T A B L E_.T A L K Seen a TV ad that affects you like fingernails on the blackboard? Name it and share your misery in the Television area of Table Talk   Extra! Extra! Find the media books you want to read at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y I can't get arrested in this town! By James Poniewozik A tale of the thin blue rope line (03/30/99) $400,000 misunderstanding By Susan Lehman So maybe Vanity Fair writers don't actually make 400 grand. Who needs it, when editor Graydon Carter is constantly sending them sweet personal notes on blue stationery? (03/25/99) Why Elia Kazan should not receive an Oscar By Steve Erickson By bestowing a special honor on the director, who already has won two Oscars, the academy is glossing over history (03/17/99) Strange fruit By James Poniewozik Garden Escape is a new publication grown from the fertile soil of Garden.com. You might call it a catalog; they call it the ultimate service magazine. What if they're right? (03/16/99) Kiddie-porn trafficker -- or crusading undercover reporter? By Susan Lehman Larry Matthews' 18-month sentence for receiving and transmitting kiddie porn raises difficult First Amendment issues (03/11/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE UNSPUN ARCHIVE		SWING NATION RIP | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - A couple of weeks ago I got an e-mail from Salon inviting me to put my dibs on future famous dead people. I assume this was precipitated partly by my frantic but cruelly thwarted desire to write the Dusty Springfield obit; Dusty was my all-time favorite female singer in the sense that a singer can be an all-time favorite even when you understand perfectly well she isn't in the class of Aretha or Billie. No singer was ever more unabashed or exposed than Dusty, and it's partly for that reason she wasn't cool even in the '60s; and later when she did become cool, sort of, it was for the same cheap camp value that finally made Sinatra cool. Dusty wasn't the doll of Woodstock Nation. You loved Dusty in secret, hiding "Dusty in Memphis" behind the Crosby, Stills and Nash album that, a couple of years later, you would never listen to again because you had finally come to your senses. Receiving this e-mail, thinking about whose celebrated carcass I really cared about eulogizing in the months or years to come, what obits I could still write out of real passion rather than some journalistic obligation, I realized that with the passage of time most of the artists who really meant something to me had slipped away -- those who spoke to me through and over and around the slick New York media blather about what swings and what doesn't. There's still Van Morrison, of course, and Ray Charles. But hey, I'm not hurrying anyone along. If there are still examples of true oddball genius out there -- and if you've heard the 21st century blues of PJ Harvey's "The Wind" or Björk's "Hunter" from a few years back, or the new Sparklehorse CD, then you know that there are -- they don't exist as part of the mass culture anymore, at the intersection of vision and Zeitgeist. They struggle for oxygen somewhere off to the side, because more and more a '90s media-culture that "swings" has no room for such visions; both the culture and the media are now almost completely about affect. The most remarkable thing about the New Swing is how untransformed it is by contemporary experience, how unreflective it is of anyone's real life. Those who have adopted it have done so wholesale, resolutely determined not to make it their own; the New Swing's allure is how it never threatens to reveal the feelings or values of the times. The New Swing doesn't have even the honesty of vulgar nostalgia. If people were actually sitting around playing Duke Ellington's Blanton-Webster records, that would be one thing. But they're not, they're playing Brian Setzer, whose last manifestation of cultural authenticity was as a rockabilly hepcat from Long Island. Advertising agents and media mavens and magazine editors to the contrary, this millennium is not going to swing its way out of our lives nine months from now. It's going to lurch, slouch, crash or slither, but it's not going to swing, and the next time someone comes up and tells you something swings or doesn't, you're under a moral obligation to hit him. And while I can report to you the good news that the New Swing now seems to be dead or dying, given the evidence of the newest Gap khaki TV ads, unfortunately the new ads feature models line-dancing to country music. If you haven't seen them yet, you can take my word for it: They're an apocalyptic horror practically out of the Book of Revelation, and even Heather Graham wouldn't convince you otherwise. SALON | March 31, 1999 Steve Erickson's new novel, "The Sea Came in at Midnight," is published by Bard/Avon.