May 2014 Acquisitions

Books:
Hugo Arnold, The Wagamama Cookbook, 2007.
Brian Azzarello et al, Superman: For Tomorrow, 2013.
Ronald H. Baylor, Encountering Ellis Island, 2014.
Justin Gray et al, All-Star Western, Vol. 4: Gold Standard, 2014.
Laura Lippman (ed.), Baltimore Noir, 2006.
Jeph Loeb et al, Superman/Batman, Vol. 1: Public Enemies, 2014.
John McMillian, Beatles vs. Stones, 2013.
Jeff Parker et al, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Vol. 2, 2014.
Scott Snyder et al, Batman, Vol. 3: Death of the Family, 2014.
Pete Townshend, Who I Am, 2012.


DVDs:
Catwoman, 2004.

I Know Why the Vegas Bantam Subway Pinup Sat by the Door

The New York Times reports the deaths of photographer Bunny Yeager, graphic designer Massimo Vignelli, publisher Oscar Dystel, writer Sam Greenlee, entertainer Bob Bailey, and writer Maya Angelou.

"Where Columbus Avenue Meets Jack Kerouac Alley"

"Yes, the shop's contents are divided into sections, but they aren't the ones you'd expect to find in Barnes & Noble: One is titled Anarchy, another Muckraking. One is denominated Stolen Continents. An entire large bookshelf is devoted to banned books (and impishly contains 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Madame Bovary'). And one set of shelves, reaching from floor to ceiling, contains books put out by the bookshop's imprint. In an age when publishing is said to be dying, City Lights is busy bringing out short stories by Ry Cooder; fiction by the undying hero of small presses, Charles Bukowski; and works by such graying revolutionaries as Angela Davis and Noam Chomsky."


In the Los Angeles Times, Pico Iyer visits San Francisco's best bookstore.

"A Smart if Occasionally Frustrating Historical Overview of America's 200-Plus Year Relationship with Guns"

"This is the puzzle of the 2nd Amendment, which, Waldman admits, is a problematic text at best. 'Let's be clear,' he writes: 'the eloquent men who wrote "we the people" and the First Amendment did us no favors in the drafting of the Second Amendment.' By way of explanation, he takes us on a looping ride from the colonial era, when gun ownership was not only common but also, in many cases, compelled because of the militias, to our own post-Sandy Hook America, in which 'Second Amendment fundamentalism rests powerfully on the idea that an empowered individual—armed to protect himself (gender definitely intended) and his family—is the morally virtuous way to live.'
"The movement he traces is a key one: from the people (as a group) to people, from defense of the homeland to defense of the home."


In the Los Angeles Times, David L. Ulin reviews Michael Waldman's The Second Amendment: A Biography.

"The Death Penalty Was Considered Incompatible with the Basic Principles of Human Rights"

"During this same period, the death penalty was abolished in many nations. One of the last Western countries to do so was France, in 1981. In France, as in the U.S. today, the death penalty enjoyed general support. What brought about the end of the death penalty in France was a top-down approach. Then-President Francois Mitterrand made abolition of capital punishment one of his priorities and persuaded legislators to pass a law to that effect. Such an approach seems almost inconceivable in today's America, yet it may be the only way for abolition to triumph here."


In the Los Angeles Times, Moshik Temkin looks at efforts to end the death penalty.

"'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens"

"'This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,' said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations."


From The Onion.

"Both His Echo and His Evolution"

"Here’s what I found: In each story, a small world of alienation and humor and despair, a meditation on family or work, the city or the suburbs, travel or stasis, success or failure. Stories that resist neat epiphany. Stories that capture the pivot points of the 20th century. This last one matters very much; 14 years into the new century, we’re still processing the seismic cultural shifts of the last one. We live in the world the ’60s made, and made possible."

In Salon, Rebecca Makkai connects Mad Men to John Cheever.

Kochs Are It

"Although Schulman leaves out no confirmable damning detail, especially about Koch Industries’ deadly indifference to environmental and safety matters, he grants Charles and David two key concessions: They have sincere political views that go beyond being just a cover for their companies’ interest in lower taxes and fewer regulations, and many of their political activities have been right out in the open, rather than lurking in the shadows. He seems to be almost in awe of Charles, the most mysterious of the brothers, who runs Koch Industries by a system he devised called Market-Based Management. Summarizing, but not dissenting from, the views of Charles’s employees, Schulman calls him 'a near-mythic figure, a man of preternatural intellect and economic prowess,' adding: 'He is unquestionably powerful, but unfailingly humble; elusive, but uncomplicated; cosmopolitan, yet thoroughly Kansan.' It’s noteworthy, Schulman argues, that for decades the Koch family was definitely not welcome in the Republican Party. That they came to stand for Republicanism, at least in the minds of liberals, in 2010 and 2012 is testament to their persistence, to the weakening of the traditional party structures and to their success in making libertarianism a mainstream rather than a fringe ideology."


