March 2013 Acquisitions

Books:
Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho Was a Right-on Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism, 1972.
Edward T. Chang and Russell C. Leong (eds.), Los Angeles--Struggles toward Multiethnic Community, 1994.
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, 2012.
Darwyn Cooke, DC: The New Frontier, Vol. 1, 2004.
Chuck Dixon et al, Batman: Contagion, 1996.
Marcia A. Eymann and Charles M. Wollenberg (eds.), What's Going On?: California and the Vietnam Era, 2004.
Alan Grant, Batman: The Abduction, 1998.
Theodore Hamm, Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948-1974, 2001.
Dan Jurgens et al, Superman: The Death of Superman, 2003.
Dan Jurgens et al, Superman: World without a Superman, 1998.
Gerald O'Collins, Catholicism: A Very Short Introduction, 2008.
John Ostrander et al, Superman: The Kents, 2000.
Scott Snyder et al, Batman: The Black Mirror, 2013.
W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst, 1981.
Judd Winick et al, Catwoman, Vol. 2: Dollhouse, 2013.

DVDs:
Ratatouille, 2007.

Muscle Trumpet

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for bodybuilding promoter Joe Weider, journalist Anthony Lewis, record producer and songwriter Deke Richards, actor Richard Griffiths, and record producer Phil Ramone.

A Sunkissed Miss Said, "Don't Be Late"

"But there is something irrational, indeed unpatriotic, in rooting for California to fail, as so many conservatives are now doing. Sure, they are upset that the Republican Party is dead in this state—R.I.P. G.O.P. And, among the fringes, there are those who cannot accept that California is a minority-majority state, with whites making up about 39 percent of the population. They’ve seen the future and don’t like it one bit.
"When Cal-haters say people are leaving the state because of high taxes—its top rate is 13.2 percent on earnings over $1 million—they mean people like them. Or people like the golfer Phil Mickelson, who complained that the tax burden on the millions he makes hitting a little white ball may force him to look beyond his Southern California moorings.
"Because, by any measure, the state is still growing."

Timothy Egan in The New York Times looks at California's comback.

As does Paul Krugman.

"Man Cautiously Avoids Barnes & Noble Section Where Teens Check Out Graphic Novels"

"'I really don’t want to go over there,' said Gannon, adding that he would prefer to avoid asking the lip-pierced, teenage girl with a ski cap covering her dyed-red hair if she would please move her backpack so he could browse the shelves. 'I’ll just pretend to browse the Business and Money section until they leave.'"

From The Onion.

"If Dixie Can Make Peace with the Hellish Parts of Its Legacy while Fostering Its Inherent Strengths, It Just Might Achieve a Real Breakthrough"

"Thompson finds the greatest reason for hope in an unlikely place—the past, specifically that part of it staked out by the Agrarians, the group of Vanderbilt University teachers and students (among them Robert Penn Warren) who in 1930 published 'I'll Take My Stand,' a manifesto in praise of the Southern way of life.
"Although wrong about race, the book was right about much else. The Agrarians championed sustainable family farms, ecology, human scale and, most of all, community. They were green many decades before the rest of America, and they were down home."

Steve Oney in the Los Angeles Times reviews Tracy Thompson's The New Mind of the South.

"The Blueprint for All Motion Picture Parodies to Come"

"For many of us, the first exposure to classic films wasn’t on film at all, it was in print. It was in black and white even if the films were in color, it was printed on cheap paper, and it was full of some of the worst puns known to man. We thrilled to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Oddfather, Arthur Penn’s revisionist Western Little Dull Man, the sophisticated sex comedy Shampooped, and Stanley Kubrick’s ground-breaking 201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy. For us, Casablanca was cast with professional wrestlers, My Fair Lady featured women’s libbers trying to reform a male chauvinist Burt Reynolds, and The Exorcist ended with Satan demanding a six-film deal."

Grady Hendrix in Film Comment traces the history of Mad magazine's treatment of the movies.

"I Would Exterminate"

"Although we think of the Civil War as fought by armies, the historian Daniel E. Sutherland has recently reminded us that it was also marked by extensive guerrilla warfare that spread throughout the Confederacy and into Northern border areas. Such fighting occurred first and most virulently in Missouri. Another historian, Matthew C. Hulbert, calls the guerrilla war in Missouri 'hyper-violent,' making it a 'uniquely different wartime experience' from that of ordinary soldiers. Even the name given to the guerrillas, 'bushwhackers,' carried connotations of a different kind of fighting—attacks from ambush. Indeed, Hulbert argues that Quantrill’s biographer 'concocted' the exchange between his subject and Seddon in part 'to legitimize the brutality' of the Missouri guerrillas."

Nicole Etcheson in The New York Times discusses Confederate William Clarke Quantrill.

Things Fall Deep

The Los Angeles Times runs obituaries for Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, car designer Roy Brown, actor Harry Reems, and author Chinua Achebe.

"YouTube Reaches 1 Trillion Racist Comments"

"'It’s hard to even comprehend how many completely ignorant comments 1 trillion is. We’re truly humbled by our dedicated and extremely uneducated users who make such vile and imperceptive statements each and every day. Thank you, everyone.'"

From The Onion.

The Mortal Code

Columbia University awards the 2013 Bancroft Prize to historians W. Jeffrey Bolster and John Fabian Witt.

"Drifting In and Out of Focus Like a Dream"

Robin Pogrebin in The New York Times reports that Toyo Ito has won the 2013 Pritzker Prize for architecture.

