"The idea, in a word, 'Cease-Fire,'" wrote Kinsley, who edited Slate and the New Republic before joining the Times. "You get your politicians or your experts or your interest-group representatives, and instead of poking them with a stick to widen their disagreement, you nudge and bully and cajole them toward some kind of common ground. It sounds goody-goody, I know, but the intention would be more Judge Judy than Bill Moyers."

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Catherine had her own answer to that. When she came to visit us a few months into the school year, her look had completely changed. Gone was the generic Gap and Old Navy garb of before. Though only 11, she was now wearing a plaid miniskirt, striped stockings and a little black shirt adorned with a tragic looking kewpie doll -- imagine a bobble-head with a Laura Petrie do -- called Oopsy Daisy and the message "Oops, I Went Goth!"

Musically, goth has always been sort of like punk's sick little sister. While punk snuck out at night and smashed your parents' car, goth was at home setting things on fire. Punk liked speed; goth preferred absinthe. But both were joined by a certain cynicism and disdain for what our president might call "traditional values" -- and certainly good grooming. While punk has splintered into myriad musical shards -- from the pop punks who groove to radio-friendly bands like Good Charlotte and A Simple Plan to spiritual punks who listen to straight edge groups -- goth is still best represented by bands like Bauhaus and the Cure.

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Among the faithful tonight are the Dharma Punx, a loose affiliation of friends who share a love of punk rock and a penchant for spiritual practice. In S.F., home to gay conservatives and pacifist policemen, spiritual punks hardly raise a pierced eyebrow. The Justice League doorman waves them in like the regulars they are. There's Mike Haber, who was the leader of a rockabilly motorcycle gang in Santa Cruz, Calif., before sobering up and discovering meditation; and Lars Frederiksen, the clean-and-sober member of the stalwart S.F. punk band Rancid, as well as a new group called the Bastards; and Lars' roommate, Noah Levine, a former drunk, drug addict and jailbird who now brings Buddhist teaching into jails and juvenile halls, when he's not out seeing shows.

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We were just past the introductions, opening the menus and ordering drinks, when the young nympho fixed me with a frank gaze.

"Did anyone ever tell you," she said, smiling coquettishly, "that you look just like George Bush?" I must have shot water out of my nose because she hastened to add, "I find him very attractive!"

"You know, you do kind of," the editor said. The rest of the lunch passed in a blur as I tried to study my reflection in the silverware. At least she didn't mean George Sr.

The next time it happened I was at another lunch. The editor of a men's magazine was interested in hiring me to write for them on a regular basis. We were in one of these clubby old steak houses where you can imagine them killing the steers in the back room, but I was not wearing a suit, nor was my jacket adorned with an American flag stick pin. I was in the middle of making some droll observation when he leaned forward and squinted a bit.

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The Moonie-owned Washington Times, ever ready to re-fight the culture wars of the '60s, painted the hiring of FHM editor Ed Needham as a potentially good thing, one that might sound a death knell to the writings of Hunter S. Thompson and his imitators: "It's probably too much to expect a change in the sort of drug-boosterism that inspires pot-friendly travel tips, non-judgmental post-mortems on overdosed rockers, and hysterical posturings against the drug wars." The Los Angeles Times was downright nasty. "Shove over, you middle-aged boys, with your Bics burning at Bruce Springsteen concerts, your thinning hair, your love of 6,000-word dispatches from Tom Wolfe and other gonzo authors," read the lead. "It's not about you anymore."

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It's easy to imagine him playing his own best-known character, Randall P. McMurphy, the bull-goose loony in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," or see him as Hank Stamper in the 1971 film version of "Sometimes a Great Notion," just by squinting a little at Paul Newman. But when I think of Kesey, I think of him on top of that bus, the same old International Harvester he left to the weeds outside his Oregon farm instead of the Smithsonian Institute.

Here's one of the luminous snapshots captured in Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," the book that chronicled the 1964 cross-country trek of Kesey and his Merry Pranksters with the same love and attention to detail Stephen Ambrose employed to limn the voyage, toward a different frontier, of Lewis and Clark.

"Going through the steams of southern Alabama in late June and Kesey rises up from out of the comic books and becomes Captain Flag. He puts on a pink kilt, like a miniskirt, and pink socks and patent leather shoes and pink sunglasses and wraps an American flag around his head like a big turban and holds it in place with an arrow through the back of it and gets up on top of the bus roaring through Alabama and starts playing the flute at people passing by ..."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/11/16/kesey_apprec/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2001/02/06/murray_3/ http://www.salon.com/2001/02/06/murray_3/#comments Tue, 06 Feb 2001 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2001/02/06/murray Bertolt Brecht would have loved Bill Murray. OK, maybe not "Meatballs." But the revolutionary dramatist, who sometimes asked his actors to speak directly to the audience, believed in "the distancing effect" -- any device that prevents the audience from being caught up in the illusion of theater and allows them to maintain a critical distance. "Whereas identification reduces extraordinary events to the level of the commonplace," Brecht wrote, "distancing makes commonplace events rare and astonishing."

