January 2013 Acquisitions

Books:
Jason Aaron and R. M. Guera, Scalped, Vol. 2: Casino Boogie, 2008.
Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, and George Kalogerakis, Spy: The Funny Years, 2006.
Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, 100 Bullets, Vol 11: Once upon a Crime, 2007.
Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics, 1970.
J. M. DeMatteis and Kent Williams, Blood: A Tale, 2004.
Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, The World Comes to America: Immigration to the United States Since 1945, 2012.
Garth Ennis and John McCrea, Hitman, Vol 4: Ace of Killers, 2000.
Darius James, That's Blaxsploitation!, 1995.
Paul Lieberman, Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles, 2012.
Grant Morrison et al, Batman Incorporated, 2013.
Walt Simonson et al, Indiana Jones Omnibus, Vol. 1: The Further Adventures, 2009.
Doug TenNapel. Black Cherry, 2007.
Roy Thomas et al, Star Wars Omnibus, Vol. 1: A Long Time Ago..., 2010.
Judd Winick et al, Catwoman, Vol. 1: The Game, 2012.

DVDs:
The Incredibles, 2004.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, 1969.
Sean Connery 007 Collection, Volume 1, 2011. 
Sean Connery 007 Collection, Volume 2, 2012.
The Street Fighter, 1974.

The Return of Liberalism

"Some liberals have shown arrogance. Some have given up. Others have over-reached. But at its best, liberalism has been a pragmatic system that could help create a society that helps those in need and works against our growing inequality. Four years after Obama became president, he may have finally launched—at least for now—a robust fight for what most liberals believe."

Alan Brinkley in The New Republic responds to President Obama's Second Inaugural Address.

"An Acidic Indictment of the Present-Day Cult of Architectural Stardom"

"There’s a cinematic sweep to Taylor’s compositions that makes several splash pages seem as capacious as a 70-millimeter theater screen. For their predominant tonality he chooses a warm sepia that has all the subtle gradations and dramatic multiple light sources of film-noir cinematography. Likewise, Kidd’s dialogue harks back to the fast-paced banter of B-movies in the Golden Age of Hollywood. The book’s craftily gauged pacing—which varies from crowded multi-panel pages to stunning single-image spreads—proves that all the digital gimmickry and 3-D effects of today’s action-movie franchises pale next to the imaginative powers of a first-rate artist working with pencil in two dimensions."

Martin Filler at The New York Review of Books reviews Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor's Batman: Death by Design.

Touching from a Distance

"Hook tells his story without any preciousness—in fact, he seems to revel in his abrasiveness throughout. He badmouths the Cure, writing, 'I think they thought, "I wish we were Joy Division."' He describes Buzzcocks lead singer Pete Shelley as a 'Little Lord Fauntleroy' for ordering lobster at a restaurant. Hook says early on that former bandmate Sumner hates being called Barney—then proceeds to call him that for the rest of the book."

In the Los Angeles Times, Randall Roberts reviews Peter Hook's Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division.

"Like Liberace Turned Inside Out"

"Moss, a onetime professional sports gambler, opened the bar on a blighted side street. The first five years were roughhouse—pool cues got swung, faces got bloodied. Moss and his small staff dreamed up bizarre gimmicks to draw in customers, from $20 'puke insurance' to an ill-advised come-on called Toothless Tuesdays, when having two successive missing teeth got you a free beer. The end came not long after one numskull patron let another pull a tooth with a pair of pliers right there at the bar—just for the booze."

John M. Glionna in the Los Angeles Times talks with P Moss, the owner of the Double Down Saloon in Las Vegas.

Even Better than the Real Thing

"Fourteen years ago, in my book 'Life: The Movie,' I wrote about a growing phenomenon in America in which life itself was being transformed into an entertainment medium, often usurping more traditional entertainment media. I attributed this to many things, perhaps chief of which was the extent to which we had lived so long in a nimbus of constant entertainment, where music, television, novels and especially movies had infiltrated our imaginations, that these became the matrices for our lives and the bars for the heights of our expectations.
"Whether it was a matter of us just becoming too jaded with our mundane reality or too hyped by fictions, we had come to demand more of life. We wanted reality to measure up. Maybe we even wanted reality to challenge the artifices of traditional entertainments—artifices like scripts and stars."

Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times explores how people fall for scandalous sports stars.

The Night Was Clear and the Moon Was Yellow

"Stagolee is one such character, a 'bad man' who shot a man over, in various versions, a muddy glass of water, tainted meat, or a Stetson hat. Similarly, the character Bad Lazarus broke into a commissary counter and then 'He walked away, Lord, Lord, he walked away." In the 1890s, Railroad Bill was a 'mighty mean man' who 'shot the light out of a poor brakeman's hand,' then bought a pistol as long as his arm to 'shoot everybody ever done me harm.' Like the characters in the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the bad men in post-Civil War black folklore were ciphers. Never fully described, they wore big hats, rode horses, and spoke with their pistols."

Scott Reynolds Nelson at The Chronicle of Higher Education places Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained into a tradition of American folklore.

Lean and Mean

"The temp industry’s continued growth even in a boom economy was a testament to its success in helping to forge a new cultural consensus about work and workers. Its model of expendable labor became so entrenched, in fact, that it became 'common sense,' leaching into nearly every sector of the economy and allowing the newly renamed 'staffing industry' to become sought-after experts on employment and work force development. Outsourcing, insourcing, offshoring and many other hallmarks of the global economy (including the use of 'adjuncts' in academia, my own corner of the world) owe no small debt to the ideas developed by the temp industry in the last half-century."

Erin Hatton in The New York Times traces the rise of temporary labor since the 1960s.

The Ghost of John Calhoun

"Republicans today face an increasingly desperate political predicament, similar to the one that Calhoun and his contemporaries faced in the early 1800s. They are a sectional party whose ranks are dwindling, relative to the rest of the country. Since they don’t want to give ground on their political agenda, they’re grasping at levers for thwarting the majority. In Congress, that has meant transforming the filibuster into a routine means of blocking simple majorities from passing laws. (Among those who have observed the parallels to Calhounism are James Fallows.) More recently, in state capitals of conservative states, it has meant taking advantage of lingering majorities there to ram through policy changes, like eliminating income taxes, that will undermine the welfare state for generations.
"But the most pernicious part of this campaign may be the campaign to thwart Democratic voters from exercising their rights to have equal influence in politics—whether by preventing them from going to the polls on election day or, via this latest effort in Virginia and other swing states, to prevent majorities from having the power to determine election outcomes."

Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic discusses how the GOP is trying to undermine to will of the majority.

"Two Years Ago, They Were Writing Our Obituary. Well It Didn’t Happen."

"We--right here in California--have such a rendezvous with destiny. All around us we see doubt and skepticism about our future and that of America’s. But what we have accomplished together these last two years, indeed, the whole history of California, belies such pessimism."

The Ventura County Star provides a transcript of Gov. Jerry Brown's 2013 State of the State Address.

And Paul Whitefield in the Los Angeles Times says that Brown should run for president.

Albion's Seeds

"After 1863—after Gettysburg turned the tide of the war, but, more importantly, after Lincoln defined the conflict as a contest over human rights—such racialist accounts of the Civil War more or less dissipated to a vague mythology of Southern cavaliers and New England Puritans. But we might recognize in its essential logic a certain tendency to transform political conflicts into matters of biological hostility. It is by such a logic that struggles in places such as Iraq or Bosnia have sometimes appeared to American onlookers as if rooted in “age-old” antagonisms, after all. By a similar way of thinking, sectional disputes over the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision once appeared to many Americans as a merely topical pretenses, under the cover of which latter-day Normans and Saxons exercised their congenital antipathies, ancient conflicts carried over the Atlantic."

Christopher Hanlon in The New York Times explains nineteenth-century descriptions of the Civil War as brought about by irreconcilable white racial groups.

