Jiro Dreams of Sushi

The Movie

Anthony Bourdain

Still Life with Lemon, by Lucian Freud, 1946
via:

Sillouettes in Bombay. Danish Siddiqui
via:

Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable?

[ed. Five reasons why it might not be.]

I am often asked if the recent global financial crisis marks the beginning of the end of modern capitalism. It is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable replacement waiting in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to today's dominant Anglo-American paradigm are other forms of capitalism.

Continental European capitalism, which combines generous health and social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement and relatively equal income distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it - except sustainability. China's Darwinian capitalism, with its fierce competition among export firms, a weak social safety net, and widespread government intervention, is widely touted as the inevitable heir to Western capitalism, if only because of China's huge size and consistent outsize growth rate. Yet China's economic system is continually evolving.

Indeed, it is far from clear how far China's political, economic and financial structures will continue to transform themselves, and whether China will eventually morph into capitalism's new exemplar. In any case, China is still encumbered by the usual social, economic and financial vulnerabilities of a rapidly growing lower-income country.

Perhaps the real point is that, in the broad sweep of history, all current forms of capitalism are ultimately transitional. Modern-day capitalism has had an extraordinary run since the start of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, lifting billions of ordinary people out of abject poverty. Marxism and heavy-handed socialism have disastrous records by comparison. But, as industrialisation and technological progress spread to Asia (and now to Africa), someday the struggle for subsistence will no longer be a primary imperative, and contemporary capitalism's numerous flaws may loom larger.

by Kenneth Rogoff, Al Jazeera via Project Syndicate |  Read more:
Photo: Gallo/Getty

The Hot Spotters

The critical flaw in our health-care system that people like Gunn and Brenner are finding is that it was never designed for the kind of patients who incur the highest costs. Medicine’s primary mechanism of service is the doctor visit and the E.R. visit. (Americans make more than a billion such visits each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.) For a thirty-year-old with a fever, a twenty-minute visit to the doctor’s office may be just the thing. For a pedestrian hit by a minivan, there’s nowhere better than an emergency room. But these institutions are vastly inadequate for people with complex problems: the forty-year-old with drug and alcohol addiction; the eighty-four-year-old with advanced Alzheimer’s disease and a pneumonia; the sixty-year-old with heart failure, obesity, gout, a bad memory for his eleven medications, and half a dozen specialists recommending different tests and procedures. It’s like arriving at a major construction project with nothing but a screwdriver and a crane.  (...)

The Special Care Center reinvented the idea of a primary-care clinic in almost every way. The union’s and the hospital’s health funds agreed to switch from paying the doctors for every individual office visit and treatment to paying a flat monthly fee for each patient. That cut the huge expense that most clinics incur from billing paperwork. The patients were given unlimited access to the clinic without charges—no co-payments, no insurance bills. This, Fernandopulle explained, would force doctors on staff to focus on service, in order to retain their patients and the fees they would bring.

The payment scheme also allowed him to design the clinic around the things that sick, expensive patients most need and value, rather than the ones that pay the best. He adopted an open-access scheduling system to guarantee same-day appointments for the acutely ill. He customized an electronic information system that tracks whether patients are meeting their goals. And he staffed the clinic with people who would help them do it. One nurse practitioner, for instance, was responsible for trying to get every smoker to quit.

I got a glimpse of how unusual the clinic is when I sat in on the staff meeting it holds each morning to review the medical issues of the patients on the appointment books. There was, for starters, the very existence of the meeting. I had never seen this kind of daily huddle at a doctor’s office, with clinicians popping open their laptops and pulling up their patient lists together. Then there was the particular mixture of people who squeezed around the conference table. As in many primary-care offices, the staff had two physicians and two nurse practitioners. But a full-time social worker and the front-desk receptionist joined in for the patient review, too. And, outnumbering them all, there were eight full-time “health coaches.”

