Honkers and Shouters

This is a jumbled story about the Internet, my dead father, and rhythm and blues. I have always been a passionate and somewhat compulsive curator, particularly when it comes to creating chronologies of art objects. When I was four, my favorite activity was flipping to the Copyright page of my children’s book or those of …

Searching for Big Data in Sharon Weinberger’s ‘The Imagineers of War’

These days, I often feel like I’m using Big Data to figure out the history of Big Data so I can better understand how Big Data is making me obsessed with Big Data. There are a few things I know for sure about this often-perplexing pattern:   The history of Big Data and the rise …

The Emergence of Germs: The Forgotten Pop Cultural Paranoia of Biological Warfare in 1960s America

On November 25, 1969, U.S. president Richard Nixon shocked the world when he announced “a unilateral renunciation of biological weapons” to reporters gathered in a conference room at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the primary hub of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories.[1] Nixon’s declaration, which he expanded into a three-year push towards the elimination of …

‘American Weirdnesses:’ The United States’ Cultural Judgment of Italy, 1948-1955

In the years immediately following the end of World War II, the United States began pumping money into Italy in an attempt to ensure a capitalist future for the country.[1] Contemporaneous texts and modern scholarship trace the power struggles and double-crosses surrounding the $3 billion that the U.S., via several State Department acronyms like the …

The Archetypal Man of the West: Fess Parker and Disney’s Comforting Vision of the American Frontier in Westward Ho, The Wagons and The Light in the Forest

  In Robert Zemeckis’s iconic 1985 film Back to the Future, 18 year-old Marty McFly is tired of fictional Hill Valley, his stereotypical, Reagan-era Southern California suburb. In the film’s opening scenes, McFly skateboards away from his dilapidated bungalow in the antiquated Lyon Estates, through trash-laden boulevards, and to the town’s central square, which is …

“General Orders:” Historical Fiction about a Renegade Kentucky Jew During the Civil War

DIVING: JANUARY 4   Cairo, Illinois, on January 4, 1863, smelled oddly like Rawitsch. Cesar Kaskel took in a deep whiff from the wrap-around deck of the Charley Bowen, the mammoth steamboat that was slowly chugging towards the dock. The beauty and disgust of the world, horse manure and vomit wafting in dizzying tandem with …

Trump’s Spaniels

1.      HALF MOON BAY: 2016 I have a terrifying recurring dream in which Donald Trump is my father. “Isn’t this fun?” he yells from the driver’s seat of his Hummer as we barrel down Highway 1 from San Francisco to his pink, rococo mansion in Half Moon Bay. “Not really,” I invariably scream back. …

24K MAGIC

Bruno Mars is a fantastic vocal technician. Along with his Hooligans ensemble and his stalwart, endlessly nostalgic production team of Philip Lawrence, Ari Levine, and Brody Brown—now going by the retro-appropriate Shampoo Press & Curl moniker—Mars has carved out a place in Billboard Top 100 history not for stylistic ingenuity or innovation but for his …

Rock Bands at the Middle East, March 2017

“Kathy Cross,” the Jim Leonard Band’s punky takedown of a posh ex-girlfriend, lies somewhere in the liminal space between aggro hostility and vulnerable self-effacement—or maybe the whole conceit is designed to make you think that Leonard is being hostile or vulnerable when in reality he’s actually one step further down the rabbit hole, glaring back …

‘Beach Music’ Alex G’s Assured Yet Somewhat Remote Label Debut

“Ready,” the eleventh track on Alex G’s label debut “Beach Music,” is the most succinct encapsulation of the sometimes-frustrating magic its artist is capable of creating. Alex G—short for Giannascoli—sings a lilting mantra over again: “She came right through me.” As his reedy voice gets louder and more guttural, Giannascoli starts bringing in subtle vibraphone …

Carletta Sue Kay

Not long after I sat down with Randy Walker, the male, non-performing ego of one of San Francisco’s most undefinable musical acts, vocal powerhouse Carletta Sue Kay(who performs at The Chapel this Fri/25), we talked a bit about college. Walker asked me the prerequisite questions about the social scene and my major, perking up at …

‘Smooth’

For the first 90 seconds of Carlos Santana’s 2000 Grammy Awards Performance, he jams. It’s a lilting melody, Latin-tinged but amorphous, grounded by drummer Rodney Holmes’s slithering cymbals. Just as the tease extends to its last moment of tolerability, Santana picks the inevitable upward arpeggio that begins “Smooth.” The lights, hitherto solely focused on the …

Thoughts on the Guess Whos’ ‘These Eyes’