"A Repudiation of the Politics of the Age of Obama"

"Zinn was deeply influenced by anarchists, and this anti-statism kept him from doing what most of the left has been doing of late—identifying with the holders of state power. Some of Zinn’s friends, Duberman writes, resented his 'never speaking well of any politician.' When many considered John F. Kennedy to be a champion of black civil rights, Zinn declared that the president had done only enough for the movement 'to keep his image from collapsing in the eyes of twenty million Negroes.' Going farther, Zinn argued that African Americans should eschew involvement with any state power, and even counseled against a campaign for voting rights.'When Negroes vote, they will achieve as much power as the rest of us have—which is very little.' Instead, they should create 'centers of power' outside government agencies from which to pressure authorities."

Thaddeus Russell in Reason reviews Martin Duberman's Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left.

"Ingersoll Dies Smiling"

"While today’s GOP is associated with public displays of faith, the Republican party of Ingersoll’s day was more likely to be the home of freethinkers, such as the churchless Abraham Lincoln. The American public wasn’t ready for overt atheism in elected or appointed office, but Ingersoll’s talent on the stump made his endorsement valuable. Jacoby persuasively argues that Ingersoll fits into the classical liberal tradition, a thread that remains visible, if controversial, in the fabric of the modern Republican party."

Katherine Mangu-Ward in The Weekly Standard reviews Susan Jacoby's The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought.

"Can One Be a Responsible, Ethical Sports Fan? Or Is Such a Thing a Contradiction in Terms?"

"The timing is ripe for this argument. We now know the scientific link between routine football plays and permanent brain damage. In the past 18 months, the owners of three different leagues locked out members of four different unions (National Football League players, National Basketball Association players, NFL referees, National Hockey League players). Penn State coaches and administrators protected an alleged child rapist. Sports fans are more likely than ever to understand that their ultimate escapist fantasy isn’t really all that escapist. As a result of this, there are no sandbags keeping real-life things, most of all politics, from flooding in to the fan’s previously myopic worldview."

Marc Tracy in The New Republic reviews Dave Zirin's Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.

"What Makes Us Exceptional–What Makes Us American – Is Our Allegiance to an Idea, Articulated in a Declaration Made More Than Two Centuries Ago"

Michael D. Shear reports as Barack Obama begins his second term as President of the United States.

"The Big Deal"

"Mr. Obama overcame the biggest threat to his legacy simply by winning re-election. But George W. Bush also won re-election, a victory widely heralded as signaling the coming of a permanent conservative majority. So will Mr. Obama’s moment of glory prove equally fleeting? I don’t think so."

In The New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that as President Obama's first term ends, political progressives should "find grounds for a lot of (qualified) satisfaction."

"Controversy Was Never Far Away"

"It’s shocking, of course, to realize that the 'golden age' of video game arcades lasted just a few, short years, but if we tie it onto the turbulent history of pinball, we’re looking at a much longer, institutional part of our culture which, in the 1980s, began to pass away. Like roller skating rinks and other public spaces 'for young people only,' our culture seems to have decided that kids are better off when they’re not alone with other kids, and worried parents have been victorious in their mission to rid us of these troublesome spaces for loitering, described by New York City in 1942 as a 'menace to the health, safety, and general welfare of the people.'"

Laura Jane at Verge depicts the "Life and Death of the American Arcade."

And Ben Fritz in the Los Angeles Times reports that Atari's U.S. division has declared bankruptcy.

"Absolutely No Puritan Ethic"

"In those days, the accepted wisdom was that women bought hardback books and men bought paperbacks, so Westlake decided to go after the 'machos.' And because he'd mined his humor and charm in his early Random House novels, he decided to change his style completely: 'I wanted the language to be very stripped down and bleak, no adverbs … very stark. That's how I chose the pseudonym's last name: Stark. The first name I took from Richard Widmark, a hero of mine.'
"Thus, the Parker series was born in 1962 with 'The Hunter.'"

Taylor Hackford in the Los Angeles Times writes about making the first movie to feature, with permission, Donald E. Westlake's Parker character.

"This Shadow World"

"Truman won his unexpected victory, Lingeman argues, not just because of red-baiting Wallace, but because he succeeded in rallying the party’s base: the AFL-CIO supported him because he vetoed the Taft-Hartley Act; liberals supported him because he argued for a national health insurance program; blacks supported him because he ended segregation in the military; and veterans supported him because of the GI Bill. And Wallace’s candidacy insulated Truman from charges that he was soft on communism."

