One of the most famous scenes in AMC’s Mad Men comes at the end of Season 1. Don Draper’s been having a hard time of things lately - his marriage is falling apart and his relationship with his coworkers has taken a major downwards trend. To keep those plates spinning, Don gives the pitch of a lifetime.
This is one of the most famous scenes of the series, but after having rewatched Mad Men a few times I’ve come to a really bleak reading of it. All the pictures of his wife are from their courtship and he’s just spent the last 13 episodes ignoring her, either by not being around, or by gaslighting her concerns about her life and their marriage. After the scene he tries to go home and live it and Betty’s gone, having taken the kids away for Thanksgiving (there was an argument earlier in the episode about this). Don might want to use nostalgia to go that place where he knows that he’s loved, but that place doesn’t exist inside of him. He can only summon it into being as an abstraction that he can use to land an account.
I found myself thinking about Don Draper’s Carousel after watching the new documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor. I grew up a Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood kid and if you also watched while young, just try to make it through the trailer without tearing up a bit:
Something that the documentary addresses is the everpresent question “Was he really like that?”, to which the answer appears to be “Yes”. Mr. Rogers wasn’t a Navy SEAL, he doesn’t have tattooed arms underneath his sweater, and the closest we see him get to angry is in a clip of him talking about how we are letting our children down. Mr. Rogers really was just a person who cared deeply about children, thought they had something to useful to say, and wanted the rest of society to care as much as he did.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor is uses the same tools as Don Draper’s Carousel (nostaglia), except that instead of the fictional Don Draper using it to make you buy something, it’s summoning into your adult consciousness the perspective of a child and a language that makes the emotional issues we deal as adults super-explicit.
At one point they sing Sometimes I Wonder If I’m a Mistake. Daniel Striped Tiger vocalizes all these uncertainties and anxieties - he’s so different from everyone else and he can’t do anything right.
In the documentary, the Lady Aberlin actress points out that Daniel doesn’t “snap out of it” during singing - the fear doesn’t go away just because you’ve had someone tell you you’re better. And of course, the fears of Daniel aren’t just the anxieties of a child - adults have these same anxieties and just because you’re a little bigger, that doesn’t mean you don’t need someone to accept you just as you are.
Later, there’s a scene where various people who worked with Mr. Rogers think back to someone who helped them, someone who was there for them - their parents, old teachers, old friends and loved ones. They’re there, inside of you, and the documentary bought to life for me how important that emotional place is to maintain as an oasis among all the struggles of adulthood.
It’s powerful stuff, but the nostalgia is what makes it even more powerful: these songs and characters still rattle around my brain thirty years after the last time I sat down to watch an episode of it, and the documentary reframed all those songs and characters in a way that was really impactful to me as an adult viewer.
Blow-Up is Michalengelo Antonioni’s first English film and was released at the end of 1966. The plot is quickly summarized: in 1960s London, a professional photographer (Thomas) tries to escape his day-to-day by taking pictures in a nearby park. There he encounters a couple and takes their photos from a distance. He is confronted by a woman who demands he surrender his roll of film, and she persists in following him to his studio to try to get it back. Later he develops the pictures and notices a little detail in one of them - upon magnifying it (thus given name to the title), he discovers in the grainy detail of his photographs a potential murder plot.
He returns to the park and finds a dead body, hiding under the trees. Upon returning to his studio he finds all of his film and photographs of the scene have been taken. Later, returning to the park, he finds no evidence of the dead body. Was there ever a murder? The End.
For me Blow-Up is more relevant today than Antonioni’s other works, great though they are. His “alienation triology” (L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse) are great movies that touch on alienation in the modern world, but the characters in those movies always struck me as abstract and were just a bit harder to relate to.
