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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Remainder Table: Poe in Vietnam
I. Back when I lived in California, I used to travel to Orange County to shop for secondhand books. I followed the same routine each time I went. First, I would drive to the Book Baron at Ball and Magnolia Boulevard in Anaheim, home to about a million volumes. Then I would ...

Cordon Sanitaire
Remember roots-rock? The Long Ryders, Green On Red, and of course Jason and the Nashville Scorchers? Neither does anybody else. But if Tortoise can make Spirogyra hip to a new generation of people with disposable income, you know it’s only a matter of time before every ...

Color Me Middle
January 14, 2013
If there’s one thing that’s certain about us Americans, runs the national myth, it’s that we’re a democratic bunch. We’re almost universally middle class. Oh, sure, there are some smelly vagabonds wandering the streets of our big cities, a few illiterate hillbillies ...

Doing Good, Looking Marvelous
January 14, 2013
In case you haven’t heard, Big Govemment has been safely consigned to the dustbin of history and “the Era of Big Citizenship,” as President Clinton announced just on the heels of gutting our social safety net, has dawned. Yes, unlike other nations peopled with ...

Chapters of Eleven
An hour before closing time, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange hardly seems like a dignified institution at the epicenter of American finance: It’s more like a sports bar. Throngs of grownup frat-boy traders stare at numbers flashing on a gigantic screen. Moments of calm ...

Blood and Pancakes
January 14, 2013
We are speaking of the over-the-counter Illuminati, my friends; the purveyors of smokers and spaghetti dinners and all things in between. Recite their names three times quickly—Rotary! Kiwanis! Lions Club!—and you risk invoking a suburban bugaboo. Eek! Look there! Do you ...

The Gaudy and Damned
Just off Highway 126 in Ventura County, California lies the town of Piru. Tucked among the orange groves and foothills of the Santa Clara valley, it is a strikingly well-preserved small town, the kind of place urban theorists dream about and on which towns like Disney’s ...

Triangulation Nation
January 14, 2013
Back to Normalcy II: The Theory Upper-middle-class life still has its comforts, to be sure. If anything, the suburban piles are getting bigger, the SUVs more imperious, the hotel employees more servile, and the frequent-flier perks more lavish. But turn on the TV and revolution ...

Internment Camp
January 13, 2013
For a very brief period not too long ago I was the “chief of research” at a glossy yet rugged men’s lifestyle magazine. An industry darling, this “practical guide to the sensory thrills and psychological rewards of an active physical life” (as its 1995 National ...

Cram Your Spam
January 13, 2013
For more than three years in the mid-1980s, grassroots union activists and their supporters waged a remarkable campaign against the George A. Hormel Company of Austin, Minnesota. The high point of the struggle was a 10-month strike by Local P-9 of the United Food and ...

Zoned Bohemian
January 13, 2013
Behind these pretty, pricey streets of West Town lingers a neighborhood of dim ghosts: The grimy filigree of the Milwaukee Avenue firetraps, the cornices dated to the nineteenth century, the snaking alleys of oxblood cobbles, and the smoothworn, narrow railway tracks that ...