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editor
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 Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 2:23 pm Post subject: |
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Come On In!
New Poems
Hardcover
Still another posthumous collection
by Charles Bukowski
| Quote: | another high-roller
I went to Vegas last weekend
I had on that blue dress
low-cut and short
the one you like
and I wore my brown boots
and this guy at the crap table
he kept winning
and he kept feeding me chips
he said I brought him luck.
I won a few hundred but
I swear to Christ he must have
won 40 thousand dollars that
night.
he was a great guy.
he told me,
"don't go away, we're going to win
the world!"
it was some night, believe me.
I'll never forget it.
you don't like Vegas, do
you? she asked.
I once got married there,
I said.
and what did you over the
weekend? she asked.
I waxed my car,
I told her.
(-- p. 106) |
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2007 1:52 pm Post subject: |
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Empire of Blue Water
Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe
That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign
Hardcover
By Stephan Talty
| Quote: | ... Boston still considered itself a city on a hill. Port Royal had no such illusions about itself. The town that Cromwell and Gage had dreamed of had never materialized. Instead it had become the first Wild West town, fabulously on the make.
For the brahmins there were balls for the king's birthday, masquerades, "strolling puppet players" on a swing through the island; there was family life as well, because many of the richest men brought out their families, dressed as if they were strolling along the Thames on Sundays. Below them swirled the life of the priates and their ilk; few of them had families or long -term plans. There weren't many activities that did not revolve around drinking. At the Bear Garden, bearbaiting and bullfighting were popular; cockfights drew a crowd, as did gambling and shooting games (though the games got more dangerous as the night progressed). Drinking was the national pastime. "The Spaniards wondered much at the sickness of our people," wrote Modyford, "until they knew the strength of their drinks, but then wondered more that they were not all dead." The local rum was fermented from crushed sugarcane and was famously potent; its nickname, "Kill Devil," accurately described a liquor that could knock riders from their horses. ... (From Rich and Wicked, pgs. 131-132) |
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| Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 4:21 pm Post subject: |
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
Paperback
By Willa Cather
| Quote: | That congested heaping up of the Rocky Mountain chain about Pike's Peak was a blank space on the continent at this time. Even the fur trappers, coming down from Wyoming to Taos with their pelts, avoided that humped granite backbone. Only a few years before, Fremont had tried to penetrate the Colorado Rockies, and his party had come half-starved into Taos at last, having eaten most of their mules. But within twelve months everything had changed. Wandering prospectors had found large deposits of gold along Cherry Creek, and the mountains that were solitary a year ago were now full of people. Wagon trains were streaming westward across the prairies from the Missouri River.
The Bishop of Leavenworth wrote Father Latour that he himself had just returned from a visit to Colorado. He had found the slopes under Pike's Peak dotted with camps, the gorges black with placer miners: thousands of people were living in tents and shacks, Denver City was full of saloons and gambling-rooms; and among all the wanderers and wastrels were many honest men, hundreds of good Catholics, and not one priest. The young men were adrift in a lawless society without spiritual guidance. The old men died from exposure and mountain pneumonia, with no one to give them the last rites of the Church.
