Tear Down This Myth

"To many American conservatives, the answer to those questions is simple: Reagan stared down the Soviet Union. And the Berlin Wall speech stands as the dramatic symbol of Reagan's challenge and triumph.
"But those who say this ignore the actual history and context of the speech."

James Mann in the Los Angeles Times revisits the subject of Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War.

I'm Livin' in the Aughties

"Counting the 100 trends, fashions, memes, personalities and ideas that shaped the first decade of the 21st Century."

From a new blog: You Aught to Remember.

Realism or Fantasy?

"The literary roots for this came from two streams in the 1960s. The highbrow, mainstream literary and leftist types endorsed such nonfiction, black prison literature as The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Eldridge Cleaver’s essay collection Soul on Ice; Poems from Prison, compiled by inmate and poet Etheridge Knight, which includes Knight’s “Ideas of Ancestry,” one of the most famous and highly regarded African-American poems of the 1960s; and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. All of these books have become part of black literary canon and are frequently taught in various college literature, creative writing, and sociology classes. On the pulp, populist fiction side in the late 1960s and early 1970s were the novels of former pimp Iceberg Slim and imprisoned drug addict Donald Goines—including Trick Baby, Dopefiend, Street Players, and Black Gangster. These novels are the direct antecedents of the books that Chiles found so dismaying in 2006. They occupied a small but compelling portion of the black literature output in the 1970s. Many saw them in a far more political light at that time; now these books dominate African-American literature or seem to. Then, as now, there is a strong belief among many blacks—poor, working-class, and bourgeois intellectuals—and many whites, as well, that violent, urban life represents 'authentic' black experience and a true politically dynamic 'resistance' culture."

Gerald Early on America.gov considers the rise of black pulp fiction.

"Barack Obama Names Alan Moore Official White House Biographer"

"'I look forward to seeing the kinds of subplots he will surely weave throughout the main narrative of my presidency, and how he'll tie them all back together at the end in a way that just elevates the thing to a whole other level. God, that guy is the master.'"

From The Onion.

"The Real Brains and Boss of the Chinese Government"

"Her eight-month visit to the U.S. in 1943 to raise aid for her homeland would be the envy of any modern-day PR person. She wrote countless articles, addressed both houses of Congress, and wowed crowds at Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall. Her greatest achievement was as a propagandist, persuading Congress and the American public that her husband could deliver a democratic China."

Melanie Kirkpatrick in The Wall Street Journal reviews Hannah Pakula's The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China.

Death of the Dream

"As a result, for the last two decades we have been starving higher education. California's public universities and community colleges have half as much to spend today as they did in 1990 in real dollars. In the 1980s, 17% of the state budget went to higher education and 3% went to prisons. Today, only 9% goes to universities and 10% goes to prisons.
"The promise of low-cost education that brought so many here, and kept so many here, has been abandoned."

Jeff Bleich in the Los Angeles Times laments the state of California's public education system.

The Raw and the Cooked

"A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of 'structuralism,' a school of thought in which universal 'structures' were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many."

Edward Rothstein writes an obituary for Claude Lévi-Strauss in The New York Times.

Si, Se Puede

"And yet Chávez did not act alone. The movement he built was populated by an eclectic agglomeration of people who left the fields, classrooms, courts and churches to become organizers and activists in one of the most unique collaborations in California history."

Richard Steven Street reviews Miriam Pawel's The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement in the Los Angeles Times.

Stubborn Things

"In fact, Hirsch is and always has been a liberal Democrat. Far from being elitist, he insists, cultural literacy is the path to educational equality and full citizenship for the nation’s minority groups. 'Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,' Hirsch writes, and 'the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.'"

Sol Stern praises E. D. Hirsch in City Journal.

Kawaii Couture

"A birthday party today takes place at the site of a multidimensional exhibit titled 'Three Apples'--in the lore, Hello Kitty weighs as much as three apples--which opened Oct. 23 and runs through Nov.15. The exhibit at Culver City's Royal/T cafe and art space, features more than 80 pop artists and designers including Amanda Visell, Frank Kozik, Natalia Fabia and Simone Legno showcasing their interpretations of the feline."

Sophia Kercher in the Los Angeles Times celebrates the thirty-fifth birthday of Hello Kitty.

"Mayan Calendar Warns Of Cataclysmic Roland Emmerich Film On Nov. 13"

"'At this point, all we can do is hope and pray that the high priests were wrong and the running time is less than 143 minutes.'"

From The Onion.

October 2009 Acquisitions

Books:
Valerie Barrett, Cakes Galore, 2008.
Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionlly Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day, 2009.
Edward Craig, Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, 2002.
John Harris and Calef Brown, Pop-Up Aesop, 2005.
Bruce Hershenson, Drive-In Movie Posters, 2002.
Victor Hoagland, A Catholic Child's Book of Prayers, 2008.
Sam Hall Kaplan, LA Lost & Found: An Architectural History of Los Angeles, 1987.
Jennifer D. Keene, Saul Cornell, and Edward T. O'Donnell, Visions of America: A History of the United States, 2010.
Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, Batman: Dark Victory, 2001.
Frank Miller, Sin City, Volume 2: A Dame to Kill For, 2005.
Frank Miller, Sin City, Volume 3: The Big Fat Kill, 2005.
Colleen and Michael Glenn Monroe, A Is for Ark: Noah's Journey, 2004.
Leo Politi, Juanita, 2009.
David Ulin (ed.), Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, 2002.

DVDs:
Downfall, 2005.