the past is another country
Friday, November 30, 2001
Lingua Franca, the magazine that bills itself as "The Review of Academic Life", may be shutting down. Ron Rosenbaum, the author of Explaining Hitler and The Secret Parts of Fortune (which I highly recommend), expresses hope that some "hero" will step up. Judith Shulevitz half-seriously suggests the the government subsidize little magazines. But little magazines have always gone out of business; the Little Magazine Project plans on indexing at least 2,500 title from after World War II, and I'd suspect that no more than a twentieth of the magazines from the '40s, '50s, and '60s are still publishing. (more...)
11:16 pm 
Sunday, November 25, 2001
From its beginnings as a European colony, Rhode Island (where I have spent a lovely Thanksgiving holiday) was a haven for religious dissenters; despite the folk etymology that "Rhode Island" is a corruption of "Rogue's Island", the name arose from a comparison of the size of Block Island, today a summer vacation destination for Southern New Englanders, to the Isles of Rhodes, although the Rogue's Island nickname might well have arisen later, as a Puritan response to the trickle of dissenters who were expelled or removed themselves from Puritan Massachusetts and headed south to religious liberty. (more...)
7:19 pm
Tuesday, November 20, 2001
Why is it so ridiculous that America would hire an advertising executive to coordinate its propaganda campaign in Central Asia and the Middle East? Charlotte Beers broke new trails for women in the field of advertising. Now she is the State Department's point woman for the dispersal of American propaganda. An article in Slate suggests that the move to hire Beers has been met with some sniggering from the press. I don't know about that -- mentions of Beers that I've read have largely (if not universally) been neutral to respectful. But if anyone taking this cynically, it's a shame. Beers is attempting something that will, if successful, make Americans safer: the partial defanging of anti-American rhetoric in the Muslim world. Beers isn't trying to sell Americans on the Administration's land grab of governmental authority for the executive branch or the shameless retroactive repeal of the corporate alternative minimum tax, a $25 billion dollar hand-out to some of America's largest corporations. Beers is trying to counteract a stream of falsehoods that contribute directly to the radicalization of the Islamic world. America need not be a perfect nation -- or even a very good one -- to be better than the Taliban; the American way of life doesn't need to be misrepresented to offer something appealing to the average Muslim (probably young and poor, quite possibly jobless) in the Third World. Making sure that the truth can be heard should be enough. (more...)
1:07 am
Saturday, November 17, 2001
The American Highway Project is dedicated to preserving images of "the architecture and cultural landscapes situated along the highways of the U.S." Texaco stations and abandoned signs are nothing more than historical artifacts waiting to happen -- ghost towns in the making (links via Eclogues). If there's something that the web is really good at, it's providing a venue for these images of vanished and vanishing worlds. James Lileks photo and postcard archives of the forgotten Midwest are the product of one man's obsession, but they're as fascinating in their own way as the jaw-dropping Prokudin-Gorskii photographs of Russia in the years preceding the First World War. The difference is that one will be displayed at the Library of Congress and one is available to me only online. I'm a soft case for American cultural ephemera, and this sort of website fills a huge gap. Even beloved icons like San Francisco's Doggie Diner heads, which have narrowly escaped destruction a number of times, are subject to the indignities of wind and rain. There are worse things to imagine than a world unfamiliar with tacky motel logos and old-fashioned urban advertising, but thank goodness people are putting together archives and making them available while we still have more than pictures left.
7:06 pm
Wednesday, November 14, 2001
Suppose you are driving cross-country and you decide to stop in Abilene, Kansas, on a hot summer's day. There are a few attractions where you can get into the air conditioning and buy a postcard. There's the Dwight D. Eisenhower Museum, which you would probably need to pay me to visit, and the Museum of Independent Telephony, which is more interesting than you might think, as it reveals a whole world of small-town technological and societal infrastructure. You can almost taste the wheelings and dealings that led Abilene's Brown Telephone Company to become one of America's larger corporations. And then there's the Dickinson County Historical Museum, which devotes much space to Abilene's most famous lawman, Wild Bill Hickok. (more...)
