Luv N' Haight

"'I know people hate me. I can see it in their eyes. But they're never going to get rid of junkies in the Haight,' said Steffon Haaby, 22, a former heroin addict who said he fled a troubled single-parent home in Spokane, Wash. 'If I lived my life trying to please everybody, I would have stayed home with my mother.'"

John M. Glionna of the Los Angeles Times visits San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and finds ex-hippies at war with gutter punks.

Strange Brew

"In the Colonial era, settlers drank mostly hard cider (the rural drink of choice), rum, and whiskey. It wasn't until the mid-19th century, when German immigrants came over in large numbers to man the new factories and brought their brewing skills with them, that beer really took off. When beer became more popular than cider around the time of the Civil War, it signaled an altered American landscape as much as altered tastes. Mass-market beer arose out of two key innovations of the industrial revolution: refrigeration and pasteurization. Suddenly, beer could travel long distances, and lager slowly took over countryside as well as town.
"But in America today, beer has lost its grip."

Field Maloney in Slate ponders the eclipse of beer by wine.

Put It in Your Blank

The Los Angeles Times runs an obit for Charles. Nelson. Reilly.

Where the Boys Aren't

"When community college leaders gather these days, one topic that seems to come up all the time is what to do about declining male enrollments. Nationally, men make up 43 percent of college students, and there are plenty of community colleges where that proportion is smaller."

Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed takes a look at how one college is trying to retain male students.

The Huddled Masses

"The Germans refused for decades to give up their native tongue and raucous beer gardens. The Irish of Hell's Kitchen brawled and clung to political sinecures. The Jews crowded into the Lower East Side, speaking Yiddish, fomenting socialism and resisting forced assimilation. And by their sheer numbers, the immigrants depressed wages in the city.
"As for the multitudes of Italians, who settled Mulberry Street, East Harlem and Canarsie? In 1970, seven decades after their arrival, Italians lagged behind every immigrant group in educational achievement."

Michael Powell in a 2006 Washington Post article sees parallels between today's immigration, yesterday's immigration.

The Source

Souled on Music blog offers links to the original tunes sampled on your favorite hip-hop tracks.

Rights Promotion

"The classic American formulation of human rights is Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Human beings are entitled to express their consciences and to enjoy protections from the excesses of both state and market power. As demonstrated by the jeopardy to democracy that FDR's generation observed worldwide, these basic freedoms both save democracy from failure and make democracy meaningful."

Spencer Akerman in a 2006 American Prospect article extols a foreign policy committed to human rights over democracy.

Exiles in Paradise

"As Bahr reminds us, the German exile community in Los Angeles was variously and fabulously gifted, and it included not only novelists, philosophers and composers but also artists, architects, psychiatrists and a great many actors, screenwriters and directors. For Bahr, the accident of history that placed Mann (both Thomas and Heinrich), Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, architect Rudolph M. Schindler and other German-speaking intellectuals in Southern California turned out to be fateful and decisive. Precisely because 'so many canonical authors of modern German literature had lived in exile in Southern California and produced their major works here,' argues Bahr, 'Los Angeles could have served as an icon of intellectual and artistic resistance to the Nazi regime.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Kirsch reviews Ehrhard Bahr's Weimar on the Pacific.

Precious and Few

The LA Weekly presents the best independent bookstores in Los Angeles.

"Suppose I Let You Off with a Warning This Time"

"Ruby Stevens was only 2 when her mother died after falling and hitting her head on a Brooklyn curbside; soon after, her father left to work on the Panama Canal, never to be heard from again. She was shunted from friends to relatives and back, each move stiffening her upper lip and glazing her over with another coating of protective shell. The adult Stanwyck, a blunt talker and rigid right-winger, was all brisk, efficient business, with a survivor’s compulsion for losing herself in work and a loner’s unease at being the center of attention. She made 88 films over 38 years. The worst are tolerable for her presence in them, and if the best include some of Hollywood’s finest, it’s often only partly, if no less surely, because of her."

