Reason Magazine - Topics > Arts

Soundbite: Can You Hear the People Sing?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Most people of a certain age remember Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity movement of the early 1980s and the day the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. Others may recall Czechoslovakia’s inspiring Velvet Revolution a few weeks later, or the bloodier Christmas Day executions of Romania’s odious Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Yet when you tell people that the tiny Baltic country of Estonia engineered a Singing Revolution to cast off their Soviet oppressors, the typical response is a blank stare.

James Tusty, a commercial and corporate filmmaker whose father emigrated from Estonia in 1924, first started hearing about the ways Estonians used nationalist folk songs and modern rock to defy Moscow when he and his wife, Maureen Castle Tusty, taught a film course in the Estonian capital of Tallinn in 1999.

The Tustys realized they were in a unique position to tell the world an inspirational story it did not know. The result, a moving 90-minute documentary called The Singing Revolution, became the highest-grossing documentary in Estonian history and has drawn rave reviews upon its limited release in the United States. The film is scheduled to be shown April 18–19 at the Cleveland Museum of Art and April 18–24 at the E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C.

Editor in Chief Matt Welch spoke with James Tusty in January.

Q: How did songs become an essential part of the Estonian revolution?

A: Music has always been part of Estonian history. For thousands of years the Estonians have been singing folk songs. They have one of the largest collections of folk songs in the world, even though they’re a very small country. So it was very natural that music would become part of the weapon that they would use to fight the Soviets. They have this song festival every five years called Laulupidu, which is 30,000 singers coming on stage to sing in harmony. And it’s not any 30,000 people who want to sing; these people audition, so it’s the best 30,000 singers.

Well, in 1947 Stalin had already come in and occupied Estonia. He declared the song festival a “bourgeois tradition,” and he declared the first annual Soviet Song Festival, making the Estonians sing songs in Russian that glorified Lenin and Stalin and Marx. But the Estonians snuck one by. That song became the unofficial national anthem in Estonia, and for the next 50 years they always sang it to close the Song Festivals.

Q: So what happened in the late ’80s?

A: In June of 1988, there was a rock concert with, I don’t know how many, tens of thousands of youth who were there singing into the night. The Soviet authorities got worried, and they shut down the concert. So the people walked three miles to an open field to continue singing, and they sang until five or six in the morning. And it went on for a week. Every night more and more people came until there were maybe 100,000 to 150,000 people singing these rock ’n’ roll songs, as well as some traditional songs. The Soviet police saw this, but they didn’t know what to do. And the Estonians just kept on pushing that envelope, until eventually they contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Q: What broader lesson did you learn from this story?

A: What this film is about is humankind’s indomitable drive for independence. If there’s a reason to see the film, it’s to start understanding liberty and freedom at a base level. I reduce freedom to this reality: I don’t want my neighbor telling me what color to paint my living room. Let’s get it down to that, and then let’s move out from that slowly, and talk about what political systems give us all the individual freedom we need.

This is not a political film. This is a story. And you will cry in the beginning and feel uplifted in the end, I promise.

Attention DC-area Reasonoids: The Singing Revolution is coming to Washington, D.C, playing at the Landmark's E Street Cinema starting this Friday. Check here for showtimes in other cities.

"Your Matter Is Our Market! Your DNA Is All We Need!"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:39:00 EDT

Worried about "the elusive dangers of nanotechnology mixed with the recklessness [of] capitalism"?

Have I got the "interactive/walk-through sculpture that educates" with "sensor-equipped sniffing sculptures" for you!

"Inside the Wave" is a showcase of six Tijuana/San Diego artists. One part of the exhibit features disembodied Spanish, English, and German voices saying:

"Your carbon is our lifeblood! Your matter is our market! Your DNA is all we need!"

Whoever wrote up the event for the San Diego Union-Tribune seems as baffled as I am, noting that "It isn't entirely clear what the health effects are of the strangely-named nanoparticles (like carbon buckyballs or halogenated phenoxy)."