This new and populous community must, for the present, the Kansas bishop wrote, be accounted under Father Latour's jurisdiction. His great diocese, already enlarged by thousands of square miles to the south and west, must now, on the north, take in the still undefined but suddenly important region of the Colorado Rockies. The Bishop of Leavenworth begged him to send a priest there as soon as possible, - an able one, by all means, not only devoted, but resourceful and intelligent, one who would be at his ease with all sorts of men. He must take his bedding and camp outfit, medicines and provisions, and clothing for the severe winter. At Camp Denver there was nothing to be bought but tobacco and whisky. There were no women there, and no cook stoves. The miners lived on half-baked dough and alcohol. They did not even keep the mountain water pure, and so died of fever. All the living conditions were abominable. (From Gold Under Pike's Peak, pgs. 244-245) |
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| Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2008 1:01 pm Post subject: |
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Kootenai Brown
*Canada's Unknown Frontiersman
Paperback
By William Rodney
| Quote: | Just how Brown lost his money he never said. The cost of mining operations and commodities were certainly factors. During the summer of 1862, for example, The British Colonist, July 22, 1862, reported that shovels and axes sold for $10; coffee fetched $1.50 per pound; flour retailed at $70 per hundredweight; and whisky, the standard antidote for sickness, injury and despair, brought $12 to $18 per gallon, quality and strength unknown. With the advent of winter transportation costs rose, commodities grew scarcer and prices in the winter settlement around Williams Lake rose proportionately. Apart from the high prices for commodities or necessities, there were other ways of losing money. The temptations of gambling and strong drink were ever present, but at least one saloon in Williams Lake provided an additional innocuous attraction in the form of billiards at a dollar game. The British Colonist, September 10, 1862, offers another possibility, and simultaneously reveals the wide social variations characteristic of a wide open frontier community:
| Quote: | | The prostitutes on the creek - nine in number - put on great airs. They dress in male attire and swagger through the saloons and mining camps with cigars or huge quids of tobacco in their mouths, cursing and swearing and looking like anything but the angels in petticoats heaven intended they should be. Each has a revolver or bowie knife attached to her waist, and it is quite a common occurrence to see one or more women dressed in male attire playing poker in the saloons, or drinking whisky at the bars. They are degrading set, and all good men in the vicinity wish them hundreds of miles away. (-- p. 47) |
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| Quote: | Fort Benton wasn't the West's healthiest town as the sign below on today's main street indicates. During the frontier era the local paper carried a news item that a horse thief had been caught and promptly hanged from a telegraph pole. The headline said simply, TELEGRAPHED HIM HOME.
| Quote: | THE BLOODIEST BLOCK IN THE WEST
"IT'S A TOUGH TOWN, WAL IN THE CENTER OF THE STREET AND KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT." GUNSLINGERS WALKED THIS STREET; FEW MADE A REPUTATION, MORE EARNED ETERNITY HERE THAN IN OTHER FABLED WESTERN TOWNS.
INDIANS WERE FAIR GAME. THEIR CORPSES DUMPED IN THE RIVER STARTED WAR AND MASSACRE. MOSE SOLOMON SALOON OWNER ELIMINATED 2 CUSTOMERS ON THE CORNER. LOU MARSHALL ADDED HINCHLEY AND SEVERAL OTHERS GUNNED DOWN ON THIS STREET "WON'T BE MISSED."
POKER WAS PLAYED WITH 6-GUNS ATOP THE TABLES AND FEMALES FROM THE BROTHELS WERE AS TOUGH AS THE MEN. MADAME MUSTACHE BRANDISHED COLTS TO HALT THE LANDING OF A STEAMBOAT CARRYING SMALLPOX. "HOUSES" STAYED OPEN ALL NIGHT. THIS BLOCK WAS LINED WITH SALOONS, CATHOUSES AND GAMBLING DENS - SO LAWLESS IT HAD TO BE CIRCLED BY A CAVALRY TROOP SO A U.S. MARSHAL COULD SERVE WARRANTS ON FIVE OF ITS RESIDENTS. (Cutline and photo of authentic sign at p. 121) |
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Oh, yes:
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| Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 9:30 am Post subject: |
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The Grapes of Wrath
Paperback
By John Steinbeck
View classic movie stills arranged to a recording of Woody Guthrie's Ballad of Tom Joad at YouTube.com
| Quote: | Outside, the seated man stood up and looked over the cowl of the truck and watched the restaurant for a moment. Then he settled back on the running board, pulled a sack of tobacco and a book of papers from his side pocket. He rolled his cigarette slowly and perfectly, studied it, smoothed it. At last he lighted it and pushed the burning match into the shade of the truck as noon approached.
In the restaurant the truck driver paid his bill and put his two nickels' change in a slot machine. The whirling cylinders gave him no score. "They fix 'em so you can't win nothing," he said to the waitress.
And she replied, "Guy took the jackpot not two hours ago. Three-eighty he got. How soon you gonna be back by?"
He held the screen door a little open. "Week-ten days," he said. "Got to make a run to Tulsa, an' I never get back soon as I think."
She said crossly, "Don't let the flies in. Either go out or come in."
"So long," he said, and pushed his way out. The screen door banged behind him. He stood in the sun, peeling the wrapper from piece of gum. He was a heavy man, broad in the shoulders, thick in the stomach. His face was red and his blue eyes long and slitted from having squinted always at sharp light. He wore army trousers and high laced boots. Holding the stick of gum in front of his lips he called through the screen, "Well, don't do nothing you don't want me to hear about." The waitress was turned toward a mirror on the back wall. She grunted a reply. The truck driver gnawed down the stick gum slowly, opening his jaws and lips wide with each bite. He shaped the gum in his mouth, rolled it under his tongue while he walked to the big red truck.
