January 2014 Acquisitions

Books:
Bonnie Bader and Nancy Harrison, Who Was Martin Luther King, Jr.?, 2005.
James M. Cain, Double Indemnity, 2005.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, 2014.
Bill Finger et al, Batman '66: The TV Stories, 2014.
Derek Fridolfs et al, Batman: Arkham Unhinged, Vol. 2, 2013.
Van Gosse, The Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975: A Brief History with Documents, 2005.
Jessica Gunderson, Really, Rapunzel Needed a Haircut!: The Story of Rapunzel as Told by Dame Gothel, 2014.
Shane Hamilton and Sarah Phillips, The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics: A Brief History with Documents, 2014.
Kyle Higgins et al, Nightwing, Vol. 1: Traps and Trapezes, 2012.
Gregg Hurwitz et al, Batman: The Dark Knight, Vol. 2: Cycle of Violence, 2014.
Geoff Johns et al, Justice League, Vol. 1: Origin, 2013.
Victoria Kann, Pinkalicious and the Perfect Present, 2014.
Scott Lobdell et al, Teen Titans, Vol. 1: It's Our Right to Fight, 2012.
Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, 2010.
Robert Munsch and Michael Martchenko, The Paper Bag Princess, 2005.
Andrea Posner-Sanchez, Doc McStuffins: A Knight in Sticky Armor, 2012.
Nick Robinson and Susan Behar, Origami XOXO, 2012.
Jerry Siegel et al, Superman in the Seventies, 2000.
Jerry Siegel et al, Superman in the Sixties, 1999.
Peter J. Tomasi et al, Batman and Robin, Vol. 2: Pearl, 2013.
Thomas W. Zeiler, Jackie Robinson and Race in America: A Brief History with Documents, 2014.


DVDs:
Machete Kills, 2013.

"6-Day Visit To Rural African Village Completely Changes Woman’s Facebook Profile Picture"

"'As soon as I walked into that dusty, remote town and the smiling children started coming up to me, I just knew my Facebook profile photo would change forever,' said Fisher, noting that she realized early in her nearly weeklong visit just how narrow and unworldly her previous Facebook profile photos had been."


From The Onion.

To Everything There Is a Season

"Mr. Seeger’s career carried him from singing at labor rallies to the Top 10, from college auditoriums to folk festivals, and from a conviction for contempt of Congress (after defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s) to performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at an inaugural concert for Barack Obama.

"For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action."

Jon Pareles in The New York Times reports the death of Pete Seeger.


And Alice Robb in The New Republic traces the history of Seeger's reputation.

"The Last Generation to Broadly Love Classical Music May Simply Be Aging, Like World War I Veterans, Out of Existence"

"Now let’s look at classical concerts. Live classical music is less commercially viable than ever. Attendance per concert has fallen, according to Robert Flanagan, an emeritus professor at Stanford. But 'even if every seat were filled, the vast majority of U.S. symphony orchestras still would face significant performance deficits.' Live orchestral music is essentially a charity case. A Bloomberg story on the recent wave of orchestra bankruptcies (an unheard-of phenomenon outside of the U.S., says Flanagan) notes that by 2005, orchestras got more money from donations than from ticket sales. The New York City Opera, once hailed as the 'people’s opera,' filed for bankruptcy in October. If the 'people' want opera, they’ve got a funny way of showing it."


Mark Vanhoenacker in Slate contends that "[c]lassical music in America is dead."

"The Alien, the Brain, the Brute, the Guru, the Kamikaze, the Lotus Blossom, the Manipulator and the Temptress"

"'The images were largely negative,' says exhibition curator Jeff Yang. 'This reflected the time frame—a period when the view of Asians was shaped by racist, xenophobic wartime propaganda' and fears related to immigration and economic and global rivalries.
"He adds that the pieces on display, some of which may 'disturb and disquiet,' illustrate how 'tenacious stereotypes' plus the nature of the medium ('an art of broad strokes and bright colors') helped create stock villains, vixens and sages."


Karen Wada in the Los Angeles Times discusses "Marvels & Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986," a current exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum.

