2018 Favorites

The Late Adopter selects...
Movies:
Incredibles 2 (dir. Brad Bird)
Game Night (dir. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein)
Ready Player One (dir. Steven Spielberg)
Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (dir. Rodney Rothman et al)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (dir. Ron Howard)
Teen Titans Go! to the Movies (dir. Peter Rida Michail and Aaron Horvath)
McQueen (dir. Peter Ettedgui)

Albums:
Parquet Courts--Wild Awaaaaake! (Rough Trade)
Shame--Songs of Praise (Dead Oceans)
Richard Ashcroft--Natural Rebel (BMG)
Johnny Marr--Call the Comet (Sire)
Leon Bridges--Good Thing (Columbia)
Chills--Snow Bound (Fire)
(English) Beat--Here We Go Love (Here We Go)
Kacey Musgraves--Golden Hour (MCA Nashville)
Kurt Vile--Bottle It In (Matador)
Paul Weller--True Meanings (Parlophone)

Songs:
Ford Madox Ford--'Dark American Night'
Johnny Marr--'Hi Hello'
Leon Bridges--'Beyond'
Pete Wylie--'Is That What Love Is All About?'
Charli XCX & Troye Sivan--'1999'
Chills--'Scarred'
Regrettes--'Come Through'
Half Man Half Biscuit--'Every Time a Bell Rings'
Parquet Courts--'Total Football' 
Paul Weller--'Gravity'

December 2018 Acquisitions

Books:
Tom Alphin, The Lego Architect, 2015.
Robert Faggen (ed.), Leonard Cohen: Poems and Songs, 2011.
Don Hahn, Yesterday's Tomorrow: Disney's Magical Mid-Century, 2017.
Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters: The Tragic and Glamorous Lives of Jackie and Lee, 2018.
Peter J. Westwick (ed.), Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California, 2012.
The Little Black Songbook: Christmas Songs, 2010.

Movies:
A Raisin in the Sun, 1961.

Music:
Ian Brown, The Greatest, 2005.
Alana Davis, Love Again, 2018.
Pink Floyd, The Early Years 1965-1967: Cambridge St/ation, 2017.
Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody, 2018
Robyn, Honey, 2018.
Richard Zimmerman, The Complete Works of Scott Joplin, Vol. 3, 1993.
Various, Cajun Hot Sauce, 1996.
Various, A Motown Christmas, 1999.

"I Now Understand How Nelson Mandela Felt"

"Don't get me wrong. I have always supported censorship. Major social media platforms have a responsibility to ensure that we are expressing the correct sort of free speech. Twitter's decision to suspend Alex Jones, host of American website InfoWars, set the right kind of precedent. I fully supported this action because Jones is known for disseminating fake news and wild conspiracy theories. But the fact that I was also banned makes me think that Twitter were being secretly controlled by InfoWars from the very start."

At Quillette, "Titania McGrath" introduces herself.

"Affirmative Action Should Be About Reparations"

"Luke Harris, a Vassar professor, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor at Columbia University and UCLA—both critical-race-theory pioneers—have noted that what got lost in the University of Michigan fight was that students were also awarded 10 points for attending elite high schools, eight points for taking a certain number of AP courses, and four points for being legacies. That's 22 points that certain affluent and middle-class students had built in that poor, first-generation college students had little or no access to. This structure rewarded students who already benefited from living in upscale neighborhoods, who had successful parents or parents who, at the very least, knew how to succeed in 'the system,' and who continued to benefit from the affirmative action of not descending from people who for generations were banned from reading, buying property, and living in safe neighborhoods with decent schools.
"Somehow, advantages of this sort are often invisible to the general public. And if they're made visible, the most coddled people in American society tend to get their feelings hurt—and insist on their self-worth. This dynamic explains the theater of defensiveness that played before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2018, as then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who attended one of the most expensive prep schools in the nation and who is the son of a lobbyist and judge, sneered, 'I got into Yale Law School. That's the No. 1 law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college.' Kavanaugh’s grandfather Everett Edward Kavanaugh went to Yale as an undergraduate. If Kavanaugh truly does believe that he is an island of his own merits, his lack of historical knowledge and his lack of awareness of his own privilege are terrifying for any judge, let alone a Supreme Court justice who could soon preside over affirmative-action cases."

