September 2013 Acquisitions

Books:
Jason Aaron and R. M. Guera, Scalped, Vol. 5: High Lonesome, 2009.
Jason Aaron and R. M. Guera, Scalped, Vol. 6: The Gnawing, 2010.
Jason Aaron and R. M. Guera, Scalped, Vol. 7: Rez Blues, 2011.
Jason Aaron and R. M. Guera, Scalped, Vol. 8: You Gotta Sin to Get Saved, 2011.
Jason Aaron and R. M. Guera, Scalped, Vol. 9: Knuckle Up, 2012.
Jason Aaron and R. M. Guera, Scalped, Vol. 10: Trail's End, 2012.
Neal Adams, Batman: Illustrated by Neal Adams, Vol. 3, 2013.
Jessica Alba, The Honest Life: Living Naturally and True to You, 2013.
Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II, 2009.
Darwyn Cooke, Batman: Ego and Other Tails, 2007.
Peter Evans and Ava Gardner, Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, 2013.
Jessie Haas and Sarah Davis, Saige, 2012.
Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley C Harrold, The African-American Odyssey, 2011.
J. M. Hirsch, Beating the Lunch Box Blues, 2013.
Franz Kafka, The Trial, 2009.
Damon Lindelof et al, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Vol. 1, 2013.
Walter Mosley, Little Green, 2013.
Sarah Weinman (ed.), Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, 2013.

DVDs:
Barbie: A Fairy Secret, 2011.

"Give In to Them or They Would Starve the Government to Death"

"The riders were about troops and voting, but at issue was the very structure of American government. President Hayes and Minority leader Garfield recognized that if an extremist faction in Congress could force its will on the country by holding government finances hostage, it would erase the power of the president and destroy the basic structure of the American government’s separation of powers. Even moderate Democrats, who didn’t particularly like the idea of troops enforcing black rights, agreed that the threat was truly revolutionary and menaced the Constitution. If the extremists’ tactics worked, this would be only the first of their demands, and the country would fall, as one Democrat said, under 'the absolute despotism of an irresponsible and unrestrained partisan majority' in Congress."

Heather Cox Richardson in Salon looks back to when Southern Congressmen threatened to shut down the federal government in 1879.

"A Canary in the Coal Mine of Deinstitutionalization"

"California was the first state to witness not only an increase in homelessness associated with deinstitutionalization but also an increase in incarceration and episodes of violence. In 1972 Marc Abramson, another young psychiatrist working for San Mateo County, published a landmark paper entitled 'The Criminalization of Mentally Disordered Behavior.' Abramson claimed that because the new LPS statute made it difficult to get patients admitted to a psychiatric hospital, police 'regard arrest and booking into jail as a more reliable way of securing involuntary detention of mentally disordered persons.' Abramson quoted a California prison psychiatrist who claimed to be 'literally drowning in patients. . . . Many more men are being sent to prison who have serious mental problems.' Abramson’s paper was the first clear description of the increase of mentally ill persons in jails and prisons, an increase that would grow markedly in subsequent years."

Salon publishes an excerpt of E. Fuller Torrey's American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System.

You're Tearing Me Apart, Lisa!

"Nothing about the film makes sense. Motivations change on a whim. Subplots are ignored. There's even a character who makes his first appearance two-thirds of the way through the movie, yet acts as if he's been there the whole time. 'The Room's' awfulness is so jarring it's as if the filmmakers were trying to create something that would make audiences go from suspending their disbelief to questioning their hold on reality, because no one could make a movie this terrible without realizing it, could they?"

In the Los Angeles Times, Jim Ruland reviews Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell's The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made.

They’ve Been Known to Pick a Song or Two

"How do we make sense of the fact that 'Mustang Sally' and 'When a Man Loves a Woman' and Aretha Franklin’s breakthrough hit 'I Never Loved a Man' and any number of other funk, soul and R&B classics were recorded with a band of backwoods Alabama white boys? Well, it’s complicated–let’s start there. Of course white privilege was involved, because even though Rick Hall grew up dirt-poor, he still belonged to the class of people who were able to buy property and start businesses in 1950s Alabama, and he hired white musicians–at least at first; his post-Swampers bands were integrated–because it was the natural thing to do. All that said, Hall’s also a guy with a tremendous ear and immense soulfulness who knew what he wanted–and what he wanted was a sound that fused Delta blues, hillbilly and urban African-American music. And something geographical or historical or spiritual about that obscure river-bend in northern Alabama made that possible."

Andrew O' Hehir in Salon reviews Muscle Shoals.

