Salon.com > Eric Alterman

Thinking inside the box

Wed, 16 Dec 1998 16:54:00 +0000

The CD box set is one of capitalism's great innovations. Record companies tap music scholars for unreleased material the record companies already own, give it to technicians to remaster and put together with the old stuff according to some comprehensible but always arguable principle, and then put it all in a fancy box with lots of background material. The record company has a profitable product at precious little cost; the musician in question feels honored to see his history canonized and preserved in a fashion that will likely outlast his life. And fans can achieve in just one purchase a completeness -- to say nothing of the insights frequently garnered through listening to the previously canned material -- that would otherwise take years of searching and collecting.

Perhaps more importantly, box sets give devoted fans plenty to argue about. Should the new Impulse! Coltrane box have been chronological according to recording schedules or release schedules? Does Herbie Hancock sound more proficient on his own Blue Note box, or more inspired by the Miles Davis Quintet on Columbia Legacy, which was recorded more or less simultaneously? And why oh why did Bruce Springsteen leave out "The Fever," his greatest bluesy moan, once again?

Confessions of a box-set sucker

Mon, 22 Jun 1998 12:34:00 +0000

The Rhino Records '70s pop culture box, entitled "Have a Nice Decade," positively
luxuriates in slothful decadence as it simultaneously dares you to take it
seriously. Six CDs, 156 songs, green and yellow smiley faces carved out of
indoor-outdoor carpeting on the cover, and dozens and dozens of songs that
appear explicitly designed to turn nice suburban children into crazed serial
killers. You think I'm kidding? This is not the Allman Brothers/Band/Dead/Clapton '70s stuff that survived quite nicely on its own. This is the land of Tony Orlando and Dawn. Try repeated listenings of Hamilton, Joe, Frank & Reynolds' "Don't Pull Your Love," followed by Lobo's "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo," with Cat Stevens and Three Dog Night bringing
up the rear, and see if MSNBC isn't broadcasting from your lawn within 48 hours.

Armchair pundits to Clinton: Bring us the head of Saddam Hussein!

Wed, 26 Nov 1997 20:00:00 +0000

As Americans sit down to stuff themselves this Thanksgiving, they may give thanks that we still have elections in this country, and that, Pat Buchanan aside, most pundits know better than to risk their positions of perfect irresponsibility to run in them. If it had been up to the punditocracy, for instance, we would bombing the bejeesus out of Iraq right now. Although just what that might have accomplished, none of them can say.

To most of the voices on the Sunday morning talk shows and the nation's top op-ed pages, and to the former Secretary of Whatevers hired by the networks to offer "expert opinions" on everything from military strategy in the desert to ob/gyn tactics for septuplets, President Clinton is not the current president of the United States, but Neville Chamberlain reincarnate.

The punditocracy shares a nearly universal belief that when Clinton and Hussein stood "eyeball-to-eyeball," Clinton blinked. There is a word for Clinton's response to Iraq's machinations last week, thundered Charles Krauthammer: "Appeasement -- lacking, of course, the scale of the ignominy at Munich, but matching nicely the style." New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal also found the Chamberlain sellout analogy to his liking, writing that the controversy was resolved "in the sense that the 'controversy' caused by Hitler's appetite for Czechoslovakia was 'resolved' at Munich in 1938." His colleague William Safire added, "In a meeting reminiscent of Molotov and von Ribbentrop, Primakov and Tariq Aziz agreed to 'more effective' inspection."

Media Circus: Doing the right-wing shuffle

Thu, 13 Nov 1997 20:00:00 +0000

The American Spectator may be dumping its long-time publisher; David Brock may be posing as Joan of Arc in Esquire; John Podhoretz may be ditching the Weekly Standard for the New York Post. But don't be fooled by the actors in front of the curtain. The real action is taking place in the pockets of the conservative moneybags who pay for the production and continue to call its shots.

