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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

The Gaudy and Damned
January 10, 2013
Somehow the pursuit of the American Dream is always most poignant in California. When it crashes here, it seems to do so with epochal fury. “California,” Joan Didion once wrote, “is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; ...

Pelf and Powder Blue
Sitcom Ellen is at an art gallery. For a reason known only to the TV show’s writers she’s brought her philistine pals with her, and they’re now capering doltishly around, making embarrassing remarks without any respect for the art on display. Ellen makes one last, ...

Revolution in Cliché-land
There is unrest in the empire of visual cliché. For years American purveyors of “stock photography” presided over a contented realm of jolly milkmen, smiling moms, and satisfied customers. Today, though, it’s all teenage temptresses and homelessness. What’s happened in ...

The Dustbin of Theory
January 10, 2013
Every age produces its own characteristic interpretation of history, and it seems entirely appropriate that in the America of the late twentieth century, ours should be the brainchild of a rock critic. England had its Macauley, France its Michelet—now America, a nation whose ...

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 ...