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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Charles the Excellent
January 18, 2013
It was late into the second dinner service; smartly dressed plates of venison and salmon and heirloom cabbage still marched out the kitchen’s swinging doors with brio. But the world-famous chef had pulled me away. He led me to a dimly lit nook and, summoning up two glasses ...

Build It and They Will Pay
In 1997, the Basque city of Bilbao ceased simply to be a depressed industrial town with a terrorism problem and became synonymous with a miraculous new building, architect Frank Gehry’s Spanish outpost of the Guggenheim Museum. This glittering edifice, clad in titanium ...

Universal 571
January 18, 2013
There are not many opportunities for product placement in World War II movies, Coke bottles excepted. Universal Pictures found a way around this obstacle by casting Jon Bon Jovi in its big-budget summer 2000 submarine adventure U-571 at the same time that Island Records (a ...

What About Me?
Anyone who’s spent time at a university knows what a deeply schizophrenic institution it is. Stridently oppositional and dedicated to cutting-edge research, American universities are also slow moving, riddled with annoying rules, conservatories of the past. Berkeley may have ...

They Live!
January 18, 2013
I was just sitting down to dinner when I heard a soft tapping at my apartment door. Opening it warily I found myself gaping up at a sultry giantess in a strapless cocktail dress. Eight feet tall at least, she glowered down at me with a look of woozy, carnal hunger. ...

In the Good Old Wallow Time
As more than 500 U.S. troops disembarked in the Philippines last February, double that number were suiting up on the other side of the world for one of Washington’s more secretive and bizarre tribal rituals. The exclusive Military Order of the Carabao, founded in 1900 by ...

The Rod of Correction: Cogito Oprah Sum
January 18, 2013
The critical impulse has long been the most disreputable desire in the great sensorium of our culture, since sating it usually means short-circuiting a host of other, more lucrative reflexes in the consumer body politic. From the solons of civic journalism to the touts of the ...

The Toys Are Us
January 17, 2013
It’s not often in art that the medium is actually the message, or that form really determines content. But computer animation is shaping up as an exception. Early, hand-drawn cartoons bristled with furry creatures, bucolic scenery, fauns: the familiar Disney pastoral. ...

The Mirror Myth
There are a lot of complaints these days about the declining quality of movie fare, and the worsening taste of the public is typically asked to shoulder a good part of the blame. Other causes are cited as well. When the old studio system collapsed, the high-profile chiefs who ...

The Poetry of Commerce
January 17, 2013
“Who needs God when you’ve got Capital?” mused art critic Peter Schjeldahl in a 1997 salute to Las Vegas. The saying might well have stood as art criticism’s motto of the Nineties. After all, it’s clearly the guiding sentiment of Schjeldahl’s mentor, Dave Hickey, ...

Invisible Hand Job
January 17, 2013
Years from now, the most memorable aspect of our late technology bubble will likely be the palaver. Whether all the hot air pumped up the bubble or the bubble inspired the grandiose talk, our age will forever be remembered for the honking load of bushwa Americans swallowed, at ...

Fear and Lofting in a Silicon Boomtown
I lost a pretty typical argument a while ago with a security manager at San Francisco Centre Mall. The guards had just thrown out a scraggly couple rather than let them use the bathroom. The manager stuck to his three word explanation: “They’re not shopping.” Not much I ...