Quick Links

Gah! Too much to blog, but here are some links to interesting things I've read today.

"America’s Riveting Democracy," Roger Cohen, New York Times. Why are American elections so fascinating to the rest of the world?

One reason, of course, is that the convening of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party or the selection of a European Commission president, big events in ascendant China and coalescing Europe, are hardly ready for prime time. A gaggle of guys in suits make soporific footage.

There’s nothing like bureaucracy to make democracy look thrilling. Beijing and Brussels won’t hold primaries soon. Nor will Moscow, with its Putin-to-Putin hand-over already scripted. “We the people” is a phrase alien to these capitals.

"Plan for independent store nets prize," Joyce Shelby, New York Daily News: Brooklyn is crazy. (Also, crazy delicious.)

"It's not impossible for an independent bookstore to survive, even when large chains are nearby," said Stockton-Bagnulo, 29, of Park Slope.... The [$15,000] grand prize means it will take a lot less time to open the business that Stockton-Bagnulo, who works as an events coordinator at McNally Robinson Booksellers in Manhattan, envisions - "a small bookstore with a cafe, a wine bar, lots of wood and lots of brick."

She's now looking for investors for a store in Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Windsor Terrace or Prospect Heights.

"I want to go to a neighborhood that needs a bookstore and can support one," she said.

"It's the Housing Market Deflation," William H. Gross, The Washington Post:

Our economic problem today resembles the Japanese property market crisis of the 1990s. What’s needed is not just $600 checks that will flow into Wal-Mart (and then to the Chinese) but an expanded Federal Housing Administration program offering below-market, 30-year mortgage refinancings with minimal down payments, which the private market and Bernanke cannot provide. Republican orthodoxy seems so intent on curtailing the past abuses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that some politicians are looking past a government agency solution in their own back yard. Housing and our finance-based market mania got us into this mess. Housing and government-based financial solutions must begin to get us out of it.

"What a frankly political campaign ad might look like," Jeff Greenfield, Slate:

—I'm Janet Napolitano, Democratic governor of Arizona—a state Bush won twice.

—I'm Kathleen Sebelius, Democratic governor of Kansas—a state Bush won twice.

—I'm Claire McKaskill, Democratic Senator from Missouri—a state Bush won twice.

If Al Gore had won any of our states in 2000, there never would have been a Bush presidency. Instead, Democrats lost the last two presidential elections because our candidates couldn't compete in our states, and too many others.

Any Democrat can win in your deep blue state. But to win the White House, we need someone who can win our states, too. We believe that candidate is Barack Obama.

Give A Hoot, Read A Book

The digital world is all about the gift economy these days. From Facebook gifts to donationware to Wii Virtual Console games to political contributions, you can give what you want to give online. I don't know exactly what kind of ethnographic conclusions you can draw from this development, but it's big business: Facebook gifts alone gross $15 million annually from the company, a dollar a time.

Wowio is looking to get in on the action by allowing you to give e-books just like you send greeting cards. I wonder, though; what if there were a free, Project Gutenbergesque alternative? After all, the symbolic value of the gift economy is what gives it its force, not the exchange value. As it is, though, it's not bad. And who wouldn't rather send someone a book than an icon, or a singing bear? Now we just need the Facebook widget.

There's Analog, There's Digital, and Then...

Chris Meade at if:book:

Plug headphones into an iPod or XBox and you will be able to listen to one of a large but finite range of sounds. Plug headphones into a cardboard box and you can (not) hear anything you can possibly imagine. Travelling back through the years to my childhood, these machines allowed me to think across time and space, out of the (cardboard) box. They were also a means of engaging with the TV I loved, in a bygone era when no adult expressed any interest in the way I read my TV21 comic or consumed Thunderbirds and The Man From Uncle.

Unlike those friends who screwed together bits of meccanno to build working bridges, or fiddled with circuit boards until bulbs lit up, my games were all about interfaces.

I never worried for a moment about how these things might actually work. Now a lot of inventiveness is once again going into cutting and sticking, playing with FaceBook applications and YouTube clips like we used Corn Flake packets and sticky-backed plastic. Isn't it great, living here in the future?