"When Bill Murray says, 'I love you,' he's in character, sincerely saying 'I love you,'" says a theater director I know. "But he's also acknowledging the audience, and his character, and the absurdity of both."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/02/06/murray_3/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/09/19/morrison_3/ http://www.salon.com/2000/09/19/morrison_3/#comments Tue, 19 Sep 2000 19:09:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2000/09/19/morrison Van Morrison opened his 1999 album, "Back on Top," with a song called "Goin' Down Geneva." Sung as a straight blues in the style of one of Morrison's heroes, Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Goin' Down Geneva" is in the tradition of road-weary blues tunes, a milepost on the endless highway of touring performers who don't know which hat rack to call home. "It's not easy, baby," Morrison sang in his gruff voice, "living on the exile plan."

But this Irishman's exile has always been self-imposed. He has wandered through Europe and the United States, sometimes in the footsteps of his idols, then back to Ireland and Great Britain. The soul stops on this number aren't Memphis and Mobile, though, but Salzburg and Montreux. Of Geneva he sings, "Vince Taylor used to live here, nobody's ever heard of him."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/09/19/morrison_3/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/08/02/ojmedia/ http://www.salon.com/2000/08/02/ojmedia/#comments Wed, 02 Aug 2000 19:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/col/elder/2000/08/02/ojmedia Try as I did to enjoy a media-free vacation, the news has a way of slipping under whatever shield I devise. The big stories found me on a tiny island off Maine -- Bush's choice of Dick Cheney, the failure of the Mideast peace talks, the return of O.J.

Acquitted in September 1995 of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, O.J. Simpson was supposed to walk into the sunset with his children at his side, vowing all the while to scour the earth in search of his wife's true killer.

But then came the civil trial (in which the Juice was ordered to pay $33 million to the families of Nicole and Goldman). And that little trip to Panama. And the British documentary with his imitation of the shower scene from "Psycho." And the phone calls to the police in Florida. And the fight with Nicole's sister, Denise, on Fox News. Not to mention the book and the video ...

In the words of Dan Hicks, "How can I miss you when you won't go away?"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/08/02/ojmedia/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/07/31/generation/ http://www.salon.com/2000/07/31/generation/#comments Mon, 31 Jul 2000 08:53:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/07/31/generation The weekend before July Fourth found World War II being fought all over again on the New York Times bestsellers list. Tom Brokaw's book "The Greatest Generation" and its sequel, "The Greatest Generation Speaks," held the No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively, flanked by James Bradley's "Flags of Our Fathers" at No. 1 and Bob Greene's "Duty" at No. 9. While the preponderance of titles relating to the war and its veterans constitutes an obvious trend (sales doubtless reflected a recent spate of Father's Day gift giving), "The Greatest Generation" is the real phenomenon. The book has been on the New York Times bestsellers list for more than 80 weeks now and shows no signs of flagging.

If you are recovering from severe head trauma, or have been overseas for the past year and a half, you may not know that Brokaw's book is a celebration of the generation of Americans who survived the Depression and fought the Second World War -- my parents' generation. As the title implies, "The Greatest Generation" is a straightforward, largely unironic appreciation of the (mostly) men and women who served. The NBC anchor interviewed scores of veterans and their kin to come up with the 50-odd sketches that make up the book. (The sequel is drawn from the voluminous responses he first received.) There are famous people and unknowns chronicled here, men who escaped the conflict unscathed and others who paid dearly.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/07/31/generation/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/07/12/contentville/ http://www.salon.com/2000/07/12/contentville/#comments Wed, 12 Jul 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/col/elder/2000/07/12/contentville It may be early to pronounce Contentville, Steven Brill's megasite for readers -- "the Web's first store run for and by people who love content" -- a nonstarter. But the shocking lack of press generated by its arrival on July 5 certainly seems to be a bad sign.

Timing is everything, and in the wake of some well-publicized layoffs at content sites (including this one) media watchers may simply be too overcome with skepticism to sample Contentville's wares. A pure content site in this day and age? their silence says. You must be dreaming. Oh, and you're going to charge people for it? (More silence, rolling of eyes.)

"Skepticism is a virtue," declares the cover of Brill's Content, but as with most virtues, a little of it goes a long way.