In The New York Times, Nicholas Lemann reviews Daniel Schulman's Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.

"Our Conversation Omits a Major Portion of the Evidence"

"The final thing that happened was I became convinced that an unfortunate swath of  popular writers/pundits/intellectuals are deeply ignorant of American history. For the past two years, I've been lucky enough to directly interact with a number of historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists in the academy. The debates I've encountered at Brandeis, Virginia Commonwealth, Yale, Northwestern, Rhodes, and Duke have been some of the most challenging and enlightening since I left Howard University. The difference in tenor between those conversations and the ones I have in the broader world, are disturbing. What is considered to be a 'blue period' on this blog, is considered to be a survey course among academics. Which is not to say everyone, or even mostly everyone, agrees with me in the academy. It is to say that I've yet to engage a historian or sociologist who's requested that I not be such a downer."


At The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores what led up to his new cover story, "The Case for Reparations."


And Manuel Roig-Franzia writes about Coates in The Washington Post.

Pulling the Trigger

"Their responses range from nervous fidgeting, laughter and downcast eyes to vocal anger and confrontation. It’s uncomfortable. But I stand my ground and teach the material, because that is what I am there to do. And then I create the context for students to work through it. Overwhelmingly students let me know at the end of each semester that though the discussions were hard, they are glad we had them.  Trigger warnings might have scared these students away from participating in discussions that they were absolutely capable of having. And in that regard they do more harm than good. So for the sake of my students, you won’t find them on my syllabi."


Brittney Cooper in Salon writes that "[e]ncountering material that you have never encountered before, being challenged and learning strategies for both understanding and engaging the material is what it means to get an education."

"How Photography Helped Shape the Image of Country Music"

"Ask him about that energetic shot of Lynn he took half a century ago and you'll hear pride as well as unflinching honesty: 'It would have been better if I'd had a wide-angle lens. I had the Lenhoff, which was the Cadillac of 4x5 cameras, but darn it, I was so close I cut her hand off,' he said. 'It all happened so fast. But, boy, that was a fun time.'"


In the Los Angeles Times, Randy Lewis previews the Annenberg Space for Photography's new exhibit, "Country: Portraits of an American Sound."

Searching for Alien Watergate

The New York Times runs obits for Secret Service agent Lem Johns, artist H. R. Giger, documentarian Malik Bendjelloul, and Nixon aide Jeb Magruder.

"Yes, You Are a Screwed Generation"

"In sum, you paid nearly sixty grand a year to attend some place with a classy WASP name and ivy growing on its fake medieval walls. You paid for the best, and now you are the best, an honorary classy WASP entitled to all the privileges of the club. That education your parents got, even if it was at the same school as yours, cost them far less and was thus not as good as yours. That’s the way progress works, right?
"Actually, the opposite is closer to the truth: college costs more and more even as it gets objectively worse and worse. Yes, I know, universities today offer luxuries unimaginable in the 1960s: fine gymnasiums, gourmet dining halls, disturbing architecture. But when it comes to generating and communicating knowledge—the essential business of higher ed—they are, almost all of them, in a frantic race to the bottom."


In Salon, Thomas Frank gives a commencement address.

"The Coalition of Conscience"

"The employment discrimination provision stayed in place, though its details were slightly softened to keep McCulloch happy. The amended bill passed the House on Feb. 10, 1964. For the next four months, the coalition worked the Senate side. The key was to break the inevitable Southern filibuster, which began on March 30. Risen traces the cloakroom conversations and presidential arm-twisting that gradually moved Dirksen and his fellow Republicans toward voting with liberal Democrats to cut off debate, but he balances that insider story with a careful reconstruction of the coalition’s campaign. Take its approach to Nebraska’s conservative senator Roman Hruska, who would fly home on weekends. Every time he walked into the Omaha airport that spring he was met by a prominent clergyman, who just happened to be wandering through the terminal and had some time to chat about cloture. When the vote finally came, on June 10, Hruska joined 26 other Republicans and 44 Democrats to shut the Southerners down."


Kevin Boyle in The New York Times reviews Todd S. Purdum's An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Clay Risen's The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act.

"Big Change Is on the Way"

"If social liberal attitudes become nearly universal, then today’s conservatism and today’s populism vanish or become marginalized. A four-fold division of the American electorate would be replaced by a simpler binary opposition. In an America which, a generation or two hence, practically everyone is a social liberal, there would be two socially liberal factions that disagree chiefly about economics, even as they share current liberal positions on abortion, gay rights and censorship.
"This realignment of attitudes will not happen by 2020, perhaps not even by 2030. But it has already occurred in Britain and most of Europe, where the local conservatives are social liberals, by American standards. By the mid-21st century, a similar situation is likely to obtain on this side of the Atlantic.
"One of the consequences I predict is the crack-up of today’s Democratic coalition—paradoxically, as a direct consequence of the decline of social conservatism."


