Salon.com > George Kelly

Boomeranged by Ricochet

Wed, 08 Aug 2001 19:30:00 +0000

It was like food or oxygen to me, an all-consuming need. I knew what I had before it was gone; that doesn't mean I miss it any less.

It started out as a joyful amusement, a pastime I could even display a sense of decorum and reason toward. Over time, every neuron in my noggin became driven by it, my brain's chemistry kinked as if I were a laboratory rat pressing a lever in a demented experiment.

It drove me to brazenly exhibitionistic episodes in a bookshelf- and box-filled spare room in my mother's house in suburban Washington, D.C., in the back of a speeding Greyhound bus somewhere along a highway in the middle of Nebraska and even atop Seattle's Space Needle.

At home in the Bay Area, I satisfied my lust from the confines of a seat at a crowded movie premiere, in a cab zipping along San Francisco's Geary Street late at night and even idling in midday weekend stop-and-go traffic along the concrete stretch of Interstate 80 at Oakland's MacArthur Maze, where three highways merge into the interstate's last push toward the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge tollbooths.

The new black

Mon, 23 Apr 2001 19:00:00 +0000

Earlier this month, I saw a two-page layout for Diesel jeans in Details magazine. It's the only thing I still remember reading in it.

Eight young people sit in a crowded outdoor courtyard, wearing bright, colorful and scanty clothing. They have muscles, curves and even, glowing, dark brown skin. They could be cousins to fashion runway models like Alek Wek or Tyson Beckford or any one of this month's more handsome, charismatic chart-topping hip-hoppers. Most are smiling or laughing; one man clutches a champagne bottle.

No one I know dresses or acts like this in real life. I never get invited to parties like these, where the clothes look like a dashed-off take on what some corporate designer thought the hip urban youth of today should be wearing this summer. The look that these Beautiful People are fronting isn't hip-hop swagger, retro appropriation or athletic/surf, but it somehow manages to borrow elements from all three styles without getting caught stealing outright.

Regrets, we have a few

Sat, 07 Apr 2001 22:59:00 +0000

I'm sorry. I regret having to write this story. But I can't stand idly by while a literal world of pain stands in need of apology. From China to Japan to Australia to Dan Rather (his own sovereignty), there's been a worldwide storm of regret this week. So I've taken notes:

How not to do it: (Agence France Presse.) "We regret that the Chinese plane did not get down safely and we regret the loss of the life of that Chinese pilot," Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters outside the State Department.

"But now we need to move on. We need to bring this to a resolution and we are using every avenue available to us to talk to the Chinese side to exchange explanations and move on."

How to do it better: "I regret that a Chinese pilot is missing and I regret that one of their airplanes is lost. Our prayers go out to the pilot, his family," Reuters reports the president as saying.

A Hibernian in the woodpile

Sat, 17 Mar 2001 20:00:00 +0000

Recently released U.S. Census data reveal telling demographic, or at least attitudinal, shifts afoot in the American population and how Americans identify themselves in terms of race. A New York Times story says 5 percent of African-Americans identified themselves as multiracial, or belonging to more than one race; that's many more than government forecasters with the Office of Management and Budget were expecting.

But this is nothing new for me. In fact, this kind of self-reflection about my mixed heritage is something of an annual ritual. On past St. Patrick's Days, close white friends have joked about my being "black Irish." That's been my cue to trot out a story about my great-great-grandfather, Albert Kelly, who got off a boat from Ireland in Philadelphia in 1868. The family griot, my uncle Douglas who lives in Washington state, says that Kelly married Hilda Cheatham, a Cherokee woman, and settled down on a farm in Mathews County, Va. The youngest of their four children, James Handy Kelly, was my great-grandfather and grew up to spawn my father's side of the family.

Thanksgiving rants

Thu, 23 Nov 2000 19:04:00 +0000

In these exclusive Thanksgiving rants two Salon editors have a bone to pick with Turkey Day.

David Tuller dishes "Chad stuffing" and explains how you can turn your election leftovers into a Thanksgiving staple.

"My brother the holiday" documents George Kelly's long years of suffering over the fact that his brother gets to celebrate Thanksgiving and his birthday together.

About the authors:
David Tuller is a senior editor at Salon. George Kelly is a copy editor for Salon.

Al Gore tells Queen Latifah what he likes

Wed, 01 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000

Perhaps I am a man who knows too much about Al Gore.

I'm not talking about what his opponents unjustly label his ability to morph into an advocate of whatever cause is near and dear to his audience, or his occasional factual slips.

I'm talking about Gore as a sexual being. Now, don't all drop your mice at once. Before you ponder that too much, arrest your "recoil" reflex and consider the following tidbits of information, all released within the past several months or so:

We know he's able to lip tall spouses in a single bound, earning continued praise and good-natured catcalls -- as well as the occasional hiss -- along the campaign trail.

We know that he likes to sleep "in a bed," as he told Oprah Winfrey in his mid-September visit to her show.