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Baffler Archives: Salvos

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Swing Shift
January 10, 2013
Nobody ever could play clarinet like Artie Shaw. He hit unbelievably high registers and swung like mad once he got there. Shaw led crack bands from the thirties through the fifties that featured such luminaries as Billie Holiday and trumpeter Roy Eldridge. When he wasn’t ...

Pulp Affliction
January 10, 2013
Why are the movies so awful? Are there really people out there who haven’t seen enough gangster movies with exploding automobiles that Scorsese felt he had to rush off and make one more? We probably have Francis Coppola and Pauline Kael to thank. As far as I can tell, it was ...

A Dream of Perfect Reception
January 10, 2013
Quentin Tarantino is today’s feel-good movie director, the Frank Capra of the nineties. Moviegoers are as elated leaving showings of Pulp Fiction as moviegoers must have been leaving Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or It’s a Wonderful Life. But whereas Capra’s movies were ...

Shiny, Digital, Plastic, and Aluminum
January 10, 2013
What’s a music industry to do when its new crop of rebels just aren’t convincing enough to obsolete the old? Such was the situation in the early eighties, when sales of vinyl, cassettes, turntables and cassette players were “flat.” Granted, music sales weren’t ...

The Time Management Gospel
In the old days, we made random lists on sticky notes, forgot meetings, and preserved our sloth through completely unplanned time. But there was a brushfire of technological change and team-based productivity blowing through the land. The officers of our company were quickly ...

Aux Barricades, Fonctionnaires!
When more than two million people mount street protests against their government in a foreign country on any given day, the constraints of the journalist’s profession can make some ugly demands. During the mass strikes in France last November and December, most American ...

Miracle on Ice
January 10, 2013
Spiritual enrichment of the non-monastic sort comes in all variety of human packages these days, from the mud-streaked weekend shamans who pass “talking sticks” to the readers who faithfully run up the best-selling statistics for The Celestine Prophecy. I quickly find ...

The Cultural Miracle
January 10, 2013
Have you heard? The “affluent society” is over! Virtually every respectable organ of public opinion has now officially acknowledged its demise: the warm old world of general prosperity is gone forever; poverty and economic insecurity have made a triumphant comeback; the ...

A Machine for Forgetting
January 10, 2013
One wall of the office lobby of the J. C. Nichols Company, the Kansas City real estate firm, is decorated with an enormous cartoon map of the famous Country Club District, the company’s greatest accomplishment and the nation’s first fully restricted, fully-planned ...

Local Color™
January 10, 2013
In the early 1980s, wracked by the ennui of yet another high-priced Manhattan veal-and-radicchio dinner, Esquire columnist John Berendt turned his eye to the South and began spending his disposable income on supersaver fares to Savannah, Georgia, instead. Captivated by the ...

Carter’s March
January 10, 2013
Atlanta is the quintessentially amnesiac American city. Confronted by unpleasant truths, its post-war (and there has only been one War down there) founding heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, would say, “I can’t think about now, I’ll think about it tomorrow”—which pretty ...

Ghosts
January 09, 2013
I’m living in Athens, Georgia, thinking about ghosts and the continuity of time. It’s hard to be in this town without feeling a kind of historical gravity pulling at your shoes. Around every corner, vestiges of the past are waiting: a civil war that erupted more than a ...