"Today, Elite and Highly Educated Women Have Become a Class Apart"

"It’s not about blaming women. I have to confess that one of the things I was slightly responding to is a tendency to be constantly complaining about things not being perfect for the top five percent of women, so there was a little spasm of irritation there, but it was actually much deeper than that. I do think women were oppressed [for] most of human history, and it’s absolutely wonderful that I was born late enough to be allowed to use my brain; I suppose in a way, it’s underlining the human dilemma that, in any society, it turns out almost everything has a downside. We can’t get perfection, and we can’t get perfect equality, and this is something we have to face up to. If professional women are going to be successful, then they do have to call on the labor of other people—other men or other women—and the reality is, we as human beings would rather have women looking after our babies than men. This is part of the price. It’s a slightly Faustian bargain. This is not absolving men—they’re part of it as well."

Nora Caplan-Bricker in The New Republic interviews Alison Wolf, author of The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World.

"A Different America from the One That Most Political Commentators Describe When Talking about How the Country Is Transforming"

"These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population."

Ryan Lizza at The New Yorker looks at the home districts of the Republican Party's "suicide caucus."

"It Wasn't Joe Cocker"

"Beach Boys biographer Jon Stebbins tells the tale of the song in his Web site's FAQ. It seems that Preston and Wilson were at a party late one night fumbling with songs, and Wilson helped him complete it. If you check out Wilson's solo work, you can hear where Wilson's mind took over 'Beautiful.' Wilson never pressed the issue, and let Preston have the cut and the royalties."

Craig Hlavaty in a 2012 Houston Press article explores the "Secret History of 'You Are So Beautiful'."

"Both God and Expensive Political Consultants Are Seeing This as a Season for Preferential Treatment of the Poor"

"And while here in New York, de Blasio's affection for it will surely be used to paint a picture of him as a class warrior, it's a philosophy meant to be constructive rather than destructive. Pope Francis has talked about how he has tried to listen, above all else, to what the world needs right now, and concentrate on "reading the signs of the times" in his spiritual discernment."

Noreen Malone at The New Republic discusses liberation theology in relation to Bill de Blasio and Pope Francis.

"The Apex of the Comedy-of-Humiliation"

"Constant access to Mark and Jeremy’s inner monologues—their fears, their rationalizations, their judgments of themselves and others—creates wickedly satirical contrasts with what they actually observe and say. It’s a perfect skewering of the million tiny lies we all tell ourselves and others daily to reconcile how we perceive ourselves with how we perceive the world. And it’s an amazing device for televised comedy, as even ordinary dialogue is turned into a series of self-effacing jokes."

In Slate, Chris Wade looks at Peep Show, ten years after the show's premier.

"Created a Few Big Winners and Turned Most of Us into Losers"

"Thirty years ago, as laissez-faire fanaticism took hold of America, misguided policy-makers decided that do-it-yourself retirement plans, otherwise known as 401(k)s, would magically secure our financial future in the face of gyrating markets, economic crises, unpredictable life events, stagnant wages and rampant job insecurity. It was an extraordinary shift in thinking about public policy: Instead of having predictable streams of income from traditional pensions, ordinary people with little financial expertise would suddenly transform themselves into financial gurus, putting money aside and managing complicated investments in tax-deferred accounts.
"There were red flags along the way. 401(k)s were originally supposed to supplement pensions, but clever corporate cost-cutters decided that voluntary individual accounts would replace them. Big difference! Meanwhile, throughout the 1990s, the national savings rate fell. Real wages dropped. As Helaine Olen details in her book Pound Foolish, Americans started borrowing against retirement plans to pay the mortgage or send the kids to college. The media was basically out to lunch, and politicians went on claiming the nonsense that individual retirement accounts would encourage savings and turn us all into professional money managers. The stock market would bring us double-digit returns. Whoopie!"

Lynn Stuart Parramore in Salon discusses the "Dumbest Retirement Policy in the World."

"The Beatles Were Thugs Who Were Put Across as Nice Blokes, and the Rolling Stones Were Gentlemen Who Were Made into Thugs"

"While carefully allowing for mutual respect and admiration between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he reveals that the competition between the perennial 'toppermost of the poppermost' and their scruffier, sleazier runners-up motivated the Stones to match the success of pop’s lads from Liverpool, who were then driven to keep ahead of those equally calculating London blues-rockers, during much of the ‘60s. McMillian examines the creation of the marketing images for both groups, and he demonstrates how they were both, despite denials by members, complicit in their Fab Four models and thug five poses."

John L. Murphy at PopMatters reviews John McMillian's Beatles vs. Stones.

As does Tyler McMahon in Salon.

And Newsweek publishes an excerpt.