Read about what our future with nanotechnology and capitalism will be like in Todd Seavey's "Neither Gods Nor Goo." (Hint: no apocalypse, lots of stain resistant pants.)

Keep Your Mouth Shut and Your Eyes Open

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:06:00 EDT

With the caveat that I am not the world's biggest fan of political Road to Damascus confessionals (on the theory that anyone younger than 95 years old who was ever a Trotskyist, let alone a Maoist, just should not be preaching to me about political judgment), this David Mamet mea culpa is pretty entertaining, and not only because he's going libertarian on us. A selection:

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics. [...]
[My play is] about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

Whole thing here. Maybe it was all that time in Santa Monica.

Evidence Suggests That Violating Disney Copyrights Leads to Genocide

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:35:00 EST

The Telegraph reports:

The director of a Norwegian museum claimed yesterday to have discovered cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.

William Hakvaag, the director of a war museum in northern Norway, said he found the drawings hidden in a painting signed "A. Hitler" that he bought at an auction in Germany.

He found coloured cartoons of the characters Bashful and Doc from the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which were signed A.H., and an unsigned sketch of Pinocchio as he appeared in the 1940 Disney film.

Hitler tried to make a living as an artist before his rise to power. While there was no independent confirmation yesterday that the drawings were the work of the Nazi leader, Hitler is known to have owned a copy of Snow White, the classic animated adaptation of a German fairy tale, and to have viewed it in his private cinema.

I'm extremely skeptical, but what the hell: Here are the drawings attributed to the Fuehrer:

Note that there are no sketches of Mickey Mouse. In 1931, a Nazi organ declared, "Youth, where is your self-esteem? Mickey Mouse is the most shabby, miserable ideal ever conceived....Healthy feeling by itself should actually tell every decent girl and every honest boy that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal. Don't we have anything better to do, than to decorate our dress with the filthy animal, because American business Jews want to profit?...Throw out the vermin! Down with Mickey Mouse, wear the Swastika cross!"

Attn, Hit & Run Readers: Those Bargain-Priced-To-Sell Monets May Be Stolen!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 07:26:00 EST

If anyone is suddenly pushing a cut-rate Monet or Van Gogh on you, be wary:

Armed robbers have stolen art worth $100 million, including works by Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, from a Zurich museum, police said Monday.
Zurich police said the robbery took place Sunday. Also among the works stolen were oil paintings by Paul Cezanne and Edgar Degas.
Police called the heist a "spectacular art robbery," but did not identify the museum, saying only that it is in the city's eighth district.
The prosperous and peaceful outer district on the eastern shore of Lake Zurich is home to several notable art collections.
The FBI estimates the market for stolen art at $6 billion annually, and Interpol has about 30,000 pieces of stolen art in its database. While only a fraction of pieces are ever found, the theft of iconic objects is rare because of the intense police work that follows and because the works are so difficult to sell.

More here.

Other questions of art's value raised here and here.

"We know that all governments/ Are thugs and liars"

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 14:09:00 EST

At the American Conservative, Justin Raimondo presents an impassioned encomium to antiwar poet Robinson Jeffers, whose publisher Random House once felt "compelled to go on record with its disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume"--mostly because of "frequent damning references" to FDR.

Raimondo sums up the reaction to the 1946 volume of verse in question, Jeffers's The Double Axe:

The chorus of jeers that rose up from the critics was deafening: “A necrophilic nightmare!” declared Time magazine. “His violent, hateful book is a gospel of isolationism carried beyond geography, faith or hope,” scolded the Library Journal. The Milwaukee Journal concurred: “In this truculent book, Robinson Jeffers ... makes it clear that he feels the human race should be abolished.” His critical reputation shattered on the rocks of the postwar One-World consensus, the poet never regained his former stature. As William Everson wrote in the foreword to the 1977 edition: “Hustled out of decent society with antiseptics and rubber gloves, The Double Axe was universally consigned to oblivion, effectively ending Jeffers’ role as a creditable poetic voice during his lifetime.”
............
The poet Stanley Kunitz warned Jeffers that if he didn’t get with the program, and “accept moral obligations and human values,” he would “range himself on the side of the destroyers.” The Marxist critics of the New Masses and the fellow-traveling press, who had initially embraced Jeffers’s poetry because they mistook it for an indictment of “decadent” capitalism, noted his lack of “social consciousness”—and, of course, disdained his antiwar stance, which no longer suited the party line.