In contrast it’s always been easy for me to identify with Thomas, and his emotional arc gets reinforced by the movie in ways that Antonioni’s other movies are less interested in. At the start of the movie, he is brash and overconfident. When he first “discovers” the murder plot he initially thinks he’s saved someone’s life (he’s basically a hero!). Then he takes another look at the photographs and discovers there might be a dead body body there (it’s so grainy!). He goes to the park again but it seems completely unreal, the dead body hasn’t moved in 12 hours. It seems fake. He loses his photos and then can’t even reconstruct a plausible story of what did happen. At the end of the movie in one of my favorite movie endings of all time, he watches the mimes playing tennis with an invisible ball … and then slowly begin to hear through his ear, the sounds of the invisible ball hitting the court. His feeling of objective truth is shattered, the camera pans out, and he vanishes into into landscape.
Outside its main arc, the themes of Blow-Up remain relevant in today’s world where everyone has a camera in their pocket and presents themselves to the world through a set of carefully curated pictures. Thomas’s lens of the world is one of intense privilege - he forces other people to adapt to his world as he encounters them. For his professional work, he forces the women in front of the camera to supplicate themselves to him, but it’s clear that they’re more complicated than the version of them that ends up captured by the film. In attempting to get back the park photos, Vanessa Redgrave tries to seduce him, presented as a “well, maybe this will work?” attempt by a goal-driven woman. It’s hard to feel like Thomas really knows anyone that he interacts with. Other people are just things be forced into perspective by his lens on the world.
Once the movie is over, I’m not sure where Thomas would go or what he would do. What happens after your view on the world has been totally shattered? Better to just leave him on the grass - he’s finally living in the real world instead a carefully managed construction. It’s a really great movie.
The middle ages weren’t a pleasant time to be alive. The Black Death killed half of the European population, out-of-control mercenary companies ravaged the land, peasants were exploited on every level by the nobility. In A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman (author of The Guns of August on the runup to the Great War) walks through what life was like, with an eye towards the politics of the nobility and a focus on France in the midst of the Hundred Years war.
Wars between kings are expensive, usually funded by taxes on the peasantry around extremely pointless issues, and come to anticlimatic resolution. One French Duke spends several chapters trying to get money to fund a company to go to Italy to press his claim on the Kingdom of Napes. In doing this he ignores the troubles of the French state (Charles VI has succeeded his father but is only a boy). Once he does get troops together they march down into Italy, manage to piss off all the Italian city states, ignores an opportunity to score a political win for the French state by capturing Urban VI (half of a papal schmism), and eventually dies without accomplishing much of anything. Later Tuchman characterizes this mindset:
What moved knights to war was desire to do deeds of valor augmented by zeal for the faith, not the gaining of a political end by force of arms. They were concerned with the action, not the goal—which was why the given goal was so rarely attained.
The book is full of stories like this - from our view of things, political actors pursue the wrong goals, squander their opportunities, and ultimately accomplish nothing. It’s clear George RR Martin took inspiration for his Game of Thrones from this portrait of the era. As much as his later books are criticized for going nowhere, history has way more examples of action that goes nowhere. If anything, A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons have way more action than their historical models.
A Distant Mirror ends with the story of the Battle of Nicopolis. The French knights go to Hungary to help the King of Hungary defend against the Ottoman Turks. In doing this they squander their money on luxuries for the traveling nobles, underestimate their opponents, ignore good battle advice, and make an ill-advise glory-seeking charge. The knights end up losing and are captured and ransomed by the Turks.. Later, French knights are cut down by English professional soldiers at the Battle of Agincourt, the English’s attempts to claim the French crown are foiled by revolts from Joan d’Arc and the emergence of a French national identity, and in a final act of pointlessness the main character’s castle is ultimately blown up in a show of force by Erich Luderdorff’s troops in the Great War.
Why do we read history? The fourteenth century is so disconnected from today’s political situation that it’s impossible to draw major connections, but people today are still much like people six hundred years earlier. What Tuchman does on page after page is to draw out the people - who they were, what they wanted, how they lived. There aren’t many books like this one.
It’s been nine years since I last watched The Wire and I’m finally going through and doing a proper rewatch. The Wire is one reason I stopped gushing to people over TV shows - too many people gushing about the show, and the Stuff White People Like article is a little too on the nose. Better to let people find this stuff for themselves than listen to me blabbing about how great things are.