"A Forlorn Elegy for a Fading Institution"

"A dense and thorough history of pop music, Stanley’s book actually stops in 1999 because it was at this point that pop music, as he sees it, ceased to be ubiquitous. Smash Hits, Select, Melody Maker and the BBC’s Top of the Pops are all gone. Chart hits no longer have much of an era-defining quality to them, and regional-based underground music scenes, based around small pub and club venues, barely exist in any meaningful way."


Neil Davenport at spiked reviews Bob Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop.


And in Stephin Merritt Salon interviews Stanley.

"Best, Most Original Idea Man’s Ever Had Returns 114,000 Google Search Results"

"At press time, Liptak was reading a Forbes.com profile of one of the multimillionaires who pioneered Liptak’s idea nine years ago."


From The Onion.

"Often Lurked Only in the Shadows"

"I don’t remember when I learned of Bill Finger other than that it was after I graduated college in 1994. I actually have a recording of myself in college discussing Batman’s real-life origin, in which I make no mention of Bill.
"I didn’t plan on becoming his champion; for a while, I wasn’t sure I would become his biographer! But it’s hard to put forth a tragic story like his and then feel compelled to do more on behalf of his legacy."


Michael Cavna at The Washington Post interviews Marc Tyler Nobleman about Bill Finger, "The Secret Co-Creator of Batman."

"A Sort of Hyper-America"

"The scrambling of pop time is a culture-wide phenomenon in the West, but it feels unusually strong in LA, where pop radio is dominated by old music: classic rock, New Wave and eclectic stations like Jack fm that mimic a 40-something’s iPod Shuffle. Flicking between stations, there’s a visual analogue to what you hear in the endless interplay of different eras of commercial signage and shop-front décor. In no other city have I had such an overwhelming sense of the erosion of a cultural timecode, that pulse that once synchronized the sectors of the contemporary scene (fashion, design, music, etc.) and constructed a sense of epoch."


In a 2011 Frieze article, Simon Reynolds discusses "'Hypnagogic pop' and the landscape of Southern California."

Professor Tiffany Family

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for movie producer Dick Shepherd, actor Dave Madden, actor Russell Johnson, and Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda.

Ringleader of the Tormentors

"The respective weight of Fox’s ideological and commercial motives remains a topic for debate. Manufactured indignation (the 'War on Christmas,' 'Obama’s Czars,' 'the Ground Zero Mosque') drives viewership, especially when performed for a mostly male audience by leggy blond anchors. At one level, Fox’s victimhood pose is obviously disingenuous; Murdoch has always played the outrage game to drive circulation and ratings. His most valuable player, on the other hand, seems to be genuinely seething with resentment, often at his friends as much as his enemies. Another pattern of his is to build up Frankenstein monsters, like Beck, Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, and then decry their ingratitude. Fox’s populism is so clearly an expression of his authentic feelings that it’s hard to see it as purely cynical."


Jacob Weisberg in The New York Times reviews Gabriel Sherman's The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country.

Velvet Elvises

"But the tacky, flashy, and downright ugly paintings have stayed with the popular imagination—because, according to folklore scholar Eric A. Eliason, we need them to. In his 2011 book “Black Velvet Art,” Eliason suggests that velvet paintings play an important role in Western culture as the anti-art, a fixed concept that people distance themselves from to prove they have good taste. Even though velvet painting references the same sort of pop-culture icons—such as Marilyn Monroe, the Pink Panther, comic panels—as work by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein, it lacks the detached self-awareness that allows Pop Art to be deemed gallery worthy.
"'Why is black velvet different than any other medium?' Eliason says. "'Canvas art has some crappy and tacky stuff, too. But the assumption is the minute you put an artwork on velvet, you’ve ghettoized it into this denigrated category that, I think, exists for a purpose. If black velvet didn’t play the role that it has in the late 20th century, something else would’ve emerged to take its place. This snobbery shows the ugly side of the fine-art world and upper middle-class aspirational sensibilities.'"


