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Baffler Archives: Salvos

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Wagnermania
When the revolution came to Dresden in 1849, Richard Wagner greeted it with unhinged ecstasy. “Whatever stands, must fall,” the thirty-five-year-old court conductor wrote that April in the radical periodical Volksblätter. “I will break the power of the mighty, of law, of ...

Puncher’s Chance
When I think of him in my childhood, my father is an evening man: impatient, loud, sporadically gentle. His days were spent outside, in this period uncertainly so, at the disposal of mostly unscrupulous subcontractors, corrupt and flagrantly benevolent to a gang of favorites of ...

Back from the Afterlife
January 04, 2021
I saw Heaven, or some version of it, in the late 1990s. This was on the days I stayed home sick from school, bingeing on Corn Pops and reruns of Unsolved Mysteries. Back then, the show was hosted by Robert Stack, a sort of Clinton-era Rod Serling with a raspy old-man voice and ...

Talk Like a Red
In the spring of 1997, New York City’s Classic Stage Company hosted a revival of the Depression-era play Waiting for Lefty. A New York Times review reflected on the “unfashionable” concerns of the playwright, Clifford Odets, while at the same time describing the world he ...

You Are Witness to a Crime
January 04, 2021
The call came early in the morning, November 9, 1990. I believe it was Kim Christensen who telephoned to tell me Ray Navarro had just died, and invited me to sit with his body before he was taken away and cremated. A number of us from ACT UP who cared for Ray throughout his ...

Solidarity Now
There are times when, as if by some mysterious alchemical process, mere ink and printed typeface can bring an actual human existence to life, and a person’s voice seems to rise, almost audibly, from the page. In this case, the voice belongs to a Black woman named Emma Tiller ...

Speak, Reenactment
January 04, 2021
Black smoke rises into the sky. Clumps of dirt and shattered debris hang in the air. A deep and narrow trench snakes along the scorched earth, with men in gray uniforms flowing through it. Peeking out of the trench, the soldiers aim and fire muskets as reinforcements rush ...

Coup d’Etats and Cartoons
January 04, 2021
Many documentaries that look interesting nonetheless often seem skippable to me when they’re playing in theaters. The ones I want to see I tell myself I’ll catch up with at home. I almost never do. It’s enough for me to know there’s a documentary out there about weird ...

Normal People
In a curious document written on the occasion of Heidegger’s eightieth birthday, Hannah Arendt recalls the hushed tones in which admirers in the twenties had spoken of him as “the secret king of philosophy.” I have the sense that Gary Indiana occupies a similar position in ...

Without a Reader
“The mere fact that I want to write fiction for a livingis evidence that I’m mentally deficient,” Percival Everett told an interviewer in 2002. “But I do want to participate in making truth, and I can’t make it without a reader. . . . The work isn’t complete until ...

The Descendants
January 04, 2021
An old black-and-white portrait of him hung in our living room. His slanted signature marked the books on our shelves. And once a month, cousin T. and I walked my grandmother, Agnes, to the post office to collect his pension. Until the checks stopped coming in the late ...

Seize and Resist
Globalization is under attack from all quarters. It’s hard to pinpoint when the discord began: the concept, and the process it grasps, is nearly coterminous with the contention swirling around it. January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into ...