Jeffers' values were far more human and humane than his critics, who judged "humanity" solely on enthusiastic support for world wars, granted, and his work was grand and wide in subject and language far beyond the antiwar and nature-worshipping for which he is most remembered.

For just one example of Jeffers' exquisite craft, "Love the Wild Swan" is the perfect poem for any writer who wonders whether he'll ever get it right, and if it matters. Jeffers took seriously the task of works of art and imagination, which, as he wrote in his "Roan Stallion," "without being are yet more real than what they/are born of, and without shape, shape that which/makes them."

A Code Is Born

doherty@brandeis.edu (Thomas Doherty) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 07:47:00 EST

The Rave Museum

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:36:00 EST

God did not give us the Internet for porn, political fundraising, or pissing off the RIAA. (*) He gave it to us so we could assemble amazing archives of beautiful and weird Americana. To that end, the other Jesse Walker (**) has posted a great gallery of rave flyers from Idaho Falls in the early to mid 1990s. It's well worth visiting, even if you don't care for that kind of music.

* Those were Al Gore's contributions. Thank you, Al!

** The other Jesse Walker is a DJ in Salt Lake City. We correspond from time to time, and he seems to be a nice fellow -- certainly much nicer than the other Michael Moynihan.

Radiohead Cuts Out Two Middlemen

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:48:00 EDT

With their new record In Rainbows out Oct 10, the much-beloved Brit rock band Radiohead cut out two middlemen: first, the major record label--the former EMI band is releasing the record themselves.

The other middleman they are cutting out? The guy who will obtain the CD and make it available for free on file sharing networks. By allowing you to download it from their own website for whatever you want to pay, they are working on making that dude obsolete as well.

My 1997 reason feature article on self-ownership and attitudes toward capitalism and markets in music and comics, which predicted this sort of thing.

Red Art District

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:20:00 EDT

Alexander Zakharov's blog A Soviet Poster a Day is exactly what it sounds like. Some of the posters are quite striking:

Others are kind of creepy:

Actually, they're all creepy, since they're propaganda posters from a totalitarian state. In other words: Great stuff! Collect them all!

Elsewhere in Reason: I stand up for our right to enjoy commie kitsch.

[Hat tip: Jim Gill.]

How to Build a Better Memorial

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 12:03:00 EDT

At Slate, on this day of days, Witold Rybczynski asks: Why can't we build a 9/11 memorial like this?

This is the Spire of Dublin, inaugurated in 2002, and built to replace Nelson's Pillar, which "was erected in central Dublin in 1809 to memorialize the British admiral and was demolished in 1966 after being fatally damaged by an IRA bomb."

The parallels are pretty clean: Iconic construction destroyed by terrorists. Cities in need of a replacement. Dublin wins.

Here I chronicle the woes of building on the World Trade Center site, and here Todd Seavey discusses Art Deco at Ground Zero.

Voodoo Education

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:25:00 EDT

A sketched image of something that, if it were the actual item represented, could be a threat, or could be used to threaten, is the same thing as an actual threat, say Arizona's Chandler school district officials. They suspend a kid for drawing a gun.

That's not "draw" in the old West "draw, pard'ner!" sense--that's "draw" as in creating an image on paper.

[Link via Rational Review.]

Peter Bagge Art Opening in Los Angeles--Tonight!

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 11:01:00 EDT

Fans of our own comics journalist Peter Bagge (and let the Washington Post tell you how great he is) in the greater Los Angeles area should show up for a gen-u-ine art opening starring the drawings and paintings of Mr. Bagge.