Kimberly Reyes at The Atlantic criticizes Lewis Powell emphasis on a student body's diversity.

"He Really Believes in California"

"It is no exaggeration to say that Brown’s tenure as governor of the Golden State—two disparate tours, separated by nearly 30 years, four terms and 16 years in all—bookends virtually the entire modern history of California. He is both the youngest and oldest man in modern times to preside over his state, and five years ago he surpassed Earl Warren's tenure as the longest-serving California governor. He leaves office next month, at 80, at the top of his game, California's once-depleted coffers bursting with surplus, his flaky youthful reputation as 'Governor Moonbeam' long since supplanted by his stature as perhaps the most successful politician in contemporary America."

Todd S. Purdam at The Atlantic assesses Jerry Brown.

Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle writes that "Proposition 13 is no longer off-limits."

And Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo says goodbye.

Word to Your Mother

"The way he sees it, kids today are missing out. 'I call it the lost generation, because from 2000 to 2017, nothing really defines that whole generation in pop culture. Like, how would you look back at 2000 to 2017 and remember anything? How would you see somebody wearing some gear and say, "Hey, that's gotta be from 2014?" There's no music there, there's no pop culture, there's no fashion that defines the generation.'"

Rob Sheffield in a 2017 Rolling Stone article visits a 1990s nostalgia tour.

"He's Right"

"This illustrates how the status quo benefits the right. Most conservatives policy goals involve tax cuts, spending cuts, or hamstringing Democratic regulatory reforms by defunding them. Few of these policies need 60 votes to pass. On the other hand, lots of ideas Democrats want to pass, from (small-d) democratic voting reforms to health care, do need 60 votes."

Jonathan Chait at New York writes that Donald Trump, when regarding ending the Senate filibuster, "actually happens to be correct on the procedural merits."

"Whose Faith? Which Sacraments?"

"The deaths of three men define England in the 1530s: Thomas­ Cardinal Wolsey, who died en route to trial and execution in 1530; Thomas More, executed after conviction in a carefully staged trial in 1535; and Thomas Cromwell, bundled to execution without trial by virtue of an act of attainder in 1540. 'If I had served God as diligently as I have done the king,' lamented Wolsey, 'He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.' And he went on to add a pointed warning to future royal councillors: 'Be well advised and assured what matter you put in his head: for you shall never pull it out again.' Thomas More weighed things up a little differently in his final account, saying that he died 'the king's faithful servant, but God's first.' He also protested that he died 'in and for the faith of the Holy Catholic Church'—and no one was in any doubt as to which church he meant. Cromwell was more guarded: 'I intend this day to die God's servant.' His protestation that he died 'in the Catholic faith,' and his avowals of loyalty to its laws and sacraments were, as MacCulloch remarks, a touch ambiguous."

Richard Rex at First Things reviews Diarmaid MacCulloch's Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life.

"The Body That Has Check-and-Balance Power Over an Out-of-Control Executive"

"Donald Trump is dangerous and unfit for office. Nearly every member of the House of Representatives knows this. I bet that every single senator does. History's eyes are on them, as are the world's right now. The longer they pretend not to see, the greater the contempt they will earn—and the danger they will invite."

James Fallows at The Atlantic calls on congress to stop Donald Trump.

"Politics Defeated Ryan, and the Country Is Immensely Better Off for It"

"The story of Paul Ryan is that of a man who set out to radically change the role of government in public life, and eventually settled for dumping hundreds of billions of dollars on the wealthiest people in the country and hoping for the best. 'I'm not one of these big-ego legacy guys,' he said last month with characteristic humility, well before unveiling of the six-part video treatment of his legacy."

