The Late Adopter

"New Breeding Program Aimed At Keeping Moderate Republicans From Going Extinct"

2012-02-15T00:12:00.000-08:00

"Though hopes for the captive breeding program remain high, many leading political conservationists note the number of optimal habitats for moderate, freethinking Republicans across the country has shrunk drastically, with studies showing the species may never again be able to recover in areas where it has been totally eradicated, such as the South and the GOP caucus in the House of Representatives."

From The Onion.

Vested Interest

2012-02-13T22:16:00.000-08:00

"You may notice a wide range here—the sweater vest has been proudly adopted by jocks, rich guys, guys who want to seem friendlier, and cool young men. Indeed, at first glance, the sweater vest seems riddled with contradiction. It lies at the intersection of practicality (it provides warmth to the core while leaving the arms unencumbered ) and frivolity (it is often used purely and impractically to jazz up an otherwise staid ensemble). The look is both boyish and grandfatherly, sporty and fusty, conservative and eccentric, old-fashioned and hip. These conflicting connotations emerge even more clearly when you look at the ways the sweater vest has been mobilized by various costume designers over the years: On Chandler Bing, the vest informs us that we’re looking at a lovable loser; on Ferris Bueller it reads as retro with a touch of punk; on Dirty Harry, the vest says rogue; on Steve Urkel it says nerd; worn with short sleeves and bulging biceps, the vest helps make Brad Pitt into a tough guy; the argyle version worn with Dockers tells us that Michael Bluth is a total square."

Inspired by Rick Santorum, Julia Felsenthal in Slate explores the sartorial meaning of the sweater vest.

"An Important Book Less Because of What It Says than Because of What It Omits"

2012-02-08T22:48:00.000-08:00

"Murray nostalgically regrets the lost America of his 1950s Midwestern boyhood. But to describe in any true way how that America was lost would require a reckoning of how that America was made. Unwilling, as he acknowledges, to submit his politics to the check of uncongenial evidence, Murray prefers to avoid encountering the evidence that might shake his politics."

David Frum at The Daily Beast writes an epic review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

In The New York Times, Paul Krugman joins in on the criticism of Murray.

"Family Unsure What To Do With Dead Hipster's Possessions"

2012-02-08T22:10:00.000-08:00

"'I just can't believe how much stuff Kent collected over the years,' said Lowery Tuesday. 'There's a poster for some movie called Urgh!, stacks of empty Quisp cereal boxes, at least five old lamps that don't work, and a slew of little plastic toys. Obviously, all these things meant something to Kent— but what? And why?'"

From The Onion, 2003.

Styles for 1912

2012-02-08T21:51:00.000-08:00

"The exciting portion of the 2012 primary season may be winding down, but one hundred years ago one of the most dramatic elections in American history was just getting underway. Which made us wonder: what would it be like to cover the 1912 race the same way we cover the current contest? An experiment then: blogging the 1912 election."

Gabriel Snyder at The Atlantic Wire introduces the 1912 Project.

"Neither a Man nor a Crowd nor a Nation Can Be Trusted to Act Humanely or to Think Sanely under the Influence of a Great Fear"

2012-02-08T21:43:00.000-08:00

"Like Father Coughlin, Billie James Hargis, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and so many other right wing media crusaders before them, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham understand that for many religious Americans, 'evil' is not just an adjective but also a noun. When the Puritans first arrived in New England, they believed they were reclaiming a wilderness from Satan. Many traditionalists on the right, whether Christian Millennialists or not, feel much the same way.
"To them, Godless Communism or Secular Humanism isn't the absence of a religious orientation so much as they are Satanic religions in and of themselves, whose acolytes glorify evil, promote the slaughter of innocent, unborn babies, and persecute believing Christians. Blue State America is Rome in the time of Christ. Whether its depravity is manifested in the form of sexual libertinage, income redistribution, spiritual or economic incontinence, blasphemy, women's and gay rights, or the threat of 'race mixing,' anathema and even violence are completely appropriate responses to it."

The Atlantic runs an excerpt of Arthur Goldwag's The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right.

"Something of His Subject’s Spirit"

2012-02-07T22:37:00.000-08:00

"Three years before he entered Gardner’s studio, Lincoln termed the United States, in one of his early messages to Congress, 'the last best hope of earth.' Considering that our fragile Union was not 100 years old and stood a good chance of dissolving, it was an improbable thing to say. But Lincoln saw beyond the bloodshed and division. He saw us not only as we were, but as we might be. And he calls on us through the ages to commit ourselves to the unfinished work he so nobly advanced—the work of perfecting our Union."

President Obama discusses an 1865 photograph of Abraham Lincoln in The Atlantic's special issue on the Civil War.

"Healthcare Reform's Best—and Last—Shot"

2012-02-06T20:44:00.000-08:00

"Criticism of the Obama administration gained momentum through 2009, and even became strangely vogue among economists and columnists who were widely thought to be on the president’s side. It was in this context that voices who had lionized Obama—from seasoned pragmatists like Robert Reich (who blurbs Starr’s book) to MoveOn.org—spoke of the 'public option' as the holy grail, and of Obama as its perfidious guardian. Perhaps it was the magical word 'public,' or the vague sense that Obama, having worked to salvage banks and restructure the car companies, was now protecting the profits of insurance companies. Perhaps it was the way this insinuation was magnified by the charge that the members of Obama’s economic team were mostly disciples of Robert Rubin, thus to blame for deregulating investment banking and causing the financial crisis in the first place. Perhaps it was the way Obama’s half-heartedness about a public plan, which he knew the Senate would never give him, suggested timidity. In any case, Obama’s left critics now lambasted him. Former DNC chair Howard Dean declared in November 2009 that without the public option 'this bill is worthless and should be defeated'—not grounds for drug testing, perhaps, but possibly for prescribing some Xanax."

Bernard Avishai in The Nation reviews Paul Starr's Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform.

"Forced to Choose Between God and Man, Choose Women"

2012-02-06T19:52:00.000-08:00

"According to Walsh, religious freedom is reserved for 'anybody but Catholics.' Nonsense. Are Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other pacifists exempt from taxes that pay for war and weapons? Can Scientologists, who abhor psychiatry, deduct the costs of the National Institute of Mental Health? As an atheist, a feminist, a progressive, I ante up for so much stuff that violates my conscience, the government should probably pay me damages. Why should the bishops be exempt from the costs of living in a pluralistic society? Walsh cites the Amish, who are exempt from buying health insurance because they have a conscientious objection to it, but the Amish are a self-isolated band of would-be nineteenth-century farmers; they don’t try to make others read by kerosene lamps or demand the government subsidize their buggies. The Catholic church, by contrast, runs institutions that employ, teach and care for millions of people, for which it gets oceans of public money. A great many of those employed and served aren’t even Catholic: at Jesuit universities, almost half the students aren’t in the church; at Notre Dame, almost half the faculty is non-Catholic, and that is not unusual."

Katha Pollitt in The Nation defends the Obama adminstration's contraception decision.

And Joan Walsh in Salon says that Catholics should support Obama and preach what they practice.

In Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan argues that Obama has won the debate.

"Um…What Message?"

2012-02-05T21:15:00.000-08:00

"Occupy started out well with its, 'We are the 99%' slogan. Simple and powerful, those remarks really did help to change the conversation in our political culture to one that at least addressed issues of income and wealth inequality. But…now what? There’s no demand in 'We are the 99%.' Just an assertion of aggrieved identity."

Rich Yeselson at the Washington Monthly criticizes Occupy Oakland.

"Forced Worship Stinks in God's Nostrils"

2012-02-05T19:50:00.000-08:00

"Williams next linked religious and political freedom. It was then universally believed that governments derived their authority from God. Even Winthrop, after being elected governor in Massachusetts, told voters, 'Though chosen by you, our authority comes from God.'
"Williams disputed this. Considering the state secular, he declared governments mere 'agents' deriving their authority from citizens and having 'no more power, nor for longer time, than the people … shall betrust them with.' This statement sounds self-evident now. It was revolutionary then."

