January 2011 Acquisitions

Books:
Charles Burns, Black Hole, 2008.
Roberta Edwards, Who Is Barack Obama?, 2009.
Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, The Walking Dead, Volume 1: Days Gone By, 2004.
Val McDirmid, Fever of the Bone, 2009.
John Szarkowski and William Eggleston, William Eggleston's Guide, 2002.

DVDs:
The Blues Brothers, 1980.
Kentucky Fried Movie, 1977.
Machete, 2010.
Robin Hood, 1973.

Where Young People Go to Retire

"For Portland Mayor Sam Adams, the local job market helps explain why the city has become a magnet for forward-thinking 18- to 34-year-olds. 'We're known for high-tech, digital media and outdoor apparel, and those industries require highly educated folks or folks who skew younger,' says Adams, who makes a cameo in 'Portlandia' as the assistant to the mayor. (Yes, in Portland, even the mayor's ironic.)"

Melissa Maerz in the Los Angeles Times talks to Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein about their new television show, Portlandia.

I Can Cause Destruction Just Like the Atom Bomb

"Since she was discovered at 15 in Oklahoma City, Ms. Jackson’s career has been etched by men: Hank Thompson, the country star who got her signed after hearing her on local radio; Elvis, who encouraged her to wield her singular voice—a graveled purr—in rock instead of country; Wendell Goodman, her husband of 50 years, her tour manager and constant companion; and now Mr. White. But through it all she has become a shimmying emblem of female independence in a male-dominated industry, testing boundaries with her forward style and lyrics about mean men and hard-headed women (and those are the love songs). As she allowed, winkingly, at the Knitting Factory show, 'No wonder I have a bad-girl reputation.'"

Melena Ryzik in The New York Times profiles Wanda Jackson.

In Their Memory

The Orlando Sentinel produces a commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

"A Socialist in Economics, a Liberal in Politics and a Conservative in Culture"

"In 'The End of Ideology' he contended—nearly three decades before the collapse of Communism—that ideologies that had once driven global politics were losing force and thus providing openings for newer galvanizing beliefs to gain toeholds. In 'The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,' he foresaw the global spread of service-based economies as generators of capital and employment, supplanting those dominated by manufacturing or agriculture.
"In Mr. Bell’s view, Western capitalism had come to rely on mass consumerism, acquisitiveness and widespread indebtedness, undermining the old Protestant ethic of thrift and modesty that writers like Max Weber and R.H. Tawney had long credited as the reasons for capitalism’s success."

In The New York Times, Michael T. Kaufman writes an obituary for Daniel Bell.

Roberto Foa and Thomas Meaney in The Utopian give Bell one of his last interviews.

"Gap Between Rich And Poor Named 8th Wonder Of The World"

"Its official recognition as the Eighth Wonder of the World marks the culmination of a dramatic turnaround from just 50 years ago, when popular movements called for the gap's closure. However, due to a small group of dedicated politicians and industry leaders, vigorous preservation efforts were begun around 1980 to restore—and greatly expand—the age-old structure."

From The Onion.

"The Ultimate New York Movie"

"Landing in the public eye a few years after Morris Engel's Coney Island–set Little Fugitive, Rogosin's modest, chilly movie also influenced Cassavetes and the French new wavers, and from there American independent cinema was on its way to becoming an identifiable species."

Michael Atkinson in the LA Weekly revisits 1957's On the Bowery.

"We Do Big Things"

"Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn't even there yet. NASA didn't exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.
"This is our generation's Sputnik moment."

The New York Times publishes the transcript to President Obama's State of the Union Address.

Her Paint's All Over Town

"America has no tales of Amazons or of Atalanta; our national narrative does not chronicle the defeat of an armada by a virgin queen nor a teenage Joan leading her army into battle. American history includes no Cleopatras or Hatshepsuts; no Trung Sisters, who defended Vietnam from the Chinese in the first century; and no Catherines, great or otherwise. The mythos of our founding revolves entirely around fathers, save for the seamstress Betsy Ross and the querulous spouse Abigail Adams."

In The New York Times, Rebecca Traister explores the cowgirl image in politics.

Now I Think I'm Able to Carry On

"It is a lesser misfortune of Cooke’s abbreviated life to have been born ten years earlier than the rock stars of the 1960s. Neither a raucous rock ‘n’ roll originator like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, nor an overtly cerebral counter-culture figure like Dylan or Lennon, Cooke was a highly original artist whose story falls outside the standard narrative of rock history."

