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 Posted: Fri Nov 05, 2004 3:37 pm Post subject: Yanks |
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Yanks:
The European Dream
How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream
Hardcover
By Jeremy Rifkin
| Quote: | | It's interesting to note that although people have been living the American Dream for two centuries, the term didn't become part of the popular lexicon until 1931. Historian James Truslow Adams published a book entitled The Epic of America, in which the term "American Dream" was used for the very first time. Adams originally wanted to use the term in the title of the book, but his editor, Ellery Sedgwick, refused, saying that "no red-blooded American would pay $3.50 for a dream." Adams's retort at the time was that "red-blooded Americans have always been willing to gamble their last peso on a dream." (footnotes omitted) (empahasis ours). (On the American dream, p. 26) |
| Quote: | Americans have always been risk-takers. That's part of what the American Dream is all about. We used to associate American risk-taking with the willingness to start over in a new land, tame a wilderness, invest in an idea, or start a new business. Today, for a growing number of Americans, risk-taking has been reduced to little more than gambling.
In 2002, seven out of ten Americans engaged in some form of legal gambling. Fifty-seven percent of Americans purchased a lottery ticket in the past year, and 31 percent of Americans gambled in casinos. he annual growth rate of American gambling has been a steamy 9 percent in the past decade, which means that gambling has been growing significantly faster than the U.S. economy as a whole. Americans are now spending more money on gambling than on movies, videos, DVDs, music, and books combined. In 2002, Americans spent $68 billion on legal gambling at racetracks, at casinos, and on lotteries, compared to $27 billion in 1991. When I was a child in the 1950s, only the state of Nevada allowed gambling. Today, forty-seven states have legalized gambling. The states raise more than $20 billion from lotteries and casinos, or more than 4 percent of their total revenue.
Gambling has fast become the national pastime and, for many Americans, a near obsession... (From Getting Something for Nothing, p. 28 (footnotes omitted) (emphasis added) |
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| Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2005 10:45 am Post subject: |
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Homegrown Democrat
A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America
Hardcover
By Garrison Keillor
| Quote: | | America is not a religious country, no matter how many Americans say they believe in God. I've been in religious countries and this is not one of them. There is no Sabbath, no fasting or prohibitions, every day is a feast day. You can buy liquor on Sunday almost anywhere, find pornography in any Marriott or Wal-Mart, say any ugly, profane thing on the radio or anywhere -- we're fat and sloppy and as disciplined as a battalion of cats, an impulsive, dreamy people walking around eating ice cream cones and eyeballing the girls' sweaters and dreaming of a big hit in the lottery. If God is looking for a nation to carry out His will on earth, it isn't this one...(From the chapter, Republicans I Have Known, at p. 211). |
Go Vikings!
Listen to the Prairie Home Companion pretty good radio show right here, right NOW. Don't miss the Four Flushers Waltz by Soupy Schindler and Bill Hinckley in Segment 4 of the Jan. 1/05 show.
A Prairie Home Companion
Entry at the Berlin Film Festival 2006
Directed By Robert Altman
Featuring Garrison Keillor
| Quote: | | In sub-zero Berlin, the warmest welcome was for A Prairie Home Companion, Robert Altman's fictional take on Garrison Keillor's old-style radio show that has run on US public radio for 30 years. The film, the other Golden Bear favorite, has a stellar Altman ensemble including Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as a country singing sister act, and an outstanding Kevin Kline as a bumbling Clouseau-style detective. The real surprise is script co-writer Keillor, who plays the dead-pan, pondering host who refuses to sentimentalize his final radio show before its theatre home is razed. Altman could have delivered another scabrous satire like M*A*S*H or The Player. Instead, the 80-year-old director delivers a gentle, warm-hearted celebration of what Meryl Streep called "the authentic voice of America." (From Playing politics in Berlin by Derek Scally in the Irish Times, Feb. 18/06, at p. 7 of The Arts). |
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| Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2005 4:44 pm Post subject: |
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Catch Me If You Can
DVD
Full Screen Edition
| Quote: | Frank Abagnale, Jr. (fraudster extraordinaire, aka Barry Allen, Secret Service et al): Ah, people only know what you tell them, Carl.
Carl, an FBI agent: Well, then, tell me this, Barry Allen, Secret Service. How did you know I wouldn't look in your wallet?
Frank: The same reason the Yankees always win. Nobody can keep their eyes off the pinstripes.
Carl: The Yankees win because they have Mickey Mantle. No one ever bets on the uniform.
Frank: (chuckles). You sure about that, Carl?