Fernandopulle created the position. Each health coach works with patients—in person, by phone, by e-mail—to help them manage their health. Fernandopulle got the idea from the promotoras, community health workers, whom he had seen on a medical mission in the Dominican Republic. The coaches work with the doctors but see their patients far more frequently than the doctors do, at least once every two weeks. Their most important attribute, Fernandopulle explained, is a knack for connecting with sick people, and understanding their difficulties. Most of the coaches come from their patients’ communities and speak their languages. Many have experience with chronic illness in their own families. (One was himself a patient in the clinic.) Few had clinical experience. I asked each of the coaches what he or she had done before working in the Special Care Center. One worked the register at a Dunkin’ Donuts. Another was a Sears retail manager. A third was an administrative assistant at a casino.

“We recruit for attitude and train for skill,” Fernandopulle said. “We don’t recruit from health care. This kind of care requires a very different mind-set from usual care. For example, what is the answer for a patient who walks up to the front desk with a question? The answer is ‘Yes.’ ‘Can I see a doctor?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can I get help making my ultrasound appointment?’ ‘Yes.’ Health care trains people to say no to patients.” He told me that he’d had to replace half of the clinic’s initial hires—including a doctor—because they didn’t grasp the focus on patient service.

by Atul Gawande, New Yorker |  Read more:
Photograph by Phillip Toledano

Matthias Moravek
via:

No Copyright Intended

On October 26, a YouTube user named crimewriter95 posted a full-length version of Pulp Fiction, rearranged in chronological order.

A couple things struck me about this video.

First, I'm surprised that a full-length, 2.5-hour very slight remix of a popular film can survive on YouTube for over six weeks without getting removed. Now that it's on Kottke and Buzzfeed, I'm guessing it won't be around for much longer.

But I was just as amused by the video description:

"The legendary movie itself placed into chronological order. If you'd like me to put the full movie itself up, let me know and I'll be glad to oblige. Please no copyright infringement. I only put this up as a project."

These "no copyright infringement intended" messages are everywhere on YouTube, and about as effective as a drug dealer asking if you're a cop. It's like a little voodoo charm that people post on their videos to ward off evil spirits.

How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say "no copyright intended" or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a "copyright disclaimer" citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.

Judging by his username, I'm guessing crimewriter95 is 16 years old. I wouldn't be surprised if most of those million videos were uploaded by people under 21.

He's hardly alone. On YouTube's support forums, there's rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no "intentional copyright infringement." Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.

YouTube's tried to combat these misconceptions with its Copyright School, but it seems futile. For most people, sharing and remixing with attribution and no commercial intent is instinctually a-okay.

Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court.

No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I'd wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it's legal already.

Here's a thought experiment: Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote.

What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office? (Maybe "I downloaded but didn't share" will be the new "I smoked, but didn't inhale.")

Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give.

 

by Andy Baio, Waxy

Howard Tate (1939 - 2011)

NPR Interview, 2003

Friday Book Club - A Soldier of the Great War

Alessandro Giuliani, the Italian hero of Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War, spends much of the novel cliff-hanging — clinging to Alpine precipices and leaping chasms — and so does Helprin, literarily speaking. Literally speaking, Helprin has done his own share of Alpine mountaineering, as well as other daring things like serving in the Israeli air force and declaring himself a Republican. His previous novel, 1983's Winter's Tale, was an extravagant, reckless hash of urban reality and fantasy. No one can accuse him of playing it safe. If you're wondering what the exact opposite of the typical, carefully calculated products of academic writing programs might be like, you can't do much better than this massive, soaring novel of ideas and ordeals, which is magnificent even in its flaws. It's an Alp among contemporary fictional foothills and molehills.

The story is framed by a long walk. In the summer of 1964, Alessandro, a retired 74-year-old professor of aesthetics, is on his way from Rome to a village 70 kilometers away on the last tram-bus of the day. At the edge of the city he sees a young man running to catch up with the tram as if his life depended on it. The truculent driver refuses to stop, and Alessandro demands to be let off. As their tram disappears, he sternly proposes to the baffled young man, an illiterate 17-year-old factory worker named Nicolò, that they walk to their destination — all night, without stopping. He makes the walk first of all a metaphor for passion and persistence, a rebuke to Nicolò's complacent innocence. Then, as Nicolò is stirred into curiosity, the walk becomes the story of the war 50 years earlier that so intensified life and death, passion and chance that it separated Alessandro forever from everything comfortable and predictable.