David Hadju at The New Republic salutes Sam Cooke on the eve of what would have been Cooke's eightieth birthday.

Ask Not What the Military-Industrial Complex Can Do for You

"Ike urged Americans to pay attention to America; JFK said it was time for new American leadership in the world. Ike’s rhetoric was plain and simple, studded with common sense and references to 'balance.' JFK’s rhetoric was soaring, captivating, and inspirational to the new generation just coming to power, a generation seeking new international mountains to climb. JFK was about to lead his country into new, greater, more trying and expensive levels of involvement in the world; Ike was telling the country not to forget about the American economy and democracy that underpinned all else."

Leslie Gelb at The Daily Beast compares Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address with John Kennedy's inaugural address.

And in Slate, David Greenberg argues that Americans have misinterpreted Eisenhower's famous speech.

"Always an Outsider Asking Questions"

"In Lomax's view, folk music was the creation of a collective culture, more vital and important than anything fashioned by individuals. His recordings made that previously ignored culture accessible to younger generations, though he wasn't always happy with the uses they made of it. He harshly judged the folk revival of the late '50s as 'a careerist machine … folk songs stripped of their social roots [and] turned into fodder for pop artists.' He was surprisingly receptive to rock 'n' roll: 'A stampeding herd of youngsters [who] set America singing, dancing, rocking to its own rhythms.' Yet he remained wary of the mass media, which he feared were wiping out centuries-old folkways, encouraging people to passively consume commercial culture instead of making their own."

Wendy Smith in the Los Angeles Times reviews John Szwed's Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World.

Left of the Dial

"The 34-year-old music station—known to introduce local underground music to a small but devout Bay Area audience—will move to an online-only format, the university said in a statement soon after the airwaves went dead."

Mike Aldax in The San Francisco Examiner reports the death of KUSF-FM.

And John Vorwald in a December 2010 New York Times article discusses the decline of college radio.

David Downs in The San Francisco Examiner puts KUSF-FM death in context.

"The Character Actor Shows Man as He Is; the Heroic Actor Shows Man as He Would Like to Be"

"'I went to this little dramatic school and when I left after one year, I had three goals. One, go to New York. Two, work for Kazan. Three, become a member of the Actors Studio. I was lucky enough to have all three things happen in two weeks,' says Dern, a font of lore whose own bio reads like a who's who."

In the LA Weekly, Nicholas Rapold talks with the subjects of the That Guy! film series at Cinefamily.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fuck You

The Village Voice publishes its 2010 Pazz+Jop poll results.

"I Do Need to Get My Groove Back"

"'Biggs, drop everything and find out who it is. Then have them erased. This could topple our administration, like Primary Colors did to Clinton.'"

In Slate, Christopher Beam envisions different authors for the new book O: A Presidential Novel.

"Look Less at Yourself and More at Each Other"

"Mr. Shriver was never elected to any national office. To political insiders, his calls for public service in the 1960s seemed quixotic at a time when America was caught up in a war in Vietnam, a cold war with the Soviet Union and civil rights struggles and urban riots at home. But when the fogs of war and chaos cleared years later, he was remembered by many as a last vestige of Kennedy-era idealism."

Robert D. McFadden in The New York Times reports the death of R. Sargent Shriver.

"Some of That Blood Is on Our Hands"

"A half-century later, we should surely look back on the death of Lumumba with shame, for we helped install the men who deposed and killed him. In the scholarly journal Intelligence and National Security, Stephen R. Weissman, a former staff director of the House Subcommittee on Africa, recently pointed out that Lumumba’s violent end foreshadowed today’s American practice of 'extraordinary rendition.' The Congolese politicians who planned Lumumba’s murder checked all their major moves with their Belgian and American backers, and the local C.I.A. station chief made no objection when they told him they were going to turn Lumumba over—render him, in today’s parlance—to the breakaway government of Katanga, which, everyone knew, could be counted on to kill him."

Adam Hochschild in The New York Times recalls the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.

"Here Comes Cao Cao"

"Today, it's not so much that foreigners are regarded as bad—on the contrary, many are heartily welcomed and at least outwardly respected as harbingers of economic success. But they are decidedly other. As workers and students from around the world take advantage of relatively lenient visa policies—more than half a million lived here in 2007—there is an acute sense of who is foreign, and who is not."

In the Los Angeles Times, Megan K. Stack profiles Jonathan Kos-Read, a white American actor in China.

