2016 Favorites

The Late Adopter selects...
Albums:
Primal Scream--Chaosmosis (First International)
Moles--Tonight's Music (Fire)
Parquet Courts--Human Performance (Rough Trade)
Death Valley Girls--Glow in the Dark (Burger)
Richard Ashcroft--These People (Harvest)
Allah-Las--Calico Review (Mexican Summer)
Bleached--Welcome the Worms (Dead Oceans)
Bob Mould--Patch the Sky (Merge)
Monkees--Good Times (Rhino)
Anderson .Paak--Malibu (OBE)

Songs:
Stone Roses--'All for One'
Anderson .Paak--'Come Down'
OnDeadWaves--'California'
Primal Scream--'Trippin' on Your Love'
Parquet Courts--'Dust'
Richard Ashcroft--'Hold On'
Bob Mould--'Hold On'
Meilyr Jones--'How to Recognize a Work of Art'
Death Valley Girls--'Disco'
Mike Posner-'I Took a Pill in Ibiza [SeeB Remix]'

December 2016 Acquisitions

Books:
Françoise Bernard, La Cuisine: Everyday French Home Cooking, 2010.
Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt, The Rainbow Comes and Goes, 2016.
Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation, 2004.
Eric Foner, Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History, Vol. 1, 2016.
Eric Foner, Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History, Vol. 2, 2016.
Madhur Jaffrey, Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, 2002.
Jack Kornfield, Meditation for Beginners, 2008.
Sue Lawrence, Scots Cooking, 2000.
Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, 2014.
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 2000.
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2001.
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, 1999.
Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film, 2013.
Peter J. Tomasi et al, Batman: Arkham Knight, Vol. 3, 2016.
Peter J. Tomasi et al, Batman--Detective Comes, Vol. 8: Blood of Heroes, 2016.

DVDs:
The Sound of Music, 1965.
A Taste of Honey, 1961.
Young Adult, 2011.

"The Problem with Individualism"

"What rescued the U.S. economy from the economic crisis of the 1970s was a massive wave of consumer capitalism. And behind it were the forces of finance, because they offered credit to millions of people for the first time. In another series I made called The Century of the Self, I tried to show how the other essential component in that wave of consumerism was the idea of self-expression. People were encouraged to buy all kinds of stuff, not to be like each other as they had in the past, but instead to express themselves as individuals. In this way the very idea of self-expression became central to the modern structure of power.
"We look back at past ages and see how things people deeply believed in at the time were actually a rigid conformity that prevented them from seeing important changes that were happening elsewhere. And I sometimes wonder whether the very idea of self-expression might be the rigid conformity of our age. It might be preventing us from seeing really radical and different ideas that are sitting out on the margins—different ideas about what real freedom is, that have little to do with our present day fetishization of the self. The problem with today's art is that far from revealing those new ideas to us, it may be actually stopping us from seeing them."

Lonie Abrams at Artspace interviews Adam Curtis.

"A Continent-Spanning, Gun-Running Network"

"As his end notes demonstrate, all the evidence has been right there under our eyes for centuries, in expedition narratives, ship manifests, military correspondence and the testimonials of Euro-Americans who spent time as captives of American Indian tribes. It just required a prolific synthesizer who saw the big picture—that the gun frontier 'was a creation of Indian savvy and power, not white American Manifest Destiny.'"

Casey Sanchez in the Los Angeles Times reviews David Silverman's Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America.

Take Seventeen

The Village Voice publishes its 2016 film critics' poll results.

 "It's the Ethic, Not the Policy, That Matters Most"

"While many commentators say Trump will have to bring back jobs or vibrancy to places like the Rust Belt if he wants to continue to have the support of people who voted for him, Thompson's account suggests otherwise. Many if not most Trump supporters long ago gave up on the idea that any politician, even someone like Trump, can change the direction the wind is blowing. Even if he fails to bring back the jobs, Trump can maintain loyalty in another way: As long as he continues to offend and irritate elites, and as long as he refuses to play by certain rules of decorum—heaven forfend, the president-elect says ill-conceived things on Twitter!—Trump will still command loyalty."

Susan McWilliams in The Nation looks at Hunter S. Thompson's 1966 book on the Hell's Angels as a forerunner to the rise of Donald Trump.

"The Largest Number of 'Faithless Electors' Seen in More Than a Century"

Eric M. Johnson and Jon Herskovitz at Reuters report that Donald Trump has won a majority of electoral votes for president of the United States.

And Ed Kilgore at New York notes that the final certified vote shows that "Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2,864,974, which is 2.1 percent of the total vote."