Jon Wiener in the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Richard Lingeman’s The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War.

"The Historian Is Known as a Killjoy"

"Those actors include African-Americans, who are, as a New York Times Op-Ed argued, passive when not absent in 'Lincoln': There’s a brief opening scene in which black soldiers reverently recite the Gettysburg Address to the president and there’s Mary Todd Lincoln’s confidante Elizabeth Keckley, who is portrayed as a quietly strong seamstress, though in reality, she raised money for newly freed slaves. Said Foner: 'She was political, she was out there in the streets doing something. If you go to the other extreme, with "Django Unchained": That’s a total fantasy, but at least it’s got black people as historical actors.'"

Daniel D'Addario in Salon discusses historians reactions to Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.

In the Realm of the Diff'rent Shindig

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for historian Gerda Lerner, disc jockey Jimmy O'Neill, film director Nagisa Oshima, Disney designer Roger Broggie, Jr., actor Conrad Bain, former Orange County treasurer Robert L. Citron, and advice columnist Pauline Friedman Phillips.

"Provocation" or "Civilized Discourse"?

"Indeed, the book’s engagement with the ideological battles of our time is oblique at best. As it is, Binder and Wood walk in on one of the most consequential political debates of our time through a side door. Reading about the differences between 'Eastern' and 'Western' styles of campus conservatism, one cannot help but hear the echoes of the ongoing argument over the soul of the Republican Party. The students at Western revel in the annoyance of their liberal peers and find succor in the right-wing media entertainment complex. The Eastern students resist provocation and show faith in dialogue to promote conservative values. It is an altogether confident, high-minded, and admirable approach to politics—and jarringly quaint."

Elbert Ventura in The New Republic reviews Amy J. Binder and Kate Wood's Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives.

Call Me Orange

The Village Voice publishes its 2012 Pazz+Jop poll results.

"To Clarify Those Historical Causal Chains"

"Policies like these should be Obama’s true north, the point toward which he should try to move the nation in the next four years. There are swamps between here and there, among them the public’s conflicted and often virulent attitudes toward race. But great presidents find ways to navigate around the swamps."

Paul Glastris introduces The Washington Monthly's special issue on "Race, History, and Obama's Second Term."

"It May Be the Truest Religion of the Land"

"Wright's book comes at a time of heightened focus on Scientology. As he acknowledges, Janet Reitman's book 'Inside Scientology,' published in 2011, helped lay the groundwork for his expose. Yet for all the critical attention, Hubbard earns grudging respect. His religion, combining money, celebrity and enlightenment as it does, is unmistakably a product of Southern California."

Evan Wright in the Los Angeles Times reviews Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.

"A Contrived Place"

"Assigned here two years ago, Gill was depressed over his fate until he looked out from one of the hotel rooms and saw headlights and taillights stretching for miles in both directions.
"That's when the gambler in him surfaced. That's when Gill saw opportunity.
"'I saw all those car lights and realized that my job was to devise more ways to get people off that interstate,' he said. 'I try to get 'em both ways—to stop in on their way to the Strip or serve as the last stop in Nevada to get your gambling fix and place that football bet.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, John M. Glionna visits Primm, Nevada.

Take Thirteen

The Village Voice publishes its 2012 film critics' poll results.

100 Years of Nixon

"And why not feature some of the conversations Nixon secretly recorded? They show a fuller picture of the man. In one set of tapes, released in 2010, Nixon says to Charles Colson, his special counsel, on Feb. 13, 1973: 'I’ve just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits.
"'For example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. It’s sort of a natural trait.'
"'The Italians, of course, just don’t have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but … ' and here his voice trails off for a moment and then he continues: 'The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.'
"In a separate conversation with his personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, Nixon disagrees with views expressed by his Secretary of State William Rogers about black people.
"'Bill Rogers has got somewhat—and to his credit it’s a decent feeling—but somewhat, sort of, a sort of blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,' Nixon said. 'He says, well, "They are coming along, and that after all, they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart." So forth and so on.
"'My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years,' Nixon continues. 'I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it.'"
"So here we have the 37th president of the United States saying black people have to be 'inbred' if we want to make them smarter."