The hitch-hiker stood up and looked across through the windows. "Could ya give me a lift, mister?"
The driver looked quickly back at the restaurant for a second. "Didn' you see the No Riders sticker on the win'shield?"
"Sure - I seen it. But sometimes a guy'll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker."
The driver, getting slowly into the truck, considered the parts of this answer. If he refused now, not only was he not a good guy, but he was forced to carry a sticker, was not allowed to have company. If he took in the hitch-hiker he was automatically a good guy and also he was not one whom any rich bastard could kick around. He knew he was being trapped, but he couldn't see a way. And he wanted to be a good guy. He glanced again at the restaurant. "Scrunch down on the running board till we get around the bend," he said. (From Chapter 2, pgs. 6-7) |
The Grapes of Wrath
DVD
Daryl Zanuck's 1940 classic, yes, but nevertheless
ripe for re-make, in our view
Another notable film account of the Great Dust Bowl:
Bound for Glory
DVD
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| Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 12:38 pm Post subject: |
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Good Time Girls
of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush
Hardcover
By Lael Morgan
| Quote: | The city of Fairbanks - well organized from its inception and guided by Judge Wickersham's policy of moderately taxing vice for civic betterment - established a system of monthly fines that served as "license fees" for illicit operations, and welcomed the influx (of prostitutes and pimps). "Are you a lady or a whore?" the city attorney would ask, meeting females off each incoming boat. "If you are a lady, pass on; if you are a whore, seventeen dollars and a half." (footnote omitted)
The take averaged $1,200 a month, according to an informant for the Valdez News, and moralists in the rival settlement were scandalized. (footnote omitted)
"Fairbanks papers are going into ecstasies over the fact that the town has been conducted for the last year woithout levying a property tax. Why the people should be proud of the condition of affairs there is incomprehensible," the Alaskan Prospector editorialized.
"The money, apart from licenses, used for running expenses of the town, has been collected entirely from the sporting class by a system of fines. Every game in operation has to pay monthly tax and the sporting element are assessed a heavy per capita tax. The town is supported by licenses collected from prostitutes and gamblers. ..." (footnote omitted)
Nome's crackdown on prostitutes and gamblers in 1904 and closure of dance halls and gambling dens in Dawson left Fairbanks as the only major gold camp where the demimonde could operate comfortably. (-- pgs. 185-186) |
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| Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 10:36 am Post subject: |
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Harrowsmith Country Life
Magazine Subscription
World's First Vertical Farm
Sin City rolls dice on 30-storey food factory
Compiled by Jason Santerre
April, 2008
| Quote: | What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. And that goes double (or nothing) for the city's vegetables. The desert playground's neon glare is taking on a "green" hue as state officials gamble on an image makeover, from giddy excess and wastefulness to "sustainability and environmental awareness." The first major step involves the construction of a 30-storey building just off the Strip. No, not another casino. This time developers are breaking ground on the world's first vertical farm.
The US $200-million building is designed to grow enough food for 72,000 locals and tourists every year. Dickson Despommier, a professor at New York's Columbia University and a designer with Sun Works, an eco-friendly engineering firm, says the time is right. After all, the world's population - 60 per cent of which lives near or in an urban centre - will exceed 9 billion by 2050. Despommier imagines a future when skylines are dotted with skyscraper farms. "Each will grow enough crops to feed its citizens without weather or pests ever being a factor."
The plan is to grow each crop using hydroponics, whereby the plant travels along a conveyor belt, passing beneath grow lights and automated nutrient-delivery systems. Genetically modified strains could come into play with regard to certain fussier crops, but the details still have to be finalized. Some aspects are certain, especially in cities other than Las Vegas. For instance, less land is needed in vertical farming. Depending on the crop, one indoor acre is equivalent to six outdoor acres. Vertical farming should also reduce fossil fuel consumption: No more tractors, heavy machinery or 18-wheelers used in shipping. The controlled environment is said to help eliminate herbicides and pesticides.