It's tonight, August 10, at the comic book shoppe Secret Headquarters, located in the groovy Silver Lake neighborhood, at 3817 West Sunset Blvd.

Runs from 8 to 10 pm. You can bet I'll be there, and I hope that doesn't hurt attendence....

Bagge's reason archive.

A new book entirely dedicated to Peter's work--buy it on Amazon.

The Hipster Activist in the Library

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:16:00 EDT

Currently the most read story at the New York Times website is Kara Jessela's Sunday Styles report on the latest job trends amongst Williamsburg hipsters. According to Jessela, many of the (ironic) mustachioed boys and tattooed girls of Brooklyn—via Nebraska, usually—are turning to the library sciences to supplement their meager DJ incomes and finance their Goodwill shopping sprees. The librarian, says one interviewee, is becoming "more progressive and hipper":

Michelle Campbell, 26, a librarian in Washington, said that librarianship is a haven for left-wing social engagement, which is particularly appealing to the young librarians she knows. “Especially those of us who graduated around the same time as the Patriot Act,” Ms. Campbell said. “We see what happens when information is restricted.”
Ms. Campbell added that she became a librarian because it “combined a geeky intellectualism” with information technology skills and social activism.
Jessamyn West, 38, an editor of "Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out" a book that promotes social responsibility in librarianship, and the librarian behind the Web site librarian.net (its tagline is “putting the rarin’ back in librarian since 1999”) agreed that many new librarians are attracted to what they call the “Library 2.0” phenomenon. “It’s become a techie profession,” she said.

But the unintentional comedy award goes to Ms. Carrie Klein, a newly minted librarian who has abandoned the record industry's filthy lucre for a more academic existence:

“I wanted to do something different, something maybe more meaningful,” said Carrie Klein, 36, who used to be a publicist for a record label and for bands such as Radiohead and the Foo Fighters, but is now starting a new job in the library at Entertainment Weekly (emphasis added, though probably unnecessary).

Whole story here .

(Photo: Random hipsters found via Google. I cannot guarantee that they are librarians, though I assure you that they are really annoying.)

Who Says Video Games Have to Be Fun?

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 19:17:00 EDT

From Wired, the makers of the grim videogames Fatworld, Airport Security, and Bacteria Salad (among others) make a bid for artistic growth for the video game by claiming for it the same right as other art forms: to challenge and annoy us in a decidedly unfun manner:

"The question of fun hangs like a cloud over this medium," [Ian] Bogost [leader of Persuasive Games] says, pointing out that "fun" would hardly be accepted as the highest possible praise for a song, novel, or movie. In his new book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost describes how games can engage us through irony, luring us into a pattern of actions that we recognize as reprehensible, or at least dismaying, while at the same time exciting our competitive drive and allowing us to inhabit an unfamiliar point of view....Bogost brings to gaming something that fiction writers have always known: Moral discomfort is the root of comedy, and pain can be a source of pleasure, too.

Kevin Parker in our April 2004 on the higher meaning and potential of video gaming.

Ars Gratia Libertatis

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:22:00 EDT

Sheldon Richman reviews Bryan Caplan's new book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. The book presents a somewhat depressing, though brilliantly argued, analysis of exactly how poorly most voters understand economics, and why (quick summation: because they have no reason not to be irrational when it comes to voting), and what this means for limited government. Richman wonders what Caplan's thesis means for libertarian strategists:

Economic education for the public also would also seem in order. But just straightforward teaching won't be enough, for as Caplan elaborates, people hold fast to their errors through "emotional commitment." "A good teacher could change some minds, but the best teacher in the world would be lucky to convince half," he writes. Dogma dies hard.
At the very least, this implies that the case for liberty must be pressed across the entire cultural front, especially in movies and novels where emotions as well as reason can be appealed to. We must find emotional commitments in the population that are consistent with freedom. Libertarian strategic wisdom may well begin with Jonathan Swift's insight: "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

Previous blogging on Caplan's book, summarizing what both the New York Times and In These Times had to say about it.