In the LA Weekly, Hazel-Dawn Dumpert looks back at the life and career of Barbara Stanwyck.

Call the Doctor

"How to raise wages? By the usual methods that obtained before a plutocracy of CEOs and Wall Streeters specializing in conflicts of interest grabbed the economy by the throat: higher minimum wage laws, enforcement of the Wagner Act recognizing the right to form unions, and the use of federal reimbursements to set decent wage levels in human service work.
"How to pay for that? Restore progressive taxation on the wealthiest."

Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect considers a supposed nursing shortage.

Professor Sees Parallels Between Things, Other Things

"Fifteen years ago, Windham was awarded tenure for doing this."

From The Onion.

You Never Forget Your First Time

The Los Angeles Times runs an obit for televangelist Jerry Falwell.

All Hail the King

"But the disorienting curveball the show threw was that though he may have been lazy and full of harebrained ideas, Doug also happened to be surprisingly patient. And Carrie might have been a go-getter, but she was also selfish and shrill. Put plainly, Doug and Carrie were all wrong in just the right ways. They never had kids. They lied, got fed up with their in-laws, called each other terrible names.... For nine seasons, no matter how petty and cheap and dysfunctional you felt, Doug and Carrie were reliably just as bad. Actually, they were worse. And that was 'normal.' Talk about feel-good comedy!"

In Salon, Sarah Karnasiewicz eulogizes The King of Queens.

Whatever Happened to the Future?

"Sometimes it feels as if progress itself has actually slowed down, with the 1960s as the climax of a 20th century surge of innovation, and the decades that followed consisting of a weird mix of consolidation, stagnation and rollback. Certainly change in the first half of the 20th century seemed to manifest itself in the most dramatic and hubristic manner. It was an era of massive feats of centralized planning and public investment: huge dams; five-year plans of accelerated industrialization; gigantic state-administered projects of rural electrification, freeway construction and poverty banishment. Science fiction writers who grew up with this kind of thing (including the darker side of 'public works' -- the mobilization of entire populations and economies for war, the Soviet collectivization of peasant farms that resulted in massive famine, genocide) naturally imagined that change would continue to unfold in this dynamic and grandiose fashion. So they foresaw things like the emergence of cities enclosed inside giant skyscrapers and grain harvested by combines the size of small ships voyaging across vast prairies."

Simon Reynolds in Salon reviews Daniel H. Wilson's Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived.

Hip Hopper

Slate runs a slide show of Edward Hopper paintings in honor of a new retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (via Ghost in the Machine)

The Subject of This Post Is Marilyn Monroe

New York magazine has six photographers reenvision Richard Avedon's famous 1957 photo of Marilyn Monroe.

Study War No More?

"Popular taste, in other words, bears out the judgment of Edmund Burke, who quipped--long before the horrors of modern mechanized warfare--that the annals of good deeds would 'not afford matter enough to fill ten pages. ... War is the matter which fills all History.'
"Yet the discipline of history, as it exists in major U.S. universities, seems to have forgotten Burke's lesson."

David Bell in The New Republic ponders a decline of military history at universities.

As does Patricia Cohen in The New York Times two years later.

The Kids Are Alright

"'I don't care, as long as he's nice to his mother,' said Pollack. 'I was as dorky a kid as I could have possibly been. I wasn't good at sports. I didn't even listen to music. I listened to news radio all day. In some ways, it's like I want for my kid what I didn't have for myself. That's what it comes down to.'"

ABC News's Nightline investigates the rise of "hipster parents."

Looking for an Angry Fix

"Ginsberg once called the poem 'an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified.' So it has been. In order to make his great anti-establishment poem, Ginsberg had to assimilate much of the established, European, literary past—the same past so many young readers can now avoid, thanks in part to the focus on the relevant, the contemporary, and the immediate that Ginsberg's fiery, irreverent example, 'yaketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks,' helped to usher into American culture."