And what about irrigation? Despommier says water will come from filtered sewage and "evapo-transpiration," a natural process that collects water vapour from condensation from the plants; leaves. When it comes to real estate, vertical farms can go up on unused or even condemned lots.
The initial costs of the world's first vertical farm is high, but planners says it will generate an annual revenue of US $25 million through produce sold to the city's myriad restaurants and hotels, and another US $15 million from tourists. "It should be as profitable as a casino with operating expenses being $ US 6 million a year." The farm is said to open its doors in 2010. (-- p. 80) |
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| Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 8:43 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
British Columbia
Magazine Subscription
Our history in pictures
From the gold-rush frenzy of 1858 to our growing Olympic fever in 2008, photographers have been there to capture a visual record of the making of British Columbia. Join us for a phtographic journey through the past 150 years.
By Jane Nahirnny
Summer, 2008
| Quote: | Cariboo Wagon Road
This iconic photograph of travellers on the Cariboo Wagon Road is synonymous with our province's pioneering history. Gold strikes along the Fraser River brought thousands of enterprising California prospectors northward in the spring of 1858 - so many that the British government hastily founded the colony of British Columbia that fall to establish its claim on the region.
From the Fraser, nugget hunters moved north to even greater riches in the Cariboo. Roadhouses, saloons, and whole towns popped up overnight, and the freshly minted colony invested more than $1-million to construct a good road between Yale, on the south Fraser, and the Cariboo gold fields.
(The original route, judge Matthew Baillie Begbie decreed, was "... utterly impassable for any animal except a man, a goat or dog.") Here, freight wagons on the Cariboo Wagon Road make the perilous descent down "Eight Mile Bluff" near Spences Bridge, circa 1867. (Photo caption, p. 35) |
| Quote: | James Douglas
More of the Hudson's Bay Company of Adventurers.
right: History books call him "the father of British Columbia." As governor of the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, James Douglas defused the threat of American annexation, maintained law and order in the gold fields, built towns in the Interior and ordered the construction of the Cariboo Wagon Road. But few know the humble beginnings of the former fur trader and Hudson's Bay Company Chief Factor. Born to a Scottish plantation owner and a "free colored" woman in British Guiana (now Guyana), Douglas was shipped off to Canada at 16 to work in the Hudson's Bay Company. His wife, Amelia, was also of mixed blood, with an Irish-Canadian father and Cree mother. To end up as a knight and lady of the British Empire was an usual reward, observed historian and author John Adams in Old Square Toes and His Lady. (Photo caption, p. 36)
Old Square Toes and His Lady
Hardcover
By John D. Adams
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| Quote: | Saloons aplenty
left: Hotels and saloons, such as Nelson's Royal Hotel shown here in 1898, gave prospectors and pioneers a warm place to congregate over a glass of beer or whiskey. At the height of the gold rush in 1862, Victoria listed 60 saloons among its many business establishments. During its heyday in the mid 1890s, the mining town of Sandon, about 100 kilometres north of Nelson, offered its 4,000 to 5,000 residents 29 hotels, 28 saloons, an opera house, and one of Canada's largest red-light districts. By 1897, nearby Rossland had 7,000 people and 42 saloons. (Photo caption, p. 43) |
| Quote: | Far, far from home, we miners roam,
We feel its joys no more,
These we have sold for yellow gold,
On Fraser River's shore.
(Far From Home, a folk song from 1858, p. 58) |
| Quote: | Fraser River War
How British Columbia became a colony
The Fraser Gold Rush of 1858 attracted some 30,000 miners from America into the British-controlled region of New Caledonia. Propelled by liquor and gold fever, they overwhelmed the Fraser Canyon's Nlaka'pamux people, who had been collecting gold on the river's banks for years. Friction turned to anger, and anger to bloodshed. Accounts from the time allude to hundreds of deaths.
When word of the violence reached James Douglas, then governor of the British colony of Vancouver Island, he was gravely concerned. Already he knew a strong lobbgy of Americans citing 'manifest destiny' sought to annex New Caledonia. The killing of U.S. citizens in the Fraser Canyon would only fuel their fervor and could prompt the 1,500 American troops stationed across the border to charge north to protect their compatriots.
To keep any of this news from reaching London, Douglas suppressed official accounts of the Fraser River War, and hurried to the mainland to meet with frightened miners who were demanding protection.
