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The man who organized and thrived on all this madness was producer George Martin, whose relationship with the Beatles, always integral, was now entering uncharted territory. The aptly titled "Tomorrow Never Knows" closes the masterpiece "Revolver" with a tantalizing hint of the artistic statement Martin would help them realize next: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

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But like the 200-ton telharmonium, the world's first mechanical music
synthesizer (invented by Thaddeus Cahill around 1900), the theremin was
difficult to play. It soon disappeared behind the curtain, relegated to
cheap performances in B-grade alien-invasion movies. In 1955, four years after the theremin's eerily weepy sound was employed in
"The Day the Earth Stood Still," RCA introduced the first modern
synthesizer. The machine made sounds by
manipulating electrical waves to denote timbre, pitch and volume. Like
early computers, it filled a room and was tended by men in lab coats.

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Stepping into this miasma of greed and paranoia, Joni Mitchell performed her
song "Woodstock" in a lilting, melancholy soprano that seemed to float
somewhere above her piano, as beautifully incongruous as a seagull hovering
over a landfill. But after the song, a whacked-out man named Yogi Joe
grabbed the microphone and began shouting. After he "was thrown off the stage by her security, much to her
dismay," documentary director Murray Lerner recalls on the recently released
DVD, "the crowd began to boo and become unruly." Yogi Joe spouted off
backstage about being the "head of the official committee to paint the fence
invisible," but Mitchell had the unenviable task of quieting the belligerent
throng. As she later told British music magazine Q:

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Seventy years after Gertrude founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in
Greenwich Village, some of her descendants are openly talking about removing
the family name -- and, more importantly, a sizable portion of its money --
from the institution. The rift is over a work of art by Hans Haacke, called
"Sanitation," which was commissioned by Whitney director Maxwell Anderson
for the museum's upcoming 2000 Biennial Exhibition. The installation
apparently links Mayor Rudy Giuliani to Nazism, highlighting his
denunciations of the recent "Sensation" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of
Art.

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Since he began publishing in the 1940s, writer Arthur C. Clarke has been a modern-day Time Traveller whose mission has yielded far more practical results. With more than 80 books of science, fiction and nonfiction, Clarke has displayed an uncanny ability to see the future. In 1945, a year before the death of Wells and 12 years before Sputnik, Clarke predicted a global relay system of radio and television signals using geosynchronous satellites -- a communications revolution that began taking shape 20 years later. The first draft of the article "Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?" is now in the Smithsonian.

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But the revelations raised more questions than they answered. Is "multimillionaire" Rick Rockwell -- a comedian, real estate investor, motivational speaker and hustler -- actually a wealthy guy seeking a wife or just a show-biz hack seeking publicity? And how could Fox have put Rockwell on the show without knowing more about his past?

Most important, it's still impossible to know who was most victimized by the hoax: Fox, which received huge ratings but also an outpouring of criticism with the revelations about Rockwell; the new bride, who on Wednesday told Good Morning America she wants an annulment; or home viewers, who had to endure a new low in "real-life" programming.

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In 1966, while making plans for a second fight for the middleweight championship, Carter and a friend, John Artis, were charged with a triple murder that occurred in a tavern in Paterson, N.J., Carter's hometown. Both had rock-solid alibis, two key witnesses happened to be petty thieves who later recanted their testimony, and the murder weapons were never found. But Carter and Artis spent most of the next two decades in prison.

Carter published his story, "The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to #45472," in 1974 while he was an inmate at Rahway State Prison. He rode a brief wave of celebrity in the ensuing year, after Bob Dylan made him a folk hero with a song about his struggle for justice. But after a brief flirtation with freedom, a second trial sent "Hurricane" back to prison, where he remained for a second decade, until a federal judge gave Carter his freedom in 1985.

