Iconoclastic

POLITICS
Betsy DeVos doesn’t really believe in democracy, at Scalawag Mag by yours truly
Trump doesn’t understand why we had the Civil War
A statement from the Berkeley Antifascists

FILM
Dancing in the Dark, a documentary of the Black and Latino gay club scene in New York. Almost like Paris is Burning for a new generation.
BritishPathe.tv
Vintage Matchbox Cars on the assembly line
Indiscretion of an American Wife, starring Montgomery Clift and Jennifer Jones

ESSAY
Something uneasy in the Los Angeles Air
Crossed wires and community in 19th century dreams
Ghost in the cloud

Image credit

SIGH AND BLUNDER

FILM
We Live in Public (full documentary): the early tech boom, hubris and art
Maggie Cheung retrospective
Despotism (1946)

READING & WRITING
Transit Books talks with Publisher’s Weekly
Hating the press is not American
Interview with James Ellroy in the Paris Review
Where are the female lit mag editors? Here.

HISTORY
About Belle Starr, American outlaw
President Martin Van Buren was born 12/5/1782
After his murder, the head of Metacomet, also called King Philip, was displayed on a pike at the early American colony of Fort Plymouth for 25 years

CURRENT DISASTERS
How technology killed manufacturing jobs in America
Incredible first person video, driving through fire in Gatlinburg, TN
On the Oakland warehouse fire
On the Cambridge fire
More about the Gunman at the DC pizzeria

Image credit
Pro-tip: email subscribers click title for still of Josh Harris from We Live in Public

Towards a Better World

GET WOKE
An incredible article about Harry Belafonte and the Civil Rights Movement
The distress of the privileged and how to talk about it
Misrepresenting the white working class: what the narrating class gets wrong
In the Harvard Business Review: there is no invisible hand
Women were included in the Civil Rights Act as a joke
Explaining white privilege to a broke white person
How to explain what is wrong with #AllLivesMatter as a response to #BlackLivesMatter
Map of 73 years of lynchings
Gender bias in Academe
The case of the missing perpetrator: disappearing men
Free books on race, gender, sexuality and class

FILM
Fact checking Alec Baldwin’s monologue in Glengarry Glen Ross
The Ace of Hearts (1927) silent movie online
Confidence at The Barbershop about Women
Jimmy Durante in Palooka (1934)

MUSIC
The oldest melody in existence
Tom Waits Burma Shave (full video)
Cher and David Bowie Young Americans medley
Shovels and Rope, Gasoline
Dolly Parton and Pentatonix sing Jolene acappella

Image credit
Pro-tip: email subscribers click title for pic of young Dolly Parton holding a kitten

The Truth is Out There

Monday mornings are like the moment the hot water runs out in a long shower: real, expected, and nonetheless unwelcome. Because it takes a monumental effort for me to enter the week dressed in a simulacrum of normal personhood, I like to spend the first part of the day distracting myself with ideas that make me feel new and engaged and alive. Now that I am doing these posts / emails, it is my pleasure to share some of today’s with you.  —LJ

ASS OUT OF ME AND U
The class politics of decluttering
Problems we don’t really want to solve

PLACES
North Korea looks like a Wes Anderson movie, or Wes Anderson movies look like North Korea
A curated journey through Atlanta’s history
Explore the Cincinnati panorama of 1848
Turkmenistan: where the cities are beautiful and empty and the neighborhoods are crowded and cluttered

LITERATURE MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR ME TO WAKE UP IN THE MORNING
Essays by poet Kenneth Rexroth
The teeny-tiny writing of Charlotte Brontë

HI-LOW
Make fancy cocktails using Hi-C EctoCooler
When Henry Cotton of Moze (in Essex) was reported in 1592 for not attending church, he came before the local churchwardens, and ‘very unreverently and contemptuously farted unto them and said, “Present that to the court”’.
Taylor Swift swallows the world (and it ain’t a good thing)

GNOTHI SEAUTON
Grief Magic
Hallucinatory voices shaped by local culture
Paris Review interview with Adam Phillips:

“There are a number of people whom you might think of as casualties of the myth of the artist. They really should have done something else. Of course some people get lucky and find that art works for them, but for so many people it doesn’t. I think that needs to be included in the picture. Often one hears or reads accounts in which people will say, Well, he may have treated his children, wives, friends terribly, but look at the novels, the poems, the paintings. I think it’s a terrible equation. Obviously one can’t choose to be, as it were, a good parent or a good artist, but if the art legitimates cruelty, I think the art is not worth having. People should be doing everything they can to be as kind as possible and to enjoy each other’s company. Any art, any anything, that helps us do that is worth having. But if it doesn’t, it isn’t.” 

Image credit: Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red, 1958.