Carl: I'll tell you what I am sure of. You're gonna' get caught. One way or another. It's a mathematical fact. It's like Vegas. The house always wins. |
The John Williams score is great, aging fat guy Hanks is OK, but the best part of this film is the fact that
it's all true!
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| Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 12:48 pm Post subject: |
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The Bodley Head
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Introduction by J.B. Priestley
Hardcover
Volume One
| Quote: | 'Even alone I can't say I never loved Tom,' she admitted in a pitiful voice. 'It wouldn't be true.'
'Of course it wouldn't,' agreed Tom.
She turned to her husband.
'As if it mattered to you,' she said.
'Of course it matters. I'm going to take better care of you from now on.'
'You don't understand,' said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. 'You're not going to take care of her any more.'
'I'm not?' Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to control himself now. 'Why's that?'
'Daisy's leaving you.'
'Nonsense.'
'I am, though,' she said with a visible effort.
'She's not leaving me!' Tom's words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. 'Certainly not for a common swindler who'd have to steal the ring he put on her finger.'
'I won't stand this!' cried Daisy. 'Oh, please let's get out.'
'Who are you anyhow?' broke out Tom. 'You're one of that bunch that hangs around with Meyer Wolfsheim -- that much I happen to know. I've made a little investigation into your affairs -- and I'll carry it further to-morrow.'
'You can suit yourself about that, old sport,' said Gatsby steadily.
'I found out what your "drug stores" were.' He turned to us and spoke rapidly. 'He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That's one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn't far wrong.'
'What about it?' said Gatsby politely. 'I guess your friend Walter Chase wasn't too proud to come in on it.'
'And you left him in the lurch, didn't you? You let him go to jail for a month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject of you.'
'He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old sport.'
'Don't you call me "old sport"!' cried Tom. Gatsby said nothing. 'Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but Wolfsheim scared him into shutting his mouth.'
That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby's face.
'That drug-store business was just small change,' continued Tom slowly, 'but you've got something on now that Walter's afraid to tell me about.' (-- pgs. 230-231 of The Great Gatsby) |
| Quote: | The Great Gatsby
DVD
We couldn't agree less with the criticisms of this one. Redford is so effective a Gatsby that Daisy and the others simply don't matter much. An excellent picture all around, in our view. |
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| Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 7:37 pm Post subject: |
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Bob Dylan Chronicles
Volume One
Hardcover
By Bob Dylan
| Quote: | I did everything fast. Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast and walked fast. I even sang my songs fast. I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say.
I couldn't exactly put in words what I was looking for, but I began searching in principle for it, over at the New York Public Library, a monumental building with marble floors and walls, vacuous and spacious caverns, vaulted ceiling. A building that radiates triumph and glory when you walk inside. In one of the upstairs reading rooms I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Daily Times and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herald and Cincinnati Enquirer. It wasn't like it was another world, but the same one only with more urgency, and the issue of slavery wasn't the only concern. There were news items about reform movements, antigambling leagues, rising crime, child labor, temperance, slave-wage factories, loyalty oaths and religious revivals. You get the feeling that the newspapers themselves could explode and lightning will burn and everybody will perish. Everybody uses the same God, quotes the same Bible and law and literature. Plantation slavecrats of Virginia are accused of breeding and selling their own children. In the Northern cities, there's a lot of discontent and debt is piled high and seems out of control. The plantation aristocracy run their plantations like city-states. They are like the Roman republic where an elite group of characters rule supposedly for the good of all.... (-- p. 85) |
Dylan's memoirs read like advertising copy for a pro-literacy non-profit but with the convict/fieldhand's omission of articles definite and indefinite that has typified coolspeak lo' these many decades.
Listen:
Chronicles, Vol. I
Audio CD
Narrated by U.S. actor Sean Penn
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| Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2005 10:34 am Post subject: |
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Atlantic Monthly
Magazine Subscription
BOOKS
Kiddie Class Struggle
One mom's breast-milk-curdling tour
of lower education's higher end
By Sandra Tsing Loh
June, 2005
| Quote: | | Because, like many American mothers with children at home, I am a juggling, multi-tasking, somewhat less than full-time freelance employee, the hours I spent reading Camille Peri and Kate Moses's Because I Said So, Judith Warner's Perfect Madness, and Miriam Peskowitz's The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars also involved a lot of weeping in parking lots. In the spirit of motherly sharing, let me rush to explain why. It began with the - I thought simple - wish that our daughter attend kindergarten. In the strange voodoo that is California, although houses in our neighborhood have shot up to $500,000, the corner school's demographics are 95 percent Hispanic; 76 percent of the students are learning English as a second language, and 92 percent qualify for a free lunch. Like most families just one year into the crowded magnet system, we've been waitlisted for schools with more English speakers; any openings materializing locally will be assisted by lottery, the odds notoriously poor. (Opening paragraph at p. 105) |
'Strange voodoo' indeed for a modern Western democracy to relegate public education, one of the first tenets of liberty, surely, to a mere game of chance, although kids whose parents are rich or famous enough may opt out. The story is an excellent first-person account of a Lutheran private school kindergarten entrance exam which the author's daughter somehow failed and something called Academic Performance Index (API), a statistic which apparently measures out of a possible thousand each school's chances of producing Ivy-Leaguers. A school API of 810, for instance, is considered "UCLA-on-scholarship-ready."
