Salon.com > James Surowiecki

Skin trade

Fri, 22 Sep 2000 19:30:00 +0000

The September issue of Talk magazine featured a painfully true-to-life portrait of the dating travails of Kristin Whiting, a 32-year-old single woman in New York who is, to turn Jane Austen on her head, in want of a husband. The most remarkable moment in the piece comes when Whiting explains that she refused to go out on a second date with a personable, attractive man because on their first date he suggested they split the check. "I want to be taken out for dinner," Whiting says. "Not for the economics, but for the principle."

What's remarkable about this is not that Whiting dumped the guy. That's dismaying, but not really surprising (except for the fact that Whiting is so upfront about it) to anyone familiar with the New York dating scene. No, what's remarkable about the story is that Whiting has elevated her insistence on being paid for into a principle. Because what, after all, could the principle really be?

Media Circus: Popcorn is served

Mon, 01 Dec 1997 20:00:00 +0000

I'm not sure what a New York movie theater looks like without lines of impatient people pushing to get three or four steps ahead of each other. But I'm about to find out: MovieFone has just introduced reserved seating at two New York theaters -- a Chelsea multiplex and the palatial, 2,000-seat Ziegfeld -- and plans to bring it to theaters all over the city and, eventually, all over the country.

Here's how the new scheme works: Customers can either buy tickets over the phone -- as you can already do with MovieFone -- or buy them at the box office. Either way, they're asked if they'd prefer to sit left, center or right and front, middle or back, and then they're given an assigned seat. Latecomers will still have a chance to strain their necks in the front row since seats in the two front rows won't be assigned.

So will people turn away when they find out they can't sit together at a particular movie? Probably not. "We asked people about this, we tested this, and moviegoers said they wanted it," says Howard Lichtman of Cineplex Odeon, which is working with MovieFone on the system. "It's just like reserved seating for a concert or a play. People want to know that they'll be able to sit together, and they like being able to call up ahead of time and get the seats they want."

Media Circus: Sex with the perfect stranger

Tue, 18 Nov 1997 20:00:00 +0000

Notorious, whose premiere issue is on newsstands now, promises simultaneous "entertainment for women and men." And the half-naked couple embracing on the cover of the first issue makes it pretty clear exactly what the editors mean by "entertainment." A magazine that's come up with a new way to write about sex and relationships? Count me in!

Having read Notorious, this is what I know: Model Eva Herzigova and Tico Torres (the "celebrity" couple on the cover) spend "nearly all their time shopping for household goods" when they're at home. (All their time? The things that pass for sex in the '90s!) I also know that Michael J. Fox got more than six thousand pieces of anti-Semitic hate mail when he started dating Tracy Pollan, although I have no idea how his harassers figured out that Pollan is Jewish. And I know that a group of American guys who went to Havana for an extended bachelor party couldn't visit Ernest Hemingway's old estate because there were lots of cats there, and two of the guys were allergic. Way to live up to Papa's legacy! What all of these things tell us about relationships in the late 1990s remains something of a mystery, of course, as does Notorious' belief that it's breaking new ground in the way it talks about sex.

Media Circus

Wed, 15 Oct 1997 19:00:00 +0000

Esquire's October cover story on Kevin Spacey has generated more attention than the magazine got during the three years Ed Kosner served as editor. The magazine's new editor, David Granger, must be gloating -- even though Tom Junod, the two-time National Magazine Award winner who authored the Spacey piece, has been widely lambasted by publicists, editors and columnists for pseudo-outing Spacey. The actor himself slammed the piece, calling it "dishonest and malicious"; his agent told other clients to snub Esquire and its reporters. In the brouhaha surrounding Junod's piece, no one has mentioned the most interesting thing about the story, which is that Junod spends as much time stuffing Spacey into the closet as he does dragging him out of it.

Titled "Kevin Spacey Has a Secret," the piece is a bit of a narrative striptease act. Which makes sense: Secrets are interesting only so long as they remain on the verge of being revealed, as long as they're charged with the possibility -- and not the reality -- of disclosure. A good way to keep that charge alive, in fact, is to almost tell a secret, to hint that what you've said is the truth while simultaneously suggesting that there's more -- or less -- you haven't yet disclosed. If Spacey were openly gay, after all, there would be no story. All the ambiguity and all the complicated interplay between public and private personas that Junod uses to structure his story would disappear. Junod didn't want Spacey to be out. He wanted him in-between.

Media Circus

Mon, 06 Oct 1997 19:00:00 +0000

"I really think sports is the rock 'n' roll of the '90s," says Michael Caruso, the new editor of Details. And Caruso isn't the only one. The deluge of press coverage attending the new sports magazines for women suggests that the new audience for sports journalism consists mainly of long-limbed, strawberry-blond girls. In fact it's men -- or at least men's magazines -- who have rediscovered sports.

As Art Cooper has done at GQ, both Caruso at Details and David Granger at Esquire are looking to make sports coverage as important to their editorial visions as it is to most men's lives. "Sports is this really cool, exciting thing," Caruso says. "It's the place where a lot of what's really interesting is taking place. It makes complete sense to me to integrate this into [Details]."

Media Circus: Dedicated Swallower of Fashion

Wed, 17 Sep 1997 19:00:00 +0000

I had to break up a fight over Labor Day weekend. Actually, "fight" may be overstating things. Let's instead call it a thrashing, since the battle consisted of one of my little cousins clubbing the other over the head with the September issue of Vogue, which is 730 pages long and leaves a satisfying dent in the forehead of one's enemy when swung with enough force. "THE THRILL IS BACK!" indeed.

