The Meridian Archive
MER
March 1995
The Next Bohemia

The Next Bohemia

Closed mid-February 1995 · On stands late February 1995

The Front

Index of the Thaw

Regional theater subscription renewals, indie-label single sales, rent differentials in college towns block by block — and, elsewhere, the advance ticket sales for a reunited stadium act's summer tour, moving faster than the promoters staffed for

A Search Engine's First Year

A short note on the early web's television fan communities and the technology that let a canceled show's audience organize itself, apart from any account of the show's own subject

The Essay

What Silence Reads As

A house essay on rooms that go quiet for different reasons — a winter theater season's empty houses, a network sitcom's sudden ratings collapse, a chart-topping pop act's canceled tour dates — and what silence means in each

The Foreign File

Warsaw's Second Decade

Furniture on a country five years into the transition

The Feature Well

The Price of a Face

A profile of the fashion industry's newly minted supermodel economy — the day rates, the exclusive contracts, the first cosmetics deals worth more than a studio picture

The Line Breaks Uptown

A formal reading of rap lyricism — scansion, rhyme scheme, internal rhyme — given the same critical apparatus the magazine gives verse, commissioned from an unpublished twenty-six-year-old critic pulled off a Xeroxed Newark record-shop quarterly's mailing list

The City

Subject: Williamsburg as the city's next bohemia — cheap lofts, galleries, bands, a scene forming

The Back

Books: Review of a debut story collection · Art: A first group show at a gallery outside New York, briefly · Film: Late-winter releases, house style, with a note on a broad studio comedy's opening-weekend gross running well ahead of the quarter's prestige pictures