21/00]

Complete archives for Media

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

1) Warren Zevon "Life'll Kill Ya" (Artemis)

The old rounder borrows his old melodies, his old ideas and kicks over his own rocking chair: "I Was in the House When the House Burned Down" is "Excitable Boy" with humor intact, but no longer a joke, because when the house burned down the singer found he had nowhere else to go; he still lives in the ashes. So he blows his horn, gets syncopation out of his guitar, passes it off to the drummer and steps up to the mike. As Zevon imagines himself back to the Crusades, back to Graceland ("He was an accident waiting to happen," he begins, speaking like a witness in court, a storm-warning guitar line hanging over his head. "Most accidents happen at home"), into the ground, the album takes on such a sweep that the house that burned down comes to seem less a place than Zevon's whole era, that time Billy Joel sings about in "We Didn't Start the Fire." Of course we did, Zevon says. Want a light?

2) John Carman "Mob Rule" (San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 14)

"Saturday Night Live" ran a hysterical parody of "Sopranos" reviews on Jan. 15, but unlike most of the cream-in-their-jeans crowd -- TV critics who sounded like nothing so much as the swells who take Tony to their golf club and treat him like an exotic pet -- Carman has something to say. "There's a reason Tony can't find his bliss at home; at his strip-joint hangout; or in his psychoanalyst's office. He's a criminal; his life has rotted from the inside out." But that's just a warm-up. The code of the show is in its language, Carman writes, in all the variations of "fuck" except the one that takes a "Let's" in front of it: "The f-word as an adjective serves to demean the noun it modifies. As a nonsexual verb, it demeans the direct object. The language itself is life-negating, and the negation of life is the rampant disease corrupting Tony's two families, biological and criminal."

3) Etta James "A Sunday Kind of Love" on "Her Best" (Chess)

In 1960, "Miss Peaches" drifts around the old song as if it's "Since I Fell for You," as if she has all the time in the world.

4) Bonnie Raitt voted into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in first year of eligibility

I was complaining about this to another music writer. "I think her body of work is superior to Ruth Brown's," he said of the R&B pioneer inducted in 1993. But neither Brown nor Raitt has a body of work. Brown had a string of singles, Raitt has a bunch of albums; you flip through them, looking for a moment when you say, yes, this made a difference. If you place Brown's 1949 "Teardrops from My Eyes" against, say, Raitt's 1989 "Nick of Time," you'll see that mannerism can never speak the language of style -- and that Raitt, in her honest, dedicated way as false a singer as Michael Bolton (who really does love "When a Man Loves a Woman," you know), is being honored for her class. In the Marxist sense.

5) Ed van der Elsken "Love on the Left Bank" (Dewi Lewis)

This legendary photo-novel, originally published in 1956, is set mostly in a small bar off St. Germain-des-Prés. It's the early '50s, and all the bohemian clichés are present -- sex, drugs, violence, poverty and bad art -- but also movement, tension, the unknown. Looking at the way people stand, shout or pass out, you can feel the blank sense of freedom that followed the war all over the West now compressed into this one shabby cafe and nobody there having the slightest idea what to do with it. Or almost nobody. At one table, a few youthful megalomaniacs -- among them Serge Berna, Michèle Bernstein and Jean-Michel Mension, who are visible here, and Guy Debord, who isn't -- were working on the problem. And you can feel that, too.

Next page | Lennon and McCartney, reunited. Plus: "Magnolia"