Give Me Some Slack

Many a song is marketed as the bottled zeitgeist of a generation, but when a fluky hit like Loser, by 23-year-old Los Angeles boy-waif Beck Hansen, runs up the charts, it has to be the real thing. With sarcastic lyrics like "I'm a loser, baby/ So why don't you kill me?" and its mix of rap-style grooves and slide guitar, the song has become an anthem of nihilism chic among slackers. But the singer isn't pleased with commercial success. "I didn't want things to get cheesy or homogenized," he says. "Not that they aren't already."

Big-Screen Elle

Back home in Australia she's nicknamed "the Body." In the States she's known for her swimsuit modeling. So it didn't take a genius to cast Elle MacPherson to play Sheela, the painter's model in Sirens, a new film set in Australia during the 1930s. This is MacPherson's acting debut (not counting a cameo in the film Alice), and she performs with a mischievous, sensual relish that has won critics over. "Americans equate nudity with sex," she says. "Australians don't." Silly Americans.

Seen & Heard

After Zsa Zsa Gabor called Elke Sommer a Hollywood has-been in a German magazine last year, Sommer sued, and last December a court ordered Gabor to pay Sommer $3 million. As a result, Gabor has filed for bankruptcy protection in Beverly Hills, California. The next time she slaps a cop, she'll be driving a Hyundai instead of a Rolls-Royce.

Surely he was expecting his own field of dreams, but spring training has been more like quicksand for Michael Jordan. So when he finally got his first hit (in 17 at bats), his teammates doused him in champagne. Enjoy it now, Michael. In the minor leagues it's beer at best.

He's published one short novel in the past 20 years, so devoted readers were thrilled to learn that Thomas Pynchon has produced a new work: liner notes to Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones. Pynchon describes the rare pleasure of enjoying Spike's big-band slapstick with a phrase that could apply to his own writings: "like good cowbell solos, few and far between."

Change of Heart

After Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith were divorced in 1978, it took them 11 years to remarry. But things seemed to happen more quickly last week. Griffith filed for divorce amid scuttlebutt that Johnson had chatted up an Aspen, Colorado, restaurant T-shirt saleswoman named Holly. Within days, though, the two stars reconciled. Meanwhile, Holly made the tour of tabloid-TV shows.