"It’s Creativity that Made the Modern World"

"It’s the utopianism of both the left and the right that’s bad. You say, the only dignified life is being a soldier—that’s the aristocratic idea. Or the only dignified life is being a saint. And those two get adopted, one by the right and one by the left."

Joshua Rothman in The Boston Globe interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her new book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.

"Almost Lennonist"

"Yet the puzzle is not why it still has obvious shortcomings but why it has worked so well. Wikipedians offer several explanations. It arrived relatively early, when there were not countless other sites for fledgling netizens to spend their time on. An encyclopedia deals (mainly) with verifiable facts rather than mere opinions, the common currency and curse of the blogosphere. Above all, Wikipedia struck lucky with its communities of contributor-editors. Given the scale of the thing, the corps of regular editors is amazingly small. About 100,000 people contribute more than five edits each a month, but the big, mature Wikipedias are sustained by perhaps 15,000 people total, who each make more than 100 contributions a month. They tend to be young, single, well-educated men. Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation, says she can spot a typical Wikipedian at 100 yards."

In the Los Angeles Times, Timothy Garton Ash marks Wikipedia's tenth anniversary.

"Gun Nuts Battle Against Gun Grabbers"

"Gun researchers point to the impact of academic studies of automobile fatalities as a model for future gun policy. The goal of such policies ought to be to enact laws likely to reduce deaths and injuries with the lowest possible costs to legitimate gun users. Obviously, new policies will not be cost-free. New laws will mean some additional costs for gun owners, and likely some modest inconveniences, but at least some of these expenses could be offset by tax incentives for safe gun practices. It's important to recognize that Americans have been shouldering the direct and indirect costs of gun violence for as long as there have been guns. The advantage of this new economic model is it acknowledges gun owners' rights and restricts new policies to those likely to produce a reasonable effect without imposing a significant burden on gun owners."

Saul Cornell in Salon considers alternatives to gun control.

"Totally, Completely, Utterly, and Inarguably Wrong"

"The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks 'loose' and uneven; there's a lot of white space between characters and words, so it's more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here's the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we've all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it."

Farhad Manjoo in Slate rants against typing two spaces after ending a sentence.

Empire State of Argument

"Let the shouting begin."

New York magazine invites all to ponder New York City's greatest year, musical, mayor, TV show, athlete, building, novel, film, song, artwork, and day.

Taking Tiger Mother (By Strategy)

"What makes reacting to this book so complicated is that many Chinese-Americans will, I think, recognize aspects of Chua's story from their own childhoods: The importance of academic achievement, the expectation of a certain level of self-discipline, the closeness (if not always warmth) between parents and children. Even if I find her cultural analysis eye-roll-worthy, I can't deny that. Nor would I want to—shared experiences and frames of reference are what make a community a community. I just hope that people realize that Chua's personal account is just that—one Chinese woman's individual story."

Nina Shen Rastogi in Slate criticizes Amy Chua, author of the new memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, excerpted in The Wall Street Journal.

And Bad Mother author Ayelet Waldman ponders Chua.

He Loves to Go Out and Make Some Noise

"'Changing the old anger is the challenge for me,' he said. 'When I was 17, it was perfect, because I needed it. I needed it to defend myself against the attacking world, and I had plenty of it. Even in my 20s, it was great. Anger's great for writing. Like everything, some of these things that were survival skills turn into a double-edged sword in your adult life—they can affect your marriage, affect your relationship with your children, affect your relationships period.
"'It's been a little turbulent,' he said, adding with a twisted smile: 'It's an interesting—and stressful—period in life, and that always does create a good record.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Randy Lewis talks with Mike Ness as Social Distortion release a new album.

"I Believe We Can Be Better"

"The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives–to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud. It should be because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other's ideas without questioning each other's love of country, and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American dream to future generations."

The New York Times publishes a transcript of President Obama's speech in Tucson.

Gee, Our Old LaSalle Ran Great

"Developed by Norman Lear, the CBS series revolved around a working-class Queens family: Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor); his 'dingbat' wife, Edith (Jean Stapleton); his daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers); his liberal son-in-law, Mike 'Meathead' Stivic (Rob Reiner). The plots contained some of the expected sitcom fodder: misunderstandings, silly deceptions, crises that turned out to be no big deal. But the heart of the show was topical humor. The Bunkers and their friends and neighbors debated war, religion, drugs, gun control, sex, sexism, gay rights, race relations, immigration, taxation, the environmental movement and everything else under the sun."