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The horrors of the asthmatic paroxysm far exceed any acute bodily pain: the sense of impending suffocation, the agonizing struggle for the breath of life are so terrible they cannot be witnessed without sharing in the sufferer's distress ... [If the asthmatic] knows anything of the nature of his complaint, he knows that his sufferings may terminate in a closing scene worse only than the present. -- Dr. Henry Salter, "Asthma: Its Pathology and Treatment" (1882)

In a photograph I've kept on or near my desk for 12 years, my brother Ryan is a small, 8-year-old boy standing outside with a mitt dangling from his left arm. A baseball hangs, blurred, in the air in front of him, suspended over his outstretched palm. Everything in the frame around him seems gigantic -- the too-big glove, the rows of pines and palm trees behind him -- but Ryan's confident grin is the center of all this wilderness and movement. A baseball player almost since he was old enough to stand, Ryan also spent his childhood as a severe asthmatic, enduring a seasonal tightening of the chest that made a precious currency of his breath, exhausted him after nights of bleary-eyed coughing and required him to consume an endless stream of pills and inhaled medicines. Yet all this somehow gave Ryan the most unlikely, serene composure. As in the picture, he always stood tall above the turbulence. He may have been at the fragile heart of a malignant universe, but when you saw that smile, you knew he was going to catch the spinning baseball.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/12/23/asthma/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/12/23/hotjobs/ http://www.salon.com/1999/12/23/hotjobs/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/log/1999/12/23/hotjobs Julie, a freelance Web producer, arrived 15 minutes early for a hot
job interview at the CBS news studios on West 57th Street in
Manhattan. She was daydreaming about her chances of being a producer
at CBS when she found her attention drawn to the reception desk,
where several people were being turned away. When the clock struck
10 a.m., time for her to approach, she found out why: Julie (who
asked to be identified by her first name only) wasn't scheduled for
an interview, and neither were about a dozen others. The job posting
was "an Internet hoax," the receptionist said.

The job had been posted to both the href="http://www.nynma.org">New York New Media Association site
and HotJobs.com.
When Julie responded to it, she got an e-mail that said, "Greetings.
Your resume looks wonderful! We sincerely apologize for the delay in
getting back to you. If you are still interested in the position, we
would like to have you meet with our HR person, Valerie Fields, on
Friday Dec. 10 at 10 a.m. at our West 57th St. offices." It was
signed, "the CBSNews.com staff."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/12/23/hotjobs/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/11/01/coolwhite/ http://www.salon.com/1999/11/01/coolwhite/#comments Mon, 01 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/feature/1999/11/01/coolwhite During his opening monologue on MTV's Video Music Awards in September, host Chris Rock surveyed the audience and asked, "Where are all the cool white guys?" Throughout the night, Rock could savor the accumulating evidence for his assertion that they were, in fact, missing in droves. Pretenders to the long tradition of cool white male stars embarrassed themselves on stage or sat in the audience looking like nervous piglets cornered by Rock's wolfishly scathing wit. The sad display reached the pit of inanity when Limp Bizkit's front man, Fred Durst, made lewd references to co-presenter Heather Locklear's breasts. While Durst smirked, a bandmate and fellow would-be homey either pretended to be inebriated or really was stumbling -- and neither scenario was all that entertaining.

Then Madonna took the stage, thank God, to introduce the evening's surprise guest. She called him a talent the likes of which surfaces but a handful of times in a century. Seconds later, when Paul McCartney strutted forward, I was struck by his quiet self-assurance, his apparently secure knowledge that he was all those things the Material Girl had called him. His unimpressed aplomb contrasted neatly with all the young dudes who were so desperate to attract attention. Here at last was a cool white guy.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/11/01/coolwhite/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/10/29/gibson/ http://www.salon.com/1999/10/29/gibson/#comments Fri, 29 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/10/29/gibson William Gibson is so secure in his status as a prophet of the digital age that it's easy to forget he's been publishing novels for just 15 years -- about as long as the Apple Macintosh has been around. But the computer revolution is all the history Gibson needs for his books; he combines it with old-fashioned notions of character and suspense and skews his novels hyperkinetically forward in time. A futurist who plays games with the present, Gibson imbues his stories with elements of technology both recognizable and unfathomable.