Before the war Alessandro had been a brilliant student, developing aesthetic theories, writing for the papers, disturbing the sleepiness of Rome with headlong horseback rides, climbing in the Alps with a Jewish friend he had saved from anti-Semitic thugs, experiencing thwarted love with a beautiful neighbor and unthwarted lust with an Irishwoman in a train compartment, living a civilized and secure life with his parents and sister. His experience of the war is so thorough as to render it a symbol of loss — of innocence, pride, belief, love. He witnesses the relentless, pointless slaughter of the trenches; he hunts deserters who have joined forces with the Mafia in Sicily and becomes a deserter himself; he returns to the Alps he once climbed for sport to shoot Austrians. As a prisoner of war, he is handed from savage Bulgarians to a whimsical pacifist field marshal; as the war ends, he has a final ordeal of escape over the glacial, sovereign, timeless Alps, and in the Italy he returns to, everyone he loves is dead or vanished, and fascists and communists prepare for further mayhem.

In spite of the Italian front, the rain, and a wounded soldier falling in love with a nurse, this book has little in common with A Farewell to Arms; it's not about lyrical disillusionment but the lyrical transcendence of disillusionment. It has more in common with Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, including a witty rendering of cynical diplomats; a vivid evocation of the chaos of war and the persistence of passion; a love for Italy and Italians. But it most resembles Dostoyevski, at his best and worst. Wedged between the narrow escapes and convenient coincidences of the melodramatic plot are enough philosophical reflections and dialogues to occupy a whole platoon of Middle European metaphysicians; even an elderly railway porter seizes the opportunity and comes up with a theory of time. The philosophy, in bare summary, may not sound original: Language and reason can never grasp what is most sacred in experience; history is compounded of illusion and futility; art is about beauty and beauty about intimations of God; truth lies in stillness, not action; the innocence of children has an angelic power; the presence, or memory, of those we love is what ultimately matters. But this vague mix of existentialism, neo-Platonism, and quietism is made eloquent by the sober beauty of Helprin's prose and the hard-won experience it conveys. And if the plot has its Dostoyevskian defects — a grotesque, mad, dwarflike clerk becomes a little too portentously the symbol of the arbitrary character of war — it has its intense, memorable triumphs in the passages on war, nature, and love. And not least important, the book reminds us that one freedom the 20th century has taken from us is the freedom to ignore politics

by L.S. Klepp, EW

Conflicted

With its cast of international superstars, 135-minute running time, nine interconnecting subplots, and ostentatious tagline “The Ultimate Romantic Comedy,” Richard Curtis’ Love Actually seems to have made its way into the pantheon of Christmas classics by sheer force alone. It’s a glossy, big-budget film with borderline-detestable examinations of love and romance containing perhaps three genuine moments that seem to be of our own universe, but Love Actually is one terrible Christmas movie that has strong-armed its way into the hearts of millions (including my own) despite being absolutely terrible. And this is why.

by Bobby Finger, The Hairpin |  Read more:

Now That Books Mean Nothing

[ed. For Anna, in admiration.]

About a month ago, I had surgery. I am not sick, but the surgery was to reduce my risk of becoming sick in the future: a double mastectomy, a significant procedure for an otherwise healthy 31-year-old woman.

I’d been struggling with whether to do it for nearly two years, ever since I learned I carry the BRCA1 genetic mutation that predisposes me to early-onset reproductive cancers. My sister and I both inherited it from our mother. Typing the percentages of cancer risk for those with the mutation makes me cringe, as much for us women as for the simple, intractable nature of the human genome: The risk of breast cancer is as high as 90 percent, and 50 percent for ovarian. Breast cancer typically appears first. Thus, if you have not already developed cancer and been forced into decisions, as my sister has, doctors often recommend the prophylactic removal of one’s breasts and, eventually, ovaries, where the cancer is far more difficult to detect but whose removal is far more physically and existentially complicated.