Matt Zoller Seitz in Salon marks the fortieth anniversary of the debut of All in the Family.

"I Present Myself as a Mayor for Everyone"

"He noted the 'long, troubled and proud history' of Chinese Americans in this city, laced with racism and neglect, and acknowledged twice the key role his longtime friend and Chinatown political power broker, Rose Pak, played in him becoming mayor.
"'Now, today, Rose, our struggle, our struggle is here, and it is succeeding,' Lee said."

John Coté in the San Francisco Chronicle reports the inauguration of Edwin M. Lee as San Francisco's first-ever Chinese-American mayor.

What Brown Can Do for You

"'To be blunt, voters are the source of most of the problems,' said Ethan Rarick, the author of 'California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown,' a biography of the governor's father.
"'Most of the things that most people would say we need to do, the voters won't do, at least not now, and many of them were caused by voters,' he said, referring to the plethora of ballot measures that have tied budgets in knots, among other things. 'Voters clearly want something for nothing; they want to see services without paying for it.... I hope there is an opportunity for him to change people's minds, but I'm dubious about it.'"

Cathleen Decker in the Los Angeles Times reports on Gov. Jerry Brown's new budget.

And Shane Goldmacher and Tim Rutten discuss reactions to the budget's unveiling.

"It's Not a Legitimate Mark. Period"

"He's doing it with hopes of proving that Denise Whiting, the founder of Honfest, the city's annual homage to an apocryphal Baltimore gal known for her beehive hairdo and cat's-eye glasses, has no legal claim on the word."

Jill Rosen in The Baltimore Sun reports on a dispute in Charm City over trademarking the word "Hon."

The War between the State

"The 1980s saw what appeared to be a permanent reversal, as Southern California's aerospace industry boomed and it developed its own powerful banking sector and the beginnings of a cultural presence. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics seemingly symbolized the region's status as an international powerhouse.
"It was, however, merely a temporary shift."

In The Sacramento Bee, Dan Walters argues that "the Bay Area reigns supreme in California politics."

"A Future that Doesn't Work"

"And that reality has implications for the nation as a whole. For Texas is where the modern conservative theory of budgeting—the belief that you should never raise taxes under any circumstances, that you can always balance the budget by cutting wasteful spending—has been implemented most completely. If the theory can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times argues that the "Texas miracle" is a mirage.

Give Out but Don't Give Up

"During those decades, Eggleston also spent time in the Chelsea Hotel romancing Warhol superstar Viva and sharing accommodations with Sid and Nancy. Back home in Memphis he counted as confidants indie-rock godfather figure Alex Chilton, cult music producer Jim Dickinson and the great Stanley Booth, author of one of the best (if not the best) books on rock music ever, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Rock groups of impeccable taste have been licensing Eggleston's images as cover art since Chilton's band Big Star's Radio City (1974), and David Byrne even set an entire film (True Stories) in an Egglestonian universe."

Gustavo Turner in the LA Weekly reviews LACMA's "William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008."

The Tyranny of the Minority

"And thus our Constitution was amended under the guise of an accommodating rule change. Forty-one senators can and routinely do block any disliked bill before them. Even more distressing, the Senate leader often declines to bring forward bills for deliberation if he is unsure of getting 60% support. In the first two years of the Obama administration Republicans have used 'the invisible filibuster' 84 times, more than in all the Congresses of the 1950s and 1960s put together. A practice that began as a courtesy to Senate speakers has morphed into a fundamental challenge to the principle of majority voting."

In the Los Angeles Times, Joyce Appleby calls for an end of the Senate filibuster.

The Roq of the '80s

"Mixing rockabilly with reggae, early electronica with punk rock, ska, new wave, and every mutation thereof, KROQ championed unknown baby bands, including the Clash, U2, R.E.M., INXS, Duran Duran, XTC, Depeche Mode, the Smiths, the Cure, the Go-Go's, Culture Club, Devo, the Police, the Pretenders, New Order, the Specials, Billy Idol, Adam Ant, the B-52's, Oingo Boingo, Eurythmics, Tears for Fears, Soft Cell, Spandau Ballet, Simple Minds, the Human League, ABC, Split Enz, the Cult, Midnight Oil, Yaz, Bananarama, Berlin, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Madness, X, the Bangles, Thomas Dolby, Missing Persons, the Stray Cats, UB40, Men at Work, and the English Beat. KROQ is also to be held accountable for 'Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage,' 'I Eat Cannibals,' and Huey Lewis & the News."

