Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Salon Columnists
Follow these links for the most recent column by:
Susie Bright
Robert Burton, M.D.
Joe Conason
Sean Elder
David Horowitz
Garrison Keillor
Anne Lamott
Greil Marcus
Joyce Millman
Camille Paglia
Amy Reiter
Mary Roach
Scott Rosenberg
Ruth Shalit
Michael Sragow
Virginia Vitzthum
Sarah Vowell
Cintra Wilson
Burt Wolf

+ Columnists' schedule

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Music Interview
"Boy, you sing like your granddaddy"
Hank Williams III pays a debt to Nashville -- and looks toward Texas for real country music.
By David Bowman
[11/03/99]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
Why the High Llamas are more than just another workingman's Beach Boys.
By Andy Battaglia
[11/03/99]

Movie Interview
The horror of indie filmmaking
Scary movie director and "American Movie" star Mark Borchardt talks about living the examined life.
By Dakota Smith
[11/02/99]

Movie Interview
"American Movie"-maker
Chris Smith wins the indie-film lottery with his documentary about another struggling independent filmmaker.
By Martin Knelman
[11/02/99]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
One-man band Bob Log III makes the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion look like blues night at the local jazz club.
By Jason Ferguson
[11/02/99]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

When Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle said, "Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets," he didn't sound like a crackpot en route to an assassination. He sounded like he could have been any old reasonable American living west of the Hudson. I remember stumbling out of the ag building when it was over, grateful to walk home in the pure driven snow.

Sarah Vowell Sarah Vowell's column appears on the Arts & Entertainment site every other Wednesday. + Biography + Archives

New York used to serve a purpose. It used to be the big, bad metaphorical arena where evil duked it out with good. Especially in the gangster movies, a genre as irresistible as the western to American eyes. Even though I could have pointed to Manhattan's actual coordinates on a map -- just as Scorsese must have known that the Monument Valley in all those westerns is carved from real rocks by the real wind -- no one actually needed to go there. (Unless of course the president is ejected via pod into Manhattan during a terrorist attack on Air Force One, at which point it's fine to send that dreary Kurt Russell in after him as long as he can be injected with explosives that will blow him up if he can't get the prez out alive.)

New York was just a backdrop, a gritty if photogenic symbol of degeneration and anarchy that was both conveniently far away and as near as the next matinee. Sure, in my nice little town we had no mission as important as Travis Bickle's attempt to rescue a 12-year-old prostitute, but that gave us more free time to sit on the porch and read our six-page newspaper to keep up on the latest planning commission imbroglio. David Letterman exploited this distance better than anybody; an Indiana native, he must have known how comforting it would be, how thrilling, for viewers in the rest of the country to fall asleep to New York garbage-on-the-street wisecracks. It was exactly what we wanted to hear.

But something happened to cinematic New York that might have something to do with what happened to the real New York. Why else would the new Scorsese movie, "Bringing Out the Dead," the kind of bloody, violent urban thriller that's been the director's bread and butter from the get-go, make such a point at the beginning that it takes place "in the early '90s." Because apparently in the early '90s you could still find some decent crack houses and street O.D.'s to make a movie about. But now, in the (as long as you're white) kinder, cleaner Giuliani years, the most terrifying Gotham morality tale is Nora Ephron's "You've Got Mail": Oooh, they're building a chain bookstore! I'm so scared!

Next page | The current TV season: One big "I heart New York"