"It May Be the Perfect Time for Such a Project"

"Second, in this era of renewed interest in the Constitution (especially on the Right, but given the nature of the incoming administration in Washington, soon to be extended to the Left), it is essential that public discourse over the 'Founders' intent' include the full realization that the Constitution without the Reconstruction Amendments (the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal rights, and the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right to vote) represented a failed design that inevitably led to a bloody Civil War. Claiming to revere the Constitution while ignoring these amendments, which crucially modified the states-rights and limited-government assumptions of the original document, is to adopt a neo-Confederate stance. 'Constitutional conservatives' sometimes need to be reminded of this basic problem."

At New York, Ed Kilgore agrees with calls for a National Reconstruction Memorial.

"The Bobby Kennedy Coalition"

"'I think Bobby Kennedy would have had a much stronger appeal to the Trump kind of voter than even Barack Obama did,' Tye told The New Republic.
"He recalled that in the 1968 Democratic primary Kennedy won with conservative whites in Indiana and Nebraska, carrying county after county where George Wallace had prevailed four years earlier. At the same time, Kennedy cleaned up in the black districts of these states and won heavily in Washington, D.C.
"'At a time of huge racial strife in America, he went into black communities and white ones and said precisely the same tough message—our streets have to be safe, and the only way to get safe streets is to have racial justice,' Tye said. 'That was a message that, one could say, managed to offend white and black audiences equally.'
"And yet, that offensiveness—or, more precisely, Kennedy's willingness to tell the same hard truths to every audience—was key to his appeal."

Graham Vyse at The New Republic looks back to Robert Kennedy as a model for Democrats in the future.

"There Is Nothing 'Mere' About Symbols"

"He was phenomenal—the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people. This was the core of his 2004 keynote, and it marked his historic race speech during the 2008 campaign at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center—and blinded him to the appeal of Trump. ('As a general proposition, it's hard to run for president by telling people how terrible things are,' Obama once said to me.)
"But if the president's inability to cement his legacy in the form of Hillary Clinton proved the limits of his optimism, it also revealed the exceptional nature of his presidential victories. For eight years Barack Obama walked on ice and never fell. Nothing in that time suggested that straight talk on the facts of racism in American life would have given him surer footing."

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic reviews the Obama era.

And Eric Bates at The New Republic leads a roundtable discussion of the soon-to-be-former president.

"He and His Forecast Were Typical of His Times"

"Known across academe as 'the Bowen Report,' the book became notorious for its Panglossian forecast of better times for academic job seekers. It soon symbolized the misguided optimism of a generation of would-be professors who kept waiting for their ship to come in, and eventually starved by the shore. Bowen's reasoning in the book wasn't overly complicated. He and Sosa argued that a coming increase in the number of college-bound students would soon necessitate the hiring of many more new professors. The authors forecast a faculty shortage, especially in the humanities and social sciences, where they said graduate-student enrollment levels were particularly unprepared to meet the coming influx.
"The Bowen Report proved persuasive, but it also proved wrong."

Leonard Cassuto at Vitae considers education scholar William G. Bowen.

A "Singular Experience of Economic Growth"

"Instead of permanent stagnation, growth became so rapid and so seemingly automatic that by the fifties and sixties the average American would roughly double his or her parents' standard of living. In the space of a single generation, for most everybody, life was getting twice as good.
"At some point in the late sixties or early seventies, this great acceleration began to taper off. The shift was modest at first, and it was concealed in the hectic up-and-down of yearly data. But if you examine the growth data since the early seventies, and if you are mathematically astute enough to fit a curve to it, you can see a clear trend: The rate at which life is improving here, on the frontier of human well-being, has slowed."

In a 2013 New York article, Benjamin Wallace-Wells explores if "the rate of improvement in the standard of living—[,] year over year, and generation after generation­—[,] will be no faster than it was during the dark ages."

"The Dead-Serious Ideas Undergirding Their Behavior"

"To liberals, it may sound baffling and incomprehensible that ordinary political arguments about taxes and regulation could outweigh his authoritarianism. Liberals generally see economic policy as a normal disagreement, apart from and subordinate to larger questions about democracy and structure of government.

"Most conservatives, however, do not see these issues this way. The conservative movement treats small government as a first-order question of liberty, alongside or even above political liberty. Liberals treat economic policy on pragmatic grounds—the point of Medicaid is to help poor people get health care, and the point of the Clean Air Act is to create more breathable air. Expanding government is the means toward those discrete ends. Conservatives have discrete goals, like economic growth, but also larger ideological ones. As Milton Friedman once put it, '"freedom" in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so "economic freedom" is an end in itself to a believer in freedom.' While it may seem strange to liberals, for economic conservatives, the fight to slash down the size of government is itself tantamount to a fight against authoritarianism."