Roger Simon at Politico doesn't quite celebrate Richard Nixon's centennial.

How Much Is that California's Gold?

The Los Angeles Times publishes obits for singer Patti Page, television host Gloria Pall, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, and televison host Huell Howser.

"4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence"

"Officials also stated that an innocent 35-year-old passerby who found himself caught up in a long-winded dispute over use of the serial, or Oxford, comma had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound."

From The Onion.

"As Memorable for Its Utter Tastelessness as for Its Technical Accomplishments"

"As cultural history, this is an impressively researched, convincing argument. But Sperb is on shakier ground as a polemicist. He implies that the company has whitewashed (so to speak) its past by burying a moral embarrassment while still reaping profits from it. And ashamed as I am to type this, I’m not sure he’s being entirely fair to Disney."

John Lingan in Slate reviews Jason Sperb's Disney's Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South.

Worst. Congress. Ever.

"What’s the record of the 112th Congress? Well, it almost shut down the government and almost breached the debt ceiling. It almost went over the fiscal cliff (which it had designed in the first place). It cut a trillion dollars of discretionary spending in the Budget Control Act and scheduled another trillion in spending cuts through an automatic sequester, which everyone agrees is terrible policy. It achieved nothing of note on housing, energy, stimulus, immigration, guns, tax reform, infrastructure, climate change or, really, anything. It’s hard to identify a single significant problem that existed prior to the 112th Congress that was in any way improved by its two years of rule.
"The 112th, which was gaveled into being on Jan. 3, 2011, by newly elected House Speaker John Boehner, wasn’t just unproductive in comparison with the 111th. It was unproductive compared with any Congress since 1948, when scholars began keeping tabs on congressional productivity."

Ezra Klein at The Washington Monthly bids adieu to the 2011-2013 Congress.

"Good Times!"

"The real scandal of the deal is that taxes went up more for people making $50,000 than those making $400,000, thanks to a combination of ending the payroll tax cut 'holiday' and keeping the Bush tax cuts for those making between $250,000 and $400,000. The deal also continued the practice of protecting the wealth of the super-rich. Yes, the capital gains tax rate went up from 15 to 20 percent, but it was 28 percent before Clinton presided over its reduction during the 1997 tech boom, and didn’t apply to dividends until the Bush tax cuts. Now dividends remain taxed at the lower, privileged rate as well. The deal maintained the estate-tax exemption at $5 million, though it was set to revert to $1 million, while bumping up the rate from 35 to 40 percent. Note that the deal did nothing to hike the 'carried interest' rate that helped Mitt Romney pay a scandalously low tax rate.
"All of this reflects the fact that nobody involved in D.C. policy debates makes $50,000 or less, and most probably dwell in that sweet spot protected by the deal, the $250,000 to $400,000 realm of the 'not really rich,' in the formulation of coastal Democrats as well as all Republicans. And not surprisingly, they’re big winners in the deal."

Joan Walsh in Salon reacts to the "fiscal cliff" deal.

As does John B. Judis in The New Republic.

Lincoln Unchained

"While not burdened with the visceral racism of many of his white contemporaries, Lincoln shared some of their prejudices. He had long seen blacks as an alien people who been unjustly uprooted from their homeland and were entitled to freedom, but were not an intrinsic part of American society. During his Senate campaign in Illinois, in 1858, he had insisted that blacks should enjoy the same natural rights as whites (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), but he opposed granting them legal equality or the right to vote.

"By the end of his life, Lincoln’s outlook had changed dramatically. In his last public address, delivered in April 1865, he said that in reconstructing Louisiana, and by implication other Southern states, he would 'prefer' that limited black suffrage be implemented. He singled out the 'very intelligent' (educated free blacks) and 'those who serve our cause as soldiers' as most worthy. Though hardly an unambiguous embrace of equality, this was the first time an American president had endorsed any political rights for blacks."

In The New York Times, Eric Foner marks the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.