By the time he arrived, the worst was over. Chief Spintlum had successfully advocated peace to his fellow Nlaka'pamux chiefs and, in meetings with militia leader Henry Snyder, had negotiated an end ot the violence. Douglas helped to cement the truce by allocating land along the river to the native people in verbal agreements - generous settlements that were ignored by susequent government officials.
To ward off further threats from the Americans, Douglas worked with British officials to create the Crown colony of British Columbia in November, 1858, and served as its governor for five and a half years. (-- p. 59) |
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| Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 12:08 pm Post subject: |
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Divisadero
Hardcover
By Frostback Wonder Michael Ondaatje
| Quote: | More than a century before us, in August 1849, a group of men set up camp in a valley more than a hundred miles north of Petaluma. They built cabins at a place they called Badger Hill and began to search for gold. There were twenty of them panning the streams, standing knee-deep in the icy rivers, and they almost surrendered to the winter storms that overtook them. But within six months gold-laced quartz was unearthed in the place that would eventually be called Grass Valley. A hundred ramshackle hotels went up, and bizarre names for mines began to speckle the constantly repreinted maps - Slumgullion, Delerium Tremens, Bogus Thunder, Hell's Delight, Graveyard, Lone Jack, Rich Hell, Ne Plus Ultra, Silver Fork, Rocking Horse, Sultana. Men would be stranded in the mountains with no supplies and become hunters out of necessity, killing grouse, cattle, bears, with shotguns and pistols. Butcher shops sprang up. Steamboats travelled inland to the furthest point of navigation - as far as the Feather River. And a many-headed civilization arrived. Gamblers, water entrepreneurs, professional shootists, prostitutes, diarists, coffee drinkers, whisky merchants, poets, heroic dogs, mail-order brides, women falling in love with boys who walked within the realm of luck, old men swallowing gold to conceal it on their return journeys to the coast, balloonists, mystics, Lola Montez, opera singers - good ones, bad ones, those who fornicated their way across the territory. Dynamiters blasted steep grades and the land under your feet. There were seventeen miles of tunnels beneath the town of Iowa Hill. Sonora burned. Weaverwille burned. Shasta and Columbia burned. Were rebuilt and burned again and rebuilt again. Sacramento flooded.
A hundered years later, at the time of Coop's obsession, there would still be five thousand full-time gold miners along the banks of the Yuba and Russian rivers. They scouted out the old towns in the Sierras named after lovers and dogs and characters in novels - names that were a time capsule of hunger and desire for a new life. Ne Plus Ultra! At each filament-like dot on the country maps, something had happened. On this riverbank two brothers killed each other arguing about which direction to travel. At this clearing a woman was traded for a site. It was as if there were a novella by Balzac round every bend.
Prospectors now drove up in Airstreams, pulling gas-fuelled dredges to suck up whatever remained on the river bottoms. A century of flooding and storms had knocked loose the gold from the prehistoric beds, sluicing it down into the rivers. Miners in wetsuits were 'sniping' the streams, and swam in the underwater darkness holding giant cauldrons of light. (From Part One, Anna, Claire and Coop, pgs. 12-13) |
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| Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:28 am Post subject: |
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Will the Circle Be Unbroken - The Trilogy
Audio CD
Featuring the Tennessee Stud sung by legendary
guitar picker Doc Watson
| Quote: | Tennessee Stud
By celebrated Arkansan Jimmie Driftwood
Along about eighteen twenty-five,
I left Tennessee very much alive.
I never would have got through the Arkansas mud
If I hadn't been a-ridin' on the Tennessee Stud.
I had some trouble with my sweetheart's pa,
And one of her brothers was a bad outlaw.
I sent her a letter by my Uncle Bud,
And I rode away on the Tennessee Stud.
The Tennessee Stud was long and lean,
The color of the sun, and his eyes were green.
He had the nerve and he had the blood,
And there never was a horse like the Tennessee Stud.
One day I was riding in a beautiful land
I run smack into an Indian band
They jumped their nags with a whoop and a yell
And away we rode like a bat out of hell.
I circled their camp for a time or two,
Just to show what a Tennessee horse can do.
The redskin boys couldn't get my blood,
'Cause I was a-riding on the Tennessee Stud.
We drifted on down into no man's land,
We crossed that river called the Rio Grande.