Jonathan Chait at New York says goodbye to the outgoing Speaker of the House.

"'It's Anti-War, and It'll Have a Big Effect on the War'"

"It was obvious that someone at Columbia felt Head had box office potential, because roughly a month out from the premiere, large, mysterious ads began appearing in the pages of the Voice. A thick-lipped young man sporting a dark comb-over and glasses gazes at the reader; in the first two ads to run, the only copy acts as a textual dopplegänger to the half-tone image. Other movies advertised on those same pages give a sense of the era's cultural tumult: Andy Warhol's Flesh, Jane Fonda exposing much of her own skin in Barbarella, Godard's visceral Weekend, Steve McQueen's careening Mustang in Bullitt arriving for an engagement at Radio City Music Hall."

R. C. Baker at The Village Voice looks back at the Monkees' movie, upon its fiftieth anniversary.

The Years Punk Broke

"I had plenty of American punk albums made by groups who were before my time--so, X and Misfts, for example--but the game-changer for me was Bad Religion's No Control, which I bought the year after it was released. From then on, I was a contemporaneous fan of the band and, from that, other Epitaph groups such as NOFX and The Offspring. This was the first time that I listened to U.S. punk rock that was box-fresh. From there groups such as Green Day followed. That I've written a book about all this stuff more than 25 years later shows just how profound an effect it had on me. It was the music I'd been waiting for all my life to hear."

Brett Callwood at the LA Weekly interviews Ian Winwood, author of Smash!: Green Day, The Offspring, Bad Religion, NOFX, and the '90s Punk Explosion.

"Faced With a Choice Between Democracy and Power, the Party Chose the Latter"

"Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn't a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological. The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order. Several of its intellectual founders—Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, among others—were shaped early on by Communist ideology and practice, and their Manichean thinking, their conviction that the salvation of Western civilization depended on the devoted work of a small group of illuminati, marked the movement at its birth."

George Packer at The Atlantic traces the intellectual decline of the Republican Party.

Troll Farmers

"More than any other topic matter, much of this activity focused on infiltrating racial-justice movements and prodding racial tensions, which the New Knowledge report calls an 'expansive cross-platform media mirage targeting the Black community.' That mirage included a complex architecture of accounts across multiple platforms for single fake activist groups. One such group, BlackMattersUs, hosted accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Google Plus, Facebook, and Gmail. The faux racial-justice group also hosted a page on PayPal that it shared on its website BlackMattersUS.com, as Slate first reported in November 2017."

April Glaser at Slate explains Russian infiltration into American politics.

"Who Could Have More Riches Than That?"

"Burnett was something of a hot ticket on the academic circuit. In 1931, he and his wife, Martha Foley, had founded Story magazine, which they still ran, and their acumen for spotting new talent had made their hundred-page monthly a must-read for the big New York publishers. In its first few years, Story had featured debut works by William Saroyan, Nelson Algren, Conrad Aiken, Kay Boyle, John Cheever, Wallace Stegner, and Carson McCullers—an eye-popping list that would soon include Norman Mailer, Jean Stafford, Richard Wright, Joseph Heller '50GSAS, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams.
"But little did Burnett know, in the spring of 1939, that the writer who would become Story's most fabled discovery was seated in the back row of room 505."

Paul Hond at Columbia Magazine tells the story of J. D. Salinger's first publisher.

"Most of the 'Alternative' Stuff Going On Was Actually Alternative"

"In an office full of debauchery, the art department was particularly notorious, glamorous in a fucked-up way and always louche. There'd be cocaine bindles casually tossed into the trash sitting on top of proof pages, and people having Irish coffee as they pasted up the paper at 9 a.m. Every time the door to the art department opened, it was like a cross between the party scene from Breakfast at Tiffany's, a Cheech & Chong film and the playa at Burning Man."