Next thing you know, Yanks will reject the concept of a national public health care scheme...
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| Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2005 9:53 am Post subject: |
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Blood on the Tracks
CD Audio
(Newly Remastered)
By Yank chameleon Bob Dylan, song and dance man extraordinaire
| Quote: | Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts
The festival was over, the boys were all plannin' for a fall,
The cabaret was quiet except for the drillin' in the wall.
The curfew had been lifted and the gamblin' wheel shut down,
Anyone with any sense had already left town.
He was standin' in the doorway lookin' like the Jack of Hearts.
He moved across the mirrored room, "Set it up for everyone," he said,
Then everyone commenced to do what they were doin' before he turned their heads.
Then he walked up to a stranger and he asked him with a grin,
"Could you kindly tell me, friend, what time the show begins?"
Then he moved into the corner, face down like the Jack of Hearts.
Backstage the girls were playin' five-card stud by the stairs,
Lily had two queens, she was hopin' for a third to match her pair.
Outside the streets were fillin' up, the window was open wide,
A gentle breeze was blowin', you could feel it from inside.
Lily called another bet and drew up the Jack of Hearts.
Big Jim was no one's fool, he owned the town's only diamond mine,
He made his usual entrance lookin' so dandy and so fine.
With his bodyguards and silver cane and every hair in place,
He took whatever he wanted to and he laid it all to waste.
But his bodyguards and silver cane were no match for the Jack of Hearts.
Rosemary combed her hair and took a carriage into town,
She slipped in through the side door lookin' like a queen without a crown.
She fluttered her false eyelashes and whispered in his ear,
"Sorry, darlin', that I'm late," but he didn't seem to hear.
He was starin' into space over at the Jack of Hearts.
"I know I've seen that face before," Big Jim was thinkin' to himself,
"Maybe down in Mexico or a picture up on somebody's shelf."
But then the crowd began to stamp their feet and the house lights did dim
And in the darkness of the room there was only Jim and him,
Starin' at the butterfly who just drew the Jack of Hearts.
Lily was a princess, she was fair-skinned and precious as a child,
She did whatever she had to do, she had that certain flash every time she smiled.
She'd come away from a broken home, had lots of strange affairs
With men in every walk of life which took her everywhere.
But she'd never met anyone quite like the Jack of Hearts.
The hangin' judge came in unnoticed and was being wined and dined,
The drillin' in the wall kept up but no one seemed to pay it any mind.
It was known all around that Lily had Jim's ring
And nothing would ever come between Lily and the king.
No, nothin' ever would except maybe the Jack of Hearts.
Rosemary started drinkin' hard and seein' her reflection in the knife,
She was tired of the attention, tired of playin' the role of Big Jim's wife.
She had done a lot of bad things, even once tried suicide,
Was lookin' to do just one good deed before she died.
She was gazin' to the future, riding on the Jack of Hearts.
Lily washed her face, took her dress off and buried it away.
"Has your luck run out?" she laughed at him, "Well, I guess you must
have known it would someday.
Be careful not to touch the wall, there's a brand-new coat of paint,
I'm glad to see you're still alive, you're lookin' like a saint."
Down the hallway footsteps were comin' for the Jack of Hearts.
The backstage manager was pacing all around by his chair.
"There's something funny going on," he said, "I can just feel it in the air."
He went to get the hangin' judge, but the hangin' judge was drunk,
As the leading actor hurried by in the costume of a monk.
There was no actor anywhere better than the Jack of Hearts.
Lily's arms were locked around the man that she dearly loved to touch,
She forgot all about the man she couldn't stand who hounded her so much.
"I've missed you so," she said to him, and he felt she was sincere,
But just beyond the door he felt jealousy and fear.
Just another night in the life of the Jack of Hearts.
No one knew the circumstance but they say that it happened pretty quick,
The door to the dressing room burst open and a cold revolver clicked.
And Big Jim was standin' there, ya couldn't say surprised,
Rosemary right beside him, steady in her eyes.