John M. Barry in the Los Angeles Times discusses the life of Roger Williams.

"A Cinematic Rorschach of Social Changes Percolating through Postwar Society"

2012-02-04T20:35:00.000-08:00

"Just as Lord claims, these films are disturbing to process. It’s incredible to think that their subversive themes survived the scrutiny of the Hays Code censors, who bowdlerized American films between 1930 and 1967. Taylor’s first big break came in 1944, at the age of 12, when she starred in 'National Velvet.' But her first important grown-up role was in a movie about unwanted pregnancy and, tacitly, abortion ('A Place in the Sun,' 1951). She confronted sexism and racial prejudice in the Texas epic 'Giant,' and her later films addressed female sexual autonomy ('BUtterfield 8'), homosexuality ('Suddenly, Last Summer,' 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof') and female fury ('Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'). Their daring subjects aside, these films are made disconcerting by Taylor’s unrestrained physicality and unmuted emotion."

In The New York Times, Liesl Schillinger reviews M.G. Lord's The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice.

"Obama Criticized For Living In Lavish Mansion While Most Americans Struggle To Make Ends Meet"

2012-02-01T23:42:00.000-08:00

"'Each morning, as most office workers are squeezing into tiny cubicles, the president is kicking back in an 800-square-foot space with not one, but two separate couches,' said pundit and blogger Chet Ogilvy, adding that Obama even employed a personal secretary to 'handle the phones and basically everything else.' 'On top of that, he sits there like a king while a whole team of people brings him typed reports on everything important happening everywhere in the world.'
"'Can't this guy just pick up a paper like everybody else?' Ogilvy added. 'Who does he think he is?'"

From The Onion.

Love, Sweat, Pitt, and Penn

2012-02-01T20:13:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times reports the deaths of television host Don Cornelius, actor Robert Hegyes, actor Ian Abercrombie, and football coach Joe Paterno.

January 2012 Acquisitions

2012-01-31T23:36:00.000-08:00

Books:
Nick Brownlee, Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop, 2003.
Brian Cogan, The Encyclopedia of Punk, 2010.
Anna Dewdney, Llama Llama Home with Mama, 2011.
P.D. Eastman, Perro Grande... Perro Pequeño, 1982.
Pamela Duncan Edwards and Danny Shanahan, The Bus Ride that Changed History, 2009.
Brad M. Epstein, University of California, Berkeley 101: My First Text-Board-Book,
2005.
Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, 2012.
Deanna Gunn and Wona Miniati, Cooking with Trader Joe's Cookbook Companion, 2011.
Wendy Kaplan (ed.), Living in a Modern Way: California Design, 1930-1965, 2011.
Justine Korman et al, The Lion King, 2003.
Mary Man-Kong, Barbie in A Mermaid Tale, 2010.
William P. McGivern, The Big Heat, 1952.
Doug Moench et al, Batman: Knightfall, Part Three: KnightsEnd, 1995.
James Mollison, James Mollison: The Disciples, 2011.
Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson, Batman: Gothic, 2007.
Paul Schimmel (ed.), Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974-1981, 2011.
Ken Tucker, Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America, 2008.
Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One, 1996.
Daniel Wallace, The Joker: A Visual History of the Clown Prince of Crime, 2011.

DVDs:
Scarface, 1983.

"A Stunning Failure of Policy"

2012-01-29T22:39:00.000-08:00

"The infuriating thing about this tragedy is that it was completely unnecessary. Half a century ago, any economist—or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson’s textbook 'Economics'—could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea. But policy makers, pundits and, I’m sorry to say, many economists decided, largely for political reasons, to forget what they used to know. And millions of workers are paying the price for their willful amnesia."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times denounces the "prophets of austerity."

"An Instructive Examination of American Weapons Fetishism"

2012-01-28T19:50:00.000-08:00

"Created in 1982 by Gaston Glock, an Austrian curtain-rod manufacturer, the Glock arrived stateside during the 1980s crime epidemic. Through gun buybacks, discounts and Glock-sponsored junkets to strip clubs, the company seduced many law enforcement agencies into trading their obsolescent service revolvers for semiautomatic Glocks. Troubled by some of the gun’s innovative features—for instance, the Glock lacks an external safety mechanism; its 'trigger safety' is released by merely pulling the trigger, a rarity with semiautomatics and the cause of many self-inflicted gunshot wounds among police officers who recklessly drew their new weapons—Congress convened hearings on the Glock, and several municipalities banned the gun. Through these simultaneous developments, Barrett writes, the gun 'inherited all aspects of the American firearm heritage: It was seen as an instrument of law and security, but also menace, danger and fear.' Americans’ desire for a certain gun is elementary: if cops use a gun or if a weapon’s availability is threatened, people demand the gun."

In The New York Times, Michael Washburn reviews Paul M. Barrett’s Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun.

"Amid the Passions of This Election Season"

2012-01-26T00:07:00.000-08:00

"It is estimated to have missionaries in 162 countries and a global membership of some 14 million; it is also, from its base in the American West, making inroads into Hispanic communities. Put simply, the Baptists and Methodists, while still ahead of the Mormons numerically, are feeling the heat of competition from Joseph Smith’s tireless progeny."

David S. Reynolds at The New York Times explores why evangelical Protestants dislike Mormonism.

"A Forgotten Work of Political Art"

2012-01-25T23:20:00.000-08:00

"The skirmishes back then began before the tower even existed. One day in January 1966, a group of artists announced their intention on a billboard-sized sign on Sunset near La Cienega Boulevard. 'Stop War in Vietnam,' it screamed in 3-foot-tall letters. 'Artists' Protest Tower to Be Erected Here.'
"The very night the sign went up, vandals knocked it down. The artists put up a new one, which was knocked down again, and this time the attackers tried to burn it. A months-long battle had begun."

Jon Wiener in the Los Angeles Times recalls the 1966 Tower of Protest.

"Today, Nearly all Political Centrists Are Democrats"

2012-01-25T21:14:00.000-08:00

"Half a century ago Republicans were a respectable but slightly boring presence on the political scene. Wary of excessive government, they were nonetheless reconciled to its expansion under Franklin D. Roosevelt and were mainly concerned with keeping it lean and solvent. Their beau idéal was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1952 became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected president. His principal opponent for the nomination, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, had opposed the New Deal and was a staunch isolationist who opposed supporting Britain in the first years of World War II. Eisenhower represented a more pragmatic strain of conservatism, internationalist when it came to foreign policy and willing to accept a larger government role at home. He called it 'modern Republicanism.' With Eisenhower's landslide re-election in 1956, his gospel looked like the future, at least for the G.O.P.
"Of course it wasn't."

In The New York Times, Timothy Noah reviews Geoffrey Kabaservice's Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party and Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.

"The Continent Has Long Been Divided into 11 Rival Regional 'Nations' Determined by Centuries-Old Settlement Patterns"

2012-01-24T22:27:00.000-08:00

"'Since 1877, the driving force in American politics hasn’t primarily been a class struggle or tension between agrarian and commercial interests, or even between competing partisan ideologies, although each has played a role,' Woodard writes. 'Ultimately, the determinative political struggle has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethnoregional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom.'"

Alec MacGillis in The Washington Post reviews Colin Woodard's American Nations.

"I Intend to Fight Obstruction with Action"

2012-01-24T19:15:00.000-08:00

"The two of them shared the optimism of a Nation that had triumphed over a depression and fascism. They understood they were part of something larger; that they were contributing to a story of success that every American had a chance to share–the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.
"The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them."

The New York Times prints President Obama's State of the Union Address.

"California Is on the Mend"

2012-01-24T18:21:00.000-08:00

"As I see it, that’s my job as governor and chief executive: make the operations of government work—efficiently, honestly and in the peoples’ interest. With your help, that’s what we’ll do in 2012 and prove the declinists wrong once again."

The Los Angeles Times prints Gov. Jerry Brown's State of the State Address.

