2011 Favorites

The Late Adopter selects...
Movies:

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

Horrible Bosses (dir. Seth Gordon) 
The Muppets (dir. James Bobin)
Cars 2 (dir. John Lasseter 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 Smile Sessions (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--In the 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

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?

"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"

"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

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"

"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

"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"

"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"

"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

"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

"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"

"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

"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

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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

"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"

"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

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"

"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

"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

"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"

From The Onion.

"Repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act"

"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"

"'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."