In a 2001 Los Angeles magazine article, Kate Sullivan presents an oral history of the early years of KROQ.

"I Get to Follow in My Father's Footsteps Once Again"

"'The budget I propose will assume that each of us elected to do the people's business will rise above ideology.... It is a tough budget for tough times,' he said. 'Choices have to be made and difficult decisions taken. At this stage of my life, I have not come here to embrace delay or denial.'"

Anthony York in the Los Angeles Times reports Jerry Brown's inaugration as governor of California.

And Brown causes controversy by criticizing Proposition 13.

"No Place Epitomises the Creative and Destructive Forces of Modernity More than Detroit"

"Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbing testament to the glory and the destructive cost of American capitalism: the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets. There is a formal beauty here too, though, reminiscent of Robert Polidori's images of post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans. 'It seems like Detroit has just been left to die,' says Marchand, 'Many times we would enter huge art deco buildings with once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinary frescoes, and everything was crumbling and covered in dust, and the sense that you had entered a lost world was almost overwhelming. In a very real way, Detroit is a lost world–or at least a lost city where the magnificence of its past is everywhere evident.'"

Sean O'Hagan in The Observer discusses the new book The Ruins of Detroit.

"Put the Tea Bags in First"?

"Now, imagine that tea, like coffee, came without a bag (as it used to do—and still does if you buy a proper tin of it). Would you consider, in either case, pouring the hot water, letting it sit for a bit, and then throwing the grounds or the leaves on top? I thought not. Try it once, and you will never repeat the experience, even if you have a good strainer to hand. In the case of coffee, it might just work if you are quick enough, though where would be the point? But ground beans are heavier and denser, and in any case many good coffees require water that is just fractionally off the boil. Whereas tea is a herb (or an herb if you insist) that has been thoroughly dried. In order for it to release its innate qualities, it requires to be infused. And an infusion, by definition, needs the water to be boiling when it hits the tea. Grasp only this, and you hold the root of the matter."

Christopher Hitchens in Slate recommends proper ways to make tea.

No One Man Should Have All That Power

"Finally, and most boringly, year-end lists often favor late-year releases, when the sense of anticipation fulfilled is still fresh. In this regard music critics are no better than Oscar voters. The last thing they remember as they fill out their ballots is the triumph of Mr. West’s album, or reading about someone else’s insistent perspective on the triumph of Mr. West’s album, or assuming—rightly, at it happens—that for the next few weeks before the actual year’s end, nothing they or anyone else will do will detract from that triumph, or perception of triumph.
"Having such strict agreement among critics is a bit like letting the blind judge a beauty pageant: the results are sometimes unreliable, and even less translatable to the world at large."

Jon Caramanica in The New York Times questions the critical acclaim for Kanye West's latest album.

Re-Transgressing the Boundaries

"And then he threw down the gauntlet. Sokal was not, as he explained, trying to embarrass Social Text; his broader aim was political, for he believed–and he was not alone–that postmodernism and theory were bad for the left, and that the academic wing of the left was aggressively undermining the foundations of progressive politics:"

Michael Bérubé in Democracy ponders the legacy of the Sokal Hoax, fifteen years later.

Update: And for the twentieth anniversary of the Sokal hoax, Jennifer Ruark in The Chronicle of Higher Education presents an oral history.

Character Counts

"That robust historiographical movement was further energized in the American case—where it was called 'social history,' or 'history from the bottom up'—by the striking emergence of black nationalist and separatist ideologies in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement’s legislative achievements, the dramatic rise of an articulate feminist movement, and the no-less dramatic resumption of immigration after the repeal of the National Origins statute in 1965. In light of these anti-authoritarian developments and quests for racial, ethnic, and gender identity, it became not merely unfashionable, but professionally suicidal, for historians to suggest that the encompassing character of a society was itself a fit subject for study. In the scholarly vernacular, historians became a guild of splitters, not lumpers. In the popular vernacular, they retreated to their many separate silos and gave up the quest for a synthetic principle that might impart some measure of coherence to their prolific but woefully hermetic studies of race, class, and gender. Diversity became the guiding mantra of contemporary culture and historical scholarship alike. What unifying elements might have historically contained, connected, or shaped all that diversity were questions that went unasked."

In Boston Review, David M. Kennedy reviews Claude S. Fischer's Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character.