In light of a new museum just opened in Los Angeles, Lisa Hix at CollectorsWeekly.com depicts the history of painting on black velvet.

"A 'Race between Education and Technology'"

"Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a 'temporary phase of maladjustment' as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity. So it could well prove. However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages."


The Economist discusses the danger of "technological unemployment."

Get Yeezus

The Village Voice publishes its 2013 Pazz+Jop poll results.

"Detroit Is Affordable and Fascinating"

"But what if someone offered you a free house? In a contemporary, literary twist on old homesteading incentives, a new nonprofit organization called Write a House is refurbishing three two-bedroom houses in Detroit and accepting applications this spring for writers to move in, rent free. Poets, journalists, novelists, and anyone who falls somewhere in between are encouraged to apply. If the writers stay for the required two years and fulfill other obligations, such as engaging with the city’s literary community and contributing to the program’s blog, they’ll even get the deed to the place. As the group’s mission puts it, 'It’s like a writer-in-residence program, only in this case we’re actually giving the writer the residence, forever.'"


Ian Crouch at The New Yorker discusses a new effort to lure writers to Detroit.

"New Study Reveals Nothing Pfizer’s Lawyers Can’t Take Care Of"

"'While Pfizer has for years benefited from record sales of its stable of flagship drugs, our research shows [not a damned thing the best and most handsomely compensated legal team in the country won’t make go away in a millisecond, don’t you worry],' read the study in part, which includes a series of troubling conclusions that are all being given a thorough read-through by Doug and the rest of the junkyard dogs in legal who will make goddamned sure any resulting litigation is either dismissed in a court of law outright or will result in a minor cash settlement that, c’mon, will be a mere drop in the bucket for a company the size of Pfizer."


From The Onion.

Blues Sit-In Fantasy Runner

The Los Angeles Times reports the deaths of movie producer Saul Zaentz, athlete Eusébio, movie studio owner Run Run Shaw, writer Amiri Baraka, Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes, civil rights activist Franklin McCain, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"Investments..., Credit..., Property, Commodities and Capital"

"In 'Benito Cereno,' Melville retold these events with some significant ­changes. Omitting what Grandin calls 'Delano’s nearly yearlong hounding' of the Spaniard for what he considered his due compensation for the rescue, he emphasized Cereno’s lingering shock and Delano’s impenetrable insouciance. He focused on the leader of the slave rebellion, whose corpse, after his trial and hanging, was decapitated, with the head impaled on a spike in the main plaza of Lima so all could contemplate his 'voiceless end.'"


Andrew Delbanco in The New York Times reviews Greg Grandin’s Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World.

"The National Battle to Curb Smoking Still Smolders"

"In addition to listing all the dangers and diseases associated with smoking, Terry also took the extraordinary step of calling for government involvement in the issue.  Across the decades, the national effort to separate Americans from their cigarettes has manifested itself in the creation of warning labels on packs of cigarettes (1965), the launching of free anti-smoking PSAs on television (1967), the creation of smoking sections in restaurants, airplanes, and elsewhere in the 1970s, and the banning of cigarette advertisements.  Eventually, full smoking bans took root as well."


Adam Chandler at The Atlantic notes the fiftieth anniversary of the Surgeon General "report that linked smoking cigarettes with lung cancer."

"Education Is Not Just a Vocational Enterprise"

"There are different pedagogical approaches all over the place. There are many younger historians, much younger than I am, who are more familiar with using social media as part of history teaching—using all sorts of Internet and other resources in classrooms. I'm sure that can be very positive, although it might become distracting. My experience as a teacher and as a student long ago, is that there is no substitute for a good teacher. I don't care what bells and whistles that you're using, it's the teacher in the classroom. That's why I'm a little skeptical about MOOCs, online education. I'm old-fashioned enough to believe that the presence of a teacher is actually critical to learning.
"I'm less interested in pedagogical approaches than the training of the teacher, the ability of the teacher, the knowledge of the teacher, and the teacher's ability to inspire students by conveying his or her own enthusiasm for the subject."


David Cutler at The Atlantic interviews Eric Foner about teaching history.

