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Baffler Archives: Odds and Ends

Columns

The Code
I. The Code You need to know how to talk to these small nations. At the recent Bosnian and Croatian premieres of her film In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie gave a master class in how it’s done. As a film star, Jolie could’ve done as she pleased, yet she ...

The Head Office
February 14, 2014
The Head Office knows everything better. The Head Office has the overview, the belief in overview, and a filing system. In the Head Office men are busy with never-ending disputes but they slap you on the back and say: “Dear Friend, you can’t judge from your individual ...

Maze of Doom
February 13, 2014
Creating an L.A.-based television show is a strange enterprise. In certain ways, it’s like every other creative endeavor that begins with an idea in someone’s head. If the head belongs to a writer, there is the blank screen, the medium for realizing the idea in words. For a ...

A Bad Day in Brooklyn
February 12, 2014
If the financial industry operates in our society like a ruthless drug dealer, then the book publishing industry is like a superannuated old biddy, once grand and imperious, now losing her faculties and prone to ill-advised dispensations of large sums of money. She sort of means ...

Smells Like . . .
Yosh Han, a perfumer in San Francisco, got her start a decade ago managing 826 Valencia’s retail arm, the Pirate Store. She began making scents for her then-boss Dave Eggers and his friends and associates at McSweeney’s, including authors JT Leroy (whom she describes as ...

My Own Little Mission
Fatal Attraction An acquaintance of mine was into fly-fishing. I wouldn’t have had a clue what it was all about had he not shown me his resplendent collection of flies, their miniature beauty enchanting. I could easily imagine a dazzled salmon in a shady Scottish stream, an ...

Disposable Hip
January 10, 2014
Once upon a time the iPhone was to digital photography what Steve Wozniak was to the samba: it could perform, but it wasn’t pretty. But then Synthetic, LLC, a tiny design consultancy turned app maker, released Hipstamatic. Recognizing that the iPhone could never go ...

Buncombe
October 30, 2013
America is a country made possible by hucksterism and carnival buncombe. It is the birthplace of both modern PR and advertising, the first place on earth to apply techniques of commercial marketing to politics, and a country where, for at least thirty years, the economy has been ...

The Flight of the Creative Class
Dear Mayor Billings: Provo needs a premier literary magazine. In order to succeed in the twenty-first century and flourish economically, cities today must attract and retain the vital group of individuals that experts call “cultural creatives.” Only by doing so can cities ...

Camera Shy, Blah, Blah, Blah
My basic idea is that our times are weird times. On the one hand, they are superficially permissive. You get all the hardcore you want on the net, you can participate in orgies, blah blah blah. But at the same time it’s not even true consumerism. You have this obsession with ...