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R E C E N T L Y

And a little scumbag shall lead them
By James Poniewozik
Did a sex-mad tabloid media hijack the public discourse in 1998? We should be so lucky
(12/22/98)

Cool on global warming
By Susan Lehman
Is it a conflict of interest for a Newsweek editor to rally anti-environmentalists?
(12/17/98)

Mickey Mouse scandal grips nation
By Gary Krist
Darlene voted out of Mousketeers on straight party lines -- charged with doing really, really bad things
(12/16/98)

Brillian mistake
By James Poniewozik
Why Brill's Content is too good for this world
(12/15/98)

The strange liberation of Michael Huffington
By Susan Lehman
Us goes weekly, all the Remnick that's fit to print and other tales of media madness
(12/10/98)

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BROWSE THE
UNSPUN
ARCHIVE

DREDGING THE 1998 ARCHIVES OF ART,
POP CULTURE AND POLITICS REVEALS A
PRIVATE CULTURAL CANON.

BY STEVE ERICKSON | Hurtling faster and faster toward the event horizon of a year from now, here is the Unspun Top 10 of 1998 -- artifacts to take with you down the wormhole:

1) "Memory Gospel" by Moby: When time so outraces memory that all we can do is try to remember the future, when psychic rootlessness and cultural entropy constitute the only aesthetic anyone can believe in anymore, this soaring B-side clandestinely hidden on the latest single by the most willfully alienated artist of the decade provided a subliminal soundtrack for everything else. A pop response to Henryk Gorecki's "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," it short-circuited spiritual foreplay and cut straight to the ecstasy, the blur of orgasm merged with the careen of history.

2) Angelina Jolie in "Gia": This HBO special never really knew what to make of its subject and didn't much care, figuring if it stripped '80s supermodel Gia Carangi bare enough it could have things both ways, making her descent into AIDS as much fun for us as it was tragic for her. But in so exposing Gia, the film also unleashed actress Jolie, and got more than it bargained for. Spitting in the face of whatever glamorous delusions the filmmakers had about Gia's life, Jolie's ferocious exorcism was in a tradition that most recently includes Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves" and Sheryl Lee in "Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me," but goes back 70 years to Maria Falconetti in Carl Dreyer's "Passion of Joan of Arc" -- the first truly transcendent performance in the history of celluloid. Given even the most cursory reflection, it shouldn't be particularly surprising to anyone that this tradition has been, again and again, most boldly and relentlessly and laceratingly written by women.

3) The Linda Tripp Telephone Tapes: One of the more remarkable things about Madame Tripp is how she defies even the most overwrought effort at empathy. In an age of moral ambiguity and confusion, the genius of the Tripp tapes is their exquisitely uncomplicated villainy, the most clear-cut, black-and-white case in memory of betrayal beyond the pale, however much ghastly apologizing may be done on her behalf by the likes of Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who has suggested that Tripp was only, after all, "protecting herself." I admit that when she met the press following her grand jury testimony and intoned to America, "Who am I? I am you," it gave me pause; I wondered if she was right. But the plain fact of the matter is that whatever doubts I have about a thousand other things in my life, I can say with complete confidence I haven't a single close friend who would secretly tape a telephone conversation of mine even to save himself or herself from jail, and my guess is you probably haven't either. Unless it's Bill Kristol.

4) "Traveller" by Talvin Singh: Alternately harrowing and gorgeous, a thousand vividly hued visions of an ancient yesterday flowing into the black void of the electronic tomorrow, the karmic Indian swells in this opening track from Singh's CD "OK" finally overwhelm the underlying moan of technonihilism. In so doing, it sounds like nothing less than the first music you'll hear sputtering across the airwaves at 12:01 in the morning on Jan. 1, 2000, having arrived, through some Einsteinian warp, a year ahead of schedule.

5) "Girl in Landscape" by Jonathan Lethem: For some fans of this author's earlier novels -- genre-busting fun and games such as "Gun, With Occasional Music" and "As She Climbed Across the Table" -- this book was something of a letdown. In fact, with its insightful and unsettling portrait of adolescence on a bleak, distant planet (isn't one of the great traumas of life moving to another neighborhood when you're a teenager?), this is Lethem's most emotionally radical work yet. Slipping back and forth across the border between exotic and ruined exterior landscapes on the one hand and a young girl's familiar and claustrophobic interior drama on the other, the novel renders her life a no man's land even as it reveals that the most exotic landscape of all is the vista of the soul.

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