Camille speaks!

But these things are irrelevant to Madonna's permanent artistic stature. Her best compositions, like "Into the Groove" -- 20 years old next year -- never lose their freshness. Her videos are in the main line of the best of studio-era Hollywood. I personally feel that the video for "Vogue" is superior to anything produced in the fine arts worldwide in the last decades of the 20th century.

She's at least taking care of herself -- we're not seeing nervous breakdowns and drug overdoses. Madonna's drug is mania -- these monstrous intrusions into her husband's and children's lives. But all great stars and great artists are monsters. I'll be happily watching her to the end.

Who has emerged to eclipse her? Where is the next Madonna, the mass-multimedia star?

I'm afraid that the great era of great stars and great personalities is over. American popular culture, which I thought was in a Renaissance, turns out to have had a natural organic shape to it, and this is its stage of decline. The entertainment industry is massive but fragmented. Video games have absorbed young people's creative energies and diverted them away from the study or practice of the fine arts.

The Web has also dealt a fatal blow to the culture of stardom because isolated types can now instantly express and exhibit their conflicts and find fellow sufferers around the world through the Web. But e-mail is evanescent. And the blog form is, in my view, the decadence of the Web. I don't see blogs as a new frontier but as a falling backwards into word-centric print journalism -- words, words, words!

The Drudge Report, on the other hand, is a true product of the Web. It's interesting how Matt Drudge still has no competitors. I used to think, how long can Drudge be king? Surely his rivals will spring up like mushrooms. But no, Drudge remains unique. He shows that the Web can be a medium for stardom, if you know how to use it. Unlike Madonna, he knows how to preserve his mystery.

But I'm very worried because young people are growing up without major role models in terms of stardom. Madonna was trained as a dancer and had independent ideas about music and performance. Too many young stars are bland Madonna clones without a thought in their heads. Because she was raised in a rigidly moralistic Catholic household, Madonna's use of sex had symbolic meaning -- she was challenging institutional tyranny. Now girls borrow her moves, but there are no ideas behind it. It's all glitz for the eye.

I like Britney Spears -- I find her very charming and athletic and sexy -- but she's not producing the kind of galvanizing songs that were Madonna's signature. And she also doesn't have Madonna's sophisticated, hypnotic skill for posing for the still camera -- which emblazoned her image into the minds of people who never heard a note of her music. None of these young women has that ability to master and manipulate the world media.

Why aren't you a fan of blogs?

Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you're condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose! There's a lack of discipline, a feeling that anything that crosses one's mind is important or interesting to others. People say that the best part about writing a blog is that there's no editing -- it's free speech without institutional control. Well, sure, but writing isn't masturbation -- you've got to self-edit.

Now and then one sees the claim that Kausfiles was the first blog. I beg to differ: I happen to feel that my Salon column was the first true blog. My columns had punch and on-rushing velocity. They weren't this dreary meta-commentary, where there's a blizzard of fussy, detached sections nattering on obscurely about other bloggers or media moguls and Washington bureaucrats. I took hits at media excesses, but I directly commented on major issues and personalities in politics and pop culture.

If bloggers want to break out of their ghetto, they've got to acquire a sense of drama and theater as well as a flair for language. Why else should anyone read them? And the Web in my view is a visual medium -- I don't log on to be trapped on a muddy page crammed with indigestible prose.

Do you also think that anyone is interesting enough to have something worthwhile to say, sometimes several times a day, on a blog?

Sure, if there's a powerful sensibility behind it. But every writer must work on his or her prose to find a voice. No major figure has emerged yet from the blogs -- Andrew Sullivan was already an established writer before he started his. A blog should sound conversational and be an antidote to the inept writing in most of today's glossy magazines.

As a writer, I'm inspired not just by other writing but by music and art and lines from movies. I think that's what's missing from a lot of blogs. Most bloggers aren't culture critics but political or media junkies preoccupied with pedestrian minutiae and a sophomoric "gotcha" mentality. I find it depressing and claustrophobic. The Web is a wide open space -- voices on it should have energy and vision.

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