View: letter from the Editor March 2003

"I don't know one person in the world with a pulse who hasn't been anxious," says Lou Reed on page 161 of this issue. He says this in a conversation with Greil Marcus, the magazine's music columnist, in which they're talking about Edgar Allan Poe, whose writing has inspired Reed's ambitious new record The Raven, named after one of the poet's most famous works. While he isn't the only musician by far to take on Poe--Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Philip Glass, Marilyn Manson, Marianne Faithfull, and Nine Inch Nails are just a few inspired by this writer--it's so typical of Reed that he would release such a heavy-duty record devoted to a writer whose uncanny, prescient works bear such a profound understanding of the buried secrets and truths in the human psyche.

Hey: Reed's record isn't going to sell like a Britney Spears production. That's not the point. It may do well--it may not. But whoever picks it up and listens to it will have gone somewhere. That's how Reed makes music. He is an artist who has to do work that challenges him. After all these years of being a legend, he still has his claws and his fangs. Thank goodness. Fame didn't tame him. Fortune didn't tempt him. He's a lot like Poe in that both men had the opportunity to be unbelievably successful if they had joined the mainstream--but something inside them pulled them to stay on the edges of culture and experience, to "walk on the wild side," as it were.

Today, more than ever, as things get more formulaic, we need artists like them. I was talking to Patrick Giles, one of the members of the Interview team, about this, and he said something that nailed why they matter so much: "Right now, when so much of our culture is owned, prepackaged, and sold to us by a dwindling number of owners, and when there seems to be so much more to fear out there, we need those lone voices who've already made it to the edge, and who've come back with tales to tell." And songs to sing.

As much as we need people who know their way around the dark, we also need the light, and people who can make things light for us. We also need the chance to laugh; and that's exactly what cover girl Kate Hudson gives us in her latest movie, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which will have just come out as this issue hits the stands. This film is not pretending to be anything but what it is--a screwball romantic comedy about a bet that backfires. It's the kind of movie that they used to make. When I saw it, I thought about the Doris Day/Rock Hudson films of the '50s and '60s, which pivot around a romance that will ultimately happen, but not before a whole string of plot twists and misunderstandings occur. These are innocent films--and they are of a genre that is making a comeback, as we will see over the next few months with a number of new movies that share a similar sensibility. To my mind, it's not nostalgia that is going on here but a desire for a sense of safety. In these movies, things go wrong, yet at the end, because of everything that's gone wrong, things work out. To a great spring.

INGRID SISCHY

EDITOR IN CHIEF

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning