I try to write a day or two ahead to make time for other stuff, but now I’m worried a tactical nuclear war will have broken out twixt when I write something and when it publishes. I apologize if that’s happened here, and I’ll get right on it.
If you didn’t check out The Avalanches official video for their song “Frankie Sinatra” yesterday, today is an even better day to do it.1
I like propaganda posters and wish I had graphic design chops. Propaganda graphics often reflect or advance the best design work of their times. The Library of Congress has a very large collection of posters from various eras and wars and countries including the U.S., many but not all of which can be classified as propaganda.23
I bet if I was good at it I could have you all handing out socialist literature on the picket lines.
The photo below was taken less than a year before the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire that killed almost 150 workers, mostly women.4
“I’m a good person but I sure have been tested.”
The Class Politics of Teeth
Dissent Magazine reports:
On a cold fall morning, about four hundred people lined up on the outskirts of the mountain community of Jonesville, Virginia. News had spread about a free weekend health clinic, organized by the Knoxville, Tennessee–based Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps, or RAM.
Since it was founded more than three decades ago, the nonprofit has headed hundreds of missions, airlifting medical relief to some of the poorest places on the planet. This was RAM’s first visit to this isolated pocket of Appalachia, in 2014. The clinic was offering a wide range of services, everything from chest x-rays to eye exams. An overwhelming number of people in the line, however, were worried about their teeth.5
That’s from 2018, but nothing’s changed. The essay, very much worth reading, is adapted from writer Mary Otto’s book, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, reviewed here in the New York Times.6
I’ve been rooting around in my bookmarks from years past, whence the Dissent story came. Here’s another, a 2019 relic from my Capital Crimes folder. It’s a piece from contrarian conservative magazine The American Conservative, “Making the World Safe for Oligopoly.” It’s about the real-time dismantling of Dodd-Frank, the legislation that is meant to prevent another meltdown like the one in 2008, as the law was being written.7
Anybody got anything they wanna talk about? Comments are good for that.
I ran across Surf Guitar Villains this morning, who appear to be deceased as a recording group, while unsuccessfully searching this morning for an instrumental surf music compilation which I have on CD somewhere in California. I like their albums “Break*Point” and “Retro Americana.” They remind me a bit of Television, one of my favorite bands, and like Television they seem to be among the thousand bands spawned by Velvet Underground.
I didn’t know Surf Curse either but they seem to fit the embryonic musical theme here. A bit more modern than I was looking for but I like them. The Hunters are playing out this post with “Art Electric,” which has a lot of jangling guitar but it isn’t surf music.
For some reason John Lee Hooker albums populate the “surf guitar” search results.
That’s all I got, comrades. Take care, be well.
You were looking for alternative terms for "democratic socialism". How about "Human rights". My point to you originally was that some other phrase was needed to avoid the turnoff to the word, "socialism". Where's an advertising or marketing person when you need them?