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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

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 ...

Remainder Table: Pamela Moore Plus Forty
One afternoon toward the end of 1982 I happened across a trade paperback called The Catalog of Cool, compiled by a veteran music-industry publicist named Gene Sculatti. The book consisted of articles and blurbs by Sculatti and his cronies, among whom were some names—Ronn ...

Cordon Sanitaire
January 13, 2013
Amps for Christ: The Secret of the Almost Straight Line 7″ EP (Westside Audio Laboratories) Barnes was the man behind Man is the Bastard’s gruesome and gigantic howl (they almost made me give up meat; no, I’m MORE cynical than you are). Here the pain comes back as love. ...

See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Accumulate Me
January 13, 2013
Despite five years of solid economic growth, ten years of impressive corporate profits, and fifteen years of a stock market so bullish that finance pundits are talking of a “new paradigm,” some Americans still worry about money. No, not those petty worries about not ...

You’re Either On the Bus…
Every morning at 5:30 a.m. the buses roll into the ghetto. They stop to pick up their cargo of dark-skinned workers, then turn around and drive out to the region just beyond the city limits—the place where anyone can find work. Once in the industrial districts of the ...

Boom Crash Opera
January 13, 2013
“From every corner of the earth where the unfettered industrial system was grinding out the raw materials for wealth, crushing men’s bones, parching their blood, following them in a perpetual orgy of chicane and debauchery, came the onrushing flood of pennies pilfered from ...

I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill
There was a time when major corporations didn’t encourage us to “break the rules,” business consultants didn’t promote revolutions, and prominent neo-con historians didn’t celebrate radical labor leaders. But the times, they are a-changin’. To wit: Joe Hill was an ...

The Gaudy and Damned
If every society makes myths to explain the great and unknowable forces of the world, the age of advanced consumer capitalism has wrought its own peculiar mythology: the brand. What originated as a means of selling standardized products across a mass market—essentially ...

A Question of Size
January 13, 2013
Everybody loves small business. Politicians use plucky little enterprises as the cover for schemes to cut taxes and ease regulations for their Fortune 500 constituencies. Pundits assure us that small business is a fount of jobs and innovation, a hotbed of entrepreneurship led ...

Babbitt Rex
January 13, 2013
The Cartesians of this world must find it difficult to listen to WYPA, the Chicago AM radio station that fills its broadcast schedule with a torrent of three- and four-minute talks on aspects of success, leadership, and entrepreneurial virtue. Not only does the object of desire ...

Remainder Table: The Invisible Novelist
Sitting to the right of my keyboard as I write are a book and a magazine. The book, purchased for ten cents at the (Salinas, California) John Steinbeck (public) Library’s discard shelf, is a dog-eared copy of the very first of the fifty or so books about Thomas Pynchon, ...