Artifact: Scars of War

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:28:00 EDT

“Suppress it!” Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman reportedly told the Ohio State Fair in 1880, referring to his experience during the Civil War, the first American conflict to be heavily photographed. “You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I tell you, war is hell!”

Former Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel knows the horrible aspects of war in a way few of us will ever have to endure. In a 2004 suicide bomber attack during his second tour of duty in Iraq, he was seriously wounded, losing an eye and suffering burns over much of his body. His injuries, including a fractured skull and an amputated arm, required 50 operations and 19 months of rehabilitation.

This image is from Ziegel’s wedding day last October, when he married his longtime fiancée Renee Kline. Recently chosen for the 2007 World Press Photo Foundation Award, it was taken by Nina Berman, a New York–based photographer whose work, online at ninaberman.com, includes the photoessays Purple Hearts,” studies of wounded Iraq war veterans, and “Under Taliban,” scenes from the repressive former regime in Afghanistan.

In the Internet age, war is no less hell than it was in Sherman’s day. But it is increasingly impossible to suppress its horrible aspects, or the scars that soldiers and their loved ones must learn to live with.

Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason.

Discuss this article online.

Designing Dissent

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:18:00 EDT

Welcome to Biotech Park

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 12:03:00 EST

National Review Online

Read this review at National Review Online.

Fear of a Black Pedestrian

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:23:00 EST

In The New York Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff points to a practice he calls "21st-century medievalism," in which "architects are being enlisted to create not only major civic landmarks but lines of civic defense, with aesthetically pleasing features like elegantly sculpted barriers around public plazas or decorative cladding for bulky protective concrete walls":

After 9/11, a craving for the solidity of walls reasserted itself. And the wars on terror, and fractious peaces, enforced it. The Green Zone in Baghdad, Jerusalem's separation barrier, the concrete bollards that line corporate headquarters on Park Avenue -- all are emblems of an unintended new mentality....That mentality has become acceptable in relatively stable cities as well, including London, where a debate has now arisen over what do to with the concrete barricades that surround the United States Embassy in historic Grosvenor Square. Some suggest that they should be replaced by a permanent, more visually appealing barrier, as if better design could somehow negate the notion that we are surrendering to the inevitable. And in downtown Miami, federal marshals have suggested that the barricades originally included in the plans for a park designed by Maya Lin as part of a new courthouse complex might have to be reinforced, even as people begin to move into the building.

The most chilling example of the new medievalism is New York's Freedom Tower, which was once touted as a symbol of enlightenment. Designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it rests on a 20-story, windowless fortified concrete base decorated in prismatic glass panels in a grotesque attempt to disguise its underlying paranoia. And the brooding, obelisk-like form above is more of an expression of American hubris than of freedom.

Part of me wants to nod my head, and part of me wants to complain that "medievalism" really isn't the best term for the trend. Most of me, though, wants to turn the microphone over to Lester Spence, who adds a little historical perspective:

While very specific design elements may have become more commonplace after 9/11, many of them had been in place for the last thirty years or so. The first modern urban threat remember was not the Arab terrorist, but the black rioter. Buildings like Detroit's Renaissance Center were noted not only for their use of curves as opposed to angles, but also for [their] use of military style bunkers to keep urban (read: black) denizens out. The bunkers have since been removed, but the first thing that I thought of as a young kid looking at it was the Morlocks. The curves (the building is in effect a series of connected tubes) served to disorient people rather than welcome them -- which of course makes sense if the only population the designers want in the building in the first place are people who know where they are going. And the use of surveillance cameras were first popularized in the US in Baltimore, while dealing with a crime spree associated with young black male criminals.

If someone were to study the shifts in these design elements over time in response to what is in effect racialized fear, it'd be hot. And if they could combine a study of building design with car design they'd be really onto something.

The 10 Best Business Novels. Or Not.