She was with Big Jim but she was leanin' to the Jack of Hearts.
Two doors down the boys finally made it through the wall
And cleaned out the bank safe, it's said that they got off with quite a haul.
In the darkness by the riverbed they waited on the ground
For one more member who had business back in town.
But they couldn't go no further without the Jack of Hearts.
The next day was hangin' day, the sky was overcast and black,
Big Jim lay covered up, killed by a penknife in the back.
And Rosemary on the gallows, she didn't even blink,
The hangin' judge was sober, he hadn't had a drink.
The only person on the scene missin' was the Jack of Hearts.
The cabaret was empty now, a sign said, "Closed for repair,"
Lily had already taken all of the dye out of her hair.
She was thinkin' 'bout her father, who she very rarely saw,
Thinkin' 'bout Rosemary and thinkin' about the law.
But, most of all she was thinkin' 'bout the Jack of Hearts.
Copyright © 1974 Ram's Horn Music |
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| Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2005 10:47 pm Post subject: |
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Fables of Abundance
Paperback
By Jackson Lears
| Quote: | | Treasure-seeking was one of several ways that early-19th century Americans used magical thinking to allay anxiety and sustain a dream of instantaneous change in their economic condition. Belief in luck survived Puritan denunciations of pagan superstition and sustained a flourishing subculture of gambling. To be sure, the gambler could display elements of calculation as well as vestiges of magical thinking. Yet in general, gambling represented a popular (sometimes playful!) alternative to the diligence supposedly required for economic success. Despite the efforts of ministers and moralists, many ordinary Americans - even those who never went near a crap game or a card table - hoped for a "lucky hit" in one of the myriad lotteries or "policy" games available in most cities. Policy was a 19th century equivalent of the numbers game. Players consulted dream books that claimed to reveal the numerological significance of dreams and coincidences; the player could learn what number to bet on when he dreamed of a policeman, or saw an old lady fall down in the street. This form of magical thinking was not confined to any one class or race. As late of 1879, the Virginia journalist James D. McCabe could observe in Lights and Shadows of New York Life that "even men accounted 'shrewd' on Wall Street" were among the purchasers of dream books. (The ironic linkage would not have gone unnoticed by the economist Henry George and other reformers; by 1879, the resemblance between stock market speculation and gambling had become a major theme in Protestant and republican critiques of capitalism.) (footnote omitted) (From the chapter, The Modernization of Magic, at pgs. 44-45) |
A fascinating series of snapshots of America's secret heart in the 19th c. by another wonderfully readable history prof.
| Quote: | Lights and Shadows of New York Life
Hardcover
By James Dabney McCabe
|
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| Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 3:42 pm Post subject: |
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Good Poems for Hard Times
Hardcover
Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
| Quote: | Rye Whiskey
Traditional
I'll eat when I'm hungry, I'll drink when I'm dry,
If hard times don't kill me, I'll live till I die.
O whiskey, you villain, you've been my downfall.
You've beat me, you've banged me, but I love you for all.
Jack o' Diamonds, Jack o' Diamonds, I know you of old.
You've robbed my poor pockets of silver and gold.
I'll drink and I'll gamble, my money's my own,
And them that don't like it can leave me alone.
My boot's in the stirrup, my bridle's in hand,
I'm leaving sweet Molly, the fairest in the land.
Her parents don't like me, they say I'm too poor.
They say I'm unworthy to enter her door.
You boast of your knowledge and brag of your sense
But it'll all be forgotten a hundred years hence.
Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey I cry,
If I don't get rye whiskey I surely will die.
(From I Feel Our Kinship at p. 273) |
A collection to speak to you when humanity, which never had it to begin with, refuses.
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| Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2006 2:23 pm Post subject: |
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New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Annals of Immigration
The Lottery
Once you have a green card, what next?
By Dan Baum
Jan. 23 & 30/06
| Quote: | | The official name of the program known as the Green Card Lottery in Peru - and in a hundred and seventy-six other countries - is the Diversity Immigration Visa Program. Of the more than two hundred visa types provided by the State Department, it is by far the oddest. While the vast majority of immigrant visas still go to people who suffer persecution or possess strictly prescribed qualifications - relatives already in the U.S., strategic skills, or great wealth - the only requirement for winning the Green Card Lottery, other than good fortune, is a high-school education or two years' experience in one of three hundred and fifty-three career categories ranging from anthropologist to housepainter to poet-and-lyricist. Fifty thousand diversity visas are made available each year; almost six million people applied to the program in 2005. Its future, however, is uncertain. Last month, the House of Representatives passed a border enforcement and immigration bill that included an amendment to abolish the Green Card Lottery. The Senate will consider that bill later this year. (-- p. 47) |
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| Posted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 9:49 am Post subject: |
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New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Iran Plans
Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran
from getting the bomb?
