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Recently in Salon Media

Brand X
The Mr. Peanut chronicles
Burned by past disasters, icon managers have learned the hard way that the suave mascot must never wear a wetsuit and that Ronald McDonald cannot hang out in bars.
By Ruth Shalit
[03/24/00]

Brand X
The inner Doughboy
How an army of admen battle to define and protect the true nature of the Jolly Green Giant, the Pillsbury Doughboy and other advertising spokescharacters.
By Ruth Shalit
[03/23/00]

Media
The San Francisco Examiner, 1887-2000
Underfunded and outmanned, the scrappy afternoon paper could sometimes prevail over the competition -- but couldn't survive its own mismanagement.
By Scott Rosenberg
[03/21/00]

Column
Real Life Rock Top 10

By Greil Marcus
[03/20/00]

Column
Real Life Rock Top 10

By Greil Marcus
[03/06/00]

Complete archives for Media

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1) Lou Reed "Possum Time" from "Ecstasy" (Reprise)

It's 18 minutes long and you can play it all day long. A huge fuzztone that sounds more like a construction site than a guitar sets an implacable, unsatisfiable zigzag line in play. "It's possum time!" a slightly demented, definitely pleased man announces. "I feel like a possum in every way!" In fact he sounds like a man who won't back down, and you follow him, at a distance, on a nighttown walk. When it ends it's as if the sun is coming up -- so soon? Already? You've seen nothing that isn't ugly, but the walk has its own rewards. "The only one left standing," Reed says, sounding tired. He's grown all the way into his role as bad conscience -- his own and the nation's. He may even grow out of it, but not yet. When, in the Velvet Underground, in another era, a young man who sounded old sang with fright and nausea of "all the dead bodies piled up in mounds," who'd have thought that more than three decades later he'd still be prowling the streets looking for more of them, more bodies, more mounds, like a detective of the obvious?

2) Phil Collins "You'll Be in My Heart" best original song (Academy Awards, Mar. 26)

Given that as an original song "You'll Be in My Heart" barely exists, Collins sang the hell out of it -- while wearing the night's best-looking suit.

3) Nick Tosches "The Devil and Sonny Liston" (Little, Brown)

This short, clean book about the St. Louis Stagger Lee who in 1964, in one of the most shocking upsets in boxing history, lost the heavyweight championship to Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali, soon enough), is a keen reminder of the limits of biography -- limits biographers almost never respect. That is: The biographer's subject has no inner life. No matter how many letters, diaries or suicide notes the subject leaves behind, all you have are lies. You can't know what goes on in someone else's head -- unless you are a novelist, and are willing to imagine another's inner life, at which point biography ceases and fiction begins. So as you pass through this account of a man whose notoriety probably bought him only a few more years than he could have expected from a life on the street, don't wonder what, in the depths of his soul, he really thought. As Tosches tries to decide why Liston was found dead in his house in Las Vegas in 1971 -- dead, probably, for a week -- think about what Tosches calls "the unseen sediment, detritus, and sludge beneath the course of this book." He means the world of manipulation and enforcement, murder and fraud, that the biographer's illusion that we can know what makes a person tick allows us to ignore.

4 & 5) Patti Smith "Gung Ho" (Arista) & Angie Aparo "The American" (Arista)

Two albums from the same label with the American flag imprinted on the discs. Aparo is a shaved-head guy who poses in front of urban wreckage but sings like a sensitive '70s troubadour; Smith bleeds for all humankind, but she's noisier. On "Strange Messengers" she condemns slavery. Just as she once confidently declared herself a "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger," now she slumps to the ground as the whip cuts her flesh and her children are sold down the river. "History sends such strange messengers," she announces: Guess who? With her band just a megaphone and her singing merely a flag to wave, she pulls out all the stops, shouting: "My people!/I speak to you!/I burned, I swung, I toiled for you and your children!" But now all her people do is "burn out your lives on crack and sorrowful stories," betraying their ancestors, betraying her. (By the way, what's wrong with sorrowful stories?) She hasn't even gotten to Vietnam yet, or the sneering twist she gives the words "Colonial-ism, imperial-ism," as if the real purpose of history were to confirm the hipster's superiority to it. "Donna, donna, donna/I'm the world's Madonna," National Lampoon's "Radio Dinner" once had Joan Baez warble; Smith has taken over, but somehow lost Baez's fab sense of humor along the way.

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