"The First Government in the World which Broke Church and State Apart"

2012-01-23T09:19:00.000-08:00

"While it's possible that there was some other civilization in the long arc of human history in which religion wasn't a matter of governance, Williams' colony apparently was the first time the concept was put into lasting practice within the European sphere. And Barry adeptly traces Williams' political thought through to the Founding Fathers, who more than 150 years later codified that thinking in the 1st Amendment on the Bill of Rights: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.'"

Scott Martellein the Los Angeles Times reviews John M. Barry's Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul.

"Desperate Pandora Employees Scrambling To Find Song Area Man Likes"

2012-01-23T01:31:00.000-08:00

"According to genre-tracking department manager Rachel Davis, the problem has been compounded by Lipton's habit of switching without warning between several extremely specific listening profiles he has created for himself.
"'Who makes a station with proto-punk and late-'90s jam bands?' said Davis, explaining how an effort to split the difference by playing the MC5 followed by the String Cheese Incident had failed disastrously. 'There are what, maybe two songs ever recorded that fit those criteria? And he just keeps skipping them.'"

From The Onion, 2010.

"French Children Don’t Throw Food"

2012-01-22T22:35:00.000-08:00

"With a dollop of research and a big helping of anecdotes gleaned from friends, Ms Druckerman identifies two elements to French parenting that set it apart from what she calls the 'Anglophone' version. One is that the French teach their children to be patient. Babies are not picked up at the first snuffle from their cots; children are expected to wait until parents have finished a conversation before getting their attention. This, she concludes, stems from a less child-centred approach, in which the adult’s needs remain at least as important as those of the child. Parenting is just one part of a French mother’s life, alongside stilettos and a briefcase, not the high- investment, all-consuming project it has become to over-anxious parents in New York or London."

The Economist prints a review of Pamela Druckerman's Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.

"Miranda July Called Before Congress To Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is"

2012-01-21T14:55:00.000-08:00

"After nearly nine hours of questioning, the committee adjourned without having made any significant headway in determining what July's whole thing is.
"'What an unbelievable slog,' a congressional aide who wished to remain anonymous said following the proceedings. 'That was even more unproductive than the hearings held to find out who the fuck James Franco thinks he is.'"

From The Onion.

Tell Mama Hand Boogie

2012-01-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reports the deaths of Etta James, Johnny Otis, and Jimmy Castor.

And a Little Bit of Pixie Dust

2012-01-20T18:57:00.000-08:00

"The joke was on the Post gossip columnist, because Peter Pan collars were around for good: They’ve popped up as a fad in nearly every decade since Adams introduced the style. In the 1920s the collars became standard fare on little girls’ dresses, creating an innocent association that persists to this day. By the 1930s, the style had become nearly de rigeur at weddings—and not for the flower girls: Wedding announcement after wedding announcement in the ’30s and ’40s (even into the ’50s) describe the bride decked out in white satin and a Peter Pan collar. In the next two decades the look managed to swing smoothly from frumpy (First Lady Mamie Eisenhower wore a 'silky purple Molly Parnis dress [with] a Peter Pan collar' to her sixtieth birthday party in 1956) to hip (the New York Times described a young Lynn Redgrave in a 'black velvet see-through Mod dress with the white Peter Pan collar' in 1966)."

Julia Felsenthal in Slate presents a history of the Peter Pan collar.

Rolling in the Kill

2012-01-17T21:21:00.000-08:00

The Village Voice publishes its 2011 Pazz+Jop poll results.

"A Fading Force in American Life"?

2012-01-17T20:24:00.000-08:00

"Put simply, the Christian Right is getting old. According to the largest and most recent study we have of American religion and politics, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, almost twice as many people 18 to 29 confess to no faith at all as adhere to evangelical Protestantism. Young people who have attended college, a growing percentage of the population, are more secular still. Catholicism has held its own only because the Church keeps gathering in newcomers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, few of whom are likely to show up at a Santorum rally. To their surprise, Putnam and Campbell discovered that conservative preachers infrequently discuss polarizing issues from the pulpit. Sermons about hunger and poverty far outnumber those about homosexuality or abortion."

Michael Kazin in The New Republic argues that the Christian Right is in decline.

"The concept of 'one nation under God' has a noble lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that 'this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.' After Lincoln, however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades. But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise: corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal."

And Kevin M. Kruse in The New York Times depicts an early victory for "Christian libertarianism" in the 1950s.

"Yes, the warhorses of the Christian Right are showing their age, but a younger generation of culture warriors, some more radical than their elders, are just beginning to come into view. The Christian Right has been buried many times by secular observers since its advent as a powerful political movement in the late 1970s. It’s far too early to write yet another obituary."

But Ed Kilgore in The New Republic challenges Kazin.

I Hear a Lot of Things

2012-01-16T23:20:00.000-08:00

The New York Times runs obits for swordsman Bob Anderson, photojournalist Eve Arnold, and actor William Duell.

"His Reelection Remains, in My View, as Essential for This Country’s Future as His Original Election in 2008"

2012-01-16T19:58:00.000-08:00

"Sure, Obama cannot regain the extraordinary promise of 2008. We’ve already elected the nation’s first black president and replaced a tongue-tied dauphin with a man of peerless eloquence. And he has certainly failed to end Washington’s brutal ideological polarization, as he pledged to do. But most Americans in polls rightly see him as less culpable for this impasse than the GOP. Obama has steadfastly refrained from waging the culture war, while the right has accused him of a 'war against religion.' He has offered to cut entitlements (and has already cut Medicare), while the Republicans have refused to raise a single dollar of net revenue from anyone. Even the most austerity-driven government in Europe, the British Tories, are to the left of that. And it is this Republican intransigence—from the 2009 declaration by Rush Limbaugh that he wants Obama 'to fail' to the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s admission that his primary objective is denying Obama a second term—that has been truly responsible for the deadlock. And the only way out of that deadlock is an electoral rout of the GOP, since the language of victory and defeat seems to be the only thing it understands."

In Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan endorses Barack Obama for a second term as president.

"Your Fight Is Our Fight"

2012-01-15T22:44:00.000-08:00

"Using and abusing King is perhaps inevitable abroad, where he was so well publicized but little understood. Yet it has echoes here in the United States, where he should be known best. Since moving to America this past summer, I have heard the man who marched for jobs and freedom invoked by all sides of the political spectrum. African-American activists seek to honor his legacy by calling for race-based remedies to combat stubborn racial inequality. Conservatives invoke his color-blind ideology to remove those same race-based remedies."

In The New York Times, Stephen Tuck describes the elasticity of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy.

"For Someone to Be Over, Someone Else Must Be Under"

2012-01-14T22:16:00.000-08:00

"Though Nietzsche loathed the left, he was loved by it. As Ratner-Rosenhagen explains, the anarchists and 'romantic radicals' as well as the 'literary cosmopolitans of varying political persuasions' who welcomed him to America believed they had found the perfect manifestation of Emerson’s Poet, for whom a thought is 'alive, . . . like the spirit of a plant or an animal.' To read Nietzsche was to overcome an entire civilization’s inhibiting divide between thinking and feeling. Isadora Duncan said he 'ravished my being,' while both Jack London and Eugene O’Neill saw him as their Christ. Emma Goldman ended her romance with the Austrian anarchist Ed Brady because he didn’t appreciate the great author who had taken her to 'undreamed-of heights.' For such readers, 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra,' with its incantatory calls for a race of overmen to establish a new morality that would 'remain faithful to the earth,' was the true Nietzsche. Thrilling to its rhapsodies, they felt confirmed in their judgment that pious, stultifying America was no place for a serious thinker."

Alexander Star in The New York Times reviews Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas.

Historians Look at How Things Actually Are, Rather Than Economists Who Are Interested in How Things Aught to Be

2012-01-14T10:24:00.000-08:00

"People approach their checkbook not from a math point of view, but from a moral point of view. I think that’s really a key to understanding all of this. It is shocking how commonplace debt is today, but another difference between then and now is the financial infrastructure of debt. We are told that our grandparents didn’t borrow. That’s not true. People borrowed in the 19^th century, they just did it surreptitiously, illegally, or at the margins. It was always stigmatized. That stigmatization arose out of the belief that a mortgage or a debt could easily bankrupt you, or the economy would change, and you would lose everything. In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s the atmosphere around debt changed: New federal programs and financial institutions, from the FHA to department stores, enabled people to borrow more safely. So that fear that everything could be lost went away in the middle of the 20^th century. In the last 30 years that changed again. Those institutions born in this era of growth have persisted into our era of stagnation."