I liked the show when I first watched it, but I was also never really compelled to rewatch it. Some of the moments are so painful - Frank Sobotka walking off to the meet at the end of Season 2, Randy’s group home at the end of Season 4 - that it’s difficult to want to revisit.
What the show does so well is the the small moments among the gang members: Bodie listening to Prairie Home Companion, great lessons about the power of repetition, crazy moments where the civil servents reveal they’re willfully cruel. On first watch Stringer Bell came off as pretty smart, on rewatch it’s clear he’s trying to put on a mask in order to escape his life, but he can’t.
What grates on me is the reputation the show has for realism. It’s hard for me to click with some of the characters - McNulty has some great moments but his writing is a bit cliche, maybe I missed something but I’m not sure why DeAngelo is so “woke” compared to his peers. Some of the people it creates are cartoons (Brother Mouzone and yes, even Omar) or so willfully evil (Rawls, Burrell) that it’s difficult to look at the world as anything other than a political rant.
Still, it’s a fun political rant to listen to, and the evil in the every-day frequently lands directly on target. Deputy likes dots.
The Great War killed 17 million people, wounded 20 million more, and left psychological trauma on victor and vanquished alike. At the Paris peace conference in 1919, Britain, France, and the United States were tasked to create a new international order that would prevent something like this from ever happening again. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.
I read through Zara Steiner’s book on international relationships in the years after the end of World War I to try to understand why a little better.
The Treaty of Versailles was an attempt by the victorious powers to prevent another war at the size and scale and create a working international order (similar to order created in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna after Napoleon’s defeat). Though France and Germany were greatly impacted by the war, they would both some day be strong nations again - and when that happened, how could they avoid creating another war?
The Treaty of Versailles has a reputation as a failed document - the victor powers had been united against Germany in the war but had their own ideas for how a post-war order would best work. France wanted Germany to be militarily crippled and so unable to invade again, leading them to want the Rhineland (the area between France and Germany) demilitarized and potentially under eternal international occupation. Britain wanted Germany to be economically reconstructed as soon as possible to recover the economy of Europe. The United States wanted Europe to handle its own affairs and didn’t want to be in a position where it would have to intervene in hundred year old continental squabbles. Over the next fifteen years these basic positions would become calcified, eventually leading to a reconstructed Germany in the hands of the Nazi party. Attempts by France to enforce the treaty, or use it as a jumping off point for disarmament, ran into British resistance as France found themselves again and again without support. It isn’t hard to look at Britain here as the “perfidious Albion” and understand better the culture that produced the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
To prevent another war, France and Britain would have needed a German people who were willing to operate within the treaty limitations, something that didn’t happen due to the timing of the German surrender (the German generals radioed to surrender while they were still inside France). Because of this parts of the German population never felt as if they were defeated, leading to various right-wing agitators to perpetuate the “stabbed in the back” myth. Working as foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann argued for the German position successfully for a number of years (Treaty of Locarno, enterance into the League of Nations), and was willing to operate within the Versailles framework. None of these victories led to an increase in the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic - upon receiving a diplomatic success, right-wing agitators would criticize the government for not getting more, especially around the territorial settlements in the East as it related to Poland and Danzig.
The League of Nations was a first attempt at creating an international body for resolving disputes - however, as the United States and Russia were not members (the US Senate had rejected the treaty of Versailles), the League proved unable to respond to crises on the global landscape. In 1931 the Japanese army conspired to invade and occupy areas of Manchuria, eventually creating a puppet state Manchukuo - while the area was nominally part of China, there was no unified central control from the Chinese government at this time. This incident was allowed to happen because the powers that would restrict it (United States, Russia, or Britain) saw no benefit in intervening. Britain was most impacted but didn’t want to go to war over a little province in China that they had otherwise no substantive interest in. While we know tools like international sanctions to be effective today at forming a response to states who are “bad actors”, at the time it was thought that sanctions were a first step towards war.