I’ve always considered myself physically sturdy, the product of determined Irish, Swedish, and German farming stock. I’ve never sprained an ankle. The only bone I’ve ever broken is the forefinger of my left hand; it eventually healed, crooked but perfectly functional. I am not allergic to anything. Lately, though, I’ve thought about how much sturdier genes are than bodies: Bodies break and fall apart but the genes that comprise them remain steadfast, titanium double helixes. Bodies, it could even be said, break most often under the implacable weight of their genes, and will continue to do so forever, or at least until we truly master how to manipulate the genes, an eventuality that of course inspires ambivalence.

I know I am fortunate to have had the privilege and opportunity to make this decision that could help save my life. I am lucky that, when the pathology reports returned from the lab, the news was that my doctors had gotten to me before the cancer had. That said, this shit—testing positive for the gene, facing the decisions it forces, this surgery, recuperation, and whatever comes next—has been difficult. I choose those words—“difficult” and “shit”—carefully: Difficult is all this is. All the time, worse things happen, things that can’t, eventually and with effort, be scraped off the sole of the boot.

Meanwhile, the months have been dwindling during which I can claim (translation: buy) comprehensive health insurance through my graduate program. I am technically still a student, yet actually just unemployed, so the possibility of getting cancer while uninsured has grown increasingly real and distinct. This is why I went ahead and did it now, while I can bask in the dual luxuries of coverage and time. That said, I’m not bouncing back the way I’d planned on or hoped for when I hoisted myself onto and under the lights of the operating table and stared up at the anesthesiologist’s surgical cap covered in smiley faces. Nearly four weeks out, and I still can’t shave my armpits properly. Pulling a shirt over my head requires a mental pep talk and I can barely lift a gallon of milk from the fridge.

As a result, all I’ve craved are suburban comforts. Chief among these: my dog, a television with decent cable, a car and a place to park it, and gas enough to get me with a short drive to someplace pretty in the country where my dog and I can both take a walk off-leash. These are some of the reasons why I am writing this not from Brooklyn, which has been home for the past four and a half years, but from my parents’ house in Virginia. Here, I migrate between my old bedroom, lined from floor to ceiling with books, and my parents’ library downstairs.

by Nell Boeschenstein, TMN |  Read more:
Illustration: Emil Robinson, Pink Book, 2011. Courtesy the artist and Waterhouse & Dodd.

via:

Heidi Palmer
via:

Christine Lafuente
via:

Alice's Wonderland

[ed. I just read this morning that six members of the Walmart family are financially worth as much as the bottom 30 percent of all Americans. For a detailed account of Walmart's beginnings and a better understanding of its policies and impacts read John Lanchester's excellent article: The Price of Pickles.]

On the morning of December 1, 2004, Sotheby’s offered at auction one of the last great private troves of American art. Daniel Fraad, who died in 1987, made his fortune supplying fuel to airlines; in the late forties, he and his wife, Rita, began amassing American paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including works by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Hopper. When the Fraads started buying, their taste was not especially fashionable—French art was more in vogue—but by the time of Rita Fraad’s death, in May, 2004, American art was highly sought after, and the seventy-eight works on the block at Sotheby’s were estimated to be worth between thirty million and forty-five million dollars.

The sale got under way at a quarter past ten, and the first lot, a portrait by the naturalist painter Gari Melchers, sold to a telephone bidder for more than nine hundred thousand dollars, seven times what was expected. The sixth lot, “The Little White House,” a 1919 landscape by Willard Metcalf, sold for just over a million dollars—nearly three times its estimate, and also to a buyer on the phone. As a reporter for Maine Antique Digest noted, “People began to wonder: with almost every collector one could think of present in the room, who the heck could be on the phone?”