Hannah Tepper in Salon interviews Louis Hyman, author of Borrow: The American Way of Debt.

"America Is Not, in Fact, a Corporation"

2012-01-13T23:06:00.000-08:00

"America certainly needs better economic policies than it has right now—and while most of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive, the president has made some important mistakes. But we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times criticizes the idea of a businessman as president.

Not His Father's Party

2012-01-13T22:46:00.000-08:00

"As the newly elected governor of Michigan, George Romney marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. Throughout the turbulent 1960s, George Romney argued, at considerable political cost to himself, on behalf of a Republican Party that would welcome newly enfranchised African-American voters and reject the coded language of Southern strategists and repurposed segregationists. In 1964, as one of the nation’s most prominent Republican elected officials, he refused to endorse Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy. He complained that Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was gearing his campaign toward disaffected Democrats in Southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi, had broken faith with party members who valued 'basic American and Republican principles.'
"While some Republicans responded to the outbreak of rioting in American cities by blaming Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty initiatives, Geoffrey Kabaservice recounts in his brilliant new analysis of the decay of the Republican Party, Rule and Ruin (Oxford, 2012), how Romney argued that government was not doing enough."

John Nichols at The Nation contrasts George and Mitt Romney.

As does Rick Perlstein in Rolling Stone.

Now You Know You in Trouble

2012-01-13T17:26:00.000-08:00

"At one point, the V.I.P. name was attached to a dozen outposts in Southern California. The chain's original location in South Central was founded by Anderson's older brother Cletus in the late 1960s; it specialized in gospel, Motown and R&B.
"After graduating from high school in Brandon, Miss., in 1972, a teenage Anderson followed Cletus to Los Angeles and got into the business. Together they opened V.I.P.'s Long Beach location—their 12th—in 1978; Anderson bought it shortly thereafter.
"'Some kids go to college, but I got my degree in the music industry working at V.I.P.,' he says."

In the LA Weekly, Andrea Domanick reports on the fall of World Famous V.I.P. Records

Vulture Capitalism

2012-01-12T21:10:00.000-08:00

"The only thing surprising about this issue is how late in the day it took center-stage. After all, an increasing number of blue-collar workers have become Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. The Tea Party movement is hardly sympathetic to Wall Street and the financial sector. And a key element of the Republican base—small business—has long regarded the corporate/establishment wing of the party with suspicion. As a populist whipping-boy, Romney is straight out of central casting."

In The New Republic, William Galston argues that Mitt Romney's business career poses problems for his presidential campaign.

And Steve Benen at Washington Monthly highlights a new ad by the Democratic National Committee featuring criticisms of Romney made by other Republican candidates.

"It Was as Close to Curating as Exhibition Can Get"

2012-01-11T20:31:00.000-08:00

"No, the beginning of the end came in 2002, when Pacific opened a multiplex at the Grove, and the ArcLight Hollywood moved in at Sunset and Ivar. These theaters showed both indie and Hollywood movies, with top-of-the-line seating and sound. Because the Laemmles were renting space at the Sunset 5, they hesitated to make improvements that would allow them to compete with the comparatively luxurious new theaters. With the lease up for an increase next year, the family had to admit it was over."

Scott Timberg in the LA Weekly laments the closing of the Sunset 5 cinema in Hollywood.

"Till Selfish Gain No Longer Stain/ The Banner of the Free!"

2012-01-10T23:19:00.000-08:00

"The lyrics were written in 1894 by the Massachusetts poet Katharine Lee Bates, an ardent feminist and lesbian who was deeply disillusioned by the greed and excess of the Gilded Age.
"Her original third verse was an expression of that anger."

David Firestone at The New York Times warns Mitt Romney away from quoting "America the Beautiful" in campaign speeches.

"A Rare Phenomenon"

2012-01-10T19:07:00.000-08:00

"In other words, if you’re looking for an orderly assemblage of the facts, this isn’t it. But 'Fela!' offers something that only the theater can provide—an immersion in Fela’s music, an encounter with his charismatically frenetic concert presence and a confrontation with his political style. The trade-off, trust me, is worth it. But be prepared to get out of your seat and shake your derriere. Passive spectatorship would be an insult."

Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times reviews Fela! at the Ahmanson Theatre.

"Let the Market Handle It"

2012-01-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

"It’s a little strange to see people who inveigh against Obama’s healthcare compromises wave away, as a detail, Paul’s opposition to any government involvement in healthcare. In Ron Paul’s America, if you weren’t prudent enough or wealthy enough to buy private insurance—and the exact policy that covers what’s ailing you now—you find a charity or die. And if civil liberties are so important, how can Paul’s progressive fans overlook his opposition to abortion and his signing of the personhood pledge, which could ban many birth control methods? Last time I checked, women were half the population (the less important half, apparently). Technically, Paul would overturn Roe and let states make their own laws regulating women’s bodies, up to and including prosecuting abortion as murder. Add in his opposition to basic civil rights law—he maintains his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and opposes restrictions on the 'freedom' of business owners to refuse service to blacks—and his hostility to the federal government starts looking more and more like old-fashioned Southern-style states’ rights."

In The Nation, Katha Pollitt wonders why some progressives like Ron Paul.

"The Greatest Revolution in American Foreign Policy in a Generation"

2012-01-10T16:46:00.000-08:00

"On 9/11/2001 the al-Qaida attacks cemented the consensus even further. Until then, the maintenance of a U.S. military that had been only moderately downsized from its Cold War proportions had been justified by the grossly exaggerated threats alleged to have been posed by 'rogue states' like Iraq and North Korea and Iran. Now there was a new enemy to justify a huge, global U.S. military: stateless terrorism. Absurdly, many American statesmen and foreign policy experts treated jihadists not as criminal gangs comparable to the mafia and drug cartels but as soldiers of a virtual superpower, comparable somehow to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Post-9/11 panic, cynically stoked by conservatives for electoral purposes, added layer on layer to a clumsy, labyrinthine homeland security bureaucracy while justifying spending on Pentagon weapons systems whose usefulness in fighting jihadists was slight or nonexistent. The neoconservative scholar Eliot Cohen and the neoconservative editor Norman Podhoretz declared that the U.S. was engaged in 'World War IV' (World War III having been the Cold War). Others called it the Long War.
"Well, World War IV is now over, according to President Obama. The Long War turned out not to be all that long."

Michael Lind in Salon takes a look at President Obama's "new vision of American defense."

Doing Me Crust In

2012-01-01T23:38:00.000-08:00

"Marriott dates the first stirrings of the myth to the mid-eighteenth century, when wealthy manufacturers and professional men who had previously lived over the shop, so to speak, began to migrate to the fashionable squares of London’s West End, thus reshaping the social landscape. Even in the sixteenth century, though, Bethnal Green and Stepney were widely regarded as existing beyond the civilised pale. Outside the city’s official boundary, untouched by censorship and tax-gatherer alike, they were a hot-bed of radical politicking and religious dissent. Huguenots fleeing persecution in France brought a distinctive culture ('serious, intellectually vigorous and virtuous') of mutual aid organisations and learned societies. Governments tried desperately to limit the number of people crammed into the ramshackle alleyways and fetid courts: not on humanitarian grounds, but because more inhabitants meant more deaths and more orphan children for whose upkeep local parishes became responsible."

In The New Republic, D. J. Taylor reviews John Marriott's Beyond the Tower: A History of East London.

The Dream of the Nineties Is Alive in Portland

2012-01-01T12:30:00.000-08:00

"You know, it takes a certain amount of good fortune, privilege and entitlement to have those things be what you’re worried about. And I think that most of us know that. So I think it’s a little bit of a stifling way to live, because it’s so well-meaning, and so well-intentioned, but, like you said, there’s part of you that knows that it’s a little bit ridiculous. And many of the characters on the show, I think, start right when someone’s belief system has just gone off the rails—or is about to."