I came away from the book feeling that World War 2 was not an inevitable result of the Versailles Treaty. The treaty would need to be revised and a less harsh war reparations regime might have bought the Weimar Republic more of an attempt to build legitimacy. The Great Depression was a result of excessive lending combined with countries locking themselves into the gold standard in an attempt to resist inflating their currency - how the gold standard would behave at this scale on an international level was not well unerstood. The Great Depression encouraged countries to turn inward and in Germany some extremely short-sighted actions from President Hindenberg and members of his cabinet led to them seeking support from Hitler and the Nazis in order to control them. This destabilizing act led to the Nazi military dictatorship, further revisionism of the Versailles treaty, and the horrors of World War 2 and the Holocaust.
It’s hard to not read this book and think “what if” - “what if” Germany had resisted the Nazis, “what if” France had demanded a more politically salable set of war reparations, “what if” Britain had diplomatically backed France at a few crucial times, “what if” economic internationalism from the United States under Herbert Hoover had been more effective. We still operate in a post World War 2 world but part of me wishes we didn’t have to have such horrible historical examples to remind us of the evil that ethnic nationalism can bring.
I really like going to the movie theatre. There’s something about the experience - you’re forced into a room where it’s socially unacceptable to check your phone or be connected with the outside world, the screen is huge, and there’s a vaguely social aspect to it where you are having a shared experience with a group of strangers. Last weekend, my movie was Nocturnal Animals. I’m going to discuss what I found interesting about the movie here which will include discussion of the ending and the themes that I picked up.
Nocturnal Animals is a movie about Susan, the owner of an art gallery (Amy Adams) who receives a book from her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhall) which is dedicated to her and purports to be about their now long-in-the-past failed marriage. As Susan reads the book she is brought into Edward’s spell as a writer - the book (also called Nocturnal Animals) is a gripping “true crime” novel of a man traveling through West Texas (named Tony, played by Jake Gyllenhall) who has his wife and daughter kidnapped by an unstable man named (think a tuned down Frank Book from Blue Velvet) and his two friends. The movie cuts between Susan’s unhappy life with her current husband (who is unfaithful to her), a narrative where Susan is reading his book in which she inserts her vision of Edward into the role of Tony, and Susan’s memories of her past relationship with Edward and their unhappy relationship that led to an unhappy split (brought on by some admittedly horrible actions on her part - an abortion and potential infidelity; quite melodramatic). The plot needs a bit of a diagram to explain it but it all makes sense while it’s happening.
In Edward’s book, Tony’s wife and daughter are found dead after having been raped. Edward works through the law and he meets a lawman played by Michael Shannon (I know him from his role in Boardwalk Empire among other things), who eggs him on to find his justice outside of the boundaries of the law. The way I think we are meant to interpret this book-within-a-movie is that it is a document of how hurt Edward feels relative to the end of their relationship - the main character has his family ripped from him and then later found dead and violated. When Edward goes looking for revenge he eventually ends up in a room alone with Roy where the antagonist describes the reason he kills - “it’s fun”. Edward shoots Roy, ends up blinded in their confrontation, then ends up shooting himself in the stomach - possibly by accident.
While Susan is reading this book, she ends up recalling their unhappy relationship - though Edward initially seems very appealing, he lives detached from reality and constantly tries to push her into being a person that she’s not comfortable with. Edward tries to explain that if you love each other, you work it out - but this view seems just as unrealistic. Eventually Susan ends up cheating on him with the dashing Hutton who we find twenty years on is unfaithful to her and in financial distress. Eventually Susan finishes the book and asks to meet Edward for dinner - he accepts, she is excited, as if something might be rekindled - and then he never shows. The credits roll.
There are some immediate readings of the movie that I’m not really happy with.
Is the lesson that Susan was an awful person for betraying Edward years ago when their relationship was unhappy?
Should Susan have abandoned the person she became to be the person that Edward was looking for her to be?
Are we meant to think that Susan is shallow, as she’s so easily seduced back by the power of her ex-husband’s words?
(I found people saying all of these online.) None of these readings seem interesting enough for me, and they take the book-in-a-movie way too much at face value.