To be sure, the knives have been out for Contentville ever since Brill announced his intention to join with such heavy hitters as CBS, the Ingram Book Group and the New York Times. Since its launch two years ago, Content, the magazine, has presented itself as the voice of morality in media, calling newspapers, networks, magazines and Web sites on their perceived shortcomings. (Fact-checking is a particular bjte noire of Mr. Brill's.) And the magazine has continuously viewed merger mania in the media world with alarm, proscribing the control of information by the few.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/07/12/contentville/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/06/28/editor_3/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/28/editor_3/#comments Wed, 28 Jun 2000 19:46:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/col/elder/2000/06/28/editor When I went for my first interview at a national magazine I was told they were looking for a "text editor." I remember thinking, "Isn't text what editors edit?" I don't mean the people in art or production who carry titles like "photo editor." This particular magazine had at least a dozen editors on the masthead, and to hear the fellow who hired me tell it, not one of them could line-edit a piece, let alone take a story apart and put it back together.

Not one of these editors, in other words, could edit.

Then I moved to New York, hay sticking out from under my hat, and went to work for women's fashion magazines. There it was a given that the fashion editors weren't generally editors in the green-visor sense, and weren't supposed to be. The titular head of one magazine where I worked seemed to do nothing but attend parties and chase girls: It was like working for a French Harpo.

At Vogue, where my wife worked, the division was more straight-ahead. They broke the editors down into two categories, the Show Ponies and the Work Horses. The Show Ponies did just that: They showed up at swank events, went to the collections, got their name in the gossip columns and in general represented. The Work Horses, well, they put the magazine out.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/06/28/editor_3/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/06/24/mergermeeting/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/24/mergermeeting/#comments Sat, 24 Jun 2000 19:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/col/elder/2000/06/24/mergermeeting Everyone's trying to get their arms around the significance of this," said Gerald Levin, CEO of Time Warner. He was addressing a crowd of several hundred Time Warner shareholders at a "special" meeting at the company's headquarters in New York Friday, and the "this" he was referring to was Time Warner's pending merger with AOL.

In January, when Levin and AOL CEO Steve Case announced the proposed merger in the same building, everyone was trying to get their arms around each other. Levin hugged Case, Time Warner's Ted Turner hugged AOL's Bob Pittman and Time Warner's Richard Parsons hugged everybody. It was a love feast the likes of which had not been seen since the Human Be-In, and there were no hard questions, just full-body embraces. (Levin and Parsons, still feeling the afterglow, came to Friday's merger meeting without their ties.)

Since then, however, a few snipers have taken aim at the union. Aside from the complaints filed with the feds by various consumer advocacy groups and rival media corporations such as Disney, the merger has been getting some hard looks from the European Union. It was they -- said Levin in response to a shareholder's question -- who were trying to get their arms around the meaning of the merger by launching a full-scale investigation of its implications. (Of particular concern to the EU is the new company's dominance of "the digital delivery of music via the Internet.")

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/06/24/mergermeeting/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/aol_6/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/aol_6/#comments Wed, 14 Jun 2000 19:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/feature/2000/06/14/aol As the merger of America Online and Time Warner lumbers toward its sweaty conclusion, odd pockets of resistance -- all joined by a singular desire to derail this megamarriage before it starts -- are cropping up in unlikely places.

Among the strange bedfellows: Internet service providers and Web sites that fear a lockout from an AOL Time Warner network, the authors of much of the content of the Time Inc. magazine division, skeptical congressmen from both political parties and a consortium of consumer advocacy groups encouraged by Disney.

Though this motley insurgency stands a snowball's chance in hell of actually derailing the merger -- the government has until the end of the year to approve it -- the assorted partisans (most of whom are fighting in the name of public interest and consumer protection) could wind up altering the nature of the agreement, quite likely for the better.

Open Sesame

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/aol_6/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/05/31/offspring/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/31/offspring/#comments Wed, 31 May 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/col/elder/2000/05/31/offspring Anyone looking for a magazine about raising children might be underwhelmed by all the offerings out there. Comparing titles is a bit like taste-testing various brands of stewed prunes.

First there are the cover photos (always photos, never illustrations): smiling babies, smiling siblings, smiling parents with babies and siblings. Then there are the cover lines, which invariably fall back on the numbers strategy: "Toddler Discipline: The 10 Golden Rules"; "Up All Night? A 7-Day Plan Guaranteed to Get Your Baby to Sleep"; "5 Emotional Skills All Children Need," etc.

People who put out magazines about children tend to stick with what works; daring experimenters usually get their hats handed to them by the circulation department. (Of course, you could say the same thing about women's magazines, which replace babies with celebrities, and men's titles, which replace babies with babes who happen to be celebrities.) For the most part, the market leaders -- Gruner & Jahr's Parents (1.8 million circulation), followed closely by Time Inc.'s Parenting (1.4 million), with G&J's slightly more upscale Child (920,000) trailing in their wake -- follow The Rules, at least on the surface.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/05/31/offspring/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/05/25/foxnews/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/25/foxnews/#comments Thu, 25 May 2000 20:19:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/business/col/elder/2000/05/25/foxnews On May 16, Rupert Murdoch's href="http://www.newscorp.com">News
Corp. sponsored a "new media workshop" in downtown Manhattan.