One of the phone bidders that day was a collector whose activities had thus far gone largely unnoticed by the art world: Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, who died in 1992. The youngest of Walton’s four children, Alice, who was born in 1949 and grew up in Bentonville, Arkansas, was a member of the richest family in America. The Waltons were worth some ninety billion dollars at the time—as much as the fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined. Alice had started buying art in the seventies, mostly watercolors by American artists, but by the late nineties she had become a more serious collector; she hung the works on the walls of her ranch outside of Fort Worth, where she raised, bred, and rode cutting horses, which are trained to work with cattle. In fact, as the auction got under way in New York, Walton was at the Will Rogers Coliseum, in Fort Worth, preparing to compete in the first qualifying round of the National Cutting Horse Association Futurity.

So it was from the saddle of a three-year-old gelding named IC Lad that Walton successfully bid for several lots from the Fraad collection: “Spring,” a gorgeous watercolor of a rural scene, by Winslow Homer; “A French Music Hall,” by Everett Shinn, the Ashcan School artist; and “The Studio,” by George Bellows, which depicts the artist at work with his children playing at his feet. Collectively, these works cost Walton more than twelve million dollars. She competed with IC Lad before lunchtime—they were in the third round, fourth horse—then returned to making bids during the afternoon session at Sotheby’s. From the collection of Pierre Bergé, the co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent, she bought several notable works, including “The Indian and the Lily”—an exquisite rendering of a muscular Native American, by George de Forest Brush—and “October Interior,” a sunny, celadon-hued painting of a domestic scene, by Fairfield Porter.

By the end of the day, Walton had spent more than twenty million dollars on art. She had also prevailed at the Will Rogers Coliseum, placing sixty-second out of three hundred and seventy-four entrants, which allowed her to advance to the next round. Indeed, she made it all the way to the finals, which took place on December 10th. Walton came in nineteenth out of twenty riders—not a spectacular result but one that came with a prize of nearly thirteen thousand dollars.

by Rebbeca Mead, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Sylvia Plachy

Capitalism vs. the Climate

[ed. Possibly one of the most powerful essays I've read in years (please read it, even if you've tuned out to the entire climate "controversy" a long time ago).]

***

When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end of the political spectrum. As recently as 2008 (the year Newt Gingrich did a climate change TV spot with Nancy Pelosi) the issue still had a veneer of bipartisan support in the United States. Those days are decidedly over. Today, 70–75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science.

Equally significant has been a shift in emotional intensity. Climate change used to be something most everyone said they cared about—just not all that much. When Americans were asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, climate change would reliably come in last.

But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion. Many climate scientists report receiving death threats, as do authors of articles on subjects as seemingly innocuous as energy conservation. (As one letter writer put it to Stan Cox, author of a book critical of air-conditioning, “You can pry my thermostat out of my cold dead hands.”)  (...)

But the effects of the right-wing climate conspiracies reach far beyond the Republican Party. The Democrats have mostly gone mute on the subject, not wanting to alienate independents. And the media and culture industries have followed suit. Five years ago, celebrities were showing up at the Academy Awards in hybrids, Vanity Fair launched an annual green issue and, in 2007, the three major US networks ran 147 stories on climate change. No longer. In 2010 the networks ran just thirty-two climate change stories; limos are back in style at the Academy Awards; and the “annual” Vanity Fair green issue hasn’t been seen since 2008.

This uneasy silence has persisted through the end of the hottest decade in recorded history and yet another summer of freak natural disasters and record-breaking heat worldwide. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is rushing to make multibillion-dollar investments in new infrastructure to extract oil, natural gas and coal from some of the dirtiest and highest-risk sources on the continent (the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline being only the highest-profile example). In the Alberta tar sands, in the Beaufort Sea, in the gas fields of Pennsylvania and the coalfields of Wyoming and Montana, the industry is betting big that the climate movement is as good as dead.