We definitely see that Edward’s book is gripping for Susan, and deeply impactful to her. However the distance the book has from the movie’s narrative makes the book’s number of ridiculous tropes clearer - of course he becomes emasculated by a group of more sexed men, of course his wife and daughter are found not just dead but raped, of course he’s got a lawman who’s pushing him into taking his revenge. Tony is an extremely passive protagonist - what does he do for himself, vs what do people do to him or ask him to do? I think we can take it at emotional face value - Edward was hurt, and so he wrote a book - but we have to be careful to bless it as a literary work. The way I interpreted the final confrontation between Tony and Roy is that Edward has put what he thinks Susan’s ethos is into his antagonist - she does what feels good, she won’t work through the hard parts if it doesn’t feel good. Essentially the book-in-a-movie is a big “fuck you” to Susan - not just the emotional pain she’s put him through, but how he sees her live her life. No wonder he doesn’t show up at the end; nineteen years later, he’s still really pissed off.
However I have to ask, is he right to still have this wound? Is all he’s created after nineteen years a somewhat veiled response to his ex-wife leaving an unhappy relationship? (We learn that he hasn’t remarried - Susan thinks this is sad.) Susan’s life may not be the happiest, but she’s changed herself a lot since their graduate school relationship, she’s remarried, she has a daughter - she’s lived a life that’s more the life she ended up wanting, rather than the life that Edward thought she wanted. It’s not her fault things aren’t as happy as this imaginary fairytale of perfection Edward has constructed for her.
On the whole I enjoyed this movie and loved the amount of ambiguity it built into its structure that allows the audience to think through this space. The lack of information we get from the flashbacks allows just a few conversation to stand-in for the lifespan of an unhappy relationship. Nineteen years later, Edward’s still constructing these fantasies, and his book ends up feeling like the emotional response to the fact that his fantasy marriage to Susan was ripped away from him. Ultimately I don’t have a lot of pity for Edward’s (unseen) character in the present.
One of my favorite history listens is Open Yale CoursesHistory 202 lectures with John Merriman, which covers the period after the end of the Thirty Years War into the modern era (there a few post-1945 lectures). Europe saw intense change during this time period, including the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, the rise of nation states and mass politics throughout the 19th century, and the awfulness of the Great War in the 20th century, with the period between 1914 and 1945 repeatedly referred to as a new more terrible “Thirty Years War”. Professor Merriman begins the course with the Brecht poem A Worker Reads History which includes lines such as:
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
True to this, the course mostly avoids the historical narrative and “great people”, instead focusing on the themes of the course, which captures a variety of societies dealing with a series of stark transitions. When he does dive into the “great men” of history, such as Peter the Great or Napoleon, Professor Merriman includes enough of the oddities that made up their personality that you are reminded of them first and foremost as people: not historical inevitabilities or divine actors.
My absolute favorite lecture in the course is where Merriman dives into forms of Popular Protest (transcript). The picture he paints is of the poor underclass - the peasants, squeezed out of their land by the enclosure movement as the landed elite got the government to back their interests and kick the peasants out of areas that they had historically lived and worked. One particular example is of the grain riot. Why did grain riots happen? Why did they stop happening? Merriman goes on to talk about the Swing riots (against the mechanization of labor brought by the threshing machine) and the la guerre des demoiselle in the French department of the Ariège (south France) (where men would dress up like women and conduct guerilla raids). Throughout it all the common theme is of the olden days being fair long - grain was sold at “just price”, jobs were available for everyone who was willing to work hard - these protests would throw this dream back into the face of their oppressors. As heroic as this may seem, these peasants were ultimately squeezed out of their land and forced into the cities as part of the growing urban workforce - cities were riddled with crime and disease. “And only I am escaped alone to tell thee” - an entire way of life lost under the wheels of progress.
There are lots of other enjoyable lectures, including Anarchism, Imperialists (including a history of Robert Baden-Powell and the Boy Scouts), and a back door history of the Englightenment as measured by the “grub street hacks” who wrote lower-quality works in Paris before the French Revolution. I’m on my third listen of this series and it never ceases to both educate and amuse me - highly recommended if you’ve got the history podcast bug.