After a projected image of unofficial corporate mascot href="http://thesimpsons.com/splash_8.html">Homer Simpson ("Doh!") brought
cheers
from the suits in attendance, News Digital president Jon Richmond took the
podium to
tout the company's Web presence in the U.S. href="http://foxsports.com/">FoxSports.com and href="http://www.fox.com">Fox.com, he said, have become popular
destinations.
Nobody disagreed.

But when Richmond brought up href="http://foxnews.com">Foxnews.com, and News Corp.'s plans to
complement it
with local Fox TV affiliates, the crowd was silent.

The news channel has a site?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/05/25/foxnews/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/05/18/realsimple/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/18/realsimple/#comments Thu, 18 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/elde/2000/05/18/realsimple "I just simplified my life!"

So exclaimed Real Simple editor Susan Wyland over an impromptu lunch of beer and pizza that followed the news of her resignation. The timing of Wyland's announcement -- after weeks of speculation over the fate of the troubled Time Inc. magazine -- left many staff members certain she was pushed before she could jump.

"They're making her the patsy," said one staff member who chose to remain anonymous. "They didn't know what they wanted, either. This is what she said she was going to do all along."

The "this" the editor spoke of is an odd milange of being and nothingness, a celebration of simplicity in a rather austere and complicated package. Unfavorable press reaction and disappointment within Time Inc. itself seem to outweigh a generally favorable consumer acceptance and strong ad pages.

And the success of Hearst's O: The Oprah Magazine, which Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine made a point of praising in the New York Times on Monday, may have had something to do with it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/05/18/realsimple/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/inside_com/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/inside_com/#comments Tue, 16 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/elde/2000/05/16/inside_com After the stealth launch of Inside.com last week, the e-mail started flying.

Despite a "Sneak Preview" disclaimer on its home page, a lot of people viewed this version (which they might have called a "beta launch" a few years back) as the final cut. Responses were mixed.

Jim Romenesko, auteur of the popular Media News site, asked readers for their reactions. So far, they have run the gamut from gotta have it to fugedaboutit. Romenesko's site, which has been cited as a source of inspiration (at the very least) for the Inside.com idea, stands to lose as much traffic as anyone (Salon included) to the megasite. But ignoring the arrival of the much-hyped brainchild of Powerful Media founders Kurt Andersen and Michael Hirschorn is like trying to ignore a dolphin in your bathtub. (That dorsal fin might give you the wrong idea.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/inside_com/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/05/11/godtv/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/11/godtv/#comments Thu, 11 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/elde/2000/05/11/godtv God knows you don't see much Biblical programming on prime time TV.

Every holiday somebody trots out "The Ten Commandments" or "The Robe," but the major networks are usually unholy zones.

So it makes sense that folks at the Christian Web site iBelieve.com saw the CBS miniseries "Jesus" as a blessedly rare opportunity to advertise.

IBelieve, launched in January, bills itself as "a site for Christians of all denominations to learn how to apply their faith to all areas of their lives." "Jesus," whose two parts will air May 14 and 17, tells the story of the man from Nazareth, from birth to crucifixion. You might forgive iBelieve's John Nardini for considering the opportunity a marriage made in heaven.

"30 million people with an interest in Jesus watching for four hours," says Nardini, who handles marketing at the Grand Rapids, Mich. site. "It's a perfect audience for us."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/05/11/godtv/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/05/04/magazineawards/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/04/magazineawards/#comments Thu, 04 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/elde/2000/05/04/magazineawards Movers and shakers in the media world
are rather like Pokimon, the
"pocket monsters" beloved by elementary
school children. Pokimon, as any
kid can tell you, can only say their own
names when they meet ("Pikachu!
Pik-a-chu!" "Bulbasaur! Bul-ba-saur!"),
while media moguls can only talk about
themselves. And their companies. And
their visions for the future.

But at conventions such as the Media
Summit, produced by the Standard and New
York magazine and held in New York's
Museum of Modern Art Wednesday, these
moguls are given the opportunity to talk
about something else for a change. Like
their competitors. But like the
Pokimon they resemble, they keep
steering conversation back to themselves
and their businesses.

Michael Wolff, New York's media
columnist and the author of "Burn Rate,"
kicked off the proceedings by saying he
had been to 63 such conferences in the
'90s. Then he added, "Kurt Andersen was
on that many [panels] last week."

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