"More Than Any Man Except Abraham Lincoln, John Bingham Was Responsible for Establishing What the Civil War Meant for America’s Future"

"It is Bingham who is responsible for the words: 'No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'
"This sentence would be the legal basis for the Supreme Court’s subsequent decisions desegregating the public schools, securing equality for women, and creating the right to sexual privacy. Bingham also said that his text would also extend all of the protections of the Bill of Rights to the actions of state governments, which is largely, though not completely, the law today."

Gerard N. Magliocca in The New York Times discusses the "Father of the 14th Amendment."

"Inequality Is Far Wider Now than It Was Then, and Threatens Social Cohesion and Trust"

"But economic class isn’t the only dividing line in America. Many working-class voters are heartland Republicans, while many of America’s superrich are coastal Democrats. The real division is between those who believe the game is rigged against them and those who believe they have a decent shot.
"Losers of rigged games can become very angry, as history has revealed repeatedly. In America, the populist wings of both parties have become more vocal in recent years—the difference being that the populist right blames government more than it does big corporations while the populist left blames big corporations more than government."

Robert Reich in The New York Times says that inequality inflames political polarization.

"Social Movements that Explicitly Defend the Interests of the Rich and the Almost-Rich Have Been a Recurring Feature of American Politics"

"With meticulous research, Martin shows how the modern Tea Party grew from decades of efforts by American oligarchs to de-tax themselves. They relied on cranks, rogues, and a few scholars to polish the most effective ideological marketing pitches. Their goal was selling the notion that if the rich bear less of the burden of government, all of us will somehow end up better off. These pitches have worked best when some newly proposed government initiative—like President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act—arrives to pose the threat of major policy change. They have depended on diverting attention from obvious questions, such as just how does a smaller tax bill for the Koch brothers benefit us?"

David Cay Johnston in The American Prospect reviews Isaac William Martin's Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent.

"'GTA V' A Sophisticated Gaming Experience, Says Man Who Spent 3 Hours Running Over Homeless People With Fire Truck"

"At press time, Mitchell was remarking on the game’s 'stunningly inventive storycraft' while repeatedly kicking a Los Santos resident until blood pooled around their lifeless body."

From The Onion.

"The Charles Bronson of the 12-String Guitar"

"Linda Ronstadt, who performed cover versions of such Zevon classics as 'Poor Poor Pitiful Me' and 'Carmelita,' said Zevon believed that his musical success came from a unique combination of a 'very poetic sensitivity with this real dark, film noir, Raymond Chandler quality.' She recalled Zevon as an enigmatic character who carried a copy of the military magazine Jane’s Defence Weekly.  'Was he a KGB agent?' she joked and further speculated that she recorded his songs because she 'wanted to be as cool as Warren.'"

Harold Heft in The Jewish Daily Forward remembers Warren Zevon.

Goodbye, Larry

"It’s a bit strange to say that the world’s top economic policymaking job may not even have been the most important thing at stake in the fight over Larry Summer’s candidacy for Fed chair, but it’s likely that this was the case. In reality, the Summers fight was the first fully-engaged Obama-era battle over the future of the Democratic Party—not just over its economic philosophy, but its whole economic constituency."

Noam Scheiber in The New Republic writes an obituary for Larry Summers's quest to head up the Federal Reserve.

"Russian Shot in Quarrel over Kant's Philosophy"

"The victim was hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening. Neither person was identified.

"It was not clear which of Kant's ideas may have triggered the violence."

 

Not from The Onion.

"An LSD Bummer Before the Term Was Coined"

"Fuller's script, originally titled 'Lunatic,' was written in the late '40s and offered to Fritz Lang. The premise, based on a famous late 19th century journalistic stunt, had a reporter feign madness to expose a murder committed in an insane asylum. By the time the scenario reached the screen, however, it had become topical—the events of late 1962 and early 1963, including the Cuban missile crisis and the escalating struggle for civil rights, had percolated in writer-director-producer Fuller's imagination."

J. Hoberman in the Los Angeles Times revisits Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor.

Spot Pop Melts in the Air

The New York Times publishes obits for car salesman Cal Worthington, soundman Ray Dolby, journalist Lansing Lamont, academic Marshall Berman, and Hitler bodyguard Rochus Misch.

And the San Francisco Chronicle reports the death of the Professor of Pop, Andrew Goodwin.