"Girlfriend Overdoses On Lotion"

"'Caroline didn’t do this to herself on purpose—she just didn’t know her limit,' distraught boyfriend Eric Klein told investigators, recalling that Nagler would often come home covered in a layer of lavender salve without acknowledging that she glistened brightly or smelled heavily of morning dew. 'It’s a wonder she hasn’t had an overdose yet; it’s a full-on addiction. She hides the bottles everywhere—underneath the sink, in the back of cabinets. I once saw her pull a small bottle of it out of her purse. She couldn’t go 20 minutes without it.'"


From The Onion.

It Must Be Won in the Field, in Every Private Home, in Every Public Office, from the Courthouse to the White House

"Half a century after Mr. Johnson’s now-famed State of the Union address, the debate over the government’s role in creating opportunity and ending deprivation has flared anew, with inequality as acute as it was in the Roaring Twenties and the ranks of the poor and near-poor at record highs. Programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps are keeping millions of families afloat. Republicans have sought to cut both programs, an illustration of the intense disagreement between the two political parties over the best solutions for bringing down the poverty rate as quickly as possible, or eliminating it.
"For poverty to decrease, 'the low-wage labor market needs to improve,' James P. Ziliak of the University of Kentucky said. 'We need strong economic growth with gains widely distributed. If the private labor market won’t step up to the plate, we’re going to have to strengthen programs to help these people get by and survive.'"


Annie Lowery in The New York Times marks the fiftieth anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's declaration of a War on Poverty.

The Calvinist Moment

"That focus on sinfulness differs from a lot of popular evangelicalism in recent years. It runs contrary to the 'prosperity gospel' preachers, who imply that faith can make one rich. It sounds nothing like the feel-good affirmations of preachers and authors like Joel Osteen, who treat the Bible like a self-help book, or a guide to better business.

"'What you’d be hearing in some megachurches is, "God wants you to be a good parent, and here are seven ways God can help you to be a good parent,"' said Collin Hansen, the author of 'Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey With the New Calvinists.' 'Or, "God wants you to have a good marriage, so here are three ways to do that."' By contrast, Mr. Hansen said, those who attend Calvinist churches want the preacher to 'tell them about Jesus.'"

Mark Oppenheimer in The New York Times reports on the rise of Calvinism among Evangelical Protestants.

Imitation of Bel-Air Brothers

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for valet George Jacobs, scholar Ian Barbour, actor James Avery, actress Juanita Moore, and singer Phil Everly.

"Oh, and Its CEO Jim McNerny’s Total Compensation Is Somewhere North of $20 Million"

"But to really address the underlying trends will also mean taking on the more fundamental forces that lead to an outcome like we just saw in the Puget Sound: strengthening labor laws and unions in right-to-work states to weaken employers' race-to-the-bottom threats to move south; raising taxes on upper incomes and capital gains to slightly rebalance the equation between the McNernys of the world and their flush investors on the one hand and their overmatched workers on the other; and, perhaps most difficult of all, changing the norms for acceptable behavior by corporate titans, even if they've been named to the presidential exports council."

Alec MacGillis at The New Republic reacts to the union vote at Boeing near Seattle.

"The Squares Have Joined In"

"That's right, America. We've entered the age of the iPhone bong—sleek, elegant, corporate. Oh sure, maybe that Grateful Dead-style blown-glass hippie shit was never cool. Indeed, those items are ugly. But they know what they are. Far worse is the middlebrow pipe that strives to be something more.
"The situation has left actual young people confused."

Elspeth Reeve at The Atlantic argues that legal marijuana is uncool.

"A Classic Example of Style over Substance"

"As much as they were a musical act, the Pistols (and especially Vicious) were proof that all important bands think visually.  The neon cut-and-paste art, the tarted-up military fashions and edge-of-a-breakdown stage presence were all calculated for maximum impact and totalizing effect."

August Brown in the Los Angeles Times visits the latest Shepard Fairey exhibit, "SID: Superman Is Dead."

Take Fourteen

The Village Voice publishes its 2013 film critics' poll results.