In his first novel, "Neuromancer," he explored the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace (he coined the word himself, in a 1981 short story), navigated by hackers and elegant forms of artificial intelligence who appear as ghosts in the machine. "Idoru" (1996) is set in 21st century Tokyo, where Rez, the lead singer in a rock band, becomes engaged to a pop singer named Rei Toei, a synthetic "idoru" simulated holographically by software agents. Rez's personal security detail hires Net runner Colin Laney, who can detect obscure patterns in electronic data and thereby predict aspects of the future, to ease their worries about the strange nuptials.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/10/29/gibson/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/10/08/vonnegut_interview/ http://www.salon.com/1999/10/08/vonnegut_interview/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/int/1999/10/08/vonnegut_interview Listen: This is really it. After entertaining and provoking us with his novels for 50 years, Kurt Vonnegut says he is retiring from the literature business. His last book, "Bagombo Snuff Box," is a short-story collection that harks back to the dawn of his literary career in the 1950s, a Golden Age of magazine fiction long since vanished, when he left his job as a General Electric PR flack and began publishing stories. In his introduction, he calls these new-old (and previously unavailable) pieces -- simple melodramas about materialism, pretense, love and heaven -- "Buddhist catnaps," observing that the short-story form, "because of its physiological and psychological effects on a human being, is more closely related to Buddhist styles of meditation than it is to any other form of narrative entertainment."
In "A Present for Big Saint Nick," children expose a gangster's egotism and their parents' hypocrisy. In the title story, a 9-year-old sniffs out an adult's pretensions. A couple of the stories rise to culminating jokes in the vein of Vonnegut's classic tall tale, "Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog," from his only previous collection, 1968's "Welcome to the Monkey House."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/10/08/vonnegut_interview/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/08/30/benson/ http://www.salon.com/1999/08/30/benson/#comments Mon, 30 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/feature/1999/08/30/benson Space may still be the final frontier, but few of us associate the cosmos with the kind of daring exploits that once grabbed headlines. The dreamy futurism inspired by the space race has been replaced by a warm glow of nostalgia. Mercury and Apollo exist as cultural relics alongside "Star Trek," inviting us to look back, not ahead, feeding a seemingly endless appetite for reruns. Space entrepreneur Jim Benson, for one, has had enough. To Benson, the marking of the 30th anniversary of the moon landing in July seemed less a celebration than "a wake" -- "Something died 30 years ago and we're still pining away for it," he said. "Young people have gone through two generations of disappointment in the space program. It's clear that the government is not doing it, can't do it, and it's up to the private sector to make it happen."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/08/30/benson/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/08/17/lee/ http://www.salon.com/1999/08/17/lee/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/08/17/lee Much of my childhood was spent spellbound in the Marvel Universe, immersed in a mythos hatched largely in the mind of writer and editor Stan Lee in the early '60s. New York City was where the superheroes lived. It was one of those childhood truths, a Big Apple bustling with vibrantly costumed superhumans. Spider-Man lived in Queens, the Fantastic Four in Midtown and Doctor Strange down on Bleecker Street.

It was important that Lee's heroes lived in the real world, and not in Gotham City or Metropolis, because they were real people. That is, Marvel Comics imagined how real people might act if they suddenly gained superpowers -- confused, conflicted and not necessarily eager for the responsibility. They were a departure from that straight-arrow hero of the Golden Age, Superman. The next age belonged to Marvel. And Stan Lee ushered it in with his creations.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/08/17/lee/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/07/29/wild_feeds/ http://www.salon.com/1999/07/29/wild_feeds/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/1999/07/29/wild_feeds "I did not wash my hair last night because I felt a certain amount of stiffness was probably healthy," Dan Rather says to a producer as he prepares to go on air with a report from Soweto, South Africa. "What do you think? OK, OK, the question is whether or not to wash it for tomorrow, but we'll make that decision as we go along, I guess."

