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Briefly Noted Books, Movies, and More
The rise of the parking garage, James Ellroy's pulp fiction, Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, why you shouldn't buy Christmas presents, and government-issued comics
Free Parking
The horse-crowded streets of New York City in the 1880s ran with 4 million pounds of manure and 40,000 gallons of urine every day. The car rescued us from the flood. Even as Americans used the vehicles to flee to newly viable suburbs, we continued to honor our chrome gods with temples in the cities that they saved from fecal oblivion.
“House of Cars: Innovation and the Parking Garage” (October 17, 2009–July 11, 2010) at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., collects images, models, and films of these holy places. Once cars were weak. They needed shelter with walls, heat, and minions to tend them. But then the vehicles grew stronger, facing the elements in open-sided concrete garages with only their owners to whisk them up ramps or onto lifts. Lektropark, Park-o-Mat, File-A-Way, and Circ-L-Park became part of the American landscape as human civic ingenuity found ways to manage the inconvenience of moving about in a valuable, space-consuming machine.—Katherine Mangu-Ward
Pulp Revisionism
Crime novelist James Ellroy says his books are about “bad white men, doing bad things in the name of authority.” His latest, Blood’s a Rover, deals with the baddest of them all: the government. The final volume in Ellroy’s acclaimed Underworld USA Trilogy, which includes American Tabloid (1995) and The Cold Six Thousand (2001), Blood’s a Rover is a conspiracy-driven, blood-spattered alternate history of America from 1968 to 1972.
Focused in part on J. Edgar Hoover’s deranged attempts to destroy the black liberation movement after Martin Luther King’s assassination (at the hands of Hoover’s FBI, in Ellroy’s telling), the book features a gallery of crooked pols, psychopathic feds, trigger-happy mobsters, and corrupt union officials, all involved in a web of state-sanctioned violence and deceit. As Ellroy told National Public Radio, “I get to rewrite American history to my own specification, assassinate political leaders, suffer nervous breakdowns, have a blast, use the grooviest drugs of the era, and no one gets hurt.”—Damon W. Root
Capitalism: Not Just for the Rich Anymore
Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, tries to link foreclosed homes, underpaid pilots, judges sending kids to juvie hall in exchange for payoffs, and dead workers whose employers collected on life insurance. It’s a package meant to indict private property and free markets as, in the words of a priest interviewed in the film, “contrary to all that’s good.”
Moore doesn’t notice that two of his framing anecdotes—man doesn’t pay debt on house and has it occupied by bank, business doesn’t pay wages it owes and has factory occupied by workers—are the same in justice and logic. His real point is that people richer than you (not than him, necessarily) must be punished, somehow.
He loses his whole game when he asks a woman from the factory why the workers don’t form a co-op and run it themselves. They don’t have money, she explains; they aren’t capitalists. That’s a benefit the wealthy provide to the working man that Moore won’t acknowledge.—Brian Doherty
Boo Santa
Wharton economist Joel Waldfogel has written a pocket-sized book, the kind you grab at the register at Borders on impulse. Published just in time for the Christmas season, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton), isn’t bad. Or, as Waldfogel would say, the deadweight loss of getting this book as a gift would be less than you might expect.
Waldfogel calculates the total value destruction of Christmas at about $12 billion a year, combining holiday spending figures with his own surveys gauging the relationship between money spent and the value of a gift to the typical recipient. But Scroogenomics is not all gloom and doom. Siblings, parents, and significant others aren’t terrible givers, he argues; it’s the great aunts who are dragging the average down.—Katherine Mangu-Ward
Hey Citizens! Comics!
The University of Nebraska has posted an online compilation, with free downloads, of government-sponsored comics and illustrated pamphlets. Available at contentdm.unl.edu/cdm4/browse.php? CISOROOT=/comics, the selection is bursting with both comedic kitsch and sobering insight into the state’s view of its role in citizens’ lives.
Our government has expended its (our) resources on child-level instruction about poisons, the dangers of both sugar and fire (in different comics), and how sad it will be for your house servant if you don’t pay her Social Security taxes. We have been given images of a marine shooting a flamethrower at an octopus with Tojo’s head and of “Mr. Civil Defense” warning a mayor that he has a “pretty town” but lots of bad things might happen to it.