Pleasant Gehman recalls the early years of the LA Weekly (as part of the paper's fortieth anniversary).

"The Foundation of Trump's Coalition Is Cracking"

"Although changes in survey methodology may partly explain the difference, the 2018 exit polls showed that among both working-class white men and women who are not evangelicals, Democratic House candidates won a measurably higher share of the vote than Hillary Clinton did in the 2016 presidential race. In the heavily blue-collar Rust Belt states that tipped the 2016 election to Trump—particularly Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—even small improvements might be enough to tilt the result the other way."

Ronald Brownstein at CNN points to an intriguing difference among white voters.

"The Two Most Influential Cult Bands in Rock History"

"The late '60s was a fertile time for rock, period. You could say it's hardly a shock that two pioneering underground rock groups debuted the same month. But there is something strange and special about two bands who inspired decades of underground admiration and imitation debuting within less than a week of each other. They might rule vastly disparate realms of rock, but both have established themselves as the kings of cult for decades to come."

Joe Lynch at Billboard links the Velvet Underground to the Grateful Dead.

"There Were Africans in Britain Before the English Came Here"

"With Fryer as our guide, we know that whatever multicultural bonhomie we enjoy now is a product not of Britain's innate genius and sense of fair play, but of bitterly fought struggles in which the political and media class have often resisted progress. We know that in those struggles black people have had allies, as well as enemies, among white Britons and trade unions. And that these struggles were not fought in a vacuum, but were always part of the broader economic, political and social landscape. Fryer shows us that black British history is not a subgenre of British history but an integral part of it, so tightly woven into the fabric that any attempt to unpick would make the whole thing unravel. With sufficient imagination and solidarity all sorts of Britons can see themselves in this book and spark their own transformative reckoning with who we are and how we got here."

Gary Younge at The Guardian discusses Peter Fryer's 1984 book, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain.

"All Those Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes That You Called Right-Wing Nuts and Kooks"

"Additionally, in their exhaustive examination of the tea party movement, political scientists Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto argue that Obama's election instigated the rise of today's far right. Much like how the John Birch Society arose as a rejection of progress on civil rights, tea party supporters felt anxious about what they saw as the 'real' America slipping away when the country chose a black man to be its president."

Christopher Towler at The Conversation marks the sixtieth anniversary of the John Birch Society.

"The Great Awokening"

"Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. 'Social justice' theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history—itself a remnant of Christian eschatology—it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.
"The same cultish dynamic can be seen on the right."

Andrew Sullivan at New York argues that "[t]he need for meaning hasn't gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction." (Sullivan responds to critics the following week,) 

And Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard at Quillette discuss the sociology of "Wokeness."

"What He Has Tapped into Is What the Founders Most Feared"

"This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called 'fascism.' Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. 'National socialism' was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who single-handedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.
"To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today."

Robert Kagan in a 2016 Washington Post article defines the threat from Donald Trump.

"The Rift Between EU Remainers and Leavers in the Referendum Vote of 2016 Has Stuck"

"Yet this compromise will amount to little as long as the underlying divisions separating Britain's two tribes persist.
"That will happen unless the government responds to the real grievance of Leavers: that the prevailing free market model no longer works for them. It is no accident that Britain as well as the United States has experienced a fierce populist revolt. Both countries have been cheerleaders for economic liberalization since the 1980s under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher."

Paul Wallace at Reuters argues that "[t]he paradox of Brexit is that the best way to mend the rift it exposed is by staying in the EU."

"To Colour Their Faces with Such Sibbersauces"

"During her reign, Elizabeth became an icon to worship—the Protestant object of a 'royal cult' that, Montrose reports, clashed with and contested the Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary. This 'cult of Elizabeth,' which emphasized her virginity and beauty, provoked a range of responses among Britons, who 'sustained, elaborated, and appropriated [the cult] to their own ends' during her time in power. Living inside it all, Elizabeth clearly seemed to realize her presentation of a mask that didn't slip was critical to her survival.