David Daley in Salon interviews Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein about the new season of Portlandia.

Happy New Laws, 2012!

2012-01-01T10:21:00.000-08:00

"Other measures bar minors from tanning beds, allow students to be suspended for cyber-bullying and require booster seats for children in cars until they are 8 years old or at least 4 feet, 9 inches tall."

Patrick McGreevy in the Los Angeles Times explains new laws that take effect in California today.

2011 Favorites

2011-12-31T11:34:00.000-08:00

The Late Adopter selects...
Movies:

Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (dir. AlexStapleton)

Horrible Bosses (dir.Seth Gordon)
The Muppets (dir.James Bobin)
Cars 2 (dir. JohnLasseter and Brad Lewis)
Winnie the Pooh (dir.Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall)
Everything Must Go (dir. Dan Rush)
Bridesmaids (dir.Paul Feig)
Tabloid (dir.Errol Morris)
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (dir. Gӧran Olsson)
American Grindhouse (dir. Elijah Drenner)

Albums:
Beach Boys--The SmileSessions (Capitol)
Vaccines--What Did You Expect from the Vaccines? (Columbia)
Strokes--Angles (RCA)
Glasvegas--Euphoric Heartbreak (Columbia)
Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi--Rome (Capitol)
Horrors--Skying (XL)
Raphael Saadiq--Stone Rollin’ (Columbia)
Bangles--Sweetheart of the Sun (Fontana)
Kasabian--Velociraptor! (Sony)
Brian Wilson--Inthe Key of Disney (Disney)

Songs:
Vaccines--'If You Wanna'
Rihanna--'We Found Love'
Civil Wars--'Barton Hollow'
Viva Brother--'Darling Buds of May'
Bangles--'Anna Lee (Sweetheart of the Sun)'
Glasvegas--'Shine Like Stars'
Dev--'In the Dark'
Horrors--'Still Life'
Social Distortion--'Machine Gun Blues'
Strokes--'Taken for a Fool'

December 2011 Acquisitions

2011-12-31T01:33:00.000-08:00

Books:
John H. Arnold, History (A Brief Insight), 2009.
Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, Batman: Broken City, 2005.
RH Disney, What Is a Princess?, 2004.
Kellie Jones, Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980, 2011.
Doug Moench et al, Batman: Knightfall, Part One: Broken Bat, 1993.
Doug Moench et al, Batman: Knightfall, Part Two: Who Rules the Night, 1993.
Eva Montanari, Chasing Degas, 2009.
Edward and Lorna Mornin, Saints of California: A Guide to Places and Their Patrons, 2009.
Rebecca Peabody et al (eds.), Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945–1980, 2011.
A. P. Porter and Janice Lee Porter, Kwanzaa, 1991.
Harvey Solomon and Rich Appel, Book of Days '70s: A Day by Day Look at the Pop Culture Moments that Made History, 2009.
E. B. White and Maggie Kneen, Some Pig! A Charlotte's Web Picture Book, 2006.
Harriet Ziefert and Yukiko Kido, Posey Prefers Pink, 2008.
If I Were a Ballerina: The World of Ballet in Pictures, 2011.

DVDs:
The All New Super Friends Hour, Season One, Volume One, 1977.
Cars 2, 2011.
Classic Quad Set 2, 2010.
The Coen Brothers Movie Collection, 2007.
Fight Club, 1999.
The Lion King, 1994.
The Mack, 1973.
The Muppet Movie, 1979.
Sam Peckinpah's The Legendary Westerns Collection, 2006.
Top Secret!, 1984.
Toy Story 3, 2010
Vanishing Point, 1971.
Winnie the Pooh, 2011.

Why Iowa?

2011-12-30T23:08:00.000-08:00

"The caucuses were moved up January not as a power play, but because the state party chairman was determined to give every delegate a copy of the rules and platform proposals. Officials determined that they would need four months to print the materials on their mimeograph machine."

Rachel Weiner explains at The Washington Post.

"The Boom, not the Slump, Is the Right Time for Austerity at the Treasury"

2011-12-30T23:05:00.000-08:00

"The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem—a depressed economy and mass unemployment—worse."

In The New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that circumstances have, once again, vindicated Keynesian economics.

Talk That Talk

2011-12-29T00:54:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for cafe owner Bob Hare, artist Helen Frankenthaler, and musician Sean Bonniwell.

"Just Leave It Up to the Experts"

2011-12-28T17:41:00.000-08:00

"I’m speaking here of the liberal culture in Washington, D.C. There was no Occupy Wall Street movement [at that time] and there was only people like me on the fringes talking about it. The liberals had their leader in Barack Obama … they had their various people in Congress. But these people are completely unfamiliar with populist anger. It’s an alien thing to them. They don’t trust it, and they have trouble speaking to it. I like Barack Obama, but at the end of the day he’s a very professorial kind of guy. The liberals totally missed the opportunity, and the right was able to grab it."

Jefferson Morley in Salon interviews Thomas Frank about Frank's new book, Pity the Billionaire: The Unlikely Resurgence of the American Right.

A Bit of the Old Ultraviolence

2011-12-28T16:37:00.000-08:00

"For Burgess, and the character of the prison chaplain, it's a matter of liberty to choose between good and evil, wherever it takes us: the author claims to have sickened himself by having to depict such garish atrocities to forge his argument. Kubrick talked instead about how Alex 'represents the id, the savage repressed side of our nature which guiltlessly enjoys the pleasures of rape', a reading for which the director had to find rampant and joyful stylistic expression. This emphasis leaves the film open to attack on, above all, feminist grounds: it revels in what are ecstatic fantasies of the released id for men only, with women as titillating props."

In The Telegraph, Tim Robey marks the fortieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

"A Pat Buchanan-Style Call for America to Return to a Golden Age of White Privilege"

2011-12-22T12:06:00.000-08:00

"But while I imagine Dr. Paul doesn’t believe in the inherent criminality of black males (though I’d bet he does believe some variation on his newsletter’s remark that 'only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions') these comments didn’t originate in a vacuum."

Alex Pareene in Salon discusses the racist strain in American libertarianism.

As does Michael Lind.

"Villains, I Always Thought, Were More Interesting"

2011-12-21T22:29:00.000-08:00

"It was a chance encounter on a tennis court in the Poconos in 1939 that started Mr. Robinson’s career. Then 17 and on vacation before going to college, he was wearing a jacket covered with his own cartoons when a man on a nearby court struck up a conversation. It was Bob Kane, primary creator of a counterpart to Superman then still in the works: Batman."

Dennis Hevesi in The New York Times reports the death of Jerry Robinson, the creator of the Joker.

Demise of Dear Leader

2011-12-18T23:43:00.000-08:00

"Short and round, he wore elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses and a bouffant hairdo—a Hollywood stereotype of the wacky post-cold-war dictator. Mr. Kim himself was fascinated by film. He orchestrated the kidnapping of an actress and a director, both of them South Koreans, in an effort to build a domestic movie industry. He was said to keep a personal library of 20,000 foreign films, including the complete James Bond series, his favorite. But he rarely saw the outside world, save from the windows of his luxury train, which occasionally took him to China."

In The New York Times, David E. Sanger reports the death of Kim Jong-il.

The Velvet Revolutionary

2011-12-18T09:08:00.000-08:00

"A shy yet resilient, unfailingly polite but dogged man who articulated the power of the powerless, Mr. Havel spent five years in and out of Communist prisons, lived for two decades under close secret-police surveillance and endured the suppression of his plays and essays. He served 14 years as president, wrote 19 plays, inspired a film and a rap song and remained one of his generation’s most seductively nonconformist writers."

Dan Bilefsky and Jane Perlez in The New York Times write an obit for Vaclav Havel.

"In the Tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell"

2011-12-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

"He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. 'Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that—or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation—is worth it to me,' he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was 'impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.'"

William Grimes in The New York Times writes an obituary for Christopher Hitchens.