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:23:00 EST

Over at The American (the American Enterprise Institute's nicely revamped commentary magazine), the editors have compiled a list of "The Ten Best Business Novels."

Topping the charts is Theodore Dreiser's The Financier, which I've read and enjoyed (what's not to like about a book that spends what seems to be a 1,000 pages describing a battle to the death between a lobster and a squid and then following up with a plot about mass transit scams in turn of the century Philadelphia?). However, why it's at the head of a list of books supposedly chosen first and foremost for "literary merit" is a real brain buster. I have no interest in arguing whether someone is a "great" stylist (such aesthetic distinctions are by turns vapid and masks for other agendas, methinks), but really. Dreiser not only writes like English is his third language, he makes the reader feel that way, too.

Other titles making The American's list include Balzac's A Harlot High and Low (go Vautrin, go); Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full (puh-lease: this book, despite--or perhaps because of--George W. Bush's recommendation, sucks; and don't you get the idea that Bush needs to have someone even listen to audio books for him?); Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (isn't this a book about sado-masochism and rock quarrying, not business per se?); Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (reportedly the book that put Terri Schiavo in a coma); and something by Trollope (whatever it is, I'm sure it's even classier than an episode of Yes, Minister).

The point of such lists is to make people bitch and moan, so please proceed to do that. And throw in your neglected faves too.

Mine would include The Great Gatsby (an obvious choice but Meyer Wolfsheim is one of the great unacknowledged heroes of American Fiction); Mildred Pierce (who hasn't baked a pie and dreamed of making millions?); and at least two of the Henry Reed kid novels (Henry Reed's Baby-Sitting Service and Henry Reed, Inc.; Reed was the original nerdtrepreneur).

And where for god's sake is McTeague, typically read as a cry against capitalism and greed (indeed, it's the basis of the von Stroheim film with that name) but in fact a broadside against dental licensing laws (really, even if the author didn't quite intend it that way). And speaking of Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities is a great tour de force in terms of "literary merit" (not that I care about such trifles!) that helped create the '80s' ethos even as it was documenting it; more important, it's a fascinating look at Wall Street culture, commerce, and money.

One final thought: The depiction of businessmen as scumbags and low-lifes--was there ever a '70s detective show in which the businessman wasn't the bad guy; how the hell did Mannix, or Barnaby Jones, Jim Rockfish, or even Banacek, for christ's sake, ever make it out the parking lot alive when the cornered malefactor would sic his goons on them?--has no effect on the real world whatsoever. Except when it actually motivates them to kill Ceaucescu and worship Larry Hagman. Which, admittedly, is a mixed bag. But it's something.

Be A (Red Hot Chili) Pepper!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 08:55:00 EST

Via the Wash Times, the AP notes that the outfit called Authentic Hendrix, which controls the corpse (er, estate) of Jimi Hendrix has licensed a new, non-alcoholic beverage called "Liquid Experience" (now with no choke-inducing vomit!), a nod to the watershed album Are You Experienced?

Doesn't Liquid Experience sure sound tasty? I bet it will go just great with the doubtlessly forthcoming "Voodo Chili." This isn't the first time that the Hendrix persona has been used to pitch product. Reports the AP:

The image of Mr. Hendrix, who died in 1970 from a drug overdose in London, has been licensed for products including baby clothing, an air freshener, a lava lamp and a Christmas ornament. Portions of royalties have gone to several educational causes, including the United Negro College Fund.

And this time around, Authentic Hendrix--not to be confused with Ersatz Noel Redding--will "honor Mr. Hendrix's memory by donating some of the profit from the Liquid Experience to an unidentified music-education foundation."

Yet some rockers are acting pissy, and not just because they've guzzled too much Liquid Experience. Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers channels Doors drummer John Densmore and moans:

"To see his image and the beautiful feelings it has created during my lifetime cheapened by base advertising ... is very disappointing to me."