By Seymour M. Hersh
April 17/06
| Quote: | The European diplomat said that he was skeptical that Iran, given its record, had admitted to everything it was doing, but "to the best of our knowledge the Iranian capability is not at the point where they could successfully fun centrifuges" to enrich uranium in quantity. One reason for pursuing diplomacy was, he said, Iran's essential pragmatism. "The regime acts in its best interests," he said. Iran's leaders "take a hard-line approach on the nuclear issue and they want to call the American bluff," believing that "the tougher they are the more likely the West will fold." But, he said, "From what we've seen with Iran, they will appear superconfident until the moment they back off."
...Other European officials expressed similar skepticism about the value of an American bombing campaign. "The Iranian economy is in bad shape, and Ahmadinejad is in bad shape politically," the European intelligence official told me. "He will benefit politically from American bombing. You can do it, but the results will be worse." An American attack, he said, would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic to the US. "Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to US movies and books, and they love it," he said. "If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run." (emphasis added) (- p. 36) |
More about Iran today:
Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
A New Day in Iran?
The regime may inflame Washington, but
young Iranians say they admire,
of all places, America.
By Afshin Molavi
March, 2005
| Quote: | | It’s increasingly apparent that Iran’s young are tuning out a preachy government for an alternative world of personal Web logs (Persian is the third most commonly used language on the Internet, after English and Chinese), private parties, movies, study, and dreams of emigrating to the West. These disenchanted “children of the revolution” make up the bulk of Iran’s population, 70 percent of which is under 30. Too young to remember the anti-American sentiment of the ’70s, they share little of their parents’ ideology. While young Iranians of an earlier generation once revered Che Guevara and romanticized guerrilla movements, students on today’s college campuses tend to shun politics and embrace practical goals such as getting a job or admission into a foreign graduate school. Some 150,000 Iranian professionals leave the country each year—one of the highest rates of brain drain in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iranian intellectuals are quietly rediscovering American authors and embracing values familiar to any American civics student—separation of church and state, an independent judiciary and a strong presidency. (From p. 2 of the online version) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Fri Apr 14, 2006 10:07 am Post subject: |
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Barron's Online
Minting Money
The Goldman Sachs Way
By Michael Santoli
April 10/06
| Quote: | Here is what Goldman is not, despite what alarmists say: It is not a huge hedge fund, or an impenetrable "black box," though the firm offers fewer details about its trading operations than some shareholders would like. Nor is it a leveraged proxy for stock prices, or a surfer of the yield curve, or a mere play on oil prices through its commodities business. Goldman is not a place where folks with MBAs and nice golf strokes simply roll the dice hoping for a seven. No gambler, it is much more like "the house."
Though the firm might bristle at the suggestion its clients are gamblers, the reality is that those clients, including many hedge funds, lay the bets, on which Goldman helps set the odds. And, like the casino credit window, Goldman can elect to lend them money on its own terms, or not. |
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| Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2006 10:42 am Post subject: |
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Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
This Month in History
By Alison McLean
November, 2005
| Quote: | 240 YEARS AGO: RIOT ACT
The Stamp Act goes into effect in the American Colonies November 1, 1765. Passed in March by Britain to tax documents, almanacs, newspapers, cards and dice in order to pay debts from the French and Indian War, the act incenses Colonists, who protest the "taxation without representation" by petitioning, boycotting and even stringing up the odd tax agent. Parliament rescinds the act in 1766 but can't retract the spirit of revolution it unleashes. (-- p. 28) |
Go colonists!
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| Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 3:53 pm Post subject: |
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Lucky You
CD Audio
By Carl Hiassen
Performed by George Wilson
| Quote: | With liberal dashes of dark humor, Carl Hiassen creates vivid, loony characters and turns them loose in Florida, the dark side of Disneyworld. Lucky You takes you to Grange, Florida, a little town famous for miracles: the plastic statue of Mary that weeps fragrant tears, the road stain image of Jesus and the apostalic turtles.
Grange is about to add another attraction to its list. Quiet, reclusive JoLayne Lucks holds a winning ticket to the $28 million-dollar state Lotto. Unfortunately, the other winning ticket belongs to Bodean Gazzer and his buddy Chub - grungy, militant white supremacists who are itching to form a private militia. They aren't about to share the prize money with a woman , especially an African American one. (Back cover) |
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Last edited by editor on Mon Dec 22, 2008 1:30 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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