Stephen Burt in Slate reassesses Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

Well He Was Only 5’3"

"You can see it again and again and still be struck dumb by its audacity, its freshness and its courage — and especially by the way it seems to be the summation of the organized, state-sanctioned cruelty, the angst and hysteria of the modern age."

In the Los Angeles Times, Thomas Hoving celebrates the one-hundredth anniversary of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

A House Is Not a Home

Slate excerpts Witold Rybczynski's Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville as he presents a short history of the house, the rise and fall of ranch-style, and photos of a development in rural Pennsylvania.

Turn It Up

"That said, the anti-rockist polemic that resurged this decade seems to have developed a kind of runaway momentum, a malign logic that some people followed through to absurd places. You started getting people arguing that singling out a figure like Timbaland as an auteur and an innovator, that is rockist. Or that if you allowed your sense of the artist’s personality--their intent and integrity--to interfere with your enjoyment of a record, that meant your mind was still shackled by rockist hang-ups. There seems to be a drive towards eliminating all axes of judgement beyond pure pleasure, the supposed purity of the consumer’s unmediated experience of the pop commodity. The distinction between 'urgent' and 'trivial' is obviously a no-no for these heroic anti-rockists, but you even get people seriously debating whether distinctions based on quality--good/bad--are rockist and should be jettisoned. The most recent test case figure for this lunatic fringe of anti-rockism is Paris Hilton. When you’re developing elaborate validating analyses of Paris Hilton, that ought to be a sign that you’re gone too far! "

FACT magazine interviews Simon Reynolds on the eve of the publication of his new book, Bring the Noise: Twenty Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop.


"A recurring theme in Bring The Noise is the search for music that combines a radical political edge with musical experimentalism and popular appeal. 'That would be ultimate ideal, but it's one that's virtually non-existent in the history of music!' says Simon."

And Anindya Bhattacharyya interviews Reynolds in Socialist Worker.

After the Storm

"What distinguishes Litwack is that despite his elite professorial status and international reputation, he's at heart a teacher. He teaches by telling stories, mainly stories of the unsung.
"He grew up in Santa Barbara, the son of working-class Russian Jewish immigrants. His father was a gardener and his mother a seamstress. The experiences of his parents and neighbors, most of whom were Mexican, inspired his interest in people excluded from the history books.
"His patient, gravelly voice seems to have been honed at the kitchen table in the old neighborhood but has been adapted for lecture halls jammed with freshmen. For years, Litwack has set a high standard for tens of thousands of students, whether they care about history or not: dig elbow-deep into the primary source materials of America's contradictory record and come up with your own stories and your own critical stance. History is defined as the study of the past but with his students Litwack adds a qualifier: '... and all its splendid messiness.'"

The San Francisco Chronicle marks the retirement of Professor Leon Litwack from the University of California, Berkeley.

The Way of the Gun

"Some years ago, the distinguished historian Richard Hofstadter told me that, after a lifetime of studying American culture, what he found most deeply troubling was our country's inability to come to terms with the gun — which in turn strongly affected our domestic and international attitudes. Emotions of extreme attachment to and even sacralization of the gun pervade American society, and commercial interests shamelessly manipulate those emotions to produce wildly self-destructive policies."

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Jay Lifton diagnoses "gunism" as central to the history of America.

Theme Park

From A Different World to Zorro, Television Tunes has your favorite theme songs.

Return to Manzanar

"'Somehow, they trusted us,' Oda said, recalling that as an editor he confronted administrators more over shortcomings in the mess halls and the plumbing system than on the broader issue of civil liberties.
"'We reported in such a way as to take a neutral stand,' he said."

The Los Angeles Times revisits World War II Japanese-American internment camp newspapers.

Obama-Rama

David Greenberg in Slate compares Barack Obama with John Kennedy and Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker compares the candidate with Abraham Lincoln.

And Casey Blake in The New Republic's Open University connects Obama with Reinhold Niebuhr.

Eight Hours for What We Will

Nelson Lichtenstein in Slate discusses the origins of May Day.