Just finished Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs 1613-1918. This book followed the Romanov dynasty who we served as emperors of Russia for three centuries. Russian political history during the early modern period is a story of repression, where the autocracy partnered with the nobles to repress the peasants. While a Marxist reading of history might claim that this is always happening, Russia provides some really blatant examples: throughout the 18th century the Romanovs constantly reward their favorite couriers with thousands and thousands of peasant lives, and often serfs were used as a farewell present to get a troublesome lover out of their hair.
The book covered all the well-known Russian tsars, including Peter the Great (who has his own son tortured and murdered for being insufficiently loyal to his reform programs) and Catherine the Great (German by birth but who murders her husband to take power). Until the 18th centry, everything plays as a sort of fun-house mirror to absolutist rule in the west - the Russian court is usually run by ministers imported from Germany, and Peter the Great’s “All-Drunken Synod” is a mockery of courts such as Verseilles. Ultimately the autocrat and the in-group of their advisors (who could change on the whim of the autocrat) was always in charge.
Once the book gets into the 19th century and past the Napoleonic Wars, the book changes from a typical narrative history. Usually into the 19th century a narrative history starts to include the stories of people who are outside the monarch’s inner circle, but the book keeps its focus on the ruling family. As a wave of liberal politics spreads across Europe in the revolutions of 1848, it’s clear that the Romanovs refuse to change Russia and try to hang on to power as best they can (On his deathbed, Nicholas I raises a clenched fist: “Hold everything like this!”). Alexander II ends up emancipating the serfs as a way to ensure that political change comes from the top down, rather than being forced on it by the peasants. Russia struggles into the 20th century as a half-rate power with an unorganized military that suffers a number of setbacks through the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War. The autocracy ensures that the entire system is set up to serve the ruler, rather than to project power. At some point the emperors end up under constant threat of assassination. Their subjects are explicitly trying to kill them.
Eventually we get to Nicholas II and the various intrigues around his wife and their relationship with Rasputin - a wholly ridiculous figure. Rasputin, a Siberian peasant with the affect of a holy man, provides the family with a mystical justification for their autocracy. It’s not clear he was any different of a sycophant than those that usually surrounded the Romanovs, but his presence is seen as a corrupting force across the rest of the Russian political elite and a constant source of tension. Eventually the Great War puts an immense amount of pressure on the Russian ruling class, and something breaks - Rasputin is brutally murdered and Nicholas II abdicates to the forces of February Revolution. His brother Michael II is emperor for a day until he too realizes the situation to be untenable and abdicates to the forces of the revolution.
After this, the tone shifts again - Nicholas II lives with his family under house arrest. The Bolsheviks come to power in October and plan the murder of Nicholas and the entire Romanov clan (Lenin claims “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless”). After wielding power for three centuries, the Romanovs are finally the objects and the repression of the state is brought against them. Nicholas and his entire family (his wife, four daughters, and hemophiliac son) are murdered in 1918 and the Russian Republic moves forward to become just as autocratic a state as it was under the Romanovs. Stalin claims “the people need a tsar” and Russia ends up with “red tsars” in Montefiore’s parlance - except now the leader is the Communist Party. The book closes on a grim note with a postscript on Vladamir Putin and his distate for the weak men (Nicholas II and Mikhail Gorbachev) who “threw power on the floor” only to “allowed power to be picked up by hysterics and madmen”. Russia continues as an autocracy, even after the death of their ruling clan.
I listened to Frank Zappa a lot in graduate school. He has a pretty varied discography from his work with the Mothers of Invention at the end of the 1960s to his more “gimmicky” pop work in the 80s. Despite cultivating a wild personal style he was a self-described workaholic who hated drug use and presented an atmosphere of being a major perfectionist around the quality of his performance. He passed away in the 90s from prostate cancer, with a lot of his later work being very peculiar classical arrangements.
Eat That Question is a movie which presents the arc of Frank Zappa’s career through interview footage, so you don’t have the usual talking heads describing how great he was, where he was in the context of the music scene at the time, how his work changed and how some personal life event changed his art. Instead you have a lot of interview footage that the film’s producers have tied together that’s presented without commentary running over the event.
