By Steve Rhodes
A weekly roundup of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Still Depressed
With the incredibly sad demise of Punk Planet, the arrival of the new No Depression came at just the right time. At least there’s still one good music magazine going. (And at least we have the work of Don Jacobson here at the Beachwood to enjoy; if only we could clone him about a dozen times . . . ) While No Depression’s constant self-examination of what it is and who it covers gets tiresome, Peter Blackstock gets it right in his “Hello Stranger” column this issue when he writes “The difference between ND and most mainstream music publications is, of course, that while we both might cover the Shins or Miranda Lambert or Mandy Moore, the mass-media magazines are unlikely to give significant space to, say, a sideman such as Fast Kaplin (p.8), or a roots-music event such as Merlefest (p. 16), or a family bluegrass act such as Cherryholmes (p. 42). And they darned sure aren’t gonna put a 79-year-old performer of traditional country music on their cover.”
Damn straight. The 79-year-old is Porter Wagoner. The story is “Hillbilly Deluxe.” The closing line is “That’s music for grown-ups, what people used to call country music.”
No Depression
John Updike, in the latest New Yorker takes up the Amity Shlaes book on the Great Depression mentioned in a recent Reviewing the Reviews (see Sun-Times Review of Note) and concludes, as any thinking person would, that she’s full of it.
Consumption Culture
Is there a magazine out there more sensuous than Print? It’s at once a tactile, visual, brainy read that makes you want to share.
The July/August issue is all about consumption – “How Design Drives Spending, Saving, and Desire” – and is chock full of goodies.
For example, the Ladies Home Journal said this in 1918: “There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
And did you know that blue is “a primary color, but the rarest in nature, [and] was considered a form of black until about 5,000 B.C. In many languages, there is no word for blue; a term referring to both blue and green often suffices for either color.”
Pink & Blue II
An observation on gender – who brought the pink bats? – from a friendly T-Ball league.
Presumption Culture
Herbert Okun of New York writes to The Economist this week: “May I suggest ‘What Blair’s Not Learned’, courtesy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. First, ‘no matter how powerful one’s armies, in order to enter a country one needs the goodwill of the inhabitants.’ Second, ‘there is nothing more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes in a state’s constitution.’ And finally, ‘A prince should never join in an aggressive alliance with someone more powerful than himself.'”
Pillorying Hillary
The Economist’s Lexington columnist writes: “The anti-Hillary jibes of left and right cannot all be true. For all her talents, Mrs. Clinton cannot be a warmonger and a peacenik, or a radical feminist and a shill for the patriarchy. Perhaps if extremists of both left and right detest her, she must in fact be a nice, reasonable moderate . . .
“She has a prodigious memory, a bottomless capacity for hard work and a quarter-century of experience of national politics. In debates, her grasp of policy makes her Democratic rivals look callow or shallow.”
Press Freedom
Ten countries where it has deteriorated.
One Magnificent Mockery
The Farwell Building. In The Voice: The Quarterly Journal of Preservation Chicago.
Posted on June 29, 2007