If the carbon these projects are poised to suck out is released into the atmosphere, the chance of triggering catastrophic climate change will increase dramatically (mining the oil in the Alberta tar sands alone, says NASA’s James Hansen, would be “essentially game over” for the climate).

All of this means that the climate movement needs to have one hell of a comeback. For this to happen, the left is going to have to learn from the right. Denialists gained traction by making climate about economics: action will destroy capitalism, they have claimed, killing jobs and sending prices soaring. But at a time when a growing number of people agree with the protesters at Occupy Wall Street, many of whom argue that capitalism-as-usual is itself the cause of lost jobs and debt slavery, there is a unique opportunity to seize the economic terrain from the right. This would require making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power. It would also require a shift away from the notion that climate action is just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention. Just as climate denialism has become a core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

Building such a transformative movement may not be as hard as it first appears. Indeed, if you ask the Heartlanders, climate change makes some kind of left-wing revolution virtually inevitable, which is precisely why they are so determined to deny its reality. Perhaps we should listen to their theories more closely—they might just understand something the left still doesn’t get.

by Naomi Klein, The Nation |  Read more:
[ed. Also, this NY Times inteview with Noami Klein.]

The Late Word

When we speak of literature, we should not imagine that we are speaking of some stable and enduring Platonic entity. The history of literature has always been about its highly mutable institutions, whether bookstores, publishers, schools of criticism, or, for the last half century, the mass media. In other words, literature has always been about the struggle over who would have the social authority to determine what would count as literature. Early on, this authority seems to have been the possession of men who had the privilege of owning printing presses and bookstores. In our own time, the most compelling claim to this authority comes either from the capacious bosom of Oprah Winfrey and her bathetic book club, or from the arid speculations of those Hollow Men on a publisher’s marketing staff. (...)

The thing that Paul Elder’s store was emphatically not was a place where ideas challenging the dominant political authority were first made public. No one had to go into exile for fear of what the authorities would make of the books Elder sold. This was so for a simple reason: once the selection and manufacture of books became specialized, separating writers, from publishers, from retailers, and once the centralized manufacture of books required real capital, the chance that this new industry would ever challenge the reign of free market capitalism and its multiform ideologies was reduced to nothing. Publishers made profitable commodities and they kept the lid on ideas. It’s hard to say which of those two purposes was the more important. As my late friend Ronald Sukenick liked to say, “What can you expect from Simon and Shoestore?”

Another thing I can assure you of is that by the 1970s most independent bookstores, even in an area as literary as Berkeley/San Francisco, had thoroughly conceded the authority to determine what would count as literature to the commercial presses. The independents sold the same things that were sold at Barnes and Noble: NYT bestsellers, genre fiction, current affairs, and whatever NY was passing off as literary (domestic realism, eternally). When I’d go into a store in the ‘80s and ‘90s hoping for a sympathetic ear for Fiction Collective/FC2 titles, with nothing more than the polite query, “Are you stocking our books?” I was invariably greeted with an arch incredulity and a pained look that said, “That’s not still expected of us, is it?” It was as if I were asking, “Would you like to burn some money?” It shocked me how little real understanding or sympathy (forget solidarity) we got from the so-called independents. With the forever-young West Coast exceptions of City Lights, Elliot Bay, in Seattle, and a very few others (the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan, for example), I might as well have been in Barnes and Noble.

The unpleasant fact is that by the ‘90s the stores that could be counted on to consistently buy our titles were, ironically, Borders and Barnes and Noble, even if the books were mostly lost in their cavernous stores, or only sat in a warehouse somewhere until they could be regurgitated back our way in the form of murderous “returns.”

As far as I’m concerned, the book business deserves to die if for no other reason than that its business model is something out of the 1930s: send a bunch of loser Willy Lomans out as “reps,” people who don’t read and don’t understand the books they sell, and have them place the books on consignment, just as if they were old chairs that you were trying to unload at the local consignment store. As far as the bookstores were concerned, they were mostly purchasing decoration for their stores, so that it at least looked like a place to buy books. The few books that actually made money—celebrity memoirs, confessions of failed politicians, moronic self-help tomes, and jokey piss-jobs about not running with scissors—were profitably located on a few tables at the front of the store. Everything else was just ambience.