Because, you know, it's totally different, man, when you're merely exhorting kids to play "rock 'n' roll tennis" to an unidentified riff, as Flea and Anthony Kiedis did back when Andre Agassi had enough hair (and mousse) to sport a mullet. To wit:

Whole account here. True, true, there's nothing worse than commercialism creeping into an art form that is so pure and clean and decommodified that the music is always given away as free as the clap at a backstage party. Pace Flea (who I interviewed way back when The Uplift Mofo Party Plan lp was released, whose persona I like, and whose band I like too) and Walter Benjamin, one of the truly great things about rock and commercial culture in general is the endless appropriation, reappropriation, and misappropriation it allows and even encourages. Read about that here.

A while back, Brian Doherty took a long and winding look at the "Strange Politics of Millionaire Rock Stars" and realized that the rich--at least the rich in rock 'n' roll--are very different from you and me; they're even dumber.

Read all about it here.

The New Campus Dissidents

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 09:50:00 EST

"Higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students," declared Allan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind," a book that chastised a generation of academics and students with its biting, furious analysis about the decline of American liberal education. Twenty years ago, at the time of the book's publication, things looked bleak for those who shared Bloom's qualms about the effects of relativism on the academy.

Recently, Bloom's heirs have been hammering on the closed door, trying to reopen the American mind a bit. Their latest door-opening move has been an effort to create scholarly centers on campuses around the country: These centers would be devoted to the great books of Western civilization and the study of the American Founding, and they would be conducted in a rigorous, pre-1960s classroom style. Is there a chance of success?

The prototype of the idea--the Founding center, as it were--is the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, begun in the summer of 2000 by Prof. Robert P. George. The program has featured a traditional curriculum devoted, as advertised, to "American ideals and institutions," and it has attracted an array of visiting scholars, many of whom have gone elsewhere to try to seed similar institutions.

Importantly, the James Madison Program raises its own money, serving Princeton students and operating under the approval of the Princeton administration but, in certain ways, structuring its courses and hiring its faculty independent of the usual campus bureaucracy. Even Mr. George has copped to "a certain frisson one experiences with being a heretic" on a predominantly liberal campus, but he and his followers don't sound like right-wing culture warriors. Mr. George is famous for his civil tone and Socratic style, his commitment to taking ideas seriously and his relentless engagement with an older, nearly lost educational philosophy.

But one center cannot, by itself, open up America's narrow university culture. "If the light of veritas was going out when Bloom was writing," asks David DesRosiers of the Manhattan Institute, alluding to Yale's famous motto, "where are we now?" The answer seems to be that things are better, but only marginally so. To follow up on the Princeton model--to share the veritas--the Manhattan Institute has recently inaugurated the Veritas Fund, offering support to academics of a Bloomian bent. "To the degree that we find people that are interested in these subjects, in the name of intellectual pluralism we need to support them," says Mr. DesRosiers, the fund's executive director.

Patrick Deneen, who heads the newly formed Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown University, attracted the attention of the Veritas Fund right away. He wants to return to "an emphasis on classic texts, and particularly the way in which the American tradition draws on classical Western tradition and biblical tradition." The Tocqueville Forum has adopted Georgetown's emblem as its own--an eagle clutching a globe, the calipers of rationalism in one claw, a Christian cross in the other. In October, Mr. Deneen hosted a conference on American civic education. Justice Antonin Scalia was the keynote speaker, and much of the conservative professorial elite was in attendance.

Mr. Deneen, who taught at Princeton from 1997 to 2005, notes that, "for many people, there was a sense that universities had largely been lost to the forces of political correctness, softheaded multiculturalism." The Madison Program, he says, "energized many people throughout the academy." It provided "a legitimate intellectual and academic space where the kind of questions that lie at the heart of a classic education could be discussed." The Tocqueville Forum is trying to open up a similar space on Georgetown's campus.

A few other established programs, like those at Duke and Claremont McKenna provide additional models for start-ups like the Tocqueville Forum and the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. On each campus, a center raising funds for itself has set up a roster of lectures, conferences and visiting fellows. So far--none is more than two years old--they have attracted a fair amount of student interest. And Clemson even boasts a couple of dedicated faculty members.

