The fundamental problem with workers (to whom as much money as possible should be denied if commodities are to be affordable) is that they are also consumers (to whom as much money as possible should be supplied if they are to buy commodities). Marxists aren’t kidding when they talk about the contradictions of capitalism. In the end, as Marx wrote, “the ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses.” The result of declining or stagnant real wages since the ’80s has been global industrial overcapacity: too much plant turning out too much stuff for not enough buyers.
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A bubble occurs not when people pay for real estate with money they don’t yet have—as always happens, given the availability of credit—but when they pay with money they will never have, out of wages they will never receive—out of wages no one will ever receive.
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...the US consumer—a ravening appetite in a paper house—appears to be finished as the world’s buyer of last resort. It would add a nice dialectical twist to the future history of our period if it could be said that, around the time the post-Maoist Chinese took up shopping, the post-bubble Americans turned to studying Marx.
http://nplusonemag.com/intellectual-situation-your-marx
"Doomsters" such as the folks who hang out at the Life After the Oil Crash Forum, are deeply suspicious of "techno-fixes"; nonetheless, even they might enjoy Jason Stoddard's list of positive futurological novels.
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/art-entertainment/5-positive-science-fiction-novels-enjoy-while-waiting-singularity
"Middlebrow" is a pejorative term to many, but not to me; I think America was a better place when it was upward-striving intellectually. Belinda Edmondson's Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class looks at this issue in a less familiar cultural context.
http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/2010/06/11/in-hand-caribbean-middlebrow/
Jonathan Ree at the New Humanist assesses the contributions of the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper:
A new generation of readers has come to admire his astonishing verve as a historian: not only a knack for finding lost gems in scattered archives (he is said to have worked easily in eight languages) but also a talent for turning his discoveries into narratives as exotic as Graham Greene and as funny as Evelyn Waugh. Take for example The Hermit of Peking, his 1976 study of Edmund Backhouse – brilliant Sinologist, magnificent philanthropist and incorrigible fibber and fraud: the book could easily hold its own as a comic novel, if it wasn’t in fact a superb feat of historical detection. The same applies, in varying degrees, to dozens of lectures and essays and several book-length works, many of which he preferred not to publish in his lifetime – notably Europe’s Physician, a gripping survey of European cultural life at the turn of the 17th century, published posthumously in 2006.
I can heartily second the strong recommendation of Hermit of Peking, which is easily one of the best books I've ever read.
http://newhumanist.org.uk/2297/book-review-history-and-the-enlightenment-by-hugh-trevorroper
An account like this of the "Ruby Creek" sasquatch incident gets my youthful cryptozoological juices flowing all over again:
http://texascryptidhunter.blogspot.com/2010/06/sasquatch-classics-ruby-creek-incident.html
Bars, like coffeeshops, are "third places" that can (emphasis on the conditional) become venues of cultural re-vivification. Let's visit Budapest:
...it is District VII’s very dilapidation that makes the once-grandiose Habsburg-era squares and avenues so evocative. The façades may be crumbling, the paint peeling, the holes gouged by wartime bullets still unfilled, but the courtyards are packed and hopping. District VII is the epicentre of the “Romkocsma” scene. Romkocsma translates literally as “Ruin pub”, but these are not pubs in the British sense and they are a world away from the traditional dark and, by today’s standards, often rather drab Hungarian drinking dens. Instead, the best of the Romkocsmas, such as Mumus, Szimpla kert and Fogas haz, are a mix of hip bar and café, beer garden, music venue and cultural centre. Many Romkocsmas barely advertise their presence, hiding behind discreet signs and grubby doorways.
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/places/drinking-budapests-ruin-pubs
Elsewhere in Europe, we can rediscover the beauties of traditional Portuguese tilework:
http://splalit.blogspot.com/2010/06/portuguese-traditional-tiles.html
http://www.economist.com/node/16316831
Australia has a tradition of documentary photography that is little-known abroad:
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38342
http://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Exhibitions/Candid_Camera.html
Cultural Intersection: Director Olivier Assayas thrills to the work of his contemporary David Fincher:
What amazed me at the time [about Zodiac] and still does is the connection with 'Se7en,' because it's like the anti-'Se7en.' It's this incredible exercise in dialectics. In American cinema, I don't see an equivalent. The director who made 'Se7en' -- using all the elements that came to be expected from that type of genre movie, completely a fantasy notion of what a serial killer is about, a movie that has all the elements of classic Hollywood narrative culture -- would a few years later would make this movie that is the absolutely opposite of it, and that doesn't play games with what evil is about, but somehow acknowledges evil as something that floats around with no simple resolution.
I could not agree more. Zodiac is one of the best films I've seen in recent years (and Fincher and Assayas are two of the finest film-makers in the world today).
http://www.ifc.com/blogs/indie-eye/2010/06/olivier-assayas-talks-zodiac.php
Among notables born on this date are novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Edgar Wideman, Jerzy Kosinski, Laurie Colwin, Laurence Yep, and Yasunari Kawabata, journalist Pierre Salinger and Leon Wiseltier, politician Robert La Follette, activist Che Guevara, photographer Margaret Bourke-White, tenor John McCormack, theater composer Cy Coleman, pop saxophonist Junior Walker, singer/songwriter Boy George, architect Kevin Roche, businessman Donald Trump, and actors Dorothy McGuire, Gene Barry, Burl Ives, Sam Wanamaker, and Will Patton. We Irish and Irish-Americans excel at sentimentality, and when you wed that sentimentality to the exquisite voice of John McCormack, the result is magical:
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