I raced my horse with the Spaniard's foal
'Til I got me a skin full of silver and gold.
Me and a gambler, we couldn't agree,
We got in a fight over Tennessee.
We jerked our guns, and he fell with a thud,
And I got away on the Tennessee Stud.
I got just as lonesome as a man can be,
Dreamin' of my girl in Tennessee.
The Tennessee Stud's green eyes turned blue
'Cause he was a-dreamin' of a sweetheart, too,
We loped right back across Arkansas;
I whupped her brother and I whupped her pa.
I found that girl with the golden hair,
And she was a-riding on the Tennessee Mare.
Stirrup to stirrup and side by side,
We crossed the mountains and the valleys wide.
We came to Big Muddy, then we forded the flood
On the Tennessee Mare and the Tennessee Stud.
A pretty little baby on the cabin floor,
A little horse colt playing 'round the door,
I love that girl with the golden hair,
And the Tennessee Stud loves the Tennessee Mare. |
Anyone remember parties filled with competent musicians like the ones featured on these classic albums? Anyone still hosting those parties? If so, move it on over to Canada's Left Coast. Look us up. Play us a couple train songs and we'll take you deep inside the Blue Mountain and show you all the best fishing holes.
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2008 8:42 am Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Tits-Up in a Ditch
By Annie Proulx
June 9 and 16/08
| Quote: | "Had me some luck today. Goddam cow got herself tits-up in the ditch couple days ago. Dead, time I found her," he said in a curiously satisfied tone, squinting through faded lashes, winking his eyes, the same aquamarine as those of the wayward Shaina.
"Not every man would say that is luck," Bonita said wearily. She went to the sink, stepping over Bum, Verl's ancient heeler crippled by cow kicks, and began scrubhbing out the only pot large enough to boil potatoes in quantity, a pot she washed and used several times a day.
"It is, in a way of speakin."
She couldn't have puzzled that one out even if she had had the time. With Verl, it was one thing after another. He went into the national forest to cut wood every fall, and she knew that he someday would cut himself in half with his cranky old chain saw. She almost hoped he would.
For Verl Lister everything turned on luck, and he had experienced very little of the good kind. ... (-- p. 82) |
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| Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 11:16 am Post subject: |
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The Post-American World
Hardcover
By Fareed Zakaria
| Quote: | We are now living through the third great power shift of the modern era. It could be called "the rise of the rest." Over the past few decades, countries all over the world have been experiencing rates of economic growth that were once unthinkable. While they have had booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward. This growth has been most visible in Asia but is no longer confined to it. That is why to call this shift "the rise of Asia" does not describe it accurately. In 2006 and 2007, 124 countries grew at a rate of 4 percent or more. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa, two-thirds of the continent. Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term "emerging markets," has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world's next great multinationals. His list includes four companies each from Briazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India; two from China; and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa.
Look around. The tallest building in the world is now in Taipei, and it will soon be overtaken by one being built im Dubai. The world's richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese. The world's biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is under construction in India, and its largest factories are all in China. By many measures, London is becoming the leading financial center, and the United Arab Emirates is home to the most richly endowed investment fund. Once quintessentially American icons have been appropriated by foreigners. The world's largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. Its number one casino is not in Las Vegas but in Macao, which has also overtaken Vegas in annual gambling revenues. The biggest movie industry, in terms of both movies made and tickets sold, is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Even shopping, America's greatest sporting activity, has gone global. Of the top ten malls in the world, only one is in the United States; the world's biggest is in Beijing. Such lists are arbitrary, but it is striking that only ten years ago, America was at the top in many, if not most, of these categories.
... in fact, the share of people living on a dollar a day or less plummeted from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent in 2004, and is estimated to fall to 12 percent by 2015. China's growth alone has lifted more than 400 million people out of poverty. Poverty is falling countries housing 80 percent of the world's population. ... In .... China, India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, and South Africa - the poor are slowly being absorbed into productive and growing economies. For the first time ever, we are witnessing genuinely global growth. ... It is the birth of a new global order.