As worthy as such projects sound, setting up an quasi-independent institute devoted to the study of Western civilization can easily run afoul of university rules and regulations, not to mention university ideology. In late 1999, about the same time that Mr. George was setting up the Madison Program, political philosophy professor Hadley Arkes was working on a similar project at Amherst College and finding it much more difficult. Eventually, he established Amherst's Committee on the American Founding, but so far its staff consists primarily of Mr. Arkes himself. He says the university has stymied fund raising by demanding control of most of the money he has drummed up for the program.

"A week doesn't go by without someone in the administration trying to put restraints on the program or undercut the program," he says of both Mr. George's project and his own. Other scholars, at the moment wishing to remain incognito, are trying to start Madison-like programs on their own campuses, but they are meeting resistance from the faculty and administration, some of whom worry about the supposed conservative political agenda of such programs.

In November, Hamilton College decided to refuse a $3.6 million grant from alumnus Carl Menges to establish the Alexander Hamilton Center for the Study of Western Civilization. A swirl of outrage from the faculty culminated in a 77 to 17 vote "expressing concern" about the project. Perhaps this was less than surprising from a school that made headlines for its invitations to Ward Churchill, who compared the people killed on 9/11 at the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns," and Susan Rosenberg, formerly of the Weather Underground.

Robert Paquette, a professor of history and one of the organizers of the Hamilton Center, pointed out that the center "did not seek to alter the curriculum of the college in any way, to create new courses arbitrarily, for example, or new faculty positions." It sought only to add another voice to the campus discussion. He contrasted his treatment with the treatment of the scientist who brings in an outside grant "from, say, the National Science Foundation. I know of no campus where such a scientist would accede to the faculty's demand to impose its choice of assistants on a proposed experiment." Mr. Menges has threatened to take the program's endowment elsewhere.

In defense of the study of Western civilization, and perhaps to give hope to those fighting for his vision in the present, Bloom wrote that "the failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency--the belief that the here and now is all there is." The organizers and funders of these centers are avoiding this tendency. They know that the past was different and the future still could be.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor at reason. This article originally appeared in the January 19 Wall Street Journal.

Wednesday Mini Book Review: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 09:23:00 EST

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, by Paul Malmont (Simon and Schuster, 2006). A fully delightful novel, simultaneously skilled and thrilling pulp adventure mixed with serious literary skill, meta-commentary on the nature and attraction of pulp fiction, and a full-on fan wallow in the pleasures of a bang-up narrative in which the corpse of H.P. Lovecraft tries to deliver a world-saving message to Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard in a New York bar (while, separate from the action across the room, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster plan their next move), where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby help Walter Gibson (the real "Maxwell Grant") keep on the trail of a sinister Chinese man with a mysterious and horrible plan all across Manhattan to a secret counterfeiting plant, where a chemist named Edward Elmer Smith helps save Manhattan from a poison gas attack.

This novel features some of the best fight scenes I've read in years, vivid sailing action, mysterious statues in abandoned theaters in the dark heart of Chinatown, and loads of believable and lovable characters (the love and exasperation and crisis and renewal in the relationship between Lester and Norma Dent is especially winning), most of them real people, fighting for love and vengeance and self-respect and a reason to live.

First-time novelist Paul Malmont is a second generation fanatic for the lost pop art of American pulp fiction, of the Shadow and Doc Savage and the shudder pulps and the science fiction rags, and says in his introduction that his goal is to "introduce you to some old friends of mine, and make their days come alive again. I will let their voices speak and let their hearts fill with life one more time." He succeeds, gloriously. This novel provides special depths of pleasure for those who have, like Malmont, romanticized and fantasized about pulp characters and creators; but it also stands apart from these fannish pleasures as a gripping novel exploring and explaining a fascinating and colorful Lost World.

Crying Censorship

info@reason.com (Cheryl Miller) — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 17:52:00 EST