Search Salon

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

Recently in Salon People

People Feature
Celebrity rehab in the new millennium
The famous will always fall from grace. A far more interesting topic: Whose reputation will be restored?
By Steve Burgess
[08/28/99]

Nothing Personal
Sam Houston, we have a problem
Here we go again: NewsMax.com claims prez used the thinking man's Dristan; is Rowdy Rodham Clinton ready for the ring? Plus: Exclusive! Salon correspondent Tapper denies he's a Mossad agent.
By Amy Reiter
[08/27/99]

People Feature
Francis Veber plays the interview game ... and wins!
The man who gave us "The Dinner Game" and "La Cage aux Folles" is just as entertaining as his films.
By Michael Sragow
[08/27/99]

Nothing Personal
The art of crime
Galleries making a killing any way they can; Unabomber's new editor ethically impaired? Sporty Spice declares herself the Antichrist. Plus: New Dubya scandal! He once got his kicks from a "roaring afterburner." Yeow!
By Amy Reiter
[08/26/99]

Rogues' Gallery
Blow me down! It's the Rime of the Ancient Unabomber
Move over, James Cameron -- Ted Kaczynski has a boat story to tell! Plus: What's that moose doing in my pool? The backstroke!
By Douglas Cruickshank
[08/26/99]

Complete archives for People

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

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

And each of course is living half a lie. Journalists may live inner lives as Indian scouts, trail bosses, gumshoes and CIA operatives licensed to seek, find and drain our quarry of the precious blood of information. But those who buy and sell the news hold the cards; they buy and sell punks like us every day. They know that when it gets cold outside we want to come inside and sit by the warm light of a good 401(K) plan.

Also Today Celebrity rehab in the new millennium The famous will always fall from grace. A far more interesting topic: Whose reputation will be restored?

Journalists may want to be priests and soothsayers, but mainly we study the national circuses, fireworks shows and magic acts narrated by the likes of Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, hoping to divine in them some oracular code like the spidery breaks in a lamb's scapula roasted on the Aegean plains. We read our future in the fractures of our brittle national melting pot.

And all the signs indicate that our nation has gone mad with lust for fame.

And yet, while professing high purposes in these things, to earn our money we sing of babies fallen down wells and the untimely deaths of hobo minstrels.

When I was working at a San Francisco weekly some years back, the coked-up producer of a then-obscure but now world-famous rock star called me on the phone and said, "What will it take to get [my boy] on the cover?"

"Five thousand," I said. There was a long pause while he thought it over.

Then there's the joke about the Hollywood press agent who calls the journalist and asks how he can get his client's name in the paper.

"Shoot her," says the journalist.

You want press? Shoot me.

That's the gig.
salon.com | Aug. 28, 1999

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

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

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

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

Search Salon