Word: postmodernity
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...cynical, slippery slope. Not so long ago, readers of autobiographies were meant to understand that Sammy Davis or William Paley actually produced his memoir. About a decade ago, the pretense was dropped and ghostwriters' names went onto book jackets; nobody minded. Now comes an extraordinary new stage in this postmodern devolution: works of fiction that the nominal celebrity authors not only didn't write but that publishers and celebrities admit they didn't write...
...public show was subdued. Host Christian Slater felt called upon to ask for applause for Madonna, whose cross-gender opening number, straight out of Berlin 1929, set a mix-and-match postmodern tone for the performances. Lenny Kravitz and Soul Asylum did their respective versions of the early '70s. Sharon Stone, perfectly pretty in her pink '50s prom dress, was Barbie, live. (In postshow remarks, she volunteered an answer to the question everybody wants to ask Sharon Stone: "Did you fish and hunt with your dad growing up in Pennsylvania?" She did.) U2's the Edge, with a channel-surfing...
...postmodern building that houses AT&T's microelectronics division is obscured from view by the thick forests of suburban New Jersey, and to some it once seemed an apt metaphor: for much of the 1980s, the unit was really lost in the woods. It was expected to lead AT&T's charge into the computer business, but its microchips sold poorly because they were overpriced, and the company's first commercial computers -- from PCs to a midsize system -- were flops. With losses topping $3 billion, AT&T was forced to pull back from the market. Says William Warwick, president...
...then there is that inimitable chatterbox Twyla Tharp, who lightens a dry, cluttered program on postmodern dance. She talks up a storm about her work and, in rehearsal, cows a dancer and his ballerina into showing more feeling for each other. How did she get into choreography? "Nobody else would tolerate me so I had to make up my own dances," she explains. And so the camera catches her alone in a studio, bulky in practice clothes and noshing on a carrot, as she starts designing some steps to a Sousa march. Delightful...
...TIME WHEN NEW AGE SEEMS old, postmodern seems prehistoric and the anti- Establishment energy of grunge rock is being packaged and marketed like so many Cheez Doodles, Depeche Mode's musical vision of the future already seems a thing of the past: too-cool-to-care vocals, lyrics like something off an answering machine at a suicide hotline, industrial-strength dance grooves as unforgiving as capitalism itself. In retrospect, many of the band's angst- laden hits -- Master and Servant, Fly on the Windscreen -- now seem so terribly '80s, dispassionate, cold and metallic. Music written by androids, produced by cyborgs...