Little Black Peter

2011-12-15T19:52:00.000-08:00

"Trying to tell a Dutch person why this image disturbs you will often result in anger and frustration. Otherwise mature and liberal-minded adults may recoil from the topic and offer a rote list of reasons why Zwarte Piet should not offend anybody. “He is not even a black man,” many will tell you. 'He is just black because he came down the chimney.' Then, you may reply, why aren’t his clothes dirty?"

Jessica Olien in Slate reports on the controversy over the Dutch Christmastime figure of Zwarte Piet.

Color Him Father

2011-12-15T18:43:00.000-08:00

"Seven seconds of this track were enough to guarantee its immortality. One minute and 26 seconds in, the horns, organ and bass drop out, leaving the drummer, Gregory Coleman, to pound away alone for four bars. For two bars he maintains his previous beat; in the third he delays a snare hit, agitating the groove slightly; and in the fourth he leaves the first beat empty, following up with a brief syncopated pattern that culminates in an unexpectedly early cymbal crash, heralding the band’s re-entry."

The Economist discusses the influence of the Amen Break.

"30 Years of Riots, Organized Mayhem and Beautiful Music"

2011-12-15T16:34:00.000-08:00

"Although Tovar's first punk show was catching the Sex Pistols at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom in January 1978, he was introduced to punk's plight through his younger sister Bianca, who had alerted him the police were tightening their grip around shows in Southern California. The heavy-handed crackdown convinced a 20-year-old Tovar that he wanted punk rock to flourish."'I saw the culture. I wanted to push it as far as I could,' he says. 'I wanted to expose it to as many people as I could. I thought there were a lot of good thoughts that were getting a lot of resistance. And I think we won.'"

Vickie Chang in the OC Weekly traces the history of Goldenvoice Productions.

"The Book Business Is the Business of Life"

2011-12-14T21:55:00.000-08:00

"Mr. Whitman’s store, founded in 1951, has also been a favorite stopover for established authors and poets to read from their work and sign their books. Its visitors list reads like a Who’s Who of American, English, French and Latin American literature: Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin were frequent callers in the early days; other regulars included Lawrence Durrell and the Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, all of them Mr. Whitman’s friends.
"Another was the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The two met in Paris in the late 1940s and discussed the importance of free-thinking bookstores. Mr. Ferlinghetti went on to found what became a landmark bookshop in its own right, City Lights, in San Francisco. Their bookstores would be sister shops, the two men agreed."

Marlise Simons in The New York Times writes an obituary for George Whitman, proprietor of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris.

"'Layoffs Are Necessary If We Want To Keep The Lights On,' Says CEO Halfway Through Tasting Menu"

2011-12-12T19:58:00.000-08:00

"After consuming his dessert courses of lavender crème brûlée and a caramelized brioche with a strawberry foam, restating his belief that payroll cuts are simply part of what a modern company has to do, and offering to have further talks on the subject of reducing company expenditures this weekend at his country house, Byatt thanked his colleague for working with him to 'do right by this company' and snapped his fingers for the bill."'Oh, no, no, no, please,' said Byatt, waving away his colleague's hand and putting down the company credit card. 'I got this.'"

From The Onion.

"A Definitive Chronicle of the End—and the Legacy—of the '60s"

2011-12-11T10:10:00.001-08:00

"In a film that stretches and sprawls and often seems to overflow its bounds, dozens of characters around the country—on communes, in cities, on the road, starting families, finding work, reintegrating into society after time in prison—wrestle with what it means to live in the hangover of their dashed utopian aspirations."

Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times looks back at the 1975 docu-drama Milestones.

When My Love Stands Next to Your Love

2011-12-10T18:48:00.001-08:00

"Music geeks will find plenty of this familiar, and being music geeks, will fake knowing what they don’t about how, say, in the early ’70s, Latin dance music was being hotly reimagined by Willie Colón and others, or how Nicky Siano, at his proto-rave disco, the Gallery, was mastering, as Hermes writes, 'the art of dropping out certain frequencies in a cut (usually the bass) at dramatic moments, then crashing them back in on the beat, à la dub reggae, detonating dance-floor pleasure bombs.' Hermes’s is a popular history, but if the success of Patti Smith’s autobiographical 'Just Kids' is any indication, the music life of ’70s New York is saying something to a lot of people who weren’t around or listening back then."

Gerald Marzorati in The New York Times reviews Will Hermes's Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever.

"This Period of Stylistic Paralysis"

2011-12-09T20:01:00.001-08:00

"There are, of course, a few exceptions today—genuinely new cultural phenomena that aren’t digital phenomena—but so few that they prove the rule. Twenty years ago we had no dark, novelistic, amazing TV dramas, no Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire or Breaking Bad. Recycling bins weren’t ubiquitous and all lightbulbs were incandescent. Men wore neckties more frequently. Fashionable women exposed less of their breasts and bra straps, and rarely wore ultra-high-heeled shoes. We were thinner, and fewer of us had tattoos or piercings. And that’s about it.
"Not coincidentally, it was exactly 20 years ago that Francis Fukuyama published The End of History, his influential post-Cold War argument that liberal democracy had triumphed and become the undisputed evolutionary end point toward which every national system was inexorably moving: fundamental political ferment was over and done. Maybe yes, maybe no. But in the arts and entertainment and style realms, this bizarre Groundhog Day stasis of the last 20 years or so certainly feels like an end of cultural history."

Kurt Andersen in Vanity Fair argues that cultural change has slowed to a crawl.

Drifting Away

2011-12-07T23:28:00.001-08:00

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for comedian Patrice O'Neal, car designer Sergio Scaglietti, actor Alan Sues, singer Dobie Gray, and actor Harry Morgan.

"The Basic Bargain that Made This Country Great Has Eroded"

2011-12-07T23:01:00.001-08:00

"This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.
"Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that have stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for too many years. Their philosophy is simple: we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.
"Well, I’m here to say they are wrong."

The Washington Post publishes President Obama's speech on the middle class, given in the same town where Theodore Roosevelt gave his New Nationalism address in 1910.

Ben Soskis and Timothy Noah react in The New Republic.

As does Robert Reich in Salon.

And John Nichols and Ari Berman in The Nation.

You Gave Us Those Nice Bright Colors

2011-12-04T11:06:00.001-08:00

"Almost from Kodak's founding by George Eastman in 1880, the money had rolled in, thanks to Eastman's razor-blade strategy of selling cameras cheaply and reaping lavish margins from consumables —film, chemicals and paper.
"As late as 1976, Kodak commanded 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales in the U.S., according to a 2005 case study for Harvard Business School. Such seemingly unassailable competitive positions tend to foster unimaginative executive cultures, and Kodak's was no exception."

Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times depicts the decline of Kodak.

Allow Us, We'll Show You the Way

2011-12-03T20:02:00.001-08:00

"By 1970 Rodgers was gigging regularly in an early 'jazz-blues-rock-fusion' band called New World Rising. Between his technical command and a personal charm he’s too charming to brag about, his career progressed steadily, from 'Sesame Street' road band to Apollo house band to increasingly lucrative backup slots. In the early 1970s he hooked up with Edwards, whose slick sartorial style and deep soul roots contrasted so drastically with Rodgers’s hippie motley and avant-jazz upbringing that it took the happenstance of a shared job to convince them their partnership was meant to be. Musically, Edwards effected a 'soul-man makeover' by getting Rodgers to put down his hollow-bodied Gibson and teaching him to 'chuck' on a Stratocaster. But Chic was Rodgers’s concept—a minimalist funk band inspired image-wise by Roxy Music’s ersatz elegance and Kiss’s refusal to show their faces."

In The New York Times, Robert Christgau reviews Nile Rodgers's Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny.

"Rumors Of Extramarital Affair End Campaign Of Presidential Candidate Who Didn't Know China Has Nuclear Weapons"

2011-12-03T17:27:00.001-08:00

From The Onion.

"Repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act"

2011-12-02T15:31:00.001-08:00

"The only reason the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world survive is that they're never forced, by the media or anyone else, to put all their cards on the table. If Occupy Wall Street can do that–if it can speak to the millions of people the banks have driven into foreclosure and joblessness–it has a chance to build a massive grassroots movement."