"De Blasio’s Victory Is an Omen"

"The likeliest explanation for this is that while younger Republican candidates may have a greater cultural connection to young voters, the ideological gulf is vast. Even if they are only a decade older than Millennials, politicians like Cruz, Rubio, and Walker hail from a different political generation both because they came of age at a time of relative prosperity and because they were shaped by Reagan, whom Millennials don’t remember. In fact, the militantly anti-government vision espoused by ultra-Reaganites like Cruz, Rubio, and Walker isn’t even that popular among Millennial Republicans. As a July Pew survey notes, Republicans under 30 are more hostile to the Tea Party than any other Republican age group. By double digits, they’re also more likely than other Republicans to support increasing the minimum wage.
"Republicans may modestly increase their standing among young voters by becoming more tolerant on cultural issues and less hawkish on foreign policy, but it’s unlikely they will become truly competitive unless they follow the counsel of conservative commentators Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam and 'adapt to a new reality—namely, that today, Americans are increasingly worried about their economic security.'"

Peter Beinart at The Daily Beast predicts that most young voters will remain left wing as they age.

David Frum reacts to Beinart's article.

The End of Patriarchy?

Slate excerpts an epilogue of the paperback edition of Hanna Rosin's The End of Men.

But Bryce Covert in The Nation disagrees with Rosin.

"I Believe We Should Act"

"However, over the last few days we’ve seen some encouraging signs in part because of the credible threat of U.S. military action as well as constructive talks that I had with President Putin. The Russian government has indicated a willingness to join with the international community in pushing Assad to give up his chemical weapons. The Assad regime has now admitted that it has these weapons and even said they’d join the chemical weapons convention, which prohibits their use.

"It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed, and any agreement must verify that the Assad regime keeps its commitments. But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force, particularly because Russia is one of Assad’s strongest allies.

"I have therefore asked the leaders of Congress to postpone a vote to authorize the use of force while we pursue this diplomatic path."

The New York Times provides a transcript of President Obama's speech about Syria.

"There's Always a Better Song to Sing"

"We were talking about English songwriters: it's picking up on the mundane, the everyday things and putting them, into a different setting, the very, very ordinary feelings, emotions or details that, once in song, you hear them in a different way. Without something too poncey or pretentious I was thinking about pop artists as well, where they took the everyday objects and made them into art. I don't think it's that dissimilar."

The Guardian publishes excerpts of Daniel Rachel's Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters.

Be Evil

"Tech world conspicuous consumption isn’t quite the same as Wall Street conspicuous consumption. A Silicon Valley executive isn’t likely to spend his cash on bottle service and a Porsche; a trip up Kilimanjaro and a Tesla is far more the norm. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, who lives in San Francisco and is hardly a kneejerk critic of wealth, told me he plays a little game with himself where he counts the number of Teslas he sees in any given day. It used to be one a day, now it’s up to five or ten. That kind of lifestyle is certainly expensive (Teslas start at $62,000 or so, without any of the add-ons), but there’s also an element of virtuousness to it—which to some can be more grating than the unapologetic materialism of a stereotypical banker: I spend a lot of money, but it’s to save the earth, not to burnish my own image. And then there's Google Glass: an unsettling-to-the-rest-of-us status symbol that only a tech-head could love."

Noreen Malone in The New Republic asks, "[a]re tech entrepreneurs replacing Wall Streeters as the rich bad guys in the popular imagination?"

"Wouldn’t It Be Great if We Could Get All the Russian Billionaires to Move Here?"

"But his whole campaign is that there are two different cities here. And I’ve never liked that kind of division. The way to help those who are less fortunate is, number one, to attract more very fortunate people. They are the ones that pay the bills. The people that would get very badly hurt here if you drive out the very wealthy are the people he professes to try to help. Tearing people apart with this 'two cities' thing doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s a destructive strategy for those you want to help the most. He’s a very populist, very left-wing guy, but this city is not two groups, and if to some extent it is, it’s one group paying for services for the other. "

Chris Smith in New York gives Michael Bloomberg an exit interview.

Blake Zeff in Salon explains why Bloomberg is so upset.

Escape to Minstrel Island

"Tom was lanky and unathletic, with protruding teeth that embarrassed him. He stuttered, too, and felt a kinship with Porky Pig. But that same friend ascribes some of ­Pynchon’s 'social behavior issues' to his 'very dysfunctional family'—without elaborating. Pynchon himself almost never talked about his parents, especially in his earlier years. But one afternoon in the mid-sixties, he and his then-girlfriend, Mary Ann Tharaldsen, were driving through Big Sur when she complained of nausea. She wanted to stop at a bar and have a shot to settle her stomach. According to Tharaldsen, he exploded, telling her he would not tolerate midday drinking. When she asked why, he told her he’d seen his mother, after drinking,  accidentally puncture his father’s eye with a clothespin. It was the only time, says Tharaldsen, who lived with him, that he ever mentioned his family. 'He was disconnected from them,' she says. 'There seems to have been something not good there.'"