Here's what happened at the Spectator: Brock, and the magazine's recently deposed publisher, Ronald Burr, both ran afoul of the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded wing of the far right. Brock did it with his unexpected love letter to Hillary, "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham." Burr fell from favor by apparently looking too closely into the moneys that the Spectator (which is headed by R. Emmett Tyrrell) receives from various Scaife foundations. A lot of this money was apparently disbursed to persons of less than stellar character -- people, for example, who have been wandering around Arkansas looking for drug smugglers, murderers and hookers who say they can pin something on the president. Much of what they claim to have discovered has appeared in the Spectator -- some of it under Brock's byline, some under Tyrrell's. Almost none of it seemed likely to survive a professional audit of the type that Burr was demanding, however, and so he is now out of a job.

Media Circus

Tue, 21 Oct 1997 19:00:00 +0000

I first met Laura Ingraham on the set of MSNBC on the network's first day on the air. If memory serves, she asked former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres a question displaying both amazing audacity and embarrassing ignorance. Coming just days after the explosion aboard TWA flight 800 over Long Island, Laura wanted to know if Peres thought it was a good idea for the U.S. to bomb Syria or Libya in response. Peres clearly thought she was nuts and did his best to explain that no one even knew if foul play had been involved yet. In between interview segments, Laura and I gossiped about Joe Klein, who had just been unmasked as "Anonymous." She told me that a day earlier she had seen Klein coming out of a meeting at CBS all smiles, chuckling over something with his bosses there and so, as far as she could tell, his future was assured.

Media Circus

Mon, 13 Oct 1997 19:00:00 +0000

Bob Woodward was always the nice one -- the one who felt your pain, flattered your ego and maybe even came to your dinner party. He was rewarded with seven-figure book contracts, a top management job at the Washington Post and the virtually unanimous admiration of friends and foes alike. Sure, other reporters were jealous of Woodward, but he was so damn nice, what was the point of railing against fate?

Sy Hersh, he was the nasty one. He didn't feel your pain; he caused it. He had the goods already but he wanted more. He had his own view of the way the world worked and it wasn't pretty. Woodward, the former Navy officer and Ivy League Republican, would never have uncovered a massacre like My Lai, where American troops raped and pillaged like the Huns of yore. He wouldn't have believed it possible. But for young Sy Hersh, war crimes by American troops merely confirmed his view of the whole nasty business. As Clausewitz might have said, politics is merely war conducted by less honest means. No one ever considered Sy Hersh for an editor's job, and quite a few worried about the consequences of having him over for dinner. Would he browbeat the help about whether they were getting minimum wage?

Media Circus

Wed, 10 Sep 1997 19:00:00 +0000

When New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman "resigned" editor Pete Hamill last week, he aborted a brave and important journalistic experiment. It is painfully ironic that Zuckerman's ax should fall on Hamill's neck during the week the world went crazy for Diana, tabloid journalism's first victim.

Hamill had begun to challenge the tabloid ethic of the '80s and '90s that declares "news" to be whatever Diana and Dodi, Donald and Ivana, Madonna and Whoever, had for brunch. Hamill considered such nonsense "nose-pressed-to-the-window" reporting of "press-agent schlock." To show he meant business, he fired gossip columnists A.J. Benza and Michael Lewittes (who had written the News' Hot Copy column for four years), explaining, "We have too much gossip, and there aren't enough people around to gossip about ... I need the space for news." Celebrities, he announced upon taking over at the News, would henceforth read their names in the paper only if they "die, get shot, shoot their wives" or something happens to them "in the sense of a 'real verb.'" "Madonna Shops," he gleefully explained, does not contain a strong enough verb to carry the story. ("Madonna Throws Sean Penn under a Bus," he joked, "now that's a story.") Donald Trump, Hamill continued, would get his name in the paper "only if he puts a spade to earth. Calling a press conference to announce that he might build a building somewhere will not do it."