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone provides a demand list for Occupiers.

"Will Be Near to Us No More"

2011-12-01T16:50:00.000-08:00

"'I often wondered what would it have been like if those lyrics had been sung in the movie,' laughs O'Brien, now 69. ''But about a week before we were to shoot the scene where Judy sings it to me, she looked at the lyrics and said, 'Don't you think these are awfully dark? I'm going to go to Hugh Martin and see if he can lighten it up a little.'"

In a 2007 Entertainment Weekly article, Chris Willman explains the lyrical evolution of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."

November 2011 Acquisitions

2011-11-30T17:43:00.000-08:00

Books:

Colin G. Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, 2007.

Christian Lander, Whiter Shades of Pale, 2010.

Mae Ngai and Jon Gjerde (eds.), Major Problems in American Immigration History, 2012.

Joe Shuster et al, Superman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, 2004.

Ben Smiley and Victoria Ying, Tangled, 2010.

Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, Crisis on Infinite Earths, 2001.

DVDs:

The President's Analyst, 1967.

Superman: The Movie, 1978.

"As Much a Testament to the Exalted Claims Made for Culture in Midcentury America as It Is a Casualty of What Has Happened Since"

2011-11-28T19:08:00.001-08:00

"These days, it’s hard to recognize that America. The wage stagnation that began in the late ’70s has since bestowed on us the kind of income inequality more typical of a third-world oligarchy. The real minimum wage is less than it was in 1968, and the richest 1 percent of Americans take home nearly 25 percent of the country’s income, as compared with the 9 percent they earned in 1974. All of which gives Macdonald’s complaint the feel of a time capsule, one that contains no foreshadowing of how quickly and completely everything would change. Macdonald failed to anticipate what would happen not only to art but also to its audience. The middlebrow flourished because the middle class was flourishing: this much he got right. Yet he wrote as if the middle class would necessarily continue to prosper, as if the profusion of 'money, leisure, and knowledge' could be taken for granted, when in fact he was bemoaning the cultural fallout from the Great Prosperity in the last days before its demise. Middlebrowism is still with us, of course, but its growth required a middle class that was upwardly mobile as well as a link, whether real or perceived, between culture and status. Macdonald’s Midcult shit list—which includes the likes of Saturday Review, The Reporter and the Book-of-the-Month Club—is a catalog of species that are either endangered or extinct."

Jennifer Szalai in The Nation revisits Dwight Macdonald's "Masscult and Midcult" in post-middle class America.

A Taste of More Lisztomania

2011-11-28T18:54:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times publishes obituaries for educator I. Michael Heyman, playwright Shelagh Delaney, singer Andrea True, journalist Tom Wicker, and director Ken Russell.

"The Modern Conservative Movement Began 60 Years Ago"

2011-11-27T14:07:00.001-08:00

"The crusading sentiment made more sense during the Cold War, when America faced a truly collectivist, atheistic and nuclear-armed adversary. It is becoming increasingly discordant with the times, and that is why some Republican candidates with considerable support strike non-conservatives as weird."

In the Los Angeles Times, Carl T. Bogus looks to the sixtieth anniversary of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale.

"A Man of This Dimension"

2011-11-26T21:06:00.000-08:00

"Take, for instance, the story of Herb Abramson, who returned from the Army in 1955 and was eventually booted from the label. According to Gillett, Abramson returned to find that 'Jerry Wexler was in his seat and couldn’t be moved.' According to Wade and Picardie, Abramson—whose wife, Miriam, ran Atlantic’s day-to-day operations—returned from Germany with a girlfriend (or, as Wexler put it, 'a Brünnhilde!'). In Greenfield’s account, Abramson returns with the girlfriend and a drug habit. ('"Herb was snorting cocaine," someone who knew Abramson well during this period would later confirm.')"

Alex Abramovich in The New York Times reviews Robert Greenfield's The Last Sultan: The Life and Times of Ahmet Ertegun.

"Some of My Fictions Percolate Out into the Material World"

2011-11-26T20:40:00.000-08:00

"He sees parallels between the dystopia predicted in the story and the world today. The book foretold the prevalence of CCTV cameras on city streets, for instance; and Moore takes a particular satisfaction in a strand of the plot that seemed to anticipate the sort of internet-based dissent that has made groups such as Anonymous and Assange's WikiLeaks such major agents of protest. 'The reason V's fictional crusade against the state is ultimately successful is that the state, in V for Vendetta, relies upon a centralised computer network which he has been able to hack. Not an obvious idea in 1981, but it struck me as the sort of thing that might be down the line.' Moore is not computer-literate. 'This was just something I made up because I thought it would make an interesting adventure story. Thirty years go by and you find yourself living it.'"

Tom Lamont in The Guardian talks with Alan Moore about the popularity of Guy Fawkes masks with current-day protesters.

The Disappointed and the Delusional

2011-11-21T20:35:00.000-08:00

In New York, Jonathan Chait and David Frum explore problems facing liberals and conservatives, respectively.

"The Hothouse Brand of American Malice"

2011-11-20T23:40:00.000-08:00

"Whatever the similarities between Obama and JFK, the differences are substantial. Kennedy devoted little attention to domestic affairs, and Obama has no interest in replicating JFK’s entertaining give-and-takes with the press. Obama has yet to show bravery to match JFK’s standoff with Khrushchev, but he can boast the legislative achievements that eluded Kennedy. But this much is certain: Both presidents were centrists in the Democratic parties of their respective eras. Neither could be remotely described as radical, let alone 'socialist,' as critics of both have contended. Both are ardent capitalists largely content to leave corporate America to its own devices. Both are wary of the institutional left. Both are hawkish by their party’s standards. But for all this moderation, they, like the similarly centrist Bill Clinton, who was accused of enabling drug running and murder on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, have inspired a hatred so nightmarishly disproportionate to their actual beliefs, actions, and policies that it’s worthy of Stephen King’s fiction."

Frank Rich in New York uses the publication of new books about John F. Kennedy to compare the Dallas, Texas, of 1963 to the nation today.

You Can Do What You Wanna Do

2011-11-17T22:59:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for boxer Joe Frazier, rapper Heavy D, and cartoonist Bil Keane.

Out of My Brain on the Train

2011-11-16T20:30:00.001-08:00

"Unfortunately, the rock opera is also a bit of a cheat, as any classical music fan knows. If you're used to kicking back with a little Verdi, and someone comes along and plays you Pink Floyd's The Wall, declaiming, 'Behold! Here is another kind of opera to blow your mind,' you might point out that a rock opera isn't really an opera at all, but more, maybe, like a cantata, or a suite. Or even a musical, without the choreography. Rock operas aren't usually acted out, and you won't find much in the way of recitative. You get a cycle of songs, a main character, and, generally, a pretty trippy, gappy, plot. But on occasion, you can also get an album that numbers amongst rock's finest, one that is perfectly tailored to the sizable strengths of a singular band and a singular writer."

Colin Fleming at The Atlantic argues that the greatest rock opera is the Who's Quadrophenia.

New York to East California

2011-11-15T19:36:00.000-08:00

"Much new wave music was notable for its upbeat, dance-inspired tempos…an element that had largely gone missing from rock music in the 1970s when groups instead shaped their sound to fit the spectacular stadium and arena settings that defined the era. It is no accident that new wave thrived during the late 70s and early 80s in small clubs and the numerous rock discos that had begun to appear as the original disco movement itself was beginning to fade. New wave rock bands often drew on dance-related styles—whether it was disco and funk or reggae and ska in a way that few mainstream rock acts did. In doing so, new wave refused the older late 60s hippie and hard rock legacy that prevailed among groups like Foreigner and Journey."

Theo Cateforis discusses his new book, Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s, at the University of Michigan Press's blog.