Boris Kachka in New York traces the life and career of Thomas Pynchon.

"Economic Liberalism in America Is Not Dead Yet"

"True, de Blasio has some unique selling points in this campaign. He is by definition an 'outer-borough ethnic,' which blunts the easy anti-'elitist' attacks on liberals found regularly in the pages of billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman’s Daily News. Having a wife who is African-American and a former lesbian activist and a son with a gravity-challenging Afro puts a massive kibosh on the kind of identity-politics demands that have too often doomed Democratic candidates with broad electoral appeal. De Blasio is, according to the most recent polls, winning with blacks and women, despite the presence of both in the race (I don’t know about lesbians). Moreover, he has succeeded in uniting these constituencies through an inclusive class-based appeal, one that is bolstered by the fact of his being the only serious contender in the race whose kids attend our public schools. Together with his hardline opposition to Bloomberg’s illegal stop-and-frisk obsession, de Blasio has credibly positioned himself as the voice of those who, in Bloomberg’s New York, had been silently shunted off to the sidelines."

In The Nation, Eric Alterman discusses the rise of Bill de Blasio.

"A System of Higher Education that Is So Broken for So Many"

"That’s bad news for the Bay Area and California, bad news for the nation, and especially bad news for the working class. With nine out of the top ten skilled job openings in the next decade in California alone expected to require a post-secondary credential of some sort, the failure of the community colleges in a region otherwise characterized by booming growth will levy a major blow not only to the economy, but also to the very notion of upward mobility in this country."

In the Washington Monthly, Haley Sweetland Edwards claims that the San Francisco Bay Areas has "America's Worst Community Colleges."

"Why Don't We Want to Address the Racial Inequity that Is So Clearly Still with Us?"

"He does a great service by detailing how affirmative action was downgraded into the less active and much less controversial notion of diversity, a word that has expanded its meaning over the years to include just about everybody at the expense of diluting the original aim of helping blacks overcome historical obstacles to opportunity. In the landmark Bakke case in 1978, Justice Lewis Powell decided the racial redress of affirmative action was overreach and said achieving 'diversity' was a more acceptable goal in terms of using race as a factor in college admissions.
"Enlarging diversity to include marginalized groups such as women and gays is fine in principle, but Kennedy's concern is that the real crisis of black marginalization has gotten lost in the transition. Diversity may make us feel good, but when it comes to achieving racial justice, it simply can't do the job."

In the Los Angeles Times, Erin Aubry Kaplan reviews Randall Kennedy's For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law.

"It Wasn’t Always about the Hot Dogs"

"It’s all hard to imagine now. Not the bit about financial crisis and wage cuts—that’s going on all around us. Not the bit about the state serving the interests of the wealthy—look at who got bailed out, and who didn’t, after our latter-day version of the Panic of 1893. No, what’s unimaginable now is that Congress would unanimously offer even an empty gesture of support for workers’ dignity. For the fact is that many of today’s politicians can’t even bring themselves to fake respect for ordinary working Americans."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times discusses conservative disregard for labor.

Omni Rum Punch Man

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for writer Albert Murray, concert promoter Sid Bernstein, writer Elmore Leonard, actress Julie Harris, poet Seamus Heaney, record-store owner and actor Murray Gershenz, Kerouac muse Bea Kozera, and broadcaster David Frost.

"So, What’s It Going To Be?"

"By Bashar al-Assad"

"I’ve looked at your options, and I’m going to be honest here, I feel for you. Not exactly an embarrassment of riches you’ve got to choose from, strategy-wise. I mean, my God, there are just so many variables to consider, so many possible paths to choose, each fraught with incredible peril, and each leading back to the very real, very likely possibility that no matter what you do it’s going to backfire in a big, big way. It’s a good old-fashioned mess, is what this is! And now, you have to make some sort of decision that you can live with."

From The Onion.

"The Jeffersonian-Hamiltonian Paradox"

"Ms Mazzucato says that the most successful entrepreneurial state can be found in the most unlikely place: the United States. Americans have traditionally been divided between Jeffersonians (who think that he governs best who governs least) and Hamiltonians (who favour active government). The secret of the country’s success lies, she thinks, in talking like Jeffersonians but acting like Hamiltonians. Whatever their rhetoric, governments have always invested heavily in promoting the spread of existing technologies such as the railways (by giving the rail barons free land) and in seeking potentially lucrative scientific breakthroughs (by financing almost 60% of basic research)."

"Schumpeter" in The Economist reviews Mariana Mazzucato's The Entrepreneurial State.