Salon | Brilliant Careers

P R O F I L E # 1

I hunger for your touch
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
The passion of Phil Spector

S A L O N
E M P O R I U M
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living obituaries
We launched Brilliant Careers for a simple reason: We got tired of having to wait for interesting people to die before reading something intelligent about them.
Profiles are a dying form. Celebrity mugs stare out from the cover of every commercial magazine, but all too often the stories that accompany those shiny photographs are little more than gussied-up press releases, filled with information about such eye-opening matters as the subject's feelings toward the director of his latest screen commodity, the formulaic lessons she learned from her latest romantic breakup and a canned quote, handed out on her press junket like stale candy, about her "offbeat" philosophy of life. The worst, of course, are pieces on movie stars, but the prevailing sycophancy and superficiality infect even stories on more substantive figures. Thomas Carlyle once said, "A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one" -- and the notoriously dyspeptic Scot never read People.
The one reliable exception to this carnival of glossy glibness is the obituary. Maybe it's because it's hard to see the shape of a life whole until it's over, maybe it's just because death brings a final halt to access journalism, but obituaries seem to hit all the notes that standard profiles miss. They approach their subjects with dignity, but without fawning. They sort out the significant personal details from the irrelevant, realizing that not all love affairs are created equal. Above all, they assess in a clear-eyed and unsentimental way the one thing their subjects will be remembered for -- their work.
With Brilliant Careers, which we inaugurate today with Mary Elizabeth Williams' piece on Phil Spector and which will appear every Tuesday, Salon will critique and celebrate the most interesting and influential people of our time. And best of all, we'll do it while they're still walking around.
SALON | Nov. 10, 1998


	P R O F I L E # 1 I hunger for your touch By Mary Elizabeth Williams The passion of Phil Spector S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		living obituaries We launched Brilliant Careers for a simple reason: We got tired of having to wait for interesting people to die before reading something intelligent about them. Profiles are a dying form. Celebrity mugs stare out from the cover of every commercial magazine, but all too often the stories that accompany those shiny photographs are little more than gussied-up press releases, filled with information about such eye-opening matters as the subject's feelings toward the director of his latest screen commodity, the formulaic lessons she learned from her latest romantic breakup and a canned quote, handed out on her press junket like stale candy, about her "offbeat" philosophy of life. The worst, of course, are pieces on movie stars, but the prevailing sycophancy and superficiality infect even stories on more substantive figures. Thomas Carlyle once said, "A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one" -- and the notoriously dyspeptic Scot never read People. The one reliable exception to this carnival of glossy glibness is the obituary. Maybe it's because it's hard to see the shape of a life whole until it's over, maybe it's just because death brings a final halt to access journalism, but obituaries seem to hit all the notes that standard profiles miss. They approach their subjects with dignity, but without fawning. They sort out the significant personal details from the irrelevant, realizing that not all love affairs are created equal. Above all, they assess in a clear-eyed and unsentimental way the one thing their subjects will be remembered for -- their work. With Brilliant Careers, which we inaugurate today with Mary Elizabeth Williams' piece on Phil Spector and which will appear every Tuesday, Salon will critique and celebrate the most interesting and influential people of our time. And best of all, we'll do it while they're still walking around. SALON \| Nov. 10, 1998