It’s not clear that Frank Zappa really liked being interviewed, but he definitely loved to say things as part of his interviews. Part of the joy of Frank Zappa’s personality is him drawing a line around certain things in our culture (censorship, fakery), and how he won’t even treat these things are worth considering. In certain interviews he’s really tough on the interviewers, giving very short answers that lead the interviews to prompt him into longer explanations of his worldviews, which he obviously loved to talk about, whether or not the interviewer or his audience happened to agree with him. In footage of him from the “porn wars” Congressional hearings or his Crossfire appearance he’s clearly not interested in convincing anyone who didn’t already agree with him, but he makes standing around and railing about a “fascist theocracy” pretty fun.
Being a little older than during my last immersions in the Zappascape made for an interesting viewing experience. His sexually vulgar lyrics have really not aged well - songs like Bobby Brown Goes Down have lost their humor for me as I have a broader understanding of gender identity. An interview where he extols the cultural heritage of other countries was particularly frustrating (unfortunately, I can’t find online the part of quote where he talks about ethnic history):
“The thing that sets the Americans apart from the rest of the cultures in the world is we’re so fucking stupid. This country has been around for a couple of hundred years and we think we are hot shit, and they don’t even realize that other countries have thousands of years of history and culture and they are proud of it. And when we deal on an international level, with foreign policy and we’re going as this big American strong country, they must laugh up their sleeves at us because we are nothing.
I get what he’s going for here (he goes on to rail against American commercialism, always a fun and easy target), but these other countries certainly aren’t uniform in their culture and heritage, and America isn’t completely bankrupt in our own cultural history. It came off that Frank Zappa really hated Ronald Reagan and the people in charge of the government in the 1980s … so any way to get to talking about that contempt was okay.
Maybe the big difference between today’s America and the 80s culture that provoked such a strong reaction from Frank Zappa was how there’s much less of a monoculture. I think he might do well in today’s cultural landscape - there’s a lot more diversity in music due to the democratization brought on by technology (and the record industry he hated is dead). Still, it’s not obvious to me that he’d be able to resist the easier targets in today’s political landscape. The version of Frank Zappa that I like to think about is the one that’s a living example of diversity in his art and not the one sitting around railing against cultural norms.
Just finished up Children of the Revolution, a book covering the history of France from the end of the French revolution (1799, with Napoleon in charge) to the start of the Great War (1914). The 19th century is one of my favorite periods in history due to the amount of social change, the emergence of mass politics, and the formation of an industrial working class. The reason I read this book was that I was interested to learn a bit more about how France dealt with this period of change, especially after having read a book on Germany (A History of Modern Germany, 1800-2000, Martin Kitchen) which overlapped with the same period.
The book is split into two halves - the first covers the portion after the revolution up until the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. This period saw a turbulent series of political changes which Gildea characterizes as “replaying” the different aspects of pre-Revolution France - trying the Ancién Regime under Charles X, trying a constitutional monarchy again under Louis Phillipe, trying the empire again under Napoloean III. I found the second half of the book a lot more interesting as the various political changes settled down and the French Third Republic had to pick through the aftermath of the Paris Commune to create a governing society.
I really enjoyed this book and it was a good reminder of how messy “successful politics” can be. The Third Republic didn’t make everyone in French society happy and it had major threats to its legitimacy with the rise of Boulangism (a movement around a blowhard general named Ernest Boulanger who ended up successfully shut out of power) and the constant threat of a general strike from the various workers unions. It only passed certain reforms and often when it did implement them the ultimate goal might be missed, leading to continued exploitation - a labor law passed in 1892 in limited the working day of women to only 11 hours a day, but all this ended up doing was forcing labor outside the mainstream and into sweatshops branded as “family workshops”. The Dreyfus affair tore apart society along a number of lines that were existing fault lines in society: Catholics vs non-Catholics, Jews and immigrants against “French nationals”, pro-military vs anti-military. Eventually the period after 1870 ended up with a consensus in French society that lead to the nation uniting to survive the Great War.
