"The Safety Pin and the Swastika"

"When that under­ly­ing assump­tion remains unques­tioned, the rhetoric of main­stream antiracism is itself sus­cep­ti­ble to appro­pri­a­tion by the right. This is what leads some­one like Richard Spencer to voice approval for inci­dents like one at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ottawa, when a free yoga class for stu­dents with dis­abil­i­ties was shut down for 'cul­tur­al issues of impli­ca­tion.' A Stu­dent Fed­er­a­tion state­ment on the mat­ter went as far as to link it to the threat of 'cul­tur­al geno­cide.' At the blog for Radix Jour­nal, an alt-right pub­li­ca­tion he found­ed, Spencer could bare­ly con­tain his excite­ment. He cit­ed the inci­dent as an exam­ple of 'racial con­scious­ness for­ma­tion,' and applaud­ed stu­dent activists for 'engag­ing in the kind of ide­o­log­i­cal project that tra­di­tion­al­ists should be hard at work on.'
"It should go with­out say­ing that left-lib­er­al iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics and alt-right white nation­al­ism are not com­pa­ra­ble. The prob­lem is that they are com­pat­i­ble."
Shuja Haider at Viewpoint argues that "if they were con­front­ed by a uni­fied 'we'–a sub­ject that refused to rec­og­nize the bor­ders, divi­sions, and hier­ar­chies that are reg­u­lat­ed by the log­ic of iden­ti­ty–the alt-right would be left with nowhere to plant its flag."

A Smaller Splash

"The average L.A. pool, if left uncovered, loses roughly 20,000 gallons of water a year to evaporation; on an annual basis that's far, far less than Angelenos spend watering their lawns, but hardly negligible either. As UC Santa Barbara media studies professor Dick Hebdige puts it in the catalog for 'Backyard Oasis,' a 2012 photography show at the Palm Springs Art Museum, the swimming pool's bright symbolism has dramatically faded thanks to 'a growing awareness of the finite nature of water as a natural resource.'
"'The private pool,' he writes, 'is well on its way to outré.'"


Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times discusses the swimming pool in Southern California.

"Revolving Door through Which Trouble Gets to Travel"

"At first, though, all is luxury and light, a blur of what has come to be known as real estate porn, with examples of perfect pools in idyllic settings, some laid out plainly 'like great clusters of turquoise stones,' to quote a House & Garden writer cited here, some carefully composed and featuring lacquered socialites (as seen, for instance, in Slim Aarons’s 1970 photo­graph 'Poolside Gossip'). Movie stars (Marilyn, Jayne and their many spinoffs) rise Venus-like, glistening with water or oil, from the depths. Parents cautiously cavort with their toddlers (as in Bill Anderson’s 'Raymond Loewy Family,' from 1957). Shulman’s shot of Silvertop is not reproduced here, but there are many other contributions from this dedicated chronicler of midcentury modern architecture who died in 2009 at 98, his blood pressure no doubt exquisitely modulated by all the meditative sunset views his subjects showcased."

Alexandra Jones in The New York Times reviews Daniell Cornell's Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982.