Michael Lind in Salon looks to the future.

"Nothing Sanders Said Discouraged the Consensus"

"One way for Clinton to marginalize Sanders or even push him out of the race would be to move closer to Sanders’ populist positions. Could the Clintons, who are famous (or infamous) for marginalizing the party’s left and realigning it with Big Money (NAFTA, deregulation, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers), actually swing back to the left in 2016? They may think that they don’t need to, because Clinton’s economic policies only need a bit of 'refreshing,' and because a Hillary candidacy will turn into a referendum on women’s rights just as 2008 became a referendum on racism. They may be right if the Republicans cannot leash their mad-dog chauvinists. But if the nominee is Jeb Bush? The campaign then would seem to many Americans one over over dynastic succession, in which case the economic issues—and the 'Bernie factor'—could become decisive."


Tom Hayden in The Nation says that "Bernie Sanders is inching closer to deciding to run for president as a Democrat in 2016."


And Michael Kazin in The New Republic calls on Sanders to run.

"The Last King of the American Middlebrow"

"Today’s games feature far fewer questions in subjects like philosophy or classical music, statistically the most difficult categories. A recent Time study plumbing the trove of 'Jeopardy!' data maintained on a fansite called J-Archive showed that references to Albert Einstein peaked 15 years ago; newer episodes reference Justin Bieber more than twice as often. During the tapings I watched, there was a question about twerking, which Miley Cyrus had just weeks earlier brought into the boomer vernacular via her performance at the Video Music Awards. No contestant got a question about Samuel Coleridge correct, which might have been less noteworthy if they hadn’t been so quick to buzz in with 'Who is Dan Brown?' on the clue directly preceding it. A recent category—'It’s a Rap'—required Trebek to spit verse: 'Ain’t. Nuthin.’ But. A. Gee. Thang,' he gamely recited, his diction as sharp-cornered as ever. It was funny. For the viewer, anyway."


Noreen Malone in The New Republic profiles Alex Trebek.

"A Kind of Awed Testimonial to the Power of Madness"

"Kubrick wanted to shoot in New York, but no sound stage was big enough for the Pentagon war room, where much of the film is set, so he went back to England, where he had shot his previous film, 'Lolita' (he never really returned to the United States). Almost the entire film was shot at Shepperton Studios, outside London, where Ken Adam, the brilliant production designer on several of the Bond films, created the war room as a monster a hundred and thirty feet long, a hundred feet wide, and thirty-five feet high. In the center, the President and his advisers sit at an enormous circular table. Kubrick and Adam wanted to suggest a slightly loony forum, a place where furious debates over the future of existence would take place. An atmosphere of science-fiction irreality would be punctuated by preposterous intrusions of everyday life: the petulance of the President; his wheedling conversations on the telephone with Kissoff, the Soviet Premier; the squabbles, tantrums, and jockeying for position among diplomats and military men; the petty human ego struggling for precedence right up to the moment of apocalypse."


David Denby at The New Yorker marks the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The Privilege Checker

"When Tal Fortgang was told, 'Check your privilege'—which is a flip, get-with-it kind of statement—it infuriated him, because he didn’t want to see himself systematically. But what I believe is that everybody has a combination of unearned advantage and unearned disadvantage in life. Whiteness is just one of the many variables that one can look at, starting with, for example, one’s place in the birth order, or your body type, or your athletic abilities, or your relationship to written and spoken words, or your parents’ places of origin, or your parents’ relationship to education and to English, or what is projected onto your religious or ethnic background. We’re all put ahead and behind by the circumstances of our birth. We all have a combination of both. And it changes minute by minute, depending on where we are, who we’re seeing, or what we’re required to do."


Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker talks with Peggy McIntosh, author of "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies" in 1988.

"It’s Something That’s Tremendously Important to Them, so It Makes It More Important to Me"

"Backstage after the gig, Alex quickly gave a resounding 'No!' when asked by a journalist if he’d be doing another Big Star show. He signed autographs and gave an MTV interviewer a shrugged 'I don’t have anything to say.' 'A lot of fun today?' 'Right.' An old friend, record label exec Karen Glauber, hung by his side, and when he spotted Peter Jesperson, he said, 'Let’s get out of here.' They took off in Peter’s car, and while driving outside town, Alex, smoking a joint, started reminiscing about Chris Bell. When they stopped at an intersection, Alex suddenly pointed out the window: 'Check that out!' It was a street sign for Cosmos Park: perhaps an omen that Alex, though initially opposed to the idea, would spend the next seventeen years sporadically performing with the reconstituted Big Star."