As it happens, I hadn't even noticed the new Vogue yet, both because the let's-put-Linda-Evangelista-in-yet-another-bad-haircut-on-the-cover phenomenon has lost its charm and because of a traumatic experience in the lobby of the Condi Nast building when I was told by the woman who runs the magazine stand that it was a store and not a library. (Ever since, I have kept my eyes lowered when passing magazine kiosks.) That an outburst of random violence had dropped it into my hands, then, seemed like fate. Having scanned every one of the issue's pages, I have only now come up for air.

Media Circus

Tue, 02 Sep 1997 19:00:00 +0000

There are two questions any writer working on a story about the new Spy becomes quickly accustomed to hearing. The first is the genuinely quizzical: "You mean Spy still exists?" The second is the deathless query: "Do they still have all those pornography ads in the back?" Neither qualifies as the kind of inspiring response you want to get from strangers when you explain to them what you're working on.

Still, these are questions that make a certain amount of intuitive sense, given the fact that Spy -- once the country's most clever magazine and one that exerted a cultural influence out of all proportion to the size of its readership -- has gone through a rather fallow ... well, decade is probably the right word for it. And nothing seemed more emblematic of that than the two-page spread offering assorted pornographic catalogs and videotapes that has graced every issue in recent memory. A real magazine wouldn't need these ads.

Media Circus: if it's Wednesday, a black film must be opening

Wed, 13 Aug 1997 19:00:00 +0000

last week, I went to my local multiplex to catch the 10 p.m. show of the new Warner Bros. film "187." I'll admit it. I was packing heat, and I was looking for trouble. It didn't take me long to find it. There were crews there from Word and Feed, mouthing off, talking shit. Now, I like those guys personally, but I can only take so much cyber-talk at any one time. So I opened up on them. It was kind of like that scene in "Boyz N the Hood" where the guy fires the Uzi into the air and the crowd scrambles for safety. Granted, I only had one of those Super-Squirters, but it was still like that scene. No one got hit, but everyone ran. Then I was able to enjoy the movie in peace.

As I sat in the theater, much of the quiet elation I felt stemmed from the thought that I had foiled Warner Bros.' earnest effort to protect moviegoers from random violence. Only later did I discover that Warner Bros. had in fact not been engaged in this effort, and that my behavior at the theater that night, far from being a sophisticated act of cultural subversion, had instead been simply boorish.

Media Circus: True-Crime mags' corpse found stuffed under television set!

Tue, 05 Aug 1997 19:00:00 +0000

there's a newsstand in Grand Central Station that seems to have every magazine in the world on display. You can buy six different Italian fashion magazines there, and eight or nine different martial arts magazines. You can buy copies of the Sun, an elegant little literary journal published in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the Manchester Guardian Weekly. The newsstand's racks contain three different kinds of military-strategy magazines -- the kind with cover lines like: "Was Stonewall Jackson a bad leader?" -- and an infinite array of house beautiful journals. There's a wonderfully diverse selection of pornography too.

About the only thing you won't be able find, in fact, is a true-crime magazine. No True Detective, no Headquarters Detective, no True Police Cases. Nothing. If you live in New York and want to read about the "Lust of the Goliath Rapist" or the "Oriental Coed Who Was Killed -- Twice," you're out of luck. And it isn't just this newsstand, either. As far as I can tell, there's nowhere in Manhattan where you can buy a copy of what you might call "pulp fact." Considering that this is a city with a seemingly bottomless appetite for both crime and kitsch, the void is rather eerie.

Remembering Michael Dorris

Thu, 26 Jun 1997 19:00:00 +0000

"Leave-taking, I've decided, is quite beside the point. Memory, though, is not." These were the words of historian Simon Schama, speaking at a memorial service Tuesday evening at New York's Donnell Library for writer Michael Dorris, who killed himself in late April. The service, which followed one held earlier this month at Dartmouth, where Dorris was an adjunct professor of Native American studies, was attended by close to 100 of Dorris' friends, family members and colleagues, and featured a series of testimonials from a range of figures in the publishing and media world.

With his simultaneous acknowledgment of the impossibility of reconciling oneself to an untimely death and his insistence that remembering is a necessary and valuable project, Schama aptly described the mood of the service as a whole. Dorris' friends adopted a tone that might be termed celebratorily mournful, capturing the full weight of Dorris' absence by talking about the pleasure they had taken in his presence.

Murdoch knows best

Thu, 19 Jun 1997 19:00:00 +0000

rupert murdoch had a tough month of May. His dream of direct-broadcast satellite-TV domination over America -- an odd dream, to be sure -- was crushed. His movie studio announced that the $200 million "Titanic" wouldn't be appearing this summer. And people made fun of his improbable $350 million bid to acquire the Los Angeles Dodgers. But in typical Murdoch fashion, he went shopping, and now everything seems to be better again.

The latest outlet for Murdoch's ambitions could not, on the surface, be more improbable: International Family Entertainment, the cable network founded by fundamentalist Pat Robertson. Murdoch's company, News Corp., bought IFE last Wednesday for $1.9 billion. IFE owns the Family Channel, home to Robertson's own "The 700 Club." Oh, and "Hawaii Five-O" re-runs.