Tom Hanks = the Jimmy Stewart of our day?
January 12, 2001 4:12 PM Subscribe
posted by rodii at 4:46 PM on January 12, 2001
The only reason that I still stop by occasionally is to check for a new Camille Paglia column and that's becoming increasingly rare. Perhaps Ms. P has become disgusted with their boringly predictable political agenda.
I hope they hurry up and lay off the rest of their staff soon.
posted by MrBaliHai at 5:10 PM on January 12, 2001
posted by sonofsamiam at 7:51 PM on January 12, 2001
Sadly , sadly . . . yes.
posted by ojsbuddy at 9:16 PM on January 12, 2001
posted by tomorama at 12:12 AM on January 13, 2001
posted by tomorama at 12:13 AM on January 13, 2001
posted by ookamaka at 5:07 PM on January 13, 2001
I think this is a valid if rather obvious point, though. Jimmy Stewart? Sure, especially if you throw in a big lean toward Jack Lemmon. Hanks is great, although he's succumbing to his own greatness as other great actors have (Nicholson, Brando), and doing a narrower range of roles. Star turns.
posted by dhartung at 7:37 PM on January 13, 2001
The difference is that if you called up Natural History and asked what's with it, they'd tell you, and fully admit those sorts of people are their prime demographic. But if you asked someone at Salon why they're so overtly liberal, they'd say you were seeing things. They claim to be something they're not, namely a mainstream web magazine.
Not that it really matters that much in anything other than a moral sense; they're so blatant that everyone has long since figured them out. And that's a big part of the reason they're dying; If you're going to be that one-sided, you better be so great that you get twice as many of the potential readers from that side, since nobody else is going to be willing to bother with you. And Salon isn't that great.
I suppose it's San Francisco syndrome: Since everyone around them in the Bay Area (that they were willing to hang out with, anyway) was liberal and riding the dotcom wealth wave, they assumed everyone else in the country was just like them, and would want to read a liberal dotcom web mag. But it turned out that too many of the techie types out there are either conservative or possessed of a sort of warped social moderate/fiscal conservative Cyber-Libertarianism, and/or just not able to take as much self-absorbed snarkyness as Salon likes to dish out. To say nothing of the true liberals that find them all too upper-class-snotty to accept and would rather hang out at Indymedia or anyplace more egalitarian. Thus, not enough eyeballs, even before the money spigot started to dry up.
I never understood how they could name a section "Mothers That Think." It sounds so elitist; most mothers don't think?
Oh yeah, Hanks. Sure, he can be Stewart2K, as long as he doesn't end up on Jay Leno 40 years from now reading bad poems about his dog.
posted by aaron at 11:20 PM on January 13, 2001
Salon seems a lot more bitter to me after the layoffs, actually. You can almost feel the seething pain behind every article.
posted by kindall at 1:03 AM on January 14, 2001
posted by MattD at 1:52 PM on January 14, 2001
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The Son: their seeming obsession, prosecuted mainly through the "Mothers Who Think" division, with exploring, defending and/or glamorizing the sexual identify and lifestyle of what for want of a better word would be considered the Sex in the City cohort -- smart women, of (mainly) white and upper/upper middle class backgrounds, of broad sexual appetites and experience, whether in their teens or in their 40s, whether single and fretful, single and happy, or married to supportive if occasionally frustratingly underpassionate bearded academics or journalists?
posted by MattD at 4:22 PM on January 12, 2001