 

Jonathan Chait at New York explains why most conservatives have reconciled themselves to Donald Trump.

"Fascists Want the Apocalypse"

"What do those ethics entail? 'In fascist mentalities, kindness, empathy, and sympathy are seen as weaknesses, critical self-reflection is seen as a danger to security, and discussion and negotiation is seen as failure,' Gencarella says. 'Existence is a tragic struggle to be won or lost.' This mentality can be traced back to the fascist Ur-text, The Doctrine of Fascism, ghostwritten for Benito Mussolini by his Minister of Education Giovanni Gentile. 'The Doctrine is clear that perpetual war is the preferred mode of existing with others who are different, and especially to crush the weak in order to demonstrate that one is strong,' Gencarella says."

Sean T. Collins at New York argues that "The Walking Dead is the only show that actively courts, rather than critiques, fascist ethics."

And Dominic Green at The Atlantic looks at debates over "fascism."

"She Had Been Robbed of Her Part of History"

"Parker-Fraley spent decades unaware of her connection to the poster, mostly because another woman named Geraldine Hoff Doyle, who worked in a factory in Michigan, had been labeled 'the real-life Rosie the Riveter' since she believed she saw herself in an un-captioned reprint of Parker-Fraley's photo in the 1980s. 
"Because Hoff Doyle bore a striking resemblance to Parker-Fraley, no one questioned her claim, and her story traveled around the world. "

Tiare Dunlap in People writes about how James J. Kimble argues that Naomi Parker-Fraley of California was the model for J. Howard Miller's 1943 poster of Rosie the Riveter.

Faithless

"Alexander Hamilton provided a blueprint for states' votes. Federalist 68 argued that an Electoral College should determine if candidates are qualified, not engaged in demagogy, and independent from foreign influence. Mr. Trump shows us again and again that he does not meet these standards. Given his own public statements, it isn't clear how the Electoral College can ignore these issues, and so it should reject him."

In The New York Times, Texas elector Christopher Suprun announces that he "Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump."

"The Last Surviving Astronaut of the Original Mercury Seven"

"When Glenn took his pioneering turn in space, astronaut Carpenter spoke for all Americans when he radioed from launch control just before liftoff, 'Godspeed, John Glenn.' Carpenter later said he had tried to keep the mood light by telling Glenn: 'Remember, John, this was built by the low bidder.'
"NASA cut the flight short—Glenn was supposed to orbit Earth seven times—when mechanical failure created concern that Friendship 7's heat shield might fall off during reentry and cause the capsule to burn up.
"Although he remained calm, Glenn later told Life magazine that he had been prepared to die. The heat shield held. After Glenn's safe return, he became a national hero. Bathed in the spotlight, Glenn was typically low-key.
"'It's been a long day,' he said after being fished out of the Atlantic Ocean by helicopter, 'but it has been very interesting.'"

Geraldine Baum and Valerie J. Nelson in the Los Angeles Times writes an obituary for John Glenn.

"A Regime with Its Heart in Dixie"

"As a Georgian who spent some years working in community and economic development, once the thought occurred to me, Trump's behavior struck me as entirely predictable. In places that don't have a whole lot going for them to create new jobs or attract investors, public officials (especially governors) spend a lot of time pretending they personally have a big brawling, deal-making effect on decisions to keep or retain jobs. Because their individual efforts are vastly more tangible than the thousands of public policies that affect the viability of a state or locality, they get away with taking credit for private-investment decisions. And the investors involved are always happy to go along with the game in exchange for tax or infrastructure or regulatory concessions. While this is a bipartisan habit in the South and elsewhere, southern Republicans are especially eager to treat public resources from school revenues to labor and environmental regulations as expendable if giving them up creates a ground-breaking or ribbon-cutting opportunity. Everything about the Carrier case smells like that sort of scam."

Ed Kilgore at New York characterizes the incoming Trump administration as "Alabama With Nukes."

"American Life as a Kind of Reality Show"

"As Stuart Jeffries points out in his recent book, 'Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School,' the ongoing international crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy has prompted a resurgence of interest in the body of work known as critical theory. The combination of economic inequality and pop-cultural frivolity is precisely the scenario Adorno and others had in mind: mass distraction masking élite domination. Two years ago, in an essay on the persistence of the Frankfurt School, I wrote, 'If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realized.'