Such are the weighty choices our news anchors are forced to make from day to day. Rather likely did not expect to be discussing his coiffure on public view, but he is. This peek behind the curtain of the TV news business is known as a "wild feed" -- one of the unscripted, random moments found in the raw satellite transmissions used by TV networks and affiliates to send live sound and video from one location to another. The feeds are sometimes scrambled by the networks. But often they aren't, and they can be intercepted by anyone with a satellite dish who knows where to point it. Wild feeds reveal some of the embarrassingly creaky machinery beneath the high-gloss Oz of broadcast television -- and these days they can be found online.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/07/29/wild_feeds/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/07/08/paul/ http://www.salon.com/1999/07/08/paul/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/feature/1999/07/08/paul At age 9, Lester Polfuss had already learned to punch new holes in the paper rolls of his mother's player piano. But by the time he was a teenager nicknamed Red Hot Red, he'd found his real moneymaker: the guitar. Playing for spare change before an audience in the parking lot of the local barbecue, Polfuss tried an experiment: He wedged a phonograph needle into the wood of his Sears Roebuck acoustic and amplified it through the speaker, rigging his first electric guitar and tripling his tips.

That was 70 years ago. In June, Lester Polfuss celebrated his 84th birthday and his 63rd year as a musician named Les Paul. In the '50s, the Wisconsin-born inventor became synonymous with rock 'n' roll's weapon of choice and forged technological paths that the recording industry has been following ever since. A few of his experiments left an indelible stamp on the sound of pop music. Despite countless run-ins with destruction -- a car crash that nearly cost him his right arm, a broken eardrum, quadruple-bypass surgery, arthritis in both hands -- Paul still plays every week, presiding over a Manhattan jazz club with his own black Les Paul.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/07/08/paul/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/06/24/space_noise/ http://www.salon.com/1999/06/24/space_noise/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/1999/06/24/space_noise Two Junes ago in West Virginia, a group of astronomers working for SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, had the ride of their lives. Sifting the heavens for a faint whisper of otherworldly life using the 140-foot telescope at Green Bank, one of the country's leading radio telescope observatories, they picked up a radio signal that sounded as if it might be The One. The crew went on full alert for an unprecedented 24 hours. They received inquiries from the media -- serious outfits like the New York Times. "This one looked real," remembers astronomer Seth Shostak. "Nobody went home."

The noise turned out to be not E.T., but the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), phoning home to NASA from a million miles away. The research satellite is designed to study the internal structure of the sun and the solar wind, a stream of highly ionized gas that blows continuously outward through the solar system. SOHO orbits the sun just ahead of the Earth and beams back data using radio waves.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/06/24/space_noise/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/04/27/vonnegut/ http://www.salon.com/1999/04/27/vonnegut/#comments Tue, 27 Apr 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/04/27/vonnegut I first laid eyes on Kurt Vonnegut in an airport terminal. A friend in college had wangled me a job as Vonnegut's driver when he came to speak to us in 1990. A rangy 6-foot-2, he stood hunched over a pair of crutches. He had an ankle cast on one foot, a well-worn Reebok sneaker on the other. Draped over his shoulders was an old trench coat, and his moppy hair and droopy mustache were perfectly still. From a distance he looked like a scarecrow with Mark Twain's face.

As we drove toward the campus, he chain-smoked unfiltered Pall Malls, dropping butts out the window despite the open ashtray. I couldn't stop staring at him, which almost proved fatal when I nearly drove us into a highway construction site. I swerved into the path of an 18-wheeler in the next lane, then out of its way when the driver blared the horn. I apologized to Vonnegut. He didn't seem to mind. "I figured you knew what you were doing," he said with a wheezy laugh. Like his characters, he seemed resigned to forces outside his control.

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