Dens in Hyde Park

Will Wilkinson's got verve on the breach between libertarians and neocons:

I am more and more coming to the conclusion that National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager’s fantasies about what it means to be a grown up. The fundamental moral decency of liberal individualism seems, to the unserious mind that thinks itself serious, completely insipid next to very exciting big boy ideas about shared struggle, sacrifice, duty, glory, virtue, and (most of all) power. And reading Aristotle in Greek.

Blam, right? But then he goes ka-blam-o!

I sometimes think that liberal individualism is something like the intellectual and moral equivalent of the best modernist design — spare, elegant, functional — but hard to grasp or truly appreciate without a cultivated sense of style, without a little discerning maturity. National Greatness Conservatism is like a grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire. Only the most vulgar tuck in next to that fire, light a fat cigar, and think they’ve really got it all figured out. But I’m afraid that’s pretty much the kind of thing you get at the Committee on Social Thought. If you declaim the importance of virtue loudly enough, you don’t have to actually think.

I went to the U of C, and I swear, in some rooms and with some crowds, that's totally what it was like.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

The 1990s as Musical Allegory

I like the wit of the first paragraph from this Pitchfork review of the Odelay re-release:

In Spin's 20 Years of Alternative Music, Beck is called "a generation's consolation prize after the death of Kurt Cobain." Chronologically, it's an apt assessment: Cobain killed himself on April 5, 1994; "Loser" peaked at #10 on the Billboard charts three weeks later. But back in the mid-90s, Beck was practically Cobain's polar opposite. Whereas Kurt exuded raw power with every phlegm-spewing roar, Beck rapped in monotone (when he wasn't crooning like a sleep-deprived folkie). Kurt hunched and staggered; Beck pranced, did splits, and mimicked robots. Kurt raged against a doomed world with a vitriolic mix of anger and sincerity; Beck took the piss out of a doomed world with a mix of irony and showmanship. Admittedly, they were both known to wear flannel shirts from time to time.

Real Estate in Cuba

There's a spike in value, from shortages and speculation that private property might return in a post-Castro Cuba. (Emigres in Florida and elsewhere are sending cash to relatives to buy houses in anticipation of return -- or to market.) Also, sales of private property are forbidden, but transfers are permitted, so there's a healthy black market in cash-compensated swaps, including bribes to officials to look the other way.

“You have your system and we have ours,” she said, identifying herself only by her first name, Alejandra. “I prefer our system. We don’t have mortgages and so we’re not facing foreclosure like so many of you are.”

Alejandra knows about the foreclosure crisis in the United States because her son lives in Florida and is struggling to make his house payments. “I worry about him,” she said. “If he loses his job, he’ll lose his home.”

Property is sometimes seized in Cuba as well, but by the government, not the bank. Property is taken from those who hop on boats to Florida, although most switch their houses to relatives’ names well before leaving. Those fleeing the island also frequently downgrade their accommodations before going into exile, trading big places for small ones and using the money exchanged on the side to pay for their voyages — the Cuban equivalent of a home equity loan.

Enough Said

Slate:

Obama gets more white support than expected.

Over the past week, whatever limited support Barack Obama had in the white community started to slip away, according to a new poll from McCaltchy/MSNBC (PDF). The latest survey released yesterday reports that 10 percent of white respondents favored Obama. A week ago, that number was 20 percent. It seems Obama's gets more white support has drifted to John Edwards, who is challenging Hillary Clinton for second in several of the most recent polls. More white voters now support Edwards than Clinton, but he barely registers within the black community.expected.

[more ...]

The edits on the NYT article have also been interesting:

Obama Wins South Carolina Primary
JEFF ZELENY and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Senator Barack Obama won Obama’s commanding victory over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton sets the stage for a lopsided victory, drawing widespread support from a high turnout of black voters.state-by-state fight.

