Salon.com > Rachel Elson

Sharps & Flats

Mon, 05 Jun 2000 19:01:00 +0000

Ace of Base "Greatest Hits" (Arista)

There was a time once -- I think it was the summer of '93, or perhaps the spring of '94 -- when you couldn't walk through a nightlife district in Europe without hearing the brassy intro to Ace of Base's "All That She Wants" rippling out of a club or two. The hook was physical -- on a dance floor, it ripped into your hips and snaked through your spine; even when overheard, it arched your back and charged up your step for a pace or two. Like most of the tracks on that first album, "The Sign," it was as light as cotton candy, lyrically vague and completely addictive.

At a time when America was still in thrall to Kurt Cobain's dark angst and stroking its collectively goateed chin to such chipper tunes as Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" and Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun," Ace of Base was living in its own happy nation. The Swedish family act's sugary tracks offered neither pop-culture musings nor profound statements about a generation of disaffected youth -- but they had a good beat, and you could dance all night to them.

Nonparent trap?

Thu, 06 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

To secure a place on Working Mother magazine's list of the 100 best companies for working moms a business has to put a premium on the personal needs of its employees, particularly female ones. Most companies on the list offer flextime to let parents cope with family demands; many offer on-site child care as well as extended maternity leave and adoption aid.

According to Working Mother, the companies that make the grade not only are superior "trailblazers" from a corporate values standpoint but also "attract star recruits, retain talented employees and boost productivity."

Over the past 14 years, the list has become one of the oldest and most respected tools used to measure company cultures and values. To make the list -- especially at a time when companies have to offer major perks to compete for the best employees -- is widely regarded as a badge of honor, one that companies like Bank of America, Prudential and IBM are happy to receive.

But if you ask journalist Elinor Burkett about this hallowed distinction, you'll get a more disturbing assessment. She believes that these distinguished companies have set American women back half a century with discriminatory policies that violate the once-sacred feminist canon of equal pay for equal work.

“Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity” by Mary Gordon

Wed, 12 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

When Mary Gordon was a child, she tells us in her new collection of essays,
her grandmother lived in a bleak, punishing Long Island house, with its
own unwieldy vocabulary ("'commode' for toilet, 'box' for the area of the
floor where the dog was made to lie") and a precise, Old World geography. Objects had proper places and pedigrees, and pleasure was unwelcome: "Her house was her body, and
like her body, was honorable, daunting, reassuring, defended, castigating,
harsh, embellished, dark." Gordon moved into the house when she was 7,
after her father's first heart attack, and according to "Seeing Through
Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity," it cast a shadow on the
rest of her life. It is the house itself, Gordon suggests, that caused the rift between her mother and her aunt, and later propelled Gordon's own escape to the "impromptu ease" of be-ins in Central Park.

"Seeing Through Places" attempts to trace lines such as these between past
and present, between the physical geography of her youth and her adult
emotional maps. And many of the essays do offer evocative slices of an
era gone by and raise valid questions about our complex relationships to
the physical world around us. Gordon reflects interestingly, for example,
on her failure to conjure a mental image of her childhood church:

“Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister” by Gregory Maguire

Fri, 17 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

What if -- despite all you've heard to the contrary -- everything was
Cinderella's fault: the ashes, the dirty clothes, the long hours toiling
over a cauldron? What if the Grimm Brothers got it wrong, and Cinderella
was really just a controlling, prepubescent brat? If, instead of being a tale
of beauty and goodness triumphing over ugly old evil, Cinderella's story
was in fact a parable of the way those possessed of physical beauty can
trample on the patient, the intelligent, the good?

Gregory Maguire's new book retells Cinderella's story from the perspective of one of the stepsisters, in much the same way his first novel, "Wicked," reworked "The Wizard of Oz" to give the witch's point of view. In "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister," Cinderella is a manipulative, self-pitying child who hates her new family, fears the outside world and holes up at home until a visiting French prince's search for a bride offers a chance at escape.

Sharps & flats

Fri, 24 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

There's a fine line between wry and bitter, and John Prine manages to hitch his wagon just this side of it. On "In Spite of Ourselves," the singer/guitarist's new album of romantic duets, there are a few happy endings, and a few more broken hearts. Prine, however, uses a sharp, tongue-in-cheek edge to keep the whole bunch from degrading into a mess of silly love songs.

The album is a bit of a departure for Prine. It's a set of duets from a perennial solo act, and a set of covers (by the likes of Don Everly and Hank Williams) from a performer known more for his songwriting than for his raw voice. With no illusions of a "happy ever after," these songs speak of fated, helpless love and star-crossed romantic train wrecks, regrettable breakups and unfortunate entanglements. ("We're not in love with each other/We're in love with our best friends," Prine sings on "Let's Invite Them Over.") The sweet, thin tunes are lean enough to avoid sounding maudlin. Even the sweetest of them -- like "I Know One," with Emmylou Harris -- have a bittersweet, minor-key fragility.

Santorini summer

Fri, 16 Apr 1999 14:13:00 +0000

I met Robert on one heaving, wrenching ferry ride; I left him on another
one. That's the way life goes in the Greek islands: Staying put is always
easier than getting somewhere better.

I was crossing a stormy Adriatic Sea, in the middle of a long Mediterranean
vacation, when I found him. Thirsty, tired and bored after a night of being
pitched back and forth by the waves, I had wandered down to the ship's
cafeteria in search of company. Robert was a rangy Englishman with
well-creased eyes, a thick Sussex burr and a gruff pride that barely hid
the burn behind him. He was headed for a bartending job in Santorini, he
said; a three-year stint in Toronto had ended abruptly. While the rest of
us tourists shelled out for the overpriced ferry cafeteria fare, he sipped
a slow series of espressos, digging deep in his trouser pockets for the
slim billfold whose contents had to get him all the way to the islands.

Furious over Kosovo

Fri, 09 Apr 1999 13:08:00 +0000

The ongoing conflict in the Balkans has Salon readers writing in with a fury. On Monday, reader Branimir Anzulovic argued that the "Kosovo myth" of the noble, martyred, misunderstood Serbs has become a self-delusion that has fostered massacres both during World War II and in this decade. And on Wednesday, readers attacked Salon for an anti-Serbian bias in our Kosovo coverage.

Meanwhile, we heard a collective groan over the April Fools' gag in our "Money Talks" piece, especially from readers chagrined at being so easily duped.

You love Gwyneth! Or at least you don't hate her.
On Tuesday, readers got hopping mad over Michelle Goldberg's hit piece on Gwyneth Paltrow. Still, one reader actually said he found the best reason to dislike Paltrow in our pro-Paltrow piece.