"I spoke too soon."

 

Alex Ross at The New Yorker writes that, following the election of Donald Trump, Theodor Adorno's "moment of vindication is arriving now." 

"Deep-Seated Fear of Demographic Change Rather Than Abstract Constitutional or Economic Principles"

"When the tea party appeared on the scene in 2009, an intense partisan dispute broke out as to just what this movement represented. Conservatives insisted that what spurred protesters into streets and town halls were the timeless principles of conservative movement thought: advocacy of balanced budgets, adherence to a strict constructionist version of the Constitution, opposition to 'crony capitalism,' and skepticism of Keynesian economics. Liberals suggested a different explanation. The tea party was an expression of ethno-nationalist rage centered around a black president and the belief that his coalition stood for redistribution from older, white America to its younger, more diverse supporters."

Jonathan Chait at New York argues that "One could not have devised a sequence of events more perfectly designed to prove the liberal theory" of the rise of the Tea Party "than the election of Donald Trump."

"More: More and More: Always More"

"Schwartz's most brilliant exploration of his parents' failed marriage, and of its consequences for him, was the publication that launched his career. The short story 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities' was the opening piece in the Autumn 1937 issue of Partisan Review, and it took literary New York by storm. The story recreates an episode in his parents' courtship from the summer of 1909, but with a twist: Schwartz ingeniously recounts an excursion that the young couple make to Coney Island, in the course of which his father proposes, as if their son-to-be was watching these events unfolding on a cinema screen. As his father outlines his future plans and finally makes his offer of marriage, his mother dissolves into tears, and the watching Delmore stands up and shouts at the screen: 'Don't do it! It's not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous'. Of course his parents can't hear, but the cinema usher can, and she hurries down the aisle to ask him to be quiet."

Mark Ford in The Times Literary Supplement reviews Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz.

"System of Play"

"Psychically, the Lego brick is also distinctly calibrated; it operates in a space shared by childhood imagination and parental ambition. For children, Legos allow them to build whole universes to their idiosyncratic specifications. For parents, Legos seem like the vegetable your kid actually requests and then eats in heaping mounds—a toy that's also a building block for future creativity, a mechanics lesson that doesn't feel like schoolwork, a wholesome embodiment of Scandinavian craftsmanship, something tactile in a world that is increasingly pixelated. It is the plastic plaything that even the parent most committed to natural, wooden toys will gladly buy. It is also more popular today than it has ever been, which is a surprise even to some at the company, since roughly a decade ago it was nearly bankrupt."

Genevieve Smith in New York calls Lego "the perfect toy."

"It Had a Certain Poetry to It"

"By this time, Schiller was a photojournalist of some renown, and with a batch of good-quality LSD finding its way into counterculture circles and talk of so-called Acid Tests–musical events fuelled by Kool-Aid laced with psychedelics–taking place along the west coast, he set out to document the new scene. Through acid guru Timothy Leary, Schiller made contact with Kesey, who told him the Pranksters were due to hold an Acid Test on Sunset Boulevard. Mid-trip, they skipped down the block to pose for portraits. 'Cassady was there,' Schiller recalls. 'At one point I went over, and he started dancing with his silhouette.'"

Louis Pattison in a 2011 Guardian article tells the backstory of the cover of the Flaming Lips album The Soft Bulletin.

"Perhaps It's Time Someone Asked Them"

"In short, the story of a white working-class revolt in the Rust Belt just doesn't hold up, according to the numbers. In the Rust Belt, Democrats lost 1.35 million voters. Trump picked up less than half, at 590,000. The rest stayed home or voted for someone other than the major party candidates.

"This data suggests that if the Democratic Party wants to win the Rust Belt, it should not go chasing after the white working-class men who voted for Trump. The party should spend its energy figuring out why Democrats lost millions of voters to some other candidate or to abstention. Exit polls do not collect information about why voters stay home."

Konstantin Kilibarda and Daria Roithmayr at Slate argue that turnout, or lack thereof, was key to the 2016 presidential election.

Eric Levitz follows up at New York.

"The Slow-Motion Exodus Seems Set to Continue"

"Oakwood's transformation unfolds largely unseen by the 150,000 tourists who throng the carnivalesque boardwalk of buskers, drum circles, painters, bodybuilders and exhibitionists every weekend.
"Guests at the Airbnb properties which now sprinkle Oakwood can see the building blitz but the glass and steel stucco boxes are indistinguishable from the others popping up across Venice."

Rory Carroll in The Guardian discusses demographic change in Los Angeles.