"A Tahrir Moment"

2011-11-13T12:27:00.000-08:00

"But if pithy slogans are particularly good at rallying a broad base of support, they are less adept at instilling a coherent program of action among their adherents. It’s as if, having succeeded in planting the seed of desire in activists’ minds, Adbusters was always more interested in watching it take off than in fixing it to a particular program or cause. In the marketing world, the concept might be said to have gone 'viral'—an achievement of which any of Lasn’s former adman colleagues would be exceptionally proud."

Thomas Stackpole at The New Republic depicts how Adbusters magazine inspired Occupy Wall Street.

"A Lack of Power and Belonging"

2011-11-12T10:38:00.000-08:00

"For example, in March 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, a North Carolina ex-slave named Peter Price walked into the local office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency established to regulate the transition from slavery to freedom by enforcing labor contracts, adjudicating disputes, encouraging education and, at times, distributing rations. Price’s complaint was a common one. His landlord refused to turn over his share of the previous year’s crop. Price found a receptive ear in Hugo Hillebrandt, a Hungarian revolutionary who had fought with Garibaldi in Italy before joining the Union cause as a federal agent. After listening to Price’s story, Hillebrandt wrote an order demanding that the landlord turn over Price’s share of the crop.
"But when Price carried the order back to the farm, his landlord tore it into pieces, threw it on the ground, and declared that 'you might send ten thousand Yankees there and he did not intend to be governed by no such laws.' As a judge of practical power, the landlord was right. Hillebrandt could not enforce his orders outside of his office. In desperation, Price asked for help up the bureaucratic ladder, but without success. Some people—like Hillebrandt–would help him but could not; others perhaps could have but didn’t."

Gregory P. Downs and James Downs at The New York Times question the meaning of freedom after the Civil War.

"Yin WAS Searching for His Yang"

2011-11-11T14:28:00.000-08:00

"Yes, Spinal Tap is a group of actors playing characters. If that were a disqualifying factor, how then to explain Robert Zimmerman playing 'Bob Dylan,' John Graham Mellor playing 'Joe Strummer,' or the guy from Animal Collective playing 'Panda Bear'? Rock and roll has always been a costume drama, a comedy, and more then occasionally a minstrel show. The 'realness' of a given band could not be a more ludicrous criterion for taking their measure."

Timothy Bracy and Elizabeth Nelson at NPR analyze the 1984 soundtrack to This Is Spinal Tap on Nigel Tufnel Day.

"We Did Try 'Sisters' Out on People, and They Thought It Was about Nuns"

2011-11-08T19:55:00.000-08:00

"For radical feminists like me, Ellen Willis, and Jill Johnston, we had a different kind of magazine in mind. We came out against marriage and motherhood. Gloria was uptown; we were downtown. She hung out with Establishment figures; we had only ourselves. It very quickly became obvious at that first meeting that they wanted a glossy that would appeal to the women who read the Ladies’ Home Journal. We didn’t want that, so they walked away with it."

In New York, Abigail Pogrebin presents an oral history of Ms. magazine.

Where They Teach You How to Be Thick

2011-11-08T16:24:00.000-08:00

"Taken together, this work has amounted to an interrogation of punk’s essence—an attempt to figure out why this explosive and self-destructive-seeming movement has proven so persistent, and what it has meant to all the different people who have embraced it. According to Anne Cecil of Drexel University, who oversees punk programming at the annual meeting of the Pop Culture Association, the reason for the apparent surge of interest in punk among academics comes down to simple demographics. What’s happening, she said, is that people who participated in the scene as kids during the late ’70s and ’80s have reached a point in their careers where they can spend time studying what they’re really passionate about."

Leon Neyfakh in The Boston Globe reports on the emergence of Punk Studies.

Off the Wall

2011-11-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for shoemaker James Van Doren, Cahuilla Indian linguist Katherine Siva Saubel, and essayist Andy Rooney.

Stuff Happened

2011-11-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

"A group of Republican neoconservatives and other political and government figures quickly gathered not only to respond to the 9/11 attacks but also, as they saw it, to restore the nation’s confidence and ideals. Cheney and Rumsfeld had privately deplored the decline of American power in the Nixon and Ford administrations during the Vietnam War. They saw in 9/11 an opportunity to revive American power and superiority, or as Cheney put it, to 'get it right this time.' Much of what happened after the attacks would very likely have occurred no matter who was in charge—the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the building up of intelligence organizations and other changes. But from the start, Cheney and Rumsfeld began pushing for a much wider change, what the president called a 'war on terror.'
"But what did a 'war on terror' mean?"

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews two recent memoirs from Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Hail Victory?

2011-11-02T20:04:00.000-07:00

"In 1945, the team again played for the league title, losing to the Cleveland Rams. That was the last championship game the Marshall-owned Redskins would reach. In fact, from 1946 until the early 1960s, when Marshall’s deteriorating health prevented him from overseeing day-to-day operations, the team amassed just three winning seasons. There were many reasons, but prominent among them was the virulent racism of the owner."

In The New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky reviews Thomas G. Smith's Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins.

"The Story of Modern American Cultural Criticism Is the Story of Three California Girls Who Went East—Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion"

2011-11-01T19:35:00.001-07:00

"For Kael, Didion’s work suggested a familiarity with the high life that pushed all the wrong buttons. Kael was raised partly on a chicken farm and worked a string of bad jobs as a single mother before getting her feet set. She harbored a lot of bitterness toward people she thought had it easy, as Kellow shows. To be 'swank' was to risk her enduring disdain. The existential zero at the bone that Didion absolutely conquered often had nothing to do with material need. It was going to bother Kael no matter what. 'I did my own share of soul-wrestling,' Kael once said, 'and it’s not too tough to do.'"

Evan Hughes at The Awl resurrects a feud from the 1970s.

Copyrights and Wrongs

2011-11-01T18:53:00.000-07:00

"The idea that the Internet is somehow immune from law or regulation or the protection of people’s rights has been seen as a progressive idea. It’s the 'free and open Internet.' But if you really think about that for a second, that’s not a progressive argument. It’s a libertarian argument, because the same regulations that annoy you might be the regulations that protect me."

Scott Timberg in Salon interviews Robert Levine, author of Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back.

October 2011 Acquisitions

2011-10-31T17:11:00.000-07:00

Books:
Christopher James Alexander, Julius Shulman’s Los Angeles, 2011.
Robert Allen, A Thousand Paths to Zen, 2003.
Caroline Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, 2011.
Frank Miller, Holy Terror, 2011.
Dennis O'Neil et al, Batman in the Seventies, 2000.
Rob Sheffield, Talking to Girls about Duran Duran, 2010.
Len Wein et al, Batman in the Eighties, 2004.

DVDs:
Cinderella, 1950.
Lilo & Stitch, 2002.

"Remains Of Ancient Race Of Job Creators Found In Rust Belt"

2011-10-31T16:56:00.000-07:00

"'By today's standards, the job creators' society was highly unusual,' anthropologist Carla Delgado of the Smithsonian Institution said. 'One of its more bizarre customs involved workers being employed at the same job at the same location day in and day out for their entire adult lives. It was grueling, perhaps, but astonishingly, some of these individuals were able to set aside part of their earnings for the future, slowly saving money with the hope of improving the prospects of their offspring.'
"'The amazing part is, this bafflingly high level of economic security went on for generations,' Delgado added."

From The Onion.

"This Will Welcome the Crown into the Modern Age"

2011-10-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

"The announcement in Perth comes after Cameron wrote last month to the other leaders calling for change. Legislation will have to be introduced in Britain and some of the other 15 realms to amend laws including the Bill of Rights 1688, the Act of Settlement 1700, the Act of Union with Scotland 1706 and the Coronation Oaths Act 1688."

In The Guardian, Nicholas Watt reports on a constitutional change to the British monarchy that would end male primogeniture and allow a monarch to marry a Catholic.

"Weaponized Keynesianism"

2011-10-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

"At a fundamental level, the opponents of any serious job-creation program know perfectly well that such a program would probably work, for the same reason that defense cuts would raise unemployment. But they don’t want voters to know what they know, because that would hurt their larger agenda—keeping regulation and taxes on the wealthy at bay."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times calls out conservative supporters of military spending.