T A B L E_.T A L K Seen a TV ad that affects you like fingernails on the blackboard? Name it and share your misery in the Television area of Table Talk   Extra! Extra! Find the media books you want to read at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y I can't get arrested in this town! By James Poniewozik A tale of the thin blue rope line (03/30/99) $400,000 misunderstanding By Susan Lehman So maybe Vanity Fair writers don't actually make 400 grand. Who needs it, when editor Graydon Carter is constantly sending them sweet personal notes on blue stationery? (03/25/99) Why Elia Kazan should not receive an Oscar By Steve Erickson By bestowing a special honor on the director, who already has won two Oscars, the academy is glossing over history (03/17/99) Strange fruit By James Poniewozik Garden Escape is a new publication grown from the fertile soil of Garden.com. You might call it a catalog; they call it the ultimate service magazine. What if they're right? (03/16/99) Kiddie-porn trafficker -- or crusading undercover reporter? By Susan Lehman Larry Matthews' 18-month sentence for receiving and transmitting kiddie porn raises difficult First Amendment issues (03/11/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE UNSPUN ARCHIVE		-----{ U N S P U N_.B Y_.S T E V E_.E R I C K S O N } Swing Nation RIP RAT PACK SINATRA, KHAKI PANTS AND FROSTY MARTINIS MAY HAVE BEEN VAPID, BUT JUST WAIT FOR THE NEXT HORROR ON THE CULTURAL HORIZON. BY STEVE ERICKSON | Last week I listened to "The Summit in Concert," the new CD memorial to Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack days, with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. The "comedy" isn't amusing but puerile, and musically it's inferior to a second-rate Dino CD, not to mention a third-rate Sinatra -- but none of this really accounts for why I hate it, which is more complicated. In and of itself, "The Summit in Concert" doesn't really warrant any sort of emotional response other than sour irony. But in a culture of sour irony the Rat Pack is hot right now, from an HBO movie to "Ocean's Eleven" on cable, complete with all the boys' booze-and-broads wit plus a few darkie jokes here and there just so Sammy doesn't feel left out. The current Rat Pack rage coincides with the new swing phenomenon, and both remind you how little is personal about our culture anymore, how little personally the culture demands of us. A year or so back, at the beginning of what was to be a particularly misbegotten assignment for a national magazine, my editor complained that an early draft of a piece "didn't swing," and at first I thought he must have said "sing," or maybe "ring," as in "ring true." He couldn't have really said "swing," unless he was in his 60s, or maybe his teens or early 20s like Alicia Silverstone's gay heartthrob in "Clueless." But in fact this editor wasn't 20 or 60, he was my age, in his 40s, for whom over the years things have variously rocked or grooved or gotten down, but never, absolutely positively never, swung. This was around the time of Gap khaki TV ads with jitterbugging models. The New Swing is our culture at its most bankrupt and ersatz and manufactured; I assume middle-aged editors in Manhattan started talking about whether a piece "swings" when Esquire started running cover stories on the new lounge movement with frosty martinis hovering before red-smoking-jacket backgrounds, and when the Vince Vaughn movie "Swingers" became to a still-amorphous Swing Nation what "Easy Rider" was to Woodstock Nation. Truth be told, I think "Swingers" is better than "Easy Rider," though it's possible Heather Graham could convince me of any old crazy idea. It's worth noting, however, that the swinger in "Swingers" who is clearly Our Guy (played by Jon Favreau) is also the unswingingest, in part because he can't keep his own emotions at arm's length, which is what the New Swing is all about. The Sinatra CD in his collection is likelier to be the melancholy "Where Are You" than "A Swingin' Affair" or "The Summit in Concert," which the Vince Vaughn character would no doubt think is so totally money. Their big dance number at the end notwithstanding, Our Swinger gets Heather only when he stops trying to be a swinger. The New Swing, or lounge culture, or whatever you want to call it, was fortuitous in its timing. It swooped over Sinatra just as his mortal coil was beginning to rot in a very obvious way, the carrion of his legend ripe for lunch. The Rat Pack Sinatra was the Sinatra the world mourned, if that's really the right word; it was the Sinatra of surly bombast. "What made him great was his sense of style and grace," some actress who wouldn't know a Sinatra song from Jack Jones burbled on a local PBS station during a fund drive that was cashing in on his death by showing old Sinatra specials. In fact, Sinatra was, as both a personality and a man, distinctly graceless. If anything, he cultivated an attitude that said he didn't give a fuck about grace; grace, you can practically hear him snarling over a highball during one of the Rat Pack shows, is something you say over lasagna. It's hard to say whether the Rat Pack-era of the early '60s was Sinatra at his nadir -- the quasi-fascist spectacles at Madison Square Garden were still in the future -- but it certainly had nothing to do with what made Sinatra a great artist, which was a poetry devoid of ring-a-ding shtick. The appropriation of Sinatra for all the wrong reasons was Swing Nation's biggest victory. It was the final blow for posture over essence, attitude over vision, swagger over feeling. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when in the past 10 years Swing Nation was born; in some ways Madonna may have been the proto-swinger, raising soullessness and narcissism to an aesthetic statement for which she was duly anointed artist of the '80s by otherwise intelligent music critics. Over the last three decades of his life Sinatra and his public conspired together in a great mutual misunderstanding of his art until the misunderstanding almost seemed to swallow up the art altogether, until the epic self-adoration of "My Way" took over everything we had come to think or feel or know about the man. On National Public Radio a few years back, anticipating the news coverage of his approaching demise, Sarah Vowell, reprising a piece in Salon, beseeched the networks of the land, "Ix-nay on the 'My Way.'" Instead of the dreaded "And now the end is near ..." rolling over the footage at the end of Peter's and Tom's and Dan's inevitably elegiac broadcasts, Vowell proposed "What Is This Thing Called Love," from the 1955 album "In the Wee Small Hours." A fine and insightful alternative, even if I would have picked the next track on that album, "Last Night When We Were Young," or the obscure, autumnal "When the Wind Was Green," not to be confused, of course, with Frank's immortal version of the Kermit the Frog theme, "Bein' Green." Of course the networks played "My Way." This is when they weren't playing the even more odious "New York, New York." "My Way" and "New York, New York" were only the ultimate expressions of Sinatra the Rat Packer grown arrogant and monstrous. While the swinging Sinatra surely made timeless music, lost in the culture's eulogy to Vince Vaughn's Frank was Sarah's Frank, and mine -- the Frank of "There's No You" and "It's a Lonesome Old Town" and "I'm a Fool to Want You" and "My Funny Valentine" and "Angel Eyes" and the shattering 1957 version of "Autumn Leaves" and the almost unbearable 1960 version of Irving Berlin's "How Deep Is the Ocean," a hack piece of songwriting made otherworldly by a singer who invested it with an integrity occasionally equaled in popular music, but never surpassed. N E X T+P A G E | Loving Dusty Springfield in secret