A related aspect of this new era is the diffusion of power from states to other actors. The "rest" that is rising includes many nonstate actors Groups and individuals have been empowered, and hierarchy, centralization, and control are being undermined. Functions that were once controlled by governments are now shared with international bodies like the World Trade Organization and the European Union. Non-governmental groups are mushrooming every day on every issue in every country. Corporations and capital are moving from place to place, finding the best location in which to do business, rewarding some governments while punishing others. Terrorists like Al Qaeda, drug cartels, insurgents, and militias of all kinds are finding space to operate within the nooks and crannies of the international system. Power is shifting away from nation-states, up, down, and sideways. In such an atmosphere, the traditional applications of national power, both economic and military, have become less effective.
The emerging international system is likely to be quite different from those that have preceded it. One hundred years ago, there was a multipolar order run by a collection of European governments, with constantly shifting alliances, rivalries, miscalculations, and wars. Then came the bipolar duopoly of the Cold War, more stable in many ways, but with the superpowers reacting and overreacting to each other's every move. Since 1991, we have lived under an American imperium, a unique unipolar world in which the the open global economy has expanded and accelerated dramatically. This expansion is now driving the next change in the nature of the international order. ((From the chapter entitled, The Rise of the Rest, pgs. 2-4) |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2009 9:39 am Post subject: |
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Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
Profiles in Panic
With Wall Street hemorrhaging jobs and assets, even many of the wealthiest players are retrenching. Others, like the Lehman Brothers bankers who borrowed against their millions in stock, have lost everything. Hedge-fund managers try to sell their luxury homes, while trophy wives are hocking their jewelry. The pain is being felt on St. Barth’s and at Sotheby’s, on benefit-gala committees and at the East Hampton Airport, as the world of the Big Rich collapses, its culture in shock and its values in question.
By Michael Shnayerson
January, 2009
| Quote: | | There were, to be sure, some big-name “blowups” as the market began to implode. Here was Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom and CBS, who had to sell $233 million worth of Viacom and CBS stock in order to pay down part of an $800 million loan. T. Boone Pickens, legendary Texas oilman, was another blowup, and so was Chesapeake Energy’s Aubrey McClendon, forced by a margin call to sell 94 percent of his 32 million company shares into the bear market. (Worth $2.2 billion last July, the shares were sold in October for $569 million.) Kirk Kerkorian, 91, has lost about $12 billion on his 54 percent ownership stake in MGM Mirage, the casino and hotel operator that owns almost half the hotel rooms on the Las Vegas Strip, including those in the Bellagio, the MGM Grand, the Mirage, and Mandalay Bay. The company’s stock is down 86 percent this year, and its bonds were downgraded deeper into junk status in October. Kerkorian has reportedly told friends that he “lived one year too long.” (He now claims he never said it.) Nevertheless, he and the other three men are all still billionaires. ... (-- pgs. 75-146) |
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Last edited by editor on Sun Jun 14, 2009 1:55 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Jun 14, 2009 1:37 pm Post subject: |
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A Long Stone's Throw
Hardcover
By Alphie McCourt
| Quote: | Larkspur, in Marin County, only fourteen miles from San Francisco, is another world entirely. Marin County is a very rich community. A definitely upper-middle class of people lives there. They do the daily commute into San Francisco to work. That is if they need to work at all. These commuters are counterbalanced by a population of rock bands, musicians, hippies, handymen and dropouts.
Stan, my new employer at the Lark Creek Inn, is a smart and energetic businessman. His great, wide, gap-toothed smile, like the edge of a precipice, is overhung by a black mustache. They say he carries a gun. In velvet jacket, white-shirted cravat and the big-cuffed shirtsleeves, he carries the cultivated look of the gambler. (From Marin County, 1972, pgs. 155-156) |
| Quote: | The Silver Peso is owned by two sisters, Teeny and Trudy. ...
On Friday and Saturday nights I work with Jim. Jim's short black goatee matches his jet-black hair. His white whirt with no tie and black vest combination completes his El Diablo costume. He presides at the bar and brandishes his ever ready repartee. He is a cool hand with the dice cups. More often than not, when he and a customer roll the dice for a drink, Jim wins. He will drink a thimbleful of brandy with the loser. Jim will drink with anyone who will buy. The buyers, mostly the younger customers, look to impress Jim and to be accepted by him. There's worship in their gaze as they watch him down thimbleful after thimbleful. No thought is given to his liver, which will pay a hefty price for customers' boosted egos and the bar's jacked-up receipts. (-- p. 173) |
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