The first version of this story read like a romantic victory announcement for Obama; the second seemed to discount Obama's win by pointing to the predominantly black support; this version highlights the fairly large white support Obama received.

The McLuhan Galaxy

Nice essay on Marshall McLuhan in the LRC (literary review of canada), via Arts & Letters Daily.

One spark, often overlooked, but crucial, I found buried in The Gutenburg Galaxy, a book often passed over by those who prefer his later, more popular works. Philosophers have always asked what drives history. Is it revolutionary ideas, manifest destiny, great individuals, something called “the life force”? McLuhan denied none of these causes but, following one of his most influential mentors at U of T, Harold Innis, he asked: “How about tools?” We may think the end of the slave trade on the Atlantic was powered by humanitarians and abolitionists in England and America, and McLuhan would not disagree. But the main impetus, he would say, was the steam engine, a tool that reduced the need for muscle. This example is not one I have taken from McLuhan’s writings. As far as I know I arrived at it all by myself. But I would never have thought of it if I had not read McLuhan. That’s how his probes work.

The strangely under-read Gutenburg Galaxy has more to offer. King Lear, says McLuhan, has gone along with what Goneril and Regan say, and denied what he feels about Cordelia. He has broken what Shakespeare calls “the precious square of sense.” He has allowed the Renaissance emphasis on what the eye sees (appearance) to smother the earlier sense of felt reality (the fluent interplay of all the senses). Lear will suffer for it. It is not that the eye is inferior to the ear or vice versa. It is that the balanced “ratio of the senses” has become skewed by the tyranny of the visual ordering of experience brought on by print culture.

Like all original thinkers from Blake to Einstein, McLuhan was much misunderstood. He never promoted TV over books as popular accounts gave out. He never expressed a preference for tribal culture over individualism. He never said the patterns of perception imposed by the ear are superior to those of the eye. One small aphorism sticks with me: “When the globe becomes a single electronic web with all its languages and culture recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant, however precious.” However precious! Those are the operative words, about as far as McLuhan went in taking sides. But they also bring his innermost sympathies to the fore.

History as Nightmare, Pt. 2

From Der Spiegel: the last German World War I veteran is believed to have died.

The last surviving German army veteran of World War I is reported to have died in Hanover, aged 107. No official confirmation was available nor is it ever likely to be. Germany keeps no official records on its veterans from the two world wars. Dr. Erich Kästner, who was born on March 10, 1900, died on January 1, 2008, according to an announcement posted by his family in the Hannoversche Allgemeine newspaper...

The death on Sunday of one France's last two surviving World War I veterans, Louis de Cazenave, made national and international news. De Cazenave, who took part in the Battle of the Somme, died aged 110 at his home in Brioude in central France, where he was buried on Tuesday.

"His death is an occasion for all of us to think of the 1.4 million French who sacrificed their lives during this conflict, for the 4.5 million wounded, for the 8.5 million mobilized," President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement.

Chiari said Germany's memory of World War I was tainted by the crimes of World War II. "Any form of commemoration of military events is seen as problematic here," he said. "Our veterans only take part in public ceremonies when they are invited abroad to join commemorative events with veterans from other countries. World War I is seen as part of a historical line that led to World War II. You can't equate the two but there is much debate about it."

See History as Nightmare, Pt. 1: the death of the last veteran of the Irish war of Independence.

Lose All Sense of Time

File under "Wow. Just. Wow." There's a bar/restaurant in London's Covent Garden section called "Detroit Bar."

a 'style bar' in london before the word 'style' had even been invented, detroit has always mixed the best cocktails, in the most relaxing yet vibrant atmosphere. without pretention we invite you to detroit bar and restaurant to enjoy our venue. hidden away in the most attractive part of covent garden (the seven dials) detroit incorporates a unique conceptual design with intimate, cosy alcoves where it is possible to lose all sense of time. no attitude. no pretention. just detroit.

("before the word 'style' had even been invented"?)

Also, Detroit is often without pretension -- excuse me, pretention -- but rarely without attitude.

Note: for the original "Detroit Bar," see here. Or here. Or here.