Salon runs an excerpt from Holly George-Warren's A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man.

"And I’m Certainly Ready to Go Forward"

"But, now, I know everybody wants change, but we also like continuity. Tradition does have a value. What is California? Just the idea of the gold rush. What brought people here is still bringing people here, the—Google and Internet and Apple, and California is still kind of a gold rush. So I think it’s good to view the present through the lens of the past, but open to this incredible future that the state still very much possesses, and I feel very blessed to be a part of."


John Myers on the PBS Newshour interviews Jerry Brown.


And John Nichols in The Nation profiles Brown.

"In the Room"

"And we (black people) love to give ourselves the luxury of feeling like we are the only ones watching—even if we empirically know it is not true! And I believe if Leslie Jones had done her bit on 'Comic View' or 'Def Comedy Jam' or at a random Sunday on Hannibal Buress’s night at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn—where there are a ton of white people, but the lens through which they watch is BLAAAAAACK!—she would have killed! And she may have been heralded as one of our (black people’s) favorite types of comedians, one who goes there! But because of the venue and the audience, it felt weird."


In Salon, W. Kamau Bell reacts to the controversy over Leslie Jones on Saturday Night Live.

"Newborn Soothed By Familiar Sound Of Parents' Bickering"

"As of press time, Brundage had drifted off to sleep, reportedly pacified by his mother’s nightly refrain about when they’ll have enough money to pay the fucking credit card bill."


From The Onion.

Who Framed 77 Cheap?

The New York Times runs obits for actor Bob Hoskins, Mad magazine editor Al Feldstein, journalist Howard Smith, and actor Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.

"One of the Most Influential and Little-Known Songwriters in Rock History"

"Berns left a lot of important enemies behind him when he died in 1967. Neil Diamond hates him (Van Morrison--mixed feelings at best). Jerry Wexler, who was his best friend and mentor, told me he would have nothing to do with the book: 'I don't know where he's buried, but if I did, I'd piss on his grave.'"


Michael Heaton in The Plain Dealer interviews Joel Selvin about Selvin's new book, Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm & Blues.


And Robert Gordon reviews the book in The New York Times.

"Neither a Pimp for the Revolution nor a Shill for the Establishment"

"Early in the film, an interviewee says, 'We were in such a hurry to create a martyr that we forgot about the man.' Asked about the process of closing that gap, Rodriguez notes that Salazar has often been thought of 'more as myth than history. Though aspects of that myth were compelling, it always managed to privilege conjecture and innuendo about his death over details and facts about his death and his life. We set out to bring historical fact and context to the story by insisting on primary sources.'"


Michael Nordine in the LA Weekly discusses the new documentary Ruben Salazar: Man in the Middle.

"It’s Not Really 'Neoliberalism' Until the Other Party Capitulates"

"This kind of celebrationism was objectionable when Reagan was president, but under Clinton—this jolly man of the people—it looked different somehow. Those CEOs were just regular folks, working to make all of us richer, via our lovable pal the stock market! That’s what Clinton’s cultural function was — to make all this seem human. I called it 'market populism.'
"Of course it turned out to be a bubble, and it ended in disaster. As did the housing boom, which got its start in the late ’90s, and as will the next bubble to come down the pike. Neoliberalism may be heaven on earth for the people on top, but for the rest of us it means insecurity and lifelong debt and a constant struggle to hang on to what our parents took for granted. Nice going, Bill."


In Salon, David Daley and Thomas Frank talk about Bill Clinton's economic record.

"Nothing Short of Ethnic Cleansing"

"More than 46,000 Native Americans experienced this horror brought about by Jackson’s brand of populism. While Jackson did not personally supervise the extermination of tribes, according to Watson, he 'encouraged the atmosphere of callousness and indifference to Indian welfare that culminated in those deaths.'

"Jackson 'always insisted he was not an Indian hater, he just felt the presence of Indians on land that ought to be white people’s was a barrier to the development of the white country,' Watson said."

Ari Rabin-Havt in The American Prospect argues that the Democratic Party should stop honoring Andrew Jackson.

"Inside the Mind of the Assassin"

"The assassination set in motion an unintended chain of events that culminated in carnage such as the world had never seen. The 1914-1918 conflict killed and wounded more than 35m people, both military and civilian, through poison gas, starvation, shell fire and machine gun. Few had reckoned on such a long, drawn-out saga of futility and wasted human lives. The teenage Princip himself did not foresee world war. His aim was to liberate swaths of the future Yugoslavia from the Austro-Habsburg yoke and create a State of united South Slavic countries."


In the Financial Times, Ian Thomson reviews Tim Butcher's The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War.