11:42 pm
Sunday, November 11, 2001
The first indie rock show that I ever went to was Tsunami, with Franklin and Edsel opening, in the basement of an anonymous building at the University of Maryland. Or at least that's the first that I can remember; I may have forgotten one or be repressing the thoughts of something that my modern self finds embarassing (although after some cajolling and with a few drinks under my belt I'm willing to admit that I went to see Rush with Mr. Big opening while I was in high school, so the embarassment bar must be set pretty high). So that's my seminal indie rock show, just as Superchunk's No Pocky for Kitty was my very first indie rock album. Tsunami was intricately tied to the DC/Arlington pop scene and to Simple Machines Records, whose "Mechanics Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes, and CDs" probably did as much as MRR's Book Your Own Fuckin' Life to foster the "Hey kids, let's put on a show!" ethos of early- to mid-Nineties indie rock. Jenny Toomey of Tsunami was unfailingly nice to 16-year-old me, even when she probably shouldn't have been; she let me interview her via email for the zine I did in high school, and there's a direct line between my flailing away with a Xerox machine and a glue stick and the writing I'm doing now. Jenny's been doing some thinking about the future of music (of the indie variety) in a post-Napster age, and she's finally gotten herself a website. The nostalgia mills are recycling all kinds of things -- hair metal bands, say -- that should have been left buried, but Jenny is someone I'm thrilled to see resurface. It's a shame I've haven't been keeping an eye out, because I bet she never left.
11:19 pm
Wednesday, November 7, 2001
I've often wondered how it feels to be a reporter at the dual-natured Wall Street Journal. The Journal is one of the finest -- if not the finest -- sources of business reporting in the country. It's just the place you want to turn for information on the nation's economy, not to mention investigative journalism like the discovery of fraud at AremisSoft (in which company officers apparently just made up foreign contracts to pad their numbers) last year. It's also a pretty good source of general news, although its bread and butter is clearly the business reporting. But the editorial page generally runs, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, the gamut of opinion from A to B. The viewpoints are diverse: from Kissingerian fatuousness to Peggy Noonan's loopiness, from corporate welfare apologists to the occasional conspiracy theorist. The Journal is entitled to write editorials and print op-eds whatever slant it wishes, of course, but it's a shame that the editorial page doesn't even try for a semblance of even-handedness. (more...)
11:16 pm
Sunday, November 4, 2001
In 1635, the first patent on a perpetual motion was granted in England, and to this day, people are churning them out. The laws of thermodynamics mean that a closed system can only lose energy, not produce it, and the various schemes that have been proposed all overlook certain basic facts of physics that prevent them churning out free energy forever. Tidal turbines and Stirling engines are not enough; these tireless inventors want to start a revolution. And can you really blame them? Given the panoply of human desires, it's hard to take umbrage at people who want to get rich and famous off a revolutionary discovery that will give everyone clean, cheap power. And what could be more romantic than a grand windmill-till? (more...)
11:37 pm
Friday, November 2, 2001
Halloween has come and gone. I wore no costume. I skipped the only Halloween party I was invited to; V. and I have been getting up at 6, and I just didn't think I could bedeck myself in nacre and ormolu and swing, brother, swing after a ten-hour day. We bought two bags of candy and received not a single trick or treater. I don't know if it's the awfulness of the the September 11 attacks, anthrax fears, or just a sense that partying would be inappropriate, but this was a very subdued Halloween. I've been invited to a Day of the Dead party tonight, but I may not got. I looked forward to this holiday so much when I was younger; even a few years ago, this was a big deal among my friends, who managed such costumes as an angel with five-foot wingspan, a BART station, and a commedia dell'arte puppet. But this year? We went to my friend Andrew's apartment last weekend and watched a double feature of Spielberg's excellent Jaws (which V. had never seen before) and the impressively shot (for its budget) and innovative but not actually good Carnival of Souls. Other than that, no concessions were made to the holiday, and ersatz and commercial though it is, I kind of missed it. I recently discovered, to my immense delight, Haunted Attraction, the trade journal of the "dark amusement industry". Spend a few minutes looking at the wonderful, wonderful articles. Even if Halloween's pleasures prove transitory, geekery is forever.
12:32 am