All the News that Fits

"Many former alt-weekly editors would like to persuade you that their cutting take on city politics and the arts combined with their dedication to the feature form won readers. Actually, it was the whole gestalt that made the publications work. Comprehensive listings paired with club and concert ads to both entertain and help readers plan their week. Classified ads, especially the personals, often provided better reading than the journalistic fare in the front of the book. No better venue for apartment rentals existed; even people who had long-term leases used the housing ads to fantasize. Even the display ads, purchased mostly by local retailers and service providers, were useful to readers.
"In most cities—and eventually in all—the alt-weekly was priced at zero for readers, prefiguring the free-media feast of the Web, and these publications became cultural signifiers. Bob Roth, one of my bosses when I edited Washington City Paper (1985-1995), told me to watch people as they picked it up from a street box and walk away with it: Almost to a one, they would hold it in their hands or fold it under their arms as if to display the paper’s flag so onlookers would know they were City Paper people, whatever that meant."

Jack Shafer at Reuters discusses the decline of alternative newspapers.

Hail, Columbia

"Thanks to these and other women who marched, women's rights in America were secured (even if they remain always and ever contested). A century later, Columbia looks like a lady who knows how to lean in. Enough time has passed, it seems, that we might consider reviving her spirit, and returning her to the pantheon of America characters for the years to come."

Garance Franke-Ruta at The Atlantic looks back at a neglected symbol of America.

"Approaches 1"

"I was entering into the online world pretty deeply in the eighties, and I was offended by how glibly these comparisons came up—almost invariably inappropriately. My feeling was that the more people got into this habit, the less likely that people remembered the historical context of all this. And as you know, one of the injunctions of Holocaust historians is that we must never forget, we have to remember. And I just thought, Well, I’m going to do a little experiment and see if I could make people remember."

Dan Amira at New York talks with Mike Godwin about the eponymous internet law.

But Somewhere the Party Never Ends

"The coming of stagflation, and the seeming incapacity of economic orthodoxy to deal with it, discredited the Keynesians and lifted the monetarists. Economic policy didn’t seem to be working, and as the 1970s progressed, the pressure to make a change became irresistible. Monetarists ascended to key policy positions, but this ascent did not mark the capitulation of center-left governing practices to the neoliberal faith in free markets, as right-wingers like to claim. The idea that accepting monetarism meant accepting free markets is the result of a retrospective 'conflation of monetarism with a theoretically separate set of arguments about the supposed superiority of markets over government intervention in the economy.'"

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael W. Clune reviews Daniel Stedman Jones's Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics.

"Living Like a Cross between a Chameleon and a Magpie"

"But there’s more to Mr. Bowie’s compulsive changeability than a career strategy. What he was really developing during the ’70s was a new postmodern psychology based around flux and mutability. His great precursor and influence here was Warhol, the inspiration for his 1971 song 'Andy Warhol' and a role Mr. Bowie would actually play in the 1996 biopic 'Basquiat.'  Analyzing Warhol, the art critic Donald Kuspit wrote of 'the protean artist-self with no core'—a description that could also fit Mr. Bowie."

Simon Reynolds in The New York Times welcomes the return of David Bowie.

The Unknown World

"Most of us will find the news that some black people bought and sold other black people for profit quite distressing, as well we should. But given the long history of class divisions in the black community, which Martin R. Delany as early as the 1850s described as 'a nation within a nation,' and given the role of African elites in the long history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, perhaps we should not be surprised that we can find examples throughout black history of just about every sort of human behavior, from the most noble to the most heinous, that we find in any other people's history."

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at The Root explores the history of black slaveowners.

"Make Concern for the Future"

"Lasch considered himself a man of the left, and saw his attack on liberalism as coming from that perspective. But he also admitted that he was not entirely sure of his own viewpoint, and so he dived into social theory, reading Marx, Weber and the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse), among others. As we learn, this would become a typical pattern: when confronted with doubt and intellectual obstacles, he upped his reading and expanded into new areas. Indeed, he was far from the typical academic historian: he reached far afield into sociology, psychology and other areas, wherever his explorations would lead him."

Sean Collins at Spiked reviews Eric Miller's 2010 book, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch.

One Day Leader of the Tears

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for pop producer Shadow Morton, singer Cleotha Staples, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, pianist Van Cliburn, actress Bonnie Franklin, and singer Bobby Rogers.

"You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here, but It Helps"

"And yet without the Plath life-story sitting alongside it, marking it out with an especial integrity, The Bell Jar starts to show its family likeness. I’m thinking here of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).

"That is, The Bell Jar’s Esther belongs to the empyrean of the beatified and the beaten just as much as Holden Caulfield or Sal Paradise. Its narrator speaks in a distinctly countercultural tongue. Like those literary works to which it bears such a striking affinity, it presents a portrait of the stifling conformism of postwar American society. And in the rebellion-cum-suffering of Esther it counters it."

 

Tim Black at Spiked considers Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar fifty years after publication.

Truth or Consequences

"In the epilogue Morin and Rouch pace the halls of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, recapping and analyzing their experiment and its aftermath. Their subjects were variously blamed for being 'too true' or 'not true enough,' for being exhibitionists or phonies. But the filmmakers' hypothesis is that the moments they have captured on film are no less true, or at least no less revealing, for being acted. How we act, in other words, reveals something about who we are."

Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times discusses the DVD release of Chronicle of Summer.