Rebecca Onion at Slate discusses the importance of makeup to Elizabeth I.

"The First Work That Rendered This Claim Credible"

"It was the first work to show that a rock act could reinvent itself in the face of irrelevance, the first great 'comeback' album of the genre, and the earliest indication that rock 'n' roll lives might be capable of something like second acts. At the end of a year that saw an explosion of double albums and single tracks that took up the better part of an LP side, all adorned with ever-newer forms of sonic gadgetry that promised musical corollaries to other consciousness-expanding materials of the day, it was a mostly acoustic album steeped in blues, folk, rockabilly, and other, more inscrutable influences that it felt like the band had conjured from some ragged musical beyond. It was mature, painstaking, and ferociously intelligent, all things the Stones had rarely been previously accused of being. It was, weirdly, from a band who'd spent their early years as the music's foremost exemplars of incorrigible youth, a road map toward something like adulthood that didn't involve quitting the road and gradually disintegrating, a route their more-famous countrymen had recently taken."

Jack Hamilton at Slate argues that "the most consequential" album of 1968 was Beggars Banquet.

As Little as Possible

"'Totally. That's why I do feel like it's a challenge to the design world to reassess what we're producing, why we're producing it, and how we could do it better. Do we really need all this stuff?' asks Hustwit, in a way he knows his question isn't even a question. 'San Francisco is the center of the design world, packed with all these people, and they're listening to this 86-year-old German guy in his backyard for an hour and a half, about like, how they're fucking up. And they're loving it, and they're laughing!'"

Mark Wilson at Fast Company writes about a new documentary about designer Dieter Rams.

And Harry McCracken offers an obit for designer Charles Harrison, who died in November.

There Is No Love in This World Anymore

"'I'm not interested in being able to play. A musician is like another brand of entertainer.
"'There are plenty of musicians that I enjoy watching that are entertainers. But I wouldn't want to be that, because the thing with an entertainer is that there is always that dishonesty, which is what punk tried to get rid of.
"'It was like, you're not pretending to be something you are not. You are just what you are. Punk is an art of action. It's about deciding to do something and then going out and doing it.'"

Kevin Rawlinson at The Guardian reports the death of Pete Shelley.

And Jason Heller at NPR writes an appreciation.

As does Simon Reynolds at Pitchfork.

"Some Specific Suggestions"

"Elections, like military service—each is an example of duty, honor, and service to country—should be publicly funded. Can you imagine if we needed to rely on wealthy donors to fund the military? I know there are those who genuinely believe in privatizing everything. They are called profiteers."

John Dingell at The Atlantic tells readers how to improve government.

"Stay Cool, Clean and Hard"

"Noel Gallagher famously sang that listeners of Oasis should not put their life in the hands of a rock'n'roll band. I fundamentally disagree. Everything good in my life has been recommended to me by my musical heroes. My moral compass has been set almost entirely by pop stars. No teacher, no institution, no writer (OK, maybe some writers, actually) has had the same impact upon me as rock stars. Who forged your direction in life? Your parents? School? Your peers? Maybe it was a religious calling, or even a political party. If so, it's not too late to rethink your choice and invest in musicians instead." 

Ted Kessler at The Guardian introduces his book The Ten Commandments: The Rock Star's Guide to Life.

"No System Can Remain if It Does Not Integrate the Majority of Its Poorest Citizens"

"The change is not down to a conspiracy, a wish to cast aside the poor, but to a model where employment is increasingly polarised. This comes with a new social geography: employment and wealth have become more and more concentrated in the big cities. The deindustrialised regions, rural areas, small and medium-size towns are less and less dynamic. But it is in these places–in 'peripheral France' (one could also talk of peripheral America or peripheral Britain)–that many working-class people live. Thus, for the first time, 'workers' no longer live in areas where employment is created, giving rise to a social and cultural shock."

Christophe Guilluy at The Guardian explains the rise of the gilets jaunes movement in France.