Bad as this was and remains, the really fatal flaw in this system is that it allows stores to buy new titles not with money but with the return of all the books you sent them months ago that they never sold, and never really had much interest in selling. How could they sell them? No one working in the store read books, and they were no more capable of recommending a challenging literary title than they were of shaping your investment portfolio or diagnosing a kidney complaint. Every few years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, B&N would take some sort of national warehouse purgative and back would come books you thought you’d sold months and years earlier. (I once watched in appalled amazement as two-hundred copies of a backlist title that had only sold maybe five-hundred to begin with was returned by Barnes and Noble five years after it was first released. I had to wonder, did we ever sell any copies of this book?) The best that most of our books could hope for was a short shelf life of four to six months, a single lonely spine out in an acre of shelves and books.

Now even that stupid and insidious racket seems to be failing.

by Curtis White, Laphams's Quarterly |  Read more:

Breaking Big News in Small Towns

The checkout line at the supermarket was particularly long; as long as the day I just had, running a community newspaper in a small town in northwest New Mexico. In the midst of a fatal accident that claimed the lives of two people, there were the issues of selling ads, finishing delivery of that week’s newspapers, and fixing a coin rack on the opposite side of town. Then there’s always interacting with readers.

“Do you remember me? I was in your paper six months ago,” said the woman in line next to me, who seemed more curious than agitated.

“No,” I replied, wondering what story she was involved in.

She appeared to be a housewife who may have been in one of our features about youth sports or the schools. She enlightened me that she had been arrested a few months prior and charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor when police reported that liquor was served at a party for teens. My paper had embedded her booking photo in the body of the story.

“Well, the charges I faced were dropped by the District Attorney,” she informed me.

“That’s great to hear,” I said, still trying to recognize the woman but not really giving it much thought.

“Yeah, but you’re still an asshole!” she exclaimed in the middle of the checkout line for all to hear.

With a pursed-lip grin, raised eyebrows, and shrugged shoulders, I bade the woman good day. So goes one of the joys of small-town newspapering: the inability to escape your readership and story subjects.

Standards to uphold

The National Newspaper Association reports a growing preference among readers for community newspapers — an estimated readership of 86 million from some 8,000 papers — because of the hyperlocal coverage they afford. Many large dailies have followed suit in an attempt to save dwindling circulation figures, but that’s where the similarities between the two types of publications end. Life in a community paper has its rewards but is not without unique challenges; challenges not always shared by our larger counterparts.

by Joseph J. Kolb, Editor and Publisher |  Read more:

Current Events: Re-Hypothecation

[ed. I'm not an economist or banker so can't attest to the relevancy of this article (and a lot of it does seem like speculation). But, the more I learn about our financial system the more astonished I become at the sheer lunacy of it's operating system.]

A legal loophole in international brokerage regulations means that few, if any, clients of MF Global are likely to get their money back. Although details of the drama are still unfolding, it appears that MF Global and some of its Wall Street counterparts have been actively and aggressively circumventing U.S. securities rules at the expense (quite literally) of their clients.

MF Global's bankruptcy revelations concerning missing client money suggest that funds were not inadvertently misplaced or gobbled up in MF’s dying hours, but were instead appropriated as part of a mass Wall St manipulation of brokerage rules that allowed for the wholesale acquisition and sale of client funds through re-hypothecation. A loophole appears to have allowed MF Global, and many others, to use its own clients’ funds to finance an enormous $6.2 billion Eurozone repo bet.

If anyone thought that you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too in the world of finance, MF Global shows how you can have your cake, eat it, eat someone else’s cake and then let your clients pick up the bill. Hard cheese for many as their dough goes missing.

by Christopher Elias, Reuters |  Read more:

Annie Lennox