There are some famous faces here: Spider-Man, Dennis the Menace, and Li’l Abner were all drafted as propaganda agents, turning this joyous art form into a tool of a state that apparently believes its responsibilities are limitless.—Brian Doherty
More Articles by Katherine Mangu-Ward
- Turing Turns 100, Katherine Mangu-Ward, May 28, 2012
- Sex and the Supreme Court: The True Story of Lawrence v Texas, Katherine Mangu-Ward & Meredith Bragg, May 4, 2012
- The Business of Medical Marijuana, Katherine Mangu-Ward, April 13, 2012
More Articles by Damon W. Root
- Montana’s Misguided Attempt to Nullify Citizens United, Damon W. Root, May 23, 2012
- Arizona's Immigration Law Heads to the Supreme Court, Damon W. Root & Meredith Bragg, April 26, 2012
- Obamacare #FAIL: Day 3 at the Supreme Court, Anthony L. Fisher & Damon W. Root, March 28, 2012
More Articles by Brian Doherty
- Is Ron Paul the Best Hope for Progressives?, Brian Doherty, May 25, 2012
- How Pat Buchanan Conquered America, Brian Doherty, May 17, 2012
- Ron Paul Is Not Ending His Campaign for Liberty, Brian Doherty, May 15, 2012
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Untermensch|1.5.10 @ 7:19AM|#
Should that be read as “That’s a nice town you got there, Mayor. Shame if sumtin' should happen to it, know what I mean?”? Which pretty much sums up the security establishment's relationship to the tax payers' wallets.
¢|1.5.10 @ 7:21AM|#
I didn't know the new Ellroy book was out. I kind of expected he'd never finish it.
The Cold Six Thousand was the weirdest bestseller ever, stylistically. It's like a thousand-page parody of Hemingway parodies (which are never anything like anything Hemingway actually wrote), written by Celine. Totally crazy, and almost great.
Johnny Longtorso|1.5.10 @ 8:20AM|#
I thought the MM pic was for the chubby dating story in the thread above it.
Suki|1.5.10 @ 9:02AM|#
LOL
ed|1.5.10 @ 9:43AM|#
He doesn't date them. He eats them.
|1.5.10 @ 9:55AM|#
Springtime's dream.
When the
breath disappears
in the pallor
of an eternal
dream I see
beautiful skies
on the sound
of a springtime.
Francesco Sinibaldi
alan|1.5.10 @ 10:10AM|#
bad white men, doing bad things in the name of authority
Never understood why this white boy Toni Morrison is considered a major stylist. The quality of his writing is something you would expect from the offspring of two retarded fetuses, and if you think about it, the only way that could happen is if a brother and a sister mated. I slogged through two hundred pages of one of the recent tomes before throwing it away. Utter crap.
|1.5.10 @ 1:27PM|#
Yeah, he's a shitty writer. And an arrogant wanker. He considers himself to be a much greater writer than Raymond Chandler (whom he views as a poor one), and a great of his genre.
DADIODADDY|1.6.10 @ 7:25AM|#
let's go to his house and kill his dog...or better yet, just don't buy his books.
alan|1.5.10 @ 10:41AM|#
To elaborate, one criticism I have of Ben Fold's is his music comes off stilted to my ears because it sounds to me as if he is writing for the Rolling Stone critic in his head with a bullet point list of critic pleasing motifs to check off as the songs are produced. Though to be fair, Folds is still pretty good.
James Ellroy is not even that. He writes like a junky conman who took a couple of English classes and is playing to type. He knows his professor perched up on padded tweed elbows loves him some noir, loves him some jazz, and loves him some left wing politics and its mythical history.
The crazy thing is about it, Ellroy tries to create the feel of jazz rhythms in his writing but he has a tin ear for both the natural rhythm of both the older Saxony and for the four on four sensibility of the old bop.
My gut tells me, Ellroy's esteemed position in the establishment of modern letters is going to look silly a generation or two down the road.
alan|1.5.10 @ 10:47AM|#
yo, clean up in isle third paragraph, strike the 'is' and the second 'both'.
[squirrel stares quizzically, thinking, 'I don't work for you, numnuts!']
|1.5.10 @ 1:45PM|#
Comics nerds and military buffs should definitely check out Will Eisner's and Joe Kubert's work on PS, the magazine about preventative maintenance.
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My only point is that if you take the Bible straight, as I'm sure many of Reasons readers do, you will see a lot of the Old Testament stuff as absolutely insane. Even some cursory knowledge of Hebrew and doing some mathematics and logic will tell you that you really won't get the full deal by just doing regular skill english reading for those books. In other words, there's more to the books of the Bible than most will ever grasp. I'm not concerned that Mr. Crumb will go to hell or anything crazy like that! It's just that he, like many types of religionists, seems to take it literally, take it straight...the Bible's books were not written by straight laced divinity students in 3 piece suits who white wash religious beliefs as if God made them with clothes on...the Bible's books were written by people with very different mindsets...in order to really get the Books of the Bible, you have to cultivate such a mindset, it's literally a labyrinth, that's no joke
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The plate program started in 1978 with the seemingly unobjectionable purpose of protecting the personal addresses of officials who deal directly with criminals. Police argued that the bad guys could call the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), get addresses for officers, and use the information to harm them or their family members. There was no rash of such incidents, only the possibility that they could take place.
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