Word: tapes
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...media gladly helped inflate that image. The '80s were the new '20s, and here was its Capone! And Gotti obsessed over his coverage. TIME put an Andy Warhol portrait of him on its cover in 1986, and Gotti framed it in his office. On one surveillance tape, he and his associates can be heard critiquing a TV re-enactment of the Mob hit that brought him to power. Even that hit was cinematic: his predecessor, Paul Castellano, was gunned down in front of Sparks steak house in crowded midtown Manhattan at Christmastime. All Martin Scorsese would have added were credits...
Good Mob bosses--the ones who lead long careers and die of old age in their own homes--do not act like Mob bosses. Gotti was foolhardy, he was blowhard-y, he talked too proudly and loudly, and the government finally gave him enough blank tape to hang himself. In 1992 he was sent up for murder and racketeering. If his mobster act was his doom, though, it was also his source of legitimacy. Where did he learn what we expect a Mob boss to look like? Well, where did you? Pop culture's fascination with mobsters--in movies...
...indulge our power fantasies, but the series is really about the end of empire. (Boss Tony Soprano constantly escapes his woes by losing himself in Mob flicks like Public Enemy.) And the Sopranos' counterparts? They're counting down their twilight days, like the New Jersey DeCavalcantes, caught on tape debating the show's merits and looking for signs that its characters are based on them. "It's not me," one says pitiably. "I'm not even existing over there...
...streets. How anyone could have differentiated this from what Tehran normally looks like, I'm not sure, but apparently there were especially powerful American-flag flames. But I'm glad they beat us, since we wouldn't have enjoyed it if we had won. We don't throw ticker-tape parades for beating Iran at stuff, because if we did, we'd be short on ticker tape. The only thing we could possibly lose to Iran at besides soccer is subjugating women. Now that Russia isn't important, there's no one for us to get juiced about. The Taliban...
...device into your computer and transferring songs off the hard drive. But next-generation audio players like the Digisette DUO-DX E-Cassette ($189) can record songs directly from a stereo system without computer software--or, for that matter, a computer. Just pop the DUO-DX into a stereo tape deck, hit the record button and automatically convert CDs, tapes or radio tunes into MP3 files...