In a memorable scene from the 2007 American coming-of-age comedy Superbad, shy teen Evan (Michael Cera) stumbles upon a room of coke-addled, 30-something alpha males at an edgy house party. The men, mistaking Evan for a singer acquaintance, cajole the nervous high schooler into “singing something” for them. Evan hesitantly begins an a cappella version …

‘The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12’ a Triumphant Glimpse at a Revolutionary Moment

The Bootleg Series has completely transformed the way that Bob Dylan's fans view the chameleonic artist’s staggering output. In the 20-odd years since the release of the first three volumes of the collection, Dylan has continued to put out paradigm-shifting outtakes and gorgeously restored live shows, primarily covering his iconic era from 1962 to 1975. …

“None E’er Taste Bohea”: Literature’s Role in the Rise and Fall of Bohea in Early Georgian London

When the mysterious traveler George Psalmanazar arrived in London in 1703, he brought with him a manuscript that described in precise detail his supposed home country, Formosa—now Taiwan.[1] Two years later, Psalmanazar, by then a figure of profound intrigue in the upper-class London scene, published his epic tome, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa.[2] …

The Tuberculosis Gene: Historical and Contemporary Vignettes On an Elusive Search

CHAPTER I: 1881, London   Francis Galton must have been exhausted. After two months of interviews, frenzied typing, laborious photography on his composite machine, and mind-numbing addition and ex-marking, he was no closer to an answer.[1] Galton also recognized that the more he touted his invention without clear results, the more the Royal Society and …

No More Bleeding Hearts: Echoes of Nazism in Death Wish

  Overlap Between Filmic Aesthetics and Political Pressures in 1930s Germany and 1970s America             Eric Rentschler, in his 1995 article “Emotional Engineering: Hitler Youth Quex,” illustrates the thought process that ethnographer Gregory Bateson undertook to contextualize the titular 1933 Nazi film. Bateson, as Rentschler positions him in wartime New York City, argues that Hitler …

“Austria, Germany, and Drink:” Alcohol as Two Visions of Modernity in British Propaganda and The Radetzky March

              In 1917, British P.M. David Lloyd George offered an endlessly regurgitated remark to a Bangor audience[1] when he stated “We are fighting three enemies: Germany, Austria, and Drink; and the greatest of these is drink.”[2] Lloyd had offered an early political connection between the War and the mission of societal temperance that would …

“Totally Free of Man’s Influence”: Colossus: The Forbin Project and Visions of Omnipotent Military Supercomputers in Vietnam-Era Popular Culture

            In 1962, popular science writer and futurologist D.S. Halacy penned Computers: The Machines We Think With for the pulpy Dell Press. Halacy, who also wrote on the viability of space travel and solar power, offered a surprisingly thoughtful and prescient view of automation in the Armed Forces. In Chapter 9, …

‘Sink into Suburbs’: Searching for Irving Howe’s Alternative to Liberalism in “This Age of Conformity”

            The socialist critic Irving Howe, in his 1954 Partisan Review polemic “This Age of Conformity,” indicted the American intellectual community for its increasingly cushy relationship to institutional wealth. Howe began by showing how Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s view of intellectuals as agents of “social unrest” who could best foment revolution …

‘The Uses of Humility’: Arthur Godfrey’s Firing of Julius La Rosa and the Emergence of Televisual Inauthenticity

Julius La Rosa sat on a bed in a Washington, D.C. hotel room, surrounded by reporters and holding back tears.[1] The 23-year-old crooner had been unreachable all day as he rehearsed for an appearance at the Navy Relief Society Ball, and had reluctantly opened his suite to the ravenous pressmen. The date was October 23rd, …

Rockefeller Center West: The Golden Gateway as a Gentrification Case Study

In 1969, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency published The Decade Past and the Decade to Come, a triumphant 50-page glossy that was circulated in newspaper racks alongside Sunday issues of the Chronicle, one of the city’s primary newspapers.[1] The group presented its largest projects of the preceding ten years in full-color spreads, alongside tiny photographic …

The Product-Pet: Exploring the Rise of Ant Farms and Sea-Monkeys in 1950s America

In May 1960, two middle-aged, Jewish men originally from impoverished Pittsburgh,[1] Milton Levine and his brother-in-law, E. Joseph Cossman, were making millions out of their Sunset Boulevard toy factory.[2] The duo, with Levine as the “inventor” and Cossman as the “businessman,” had hit pay dirt four years earlier by patenting and putting onto market several …

‘A Computer That Cried W*O*L*F’: Examining Popular Suspicions Toward Predictive Data in the Aftermath of The Limits to Growth

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